Typhoon Cobra

On 17 December 1944 the ships of Admiral William Halsey’s American Third Fleet, operating in the Philippine Sea several hundred kilometres east of Luzon, were trying to refuel from a group of oilers. The sea was growing ever rougher, fuel hoses were parting, and destroyers with almost empty tanks were rolling dangerously alongside the battleships. No one in the flagship yet knew that a small but exceptionally violent typhoon was approaching only a few dozen miles away. The next day, 18 December, the fleet found itself at its centre. Three destroyers – Hull, Monaghan and Spence – capsized and sank, nine other ships were seriously damaged, 146 aircraft were wrecked or swept overboard, and, according to the US Navy’s history, 790 men were killed. The Americans gave the storm the code name Cobra; it has also gone down in history as “Halsey’s Typhoon”.

The date of 17 December, given in some chronologies, needs clarifying: 17 December was the day of the failed refuelling and the first signs of the storm, whereas the typhoon’s heaviest blow and the sinking of the destroyers came on 18 December local time (in United States time zones it was still 17 December). The figure of “almost 800 dead” is confirmed by American sources – the Naval History and Heritage Command gives 790 killed, 775 of them from the three sunken destroyers.

A fleet four months at sea

In December 1944 the fighting for the Philippines was entering a new phase. On Leyte, where the Americans had landed on 20 October, heavy fighting was still going on, and General Douglas MacArthur was preparing his next leap – the landing on Mindoro on 15 December, which was to provide airfields to cover the later invasion of Luzon. The task of the Third Fleet’s fast carriers, organised as Task Force 38 under the direct command of Vice Admiral John S. McCain, was to destroy Japanese air power on the airfields of Luzon. From 14 to 16 December carrier aircraft attacked them without a break, maintaining a constant fighter “umbrella” over the island intended to prevent kamikaze aircraft from taking off against the convoys sailing to Mindoro.

Task Force 38 then comprised seven fleet carriers, six light carriers, eight battleships, a dozen or more cruisers and about fifty destroyers. According to the US Navy’s history, these ships had been at sea almost continuously for four months. After three days of strikes the destroyers often had only 10–15 per cent of their fuel left. Halsey therefore planned a rendezvous on 17 December with Captain Jasper T. Acuff’s replenishment group (oilers and escort carriers with replacement aircraft), in order to refuel and resume strikes on Luzon on 19 December.

Failed refuelling and faulty forecasts

Refuelling began on the morning of 17 December, roughly 500 kilometres east of Luzon. The wind and sea rose rapidly. Destroyers steaming alongside the battleships and oilers could not keep station, lines and hoses snapped, and several ships had to stop taking on fuel. In the afternoon Halsey broke off the operation and set a new rendezvous point for the following morning; he then changed it several times, shifting the force further south – by as much as about 180 miles, according to historians. According to later analyses, these manoeuvres did not take the fleet away from the typhoon but in practice kept it in its path.

The crux of the problem was the forecasting. The typhoon was small, and in 1944 there was no network of weather stations over the western Pacific nor any regular weather reconnaissance flights. Halsey’s chief meteorologist in the battleship New Jersey, Commander George F. Kosco, judged – as the National WWII Museum in New Orleans relates – that it was a weak disturbance several hundred miles away, whereas the centre of the typhoon was much closer. The Army Air Forces forecasting centre on Saipan sent out a reconnaissance aircraft, but the information arrived late and did not add up to a clear picture. The falling pressure on individual ships’ barometers and the strengthening wind did not persuade the command to disperse the force and run from the storm – the priority remained refuelling and keeping to the operational timetable.

18 December: in the eye of the typhoon

On the morning of 18 December the fleet found itself in the most dangerous, right-hand quadrant of the typhoon. The wind reached an estimated 100 knots and more, the waves were a dozen or more metres high, and the destroyer Dewey recorded a pressure of only 924 hectopascals. Formations broke up; ships, blinded by rain and spray, lost sight of one another, and water flooding the antennas knocked out radars and radios. Some vessels rolled more than 70 degrees.

The destroyers were in the greatest danger. The older Farragut-class ships Hull and Monaghan, built in the mid-1930s, had received more than 500 tons of additional equipment during the war – radars, anti-aircraft guns, depth charges – which raised their centre of gravity. The newer Fletcher-class Spence, for her part, had almost empty fuel tanks and, according to American studies, had not managed to ballast them with seawater. Some ships that did so in time – such as Hickox and Maddox – came through the storm with only minor damage.

Before noon water pouring in through the funnels and ventilators flooded the engine rooms and switchboards of the three destroyers. Deprived of power and steering, the ships heeled over onto their sides and never righted themselves. Spence, whose rudder had jammed hard to starboard, capsized and sank; 317 men were killed and 23 survived. From Hull 62 sailors were rescued and 202 died. From Monaghan only six survived, and according to American figures 256 members of her crew were killed.

The carriers, too, went through some terrible moments. In the light carrier Monterey aircraft in the hangar broke loose from their lashings and smashed into one another and into the bulkheads until a fire broke out; three men were killed, the boiler rooms had to be evacuated and the ship lost power for a time. Among the officers who fought the fire was Lieutenant Gerald Ford, later President of the United States. In his memoirs Ford described how during one roll he very nearly went overboard, and how he was then sent below decks by the captain, Stuart Ingersoll, to assess the extent of the fire. Similar fires and damage were recorded in Cowpens and San Jacinto, and the escort carriers of the replenishment group lost several dozen aircraft. In all the typhoon destroyed or swept overboard 146 aircraft.

The rescue

The typhoon scattered the fleet over a vast area, and only on the evening of 18 December, as the storm weakened and moved away, did the extent of the losses begin to be established. The first to find survivors was the small destroyer escort Tabberer, which had herself lost her mast and radio antennas. Her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Henry Lee Plage, despite being called back, conducted a systematic search for about 51 hours and picked up 55 men – 41 from Hull and 14 from Spence. The destroyer Brown rescued all six survivors of Monaghan and a dozen or so sailors from Hull. Over the following days ships and aircraft of the Third Fleet combed the ocean; according to the US Navy’s history, of the more than 800 men of the three sunken destroyers, about 90 survived. Plage received the Legion of Merit from Halsey, and Tabberer’s crew – the first ever to do so – received the Navy Unit Commendation.

The strikes on Luzon planned for 19–21 December to cover the Mindoro beachhead had to be cancelled. The fleet turned back to Ulithi, which it reached on Christmas Eve. Admiral Chester Nimitz later judged that the typhoon had dealt the Third Fleet a more crippling blow than it could have expected to suffer in anything short of a major battle.

The court of inquiry

On 26 December 1944 a naval court of inquiry convened aboard the destroyer tender Cascade at Ulithi, with Nimitz himself attending its sessions. According to the findings described by the Naval History and Heritage Command, the court held that the main responsibility lay with Halsey, who had made errors of judgement in leading the fleet into the typhoon zone and in warning the ships under his command too late. At the same time it found that these were “errors in judgment committed under stress of war operations” arising from a “commendable desire to meet military requirements”, and therefore did not recommend that the admiral be punished. The criticism also extended to the commanding officers of the sunken destroyers, who were faulted for taking measures to secure their ships too late. Halsey retained his command; in January 1945, as previously planned, he handed the fleet over to Admiral Raymond Spruance.

Nimitz then issued a lengthy letter to the fleet in which he discussed the lessons of the disaster: the importance of ship stability and of ballasting empty tanks, the duty of commanding officers to assess the weather for themselves, and their right to leave formation when the safety of their ship was at stake.

Significance

Typhoon Cobra is regarded as the worst natural disaster in the history of the US Navy. It killed more Americans than many Pacific battles, and the aircraft losses were equivalent to a major air engagement – and this at a time when the Japanese fleet had already been broken in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The disaster also exposed the price of the fast carriers’ unremitting service, obliged to spend weeks operating in the same area with increasingly exhausted crews and ships. A similar fate had befallen the Japanese Fourth Fleet nine years earlier, when its ships were badly damaged by a typhoon during manoeuvres in 1935.

The Japanese were unable to exploit the Third Fleet’s temporary weakness. By the end of December Halsey’s carriers were ready for action again, and in January 1945 they covered the landing in Lingayen Gulf on Luzon and swept into the South China Sea. Halsey, however, did not fully learn the lesson of December: in June 1945, during the fighting for Okinawa, his fleet again ran into a typhoon, which brought further damage to ships and a second court of inquiry. This time the court recommended that the admiral be reassigned, but Nimitz, mindful of his services, did not allow it.

The most lasting consequence of Typhoon Cobra was the reorganisation of the Navy’s weather service in the Pacific. Regular weather reconnaissance flights, weather ships and a new forecasting centre on Guam were introduced. From these changes grew the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, established in 1959, which to this day tracks tropical cyclones in the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. The events of December 1944 also left their mark on literature: the storm described in Herman Wouk’s novel The Caine Mutiny, in which the crew relieves Captain Queeg of command, is usually associated with Halsey’s Typhoon.