Typhoon Connie

On 5 June 1945, less than six months after the disaster of Typhoon Cobra, Admiral William Halsey’s US Third Fleet sailed into the heart of a tropical cyclone for the second time. The typhoon, called “Connie” in American documents and “Viper” in some accounts, passed during the night of 4–5 June and the morning of 5 June through the fast carrier groups of Task Force 38 and the logistic support group operating at sea south-east of Okinawa. No ship was sunk, but the heavy cruiser Pittsburgh lost her entire bow, two carriers – Hornet and Bennington – had the forward ends of their flight decks crushed, and several dozen other vessels were damaged. Six sailors were killed and the fleet lost 76 aircraft.

The sentence common in war chronologies, that Halsey’s fleet “suffered extensive damage from a huge typhoon”, captures the essence of the event but needs two qualifications. Connie was – as descriptions of the 1945 typhoon season stress – a small, though very violent, cyclone, and weaker than December’s Cobra; its destructive power stemmed above all from the fact that part of the fleet found itself in the eye and the eyewall of the storm. Moreover, while Halsey commanded the Third Fleet as a whole, the carrier force, Task Force 38, was directly commanded by Vice Admiral John S. McCain – and it was the two admirals together who later answered to a court of inquiry.

The fleet off Okinawa

At the end of May 1945 a routine change of command took place in the waters around Okinawa: on 27 May Halsey took over the fleet from Admiral Raymond Spruance, the Fifth Fleet became the Third Fleet once again, and Task Force 58 became Task Force 38, at the head of which McCain replaced Marc Mitscher on 28 May. The ships and men remained the same. For more than two months the fast carriers had been covering the fighting on the island and fending off suicide attacks – the kamikaze off Okinawa inflicted the heaviest losses in the fleet’s history, and in May they hit, among others, the flagships of Spruance and Mitscher. Halsey wanted to shift the weight of operations to the source of the threat, the airfields on Kyushu; the first strikes on the Kyushu airfields were flown on 2 June, and more were planned for the following days.

The weather in the region had been bad since the end of May. Low cloud and rain had several times forced the cancellation of flights over Okinawa, and in the first days of June a cyclone formed to the south of the fleet. According to a description of the 1945 typhoon season, it was first observed on 1 June; it was moving north-east, with gusts said to reach about 230 km/h. That same month a specialised typhoon-tracking centre was set up on Guam – an institution that had been lacking in December 1944 and was still lacking when the Third Fleet once again had to rely on contradictory and belated reports.

The night of 4–5 June

On 4 June the ships of Rear Admiral Joseph J. Clark’s Task Group 38.1 were refuelling from Rear Admiral Donald Beary’s logistic group despite the worsening weather. According to his biographers, McCain advised Halsey to head east, away from the approaching storm. Halsey agreed that the fleet should change its area but put off the decision until newer data came in, and at about 8 p.m. ordered a change of course from 110° to 300°, that is to the north-west – in the direction from which the next strikes on Kyushu were to be launched. The assessment of the cyclone’s position and track, based on incomplete reports, proved wrong: the new course led the fleet close to its centre.

At about 3 a.m. McCain, with new information to hand, turned north. At 4.20 a.m. Clark, whose group was closest to the eye of the storm, reported that he could get out of the danger zone by steering 120°. McCain referred the request to Halsey, who ordered the existing course to be maintained; McCain himself was sailing with Rear Admiral Arthur Radford’s Task Group 38.4, which was clearing the storm on its northerly course, and saw no reason for a change. Only at 4.40 a.m. did he allow Clark to act on his own judgement. By then it was too late: at dawn Task Group 38.1 and some of Beary’s ships ran into the eyewall of the typhoon, where wind and sea are at their most violent.

Ships without bows

The most spectacular damage was suffered by the new Baltimore-class heavy cruiser Pittsburgh. The wind tore her floatplane off its catapult, and then, amid waves estimated in shipboard accounts at several tens of metres, the hull structure buckled and the whole forward part of the ship – about 32 metres of bow – broke away. None of the crew was killed. For several hours Pittsburgh kept her stern and side to the sea, manoeuvring so that the drifting bow would not strike her, and when the storm abated she made her way at about 6 knots to Guam, which she reached on 10 June. The severed bow, nicknamed by the sailors “McKeesport” after a suburb of Pittsburgh, was later towed to Guam. Faulty shipyard welding of the hull plating was blamed for the fracture.

On the carriers Hornet and Bennington huge waves struck the ends of the flight decks overhanging the bow and collapsed them – on Hornet over a length of about 7.5 metres. From then on neither ship could launch aircraft over the bow; an attempt to launch a Corsair fighter from the damaged Hornet ended with the aircraft dropping straight into the sea. Damage was also suffered by the cruisers Baltimore and Duluth, whose bow was damaged by the waves, and by the escort carriers Windham Bay and Salamaua of the logistic group. According to figures cited in the literature, seven ships were seriously damaged and a further 26 more lightly; other studies speak of 33 damaged vessels in all.

Six sailors were killed or washed overboard, and four were seriously injured. The fleet lost 76 aircraft – 33 were washed overboard, 36 were jettisoned as wrecks and seven were beyond repair – and about 70 more were damaged (some sources give 75 aircraft lost).

The second court of inquiry

Despite its losses the fleet did not break off operations. After makeshift repairs the carriers struck the Kyushu airfields again over the following days and supported the troops on Okinawa, while the damaged ships were sent to Guam and to Leyte Gulf; Bennington arrived there on 11 June and the whole of Task Force 38 on 13 June, leaving the cover of Okinawa to land-based aircraft and escort carriers. Hornet had to go to San Francisco for repairs.

On 15 June 1945 a naval court of inquiry convened in Leyte Gulf, presided over – as in December 1944 – by Vice Admiral John H. Hoover. Halsey, McCain, Clark and Beary appeared before it. The court found that the primary responsibility lay with Halsey for the change of course to 300° on the evening of 4 June, which took the fleet into the typhoon zone, and a secondary responsibility with McCain, who had delayed permission for Clark’s manoeuvre by twenty minutes. This time the court did not stop at pointing to “errors in judgement committed under stress of war operations”, as after Cobra: it recommended that serious consideration be given to assigning Halsey and McCain to other duties.

The new Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, was inclined to retire Halsey. Admiral Ernest King agreed with him in principle but – according to biographers – feared that removing the most popular admiral in the country on the eve of the decisive operations against Japan would harm the Navy. Admiral Chester Nimitz, for his part, citing Halsey’s earlier services, did not act on the court’s recommendation and left him in post. It was McCain, considered easier to replace, who bore the consequences: in July he was told that at the end of the current phase of operations he would hand over command of Task Force 38 and take up a post in the Veterans Administration. The war ended before the change took place; the exhausted McCain died a few days after the Japanese surrender.

Lessons of two typhoons

The comparison with December 1944 favours the June events only in terms of human losses. Cobra sank three destroyers and took the lives of about 790 sailors, Connie of six. This was partly the result of lessons drawn from the first disaster: destroyers ballasted their empty tanks, and commanders had more freedom to respond to the weather on their own initiative. The fundamental error, however, was repeated – the fleet commander, wedded to the operational plan and uncertain forecasts, led his ships into the path of a cyclone and allowed his subordinates to escape too late. For Halsey, who in December had escaped punishment only thanks to Nimitz’s intercession, it was the most serious blow to his reputation of the entire war.

The damage caused by the two typhoons contributed to changes in ship design – faster pumping of fuel and ballast, better protection of electrical equipment, limits on top-weight – and to the accelerated development of a storm-forecasting service in the Pacific, including reconnaissance flights into cyclones, from which the later “hurricane hunters” grew.

Significance

Typhoon Connie did not change the course of the fighting for Okinawa – the Japanese were no longer able to exploit the fleet’s temporary weakness, and the carriers, though for a few days with fewer aircraft, continued to support the ground forces in the final weeks of the battle. The loss of Hornet, Bennington and Pittsburgh for the duration of their repairs was nonetheless felt at a time when the Navy was preparing for the summer raids on the Japanese home islands and the planned invasion of Kyushu. The typhoon affair also showed the limits of commanders’ accountability in the last months of the war: the court identified the culprit, but his fate was decided by political considerations and prestige. Halsey commanded the Third Fleet until the end of the war, and in July and August 1945 his carriers conducted the last great air campaign against Japan.