The Man Whose Weather Forecast Saved the World
'If he had got the forecast wrong,' Peter Stagg said from his home an hour from Bordeaux, 'I could have been sitting in German France — not France France.'
Mr. Stagg was speaking about the pivotal role his father, Group Capt. James Stagg, played in liberating France from Nazi occupation.
The elder Mr. Stagg was not a general or a foot soldier, but in the final hours before one of the most consequential moments of World War II, he was the man everyone was waiting on.
On June 6, 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered more than 150,000 Allied troops to storm the beaches of Normandy in one of the largest seaborne invasions in history. But hours before, Eisenhower's eyes were fixed not on the battlefield, but on the skies. More precisely, on the weather report laid out before him. And the meteorologist who had created it, described by his son as 'a dour irascible Scot,' had to get it right.
'The weather forecast was a go or no-go,' said Dr. Catherine Ross, a library and archive manager at the Met Office, the weather service for the United Kingdom. 'Everything else was ready.'
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