Rotten Weather Saves the Day!

There is a Nor’easter screaming up the coast right outside my house, which naturally brings to mind the times that rotten weather saved people, armies and even a couple of entire nations.  So shake out your umbrella, wring-out your socks, grab a cozy seat by the fire and some mini-marshmallows for your coco because shit’s about to get real.  Remember the time when

1. The Israelites Crossed the Red Sea

You know that 4” fish you caught and how it morphed into an 18” monster with each retelling?  Yeah, that kind of stuff happens all the time with history and historical accounts.  There is always a fact or two at the bottom of these inflated stories, but people’s imaginations can take those facts and stretch them to ridiculous lengths.  Fact: the Israelites lived in Egypt, but wanted to leave.  Fact: the Pharaoh at the time didn’t want to lose such a useful, industrious people, so he told them no.  Here’s where things get a little fuzzy.  The Bible’s account says the Israelites followed Moses to the banks of the Red Sea and then crossed over dry ground after Jehovah parted the waters for them. And the army that Pharaoh sent after them?  They drowned after Jehovah closed the sea again.  A little incredible, especially given the fact that nobody slipped on stranded fish or sea weed. What really might have happened isn’t quite as cool as a divinely created sidewalk through the sea, but is pretty cool too.

 

Let's go, everybody!  You too, Mr. & Mrs. Glickstein.

The northern arm of the Red Sea is bordered by salt marshes with really tall reeds growing in them.  That part of North Africa is also home to these sick rogue winds.  Similar to Southern California’s Santa Ana Winds, these tempests start as superheated air boiling off the Nubian and Libyan Deserts and then barrel towards the cooler seacoast with the force of a freight train. When they hit the salt marshes, all those thick reeds are flattened, making the otherwise impassable marsh doable for people on foot, leading a few domestic animals and one wiggy prophet of God.  An army following later would become hopelessly mired, forcing it to give up the chase or drown in a sea of mud.

So did a freak wind storm get the Israelites out of captivity and on the road to the Promised Land?  Maybe.  But there is no question at all that

2. The Kamikaze Wind Saved Japan from the Mongols

A modern military historian once likened the Mongol armies to American mechanized armor battalions without the tanks.  A lot of the time, locals took one look at the Mongols and gave up.  The few that decided to fight were ground up and shat out the other end.  Ever heard of the Islamic Khwarazmian Empire?  Yeah, they fought and lost. China resisted too, but even its Great Wall was no match for Genghis Khan and his hairy horde.  From Krakow to Korea, the yak-tail standard of the Mongols waved supreme.  All that was left to complete their 16-0 season was to take care of a couple of islands near Korea the locals called Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun.

 

Mongols on the way.  We so fucked.

As great as the Mongols were on land, they weren’t too good on the water –not too many lakes and oceans in the Gobi Desert –so they strong-armed the Koreans into building them a respectable invasion fleet in order to deliver their can of whuppass to Japan.  The Daimyo and Samurai grimly sharpened their swords and donned their armor, fearing the worst.  The Shinto priests, however, sent up an urgent call to the kami, or spirits of nature, for a little help.  What they got was the Kamikaze, or divine wind –a typhoon, really  --which sent the Korean-built Mongol invasion fleet to Davy Jones’ locker.  Any Mongols that made it ashore were promptly dispatched like maki on a sushi bar, and Japan would remain unconquered until 1945, when a different sort of kamikaze couldn’t stop the USA from nuking two cities and firmly cementing baseball as Japan’s most fan-crazy sport.

Another badass ocean storm hit off Ireland in the 1500’s, when

3. The “Protestant Wind” Smashed the Spanish Armada

After the Protestant Reformation in Europe, a person’s religion wasn’t so much an individual choice as it was a political statement: Catholics were for the Pope and Spain, and Protestants were for England, the Netherlands, Northern Germany and Scotland.  It was just a matter of time before Philip II of Spain made a move against England and her heretic queen, Elizabeth, in part to return good Englishmen and women to the bosom of Mother Church, but really to stop England’s “Sea Dogs” from raiding Spain’s treasure fleets from Mexico and Peru.  His Most Catholic Majesty cut down an entire forest in order to build enough giant ships to link up with the Duke of Parma, who had just finished pounding the Netherlands, and land a huge army in England, just so that England didn’t miss out on the fun of the Spanish Inquisition.

 

Francisco, I told you to pee BEFORE we left Cadiz.  !@#*

Before things started, Sir Francis Drake came ashore in Lisbon and burned tons of barrel staves.  Big deal, right?  Yes it was, because all ships’ provisions were stored in barrels, which had to be constructed of properly seasoned staves.  This resulted in 1. a shortage of barrels, and 2. barrels made of greenwood staves, which rotted the food and skunked the water that was stored in them.  The Armada’s commander, the Duke of Medina y Sidonia, was a great general but a rotten sailor who spent the entire time seasick, leaving some critical decisions to his subordinates.  Things got worse once the Armada sailed into the English Channel, where it was subjected to the indignities of English long-range naval guns and burning fire-ships.  Still and all, things weren’t a complete bust.  The Duke decided they’d just sail around Scotland and Ireland, and whack the heretic English in Wales or the southwest coast.

How you like me now, puto?

But this was the North Sea those Spanish galleons were sailing in, and when the Armada pulled up on the west coast of Ireland, they were hit with a howling storm spun right off the North Pole which drove the leaking, crippled ships onto the Irish beaches, where any surviving sailors were rounded up and either executed or ransomed if they were nobles of means.  What remained of the once mighty Armada was left to limp and bail its way home to Spain.  Back in London, Queen Elizabeth celebrated by drinking sangria and eating paella –wait, no, she took everybody out to the pub for darts, bitters, snooker, bangers ‘n mash, and bubble ‘n squeak.

Sometimes just ordinary crummy weather can change history, like the time

4. New England’s Snowy Winter Helped Kick the British Out of Boston

After the battles of Lexington and Concord, part-time druggist and army deserter Benedict Arnold had a brilliant idea: flounce up to Fort Ticonderoga, overpower the garrison and steal all the nice cannons, mortars, powder and shot.  He asked the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety for permission to do just that and they agreed, because after all, what's safer than letting some sketchy guy from Connecticut have a whole fort full of artillery (!)  Along the way, Arnold ran into Ethan Allen who said HE was on the way to Ticonderoga to do the same thing, so piss off.  But piss off he did not do.  Arnold and Allen took the fort with no problems at all, and Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys went back to doing what they did best --drink, swear, screw farmer's daughters and generally cause a riot wherever.  Arnold left a few Massachusetts militiamen in charge at the fort and then beat it back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to report on his success and become instantly famous.

The new general in charge at Cambridge, some Virginian named Washington, was trying to do two things and coming up short on both.  Firstly, he had to get the militia surrounding Boston to stop drinking, cursing, bathing nude in the Charles River, and to start showing up regularly to the war.  Secondly, he had to remove the British from Boston.  Bunker Hill gave the Brits a bloody nose, but was still technically a loss for the Americans  What to do?

Asa Wooding's sled ran over my foot again!

Fortunately, also at Cambridge was a portly ex-book seller, self-taught artillery genius called Henry Knox who knew just what to do with the cannon Arnold and Allen had captured.  He set off through central Massachusetts and eastern New York until he arrived at Fort Ticonderoga, whereupon he put his plan into action.  He loaded all the cannon onto barges so that he could get them across a river, then muscled them onto sledges and waited for it to snow.  And boy, did it ever snow!  With all the rutted, rock-strewn roads covered by a slick coating of white, Knox bought or stole every team of oxen he could find and began gliding the whole hot mess back to Cambridge.  Along the way, recruits from towns he passed swelled the ranks and goodwives filled the soldiers with hot food until the whole operation started to look like a sleighing party.

The guns were mounted on Dorchester Heights, whereupon the British occupying Boston all took a collective dump in their britches and then sailed away to Halifax, never to return. 

Weather was to come to America's rescue again in Long Island, when

5. Washington's Entire Army Vanished in a Nor'easter

After getting his ass handed to him at the Battle of Long Island by British generals Howe, Clinton, Cornwallis and Percy, George Washington retreated to the western end of the island with about 9,000 troops and the East River at his back.  His plan was to, I don't know, coax a UFO to land and fly his army out of there?  What happened was almost as improbable.  With a superior force in his face and without control over the waterways, Washington managed to ferry out his entire army across a stretch of water notorious for its tides and sandbars and somehow kept the American Revolution in business.

The day before the Miracle on the East River, the greater New York area was battered by a Nor'easter, keeping Admiral "Black Dick" (hee-hee!) Howe and his fleet busy trying to keep their ships afloat.  The night of the evacuation was dead calm, giving some help to General John Glover's sailors from Marblehead, Massachusetts (a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem), as they ferried men, horses and cannons over to Manhattan.  At one point during the night, the commander of the troops who were supposed to keep the campfires burning so that the British sentries would believe the Americans were still there, received orders to pack up and go way before the evacuation boats were ready for them.  He and his troops ran back, stoked the fires, and kept the deception going.

As morning dawned, all of Washington's troops including Washington himself were not yet across the river.  As if in answer to his prayers, a thick fog rolled in, totally blinding the British to what ol' George was up to.  Once the fog lifted, General Howe and company were astonished to find the entire American army vanished, leaving behind only burned-out campfires and disabled cannon.  In the words of General Sir Hugh Percy, "E's buggered-off!"

You've lost the entire American army?  Did you look behind the sofa?

Some places have really nasty weather all the time, like the country of

6. Russia, Whose Weather Defeated Both Napoleon and Hitler

I'm not sure even Russians like living in Russia.  When it isn't raining and all muddy, it's hot and humid and full of flies.  And when it isn't that, it's colder than a nun's nasty.  It is so cold in parts of Russia that most people plan to stay indoors from November to April.  When the Mongols conquered Russia, they put the local princes in charge of collecting tribute and moved to the sunny markets of Tashkent and Samarkand.  When the Tatars conquered Russia, they did the same, substituting the Crimea for Samarkand.  The Swedes, no strangers to cold weather, tried to invade Russia and just lost interest.  So why the hell did Napoleon Bonaparte invade Russia?  Not enough tundra in France?

It seems that Napoleon was angry at Russia for violating something called the Continental System, a fancy name for their boycott against England.  And that was something that Napoleon would just not tolerate.  He gathered an invasion force of about 400,000 and marched into Russia on a bright summer's day, bearing his message of a personal "Mange merde" to Czar Alexander, whom he hoped to find defending Moscow.  Once there after a few cursory battles, Napoleon found Moscow surprisingly empty --there was, in fact, nobody who offered to surrender the city to him, although he was in possession of it.  As the weeks, then months dragged on and without any response to his angry letters to Czar Alexander, Napoleon decided to quit the city altogether, mostly because Moscow was burning around his ears.  Through a combination of carelessness, neglect and outright arson, the spiritual capital of Russia was fast turning into the world's biggest ashtray.

The French troops were weighed down with tons of plunder as they made their way west over roads choked with mud and rivers swollen with autumn rains.  Then it turned cold.  Then it turned bitterly cold.  Then it got so cold that even Russians said, "Shit, it's cold!"  Then the Cossacks attacked.  Then it got even colder.  Then the French started to burn their officers for warmth at night.  Then it got reeeeaaaallllyyy cold.

Was eet zees colde when we made l'invasion?

Napoleon, being the stand-up guy that he was, left his army to get back home as best as it could, while he waited in the Castle Fontainebleau for his one-way ticket to Elba to arrive. 

You'd think that 120 years later, Hitler would have remembered Napoleon's little misadventure and stayed away from Russia, but he too invaded.  In Hitler's great plan for Aryan world-domination, the Germans would kill and enslave the Slavic peoples of Europe and take their land because the Master Race needed plenty of real estate.  This is why Hitler violated the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact by invading Russia in June of 1942.

At first, things went swell.  Stalin was caught flat-footed and the three German armies plunged deep into Russia and the Ukraine.  Kiev fell, Leningrad was encircled, and old age pensioners began to dig tank traps outside of Moscow, when winter arrived.  Both sides slowed down, stabilizing the front and giving the Soviets time to dismantle entire factories, ship them to the Urals by rail, and reassemble them.  The following spring and summer, the armies fought and maneuvered to no clear advantage when against his generals' advice, Hitler staked it all on taking the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River.

Under aircraft and artillery bombardment, the city turned into a giant heap of rubble, which gave its defenders excellent places to hide and snipe at the Germans.  Then it got cold.  Sound familiar?  It was so cold that surgeons performed battlefield surgery without clamps or cauterization, because blood vessels froze in place.  Soon it is the Germans who were on the defensive in Stalingrad as an encircling Soviet army draws its noose tighter around the blasted city.  What happened next was almost unthinkable: the surrender of a German Field Marshall and his entire command, one-third of all the armies on the Eastern Front.  Months later, with Soviet Marshall Zhukov's troops in the Berlin suburbs, Hitler took his own life in a bunker under the Reich Chancery building.

So the next time you get crummy weather, don't forget that your rotten day might be somebody else's saving grace.  Because when the Mother of All Battles begins, you don't want to also be fighting that bad ol' mutha, Mother Nature!