For want of a nail, the nursery rhyme has it, a kingdom was once lost. Human history often hinges on such small, sometimes even trivial matters—and many of them are related to the weather. Had June 6, 1944, not been a foggy, cold, and socked-in day on the coast of Normandy, more German patrols might have been out on the beaches to catch the first signs of the Allied armada that landed there on D-Day. Had the day after Christmas 1776 not been fiercely cold, Hessian soldiers might have been up and about to thwart George Washington’s victory at the Battle of Trenton. Had not a desert storm brought down American helicopters sent to rescue hostages at the embassy in Tehran, Jimmy Carter might have won a second term as president.
Here are five historical events, large and small, that turned on oddities in the weather—some of which might have led to a far different world had they not happened.
In 1999, French archaeologists found the remains of two once-great cities, Herakleion and Eastern Canopus, at the bottom of Egypt’s Abu Qir Bay. The cities were famed in antiquity, but because no one had ever found a sign of their existence since, it had long been assumed that they were mythical, cousins of Atlantis. In fact, the cities did exist, and they endured well into the present era. Sometime in the eighth century, however, they were swept to sea when uncommonly strong floods caused the Nile River to rise over its banks and drench the surrounding countryside. The unstable ground on which the two cities sat turned to liquefied mud, a kind of quicksand. Buildings collapsed under the own weight into that mire, which poured down into the sea and deposited the remains of the cities miles from shore. So sudden was the loss of these wealthy, populous cities that gold-laden statuary, hoards of coins and jewels, and other treasures were found in place, meaning the residents of the two cities were swept away before they had time to gather their possessions and flee.
In the late autumn of 1274, Kublai Khan, the Chinese emperor whom Marco Polo had just visited, sent a mixed force of 40,000 imperial troops to conquer Japan. The army sailed across the sea and landed, but the weather turned brutally cold and wet, forcing the fleet to return to China. His soldiers’ reports of the little-populated and fertile countryside put Japan high up on Kublai Khan’s to-do list, and seven years later he sent an invasion force of 142,000 men to northern Kyushu. His army met with stiff resistance and made little progress, however, and so Kublai Khan dispatched yet another army, this one of 100,000 troops, to land at Takashima, an island about 50 miles from the main force, and encircle the enemy. The second army landed and was making camp when a huge typhoon struck the island, destroying the fleet and killing almost all of the second force. Japanese legend holds that the storm had come as a result of intervention on the part of the goddess Amaterasu, and thus the typhoon was called “the Divine Wind”—in Japanese, kamikaze, a term that would have a much different meaning in another war.
The Mongol fleet destroyed by typhoon, woodcut by Kikuchi Yōsai, 1847
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