Sea Cobra: Admiral Halsey's Task Force and the Great Pacific Typhoon
The ripple of interest in the typhoon that struck the U.S. Third Fleet  in December 1944, sinking three destroyers and drowning 800 sailors, swells  onward in this absorbing naval adventure saga. Historian Melton (Aaron  Burr) paints a wider canvas than do Bob Drury and Tom Clavin inHalsey's Typhoon(reviewed Oct. 9). Like  them, he regales readers with firsthand recollections of the shrieking winds  and titanic waves that battered ships to pieces, the ordeal of survivors  besieged by thirst and sharks, and the heroism of sailors who rescued them in  mountainous seas. He recounts at length the subsequent navy inquiry into the  performance of meteorologists, Adm. William Halsey and Cmdr. James Marks of the  sunken destroyerHull, who are pilloried by  Drury and Clavin but largely exonerated here. Melton pads out the story with a  blow-by-blow of the preceding Battle of Leyte Gulf, an account of another  typhoon Halsey sailed the Third Fleet into in 1945, and a chapter on Japanese  kamikazes. Melton's prose can be purplish—"The beast was still growing in the  heart of the sea... feeding on the heat of the water as if it were mother's  milk"—but when the storm breaks, he settles down to a straightforward,  gripping narrative. Photos.(Mar.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.