WEATHER AND WAR

THE WEATHER can be crucial in war. For example, in 1281, the intervention of a powerful force of weather (a storm) saved Japan from a massive invasion by Mongols. Although the Mongols outnumbered the Japanese army, their huga fleet was destroyed by a storm. The Mongol fleet with soldiers and boats were engulfed by a sudden, fierce typhoon which seemed to arise from nowhere, decimated the fleet and the Mongols had to retreat. Hence, the grateful Japanese, who would surely have been conquered, if not for the intervention of the storm, called the wind kamikaze, which means "divine wind."

More recently one of the greatest military leaders in history, Napoleon, was forced to retreat during his army's invasion of Russia in 1812. It was the bitter cold winter that defeated his army. The French army was struck by the bitter cold weather which they were not used to. The Russians also destroyed all food resulting in a starving French army. Hitler also made the same blunder as Napoleon, i.e. by attacking Russia in winter. In February 1943, a bitterly cold winter, Hitler lost 300,000 soldiers in the battle of Stalingrad and another 130,000 were taken prisoner. Read these links
http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?q=5455.0.108.0

http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture11.html

According to analysis about "Weather and War" written by Mark Cantrell, "......From the harsh winter at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War to the raging sandstorm in Operation Iraqi Freedom, weather has played an important role in war. Historically, atmospheric conditions invariably would favor one side over the other, but weather’s capricious nature quickly could reverse the advantage, sometimes during the course of a single battle. Often the combatants with a better understanding of the weather would emerge victorious. Today, advances in technology have allowed the military to provide commanders on the battlefield sophisticated weather forecasts, which they use to their advantage as they deploy ground troops or target precision-guided munitions". To continue to read this article, go to this link:
http://www.moaa.org/magazine/March2004/f_weather.asp

In writing about "Weather War", Cdr. Carl O. Schuster, talks about the importance of weather in aerial warfare. He writes "The growing importance of airpower in World War II, combined with its sensitivity to weather, led to an ever greater military reliance on accurate forecasts. Knowing if and when your airfields, your enemy's airfields, or the target area would be "socked in" by bad weather was of vital concern to the combat commanders of that war.....As much an art as it is a science, predicting the weather is dependent on the accurate tracking of weather phenomena, particularly storm fronts, from the areas where they originate. In the North Atlantic and Transalpine Europe, that means gathering weather data in Greenland, the Norwegian Sea, and the arctic regions of Norway itself. Though meteorologists of the 1940s had none of the weather tracking satellites which make that job so much simpler today, they were still able to generate usably accurate forecasts for northern Europe as much as 72 hours in advance - as long as they could get the data they needed from those regions. To continue reading this article, go to http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ohx/educate/atc/ww1.htm