On This Day during WW2....

That photo above reminded me of another picture I saw in a book on Japanese Heavy Cruisers I got recently. The Mikuma was the first Japanese cruiser lost in WW2, bomb damage amidships caused fires which spread to the Torpedo magazine which exploded and completely devastated the ship

1940?

Something you don't hear much about


"Typhoon in the Philippines

On December 17, 1944, U.S. Task Force 38 was 300 miles away from its destination: Luzon, Philippines. As the ships prepared to refuel at the island of Mindoro, winds began to pick up. "A moderate cross swell and a wind varying from 20 to 30 knots made fueling difficult," Admiral William Halsey recounted in his autobiography. He was told by his staff aerologist that it was only a "tropical disturbance."

As the storm intensified, Halsey suspended refueling and ordered his ships to move away from the storm. It was no longer a "tropical disturbance" but a typhoon. On December 18, it was on a collision course with the task force. Many of Halsey's destroyers were very low on fuel, causing the ships to ride treacherously high on the sea. As the center of the typhoon passed close to the task force, hurricane-force winds buffeted massive waves against the helpless vessels. "Shortly after twelve o'clock...," an officer on the destroyer Hull later reported, "the wind velocity increased to an unbelievable high point which I estimated at 110 knots. The force of this wind laid the ship steadily over on her starboard side."

When the storm passed, Halsey recounted, it had "swamped three destroyers, cost the lives of 790 men, wrecked some 200 planes, and damaged twenty-eight ships." Over the next three days, every able ship and plane searched desperately for survivors. Following the disaster, the worst the U.S. Navy had suffered in a storm since 1889, new weather stations and offices were established across the Pacific."

Battle of Berlin ends.