That the northeasterly courses steered by the fleet from about 0700 December 16 in an attempt to fuel certain destroyers contributed to the disaster since this maneuver held the fleet in or near the path of the storm center, and was an error in judgment on the part of Commander Task Force 38 who directed it and of Commander THIRD Fleet who permitted it.
—GENERAL OPINION #10 IN THE REPORT OF THE COURT OF INQUIRY INVESTIGATING “HALSEY’S TYPHOON.”
Comdr. George Kosco had read the Navy Department’s recent weather warning. Yet he knew well from both research and personal experience that most Pacific typhoons are stillborn, smothered and buried in their infancy by the very doldrums that conceive them. American sailors, deconstructing ancient rumors through a kind of mariners’ osmosis, may have dubbed this stretch of the ocean “Typhoon Alley,” but Kosco understood that of all the thousands of embryonic squalls that raced across the Northwestern Pacific, it was the rare thunderstorm that made the triple leap from tropical disturbance to tropical depression to tropical storm.
Moreover, those few that managed to mature into tropical storms blew themselves out in even greater numbers before reaching typhoon status. This high mortality rate reassured the fleet aerologist.
There was, however, a flaw to Kosco’s reasoning. Meteorology was not high on the U.S. Navy’s list of wartime priorities. It was, in essence, treated as small-bore intelligence. In the summer of 1944, to take one example, several army meteorological officers recently posted to Fleet Weather Central at Pearl were asked to provide a weather forecast for a carrier-based strike the following day against Marcus Island, an isolated speck of rock midway between Tokyo and Wake Island. They stared blankly at the weather map, at each other, and back at the weather map. There were seven areas on the map larger than the United States that contained no weather data whatsoever.
With so little to base any forecast upon, they fell into a philosophical discussion regarding Magellan’s thoughts upon setting out into the boundless western sea. Finally, their deadline looming, they processed what little data they could glean from the weather reports of surface ships and submarines near the coordinates. After much head-scratching, they finally determined that a nearby storm system would curve north and collide with the carrier task force set to bombard Marcus Island, and so reported. Their senior commander, however, rejected the analysis.
“Typhoons don’t recurve at that longitude at this season,” he told his weathermen. “They move straight west. Change that forecast!”
The forecast was duly changed, and off the shores of Marcus Island the following morning planes were lost and brave men died when the cyclone struck the task force.
There were various reasons for this lack of institutional awareness. For one, even by 1944 the rudimentary weather-forecasting radar installed aboard each American aircraft carrier was not designed for making long-range projections. Kosco’s staff, who maintained a round-the-clock weather watch on the navigation deck of the New Jersey, realized that the meteorological equipment on Halsey’s flagship was not that much more efficient than that which sailors of Bowditch’s era had carried on sea voyages—a good barometer, a thermometer, and a seasoned “weather nose.”
For another, America did not have enough planes in the Pacific Theater to devote to secondary missions such as weather reconnaissance flights. Even if search crews flying out of the U.S. bases from the Marianas to Ulithi to the Palaus had been trained to differentiate commonplace Pacific storms from incipient typhoons, which they were not, their aircraft were ill equipped to track them.
When American recon pilots had the time and the fuel, they tried to box a large storm’s coordinates; if not, they simply marked its general location on their maps. In any event, even these efforts often fell short. Radio silence prevented scout planes from reporting their sightings until they returned to base, typically hours later. And, unlike their Caribbean counterparts, Pacific typhoons frequently follow no directional pattern.
Although the preponderance of Pacific typhoons travel in a west-northwesterly direction, on occasion they have been known to abruptly turn in on themselves and reverse course in a phenomenon known as recurvature. This occurs when the storm falls under the influence of the upper-level, high-pressure anticyclones that dominate circulation patterns aloft in the atmosphere over the North Pacific.
Before the age of weather satellites, it was any navigator’s guess as to whether a typhoon would collide with the Philippine archipelago and continue west into the South China Sea, or turn sharply and blow nearly due north before slamming into Japan. This held especially true for late-season storms. Even Bowditch notes that December typhoons in the Western Pacific are the most unpredictable.
Despite these forecasting obstacles, Kosco and his staff did their best to analyze the myriad reports coming in from Allied weather posts and surface ships scattered about the Pacific. They knew something was out there. Fleet Weather Station at Pearl had been tracking and collating tantalizing hints of a brewing storm since December 11. But, lacking a Ouija board, the exact nature of the cyclone the U.S. Navy was shortly to dub Typhoon Cobra remained hidden from their view.
In her embryonic stage she glided west along the trade winds through the doldrums, leisurely, invisible, avoiding any contact with men, or at least men with radios. When she collided with areas of highly favorable warmth and moisture, she nearly came to a halt while sucking up energy from surface water whose temperature was 78 degrees or higher. As her barometric pressure fell, nearby cumulus and nimbus cloud systems moved in to fill her low-pressure center, at first gently gathering around her vortex, then swirling in ever-tightening coils that generated thunderous rumbles and bold strokes of lightning.
Like a massive pump sucking in humid, sea-level air and sending it spiraling upward, her convection cells progressively flourished as her cloud towers, bound for the troposphere, climbed to 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 25,000 feet. It was at one of these points that she evolved into a tropical depression, defined by sustained wind gusts up to 33 knots. As noted, these squalls are as common in the Pacific as coral reefs. Cobra, however, continued to engulf more and more warm air masses, accruing weight and size as her core became more clearly defined.
When she neared the equator, where the earth’s rotational force is weakest, she turned and began moving at 15 knots in a north-northwest direction toward Ulithi. Somewhere around 175 miles east-northeast of the atoll she again loitered, her pressure gradient dropping steeply and her circumference elongating to the west and bulging to the north. Here she drew in enough heat and moisture to mature into a tropical storm, releasing torrential rains and hurling winds of 30 to 40 knots, with gusts as high as 64 knots.
It was at this place and time, on December 15, that army meteorologists stationed on Saipan found her. She had passed south of their Guam weather station, where the foul conditions had turned what sailors call spitty. Kosco, collating all his information, spread his charts across a table on the New Jersey’s navigating bridge and placed the storm eight hundred miles southeast of the Third Fleet’s position in the Philippine Sea, moving due west.
The question was raised: Would she continue on her straight westward course, or take a northwest turn toward Halsey and his Mindoro task force as the pilot charts for December advised?
Like most naval officers, Kosco was not unaware of the destructive potential of a Pacific typhoon, particularly the late-season variety that, since the beginning of the war, U.S. military meteorologists had begun to dramatically classify as “super typhoons” (as opposed to the rainy, relatively mild “bean” or “midget” typhoons that form earlier in the year). Kosco had flown through hurricanes in the Caribbean, and officers of the line were steeped in storm lore, which was as old as the service itself. The story of the Continental Army sloop Saratoga, destroyed off the Bahamas with all eighteen hands aboard in March 1781, was still told at the Naval Academy. And prior to the Civil War, the U.S. War Department officially counted at least fourteen ships lost to storms on open oceans around the world.
During the Spanish-American War, President William C. McKinley had deftly delineated the debate between military necessity and weather hazards when he admitted to being “more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than I am of the entire Spanish Navy.” And despite the echoes of the fate of the Spanish Armada the president’s words evoked, the Navy Department was also aware that bad weather and high seas could strike anywhere water rippled, as evidenced by the three gunboats that sank in Chesapeake Bay and the schooner lost beneath frigid Lake Ontario in the early 1800s.
Moreover, by the onset of World War II, weather officers such as Kosco had taken a special interest in the fifty-year-old face-off, and subsequent devastation, of the American and German naval squadrons in Samoa’s Apia Harbor. Although over 450 American sailors had perished in Atlantic storms since the commencement of the war, the Samoan storm, being a Pacific phenomenon, seemed more raw in the collective memory of the men fighting the Japanese, as did the powerful Pacific typhoon that nearly destroyed Adm. Matthew C. Perry’s flagship frigate USS Mississippi as he sailed home from his historic “opening” of Japan in 1853.
Given the advances in naval engineering over the past century, however, Kosco was not overly concerned. Only three months earlier, in September, Third Fleet had safely ridden out the outer fringes of a typhoon on open water near Peleliu, the same storm that had buffeted Radar Technician Keith Abbott. And in early October, Halsey had even used a typhoon that limned Ulithi as cover to deliver surprise attacks on Okinawa and other outlying Japanese islands. (In appreciation of its efficacy, this “good guy” typhoon had been dubbed “Task Force Zero-Zero,” the first time a typhoon or hurricane was ever informally named.)
And despite being one of nature’s most impregnable forces, a typhoon does have innate meteorological enemies at sea. Cold water, dry air aloft, and most especially the massive cold fronts that scream out of the arctic and extend across the Pacific like invisible cordilleras will rapidly sap a tropical storm of its energy. For the past forty-eight hours Kosco had been tracking just such a high-pressure area pushing an enormous mass of cold air down from Siberia and across the eastern contours of Asia.
He knew from intelligence sources that this near-freezing bloc of air had already collided with the warm water of the Japan Current and spawned a series of violent frontal storms now tearing across the Japanese islands and riding the current toward the Aleutians. The storms had pulled the cold front down behind them, and he saw that it had begun to bulge as far south as the Philippine Sea. This front, Kosco was certain, would devour any tropical disturbance in its path.
Given the circumstances and Commander Kosco’s academic training, it should be said that he was sure he’d done the best he could. He’d studied every weather forecast sent to him; there had been no portents. He had no idea that by the evening of December 16, as Halsey’s carrier planes were raking Japanese installations on the Philippines, Typhoon Cobra was already a churning maelstrom covering several hundred square miles of ocean and rising thousands of feet into the atmosphere. The storm was also the ideal distance from the equator to have the deflective sources of the earth’s rotation set her counterclockwise cyclonic winds in motion. A small eye, probably no more than six miles in diameter, appeared in her core, producing winds in excess of 64 knots.
That night—her now clearly delineated circular eye swiftly organizing itself into an efficient airshaft, “an umbilical cord through which the storm will grow from the inside out”—she officially became a typhoon. But Cobra, as tightly coiled as a DNA helix, was maturing so slowly that she was not yet throwing out to her periphery the massive gusts and swells that would typically herald the arrival of a full-blown typhoon.
Halsey was busy coordinating his attacks against Luzon, Mindoro, and beyond when Kosco interrupted him in flag plot to inform him that a tropical disturbance, “not necessarily a typhoon,” was developing some five hundred miles east of the fleet. He further informed the admiral that he had been following what he would later call this “evil thing dedicated to death and destruction,” moving north-northwest at about nine knots. Kosco predicted that the storm would collide with the cold front bearing down across Japan and rebound toward the northeast. Away from the fleet.
Satisfied, Halsey returned his attention to the Japanese.