The Allies tried to sink those ships, but the Nazis also made use of radio reports of cancelled English soccer matches for hints about weather to the north. The Nazis had to use long-range aircraft and secret weather ships to gather observations. The Allies, who were in control of all the major landmasses that lined the ocean, had the upper hand. In the Northern Hemisphere, storms tend to move from west to east, so any prediction of what lay in store for Europe relied on knowing what was happening in the Atlantic. The weather war even had its own clandestine undercover missions in search of mundane treasures like data on temperature, pressure, and wind speed. Alongside the battle for land, sea, and air, then, a quiet war over the atmosphere was being waged. Sometimes, as with D Day, visibility was important at other times, cloud cover and fog could help conceal a position. Wartime made the stakes of weather forecasting especially plain. It wasn’t always possible to be so complacent.
But Andrew Blum’s new book, “ The Weather Machine” (Ecco), asks us to pause and marvel at the globe-spanning networks of collaboration required to turn the weather from something we experience to something we can predict. It’s easy to forget what a crucial role they play, and to overlook the monumental achievement they represent. In our world, weather forecasts are so ubiquitous that we treat them as notable only when wrong. Years later, when Eisenhower was asked why D Day had been a success, he reportedly said, “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans.” He’d even bought her a new pair of shoes in Paris for the occasion. They were so confident that an Allied attack was impossible that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Normandy defenses, decided to take a few days’ leave for his wife’s birthday. The German meteorologists had also foreseen the storms, but they’d missed the significance of the brief glimpse of calm. Had they postponed it until the next interval with favorable moon-and-tide conditions, they would have lost the element of surprise. Had the Allies gone ahead as planned, the invasion probably would have failed. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that weather forecast, as John Ross makes clear in a book on the subject. Eisenhower gave the order to reschedule the invasion.
The weather wouldn’t be ideal, but it would be good enough to proceed.
Allied weather stations were reporting a ridge of high pressure that would reach the beaches of Normandy on June 6th. The generals were wary of any delay, but Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to hold off.Ī few hours later, Stagg had better news. Even though the skies outside promised a bright morning, the meteorologists calculated that a parade of storms was poised to barrel across the Atlantic, hampering the prospects of success.
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