The D-Day Weatherman

The history books note the incredible pressure on Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as he contemplated ordering the long-awaited cross-channel invasion of France — what will forever be known as “D-Day” — this week (June 6) in 1944.

And rightly so. By June 2, months of planning and unprecedented feats of engineering and logistics were completed. The troops were briefed and on their ships — all 2,700 of them — which were at their debarkation points in the English Channel. The minefields were being cleared, the paratroopers were ready to board their planes and the support personnel were all in place. The largest, most complicated invasion in history was set to begin and upon its success greatly depended the success of WWII.

Everything depended on Eisenhower making the decision to go.

Yet, little known even today, Eisenhower himself depended on the decision of a group captain in the Royal Air Force named James Stagg, whose training had nothing to do with the military. He was a weatherman and he had to tell Eisenhower whether the weather would allow the invasion to proceed. If Stagg determined the weather was not suitable, the entire invasion would have to be postponed for at least two weeks because there were only so many days in a month when the tides and the moon were in alignment for a beach landing on France’s Normandy coast.

Talk about pressure. We think today’s “meteorologists,” with their satellite photographs and “Doppler Radar,” are maddeningly unreliable, yet in 1944 weather prediction was just a cut above guesswork, depending mostly on crude radar, weather balloons and airplanes. But Stagg had earned Eisenhower’s confidence and so, on June 3, when Stagg reported that the weather on June 5 would be too windy and rainy, and the channel too choppy, for an invasion, Eisenhower ordered D-Day postponed to June 6, the last day the moon and the tides were in alignment.

Then, late on Sunday evening, June 4, with the wind howling and rain pummeling Eisenhower’s headquarters, Stagg told Eisenhower and his staff that he thought the weather would improve briefly over the next 48 hours. Heartened, but wary, Eisenhower ordered the group to meet again at 4:30 a.m., and even though it was still pouring when the group reassembled, Stagg now told them it was a certainty — the weather would improve long enough for the invasion to be completed.

On cue, as if by a miracle, the wind and rain suddenly died down. “O.K.,” Ike said, “Let’s go.”

As history records, the weather held, the invasion succeeded and the war was eventually won. Eisenhower went on to even greater glory while Stagg went back to his weather charts, another unsung hero who helped change the course of history.