Word: typhoons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Major General Claire Chennault, wartime commander of World War II's famed Flying Tigers, decided to start an airline in the Far East in 1946, most professionals gave him about as much chance of survival as a turkey in a typhoon. He had only a few war-weary transports, a handful of his old U.S. fighter pilots and a $1,000,000 loan (at 10% interest) from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which wanted to fly food and medicine into China. But last week, as Chennault's Civil Air Transport got ready to celebrate...
...meteorologists who record the birth and upbringing of weather disturbances named her Emma, after Jane Austen's gentle heroine, the one who was so much in love with Mr. Knightley. At 4 one morning, Emma hit Okinawa with all the fury of a full-grown Pacific typhoon...
Tons of rain sweeping across the island at speeds of up to 156 m.p.h. breached sea walls, wrecked the Ryukyus Command building, reduced 3rd Marine Division headquarters to rubble and killed a military policeman. While Okinawa's 40,000 Americans shook inside their typhoon-proof but half-flooded houses, World War II Quonset huts were hurled into paddies and wrapped around telegraph poles. Thirty-five hours later, Okinawans found 7,000 homes and 80 public buildings totally destroyed, 27 fishing boats wrecked. Gone was 40% of the island's precious rice crop, 80% of the sweet-potato crop...
That thirst for knowledge which causes man to seek what lies in the heart of hurricanes and harridans had sent a U.S. B50 typhoon reconnaissance plane flying up into the thickest of the weather with 16 men aboard. Somewhere in Emma's maw the B50 broke radio contact and was never heard or seen again. Emma whipped on, toward Soviet Sakhalin...
Almost immediately, toothy Premier Dong found that he had chewed off a peck of troubles. When, last fortnight, he held his first Cabinet meeting (absent: President Ho), Hanoi's streets were still littered with the debris of Typhoon Kate, which had sunk junks and barges, torn up railroad tracks, burst dikes and spun off thatched roofs as though they were flying saucers. Although Hanoi is swarming with Russians, East Germans, Poles and Chinese (a Canadian truce-commission officer observed that "there are more white faces than during the French administration"), the Communist big brothers seem to regard North Viet...