Storm Kings

by Lee Sandlin

  Finley’s chief legacy could be seen throughout the Midwest and the plains states: the tornado caves. They were known more elegantly as cyclone cellars; sometimes they were called storm cellars, by those who didn’t want to be reminded that tornadoes existed. They had become common sights in rural Oklahoma and Nebraska and northern Texas. They could be glimpsed in a farmhouse backyard, a few dozen feet from the kitchen—a plain wooden door set at an angle in a low mound of grassy earth. Below was a simple but sturdy excavation, large enough to hold a table and chairs and a couple of cots; there’d be a shelf with a lantern and a supply of matches, and from the late 1920s on there’d usually be a radio. Families would sit and tell stories through the roar of the night, parents forcing joviality, children fearfully cradling a pet or a doll, waiting to see if their house had been blown to flinders and everything they owned scattered a mile downwind.

  But cyclone cellars were rare sights in cities, even at the heart of the tornado zone. People believed they were safer from tornadoes in a city than they were in the open country (a belief that persists today). They also believed that tornadoes didn’t cross rivers and couldn’t go into valleys—ideas that were left over from the previous century and wouldn’t be refuted by the Weather Bureau for decades more. The bureau in those years was still silent about tornadoes. People in general knew less about tornadoes than they had in Finley’s time. Nothing about tornado safety was taught in public schools; a common theme in stories from tornado survivors was that they had no clear idea what a tornado was and didn’t understand what was happening to them.

  In the popular imagination, tornadoes remained an unseen, vague, surreal, almost comical menace. In a Mickey Mouse cartoon from the mid-1930s (The Band Concert), Mickey is sucked up into a tornado and does a kind of slapstick ballet with the flying debris in the middle of a funnel cloud as an entire house is randomly assembled and disassembled all around him. A similar scene appeared a few years later in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz: as Dorothy Gale rides the tornado out of Kansas, she sees weird apparitions out the window—an old woman knitting in a rocking chair with a cat on her lap, two men in a rowboat, other Kansans swept up into the funnel cloud who are comically carrying on their ordinary lives as though nothing has happened.

  But The Wizard of Oz was also the movie that put the most effort into creating a plausible image of what a tornado looked like. The tornado was an elaborate mechanical effect: a thirty-five-foot-tall canvas sock suspended from a moving gantry; it was partially filled with fuller’s earth to create a realistic wreath of dust around its base, and there were big sheets of cellophane laboriously arranged to create believable shadows of clouds. The result was nothing like the feeble throwaway description in L. Frank Baum’s original novel but a stunning vision of dread. Whole generations of Americans would remember it as the most vivid image of a tornado they’d ever seen.

  On September 29, 1927, a tornado passed through St. Louis and killed 80 people. On March 21 and 22, 1932, there was an outbreak of tornadoes through the Deep South as a storm system passed from Texas through to South Carolina; more than 300 people were killed. On March 14, 1933, a tornado cut through the heart of Nashville, Tennessee, killing 11 people and shattering the windows in the state capitol. On the evening of April 5, 1936, a tornado destroyed the residential districts of Tupelo, Mississippi; houses on Gum Pond were carried into the water, and the pond was filled with bodies. Close to 250 people died, maybe more: no accurate count was made in the black neighborhoods. One of the survivors was a fifteen-month-old infant: Elvis Presley.

  The Weather Bureau was keeping records of tornadoes again. It was also funding some research on upper-level conditions, using weather balloons. But mostly it was letting the tornado stories accumulate, just as it had in John Finley’s time. In the bureau’s Monthly Weather Review there were occasional reports of unusual and bizarre tornado events, presented without commentary. The May 1930 issue, for instance, contained an account sent in from the Dodge City, Kansas, office of a tornado witnessed by a local farmer named Will Keller. Keller said that on an afternoon in June 1928, he saw what he described as an “umbrella-shaped cloud” in the southwestern sky. As it approached, he could make out three tornadoes dangling from a greenish-black base. By the time he got his family into the cyclone cellar, one of the tornadoes was passing directly overhead. Keller looked up from the entrance to the storm cellar straight into the interior of the funnel cloud.

  “Everything was as still as death,” he said. “There was a strong, gassy odor, and it seemed as though I could not breathe.” Then he heard “a screaming, hissing sound”; it was coming from around the base of the funnel, where smaller tornadoes were forming and breaking free. Above them was a great whirl of rotating cloud streams, crisscrossed by lightning bolts, that opened up into a vast cathedral of clear air. In its upper reaches was a small hovering cloud, rising and falling and pulsing like a heart.

  18

  The Unfriendly Sky

  The Pantlind Hotel, in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, was a huge old Beaux Arts hulk of brown brick, with pale stone arches and an ornamental cornice. In 1943 the army commandeered it, moved out all the long-term guests, and shipped in several hundred army air-force cadets. The cadets slept there each night: the luxurious beds in each room were replaced by standard army cots. They had their meals in the lavish dining halls, which had been made over as much as possible into cafeterias. After breakfast each morning the cadets were marched in squads through the glamorous lobby, across the street, and into the city’s Civic Auditorium, where they were trained to become meteorologists.

  By the end of the 1930s, the U.S. Army Air Corps had almost two hundred men with at least some basic knowledge of aviation meteorology. But with the onset of the war, as the Air Corps rapidly swelled into the mammoth U.S. Army Air Forces, with tens of thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of personnel, the need for trained meteorologists became urgent. American air bases were going up all over the world, and each required a fully staffed weather station. The Grand Rapids instructional school, together with several other ad hoc schools set up throughout America, would ultimately graduate more than twenty thousand weather officers.

  The director of the Grand Rapids school was Colonel Don McNeal. He was not remembered fondly by the cadets. He made sure the school was punishingly difficult. The classes ran for seven hours a day, every day but Sunday. In the evenings, after an hour of physical training, there was a compulsory two-hour study period monitored by officers and senior cadets. McNeal was also known for his spectacular temper. He fought constantly with his superiors about academic standards and the school curriculum: he was determined to turn out genuine meteorologists, while they were, he felt, satisfied with any warm body. But he reserved his deepest rages for the civilian Weather Bureau. There was supposed to be a general spirit of civilian-military cooperation then, as everyone pulled together for the war effort, but McNeal despised the Weather Bureau men who were being brought in by the Pentagon as administrators, instructors, and advisers. He thought they were insufferably arrogant about their superior meteorological knowledge and looked down on his cadets with contempt.

  His cadets actually felt something similar about him. He was notorious for sneaking up behind them in the study period, peering over their shoulders at their workbooks, and then berating them for their mistakes. At graduation, as the cadets waited in line for their diplomas, he would pace back and forth in ill-disguised fury until he couldn’t stand it any longer, and then he would yank out of the line the cadets he thought didn’t measure up and flunk them on the spot. Ultimately, he only allowed slightly more than half of any class to graduate. The cadets came to call him Sudden Death.

  Among the first graduates at Grand Rapids was a cadet named Robert C. Miller. He was from Southern California originally. His family had a prosperous business selling sashes and doors, but his own ambitions ran elsewhere. He’d attended Occidental College in Los Angeles; he’d gotten marri
ed there and was planning on becoming an algebra teacher. At the time of Pearl Harbor he was taking classes in differential and integral calculus. The draft board rejected him because he was overweight and out of shape and had unusually poor eyesight. He was determined to serve anyway and tried four times to enlist; he said he only succeeded the fourth time because the army physicians got tired of seeing him waiting in line.

  After Grand Rapids he was sent to the South Pacific. He was stationed on bases in Netherlands New Guinea and the Philippines. He moved with the Air Corps as its bases went up on island after island. He came in after the construction battalions had done their work—landing in force, cutting metaled airstrips into the deepest jungle, erecting hangars and barracks and mess halls and officers’ clubs where there had been impassable swamps. It was a matter of only weeks before planes were buzzing in and out like wasps.

  Miller liked the camaraderie of the corps, but he remembered the islands as impossible challenges for a meteorologist. He had nothing to work with—no spotters network, no meteorological data, no model in general for the behavior of the vast weather systems of the Pacific. He had to find his own way to master his craft. He did it by learning from the enlisted men who’d already been serving in the South Pacific for years. They knew nothing about meteorological theory, but they had picked up countless rules of thumb and weather signs that let them read the sky and the ocean.

  He also learned to trust his own intuition. He had a knack from early on of being able to visualize weather not as a flat map but as a three-dimensional process. This was a style of thinking that had been encouraged by one of his professors at Occidental who’d taught him to understand physical processes like ocean waves as evolving dynamic systems. The instructors in Grand Rapids had also helped him by teaching him the latest European theories of meteorology and forecasting (still regarded with some caution by the civilian Weather Bureau), which emphasized the complex and shifting patterns of upper-air flow. All this enabled him to make good guesses about the weather that was gliding over the archipelagoes and the open waters of the Pacific. He got into the habit of drawing his maps freehand, at the last possible minute, to make sure the pilots always had the latest data. This was a skill that would awe civilian meteorologists when they encountered Miller after the war.

  Miller himself had no doubt about what would happen to him once the war was over. He was never going to go back home and take over the family’s sash and door company. (“I couldn’t see that business as a life-long proposition,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and unfortunately it caused a great rift between my dad and me.”) Many of his fellow meteorologists were going into the civilian world; some were even joining the Weather Bureau, which he found unimaginable. He had inherited from old McNeal at the Grand Rapids meteorological school a contempt for the bureau that he never lost. But then, he had acquired through his training and his service a certain contempt for civilians generally. He was determined to stay on in the military as a weather officer.

  Tinker Air Force Base, on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, had been built as a depot and staging area during the war. It had grown into an enormous sprawling complex covering nine square miles. It was essentially an autonomous city with hundreds of buildings and thousands of personnel; by the early postwar years it had become the largest single employer in the state. In 1948, among its other functions, it had become a vast parking lot for surplus military aircraft. Hundreds of planes left over from the war were being stored there—kept in fenced airfields, wing to wing, like puzzle pieces on a limitless board.

  The great meteorological challenge for the base weather station was in predicting severe storms. These were a major issue not only for pilots in flight but for all the matériel being stored out in the open; a brief hailstorm could do hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. There was also the threat of tornadoes; the base had never seen one, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been close calls. The year before Miller arrived, a disastrous tornado had crossed through central Oklahoma. This tornado had been almost two miles wide, and its damage track was more than a hundred miles long. It had leveled the city of Woodward, Oklahoma, and killed more than 150 people; the funnel had blasted through an industrial complex and sent a storm of blood-red toxic mud falling for several miles downwind.

  Miller, though, was not initially inclined to take the weather in Oklahoma particularly seriously. He later said that he’d assumed it was essentially no different from the weather in his home in California, where people made a great show of alarm over showers and fogs; certainly there would be nothing as dramatic as the typhoons he’d seen in the Pacific.

  On the evening of March 20, 1948, Miller was on duty at the base weather station. The station was in the Operations Building, a low squat construction near the control tower. The twilight air was warm and placid. After dinner, Miller and his backup forecaster, a staff sergeant, did a routine analysis of the current weather maps. They had surface maps, which were built up from civilian and military weather stations around the Midwest, and they also had upper-air data supplied by the Weather Bureau in Washington. Miller concluded after a few minutes that there wasn’t much happening. The prairie was quiet, except for some strong surface winds blowing across the empty country to the southwest. He wrote out his nightly forecast for the base: dry weather, with gusts up to thirty-five miles per hour.

  Shortly after 9:00 p.m., as Miller and the sergeant kept an idle watch on the military Teletype, they saw reports from other Oklahoma weather stations of lightning strikes out in the remote prairie. Around 9:30 they did something that would become an automatic routine for any meteorologist but was then a novelty: they checked the radar.

  Radar was one of the great meteorological legacies of the war, even though its connection to the weather had been wholly accidental. The British scientists who had done the first experiments with a prototype military radar system had been troubled by strange signals on their monitors: here and there, amid the blips of aircraft they were tracking out to sea, were faint, transitory blobs and glows of no known origin. These phantoms were dismissed as interference patterns or mechanical failures—except that they didn’t have any detectable cause. Only gradually did the scientists realize that the radar was picking up the echoes of falling rain.

  The Allied military didn’t make that much use of the discovery during the war. But afterward, the weather stations at U.S. Air Force bases began salvaging the radar units from old aircraft. The radar at Tinker AFB was from a disused B-29. It was cranky and erratic, and the weather officers tended to leave it off as much as possible to coax more life out of it. But it was unusually powerful, with a range out to near a hundred miles. When the monitor lit up, Miller was dismayed to see bright blobs strung out along the southwestern limit of the screen. This was a line of fully mature thunderstorms crossing the empty Oklahoma prairie directly toward them.

  By 10:00 p.m. the line had reached Oklahoma City’s civilian airport, seven miles to the southwest. The weather station there transmitted its report—torrential rain and wind gusts up to ninety miles an hour. A few minutes later came an urgent bulletin: a tornado was on the ground south of the airport and moving rapidly to the northeast.

  Miller was still new to the Midwest. and found the drama of a severe weather warning excessive. He did know, or at least had been told, that he should immediately take shelter when a tornado was approaching. But he didn’t think of it; instead, he ran outside to watch.

  By then the storm was lighting up half the sky, and its towering crest was directly overhead. In the glare and flash of the lightning he could see the awesome silhouette of the tornado funnel. Miller always remembered how large and monstrous it was: a titanic flickering shape looming over the base. As it swept past the control tower, all the windows simultaneously shattered. The staff, too astonished to move, were seriously cut by flying glass. All the windows of the Operations Building blew out, too, and Miller flattened himself against a blank wall as the clouds of glas
s rained down on the parking lot. The funnel roared on through the row of airplane hangars along the edge of the airfield. Then it crossed onto the field itself, where the planes were parked. The tornado destroyed more than thirty planes before melting away into the darkness near the fences at the far side of the base.

  A plane landed at the base airstrip early the next morning. It was a priority flight from Washington, D.C., and it was bringing in an investigative board of five senior officers from the Pentagon. They spent an hour touring the damage track through the base, which was then being swarmed by repair crews and cleanup crews. Then they found an office for themselves and summoned Miller and his supervisor, Major E. J. Fawbush, to explain just how the air force could have lost more than ten million dollars’ worth of aircraft in under a minute.

  Miller sat miserably in the waiting room before the hearing began. It was hardly fair, he repeated to himself, that a California kid like him could have been expected to understand Oklahoma weather. He also had a more constructive excuse ready. He believed that he had been led to make the wrong call in his evening forecast because he hadn’t realized how untrustworthy the upper-air data supplied by the civilian Weather Bureau was. His mistake, as he put it in his memoirs, was that he hadn’t been “astute enough” to grasp that civilian meteorologists as a class were worthless. He grew so impassioned on this point as he waited to be summoned before the board that Major Fawbush had to tell him to lay off and let him do the talking.