LOOSE LIPS A Storm By Any Other Name. The practice of bestowing female names on tropical storms started during World War II. And it may have been a case of life imitating art. In 1941, a popular George Stewart novel titled Storm traced the impact of a storm known as ‘Maria’ on the lives of various characters. Fast forward to the island of Saipan in 1944, where the Army Air Corps assembled a group of young hotshots in the newfangled science of meteorology to aid in weather forecasting for bombing raids and naval operations in the Pacific. And — perhaps because of Stewart’s novel, perhaps just because they were so far from home — they started naming significant storms after wives and girlfriends. The practice almost died on the vine when one wife is said to have been quite irritated that her storm fizzled out. Storm naming switched briefly to the phonetic alphabet in the early ‘50s, but soon went back to female names until '79, when the PC crowd ruined the fun by demanding that names alternate between male and female. That practice is now commonplace in most areas of the world, except in the Far East, where tropical storms are named for rivers, animals or flowers. But the most infamous tropical storm in military history was named for a man. Although the official moniker — bestowed after the fact — was 'Typhoon Cobra', anyone who experienced the South Pacific typhoon of December, 1944, would forever and always know it as 'Halsey’s Typhoon'. That’s because Admiral William “Bull” Halsey unwittingly sailed the 86-ship strong Task Force 38 straight into the heart of it 300 miles east of Luzon in the Philippines. When the 100-knot spray and mountainous seas finally cleared, three destroyers had rolled over and sunk, and 790 men had perished. Only 93 survivors were recovered from all three ships. The worst loss was from USS Monaghan. Of 256 crew, only 6 survived. The toll on surviving materiel was equally horrific. Among 13 aircraft carriers, nearly 150 planes were lost, either by
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The 'USS Cowpens' takes a heavy roll to starboard at the beginning of Halsey's Typhoon. Eight of the planes in this photo were lost overboard.
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washing overboard or by breaking loose from their lashings and crashing back and forth below decks. This caused fires on several ships, which had to be fought by crews as the ships bucked and rolled more than 20 degrees side to side. (Among those fighting fires on the light carrier USS Monterey was future president Gerald Ford.) In total, damage was so severe that most ships were out of commission for several months while they underwent repair. In an official inquiry after the storm, it was revealed that one of the Saipan group had accurately forecast the track of the storm, but when he radioed it to Navy headquarters, the response was, "We don't believe you." Halsey was found to be responsible for the losses, but his "errors of judgment committed under stress of war operations" effectively exonerated him. — jr
