The Galveston County Daily News

July 26 was a Monday in 1943, the day that Benito Mussolini stepped down from power and the Royal Air Force started a bombing assault on Hamburg, Germany.

Galveston County awoke that day to revel in the war’s progress, unaware of the surprise assault taking shape in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Tuesday morning Houston’s three radio stations passed along a storm warning from the Houston Weather Bureau: “a tropical storm of minor size and intensity.”

Meteorologist in Charge C.E. Norquist was quoted that day as saying, “Don’t get the people disturbed by use of the word ‘hurricane.’ As matters now stand it is a small tropical disturbance. If it gets worse, we’ll let people know in plenty of time.”

They didn’t. There were no satellites then, no radar, no aircraft reconnaissance. Forecasters relied on reports from ships at sea, but suspected U-boat presence in the Gulf had led to an order of radio silence.

The worst hurricane since 1915 caught the county unaware and details about the destruction it caused were sealed for reasons of national security.

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20 Dead, Thousands Homeless

Twenty people were killed and about 4,000 left homeless in Galveston County. Damage estimates ranged as high as $17 million — more than $177 million when converted to current values.

A report in The Daily News the day after the storm described the scene: “Strand from 25th Street east looked as though it were a street in London, Rotterdam or Warsaw after a heavy German air raid.”

The storm crossed the Bolivar Peninsula and blew through Galveston Bay before making landfall near Kemah. Winds were measured at 61 mph at 11:30 a.m., but the hurricane didn’t reach its peak until early afternoon. The weather service’s wind gauge was blown away about 1:30 p.m. Wind speed estimates ranged from 85 mph to more than 100 mph, the north county taking the brunt of the watery gale.

“There is not a single house in San Leon and in Clifton that is not damaged,” then Bacliff resident J.C. Franklin was quoted as saying. “My house and three others were smashed to bits by the heavy wind. The Casino at Clifton, which stood near the beach, was blown out into the water and wrecked.”

The Daily News reported that the primary room of the school at Kemah — completed just a week earlier — was thrown over a fence and “smashed to bits.”

“The church nearby was reduced to kindling,” report said. “Not more than half a dozen houses in Kemah escaped damage and at least 12 were destroyed.”

The hurricane knocked out power and telephone and telegraph lines, causing a delay for news from the mainland to reach the island.

On July 29, The Galveston Tribune reported that 90 percent of the structures in Texas City had sustained water damage or complete destruction.

News reports were sketchy. With Texas City refineries in war-effort production, censorship was rampant to prevent the enemy from learning of weaknesses.

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Island Flooded

Hundreds took refuge in the county courthouse on Galveston Island, where 2 to 3 feet of water flooded downtown streets.

The three-story brick William Schadt Co. building on Avenue B between 24th and 25th streets collapsed. A railroad gondola car smashed into the Santa Fe building, causing $100,000 in damage. St. Mary’s Infirmary and John Sealy Hospital sustained damage and flooding.

Mary Elizabeth Rogers, who lived at 1320 Ave. E, suffered two broken legs when her house collapsed. She was quoted in the July 30 edition of The Tribune.

“I was lying on the divan in the living room when the first big gust of wind blew the roof off the Spiritualist Temple next door and it fell on our roof,” she said. “Our house began to tremble and squeak, but I couldn’t get up fast enough. Something must have fallen on me because when I came to, I looked up and saw the sky above me. All kinds of timber was all over the room and my legs were numb. At first I thought they were gone.”

The Tribune reported that Rogers screamed for help over the noise of the storm for two hours before being rescued by a passing medical student.

Louie Johnson, 16 at the time, weathered the storm on a 50-foot boat moored at the Galveston Yacht Basin.

“It was unannounced and nobody knew when it was going to arrive or how severe,” said Johnson. “The storm did not last too awfully long, but because of that west wind the water dropped awfully fast. It dropped so fast it left fish on the dock.”

Johnson said there was little information available, but he wasn’t scared.

“There wasn’t much information available,” Johnson said. “As a kid you’re one of two things: either you’re scared to death or you don’t know enough to be scared.”

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15 Seamen Drowned

More than half the lives lost in the storm were men on board the Army Engineers’ hopper dredge Galveston that sank near the north jetty.

Sixty were on board when the hurricane hit; 11 drowned, 24 were rescued July 28 by the U.S. Coast Guard after two failed attempts, and the others were rescued later that day by coast artillery detachment troops from Fort Travis on the Bolivar shore.

Four other died aboard the Titan, a tug board that was towing a barge when the storm made its unexpected arrival.

Vernon Bennett researched Galveston’s hurricanes while working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, designing extensions to the seawall.

Bennett learned that one of the men on the Galveston, Richard Clyde Goings, was presumed lost until he was found on a Bolivar beach the day after the storm. Goings had used a door from the dredge as a raft, clinging to it through huge waves for more than four hours, eventually reaching land about 40 miles away.

Airplanes remained on the ground at the Army’s Ellington Field; those in command didn’t have enough warning to fly the planes to a safer place.

Soldiers scrambled to tie the planes down against the gusting winds. Twenty-two soldiers were hospitalized with injuries for their effort and six planes were badly damaged.

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An Historic Flight From Bryan

The hurricane gained fame, not among the general public, but certainly within aviation circles. Thanks to a bet among British pilots at Bryan Field, it became the first hurricane into which an airplane was intentionally flown.

Col. Joe Duckworth and Lt. Col. Ralph O’Hair took a single-engine training plane into the storm on a bet.

O’Hair told hurricane consultant Lew Fincher that Duckworth tired of hearing his trainees complain that the AT-6 “Texan” trainers were frail. Duckworth wagered a highball that he could fly the AT-6 into the approaching hurricane, thereby proving both the plane’s sturdiness and the reliability of the instrument flying he was teaching.

Duckworth asked O’Hair — the only navigator at the table — to go along. The pair flew into the eye, where they circled for some time, then returned through the storm to the airfield.

Upon landing, the weather officer, Lt. William Jones-Burdick, asked to be flown into the storm. O’Hair gave up his seat, and Duckworth made a second trip.

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Destruction Led To Censorship Policy Change

Fincher and National Weather Service meteorologist Bill Read researched the 1943 storm extensively.

“There was a report that the FBI shut down the telegraph office in La Porte because someone had sent a telegram out of the state informing someone of the damages from the hurricane,” they wrote in a paper on the topic. “The only news of the hurricane was published in the two states that were affected, Texas and Louisiana.”

Although the censorship policy was born from national security concerns, Fincher and Read said advisories have never since been kept secret.

“War or no war, the risk to life was too great,” they wrote. “This was a lesson learned.”