Stormchasers by David Toomey

Author:David Toomey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

It was mid-December 1944, exactly a week before Christmas. Eighty-six vessels of U.S. Navy Task Force 38 were in the Philippine Sea, 300 miles east of Luzon. There were eight battleships, thirteen carriers, fifteen cruisers, and fifty destroyers, all operating under the command of Admiral William F. Halsey aboard the flagship New Jersey. The carriers had just completed three days of raids against Japanese airfields when oil tankers began refueling operations. Wind was coming from the northeast at 30 miles an hour, and seas were choppy. Crews managed to wrestle hoses aboard, but they were working on heaving decks, and the steady rising and falling kept pulling fuel lines from their housings. When conditions deteriorated from difficult to dangerous, Halsey ordered refueling to cease until they could find calmer waters.

Halsey’s chief meteorologist on the New Jersey was Commander George F. Kosco. In 1944 an American weather officer in the Pacific had little to work with. The Navy had weather stations on only a few captured islands, and pilots who were flying or had flown through weather were reluctant to break radio silence to report it. Fleet Weather Central in Pearl Harbor issued regular radio reports to ships, but even its knowledge was spotty. Consequently, Kosco’s predictions were based on what few reports he did have, and his own best judgment.

Kosco believed that the storm they were encountering was northeast of the fleet. There was a cold front over them, and Kosco was convinced that it would slow the storm, forcing it to curve farther away to the northeast. He advised Halsey accordingly, and the admiral, hoping to increase distance from the storm and buy them a margin of safety, ordered the fleet south, on a course that put the cold front between them and the storm. By afternoon, the ships’ barometers were rising again, and they thought they were out of the worst of it. But they were wrong. Soon the ships’ bows were plunging into seas, and walls of green water were washing over decks. The task force was headed directly toward the center of the typhoon, which they now realized had been following them from the southeast. The falling barometer and a shift in wind direction meant they were in it.

Crews were ordered to lash down all moveable gear and to lower elevators on all ships. Helmsmen adjusted headings to place the ships in the trough of the seas and reduced speed to minimum. Still, they were not prepared for what would come. Soon winds increased to 80, 90, then 100 miles an hour. Seas rose to 70 feet. Some twenty vessels were caught in the worst part of the storm, and Halsey had no choice but to release them from formation so they might ride it out better. The carrier USS San Jacinto was among them. It was rolling 40 degrees and more. To see the wave crests, the men on board had to look up. Every time it rolled, its deck upended like a table, and everything not secured slid sideways.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.