322 pages / 10 hrs, 38 mins
"December 1944, the Pacific Theater. General Douglas MacArthur has vowed to return to the Philippines. He will need the help of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey's Pacific Fleet. But at the height of the invasion, Halsey's ships are blindsided by a typhoon of unprecedented strength and scope. Battleships are tossed like toys, fighter planes are blown off carriers, destroyers are capsized, and hundreds of sailors are swept into the rolling, shark-infested sea.
"Only now, thanks to documents that have been declassified after 60 years and scores of firsthand accounts from survivors, can the story finally be told. Informed by years of rigorous research and narrated with the immediacy of an action movie, Halsey's Typhoon is an enthralling true tale of courage and survival against impossible odds and one of the finest untold World War II sagas of our time." --from the publisher
Wow, what an incredible experience that must have been. There were 790 seamen lost in the typhoon or from exposure to the elements as they waited to be rescued. President Gerald Ford and Senator John McCain's grandfather were two of the survivors. The story is well written and mostly understandable for people unfamiliar to wartime jargon, like me. Wikipedia has a decent article on the event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra . I give this one four out of five stars.
