The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies from a few miles to twenty or twenty-five. The smallest known was entered by a fishing boat, the _Sea Gull_, in the Gulf of Mexico, on July 27, 1936. The master, Leon Davis, was fishing a few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he became involved in a small hurricane. “Suddenly,” Captain Davis said, “the wind died down, the sun shone brightly and the rain ceased. For a space of about a mile and a half, a clear circular area prevailed; the dense curtain of rain was seen all around the edge of the circle; and the roar of the wind was heard in the distance.” On the other hand, one of the largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October, 1944. It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Florida on the west coast, near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville, the calm center was stretched out to the remarkable distance of about seventy miles. This was a kind of freak; some of the storm hunters thought that it had been distorted and finally drawn into an elongated area by its passage over the western end of Cuba.
All of the available records of this kind were consulted in due time by the men who were assigned to the perilous duty of flying military planes into the vortices of hurricanes in the West Indies and into typhoon centers in the Pacific. But one of the best of these reports—of weather and sea conditions observed on many ships caught at the same time in the central region of a big typhoon—was not available until long after it happened. The Japanese kept it secret for seventeen years.
The reason for keeping the data secret was the fact that while on grand maneuvers, the RED Imperial Japanese Fleet was outmaneuvered by a pair of typhoons and was caught in the center of one of them and severely damaged. It happened in 1935 and was not reported for publication in America until 1952.
Just how this happened is not altogether clear. It was in the middle of September, 1935, when the first typhoon appeared, northwest of the island of Saipan. It increased in fury as it moved slowly toward Japan. On the twenty-fifth it crossed western Honshu and roared into the Sea of Japan, headed northeastward in the direction of the Japanese Fleet. Soon after this, it dissipated. Before it weakened, however, another typhoon had formed near Saipan and started toward Japan. It turned more to the northward than the first typhoon and missed Japan altogether. As it approached Honshu, late on the twenty-fifth, the RED Imperial Fleet was passing through the Strait of Tsugaru into the Pacific—squarely in front of the typhoon center.