@CWO:
The December 1944 typhoon – in which Admiral Halsey was famously involved – didn’t hit “the American fleet” in the Pacific as a whole, it hit the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet, which was only one component of the USN’s total strength in the Pacific at the time. More precisely still, it hit just one part of the Third Fleet, Task Force 38, which comprised 13 carriers (7 fleet, 6 light), 8 battlships, 15 cruisers and 50 or so destroyers. Many of the ships in the TF were damaged – some severely – but only three ships were actually lost; all three of them were destroyers, the smallest of the ship types, which capsized and sank. A loss of every ship in the task force, including the carriers and battleships, would probably have required an asteroid strike rather than a typhoon. Even assuming such a worse-case scenario, however, and fully recognizing that even just the real storm’s effects were serious and unwelcome and damaging (including to Halsey’s career), the total loss of TF 38 at that point in the war probably wouldn’t have had any history-changing repercussions. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, about six weeks earlier, had more or less eliminated what was left (which wasn’t much at that point) of the IJN’s carrier forces, along with three battleships (including the superbattleship Musashi), and Japan’s stores of fuel oil were getting dangerously low, so the IJN was pretty much on its last legs. The USN, by contrast, had an abundance of warships in late 1944 (and carrier planes and pilots) of all types, all the fuel it needed, an armada of supply ships able to keep the fleet operating at sea for months on end, and a considerable network of naval bases and repair facilities (some of them in forward operational areas of the western Pacific). By June 1945, the imbalance was ever larger and Japan was just two months from surrender.
My great uncle was stationed on a destroyer in the Third Fleet during the Typhoon. He spent the entire next day sewing up sailor lacerations.