The Secret Hurricane

Don’t tell anybody, but there’s a hurricane in the Gulf

“East Texas, including Galveston…Scattered thundershowers near the upper coast.”

--The official weather forecast one day before a Category 2 hurricane slammed into the island city, killing 20 people and causing millions of dollars in property damage

* * *

On the night of July 26, 1943 the big coastal artillery pieces jutting from the huge concrete bunkers at Fort Crockett faced the Gulf of Mexico ready at a moment’s notice to hurl giant armor-piercing shells at any enemy vessel that might try to approach Galveston from the sea.

Not since the Civil War had the island city had cause to fear hostile war ships. But German U-boats had torpedoed American ships within sight of the Texas coast and for all anyone knew, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard Nazi submarines might still be lurking out there in the darkness ready to turn an oil tanker into a ball of fire.

For that reason, ships leaving Galveston after the sun went down stood to sea in blackness, their running lights extinguished so as not to present a target. Nor did they communicate by radio or wireless telegraphy. Radio signals could be triangulated to reveal a ship’s position. Weather reports from mariners could aid the enemy.

Of course, wartime censorship kept most citizens blissfully ignorant of how much success Germany had enjoyed in scuttling American vessels in the Gulf and along the Atlantic seaboard. The same need-to-know mentality on the part of the government kept detailed weather forecasts out of newspapers and off commercial radio stations. In effect, the weather had become a military secret.

Even without wartime censorship, when it came to weather forecasting, the state of the art wasn’t particularly artful. Weather satettiles weren’t even the stuff of science fiction yet. Radar was a decade from any practical application in meterology. The Weather Channel did not exist. Mr. and Mrs. Average American essentially had to rely on nondescript “forecasts” or resort to old sailor’s ditties like “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.”

On July 27, the weather bureau did admit that a tropical storm “of minor size and intensity” had developed in the Gulf, but never used the “H” word and said nothing about the weather system that seemed particularly alarming. Just some squally weather coming, most people thought.

In fairness, given the lack of tools available to them, the government forecasters may have been taken by surprise at the intensity of the storm, which began battering Galveston that summer morning. Making landfall on Bolivar Point, the hurricane moved across the bay and onto the mainland at Kemah.

The government aerometer at Galveston blew away at 1:30 p.m., but winds estimated at 85 to 100 miles an hour buffeted the island city. When the hurricane moved over Houston, which then had a population of 600,000, the peak gust at the airport was clocked at 132 miles an hour. Hurricanes weren’t categorized back then, but meteorolgoists who have studied the storm today believe the cyclone reached Category 2 force.

The seawall constructed after the deadly 1900 hurricane did its job and protected Galveston from catastrophic damage, but the storm brought flooding and left widespread moderate to severe damage over the metropolitan area. Ten crewmen aboard the Galveston, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineer dredge, drowned when the vessel was blown against the north jetty. Other deaths in the area brought the total number of fatalities to 20.

Two critical oil refineries sustained major damage, news government censors did not want the Axis powers to find out about. In fact, national newspapers remained mostly silent on the hurricane and the death and destruction it caused.

At some point, the weather bureau realized that it had gone overboard in delaying an announcement of the hurricane’s approach and minimizing its significance. According to a reserch paper written by a contemporary Weather Service staffer, the 1943 storm ended at least domestic meteorlogical censorship.

They didn’t name hurricanes back then, but today the storm of July 27, 1943 is known as the Secret Hurricane.

© Mike Cox
"Texas Tales" July 8, 2010 column
More Texas Storms & Disasters