It's hard to fight Mother Nature, as some fortunate—and decidedly unfortunate—historical figures have learned over the centuries
The retreat of the Spanish Armada
In 1588, King Phillip II of Spain sent his Spanish Armada to invade England. One goal was to force the Protestant nation to revert back to Catholicism, and things were going fine until the Armada made it to the French port of Calais. Each boat in the fleet dropped its anchor and waited to join forces with the Spanish army. But while the fleet was anchored, the English attacked, sending eight burning ships into the crowded harbor.
Mother Nature attacked too. High winds and waves from an Atlantic storm, plus the fire ships, left the Spanish Armada with no choice but to return to Spain. It was too late for most of the Armada, though. Less than half of the 130-ship fleet returned home, and 20,000 troops perished. England’s Queen Elizabeth attributed the fateful storm to divine intervention, inscribing commemorative medals with the phrase “God blew and they were scattered.”
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
Napoleon Bonaparte could get a bit cocky at times. So when he decided to invade Russia in 1812, against the advice of several fellow officers, it wasn’t a huge surprise that the invasion was a failure. But many historians say his biggest challenge was the weather.
Napoleon’s 600,000 men and more than 200,000 horses were no match for Russia’s -20 to -4 degree winters. Many horses died, and without them, the army was unable to transport its weapons and supplies. Starvation and disease set in, and when defeat became inevitable, Napoleon abandoned the army and returned home on a sleigh to prevent a coup.
Hitler’s invasion of Russia
Despite Napoleon’s surrender to the Russian winter a century earlier, Hitler led his troops there too on June 22, 1941, during World War II. He figured the campaign, dubbed Operation Barbarossa, would last just a few months, and that the group would be in and out before October. Incredibly, and quite presumptuously, they left most of their winter gear at home. Soldiers paid a heavy price for their leaders’ arrogance.
“I was struck with horror and realized that they had no eyelids,” wrote Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte about watching the German troops return home. “The ghastly cold of that winter had the strangest consequences. Thousands and thousands of soldiers had lost their limbs; thousands and thousands had their ears, their noses, their fingers and their sexual organs ripped off by the frost. Many had lost their hair. … Many had lost their eyelids. Singed by the cold, the eyelid drops off like a piece of dead skin.”
Adding to their misery: Operation Barbarossa was a German loss.
The bombing of Nagasaki
When the American bomber Bockscar took off from Tinian, an island in the Northern Mariana Islands, on Aug. 9, 1945, its initial target wasn’t Nagasaki—it was the Japanese city of Kokura, where a major Japanese arsenal was located. But when the plane approached the city carrying the “Fat Man” atomic bomb, its target was obscured by dense clouds.
Pilot Charles W. Sweeney circled the area three times before deciding to move onto the mission’s secondary target, Nagasaki. The cloud that saved one city doomed the other: At 10:58 a.m. local time, Bockscar dropped its nuclear weapon, killing an estimated 35,000 people and obliterating 44% of the city.
The battle of Long Island
The Battle of Long Island was a British victory in the Revolutionary War, but it could have been much more disastrous if it weren’t for a brief period of lucky weather that favored the Continental Army. After a week of fighting the British on Long Island and in Brooklyn, George Washington decided it was time to cross the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan and withdraw.
He started the ferrying process at night, but by morning a large part of the army was still on the wrong side of the river. By sheer luck, Mother Nature sent cover: A dense fog had descended over the area, which allowed Washington to continue ferrying his troops. Had the weather been fair, the British would have seen the troops—who likely would have been killed or captured. By the time the fog lifted and the British charged, the Continental Army was gone.
The devastation of the Dust Bowl
Weather played a huge role in the mass migration of Americans from the Southern Plains to California in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, farmers faced a double whammy of severe drought and outdated farming practices, which eroded the topsoil and caused massive crop failures. Dust storms rolled through the plains, picking up topsoil and obliterating the area’s agriculture for years to come. Families packed up and moved west, altering the history of the United States forever.
The kamikaze winds of Japan
When it comes to maintaining an empire, there’s no better propaganda than claiming the gods are on your side. That’s what the emperor of Japan did in 1274 and 1281 when Kublai Khan’s Mongol fleets failed to conquer Japan. Two major typhoons destroyed his ships, but as the story goes, the emperor summoned the kamikaze—or divine winds—to save Japan.
Emperor Hirohito retold the story of the kamikaze during World War II when he asked his fighter pilots to become his “divine winds” to protect the nation from Allied forces.
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Sources:
- U.S. Naval Institute: “Shooting Down the Kamikaze Myth”
- National Drought Mitigation Center: “The Dust Bowl”
- George Washington’s Mount Vernon: “Battle of Long Island”
- National WWII Museum: “The Bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945”
- Britannica: “Operation Barbarossa”
- Internet Archives: “Full text of ‘Kaputt'”
- Napoleon.org: “Napoleon’s Russian Campaign: The Retreat”
- History News Network: “Did Weather Make the Armada Flee?”
