One fact is clear. For many years the storm hunters had been gathering information about hurricane and typhoon centers from observations on land and sea but they knew very little of what went on there in the upper air. World War II brought a new era. _7._ FIRST FLIGHT INTO THE VORTEX! “_Whirlwinds are most violent near their centers._” —Euripides After war broke out in Europe in 1939, the job of finding and predicting hurricanes became steadily more difficult. Ships of countries at war ceased to report weather by radio and fewer vessels of neutral nations dared to risk submarine attack. After Pearl Harbor, the American merchant marine also stopped their weather messages and the oceans were blanked out on the weather maps. Already the British had been confronted by the lack of weather reports from the Atlantic and the seas around the British Isles, and this was extremely serious in their fight against Nazi air power. Notwithstanding the alarming scarcity of planes for military purposes, the British were forced to send aircraft on routine weather missions. They usually flew a track in the shape of a triangle—for example, one leg of the triangle northwestward until well out at sea, a second leg southward across the ocean about an equal distance, and the last leg back to home base. Other triangles were flown over Europe and back and over the North Sea. As time went on, the pilots of these observation planes gained much experience in flying the weather, including some fairly bad storms, but no one had occasion to fly into a hurricane. There was a good deal of talk about the situation in the United States in 1942, however, because of the danger that the West Indian region might become a theater of war, if the Nazi armies gained control of West Africa and attacked the United States by air, across Brazil and the Caribbean. With this threat from the southeast, the United States took action, which was a repetition of the events during the Spanish War in 1898. Military weather stations were set up in the West Indies and aircraft were prepared to fly weather missions in the area. At the same time, the United States was getting ready to ferry planes across the South Atlantic via the Caribbean, the South American Coast and Ascension Island. It was very definitely evident early in 1942 that hurricanes might play a critical role if the West Indies became a theater of war. By 1943, however, there were two surprising turns of affairs. The Allies invaded Africa late in 1942 and the first flight into a hurricane center, unscheduled and unauthorized, came in 1943.