In October 1944, a few months after the Air Corps meteorologists had set up operations on Saipan, Bryson observed on his weather map a probable typhoon to the southeast and requested an aerial reconnaissance of the storm. Deciding he had best venture “where I ask others to go,” he hopped on the four-engine B-24 Liberator heavy bomber for the flight. Spotting the “radiating cloud bands” in front of them, they headed into them at 8,000 feet, an altitude that proved “lousy for roughness.” Every so often, as the plane bumped and ground its way farther into the dark maelstrom, they heard “a rivet pop like a gunshot.” As they entered what Bryson recognized as the “eye wall” of a typhoon, the pilot radioed over the intercom that they would “not make it in and out” safely, and turned around. Back at Saipan, the bomber’s airframe was found to have sustained so much structural damage that the plane had to be scrapped and salvaged for spare parts, teaching Bryson still another lesson—this one firsthand—about the power of a typhoon.*
Knowing December was the tail end of what had been an active five-month season that had spawned some fifty Pacific typhoons, Bryson was not about to take any chances with the potential typhoon he had been tracking for ten days. Typically, the first data he had received about the storm had been sparse—east of Saipan the nearest weather station was at Eniwetok, a distance of 1,200 miles. Between Eniwetok and Saipan there had been only a few aircraft reports. Still, Bryson had noticed “a little shift in the wind” near Kwajalein—east of Eniwetok by another 800 miles—as well as heavier than usual cloud cover. This had suggested to him some type of low-pressure center—perhaps an “incipient typhoon”—south of Kwajalein. After that, each time he received a new set of observations, he looked for further evidence of a typhoon. There were hints here and there—one aircraft report described larger than usual clouds, and another identified strong shifts in wind direction from the north to the south, suggesting to Bryson something other than the “usual rippling of the trade winds.” Then on the morning of December 17 came a new observation from Guam, considered a reliable weather station. The winds at Guam had been gaining in strength with a “strong northerly component,” only to “abruptly shift” to the southeast as the local weather rapidly deteriorated. To the west and southwest the sky was covered with a “streaky veiling of cirrus clouds”—which, Bryson knew, “mariners for centuries” had considered the “fore-running of a typhoon.” At that point, Bryson was certain a full-blown typhoon had passed to the south of Guam.
Bryson knew that the Third Fleet was “assembled off to the west and northwest” on a track somewhere between Guam and the Philippines and that there were a lot of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, oilers, and men “out there.” It was vital to determine whether the typhoon that passed south of Guam would continue on a westerly track toward the Philippines and pass south of the fleet’s position, or whether it would recurve northwesterly—as the Marcus Island typhoon had done—and turn toward those ships at sea.
As newer weather reports arrived, Bryson identified a trough of low pressure approaching from the west that could cause the typhoon to recurve. Immediately he called the flight line and requested a reconnaissance flight to find the center of the typhoon. The aircraft took off within a few minutes, its mission to determine the intensity and location of the storm. By charting an exact location, Bryson would be able to tell whether the typhoon had started to recurve or not. Then he waited.
After “some hours,” Bryson was handed a radio message from the plane, reporting they had “located the eye of the typhoon,” giving its latitude and longitude, and estimating the surface winds at 140 knots, or 160 miles per hour. This was nearly twice the minimum wind force necessary to categorize a storm as a typhoon, and to Bryson’s mind strong enough that “not only could no canvas withstand it,” neither could “steel ships driven by modern power plants.”
When he marked the position on his map and compared it with the previous position, he confirmed the typhoon was “recurving to the northwest.” Bryson hurried over to the Teletype that connected the Army Air Corps meteorologists with the Navy’s weather office on Saipan. He sat at the keyboard and typed a message warning of the typhoon and giving its exact latitude and longitude, as well as the estimated wind speeds. He stated that it appeared to be “recurving to the northwest” and “on a track toward the fleet.”
Bryson received an almost instantaneous reply. “We don’t believe you,” a Navy aerologist typed on the other end.
Bryson was shocked despite his “previous experience with the Navy and typhoons.” He typed back this was not a guess and that a reconnaissance aircraft was “out there in the eye of the storm” and had radioed a report.
The Teletype again clattered out a quick reply: “We still don’t believe you but we’ll watch.”
COMMANDER GEORGE F. KOSCO, thirty-six, a big-boned, round-faced aerologist aboard New Jersey, had been following what appeared to him to be a tropical storm forming between Ulithi and Guam since picking up a weather broadcast from Ulithi on the morning of December 16. That evening, as the fleet rushed toward its fueling rendezvous with its logistics group, a routine weather report from Pearl Harbor mentioned “storm indications in about the same location.” On his weather map, Kosco, who had been the Third Fleet’s aerologist for only two weeks, thought it looked to be a “very weak” storm. He anticipated it would “move off to the northeast,” and he “didn’t expect any trouble” because he judged the storm to be of a “very small caliber.”
One of ten children born to Slovakian immigrants in Pennsylvania coal country, Kosco had to move away from home to a neighboring town to attend high school, and earned his room and board by working in a local hotel. An older brother who knew the importance of an education because he had quit school after the sixth grade to work in the mines “found a way” to secure an appointment to Annapolis for him from a local congressman, but Kosco failed the entrance examination by three points. He studied on his own for a year while working as a plumber, and passed the next test. He was admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1926. An inch shy of six feet and a solid 190 pounds, Kosco was a three-year member of the varsity boxing team, which was undefeated in dual meets for the past decade under the tutelage of coach Spike Webb, who at the end of World War I had trained a young Marine heavyweight named Gene Tunney. Ranked in the middle of his graduating class of 402 new ensigns, Kosco’s biography in Lucky Bag 1930 remembered him this way:
“Well, if I am not the dumbest 5*$!?,” such is the usual introduction to [his] post mortem to the monthly examination in anything in general and navigation in particular. To the uninitiated it would seem like the harbinger of a reluctant farewell, but his friends know better. George is not the dumbest, by about four hundred numbers, and we all know that even the savviest of our band frequently arrive at the impossible answer of five when multiplying four by two, superior knowledge and previous training notwithstanding…. While his resourcefulness and originality do not always fit the narrow groove of academic recitation, they do show excellent prospects for the future…. Of a cheerful disposition, always ready to lend a hand, sincere, and a hard worker—that is Georgie.
Kosco applied for aviation training but was disqualified due to imperfect eyesight. He was ordered to the battleship Colorado (BB-45) as a gunnery officer. On November 4, 1931, as Colorado engaged in training exercises off San Pedro, California, a 5-inch deck gun exploded during firing practice. In what the Associated Press reported as “one of the worst accidents in Pacific Fleet history” up to that time, four men were killed instantly as “broken steel, hurled like shrapnel, raked the decks.” Two more would die as a result of their injuries; another twenty-two men were hurt, including Kosco, who, although hit by shrapnel that imbedded in his neck, back, and buttocks, was singled out in a front-page newspaper article the next day for “giving all possible assistance to fallen comrades” before seeking treatment. For the next six years Kosco served as a gunnery officer on several ships. In 1937, h
is request to attend postgraduate school—listing ordnance engineering as his preferred course of study, with the newly developing field of aerology his second choice—was approved. He returned to Annapolis for a two-year program during which aerology became his specialty. To complete his meteorology studies, Kosco was sent with a select group of other naval officers to MIT, where he earned a master’s degree in 1940. Following duty as an aerological officer on two aircraft carriers—six months on Saratoga (CV-3), operating off California, and a year and a half aboard Ranger (CV-4), in the Atlantic—Kosco, by then a commander, was assigned in fall 1942 to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. For the next two years he was involved in several projects, not all weather-related, including the study of wave propagation, training in chemical warfare, hurricane research in the Caribbean, and the establishment of naval air transportation to Africa and Ireland. After receiving his new orders, Kosco had caught up with the Third Fleet at Ulithi, boarding Halsey’s flagship on December 2, 1944—his first wartime assignment to the Pacific and first tour to the region as an aerologist.
When Kosco had boxed at Annapolis, the officer representative to the team (as well as commander of the academy’s receiving ship, Reina Mercedes, which served as both barracks for instructors and “prison ship for midshipman transgressors”) was Captain William Halsey Jr., a fortuitous crossing of paths early in Kosco’s naval career that would “not hurt” in his new assignment to Halsey’s flag staff, a close-knit group led by chief of staff Rear Admiral Robert B. Carney. Kosco found himself rooming with one of the more notable members of Halsey’s staff, assistant chief of staff Commander Harold E. Stassen, the former Minnesota governor (and youngest, having been elected in 1940 at thirty-two) who had resigned his office in 1943 to serve in the Navy.
As December 17, 1944, dawned amid stiff winds and boiling seas some 430 miles east of the Philippines, Kosco noted that they were getting “a little bad weather” and assumed it meant the fleet was running into the front already on his maps. The latest reports from various stations showed southwest winds at Ulithi and east winds at Guam. Weather map analyses were made every six hours at Pearl Harbor by Pacific Fleet Weather Central, which then radioed their forecasts to fleet units. Kosco also had some “quite delayed” plane reports from the previous day. While there were long-range patrol aircraft flying in and out of the Marianas, Ulithi and elsewhere, reporting weather conditions was not their primary mission. In fact, they pointedly avoided heavy weather and only in “exceptional cases broke radio silence” to send any reports back prior to landing. As a result, the majority of aircraft advisories were at least twelve hours old before they reached individual ships. Checking the atmospheric pressure as measured hourly aboard New Jersey, Kosco noted that the barometer was dropping slightly—down from the normal fair-weather pressure of 29.92 inches at sea level, which it had been shortly before midnight—to a still “reassuring 29.84” inches at 8:00 A.M. As Kosco well knew, an “unsteady barometer” was listed in Bowditch’s naval bible as one of the “rules for establishing the existence of a tropical cyclone and for locating its center.” A barometer fall of between .12 and .15 inches could place the center of the storm at only “50 to 80 miles distance.” A drop of a tenth of an inch or more could be found in a larger territory “surrounding the actual storm area.” While Kosco “sort of thought” that the accumulated data suggested a “wind with cyclonic circulation,” he believed the “disturbance…lay 450 miles east” of the fleet’s position, and stuck with his prediction that it would move on to the northeast—as he believed “all normal storms” did in the area—without threatening the fueling operation. Of course, the rendezvous position selected by Halsey, while expeditious for the purpose of getting back in time for the planned air strikes, did “lay in the normal track of typhoons.” The Third Fleet had been “chased out” of Ulithi on October 3 by a typhoon; Halsey well knew, as he wrote Nimitz that day, that “the same thing may happen again at any time up to the middle of December.” However, no reports had been received by the Third Fleet about a new typhoon “even existing.” In fact, that possibility was “not given serious thought” by Kosco.
Awaiting Halsey’s carrier group, designated Task Force 38, at the planned fueling area in the eastern half of the Philippine Sea—at latitude 14 degrees 50 minutes north and longitude 129 degrees 57 minutes east—was the replenishment unit, commanded by Captain Jasper T. Acuff. At forty-six and a 1921 graduate of Annapolis, Acuff was a seagoing veteran. His At-Sea Logistics Group, Third Fleet, currently included a dozen filled-to-the-brim fleet oilers—several at a time alternated steaming back and forth to Ulithi to refill their bunkers with Navy Special Fuel Oil, the heavy by-product of crude oil that fed the fires in ship boilers, as well as aviation gasoline and diesel. Also attached to Acuff ’s group were several escort carriers that would launch fighters to provide protection for the fleet from air and submarine attack while it fueled, as well as to supply Halsey’s carriers with replacements for pilots and planes lost in the latest round of air strikes. With newer and speedier destroyers—including the Fletcher-class ships—assigned to Halsey’s fast-attack carrier force, the tankers, cargo ships, and escort carriers of the logistics unit were screened by older destroyers, among them Hull, Monaghan, and their Farragut-class squadron mates, along with ten smaller destroyer escorts, including Tabberer.
With visibility holding at 8 miles, Halsey’s Task Force 38 began appearing around 10:00 A.M. as ghostly silhouettes emerging over a misty horizon. Acuff ’s logistics group was already in formation, deployed along several widely spaced parallel lines. Throughout the morning, thick, low-slung cumulus clouds closed in overhead until the last traces of sun and sky were obliterated. The wind was gusting to more than 30 knots with increasingly choppy seas, along with longer and deeper swell sets that gave sailors the most discomfort—as opposed to smaller waves caused by the wind. Some 130 ships came “steaming in close proximity to each other,” causing a “congested area” for miles around. The fleet course was set at 040 degrees—a northeasterly heading—and speed at 8 knots. Warships lined up astern of one of three replenishment units, ready to take their turn at the pump like cars at a busy gas station.
The men on the tankers and cargo ships were well drilled in what had become for them these past months a routine chore that never lost its potential for sudden danger. Ships running together—separated by 30 or 40 feet of churning ocean—on parallel courses at identical speeds for the hours it took to fuel up and transfer ammunition and other supplies left little room for error even in favorable weather conditions. With ships close alongside in winds and seas as unruly as this day, “collisions were constant threats.”
By the time the underway replenishments—known as “unreps” in naval vernacular—began in earnest, there had been another “noticeable change in the air and sea.” In the last hour, the swell had increased; its “latent power could be felt,” especially aboard the destroyers and other smaller ships as they were “rhythmically lifted” to the top of each crest and then “let to settle into the trough” that existed between swells, only to be followed by another cycle. The wind, too, was picking up steadily, with gusts of 45 knots recorded on New Jersey. Even the bigger ships—the carriers, battleships, and cruisers—rose and fell with the seas as they took on fuel and supplies. Replacement pilots, hanging on “for dear life,” were sent over from the escort carriers to the attack carriers in “swaying, swirling” chairs hung on lines between ships, and were hauled in soaking wet. Soon these transfers of personnel were cancelled for safety reasons. The aircraft sent aloft to protect the fleet were “fighting air as rough as the sea” in pelting rain, gusty winds, and low visibility, and finally were ordered to land. Before they all made it down safely the conditions became “too rough” to attempt further carrier landings, and two pilots still aloft were ordered to turn their planes upside down and bail out nearby. After asking for the unusual order to be repeated, the pilots did as instructed and were rescue
d by a destroyer.
Down to the Sea Page 16