1. MONSTERS OF THE WORLD OF STORMS
The hollow winds begin to blow,
The clouds look black, the glass is low.
—E. Darwin
A stiff breeze, now and then with a hard gust, swept rain across the Navy airfield. The place was gloomy and deserted, except for one Privateer standing behind the air station, all other planes having been evacuated the night before. A tall young airman came out of a building down at the other side of the field. He looked nervously at the blackening morning sky as another squall came by, hurried over to the plane and stood between it and the protecting station. In a few minutes, eight men followed him. They climbed aboard the craft. The tall airman was last, taking a final look at the sky over his shoulder as he crawled in. The roots of his hair felt electrified, his spine tingled and his knees turned to rubber. In a few moments the plane took off into the darkening sky.
In those anxious moments as he had glanced upward at the wind-torn clouds with driving rain in his face, many thoughts passed through his mind. In training for this job he had read about aircraft carriers having their flight decks torn up by typhoons, about battered destroyers sunk by hurricanes, big freight ships tossed out on dry land, upper stories of brick buildings sliced off, timbers driven endways through the tough trunks of palm trees. The idea of sending a plane into one of these monsters seemed fantastic. He could imagine the wings being torn off and see vividly in his mind the broken craft rocketing downward into the foam of gale-swept waters far below. He leaned over on the radio table and muttered a prayer, hoping that God could hear him above the tumult of winds, seas and engines. To most of the men this was “old stuff.” Flying into hurricanes had been going on for two years. To him it was a strange adventure.
He was the radio man and this was to be his first flight into a hurricane. And it would be no practice ride. This was a bad storm, getting too close to the coast to suit him. He had been told that after nightfall its center would strike inland and there would be widespread damage and some loss of life. He tried to remember other things they had told him in the briefing session and some of the instructions he had been reading for three days now. Well, such is life, he thought. His father had been the master of an oil tanker for the last fifteen years. He had told his growing son a lot about these big storms of the Caribbean. What would his father say now when he learned that his son was one of the men assigned to the job of flying into them? His thoughts were interrupted by violent agitation of the plane and the roar of the wind. The navigator said something about the turbulence.
He remembered asking one of the men what it would be like in the hurricane, and the fellow laughed and said, “Like going over Niagara Falls in a telephone booth.” He recalled the burly fellow who pointed to the map and told them where the center of the hurricane was located and how to get to it. In answer to his last question, one of the men had told him that all he had to do was hold on for dear life with both hands until the weather officer handed him a message for the forecast office and then he should send it as quickly as possible, without being thrown on his ear. Now the plane was bumping along in the overcast and the rain had become torrential. The wind was on the port quarter and water was coming through the nose and flooding the crawlway. It was pouring on him from above somewhere. Rivers were running down his back.
He asked the weather officer what he thought about it, and he replied, “Oh, this is the usual thing. Sometimes it gets a good deal worse.” Well, he thought it was getting a lot worse. Maybe the pilot and co-pilot could see but he could see nothing outside the plane. He hit his head on something, a hard crack, and he started to feel sick. Finally, he put his head down on the edge of the table and began to lose his breakfast.
Up and down the coast the Air Force bases were deserted. All planes but one had been flown inland and the last one, a B-17, was poised on Morrison Field for the final hop into the big winds, to return before nightfall.