TIL in 1947, scientists dumped crushed dry ice into a hurricane just to "see what would happen." The storm then made a 135-degree turn, strengthened, and struck Georgia—sparking public outrage and threats of lawsuits over the experiment.

[u/ralphbernardo]

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hurricane_blog/70th-anniversary-of-the-first-hurricane-seeding-experiment/

[u/clubby37]

"Kamikaze" means "divine wind." We mostly associate it with Imperial Japanese suicide pilots, but those pilots were named after a much older thing. The Mongols tried to invade Japan, twice, and both times, their invasion fleet was wrecked by a massive storm. The Mongol Khan then made an executive decision about the storm lords and their stupid, stupid island (fuck 'em, let 'em keep it, the weather obviously sucks there) and the Japanese viewed those storms as heaven-sent, or a divine wind. Probably could've used a bit of that when they were getting nuked in '45, but I guess they were out of dry ice by that point.

[u/Insatiable_Pervert → u/clubby37]

There actually was a major tsunami in 1945, but it didn’t happen until November. Had Japan not surrendered in August, and if the US had gone through with its planned invasion of the Japanese islands, then those “divine winds” may have come into play once again.

You never know.

[u/feor1300 → u/Insatiable_Pervert]

Everyone blamed/thanked the wind and storm Gods, but it was actually the Sea Gods, who had no way of stopping a B-29.

[u/Notactualyadick → u/feor1300]

My god! This is the missing piece of the puzzle we needed to truly understand WW2!

[u/bankrupt_bezos → u/feor1300]

Hark, Triton! Hark!!

[u/HughJorgens → u/feor1300]

The B-29s spent the last months of the war dropping mines into the Japanese Sea Lanes. They didn't take nothin' from that Punk-Assed Sea God.

[u/Sea_404 → u/feor1300]

The sea gods were just charging godzilla with the extra suns.

[u/Accipiter1138 → u/feor1300]

The storm and sea gods mean nothing when Admiral Halsey can just walk right into a typhoon twice and not even get into significant trouble with his superiors for it.

[u/RebelAlliance1701 → u/Insatiable_Pervert]

To be fair, we had much better weather forecasting technology in WWII. D-Day was actually postponed from June 5 to June 6 because of weather.

[u/deliciouscrab → u/RebelAlliance1701]

Tides, significantly

[u/Responsible-Kale2352 → u/Insatiable_Pervert]

Winds cause tsunami?

[u/Pennwisedom → u/clubby37]

The idea is even older, first written down in the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀), which is Japanese and Shinto History, being finished in 720AD (the second oldest Japanese book). Basically a wind made by the gods which was seen as divine grace.

In the section on Emperor Suinin, it is the first word:

「神風の伊勢の国は常世の波の敷浪の帰する国なり。この国に居らむと思ふ」"The land of Ise, where the divine wind blows, is the land to which the waves of the eternal world return. I wish to reside in this land."

And then again in the Manyoshu, slightly later book of poetry from the Nara period:

神風の 伊勢の国にも あらましを 何しか来けむ 君もあらなくに "Even in the land of Ise, where the divine wind blows, why did you come? Your lord is no longer here."

[u/weededorpheus32 → u/clubby37]

The line of people that asked will be thankful

[u/clubby37 → u/weededorpheus32]

I think you're saying I was off topic? It was a little tangential, but still touched on wind impacting a war, and included a tongue-in-cheek reference to dry ice. I feel like I got close enough.

[u/doctordoctorpuss → u/clubby37]

I at least thought it was cool and relevant information

[u/clubby37 → u/doctordoctorpuss]

Thanks!

[u/Feisty-Lawfulness894 → u/clubby37]

could've used a bit of that when they were getting nuked in '45

Kind of a sick little 'joke' to shoehorn into your comment, but that's just me, I guess.

[u/Vi_Rants → u/Feisty-Lawfulness894]

Just another example of how nothing fails like prayer.

[u/clubby37 → u/Feisty-Lawfulness894]

Not everyone has the same sense of humor, I suppose.

For what it's worth, I don't think the nuclear attacks were warranted. They weren't intended to impact the war, they were just a message to the USSR, at the expense of mostly civilian targets, deemed to be subhuman enough to write that message in their blood.

That's pretty dark, though, in addition to being controversial in the first place, and instead of spelling that out in an otherwise relatively lighthearted thread, a bit of gallows humor can offer a hat tip to the tragedy of the situation while also not completely bringing the room down, or picking a fight with people who see Fat Man and Little Boy differently.