Foreign News: Atlantic Cataclysm

For six nights last week a pale sliver of moon peeped down through mountainous clouds on the most frightful storm that has shaken the continent of Europe for nearly a century, a storm that uprooted trees, flooded valleys, furrowed the spume-streaked North Atlantic with giant combers, cost the lives of more than 200 persons.

At the tempest’s end, U. S. citizens home for Christmas disembarked, sleepless, stiff, scared, after the worst crossing any of them had ever remembered. Passengers on the ponderous Berengaria told how their ship rolled till sea water dashed over the funnels, how the steel walls of the rudder house had been squashed like a sardine tin. The Bremen, world’s fastest liner, was forced to crawl for two days at five knots per hour, pouring oil on the water. In mid-ocean a gigantic wave set the ship nearly on its beam ends, knocked two teeth from the jaw of Monsignor William McKean of Bernardsville, N. J., broke the right thumb of one “Peppy” d’Albrew, Broadway tangoist. At that instant Col. Sam Park, famed socialite U. S. Vice Consul at Biarritz, was being shaved by the ship’s barber. Only the barber’s steady hand saved him from instant decapitation. As it was, his consular lip was badly gashed. When the storm subsided, the reported sea toll read : 16 ships sunk, 32 beached, 8 abandoned at sea.

Great Britain. Official barometers registered a low mark of 27.5 inches, a low pressure seldom equaled by the worst tropical typhoons. Off the Welsh coast the British destroyer Tormentor, dismantled, was being towed to a shipbreaking yard. The tow rope snapped, the Tormentor and her skeleton crew of four vanished into the storm.

With 319 passengers aboard, the S. S. Andalucia Star limped into Falmouth, rudderless. In the Bristol Channel, the Radyr went down with all hands.

Flood waters swelled the Thames three miles wide in Buckinghamshire. Eton College closed, its playing fields eight feet under water.

At Bridgewater, Somersetshire, 30 houses collapsed. On Bridgewater dam armed sentries tramped in gleaming raincoats to stop enraged farmersfrom dynamiting the dyke that was flooding their fields.

For the first time in British railway history a royal train, carrying King George & Queen Mary and King Christian & Queen Alexandrine of Denmark, reached London behind schedule, stalled 18 minutes by the force of the storm. On his arrival in Britain last fortnight, long King Christian, whose life is a succession of minor mishaps (TIME, March 18, 1928), was stranded for hours on a mudbank. Last week, like Ajax defying the lightning, he re-embarked for home in the height of the hurricane.

France. At Villacoublay, second largest airport in France, a mammoth hangar collapsed, killed Antoine Rouverie, general manager of the field. During the three worst days of the storm, all commercial flying ceased in northern France.

At Cherbourg fishermen prayed as a hurricane blew the harbor waters into a 50-foot wall, smothering the breakwater.

Holland. Dykes, windmills were smashed, thousands of acres flooded. Into The Hague limped the tug White Sea, Captain Verscheor, master, famed tugster who pulled the 50,000-ton world’s largest floating drydock from Britain to Singapore, early this year, having lost his haul for the first time in, his career. Off Borkum Reef, the 200-foot drydock that he was towing last week reared high on two gigantic waves, broke in two, sank. Brave Captain Verscheor, bruised and bleeding from being smashed against the rails of his bridge, stood by to rescue all nine of the foundered drydock’s crew.

Spain. The Teresa, the Orientil, the Beatrix, Spanish cargo boats pounded to pieceson the rocks of Cape Finisterre, more than 20 were killed.

Italy. Mountainous Atlantic seas crashing against the Spanish coast and the Bay of Biscay sent subterranean jolts across Europe, down the backbone of Italy to waggle seismograph needles in the Catholic Observatory in Florence. In Sicily, Mount Etna sputtered in mild eruption.