TYPHOON

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 28 August 1945, Page 4

TYPHOON

NATURE has intervened to upset General MacArthur’s time-table for occupying Japan. All who have read Joseph Conrad’s dramatic story will have some idea of the elemental fury of typhoons, which constitute real hazards to ships and aircraft. This is the season for them in Far Eastern waters and they normally last until late October besides blowing up unexpectedly sometimes as early as July and in November. A few weeks ago a United States carrier task force passed through the centre of a typhoon in which the wind velocity reached 140 miles an hour and suffered more damage than the Japanese Navy had succeeded in inflicting in any battle. * These tropical hurricanes, of which as many as 20 severe ones may occur each year, originate over the oceans when the belt of equatorial calms reaches its most northerly extension. The usual path is a northerly one along the 1000-mile eastern coast of the Philippines, sweeping Formosa, Okinawa and the other Ryukyu Islands, and then passing north-eastward along the coasts of the Japanese mainland. They are generally from 50 to 100 miles in diameter and move forward rather slowly, but the circular whirl of air in them often reaches a velocity of well over 100 miles an hour. Halsey’s mighty Third Fleet has apparently had to encounter a threepronged typhoon. The Japanese know them as “divine winds” which wrecked the • fleet of the would-be Mongul invaders way back in the thirteenth century. On the present occasion, however, the storm, instead of shielding the Japanese from the enemy, actually drove the greatest of all Pacific armadas towards their shores. Halsey’s American and British ships have ridden out the gale and the occupation of Japan has begun. No permanent protection for Nippon against the irony of fate can come from the “divine wind.”