Sea Cobra: Admiral Halsey's Task Force and the Great Pacific Typhoon [Hardcover]

The history of one of the most dramatic and underreported stories of WWII.One of the costliest battles of World War II happens to be one of the least known. After failing to stop the attack of Admiral Takeo Kurita at Leyte Gulf, Admiral Bull Halsey made a desperate attempt to engage the Japanese Imperial Navy in a full-scale battle. Acting against better judgment and in a desperate attempt at redemption, Halsey led his crew into the raging path of a typhoon, which resulted in the loss of nearly one thousand sailorsthe most costly mission of the Pacific war.Buckner F. Melton Jr. is a historian and a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and University Press Fellow at Mercer University. He is the author of A Hanging Offense and Aaron Burr.The Greatest Generation meets The Perfect Storm in this riveting account of one of the most devastating episodes in the Pacific during World War II. In the final year of the Second World War, as the United States Navy fought Japanese forces in the largest sea battle in human history, none could foresee that just a few weeks later the Pacific Fleet would be fighting another foe: the Pacific Ocean itself. At the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Imperial Japanese Navy had unleashed a new weapon of desperation, the dreaded kamikaze squadrons, in an effort to stave off defeat. Admiral Bull Halsey, his reputation clouded after controversial decisions at Leyte, grew obsessed with destroying kamikaze air bases in the Philippines. Meanwhile, a tropical storm in the Pacific was slowly gaining power, unseen, untracked, unsuspected. It was headlong into this storm, dubbed Typhoon Cobra, that Halsey would lead his fleet. Sea Cobra tells the dramatic story of the ships and men of the famed Fast Carrier Task Force as fate lands them squarely in the path of this killer typhoon. Using survivors interviews and other firsthand accounts, seasoned historian and author Buckner F. Melton Jr. tells the story of a modern fleet encountering one of the most destruclƒ˝