MURROW: There is little optimism in London tonight….
It sounded very professional. Only a veteran journalist could have sensed how thin CBS coverage was. Despite their elaborate titles, thirty-year-old Murrow and thirty-four-year-old Shirer were still the sole CBS analysts on the program—were, for that matter, the network’s only two men in Europe. They had been scurrying around the continent talking to one another from phone booths. It was a zany, patchwork quilt they were putting together, a kind of Rube Goldberg approach to broadcasting, and one explanation for its success—which was enormous—was European ignorance of what was going on. Finding out took a while; when Eric Sevareid arrived in the Netherlands a few months later as a CBS reinforcement, the Dutch were bewildered when they learned that he intended to send back news of the day. All previous broadcasts from Holland to America had been about tulips and windmills. To Europeans broadcasting was entertainment—as indeed it had been for most Americans.
To the astonishment of conservatives in the news media, radio coverage of European turmoil not only held its own, it became increasingly efficient. Kaltenborn, installed in Studio Nine with his sandwiches and black coffee, was fed streams of accurate information from the jerry-built Murrow-Shirer structure across the ocean. Because censorship was gagging native journalists there, while American speech remained free, people in the United States knew more about the September crisis than European listeners. The BBC wouldn’t even allow Winston Churchill to speak; there was suspicion (well founded) that he might try to sabotage the peace. One British magazine editor suggested that readers who really wanted to know what was going on in the Czechoslovakian crisis ought to tune to shortwave broadcasts from the United States.
Murrow was rapidly becoming almost as famous as Kaltenborn. He made thirty-five broadcasts himself that September and set up another 116 from eighteen European cities. As the European chief he was Studio Nine’s link with the continent; when communications became difficult or fadeouts frequent, the fascinated country would hear Kaltenborn say in a querulous hush, “Calling Ed Murrow! Calling Ed Murrow!” In the first days of the crisis this sort of thing was infrequent. European staffs had improved enormously since spring; one Czech switchboard girl was keeping track of a hundred placed calls. The weather was so clear that two-way conversations were possible. It was actually possible to hold “round table” discussions with correspondents overseas. The listening audience, holding “crisis maps” which the networks mailed on request, could listen to Murrow or Shirer talking to Kaltenborn or Trout, and follow reported movements of troops toward the Maginot Line, say, or in Silesia. It was almost like Monopoly, if you didn’t think about it too much.
Then, on September 15, the fourth day, something went wrong. With armies in place, diplomatic confrontations reported hourly, and Hitler and Chamberlain eyeball to eyeball—no one then knew how quickly the prime minister’s eyes would become shifty—the weather went bad. Shortwave transmissions, unlike those over ordinary frequencies, are highly vulnerable to atmospheric conditions. Day after day CBS frequencies remained inaudible; Kaltenborn called Murrow in vain, and was left to rely on cabled news. Suddenly, to the horror of CBS, NBC men in Europe began coming through loud and clear. The other network had found a fantastic solution, relaying shortwave over a Capetown to Buenos Aires to New York circuit. Broadcasts originating from Europe were traveling three times the distance on this circuit, but the delay was only a few seconds. And they were clear. CBS caught on, though direct broadcasts were still preferred.
The weather over the Atlantic was still unspeakable (what was going on out there?) when events in Prague reached a climax. The Czechs, as punishment for standing firm, were being treated shabbily by their two great allies. At 2:15 A.M. on September 21, the British and French ministers to Czechoslovakia routed President Eduard Benes out of bed and bluntly told him that their governments intended to break their covenants. In spite of their pledged word, they would not march; either the Czechs would capitulate to the Nazi dictator or they would be left to fight alone. All through the day Benes, staggering from fatigue, consulted with his cabinet, party leaders, and generals. At about five o’clock that afternoon of September 21 his government submitted. A Czech communiqué explained to the world: “We had no choice, because we were left alone.” Benes said, “We have been basely betrayed.”
At 5 P.M. it was still only 11 A.M. in New York and New England. Radio engineers were still complaining of the weather at sea, and merchant sailors were muttering about the strange copper-colored sky at last evening’s sunset, but no one else worried about it. The forecast in that morning’s paper wouldn’t have panicked anyone. It read: “Rain and cooler.”
It actually said just that.
***
In 1938 the United States Weather Bureau was but a shadow of its future self. It lacked the superb instruments of the next generation: radar-scopes, jet-propelled aerial surveillance, and weather-reporting satellites equipped with television cameras. Its chief devices then were the sixteenth-century thermometer, the seventeenth-century mercurial barometer, and the medieval weathervane. The greatest need was oceanographic information. Outposts on land could exchange reports with one another, but the seas were mysterious. Meteorologists relied entirely upon voluntary observations from merchant ships and aircraft. In the Depression the government wasn’t going to let weathermen fly around in expensive planes of their own, observing conditions there. So the meteorologists wondered, or guessed. They had long known that one of their guesses might be tragically wrong, and now the law of probability was closing in.
Yet it would be wrong to limn them as helpless scapegoats. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Weather Bureau was a slack outfit. Some new skills were known, to others if not to them. Estimating the approach of a big storm by studying wind velocity and barometric readings, a proficiency required of all licensed navigators, baffled many veteran forecasters. And when one remembers their great need for data, it is an astonishing fact that key meteorologists did not even attempt to phone one another that day until the blow had already fallen, carrying the telephone lines with it. Ironically, the New York Times ran an editorial praising the bureau on September 21. The humdrum forecast was published on the lower left corner of page 27. Nowhere was there any suggestion that the most destructive hurricane in American history—and the first to hit Long Island and New England since September 23, 1815—was on its way.
It is possible to trace the progress of the storm with some confidence. Atlantic hurricanes, known to seamen as tropical cyclones, begin as small disturbances in the doldrums, west of the Sahara Desert and east of the Cape Verde Islands, a calm area between the trade winds that blow from the northeast and southeast. The first stage of a tropical cyclone occurs when a column of hot moist air starts to rise. Cooler air moves in below it, the cycle accelerates, and the eastward rotation of the earth sends it spiraling off counterclockwise toward the western hemisphere. The longer the cyclone is over the water, the more powerful it becomes. This one was first sighted at 9:30 P.M. on September 16 by the captain of a Brazilian freighter, the S.S. Alegrete. It was 350 miles northeast of Puerto Rico, and the captain radioed that he could find nothing good to say about it.
The closest U.S. weather station was in Jacksonville, Florida. It was also the one most experienced in judging hurricanes. But the storm lay in the area most dreaded by American meteorologists—the triangle of sea between Long Island, Bermuda, and Georgia. Weather there was notoriously unstable, yet they had no idea what was happening. They kept listening for signals from afflicted ships. None came; if any merchantmen were there, they were either lacking in public spirit or already in Davy Jones’s locker. Despite its ignorance, Jacksonville made the right moves. Warnings went out on Sunday, September 18, and Monday, September 19. Floridians, accustomed to this sort of thing, bought candles and boarded up windows. Many from New England, anxious to miss the winds, took the train home. At that point trains were moving faster than the cycloni
c winds. They weren’t going to miss anything after all.
Monday night the hurricane turned away from Miami. Jacksonville dutifully reported that the storm was “moving rapidly north” and only possibly “east of north.” The eye was then estimated to be 275 miles south of Cape Hatteras; that is, just off North Carolina. At Hatteras it automatically passed from Jacksonville’s jurisdiction to Washington’s, and here an incompetence bordering on the criminal began to creep into forecasts. To grasp what was happening one should bear in mind that a fully developed hurricane, blowing 75 mph, is as powerful as 500 Nagasaki-type atomic bombs and contains more electricity than the entire United States uses in six months. That is an ordinary hurricane. This cyclone was churning around at over 200 mph. How far over is a matter of speculation, but on Wednesday the Harvard University observatory at Blue Hill, ninety miles from the vortex, was measuring a steady 121 mph, with 186 mph gusts, and New York City, far west of the storm center, noted 120 mph on top of the Empire State Building. Washington didn’t know that, but it had a report from the skipper of the Cunard White Star liner Carinthia. His barometer measured its pressure at 27.85, one of the lowest barometric readings ever taken off the Atlantic coast. Nevertheless, the Washington station, staffed by the most seasoned meteorologists in the country, dropped the word “hurricane” from its forecast. As late as 2 P.M. September 21, when the storm had torn up Atlantic City’s boardwalk and was transporting entire houses across Long Island Sound, Washington reported that the “tropical storm” was rapidly blowing out to sea.
New York and Boston went along with the Washington brass. Every meteorologist knew there was a lot of commotion just offshore, but it had been 123 years since a tropical cyclone had turned inward, and they just couldn’t believe it would happen now. As it passed along the Carolinas, Virginia, Delaware, and New Jersey, the forecasters, snug inland, watched their barometers dip and rise again as the eye moved on. They sighed; that was over. Yet their instruments were warning them that it was far from over. Since 8:30 A.M. the hurricane’s isobars—lines of equal barometric pressure—had been lengthening into ovals, all pointing north. Nevertheless, the forecasters kept talking about “shifting gales,” as though this were a good day to fly heavy kites. Their folly was compounded by a cruel coincidence. The hurricane was coming when the moon was nearest the earth, and the sun and moon, pulling together in phase, caused tides a foot higher than usual. And the storm wave was going to hit precisely at high tide.
The weathermen hadn’t thought of that; implicit in their logs was the assumption that once Miami was saved, it was all over. What they had failed to see (apart from their own instruments) was that just when the storm seemed about to swing northeastward at Cape Hatteras, its path had been blocked by an unusually broad high-pressure plateau covering almost the entire North Atlantic. Caught between that and another high pressure area just inland, the cyclone was unable to spread out and dissipate its power. On the contrary, the winds doubled and redoubled in force.
Long Island and New England had been lashed by rain for four straight days and nights. The air there was unnaturally warm and muggy. Ears felt queer, because atmospheric pressure was decreasing. In Vermont people noticed the smell of the seashore in the air. Hurricanes love nothing so much as warmth and dampness, and this one lurched toward the broad moist carpet six hundred miles long. Moreover, at the instant it crossed the shore, another dreadful principle would come to bear upon it. Usually hurricanes weaken over land, but the soggy ground, extending all the way to Canada, meant the storm would continue to blow as hard as though it had been in the Caribbean—picking up speed from the sticky air until the eye was moving at 60 mph, as fast as a tornado, fast enough to reach Montreal that same night.
The 1 P.M. news broadcast from New York brought the first sign that some forecasters were belatedly coming to terms with reality. The announcer said the storm had changed course and would “probably hit Long Island.” That was something, more warning than New England was going to get, but it was too late for effective precautions. Besides, the vast majority of people missed the broadcast, and the Coast Guard had not been alerted. The richest seaboard in the world, from Cape May to Maine, was completely unprotected. Among the striking stories which later came to light was the experience of a Long Islander who had bought a barometer a few days earlier in a New York store. It arrived in the morning post September 21, and to his annoyance the needle pointed below 29, where the dial read “Hurricanes and Tornadoes.” He shook it and banged it against a wall; the needle wouldn’t budge. Indignant, he repacked it, drove to the post office, and mailed it back. While he was gone, his house blew away.
It happened that quickly. One moment the barometer read 27.95 inches. A moment later the winds struck, and people on the south shore saw what one of them described as “a thick and high bank of fog rolling in fast from the ocean.” He added, “When it came closer we saw that it wasn’t fog. It was water.” With gusts already bellowing and the wind raving at every door jamb, the great wall of brine struck the beach between Babylon and Patchogue at 2:30 P.M. SO mighty was the power of that first storm wave that its impact registered on a seismograph in Sitka, Alaska, while the spray, carried northward at well over a hundred miles an hour, whitened windows in Montpelier, Vermont. As the torrential forty-foot wave approached, some Long Islanders jumped into cars and raced inland. No one knows precisely how many lost that race for their lives, but the winners later estimated that they had to keep the speedometer over 50 mph all the way. Manicured lawns a mile inland at Quogue were under breakers two feet high, and a cottage near there floated away with ten people on its roof.
J. P. Morgan’s multimillion-dollar estate at Glen Cove was blown to flinders. Thirty-room mansions at Westhampton were swept away, and owners couldn’t rebuild because the land had gone with them. Seventeen people were huddled chest-deep in brine on the second floor of one of these châteaux; then the walls collapsed. The 190-foot Mackay radio tower, out toward Montauk Point, was gone. The Bridgehampton freight station had been moved to the wrong side of the tracks. Pullman cars weighing sixty-seven tons were rocking. Fishing craft were split apart, fishermen’s shacks were sailing into Connecticut. The entire coastline had been altered, and obviously this was only a beginning; thirteen million people lay in the storm’s path, which could now be projected through New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Northampton, Vermont, and Montreal. Had the hurricane come three weeks earlier, six thousand dead could have been expected. Even as it was, Long Island Sound, beaten into one solid mass of foam, was hurling corpses at the wreckage of what had been comfortable cottages only that morning.
At 3:40 P.M., when the forward edge of the doughnut-shaped storm was uprooting Yale’s famous old elms, the eye of the storm reached Long Island. The survivors assumed that they had been saved. The sun came out, the sky was blue, zephyrs whispered in the wreckage. Then the distant roaring drew near again, and they knew they were in for it again. Actually, the worst was to come; the mightiest force in a hurricane lies in the swifter, titanic winds behind the eye. The most remarkable accounts of this phase will never be told, for the participants were dead before evening. We know that the second storm wave destroyed the Westhampton section of the outer barrier beach, blew the dunes away, leveled most of the houses left standing, flooded the Maidstone Club golf course, and swamped the Montauk Highway and the Long Island Rail Road tracks at Napeague Beach, temporarily cutting Long Island in two. At the height of it, one couple actually swam across Moriches Bay with two dogs and a Coast-guardsman. Arriving, the drenched woman dismayed bystanders by announcing that Long Island was sinking. That part of it nearly did. Of 179 Westhampton houses, 153 had completely vanished, and most of the others were too battered ever to be inhabited again. In and around them were twenty-nine corpses.
In effect, Long Island was serving as a breakwater for the seventy-mile stretch of Connecticut shore across the sound, including New Haven and Bridgeport (which were having other problems). The exposed
Connecticut and Rhode Island shores east of Montauk Point were being belted by even stronger seas, and the city struck hardest was Providence, at the mouth of Narragansett Bay. One huge wave, a hundred feet high, swept up the bay, crushed the docks into kindling, and broke near City Hall, drowning pedestrians outside. The sea pulled people from automobiles, sometimes from behind the wheel, thereby saving their lives. When it subsided, downtown Providence was under thirteen feet of water. Policemen in motorboats patrolled the Mall and Exchange Place. The headlights of thousands of automobiles shone under water, and short-circuited car horns blew steadily, like a traffic jam in a nightmare.
Meanwhile, the hurricane had been thundering through Connecticut and Massachusetts. There was a grayness around everything that afternoon, as though the storm were veiling its atrocities. Wesleyan University’s hundred-year-old stone chapel steeple had been blown down. New London was burning. In Hartford and Springfield men were toiling with sandbags, holding back the Connecticut River, already at flood. Among the waiting mobs of refugees—no one had time for them now—was Katharine Hepburn; she had waded to safety from her parents’ summer cottage an hour before it was carried away.
By nine o’clock that evening Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, was as embattled as Yale had been at 4 P.M., with the wind building and the rain slanting vertically, but by the next morning the sky, as the Weather Bureau cheerfully reported, was clear. Conditions were hardly normal, though. The New Haven Railroad estimated that 1,200 trees and 700 telephone poles lay across its tracks. The Shore Line of the New York, New Haven and Hartford was trying to find a missing train and wondering what to do with a 300-foot steamship that lay across its tracks in New London. American Airlines was searching for an empty plane that had blown away from Logan Field in Boston. Not one Connecticut highway was open. The Hartford Courant described September 21 as the “most calamitous day” in the history of the state. “As near as the crippled communications can indicate,” the editorial said, “no community of any size escaped damage. New Haven is still dark and battered. The heart of New London is in smoking ruins.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 28