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Interesting piece on the weather forecast prior to the D-day landings. I knew the invasion was delayed by weather. This adds a bit of detail to that fact.
The weather, then as now, comes mainly from West to East. That means that whatever happens in Europe, it likely begins somewhere out in the Atlantic before being pushed across the continent. Obviously there were very few weather stations in 1944 out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, so predicting the weather for the D-Day landings was fraught.
It’s devilishly hard to coordinate a landing of thousands of ships, tens of thousands of troops, floating the mulberrys across the harbor, arranging for the logistics of ammunition and artillery and tanks and so forth, and once it was all arranged it was like a slingshot pulled back to the max, waiting for the “go” order. Eisenhower could delay for a day, but probably not two, certainly not three. The attempt to bring the mulberrys over in rough seas would have doomed the effort entirely - and now there are thousands of men overstuffed on ships and landing crafts and whatnot, paratroopers who need to advance in, uh, advance.
That weather forcast, coming from the most reliable site most westerly of the continent was crucial. And after delaying for a day Eisenhower got the word that there would be break (although there were scattered reports from Allied ships further out in the ocean that a second front followed closely) and he gave the go-ahead and the landing proceeded.
Apropos of nothing, the Germans had almost no view of the approaching weather, even their Atlantic submarines (which weren’t exactly in great shape to see the weather anyway) were useless… and given the weather that had preceded Hitler was confident enough to sleep, Rommel took a couple days off to attend his wife’s birthday party deep in France, and the Nazi defense was left in the hands of second- and third-stringers.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Hitler wouldn’t be wakened from his sleep for hours, no one could make a decision to move support troops without his OK, and the allies faced only a thin cohort of front line troops on their arrival. (That still didn’t prevent massive casualties at some of the landing beaches, while at others the Allies landed almost unscathed.)
The importance of the mulberrys was demonstrated a few weeks later when another large storm system swept through and destroyed all of one “port” and most of another, leading to a severe drop in the Allies ability to get materiel ashore for weeks. But it didn’t matter, by then beachheads had been established and fortified, Hitler was fooled for long enough to keep his backup Panzer divisions out of the action, and the Allies game was on.
A quirk in the weather. On which the fate of the world turned.
One interesting side note: the Manhattan Project, at least the political dimension of it, was planning to use the atomic bomb in Europe, not Japan, because Hitler was known to be the larger threat (and Japan was mostly on the ropes, the tide having mostly turned against them after Midway, almost two years earlier.) Imagine if the invasion had failed, 1944 and 1945 continued in stalemate, and the Allies only recourse had been to use the bomb on Berlin rather than Nagasaki and Hiroshima. What a different world we wojuld live in.
