Today will be hot and sunny across Virginia, much as it was 82 years ago on June 5, 1944.
On the other side of the ocean, it was not so pleasant. Great Britain and northern France were being lashed by wind and rain. The greatest armada ever assembled, primed to leap across the English Channel and thrust itself into battle against the Nazis, was pinned down by a force so powerful no military could hope to overcome it: the weather.
June 5 was supposed to be D-Day. It was not, all because of a forecast — which, providentially, proved true.
We in the southern and western parts of Virginia are sensitized to the history of D-Day because so many sons, fathers and brothers of our forebears eventually made that channel crossing — and not much more. Their lives ended on a bloody beach in Normandy. This is why the National D-Day Memorial is now in Bedford County, the community that suffered the heaviest losses (20 dead, said to be the largest per-capita loss of any place in the country). Bedford’s sacrifice overshadows those of other places across Virginia that also had units in the initial waves at D-Day and took their own losses, an arc of communities from Winchester to Roanoke and then east to Emporia.
We detail all that in our D-Day memorial project, which was published two years ago on the 80th anniversary and relies on the words of the men who were there — and who survived — to tell the story. Those accounts begin on the morning of D-Day, which turned out to be June 6, a day later than planned. The only reference to the rough seas comes in the account from Company M, 116th Infantry out of Emporia, and it’s a fleeting one that might have happened anyway: “Sea-sickness was getting some …”
The story behind that one-day weather delay is told in the movie “Pressure,” which is now playing in movie theaters. It’s a well-told drama that, in Hollywood fashion, follows the tradition of “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
The basic premise is true: The British meteorologist James Stagg oversaw a controversial — but ultimately correct — forecast that forced Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to delay the cross-channel invasion, first for about two weeks, but in the end, just for a day. I hate to be the spoiler, but some of the best story lines in the movie just aren’t so. The movie portrays Stagg as a kind of meteorological savant. In fact, he had little forecasting experience, and that was mostly in the deserts of Iraq. One of the Royal Navy meteorologists under him said later that “we six never agreed on anything except that Stagg was not a good meteorologist and that he was a bit of a glory hound.”
Stagg had been chosen to advise Eisenhower about the weather for D-Day for the same reason that Eisenhower was put in charge of the Allied forces: He was considered a good administrator. The real dispute, which is central to the movie plot, was not between Stagg and an American meteorologist but between the American meteorologist and a Norwegian one; Stagg was the referee who sided with Sverre Petersen that the weather was going bad. History is more complicated than Hollywood likes.
That’s not all: One of the best story lines about D-Day isn’t pursued except for a brief mention that assigns the woman in question her post-war married name, not her name at the time, and doesn’t put her in context. This is hardly the first time that a woman has been squeezed out of her rightful place in history.
On his inauguration day in 1961, incoming President John Kennedy asked Eisenhower, by then the outgoing president, what gave him the edge on D-Day. Eisenhower famously replied: “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans.”
That may have been true — the Germans relaxed their defensive posture in France because they didn’t think an invasion would come during a storm — but one reason the Allies had better meteorologists is that they had Maureen Flavin, a 21-year-old postal clerk in Ireland who was the first to spot the storm that delayed D-Day and then the first to spot the break in the storm that allowed the Allies to attack.
The real story starts in Ireland and goes like this: By the time Maureen Flavin finished school, her parents had died. She was 18 and needed work. She thought about moving to the United States. Instead, she saw an ad for a postal clerk in Blacksod, a village on the west coast of Ireland. It took her two days to get there to apply in person.
She got the job, working under the postmistress Margaret Sweeney. It was only then that Flavin learned that another duty came with sorting the mail: The Blacksod post office took weather readings from the nearby lighthouse and sent them to the Irish weather service.
June 3, 1944, was Flavin’s 21st birthday. At 1 a.m., she was up to take one of the required readings. She and the Sweeney family took turns for the night shifts. This particular reading was … odd.
The weather until then had been fine — well, as fine as weather in the British Isles can be — but this reading showed a drop in barometric pressure. That was the first sign of an incoming storm.
Flavin woke up Ted Sweeney, the lighthouse keeper and the postmistress’ son, to double-check her readings because he was more experienced with the instruments. He confirmed her reading, and it was called in to the telephone exchange in the coastal town of Belmullet, which then telegraphed it off to the Irish Meteorological Service in Dublin. That was as far as it went, as far as Flavin knew. What she didn’t know was that the Irish regularly forwarded all her readings to the British. Although Ireland was officially neutral in World War II, the country had secretly agreed to supply the British with weather data, because the weather coming across the Atlantic hit Ireland first. Flavin took more readings, all of which confirmed the dropping barometric pressure. That was important, but Flavin had no idea how important. If you live on the west coast of Ireland, storms happen, so none of this seemed out of the ordinary.
What she didn’t know is that her data had quickly made its way to Stagg (whose character is the star of “Pressure”). D-Day was two days away, but a storm would wreck the Allies’ plans, which depended on the confluence of a full moon to provide visibility, low tides to expose German obstacles — and good weather. The first two of those things were going to happen anyway, but the third was always in doubt. And now these readings from a 21-year-old postal clerk in a neutral country put the whole invasion in doubt.
At some point in the early morning of June 3, Flavin’s telephone rang. There was a woman — yes, another woman in the otherwise male-dominated story of D-Day — on the phone. Strangely, she had an English accent. The mysterious caller instructed Flavin to “please check … please repeat” her readings.
“What’s wrong?” Flavin asked.
The woman on the other end wouldn’t say; she just wanted Flavin to check her readings again.
Flavin did. They were the same; the barometric pressure was definitely dropping.
The woman on the other end of the phone was in Stagg’s office; he was so alarmed by her overnight reports that he bypassed the usual liaison procedures with the Irish and had his staff call Flavin directly.
About an hour later, an unidentified man called, asking for more weather data from Flavin, which seemed an unusual amount of curiosity about the weather from the coastal tip of Ireland. Flavin wondered if the telegraph wires had gone down and delayed transmission of her initial report. On the contrary, all her reports eventually went straight to the top meteorologist for the Allied forces and, in summary form, to the Supreme Commander himself.
Armed with Flavin’s data (later confirmed by other stations), Stagg advised Eisenhower: “The whole situation from the British Isles to Newfoundland has been transformed in recent days and is now potentially full of menace.”
Eisenhower polled his commanders. The British general Sir Bernard Montgomery, who was in charge of the ground forces for D-Day but always thought he was Eisenhower’s better, thought the attack should go forward, weather or no weather. Admiral Bertram Ramsey, who oversaw the naval forces, was hesitant. The two air commanders in the room — Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy, and Trafford Leigh-Mallory — were “flatly opposed,” according to Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith. “Eisenhower, who deemed close-in air support essential, ordered a twenty-four-hour postponement.”
At the time, there was concern that D-Day would have to wait until June 18, and commanders worried that the Germans would learn of their plans in the meantime.
For more on D-Day forecasting
Cardinal weather journalist Kevin Myatt wrote two years ago about how forecasting has eolved since 1944. You can sign up for his weekly newsletter here.
Then another reading from Blacksod showed some unusual numbers. There’s some historical dispute as to whether this reading on June 4 was taken by Flavin or Ted Sweeney, the lighthouse keeper. Either way, it read: “Heavy rain and drizzle cleared, cloud at 900 feet, and visibility on land and sea very clear.”
There was a small gap in the storm that was passing over Blacksod and would eventually pass over the English Channel.
When Eisenhower and his commanders gathered at 4 a.m. on June 5 — just hours before D-Day was supposed to have happened — “the winds had reached gale proportions and the rain pelted down in horizontal streaks,” Smith writes.
Stagg, though, appeared with what one of Eisenhower’s aides called “the ghost of a smile.”
According to that account, Stagg told the supreme commander: “I think we have found a gleam of hope for you, sir. The mass of weather coming in from the Atlantic is moving faster than we anticipated. We predict there will be rather fair conditions beginning late on June 5 and lasting until the next morning, June 6.”
After that, the weather “would turn foul” again, Smith writes.
Eisenhower polled his commanders. Ramsey said if there was a decision to go ahead, the word needed to be sent to the fleet within 30 minutes to get the ships ready. The two air commanders found the weather “chancy.” Montgomery shouted an enthusiastic “Go!”
Eisenhower sat silently “for five full minutes,” Smith writes. “When Ike looked up, he was somber but not troubled.”
“OK, we’ll go,” he said.
The armada lurched toward Normandy — and history.
This weekend, we take time to remember the sons of Virginia who perished on those beaches.
If you’re a moviegoer, you should go see “Pressure,” but keep in mind that not all of it is accurate.
However, we should really remember that if it weren’t for 21-year-old Maureen Flavin and her weather readings, more would have died in the torrential weather of June 5.
There were many heroes on D-Day. But a young Irish postal clerk was the heroine. She just hasn’t had a movie made about her.
* * *
And now, the rest of the story: Flavin didn’t know what role her weather readings played until 1956, when the weather station was automated and the news came out. That lighthouse keeper’s son who double-checked her initial readings? They later married. In “Pressure,” there’s only a brief mention of a reading coming in from “Maureen Sweeney,” but she wasn’t Maureen Sweeney at the time.
In 2021, she was honored by the U.S. House of Representatives and awarded a medal. She died in 2023 at the age of 100.
I’ll have more about D-Day in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter.
