By the end of 1942 it was plain that the weather offices of the Army and Navy would have to join with the Weather Bureau in hunting and predicting hurricanes. It was agreed that the combined office would work best at Miami. For the 1943 storm season, the Weather Bureau moved its forecast office from Jacksonville to Miami, with Norton in charge, and the military agencies assigned liaison officers there for the purpose of coordinating the weather reports received and the warnings issued. All the experts felt that military aircraft would have to be used to get the reports needed. In August, 1943, the news of Colonel Duckworth’s successful flight into the center of the Texas hurricane was the decisive factor. Reconnaissance began in 1944. _9._ WINGS AGAINST THE WHIRLING BLASTS _Said the black-browed hurricane Brooding down the Spanish main “Shall I see my forces, zounds! Measured in square inches, pounds? With detectives at my back When I double on my track! All my secret paths made clear! Published to a hemisphere! Shall I? Blow me, if I do!”_ —Bret Harte After Joe Duckworth flew into the center of the hurricane near Galveston on July 27, 1943, there was much excitement about the remarkable fact that he had experienced no very dangerous weather or damage to his plane on the trip. But the experts realized that hunting hurricanes as a regular business would be different. Men who had flown the weather in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the tropics and subtropics, and those who had just thought about it, had visions of undulating seas stirred by soft tropical breezes, white clouds piled in neat balls on the horizon, blue water, blue sky, and lush palm-covered coasts and islands. And yet they knew that nowhere is the sly trickery of wind and storm more dangerous. Suddenly and with no apparent reason, the soft breezes turn into quick little gusts and wrap themselves around a center, with gray clouds spreading and rain coming in brief squalls. The whirl spreads, gathering other winds into its orbit, and hard rain begins. Soon there are violent gales and the power of the storm is apparent in the roaring of the wind and sea. And so it is easy to think of a plane in a hurricane as being like an oak leaf in a thunderstorm, except that the leaf is bigger in proportion but lacks the skillful handling of a youthful crew, alert, fearful and resourceful, straining desperately to keep it from rocketing steeply into the wind-torn sea below. For these reasons, the men who ventured in 1943 to probe tropical storms by air were exceedingly cautious about it. They went into it at a high level—usually as far up as the plane would go—and came down by easy stages, in the calm center, if possible, ready to turn around and dash for land the moment anything went wrong.