HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-09-28T11:13:53.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/d-day/feed/atom HistoryExtra <![CDATA[D-Day could have ended in disaster – but one Scottish hero changed everything]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-a-weatherman-really-save-d-day-from-disaster-how-5-forecasts-changed-the-course-of-history/ 2026-09-28T11:13:53.000Z 2026-09-21T15:00:26.000Z 1. A national warning

A ruinous storm in 1859 gives rise to the Shipping Forecast

On 25–26 October 1859, the most severe storm to hit the Irish Sea in the 19th century raged. “The wind screamed like a living thing,” was how one witness described a night when winds reached hurricane force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The storm took 800 lives and 133 ships. As it progressed, twice as many people were lost at sea around the British Isles than in the whole of the previous year. Yet out of the devastation was born one of the most significant innovations in the history of meteorology.

The weather event was dubbed the Royal Charter Storm after a famous steam clipper. On the last leg of a journey from Melbourne to Liverpool, Royal Charter was driven ashore on the north coast of Anglesey with the loss of around 460 lives, including all the women and children aboard. In the era of the Australian gold rush, a cargo of gold insured for the equivalent of £35m in today’s money was also lost. There were only 40 survivors, most of whom owed their lives to the heroism of Maltese sailor Joseph Rogers, who managed to get ashore with a rope. The disaster remains the highest loss of life in any single shipwreck on the Welsh coast.

Unsurprisingly, given the death toll, public attention soon focused on the need to prevent a similar tragedy. Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy, founder of the Meteorological Office, which had been collecting observations from around the British coastline since 1854, believed his department could provide this service.

FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle on the circumnavigation that helped shape Charles Darwin’s thinking, was an experienced mariner who understood how to forecast changes in the weather based on observations of pressure, wind speed and direction. Analysing the Royal Charter gale and others, he proved that weather observations could be obtained using the new electric telegraph and undersea cables, creating the ability to forecast poor weather. Along with new weather forecasts, he proposed a national storm warning system.

A first warning was issued on 6 February 1861. It read: “Caution: Gale threatening from south-west and then northward. Show signal drum.” The warnings used a combination of canvas cone and drum shapes by day and lights by night, which were hoisted on a staff to warn ships of an approaching gale.

Yet not everyone took heed. On 9 February, a severe storm struck the north-east coast of England. Around 200 vessels, which had put to sea despite the warning, were lost. The Whitby lifeboat capsized with the loss of all but one of the crew during its sixth rescue.

However, further warnings were heeded and the number of lives lost around Britain fell by about a third. The reliability of FitzRoy’s methods was such that Queen Victoria requested weather forecasts before sailing to her retreat on the Isle of Wight. The warning system, believed to be the world’s oldest national forecast service, is now known as the Shipping Forecast.

2. Battlefield intelligence

Meteorologists power British advances at Passchendaele in 1917

The reply was unequivocal bordering on tetchy when the Meteorological Office offered its assistance to the military in 1914. “The Army does not go to war with umbrellas,” noted the War Office. But after disastrous losses in the air, artillery misfires and the introduction of gas warfare, attitudes changed. The Meteorological Field Service, universally known as Meteor RE, was established in 1915 and operated from the British Expeditionary Force General Headquarters at Montreuil, France.

Meteor initially provided frontline warnings when conditions were potentially suitable for the deployment of poison gas by either side, or when observations could be made from balloons to improve the accuracy of artillery. Later, aircraft of the Meteor Reconnaissance Flight improved the quality of these observations and provided forecasts for the fledgling Royal Flying Corps (RFC).

But forecasting really came to the fore towards the end of the battle of the Somme in 1916. Engaged in a conflict of static trench warfare in waterlogged terrain and with winter approaching, commanders realised that an understanding of expected weather conditions had to play a key part in military planning.

The earliest known operational military forecast provided by the Met Office was written by the British meteorologist Major Ernest Gold on 24 October 1916. Soon the forecasts included charts and a selection of observations. At first, the charts were hand-drawn, which limited their production and distribution. However, their value became so evident that ‘clay copiers’ were introduced, enabling them to be shared far more widely.

This enhanced technology truly came into its own during the battle of Passchendaele – the opening stages of which were fought in exceptionally wet weather. In Ypres across the 31 days of August 1917, 127mm of rain tumbled from the skies, around 60mm more than average. With trenches immediately filling with water and parts of the battlefield turned to swamp, combat operations were severely compromised.

When the weather finally improved in late September and October, the British were ready to strike, thanks, in part, to the Met Office’s forecasts. The drier weather of September hardened the ground and brought early morning mists, which gave cover to advancing British infantry. When the mists cleared during the morning, German counter-attack formations were revealed to air and ground reconnaissance.

Armed with this intelligence, the British were able to launch offensives at the Menin Road Ridge (20–25 September), Polygon Wood (26 September–3 October) and Broodseinde (4 October). Together, these engagements led to British possession of the strategically important ridge east of Ypres – before the rain returned in October.

Ernest Gold’s diary includes notes from meetings and telephone calls with General Plumer, commander of the Second Army, and his chief of staff, General Harrington, warning them of deteriorating weather. Perhaps the British Army could fight the war with umbrellas, after all.

• Read more | The First World War’s deadliest battle was stalling, but everything changed when Little Willie arrived

3. A storm before D-Day

The Met Office saves thousands of soldiers’ lives in 1944

After long months of preparation, the Allied invasion of western Europe was set for 5 June 1944. The only thing that could delay D-Day was bad weather.

Timing was crucial. The invasion had to coincide with the Soviet summer offensive in the east to ensure maximum pressure on German resources. But moon and tide conditions were favourable on only three days: 5, 6 and 7 June. The odds of even broadly acceptable weather were at least 13-1. The requirement for a full moon at the same time as the desired weather roughly trebled the odds.

Enter Dr James Stagg. He was the Met Office official charged with negotiating the meteorological minefield that confronted the Allies in the nerve-shredding countdown to D-Day. Stagg’s job was to bring together the differing perspectives of meteorologists from the US Air Force, UK Met Office and Admiralty in order to provide accurate forecasts to General Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. It was, to put it mildly, a fiendishly difficult job brief.

In terms of data, the Allies had a significant advantage. By June 1944, German forces had not only been pushed back in the air and at sea, they had largely failed to crack Allied codes. This meant that German forecasters likely lacked critical weather observations from the Atlantic. The chief meteorologist of the German 3 Air Fleet advised of poor weather conditions on 6 June. German commanders decided not to trigger their warning system, which had been designed to alert troops defending Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Atlantic Wall to potential invasion. Reassured, Rommel himself returned to Germany for his wife’s birthday party.

Thanks to the work of the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Allied forecasters had access to all of the German weather observations. But that didn’t mean they could agree on what the weather would bring. Initially, the American team strongly supported a favourable forecast for 5 June but the Met Office and Admiralty believed the weather would be bad. Following significant disagreements, Stagg briefed Eisenhower to expect poor conditions on the French coast – and so the invasion was postponed. The forecast was correct and thousands of lives were saved. Stagg was now under intense pressure to find a weather window on 6 or 7 June. In his diary, he wrote: “I am now getting rather stunned, it is all a nightmare.”

On 4 June, observations from the Atlantic had begun to indicate a brief window of better weather two days hence. Stagg’s diary again reflected the knife-edge nature of the decision when, responding to praise for his forecast from Admiral Creasy, he wrote: “I wonder. He should wait till he sees how things go.”

As it turned out, conditions were marginal. But finding that elusive weather window enabled Stagg and his forecasters to give the Allies the element of surprise. And as the greatest amphibious assault in history got under way, that element of surprise would prove crucial.

4. Forecasting by numbers

In 1965, meteorology enters the computer age

As a pacifist who drove ambulances during the First World War, Lewis Fry Richardson spent his breaks working out how to use mathematical equations in meteorology. Published in 1922, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process was years ahead of its time as it showed how to use mathematics and physics to predict the weather from a starting set of observations – and how this could be done for more than one location at the same time by splitting up an area into a chequerboard design to create gridded forecasts.

Richardson was the first to propose this form of forecasting, although his work was nearly lost when a draft of it was sent to the rear lines during the battle of Champagne and went missing, only to be unearthed months later under a heap of coal.

He calculated that to complete his forecasts in real-time he would require 64,000 “computors” (people carrying out calculations). Richardson imagined a “forecast factory” rather like a theatre in the round and full of boxes representing the grid squares. Computors in each box carried out calculations and passed on their results, all under the direction of a central conductor keeping everything moving on schedule. Conceptually, he was essentially describing the working of a supercomputer.

Experiments in the 1950s and 1960s built upon Richardson’s work to create a simple mathematical model of the atmosphere. The first operational computer forecast using numerical weather prediction (NWP) arrived on 2 November 1965. The technique enabled the Met Office to produce twice-daily forecasts at three levels in the atmosphere across the North Atlantic and western Europe. Even with today’s more sophisticated forecasts, Richardson’s basic equations are still present.

Using computers to produce weather forecasts dramatically enhanced forecasts to extend further into the future. It gave earlier warning of severe weather events, as well as allowing forecasting for different parts of the globe. Some of the earliest impacts were seen in aviation forecasting. As early as April 1966, NWP showed that deep low pressure would bring strong high-level winds in the mid-Atlantic and heavy snowfall to much of the UK, including London. Pilots and airlines were alerted to the risks associated with these conditions.

Models have constantly improved. When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, meteorologists took just 48 hours to extend their forecasting model into the South Atlantic. These days, the Met Office supercomputer is based in the cloud and can perform 60 quadrillion calculations per second. A far cry from Richardson’s original design, but nevertheless an evolution of his original idea.

• Read more | Is Pressure a true story? Here’s the real history behind the D-Day drama

5. Hurricane? What hurricane?

In 1987, a BBC forecaster issues an infamous denial

On 15 October 1987, BBC forecaster Michael Fish delivered Britain’s most infamous weather forecast. “Earlier on today,” he said, “a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.” He was correct, but he was talking about a storm over the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean. He said it wouldn’t reach the UK and it didn’t. However, a rapidly deepening area of low pressure from the Bay of Biscay did.

Forecasters had flagged the risk of severe weather days in advance, but early models showed the worst of it staying just south of England. As things played out, though, a clash between unusually warm tropical air and cold polar air forced the warm air upward, creating a deep area of low pressure. The sharp temperature contrast produced a particularly intense weather system.

Several ingredients made the Great Storm so memorable, but its track was probably most significant. Hitting the south coast, it pushed north and east, reaching the Humber estuary at about 5.30am on 16 October. This path included densely populated areas.

Gusts exceeded 100mph, uprooting 15 million trees, tearing roofs from houses, flattening vehicles and severing power across much of southern England. One family in Kent recalled waking as “the house shook as though grabbed by a giant hand”. Roads were blocked, trains halted, entire counties were plunged into chaos and 18 people died. The highest gust recorded over the UK was 115mph at Shoreham in Sussex at 3.10am. A Guardian article, “Mayhem brings London to halt”, described how power supplies, telephone connections and transport infrastructure collapsed. It also reported that Woolworths had sold 25,000 brooms and 50,000 candles as people tried to cope in the aftermath.

The apparent mismatch between the forecasts and the storm’s severity sparked national debate. The Great Storm became a catalyst for investment and improvement in the science, technology and communication of forecasting, which has since transformed the way the UK understands and responds to severe weather.

After 1987, the Met Office created the National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) to give government, industry, emergency responders and the public a clear, coordinated system for severe weather alerts. The warnings help people prepare. Back then, alerts were sent by fax and email to emergency services and media outlets for broadcast on TV and radio. Today, most people get forecasts and warnings through apps, social media and the web. Since 2015, storms have been named to provide a shared reference point.

The Great Storm stands as a reminder that accurate forecasting saves lives and that, when the worst weather hits, it enters national folklore. Just ask Michael Fish.

Catherine Ross is the library and archive manager at the Met Office

This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Churchill’s evolving perspective on D-Day]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-d-day/ 2026-06-08T14:26:16.000Z 2026-06-06T21:10:54.000Z D-Day was one of the key episodes in the Second World War. But what did Winston Churchill make of the plans for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France? Was, as some have suggested, the British prime minister really reluctant to get involved? And how fraught were relationships between the Allied leaders?

Speaking to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast, Richard Dannatt and Allen Packwood, authors of the book Churchill’s D-Day: The Inside Story, discuss the decisions and tensions behind the operation.

What context do we need to understand about Churchill – and Britain – in the early years of the Second World War to make sense of what was to happen in the run up to D-Day?

Richard Dannatt: The first thing to consider is the circumstances of how Churchill became prime minister in May 1940. He had recently been present at a parliamentary debate to defend a disastrous campaign in Norway that had taken place in the months beforehand. It had been Churchill’s idea to try and hobble German industry by cutting off the supply of iron ore from Sweden through Norway into Germany – and it had been a disaster. Everything you can think of that could go wrong, had gone wrong – and it’s one of the illustrated examples that we use in the British Army staff college about how not to conduct an operation. This – among other things – would continue to play on Churchill’s mind.

• Read more | Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?

Allen Packwood: We must remember that Churchill is not elected prime minister in May 1940. He is there, really, because of a Westminster coup to remove Neville Chamberlain.

Churchill then had to construct a national coalition government, which meant he had to put together a war cabinet containing people who – until recently – had been his rivals or political opponents. This meant he did not enter the war as prime minister in a strong position – and he had to consider carefully how he was going to respond to that.

We then had the Dunkirk evacuation, and Churchill very famously said that wars are not won by evacuations. But it must have been very clear to him – in 1940 – that the road was going to be a very long, hard one before Britain could return to France.

One of the things that has often been said to have influenced Churchill’s approach to D-Day is his experience in the First World War, specifically the Dardanelles campaign (1915–16). Do you think this is overstated?

RD: I think the Dardanelles campaign had a major impact on Churchill. He was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, and he had come up with the campaign’s concept, which was a bold attempt to try and break the deadlock of the extended trench warfare on the Western Front. You must give him marks for trying to find a new initiative, but – and this is the sadness – although the strategic thinking might have been reasonable, the operational delivery was woeful.

There was also a huge loss of life in the Dardanelles campaign. This, in addition to the Norway campaign, sat heavily on Churchill’s mind in the run up to D-Day. I think it played very much into his overall thinking.

AP: The lesson that he took away from Dardanelles was that if you were going to attempt an operation of this scale and complexity then you needed to do it very carefully – and at the right time. You needed to make sure that you had control of all the moving parts, politically and militarily.

We tend to think of Churchill as this bellicose war leader, but actually he was keen to avoid the huge losses of life that had occurred in the First World War. This certainly influenced his strategy and thinking when it came to D-Day.

To what extent is it right to say that Churchill was sceptical of D-Day?

RD: Churchill knew at some stage that there needed to be re-entry into Europe, but he was very keen on it not being premature. So on the one hand, he was sceptical. But on the other hand, he knew it was inevitable. The big thing was to get the timing and preparation right.

AP: This idea of Churchill being sceptical about D-Day developed quite quickly after the end of the Second World War. Eisenhower, when he published his memoirs, described how at one of the big conferences in May 1944, just before D-Day, Churchill had told the gathering that he was hardening on this enterprise, which the Americans immediately took to mean that he had been soft on it up until that point.

This view has been taken up more recently in popular culture by the movie Churchill (2017). The film starts with Churchill walking on a British beach and recoiling as he has a vision of the sea running red with blood. The implication is that history is going to repeat itself; it’s going be the Dardanelles campaign all over again. The movie then proceeds to show Churchill attempting to obstruct the operation with 48 hours to go – which of course was not the case.

• Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero

Churchill was also keenly aware of this idea that he was sceptical of D-Day – and he tried to respond to it in his own war memoirs. The key point is that he always knew we were going to have to go back into France, but he knew it should only be contemplated at the right moment when all the necessary preconditions have been met (so when we had the tactical experience, expertise, strategy and equipment required for what was going to be an incredibly difficult operation).

Do we know what Churchill felt about D-Day in the run up to the day itself?

RD: I think once Churchill had agreed in his own mind that it was going to happen, then he was determined that the operation should be given the best chance of success. He leveraged his convening power as prime minister to make sure that all these different elements were in place – from technical innovations… to planning… to even putting a lockdown in place in the south of England to maintain the security of the operation.

But we know that Churchill had doubts and fears about D-Day. Hence the remark to his wife, Clemmie, the night before, in which he mentioned the possibility of enormous casualties.

AP: Another of Churchill’s big concerns in the weeks running up to D-Day was the risk of French civilian casualties.

The bombing scheme that Eisenhower and the military commanders had settled on was one that targeted the French railway system and marshalling yards. These tended to be in areas of high civilian population density.

Churchill raised this issue multiple times with the defence committee and the war cabinet. He raised it with Eisenhower and President Roosevelt. His fear was that if the French take these very large casualties, then this might turn them against the Allies.

He was also thinking of the political ramifications of this course of action, which are that in the postwar world, this might drive a wedge between Britain and France. Ultimately, of course, he didn’t overrule the military commanders, but he did everything he could to try and limit the effect of that bombing on French civilians.

What did Churchill do on 6 June itself?

AP: Churchill was in Downing Street in the Treasury Annex on the morning of D-Day, poring over the latest maps and charts and receiving the latest reports on what’s happening on the beaches. At 12 noon, he moved to the House of Commons to make his first statement. At that point, there was not much he could say; the operation was still shrouded in the fog of war and it was not clear how it was developing. So Churchill left to have lunch with the king, and then visited some of the headquarters on the outskirts of London before coming back and reporting to parliament. The really interesting fact, of course, is that this was not where Churchill wanted to be at all – he wanted to be in the centre of the action itself and had tried unsuccessfully to get himself on board a British cruiser.

What were the repercussions of D-Day? How did it affect Churchill’s relationship with, for example, the US?

RD: Churchill began to realise – once the operations ashore were fully developed – that this was now the beginning of an inevitable switch from British influence to American influence. This meant that his ability to influence subsequent military strategy and higher-level operational objectives were no longer in his control. It was no longer solely a British operation. It was a realisation that the British position was changing and that the Americans’ position of supremacy was frankly becoming a reality.

Tim Benbow at King’s College London has written that the D-Day landings showed Churchill at his best and at his worst. Is this a view that you have sympathy with?

AP: This is probably a view that I would have some sympathy with.

I think one of the things that Churchill did well – but isn’t often credited for – is the political work that he did behind the scenes in maintaining the national coalition. In the months before D-Day, he spent a lot of time preparing the country for this huge operation using the convening power of the prime minister to knock heads together, to ensure that production targets are met, to ensure that the artificial harbours needed for the operation are being built, to ensure that the right equipment and tanks are in place.

I suppose the worst of Churchill might be a certain sort of selfishness and stubbornness, which was certainly evidenced in his insistence that he wanted to accompany the troops across the channel, even though that was clearly not where he should be. I think he found the months leading up to D-Day personally very difficult because he was one of those people who liked to be at the centre of the action.

I think he also found it difficult to accept the transition to secondary status in the Anglo-American relationship.

How would you like people to understand D-Day and Churchill’s role within it?

RD: I think Churchill’s role in D-Day illustrates most effectively Britain’s role in D-Day and Britain’s role in the new Europe that was created at the end of the Second World War. Let’s face it, if D-Day had failed – and if we had not been able to defeat Nazi Germany and some kind of pact had been formed between Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union – Europe would have looked a very different place today.

• Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line

AP: For me, it’s all about complexity and nuance. Too often when we talk about Churchill, we tend to just see that famous image of Churchill as the ‘bulldog warrior’ with his V for Victory salute and a cigar. We think of his speeches. But Churchill was an incredibly complex character; the decisions that he – and others – were taking were incredibly difficult and it’s impossible to know if they got it right. In many of these decisions, there was not one right answer, just some incredibly tough choices.

But I think if you want to understand the world that we inhabit today – and the Europe that we inhabit today – then you must understand the decisions that underpin this and got us to where we are now.

Allen Packwood is director of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College in Cambridge

Richard Dannatt is former Chief of the General Staff and member of the House of Lords

This interview, originally published in 2024, was taken from an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast: D-Day: was Churchill really against the operation?

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The women’s work that made D-Day a success]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/women-d-day/ 2026-06-08T14:26:38.000Z 2026-06-06T00:10:00.000Z “I was sent with a team of other Wren officers, to a strange secret hideout in the cellars of the old Barclays hotel, where we sat down in front of huge sheets of statistics, with columns and columns of figures,” former WRNS meteorologist Paulina Nichol recalled. “And all we had to do was add the figures up.”

Nichol was talking about a particular assignment covered by the Official Secrets Act; the plan for when the invasion of Normandy, known as D-Day, would take place. Women, she says, were used “as calculators”, just one of the vital ways that women’s labour shaped the events of 1944 and beyond.

The enormous degree of planning and detailed work that made Operation Overlord and the subsequent battle for Normandy a success is rightly well-remembered, and D-Day is widely commemorated each year. Perhaps less often foregrounded is the role of women, who were involved at almost every level of the operation well before 6 June 1944 – whether as members of the Allied military services or as civilians.

More than 80 years on, it is worth delving a little deeper into the varied ways that women took part.

The women who planned D-Day

RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire was home to the RAF’s Central Interpretation Unit. Using photographs from reconnaissance missions, the unit constructed three-dimensional images of key targets. Between 1941 and 1944, the staff grew from 231 to over 1,700, going on to provide key intelligence reports and monitoring the railways around the Normandy area to assess the impact of bombing raids, in a bid to delay German reinforcements.

• Read more | D-Day: the spearhead of the invasion

The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) undertook many roles at Medmenham, one being photographic interpreters, who included in their ranks Sarah Oliver – the daughter of Prime Minister Winston Churchill – and Mary Harrison, who crafted physical models of major targets, including the Normandy beaches. Precision was essential, using photographs and maps to recreate every contour and building accurately with papier mâché, plaster of Paris and lino. Mary explained: “You looked for guns and artillery and defence and they were marked usually in red… all the time you were looking for things… that the army or the landing troops could look for.”

This three-dimensional view of the beaches allowed military staff to visualise the landing site, identify landmarks and strategic goals, assess potential enemy strong-points, and plan their progress inland.

The women who trained for D-Day

When preparing to land on the beaches of Normandy, the troops had to practise with the landing craft, and training exercises were timed to the second. Margaret Seeley of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, and officially known as the Wrens), was stationed at the signals office, HMS Squid in Southampton.

She described her role in a major exercise: “I had to cancel my leave, and I was told to go down to the Hard, which is down in the harbour, and it was the only time in the war I had to wear my tin hat.

“We had to look out the window and see every landing craft that came in, note its exact time, how long it took to load and when it sailed. And then report this over the phone back to head office,” she said. There’s a sense of their work as being essential. “I was told that when the actual thing happened, I would be able to do this job and I was thrilled.”

To Margaret’s disappointment, though, when the time came for invasion, she wouldn’t get any closer to the operation. “Towards the end of the exercise they decided it wasn’t the place for women, so I had to hand over to a naval rating, who was a young lad.

“He didn’t even know how to use a telephone and I had to show him how to do this job. I was rather disappointed, but, you know, one just obeyed orders and that was it.”

The women who prepared the landings at D-Day

After the initial invasion and once the Allies had formed a bridgehead into Normandy, gaining important territory, they installed artificial ‘Mulberry Harbours’, temporary portable harbours that allowed more troops and equipment to arrive.

Ahead of D-Day, Elizabeth Rowell was one of the many factory workers manufacturing different components of the harbours. Working in Sunderland, her job was to splice ropes. It was heavy, dirty manual work. Groups of eight women stood in a circle, winding wire coils, over and under around a cable base. They would then insert hooks and thimbles (rings) at either end. These heavy wire cables were then used to hold the Mulberry Harbours together, although many of the factory workers didn’t know this until after the war.

The woman who chose the date of D-Day

D-Day was initially earmarked for May 1944 – and meteorologists were tasked with selecting the best exact date, tracking the moon, tides and the most unpredictable element, the weather.

Wren Officer Paulina Nichol, a meteorologist, explained how it worked: “They were constantly trying to discover how best to choose the day for invasion. And this was to do with phases of the moon, it was some slightly crack-pot theory.

“This being before the days of calculators, they used us as calculators.”

Ultimately, 5 June 1944 was selected for D-Day, but with just 36 hours to go, Maureen Flavin, an Irish postal clerk in County Mayo, was the first to forecast a storm approaching from the Atlantic. As a result, D-Day was pushed back 24 hours until the weather was sufficiently improved.

The woman who fooled the Germans

To confuse the Germans, the Allies created ‘windows’ where RAF planes dropped strips of metal foil over the English Channel. This fooled German radar by giving the false impression that a large Allied fleet was sailing for the Pas de Calais area of northern France.

This technique had been devised by Joan Curran, a Welsh physicist who had been a PhD student when the war broke out.

The women codebreakers

Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes was home to Britain’s codebreakers, and over three-quarters of the staff were women.

Intercepting transmissions and breaking codes, the staff at Bletchley gathered information on enemy movements, monitoring whether deception tactics were working, and whether the Germans anticipated the Allied invasion. After 6 June, Bletchley relayed information about German counter-attacks.

The women intelligence agents

Special Operations Executive (SOE, established in 1940) deployed both male and female agents in occupied Europe, to gather intelligence and galvanise the local resistance.

Gradually, SOE occupied several buildings on Baker Street in London, with Colonel Maurice Buckmaster leading ‘F section’, overseeing agents in France. Many of the Baker Street staff were female.

Odette Brown, an officer with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry described her role as secretary: “One of the things I did… was type out the personal messages that went out on the BBC radio, and especially the D-Day messages. I knew them by heart, which message applied to which circuit. There were two lots of messages, there were ‘A messages’ and ‘B messages’.

• Read more | Why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day

Brown’s messages relayed crucial information across the network, she explained. “Now the agents had been warned as D-Day approached, they had to listen to the BBC on the 1st and 15th of every month and that if they heard the A messages, then they knew the invasion would happen within the next two weeks. So, then they had to listen daily until they heard the B message, which meant the invasion would start the next day.”

SOE agent Lise de Baissac was in her hometown of Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast. Lise had fled the German invasion, eventually arriving in London in 1941 and was recruited by SOE in May 1942. Four months later, she parachuted into occupied France and worked as a courier for her brother Claude’s network in Bordeaux, before setting up her own network in Poitiers. After a period back in England as a liaison officer training other SOE agents, Lise returned to France in April 1944 to support her brother’s new network in Normandy. “There were groups of Maquis (French resistance) and I had to pass on orders from one to the other. What my brother couldn’t do for himself, I did for him.”

• Read more | Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings?

Recruiting in Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast, Lise raced back to Normandy, avoiding large German military formations. For the next three months, Lise and Claude’s network sabotaged German reinforcements and sent critical intelligence reports to the Allies.

The women who oversaw the operation

Before the days of computers, the WAAF at Fighter Command HQ at RAF Bentley Priory plotted out air force positions in real time on a large map. Overlaid with a grid, the map extended from the South of England across the Channel to the Normandy coastline. On the eve of D-Day, plotter Joan Seaman recalls how the map table was suddenly transformed:

“On the table, we plotted convoys, just a circle of card with the convoy name on it… That was all the ships going over. There was so much… the whole plotting table was just a complete mass of coloured arrows, a complete mass of it.”

As the invasion began, the female plotters marked out the Allied positions. It was fast and frantic work, but Joan remembers it as “extremely exciting… to give a complete picture of everything that was going on around the shores of the British Isles”.

Elsewhere, General Dwight D Eisenhower oversaw the Allied Invasion from Southwick House near Portsmouth.

Deep underground there, Wren Marie Scott was a radio operator, alongside other women from the WRNS, the WAAF and Auxiliary Territorial Service.

On landing day, Marie was relaying messages directly to the men on the beaches. To her alarm, the sounds of warfare filled her ears. “In my earphones, I was on the beaches of Normandy, I heard everything… Machine gun fire, cannon fire, bombs, men shouting orders, men screaming… it was the chaos of war.”

With no conflict training, the female radio operators had no preparation for this, but they had no option but to continue their work.

The women nurses of D-Day

Some of the first women to arrive in Normandy after the landings were military nurses. Amy Dunnett served with No 3 Casualty Clearing Station.

Taken out on a landing craft, Dunnett recalls nurses scrambling down the nets, wearing heavy army boots and tin hats, packs on their backs, landing on Gold Beach in mid-June. They went to a tented hospital in a field full of tall grass and flowers. “It was very primitive”, but they had to make do as casualties came in thick and fast. “I worked in the operating theatres, on one occasion working for 56 hours without a break.”

The women of D-Day, both military and civilian, played a crucial role in the Allied victory. Their tireless work contributed to the success of Operation Overlord and helped pave the way for the liberation of Europe.

Elisabeth Shipton is a military historian, television and radio documentary researcher, and author. Her books include Female Tommies: The Frontline Women of the First World War (The History Press, 2014)

]]> Nick Hewitt <![CDATA[The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/d-day-battle-normandy-allied-navies-sailors-operation-neptune/ 2026-06-08T15:42:34.000Z 2026-06-05T23:01:32.000Z On 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.”

Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men.

Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944.

• Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan

The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians.

Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-chief, General Dwight Eisenhower, recognised in his final report: “For the successful maintenance of the armies in France… we were dependent upon the ceaseless work of the Allied navies, assisted by RAF Coastal Command.”

Normandy had been confirmed as the site for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe at the Quebec Conference, codenamed ‘Quadrant’, in August 1943. Two months later, Ramsay was appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief, Expeditionary Force, with the rest of the command team appointed in December. The overall commander-in-chief was Eisenhower, and the military and air commanders were General Sir Bernard Montgomery and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory.

The countdown to D-Day

With the leadership structure in place, Ramsay then issued his Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune, the invasion’s assault phase, on 28 February 1944. While the planners worked, extraordinary efforts were made to assemble the huge fleet required for the invasion.

Royal Navy officer Christopher Clitherow, for instance, commissioned a new Landing Ship (Tank), or LST, which would help transport men and vehicles across the Channel. Created using innovative mass production methods in the US, the vessels resembled welded steel shoeboxes, and offered very little in the way of comfort. “She reacts to a bump like a diving board off which one has just jumped,” Clitherow later recalled. “Every conceivable piece of the ship rattles as if its teeth were about to fall out.”

Meanwhile, the sheer number of men required to deliver Neptune meant that most new British recruits were posted to Combined Operations, which had been founded in July 1940 to plan and carry out amphibious warfare. They were put through their paces at special centres across the UK, before joining their units and taking part in huge pre-assault exercises.

Exercise Tiger, held on 26–28 April, saw the most significant setback of the training cycle, when a convoy of American LSTs making a practice landing at Slapton Sands, Devon, was attacked by German motor torpedo boats (also known as ‘E-boats’), killing 749 US servicemen and wounding more than 300 others.

Yet despite this tragic turn of events, Operation Neptune officially began at 11.30pm on 25 May, when commanders opened Ramsay’s sealed orders and military camps in southern England were closed off to the outside world. D-Day itself was scheduled for Monday 5 June, but after an unseasonal summer gale, it was determined that the invasion would instead be pushed back to Tuesday 6 June.

The Normandy landings in numbers

7,016

Ships and major landing craft that participated in Operation Neptune. Approximately 79 per cent of the vessels were either British or Canadian

195,701

Naval personnel involved in Operation Neptune

917

Allied ships and major landing craft lost or seriously damaged between 6 and 30 June 1944

509

German mines, of all types, swept in the Allied assault areas between 4 June and 3 July 1944

183,540

Vehicles landed in the British and US sectors by 4 July 1944 – the day after Operation Neptune officially came to an end

After setting out on the 5th, the armada passed along the south coast and turned out into the Channel, with most of the ships passing Area Z, a buoyed patch of water south-east of the Isle of Wight nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Circus’. From there, the vessels then passed down the ‘Spout’ – 10 marked and mine-swept channels – into their designated assault areas. Sweeping and marking this huge stretch of sea was fraught with danger. When the US Navy minesweeper Osprey struck a mine, caught fire and sank, the five sailors and one officer who lost their lives became Neptune’s first deaths in action.

Arriving off Normandy, bombarding warships subdued the German coastal defences while soldiers got ashore. Warships provided an overwhelming advantage on the battlefield, but bombardment was exhausting work – and quite different to the stop-start nature of conventional naval action. Gordon ‘Putty’ Painter, a 20-year-old gunlayer aboard the cruiser HMS Belfast, would later recall firing broadsides that rocked the ships “backwards and forwards” for hours on end.  In fact, such were the demands of the operation that the only time that Painter and his comrades could leave the turret “was if nature called”.

View Green Video on the source website

Naval bombardment would prove instrumental to ensuring D-Day’s success, particularly within the American Omaha area, where destroyers operating dangerously close inshore helped the army establish a precarious beachhead. But the fire support came at a cost: two destroyers, the Norwegian Svenner and USS Corry, were both sunk with heavy loss of life, the former by German torpedo boats and the latter by coastal defence guns.

Meanwhile, more sailors carried assault troops to the shore in landing craft – and their experiences were often extraordinary. George Kirkby, for example, was the coxswain of a Landing Craft (Assault) launched from HMS Prinses Astrid, one of several converted Belgian ferries that was tasked with delivering British commandos and US Rangers. Later, he would describe a beach “strewn with dead and wounded bodies, the air thick with smoke and the water around us spraying up into the craft through concentrated mortar and machine gun fire”.

After D-Day: the remarkable logistics that kept the fight going

The initial follow-up forces also landed in assault craft, but from 10 June onwards, the focus of Operation Neptune switched to methodical logistics, with at least eight convoys of merchant ships sailing across the Channel every 24 hours. The process was remarkably efficient: allowing for loading and unloading, any individual ship could make a round trip from England to France in just four days. They not only brought in fuel, vehicles, ammunition and reinforcements, but they also took out wounded Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war.

Once the ships had arrived, there were several methods of getting supplies into the beachhead itself. The first was to bring everything over the beaches or from anchorages offshore, using assault craft and barges, while the second was to make use of the small harbours captured in the landings. The third option, meanwhile, was to utilise the two huge artificial harbours known as ‘Mulberries’ that the Allies constructed off Saint-Laurent in the Omaha area and Arromanches in Gold.

Assembly of the harbours began as soon as the beaches were secured, with sailors playing a leading role. Able Seaman Kenneth Bungard, for example, crossed the Channel riding on one of the prefabricated concrete caissons used to create the harbours’ walls. Crawling along on a slab-sided monster with the seakeeping qualities of a house brick was far from pleasant. “If we were hit with a torpedo, that would be the end,” he recalled. “It was all concrete [and] it would just disintegrate.”

All this vulnerable shipping had to be protected. In the Eastern (British) Task Force area, the defence was largely static to reduce the risk of collisions and friendly fire. Defence Line A, consisting of anchored minesweepers, ran along the assault area, six miles offshore, to guard against attacks from the north, while a line of armed landing craft and Coastal Forces craft (later christened the ‘Trout Line’) ran south to the shore, watching the German naval base at Le Havre.

Elsewhere, in the Western (US) Task Force area, destroyers, patrol craft and British steam gunboats patrolled the ‘Dixie Line’, which ran parallel to the coast to meet Defence Line A. Radar-equipped destroyers patrolled south of this, and more Coastal Forces craft watched the ‘Mason Line’, which ran up the Cotentin Peninsula to the northern edge of the Utah area.

Timeline: how the Allied navies turned the tide in Normandy

17–24 August 1943

The Quebec Conference (codenamed ‘Quadrant’) takes place in Canada. Allied leaders decide that the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe, Operation Overlord, will begin with an assault landing in Normandy.

25 October 1943

Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay is appointed Allied Naval Commander Expeditionary Force.

28 February 1944

Ramsay issues the Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune – the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord.

28 April 1944

Nearly 750 men are killed in a German E-boat attack at Slapton Sands, Devon, during Exercise Tiger – one of the final rehearsals for the seaborne invasion.

25 May 1944

Operation Neptune officially begins at 23:30. Ramsay’s sealed orders are opened and military holding camps on the south coast of England are closed off.

6 June 1944

The Allied invasion of Normandy begins. Known as D-Day, the first day of the campaign sees 132,715 British, Canadian and American soldiers coming to shore across five landing beaches, with a further 23,400 airborne troops dropping further inland.

25 June 1944

The US-led Task Force 129 bombards Cherbourg in support of a US Army assault on the city.

3 July 1944

Operation Neptune comes to an end. The last of the senior officers leading the assault are withdrawn and new headquarters are established ashore.

5/6 July 1944

Human torpedoes of the German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände (small battle units) launch their first attack on the Allied assault area. Two minesweepers and the British frigate HMS Trollope are sunk.

12 September 1944

With much of the fighting now moving further inland, British troops finally take the German naval base at Le Havre. Three months and six days after D-Day, combat operations for the Allied navies in the Seine Bay come to an end.

Despite these formidable lines of defence, enemy attacks continued apace. E-boats and other German warships frequently sortied from Le Havre and Cherbourg, trying to strike the supply ships or lay mines, while the Luftwaffe carried out bombing and torpedo attacks almost every night. On one particularly bad day, 8 June, three US warships went down to mines, while the British lost the frigate HMS Lawford to a remote-controlled glider bomb. Another Luftwaffe raider hit a huge petrol and ammunition stores dump in the Sword area.

On 14 June, an increasingly concerned Admiral Ramsay asked for RAF strategic bombers to strike Le Havre, and they duly responded, sinking three of the German Navy’s large torpedo boats and 10 E-boats. Yet there was more turmoil to come.

A few days later, the worst summer storm in living memory swept through the Seine Bay, halting the fighting and delivery of supplies until late on 22 June. The Mulberry harbour at Saint-Laurent was smashed beyond repair, while more than 800 vital ferry craft were left stranded. The churning water also triggered the sensitive detonators on German pressure-operated ‘oyster’ mines, which blew up unexpectedly across the assault area.

The assault on Cherbourg

Once the storm had passed, the US Army attacked Cherbourg on 22 June, while a naval task force bombarded the defences on the 25th in support. This time, the German gunners were ready to respond, and all but one of the seven battleships and cruisers taking part were hit. US Rear-Admiral Carleton Bryant’s flagship USS Texas came under particularly heavy fire, with one shell smashing the battleship’s bridge structure, killing the helmsman and wounding several others. “Having 11-inch shells fired at you is no fun,” Bryant later recalled. “When the salvo hits the water there is the most ungodly smack you ever heard.”

Cherbourg surrendered on 26 June, but the submarine and air attacks continued, as did the minelaying, and July saw the arrival of the Kleinkampfverbände – the German Navy’s ‘small battle units’. The first weapons to turn up at Villers-sur-Mer near Le Havre were explosive motorboats and craft known as ‘human torpedoes’, ridden into action by young volunteers whose confidence was boosted by cocaine and amphetamines.

Twenty-six human torpedoes attacked on the night of 5/6 July, and although 10 were lost, they succeeded in sinking two minesweepers and the frigate HMS Trollope. Two nights later, the Kleinkampfverbände returned and sank the old Polish cruiser ORP Dragon with the loss of 37 officers and men.

Despite the constant pressure from sea and air, the vital supply build-up continued at an impressive rate. By 14 July, a million tons of stores and nearly 300,000 vehicles had been put to shore, and on 25 July, the US First Army was able to break out of the beachhead and race into France. The western flank of the assault area was now secure, and the fleet started to operate further west, blockading German bases in the Bay of Biscay and destroying evacuation convoys.

On the eastern flank, however, Le Havre remained an enemy stronghold. On the night of 30/31 July, German E-boats struck the Allied convoy FTM53 with long-range pattern-running torpedoes, hitting five freighters. Although only one of the freighters, SS Samwake, actually sank, none of the others went to sea again. Samwake’s captain, Owen John, described his ship’s end in a melancholy report: “She dipped by the head, the stern reared up vertically and held for a few minutes, then very slowly she rolled over to starboard and disappeared at 0545 in a small fountain of water.”

End of the Normandy's naval campaign

Alarmingly, there were more losses to come. As well as the aforementioned HMCS Regina, further Allied casualties included the hospital ship Amsterdam, which was mined and sunk on 7 August, claiming the lives of 55 patients, 10 Royal Army Medical Corps staff, 30 members of the crew and 11 prisoners of war. Among the dead were military nurses Mollie Evershed and Dorothy Field, the only women named on the British Normandy Memorial in the village of Ver-sur-Mer.

Later, the cruiser Frobisher was torpedoed and damaged on the 9th, and the valuable repair ship HMS Albatross was torpedoed on the 11th with the loss of 67 naval and military personnel. It wasn’t until 12 September, with the land fighting far away, that the British captured Le Havre and the complex infrastructure of the Seine Bay was dismantled. More than three months after D-Day, the naval campaign was finally over.

Looking back at the events more than 80 years on, the sailors who served should not be remembered as mere taxi drivers, ferrying men and supplies to the shore, but as active combatants who guarded the vital coastal waters and Allied assault areas until the very end. Whether by day or by night, they maintained a ceaseless watch against all manner of threats – and in some cases, ended up paying with their lives.

Counting casualties is not an exact science for a campaign that has never been studied coherently, but nearly 3,000 Allied sailors are known to have died in the operations in and around the Seine Bay – and possibly many more. As General Sir Bernard Montgomery would write in May 1945, “any success achieved by the British Armies has been made possible only by the magnificent support given us by the Royal Navy”.

This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Why did Hitler believe D-Day was a trick?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-did-hitler-believe-d-day-was-trick-video/ 2026-06-05T09:26:04.000Z 2026-06-05T09:25:56.000Z D-Day, 6 June 1944 saw the launch of the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. Delayed by stormy weather, the high-stakes decision by General Eisenhower to go ahead in a fleeting 36-hour weather window marked one of WW2's most important turning points. His now-famous words – "Let's go" – set in motion the largest amphibious invasion in history.

Join historian and broadcaster Taylor Downing as he explains the landings across the five Normandy beaches: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword.

Find out how, from the German perspective, poor weather forecasts, disrupted communications, and Hitler's late awakening caused paralysis and confusion. By the time reinforcements were mobilised, the Allies had already secured strong positions.

Discover rare insights into Allied heroism, German mistakes, and the true cost of the longest day, in Downing’s expert analysis for this D-Day HistoryExtra Academy series.

View Green Video on the source website]]> Jonathan Wright <![CDATA[Who was the real Kay Summersby of Pressure?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/real-kay-summersby-pressure/ 2026-09-09T21:52:27.000Z 2026-05-29T17:00:46.000Z It’s early June 1944. While arguments rage in the genteel and picturesque surroundings of Southwick House, Allied headquarters in Hampshire, Dwight D Eisenhower has to make a final decision on whether it’s safe for Operation Overlord to begin.

As the gripping drama Pressure reveals, it’s a decision that rests in great part on the advice of meteorologists. But Eisenhower’s weathermen cannot agree on a forecast.

Played by Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin), Lieutenant Kay Summersby, a driver who became Eisenhower’s personal assistant, acts as a sounding board and, working behind the scenes, pours oil on stormy waters.

Who was the real Kay Summersby?

Born in County Cork, Ireland on 23 November 1908, Kathleen Helen Summersby (née MacCarthy-Morrogh) moved to London as a young woman and, in 1936, married Gordon Thomas Summersby, whose name she kept after the couple divorced in 1942. During the Second World War she became engaged to US Colonel Richard Arnold, but he died while clearing mines in north Africa.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Summersby joined the British Mechanised Corps and drove an ambulance in London during the Blitz. In May 1942, she was assigned to be Dwight D Eisenhower’s driver after he first arrived in London. As Eisenhower was promoted, she became his personal assistant. Their relationship was close, and rumours began to swirl that they were having an affair.

With Eisenhower’s assistance, she became a captain in the US Women’s Army Corps and, after the war, an American citizen. For her service during the conflict, she was awarded the British Empire Medal. At the insistence of Winston Churchill, who was charmed by her presence at dinner parties where she acted as Eisenhower’s hostess, she received the honour at the same time as being presented with a signed photograph of Britain’s war leader.

In the wake of the Second World War, she emigrated to the US. Though she enjoyed success working as a costume designer and a fashion consultant for CBS Television, the rest of her life was nowhere near as eventful as her wartime adventures, and even a little unhappy. She died of cancer at her home in Southampton, Long Island, in 1975.

Did Summersby and Eisenhower have an affair?

It’s difficult to be sure. As Pressure suggests, the couple were intimate friends who trusted each other, but two books by Summersby give conflicting accounts of their relationship. In her 1948 memoir, Eisenhower Was My Boss, she made no mention of anything other than a platonic relationship.

As the title of her posthumously published autobiography Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D Eisenhower – written after the death of her former boss in 1969 – proclaims, she later said that in fact they had been romantically involved. Yet she also stated that the two never consummated a romance that largely consisted of “stolen kisses”. There have been suggestions that stories of an affair were mere spin to make the book more marketable.

Are there any reliable witnesses who can settle this matter?

No – and many contradictory accounts of the couple’s relationship exist. Democrat President Harry S Truman, for example, is said to have claimed that Eisenhower asked for permission from the military authorities to divorce his wife and marry Summersby. But, as historians have pointed out, there are no records to back up this suggestion. In fact, Eisenhower asked for permission to bring his wife to Europe.

• Read more | From the USA's 'good war' to Britain's 'great hurrah': how is D-Day remembered around the world?

So Truman misremembered what happened. Less charitably, there was personal animosity between him and Eisenhower, his Republican successor as US president. Was Truman making mischief? Very possibly. But matters grow muddier still: Truman also claimed to have destroyed letters held at the Pentagon relating to Eisenhower wanting a divorce.

Anyway, perhaps all this ‘did-they-didn’t-they?’ conjecture is not just prurient but irrelevant. What’s undeniably true is that Eisenhower saw Summersby as someone he could trust at close quarters at a time when he was taking decisions on which thousands – even millions – of lives depended.

How influential was Summersby?

In Pressure, Summersby is portrayed not just as Eisenhower’s closest confidant but as someone who chivvies along the rest of the team at Allied headquarters when the going gets tough. To quote actor Kerry Condon: “There’s a nurturing aspect that she brought to these men.”

Is this an accurate reflection of events and her personality? Eisenhower’s son, John – who later served as an aide to his father – likened Summersby to the actor Mary Tyler Moore, saying that: “She was perky and she was cute.” Frankly, this comes across as a rather sexist and reductive assessment. In contrast, Pressure shows Summersby as a drier, wittier presence.

Whatever the truth, there are no records to suggest that Summersby had any direct input into key decisions. Again, we’re in the realm of conjecture, though having Summersby act as a kind of go-between between divergent factions in Pressure works dramatically.

Did the closeness between Summersby and Eisenhower endure?

No. There was only one mention of Summersby in Eisenhower’s wartime memoir Crusade in Europe (1948), as a name on a list of aides. Intriguingly, a news feature from 1995 reported that she once called on Eisenhower at the White House and “was graciously received but afterward told by an aide not to call again”.

Politically, it was better for Eisenhower – whose wife Mamie, née Doud (1896–1979), was embarrassed by her husband’s closeness to Summersby – to gloss over the relationship.

Pressure is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 9 September

]]> Jonathan Wright <![CDATA[Is Pressure a true story? Here’s the real history behind the D-Day drama]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/is-pressure-a-true-story-heres-the-real-history-behind-the-d-day-drama/ 2026-09-09T21:49:46.000Z 2026-05-29T17:00:38.000Z Anthony Maras’ Second World War movie Pressure – adapted for the screen from David Haig’s hit play – takes us into the heart of a military storm. We join the action in late spring 1944 at Southwick House, five miles north of the naval port of Portsmouth on England’s south coast, where planning for the Allied invasion of occupied France is at an advanced stage.

Enter Group Captain James Stagg of the Royal Air Force, a meteorologist later described by Dwight D Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, as a “dour but canny Scot”.

Stagg is spiky, difficult, a stickler for detail. He’s also convinced that, despite the weather in May having been largely fine, a storm is brewing in the Atlantic. His American counterpart, Irving P Krick, vehemently disagrees. But both men cannot be correct…

Is Pressure a true story?

Yes – Pressure is based closely on the true story. Weather was of crucial importance to those planning the D-Day landings. Ideally, Eisenhower and his senior officers wanted the invading flotilla to set out on a night with minimal cloud cover just before or soon after a late-rising full moon, so that Allied airmen and sailors would have enough light to see their way.

In addition, the Allies wanted to land shortly before dawn on a rising spring tide. That would allow them to see obstacles on the Normandy beaches and landing craft to be run aground and unloaded without becoming stranded as the sea retreated. But the more prescriptive the demands for specific conditions, the fewer dates would be acceptable.

In mid-May, Eisenhower selected Monday 5 June as D-Day – if the weather looked likely to be suitable. If, though, conditions were too choppy and seas too high, there was a risk that landing craft would sink and men would drown. The world’s largest-ever seaborne invasion might then end in disaster.

This level of caution by Eisenhower and the Allied high command was born of bitter experience. A raid on the German-occupied French port of Dieppe in August 1942 had been a disaster: the predominantly Canadian assault force fought valiantly, but this full-frontal attack on a heavily defended port had been folly.

Similarly, an amphibious landing at Anzio in Italy in January 1944, Operation Shingle, failed to capitalise on the element of surprise. Allied troops were stymied by a combination of German resistance and marshy terrain that favoured the defending forces.

Yet there were risks in delaying the launch of Operation Overlord, too. What if the enemy realised that the Allies were planning to land in Normandy rather than in the Pas-de-Calais region, as the German high command expected?

As the potential threat of stormy weather grew, Pressure suggests, James Stagg was called on to advise whether the operation was safe to go ahead. Stagg, portrayed as a man who took decisions based on the interpretation of data, urged caution. But he faced opposition from his American counterpart Irving P Krick, a brash meteorologist who based his forecasts on historical weather patterns.

What’s the real history behind Pressure?

Much of what we see on the screen is broadly true. Those charged with authorising the invasion were faced with decisions that would have made many quail.

Pressure also captures the characters of key players at Southwick House. As played by Damian Lewis, for instance, General Bernard Montgomery – by that time, commander of Allied Ground Forces – is gung-ho, blasé about landing as planned on 5 June whatever the risks. There’s truth in this portrayal of a man who, for all his brilliance, could be high-handed and often exasperated his fellow senior officers, including Eisenhower.

As for the central tension in Pressure, the taciturn Stagg and the expansive Krick certainly didn’t see eye to eye. Moreover, the suggestion that Krick was regarded as flashy – even a charlatan – by contemporaries is as rooted in reality as the notion that people found Stagg to be hard work. Francis Reichelderfer, director of the US Weather Service, reportedly thought Krick a smug, supremely self-confident self-promoter.

However, we shouldn’t forget that this is at its heart a screen drama. The script, co-written by Haig and director Anthony Maras, makes much of those meteorologists’ disagreements. Their clashes come to represent the idea of – to employ a phrase attributed to both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw – nations divided by a common language.

In truth, they were just two of the meteorologists working across three different teams from the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, the Meteorological Office and the Royal Navy Meteorological Service, all reporting to Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force.

In many respects, Stagg’s job was to act as a referee and, where the experts couldn’t agree, to decide what information should be laid before the top brass. It’s a strange detail that Stagg – a geophysicist whose primary interest in the interwar years was in terrestrial magnetism – wasn’t the most highly regarded meteorologist of those who worked on the D-Day forecasts. The Norwegian Sverre Petterssen, for example, was far more eminent, and a key figure shaping the forecast that pushed the invasion back by a day from the originally planned date, 5 June.

However, like Eisenhower, Stagg understood committee work and administration. He may have found social interactions difficult, but he ultimately arrived at the correct forecast, enabling the D-Day invasion force to land on Tuesday 6 June.

If you want to get closer to some of the original sources, in this video, Charlotte Vosper travels to the UK MET Office to explore more of the real history behind Pressure. You'll see a personal diary from Group Captain James Stagg, the meteorologist (played in the film by Andrew Scott) who was tasked with providing crucial weather charts that helped make the final decision.

View Green Video on the source website

Did the Associated Press (AP) mistakenly announce an invasion, as Pressure suggests?

Yes. On Saturday 3 June, an AP flash – sent out accidentally by an inexperienced London telegraph operator – did state that “Eisenhower’s forces are landing in France,” only to have to cancel the report.

Did the Allies use inflatable tanks as a decoy?

Yes. Inflatable tanks were deployed in south-eastern England to fool the Germans into believing that Allied forces were preparing to invade the Pas-de-Calais coast, rather than the actual beaches targeted farther west in Normandy.

More generally, the Allies went to huge lengths to convince the Germans that an imaginary US Army Group was based in south-east England. Winston Churchill, as well as many in the British military and intelligence services, had a real enthusiasm for such wizard wheezes.

• Read more | Quality or quantity? With WW2 tanks, there was a surprising winner

Was D-Day rehearsal Exercise Tiger really a disaster, as depicted in Pressure?

Yes. In April 1944, preparing for the expedition planned to attack Utah Beach, US troops undertook a rehearsal landing at Slapton Sands in south Devon, Exercise Tiger. Eisenhower specified that live rounds were to be fired over the heads of the troops to acclimatise the men to what it would be like to wade ashore in France. For similar reasons, naval forces were to bombard the land 50 minutes before the men landed.

But there was a miscommunication and, although the exercise had been delayed, some of the landing craft did not receive word of this change – so the troops landing came under direct fire from the sea. Compounding the misery, there were also heavy losses when fast-moving German E-boats ambushed a convoy of landing ships in Lyme Bay.

The official death toll from these disasters stands at 749. With D-Day imminent, the incident was covered up.

Were weather reports from Ireland crucial to the final forecast?

Yes. On 3 June, a report of force six winds and barometer readings of rapidly falling air pressure, recorded at Blacksod Point weather station in County Mayo, was sent to Britain by post office clerk Maureen Flavin. This suggested that a storm was approaching – leading to the postponement of the invasion for 24 hours. Nevertheless, Stagg believed that a ridge of high pressure was building up from the Azores, indicating that better weather would follow.

He was right. On 4 June, Maureen’s future husband, lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney, reported: “Heavy rain and drizzle cleared, cloud at 900 feet, and visibility on land and sea very clear.”

D-Day was on.

Pressure is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 9 September

]]> Jonathan Wright <![CDATA[Who was the real Dwight D Eisenhower of Pressure?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/real-dwight-d-eisenhower-pressure/ 2026-09-09T21:49:55.000Z 2026-05-29T17:00:29.000Z During planning for D-Day at the Allied headquarters in Southwick House, Hampshire, the final decision on when Operation Overlord would commence fell to US General Dwight D Eisenhower. With the weather turning stormy, this was no simple matter.

As shown in WW2 movie Pressure, arguments among Eisenhower’s meteorologists added to his difficulties. They couldn’t agree on a forecast and, as Scottish scientist James Stagg – the operation’s chief meteorological adviser – constantly warned, any forecast they did produce would anyway be highly contingent.

Played by Brendan Fraser (who won an Academy Award for The Whale), Eisenhower is a man who projects a sense of calmness and control. When alone, though, the general is sometimes wracked by doubt, sometimes coming close to feeling overwhelmed.

Who was the real Dwight D Eisenhower?

Born in Denison, Texas on 14 October 1890, Eisenhower was the third of seven boys. At a young age his family moved to Abilene, Kansas, which he regarded as his hometown. His family were religious and discipline was strict at home. They had little money and, at one point, Eisenhower and his older brother Edgar made a deal that they would attend college in alternate years, each working to earn the tuition fees while the other studied.

In the event, Eisenhower went to West Point, the oldest of the five US service academies. He graduated in the middle of his class in 1915.

Despite requests to be assigned to the front, Eisenhower never saw action in the First World War. He was, though, able to climb steadily through the ranks in the interwar period, when he honed his ability to organise behind the scenes.

When the US entered the Second World War in December 1941, Eisenhower was the right person in the right place at the right time. After serving on the General Staff in Washington, he was placed in charge of the Allied Expeditionary Force in north Africa. Prior to D-Day, he was a key figure in the planning of seaborne landings in Morocco, Algeria, Sicily and mainland Italy.

Did Eisenhower agonise over the casualties suffered during Exercise Tiger?

In Pressure, Eisenhower is shown as being privately close to anguish over the errors that led to hundreds of men being lost in Exercise Tiger, a disastrous D-Day landing rehearsal in Devon. For Brendan Fraser, this tallied with research he conducted prior to taking on the role. “Eisenhower cared about his troops,” the actor has said. “They were all his sons, as far as he was concerned.”

Though Pressure makes the most of his feelings over this failure for dramatic effect, Exercise Tiger certainly a debacle that genuinely shook Eisenhower. What if these kinds of errors happened on D-Day itself?

In addition, 10 officers with BIGOT clearance – signifying that they had access to the planning of Allied amphibious invasions – went missing during the exercise. If one or more had been captured by the Nazis, there was a risk they might have given up the secrets of D-Day. (In the event, the bodies of all 10 were recovered soon afterwards.)

More generally, despite an ability to project confidence and control in public, Eisenhower had issues managing his temper – so he developed a life hack to help him overcome this. When people made him angry or let him down, he would write their names on slips of paper, crumple them up and lock them in the lowest drawer of his desk, his “anger drawer”.

Did fellow officers poke fun at Eisenhower over his lack of combat experience?

Yes. As shown in Pressure, General Bernard Montgomery (Damien Lewis), the British commander who’d achieved success in north Africa and the invasion of Sicily, was among those who made pointed references to the fact that Eisenhower had never gone into battle on the frontline. “Nice chap, no soldier,” Montgomery is reputed to have noted later. Others in British High Command, as well as US General George S Patton, were similarly dismissive.

• Read more | Who was the real Kay Summersby of Pressure?

Yet Eisenhower possessed other key attributes and skills. Given the vast scale of the campaigns in 1939–45, the ability to efficiently marshal huge volumes of both resources and men was essential. Eisenhower’s career, which took in the training of tank crews, logistics and administration, arguably prepared him far better for the challenge of organising D-Day than leading men in combat would have.

In this context, it’s intriguing that Eisenhower’s West Point cohort became known as “the class the stars fell on” because 59 of the 164 graduates, similarly building careers in a relatively peaceful era, reached the rank of general. They included Major General Omar Bradley, who commanded the US First Army on D-Day.

Did Eisenhower find disagreements between his meteorologists as frustrating as Pressure suggests?

Yes – but he was also someone who listened, weighed opinions and sought advice. After the war, while travelling to his inauguration, president elect John F Kennedy asked his predecessor why D-Day had been such a huge success. “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans,” Eisenhower replied.

What happened to Eisenhower after the Second World War?

In November 1945, Eisenhower was promoted to become chief of staff of the US Army. But a second career beckoned. After acting as president of Columbia University, and serving as Nato Supreme Allied Commander Europe – and despite once claiming he wouldn’t want to hold any political office “from dogcatcher to grand high supreme king of the Universe” – in 1952 Eisenhower ran as Republican candidate for the US presidency Republican.

He won that election, and served two terms. A curiosity of his candidacy is that Harry S Truman, realising that the hitherto unaligned Eisenhower had a good shot at the top job, tried to persuade him to stand for the Democrats.

Eisenhower died of congestive heart failure in March 1969.

Pressure is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 9 September

]]> Jonathan Wright <![CDATA[Who was the real James Stagg of Pressure?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/real-james-stagg-pressure/ 2026-09-09T21:46:38.000Z 2026-05-29T17:00:18.000Z Ordered to report to the Allied headquarters at Southwick House in Hampshire, James Stagg leaves behind a scene of domesticity, his wife heavily pregnant. Stagg’s expertise is needed – and the planning of Operation Overlord has to take precedence.

As shown in WW2 movie Pressure, he arrives to find a working environment that doesn’t meet his exacting standards, and he immediately makes his displeasure known, ordering: “Get rid of the piano, thank you.” A clash with brash American meteorologist Irving P Krick becomes inevitable.

Played by Andrew Scott (Fleabag, 1917), Stagg is shown as demanding and difficult but also a brilliant scientist. Crucially, though he constantly warns Eisenhower about the difficulties of predicting weather blowing in from the Atlantic, he is also prepared to back his own insights when he’s sure – or as sure as he can be – about the conditions that lie ahead.

Who was the real James Stagg?

Born in Musselburgh, East Lothian on 30 June 1900, Stagg grew up in modest circumstances. But his seamstress mother, Ellen, had grand plans for her boy, certain that he could make something of his life. While other children went out to play, young James was required to do his homework at the kitchen table.

That may not have been much fun, but Stagg was bright, and learned personal discipline from his boyhood experiences. After enlisting in the Royal Flying Corps, he completed a BSc at Edinburgh in 1920, then became a science teacher before joining Britain’s Meteorological Office in 1924.

Keen to study the Earth’s magnetic fields and to prove his worth, he made it clear that he was happy to be sent to isolated postings. “He is rather slow and deliberate, but he is far-seeing and ambitious,” noted one of his professors, CG Barkla, in a reference.

Stagg’s career was up and running. Subsequent highlights included leading the British Polar Expedition of Arctic Canada over the winter of 1932–33. After the Second World War, he rose to become director of services at the Met Office.

Was James Stagg really as dour as Pressure suggests?

Yes. Probably reflecting his background, Stagg lacked social graces. He was tall and, in the estimation of the Royal Navy’s Admiral Sir George Creasy, naval commander-in-chief of the Allied Expeditionary Force, his presence when delivering forecasts was akin to “six feet two inches of Stagg and six feet one inch of gloom”.

It’s difficult to say whether Stagg would have been so rude as to call the expansive Krick “a confident moron” as occurs in Pressure, but he was the antithesis of a people-pleaser.

• Read more | D-Day: the spearhead of the invasion

Discussing his performance, Andrew Scott has touched on the British meteorologist’s capacity for telling unpalatable truths: “It was very important to me that Stagg never says anything that feels like a movie moment, and that we really understand that this is a human being – and a very specific, quite unusual human being.”

Was Stagg really prevented from seeing his pregnant wife over the 72 hours leading up to D-Day, as depicted in Pressure?

Without giving away too many spoilers, some dramatic licence is at play, but Stagg would certainly have been confined to Southwick House at that time for operational security reasons. It’s true that his wife, Betty, was pregnant in 1944. She was, according to John Ross, writing in The Forecast for D-Day: And the Weatherman behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble, “short and elfin with a pixie twinkle in her eyes”. Like so many husbands who had to leave home because of the war effort, Stagg worried for his family.

The couple lived in Richmond Hill, south-west of London. Between January and May 1944, bombing attacks on southern England became more frequent, at least partly in retaliation for Allied raids. Operation Steinbock – dubbed the ‘Baby Blitz’ – consisted of nighttime missions, mostly against London. Stagg must have been concerned.

That campaign was a failure. The Luftwaffe lost 329 aircraft and suffered heavy casualties. In the wake of D-Day, the Germans no longer sent bombers to the UK, instead launching V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets.

Did Stagg really clash with Krick?

Yes – but it’s worth remembering that Pressure has in some key respects streamlined these incidents for dramatic effect. In truth, all of the meteorologists involved were, to a greater or lesser extent, struggling to reach a consensus.

As to why, it’s neatly summed up by a moment in Pressure when Bernard Montgomery, commander of the 21st Army Group – and, it might be added, a man as charmless as Stagg – barks at the meteorologist: “Do not sow doubt, Group Captain!” Whether this actually happened or not, it’s a scene that captures the demands of the top brass for clear information.

In such an environment, there was a risk that Overlord planners would believe the over-confident Krick, who expressed his views without doubt. Despite the frustration it caused, Stagg rightly thought it necessary to study and discuss he data before reaching a decision.

He was right to be cautious. Had D-Day failed, the outcome of the Second World War would have been quite different.

Were Stagg’s methods more sophisticated than those employed by Krick?

In Pressure, Stagg is shown as a man who’s obsessed with data. “If we’ve measured it then I want it,” he says at one point. There’s a suspicion that his language belongs more to the 21st century than the middle of the 20th, but this moment captures a truth. Another of the meteorologists working on D-Day was the Norwegian Sverre Petterssen, a product of the Bergen school of meteorology. Regarded as the basis of much modern forecasting, this school of thought emphasises the importance of mathematical modelling.

In contrast, Krick’s analog forecasting, based on past observations, was unsophisticated and simplistic.

What happened to Stagg after the events of Pressure?

He became a revered figure: it was clear that Eisenhower had been right to listen to him. Stagg received multiple gongs for his work, including the US Legion of Merit awarded for his service in the buildup to D-Day. As his mother had hoped, he attracted a high level of respect and an honoured place in the world.

One of Stagg’s sons, Peter (born 1941), who grew up to be even taller than his lanky father, achieved fame as a rugby union player. He won 28 caps for Scotland as a lock, and three test caps with the British Lions.

Pressure is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 9 September

]]> Jonathan Wright <![CDATA[Who was the real Irving P Krick of Pressure?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/real-irving-p-krick-pressure/ 2026-09-09T21:50:13.000Z 2026-05-29T17:00:08.000Z The embodiment of “oversexed, overpaid and over here”, American meteorologist Irving P Krick – certainly as portrayed in D-Day drama Pressure – knows how to command a room. It’s a useful skill but, as the movie explores, it may be that his well-honed patter masks the true character of someone who is glib, insufficiently rigorous in questioning his own work and, ultimately, seeking glory.

If that’s true, it would be of vital importance to those planning Operation Overlord in the 72 hours leading up to the invasion of occupied France.

Basing his forecasts on patterns from the past, Krick – played with breezy charm by Chris Messina (Air) – declares that the weather will be fine on Monday 5 June. Dour Scottish scientist James Stagg disagrees strongly. The success of D-Day rests on who is correct.

Who was the real Irving P Krick?

Krick was born in 1906 to a comfortably wealthy family in San Francisco. In 1928, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BSc in physics. Having worked in the nascent airline industry, Krick’s career began in earnest in 1934, when he gained a PhD in meteorology from the California Institute of Technology, where he later worked as a professor.

His work attracted attention when he wrote a paper claiming the 1933 crash of the helium-filled airship USS Akron on errors in a forecast made by the US Weather Bureau.

With the outbreak of war, Krick was recruited into the United States Army Air Corps by aviation pioneer Hap Arnold, a military pilot who had been taught to fly by Orville Wright and who rose to be a five-star general. Arnold loathed uncertainty and, though Krick’s forecasts were often wrong, he effectively became Krick’s patron. So it was that Krick came to be one of the meteorologists working on forecasts ahead of Operation Overlord – the Allied invasion of German-occupied Normandy in 1944.

Did Krick really play the piano in the workplace, as portrayed in Pressure?

Certainly Krick was an accomplished pianist, and his mother hoped that he might become a professional musician. Krick’s own assessment, as reported in Victor Boesen’s Storm: Irving Krick vs the US Weather Bureaucracy – a book many weather historians see as reflecting Krick’s own perspective – was that “he wasn’t good enough to make it to the top in music”.

Nevertheless, he did perform with the NBC Symphony Orchestra. By all accounts, he was certainly a showman. He also worked in radio, at the Oakland station KTAB, and taught piano in Los Angeles.

Did Krick boast about working in Hollywood?

In one scene in Pressure, Krick makes much of having predicted the weather for the producers of Gone with the Wind. Well, you wouldn’t want to film the burning of Atlanta on a wet or windy day.

This tallies with the historical record. Krick always liked chasing and making money. To quote John Cox, the author of Storm Watchers: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin’s Kite to El Niño, “Weather forecasting was his product line, although, like many a great salesmen, his number one product was himself.”

• Read more | Is Pressure a true story? Here’s the real history behind the D-Day drama

Did Krick clash with other meteorologists working on forecasts ahead of D-Day?

Yes. As Pressure suggests, Krick forecast that the weather on Monday 5 June would be fine. He routinely based his predictions on old weather maps that showed conditions in previous years, tracking charts for conditions on subsequent days in those years to suggest what was likely to happen.

Using that approach, known as analog forecasting, Krick claimed that he could predict the weather weeks in advance. Meteorologists working for the British, including James Stagg, disagreed. To quote The Forecast for D-Day: And the Weatherman behind Ike's Greatest Gamble, they thought that “the idea was pure bunkum.”

They had a strong point. On 5 June 1944, contrary to Krick’s predictions, Normandy was buffeted by stormy weather.

Krick isn’t emerging as an especially sympathetic figure. Were there any mitigating circumstances?

When taking the part, Chris Messina told director Anthony Maras: “I think Krick is Salieri to Stagg’s Mozart.” If you were to take a charitable view, there’s something in this idea. Krick was working in an era when far less data was available than today. Nevertheless, he well understood, for instance, the dangers of different fronts of warm and cold air colliding. Moreover, he learnt his trade studying the weather patterns in continental North America rather than in the British Isles, commonly buffeted by capricious Atlantic storms even at the height of summer.

However, the historical record frequently shows Krick behaving badly. In particular, as portrayed in Pressure, he had a disregard for the chain of command, often trying to go above his superiors with his ideas. At one point, for instance, it’s said he even tried to interest Franklin D Roosevelt in a plan to shift bombing operations to Siberia based on his own – flawed – long-range forecasts.

What happened to Krick after the Second World War?

Caltech, where he was a professor, closed its meteorology department in 1948. Krick then set up his own firm in the private sector. In addition to forecasting, he became involved in cloud seeding, the practice of trying to force rainfall in dry areas. By 1951, his cloud-seeding business had 120 employees.

However, following a by-now familiar pattern, the meteorological establishment saw little scientific merit in Krick’s work. In 1990, he sold his company, and in 1996 he died of heart failure.

Pressure is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 9 September

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