It was almost a panic, if we can use the word to describe the desperate movements of a great battle fleet. Messages flew back and forth, changing the ships’ courses as the wind changed. They ran toward the northwest, then toward the southwest, and finally due south, in a last effort to escape the central fury of the great typhoon. But all this did no good. The lighter vessels, escort carriers, destroyers, and such, top-heavy with armament and equipment and with little oil for ballast, began the struggle for life. Each hour it seemed that the height of the storm had come, but it grew steadily worse. Writhing slopes of vast waves dipped into canyon-like depths. The crests were like mountains. The wind came in awful gusts, estimated at more than 150 miles an hour. The tops of the waves were torn off and hurled with the force of stone. Ships were buried under hundreds of tons of water and emerged again, shuddering and rolling wildly. On the eighteenth of December, one after another of the ships of the Third Fleet lost control and wallowed in the typhoon. Time and again thousands of men faced death and escaped by something that seemed a miracle. There was no longer any visible separation between the sea and the atmosphere. Only by the force with which the elements struck could the men aboard distinguish between wind-driven spume and hurtling water. Steering control was lost; electric power and lights failed; lifeboats were torn loose; stacks were ripped off; planes were hurled overboard; three destroyers rolled too far over and went to the bottom of the Pacific. Altogether, nearly 150 planes were destroyed on deck or blown into the sea and lost. Cruisers and carriers suffered badly. Battleships lost planes and gear. The surviving destroyers had been battered into helplessness. Almost eight hundred men were dead or missing. As the typhoon subsided, the crippled Third Fleet canceled its plans to strike against the enemy on Luzon and retreated to the nearest atoll harbor to survey its losses. More men had died and more damage had been done than in many engagements with the Japanese Navy. A Navy Court of Inquiry was summoned. It was said that this typhoon of 1944 was the granddaddy of all tropical storms. But a study of the records shows that it was just a full-grown typhoon. There have been thousands of hurricanes and typhoons like this one. Down through the centuries, these terrible storms have swept in broad arcs across tropical waters, reaching out with great wind tentacles to grasp thousands of ships and send them to the bottom. Pounding across populous coasts, with mountainous seas flooding the land, they have drowned hundreds of thousands of people, certainly more than a million in the last three centuries, and untold thousands before that.