Kamikaze destroys second Mongol invasion of Japan

August 15, 1281

A vast Yuan invasion force of Chinese and Korean ships anchored at Kyushu was caught by a typhoon in Imari Bay. Tens of thousands drowned. Shinto priests credited the gods; samurai inherited a legend that would be invoked with tragic results in 1945. The wreckage of the invasion fleet, recently discovered on the seafloor, confirms the scale of the disaster that contemporary Japanese sources describe.