That action be taken to impress upon commanders the necessity of giving full consideration to adverse weather likely to be encountered in Western Pacific.
—RECOMMENDATION #3 IN THE REPORT ISSUED BY THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Despite great leaps in technology, by 1944 not much more was known about the provenance or mechanics of tropical cyclones than had been understood a millennium earlier. What was certain, however, was that the word “typhoon”—from the Greek typhon, Aristotle’s mythical “whirlwind” monster with one hundred heads—remained a navigator’s nightmare.
Called baguios in Manila, tufans in Muscat, and taai fungs in Hong Kong, these annual tempests have ravaged Oceania from time immemorial, shaping the culture and commerce of Asian societies as surely as the hard winter breakup determined the rhythms of Inuit civilization, or the screaming Boreas winds influenced the religious sacrifices of the ancient Athenians. And to the U.S. Navy during World War II, nowhere was this more apparent than in the funnel-shaped channel of water in the Northwestern Pacific known as the Luzon Strait, through which more typhoons sweep than anywhere else on the planet.
To greatly simplify, a typhoon or hurricane is a tightly organized storm system of furious energy in which a warm center of low barometric pressure is surrounded by gale-force winds rotating counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. Typhoons, like hurricanes, are elliptical in shape and generally cover an average area of about three hundred miles in diameter, with the curving cloud bands forming their eye walls extending anywhere from three to sixty-five miles in circumference. The blinding rains and furious winds of a Pacific typhoon’s eye wall are the fiercest on the planet—some have been measured in excess of 250 knots, more than half the speed of the winds whipped up by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Yet it is within the still, humid eye where the air pressure is lowest and the domed, “upswelling” storm surge most violent.
Pacific typhoons, which travel in a general westerly direction at between five and twelve miles per hour, occur far more frequently than either Atlantic hurricanes or Indian Ocean cyclones. And such is their enormity that some of the lowest barometric pressures ever recorded have been observed in their vortexes. In the Philippines the official “typhoon season” runs nine months, from April to December, and the weight on the earth’s crust shifting under a large storm’s rapidly plunging barometric pressure has been known to cause earthquakes through the archipelago’s active tectonic zones.
Born as tropical disturbances on one of the 120-odd low-pressure “tropical waves” that develop annually on the broad band of eastern trade winds that gird the planet near the equator, the storms are spun into a circular motion by the earth’s rotation and migrate westward between the latitudes 6 degrees North and 12 degrees South toward the North Pacific basin. Called tropical depressions in their embryonic state, they ride the heated, sun-swollen ocean in a roughly westerly direction along the equatorial trough. In a typical rainy season, somewhere between 15 and 20 actual typhoons evolve to lash toward the Philippines, Japan, and China before eventually recurving northeast toward the Aleutian Islands or the American Pacific Northwest.
Given the Pacific’s vast swaths of watery distances—the world’s largest ocean covers 32.4 percent of the earth’s surface, 3.2 percent more than the total land mass of the entire planet—these storms often remain potent for several weeks and roam over thousands of miles of sea. Their dense, gray cumulonimbus clouds can rise fifty thousand feet into the troposphere and, on rare occasions, their plateau-shaped canopies have actually penetrated the tropopause, the barrier that separates the earth’s atmosphere from the stratosphere.
Throwing out winds a considerable distance through the dual processes of convection and advection—the vertical and horizontal eggbeater-like movement of heat and moisture within the eye—it is not unusual for a typhoon’s “wind spread” to extend 200 miles from its core, and for hurricane-strength winds to be felt 75 miles distant.
Approaching gales, precipitous drops in barometric pressure, and long, lazy cross-swells arriving at the rate of about eight per minute are all indicators of a typhoon’s imminent emergence. On his second voyage to the New World, in 1494, Christopher Columbus noticed these swells and ordered his caravels to take refuge off the southeastern tip of Hispaniola. There he rode out a tropical storm—classified according to the British admiral Francis Beaufort’s windforce scale as any disturbance whose sustained (one-minute mean) surface wind speed falls between 34 and 63 knots.
Though Columbus’s caravels suffered no damage, the experience proved valuable. For on his fourth, “High Voyage” nine years later, his high-sided naos sailed before a full-blown Atlantic hurricane in the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the present-day Dominican Republic. Columbus read the signs of the “canvas-ripper” at the first appearance of a southeasterly swell, and despite sailing beneath a blue-domed sky, instructed his ships to run for shelter. The Portuguese commander of a hard by flota of galleons and caravels, unfamiliar with the warning indicators and buoyed by the benign weather conditions, lost 26 of his 30 vessels and over 500 men.
Long before the Dutch meteorologist Christopher Buys-Ballot posited, in 1860, his eponymous premise for locating typhoons at sea, captains of Chinese junks and Micronesian outriggers alike were passing down to younger generations of seamen their age-old version of “Buys-Ballot’s Law” for finding, and fleeing, the eye of a storm. That is, face the wind head-on and extend a right arm at an angle between 90 and 135 degrees. The storm center will fall somewhere within that 45-degree arc. Buys-Ballot’s Law dictates that vessels to the right of the storm’s path—“the dangerous semicircle”—should put the wind to their starboard bow and attempt to outrun it. Ships in a direct path or to the left of the storm’s track— “the navigable semicircle”—should place the wind to the starboard quarter and run.
Ancient Polynesian mariners learned to race for the lee side of a typhoon once its oncoming warning signals were identified, particularly the rolling swells and the wispy veiling of advancing high-level cirrus and cirrostratus clouds, like bony white fingers, far off to the east or southeast.
By the eighteenth century the 30-million-square-mile expanse of the North Pacific Ocean was already being referred to as “Typhoon Alley” by American navigators. The nautical pioneer Nathaniel Bowditch, in his encyclopedic The American Practical Navigator, cautioned whalers and merchant ships sailing these sea-lanes to beware of “the largest and most intense tropical cyclones in the world; circulations covering more than 600 miles in diameter are not uncommon.” Yet long before the “golden age” of sail, the myth of the tropical typhoon had also acquired a spiritual semblance.
It was, in fact, out of an ancient religious awe that the Imperial Japanese War Department “venerated” the suicide pilots that wreaked havoc on the U.S. Navy during World War II by naming them after the furious kamikazes that scattered the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan’s two invasion fleets in the thirteenth century. The Japanese honorific “kamikaze” translates roughly as “divine wind,” and in the Middle Ages it was only such a wind that twice prevented Japan from becoming a Chinese vassal state.
Although Japan’s squabbling feudal lords united in 1274 under the Kamakura shogunate to defend their country against Kublai Khan’s first armada of 900 Chinese ships carrying more than 40,000 troops, they proved no match for the Khan’s cavalry with its terrifying gunpowder bombs. Japanese nobles fled to temples and shrines to pray for divine intervention, and the civilian populace—as they would seven hundred years later on Saipan—prepared to commit mass suicide. After overrunning the islands of Tsushima and Iki, however, the Chinese fleet was demolished in Hakata Bay by a freak gale that shifted course overnight. More than 200 ships were lost, and 13,000 Mongol soldiers drowned. The result was not only the retreat of the Khan’s landing force, but the spawning of the belief among Japanese that their islands had been rescued by a miraculous wind directed by the Shinto gods.
Seven years later, in 1281, when a thunderous typhoon ravaged another, larger invasion fleet of more than 4,400 Chinese vessels, this conviction was cemented. These failed offensives remained the only severe threat to the Japanese mainland prior to World War II. And despite the rapacious destruction and loss of life wreaked by the Great Tokyo Typhoon of 1918, the ethos and spirit of the kamikazes remained a key component of Japan’s homeland myth, a sort of inverse Manifest Destiny.
But it wasn’t until the British adventurer and circumnavigator William Dampier published his sublime A New Voyage Round the World, in 1697, that Europeans became acquainted with the “violent whirlwinds” of what Dampier referred to as a Pacific “tufoon.”
“Before these whirlwinds come on there appears a heavy cloud to the northeast which is very black near the horizon,” reported Dampier, describing the wall of cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds that has since come to be referred to as the “bar” of a tropical cyclone. “But toward the upper part is a dull reddish color. The tempest came with great violence, but after a while, the winds ceased all at once and a calm succeeded. This lasted … an hour, more or less, then the gales were turned around, blowing with great fury from the southwest.”
Ironically, in the late nineteenth century a Pacific typhoon may have played the odd role of peacemaker in preventing another conflict that presaged the twentieth century’s two world wars. This occurred in the spring of 1889, when three German men o’ war dropped anchor in the bottle-shaped Samoan port of Apia. They were on a mission that U.S. president Benjamin Harrison adroitly, and correctly, viewed as a colonial probe by Germany’s empire-hungry “Iron Chancellor,” Prince Otto von Bismarck. Harrison dispatched three U.S. warships to intimidate the Prussian flotilla. Joining the American vessels was a British corvette.
In the ensuing standoff, a state of war was narrowly averted when, on March 16, a typhoon struck the island and raged for three days. Warships and merchantmen alike anchored in the harbor were wiped out. German and American sailors even worked together to help keep the fatalities to about 150 men—a cooperative effort that lasted only as long as the storm raged. As it was, however, the typhoon not only obliterated the two miniature fleets, but also destroyed Germany’s Pacific territorial ambitions.
Following the Samoan cyclone, European powers were forced to begin factoring the Pacific’s violent weather into their colonial equations. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the British Royal Navy even attempted to thwart nature, or at least warn of her approach, by positioning a large cannon capable of firing 48-pounders near the entrance to Hong Kong’s harbor. The firing of this “Typhoon Gun” not only served as not only the first alert of a forthcoming storm to both the island’s residents and vessels at anchorage, but also the last. It was better than nothing, if not by much. On September 18, 1906, the cannon was fired less than an hour before the eye of a powerful typhoon, with its pounding rain, shrieking winds, rising seawater, and terrific streaks of lightning, swept through the harbor. Ten thousand people were killed.
As the British experience in Hong Kong illustrated, foreknowledge of a Pacific typhoon was woeful prior to the invention of rudimentary long-distance radar, much less our current satellite-borne radiometer systems and Doppler radar stations. Mariners and islanders were familiar with the approximate months of a storm’s arrival, the peak season of July through October. But this was often deceptive, as a good 30 percent of Pacific typhoons also form in the preceding and succeeding months.
As merchant vessels were gradually equipped with radios in the early twentieth century, typhoon notices could be forwarded to fellow merchantmen and populated islands. These wireless communications ended, however, with the onset of World War II. Not only did merchant shipping virtually cease during the war, but both combatants enforced strict radio blackout rules. Great blank stretches of ocean returned to spawning giant, heat-seeking atmospheric engines of which no sailor was ever aware. Between 1941 and 1945, maps of Pacific typhoon lanes may as well have been marked “Here Be Dragons.”
But, in the autumn of 1944, with America’s invasion plans for the Philippines pumping at full throttle, not many sailors among the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s high command, and certainly not the voracious “Bull” Halsey, were of an inclination to be distracted by dragons.