Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  As I walked back down Amwell Street to post it, I thought again about James Stagg – my former mentor at Kew and the man who had been chosen to lead the weather forecast for the invasion. It would be an honour to join him, but I didn’t think much of my chances now.

  In some ways he was quite a surprising choice for Sir Peter to have made to lead the D-Day team. Dr Stagg had been science master at George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh before entering the Met Office in 1924. Like Ryman, he had worked at Eskdalemuir Observatory in Dumfriesshire for a while, but there his field had been terrestrial magnetism, auroral activity, not meteorology. He was earth sciences really, not actually a forecaster at all, though I believe he had done a little of that in Iraq at some time. He had also served on a polar expedition to Arctic Canada before becoming superintendent at Kew.

  Was it there that the cold entered his heart, I wonder, or did that chill, remote air he sometimes had, that seemed to whirl about him, emanate from Covenanter traditions? For he was certainly an awkward character – rather like Ryman, in fact, but without the playfulness.

  After posting the letter to Sir Peter I went into the Three Kings again. Into my own shame, feeling as if I were a hamster circling a wheel, but grateful for the all-conquering, uncertainty-dispelling booze all the same. What the alcohol did for me, I now see, was appear to suspend time; the awful sense of endlessly waiting or, equally, of being endlessly too late, became something of myself, absorbed into the ebb and flow of my own body, rather than something imposed from outside. I remember in later years – over one of the cups of strong, aromatic coffee that he favoured at a certain Cambridge café – Brecher telling me that the human idea of time was bound up with the fervid rhythms of the blood.

  Some hours later – it was dusk by now – I woke up in my rooms feeling hot and thirsty and headachy, on account of the drink, no doubt. I went downstairs to make a cup of tea. I would have preferred it with plenty of sugar, which usually does the trick with hangovers, but we were having to do without that then.

  Claremont Square was on a hill. If I stood on a bench I could see down into King’s Cross, where a cupola of pink light – the accumulated pollution of trains and factories – was adding further colour to an already colourful horizon. How strange it is that some of the sky’s most beautiful spectacles are produced by pollutant particles of smoke and chemicals. The moon was pale yellow, with a halo of fattening blue, which gradually attenuated through puffy clouds into yellow again.

  Pink, yellow, blue: it was like a picture show, so pretty I could almost have forgotten that we were at war. One was always on the lookout for planes, of course, or the flash of antiaircraft fire, but the impression I had that night was of calm, of a deadly normality. It was as if my fate were being painted up there on the canvas of the sky – and I had an uneasy feeling the painter was disguising the true perspective.

  Light, colour: illuminating and entertaining as they are, these quantities can distract from the facts of a matter as they funnel into the eye – glistening, swirling, a steady stream of stimulation – filling the observer with misguided perceptions, dubious assumptions, delirious upliftments. Chief among these is the belief that everything is going to be all right in the morning.

  2

  But it was! It was all right. Not the following morning, which was gruesome and hangover-blighted, but one a day or two later.

  I was sitting in the kitchen reaching for the ersatz marmalade – it was made with cabbage and honey – across the breakfast table when there was a knock at the door. The landlady went to see who was there. She returned with a familiar envelope marked PRIORITY in blue letters.

  Through the glass of an upper window – the kitchen was in the basement – I saw a telegram boy mount his bicycle. Serried ranks of iron railing staggered his steady start.

  What he had brought was, I knew as soon as it came into my hand, a missive from Sir Peter containing my fate. It looked just the same as the one which had first summoned me to Adastral House all those months ago. Leaving the margarine soaking into my toast, and undergoing a keen perception of bad news, I opened the envelope with a trembling hand.

  PROCEED WITH URGENCY TO SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE (SHAEF), BUSHEY PARK, TEDDINGTON, TO TAKE UP ROLE OF PERSONAL METEOROLOGICAL ASSISTANT TO GROUP CAPTAIN STAGG.

  I leaped up from the table and cheered, knocking over the counterfeit marmalade in my joy. ‘I’ve got a job,’ I cried to the landlady. ‘I’ll be leaving today.’

  ‘Good. Make sure you pay your rent,’ was all she said, with a sour mouth.

  Once I had recovered my composure, and the marmalade jar had been rescued, I ate the rest of my breakfast in a jolly mood, certain that at last the right path had opened up for me in the tangled wood of life. I settled my account with the landlady and went upstairs to pack.

  Taking the train from Waterloo to Teddington, and then a bus to Bushey – on 7 May 1944, my diary says – was rather like going home for me. I’d lived in Richmond before the war, as it was convenient for the observatory at Kew. But now it was a home I barely recognised. Southern England was loaded with troops and materiel. There was khaki everywhere. The trains were full of soldiers and the roads packed with convoys of tanks and landing craft and endless lines of lorries with canvas covers heading for the coast.

  We waited in the bus for almost an hour for a lorry carrying an enormous length of concrete – I later realised it was a section of one of the ‘Mulberry’ artificial harbours – to manoeuvre itself round a corner. There was a lot of shouting and sounding of horns by the drivers of the backed-up vehicles.

  Then it all cleared and we were on our way, passing into a green archway of trees over the road. To me it felt a tunnel joining two segments of my life. For it was here that I resolved to stop the drinking, which had been rather building up, and knuckle down at last.

  Finally, I reached Bushey. Part of the park was surrounded by high walls; the rest was cordoned off with tall fences. American Military Police with white helmets and unsmiling faces guarded the gate. As they checked my papers, I wondered again about Stagg. He had always been very good to me when I worked under him at Kew, though others found him a difficult, prickly man. Later this reputation came to dominate, but people had no idea of the strain he was under. By the time I arrived at Bushey Park he had been working on the invasion forecast for several months.

  It was late Sunday afternoon when I arrived, but no one would have known it from the hustle and bustle of the place. I had quite a time getting through the various security cordons, but after numerous calls by the ‘Snowballs’ (a common nickname for the men in white helmets), I was escorted to the SHAEF meteorological office.

  It was quite a long way, and as I followed one of these Snowballs through the temporary buildings – Nissen huts, cement storehouses, messes and troop quarters in tents and tin-roofed sheds – I was borne along in a flood of frenetic activity. Officers and men, British and American, from all the services, were rushing about with papers and files under their arms. The atmosphere was rather like that of a school on the day before a very important examination.

  The Met section was situated in the main headquarters, a long, low-slung building – rather like a much larger version of my cot-house in Scotland, but built of concrete blocks, not stone – covered with a camouflage net. Stagg’s office was next to the map room, the operational headquarters for the invasion. I thought I caught a glimpse of General Eisenhower, but I couldn’t be sure.

  The Snowball knocked on the door.

  3

  Stooping, Stagg appeared in the frame. Wearing a slate blue RAF group captain’s uniform, he greeted me with a weary smile. ‘Hello, Meadows. How are you?’

  ‘I’ve been better,’ I replied, as the MP marched off.

  ‘Yes. I am not surprised. Sir Peter told me all about that dreadful business in Scotland. Ryman was a great man, but it is understandable that these things happen.’

  ‘Is it?’ I said doubt
fully, suddenly realising that my role in Ryman’s death was by now common knowledge in the meteorological community.

  ‘Yes, in wartime it is understandable. Look, whatever happened, I’m glad you’re here, Meadows. I desperately need some help. They gave me a list and I picked you.’

  Like Sir Peter, Stagg had aged markedly, the strain of his task accentuating the structure of his thin, severe face, the most noticeable feature of which was a light moustache. The total effect was a curious mixture of strength and weakness, strong will tempered with a sense of anguish.

  ‘Well, sir, that is why I am here,’ I said, looking at his uniform. ‘And I will do what I can. I see you have become a military man.’

  ‘Ah yes. I want to talk to you about that. You’d better come in.’

  He led me into the office and shut the door. It was a large, sparsely furnished room with a dark brown carpet. There were weather charts on the walls and a big table in the centre, with three telephones standing on it: one red, one black, one white.

  Stagg sat at a small desk, motioning me to one of the chairs at the table. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to join up, too,’ he said. ‘I was having a lot of problems with chaps not taking me seriously as a civilian, so the Air Ministry finally mobilised me. Our allies don’t like to deal with civilians when such highly secret matters as these are being discussed. For a time I was demoted and my deputy, Colonel Yates of the US Air Force, became chief Met adviser. The American generals were not happy that a civilian should come between them and Yates. They like to have a clear chain of military command. You’ll meet Yates soon. Nice fellow. Now, sit back and I’ll tell you how it is.’

  Looking at me over a pile of dossiers on his desk, Stagg explained that, since the middle of April, he and a team of forecasters had been producing a five-day forecast every Sunday evening for distribution to General Eisenhower and the rest of SHAEF. It related to the crossing of the English Channel in order that the Allies gain a foothold on mainland Europe – which first step to recovery of the continent was code-named Operation Neptune. The invasion as a whole was code-named Overlord.

  ‘The forecast is for the whole week,’ Stagg said. ‘Every Thursday is regarded as a dummy D-Day, which is the name we are giving to the invasion date. H-Hour, similarly, is the landing time for the first airborne troops. As you’ve probably gathered from the number of troops moving about the country, it is likely to happen quite soon.’

  He spoke in a low tone. ‘I can’t tell you how difficult this is, Meadows. I need you to help me with the technical work, including taking the minutes and preparing documents for each conference. Representatives of the three armed services have been trying to foresee each critical weather element for D-Day by convening a conference. I need you to examine the forecasting process.’

  ‘What are the critical elements?’ I asked, trying to focus my mind.

  ‘Broadly, the limiting conditions are as follows.’ He counted them off on the fingers of his left hand.

  ‘(A) D-Day should be within one day before to four days after a full moon. (B) There must be quiet weather on the day and for three days afterwards. Wind to be of no more than force three onshore and force four offshore. (C) Cloud to be less than three-tenths cover below eight thousand feet; visibility three miles plus. Or as an alternative to condition (C): (D) in which case the cloud base itself has got to be above three thousand feet generally, morning mist not excluded. There are other constraints affecting parachute drops, which we have not yet tried on this scale.’

  I was shocked that such a grand, important plan as Overlord depended on conditions so difficult to fulfil. No wonder Sir Peter was anxious. ‘It doesn’t sound very likely in any of those permutations,’ I ventured.

  ‘No,’ Stagg replied lugubriously. ‘That is why it’s such a devil. But it must be possible. It has to be, for all our sakes. The immediate military objective is to land a force on a fifty-mile strip of enemy-held coastline. A force strong enough, and with supply lines secure enough, to resist quick dislodgement. We need moonlight and we need low tide, but the critical probabilities will be the state of the sea, which of course is mainly dependent on the wind strength on the beaches, and the amount of cloud.’

  He scrabbled around for a piece of paper. ‘Look at this bloody thing.’

  Typed out, bearing the stamp BIGOT, the paper listed the probabilities of various combinations of the conditions Stagg had outlined, expressing them as racing odds:

  LIMITS CHANCES TO ONE AGAINST

  MAY JUNE JULY

  I: WANING MOON

  B AND D WITHOUT A 4 2 5

  B AND C WITHOUT A 9 4.5 19

  II: WITH NEW OR FULL MOON

  B AND D WITH A 11 6 16

  B AND C WITH A 24 13 50

  III: FULL MOON ONLY

  B AND D WITH A 24 13 33

  B AND C WITH A 49 24 100

  The word BIGOT, I would discover, was stamped on all Overlord documents. The rationale was that no one would go about boasting that they were reading papers with the classification BIGOT, any more than they would say they only had one testicle.

  ‘Crikey,’ I said, doing some quick calculations in my head.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Stagg. ‘Not the best conditions in which to undertake the greatest amphibious operation in history.’

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s all much riskier once you put in the demand for moonlight. Odds in category II are roughly three times those in I.’

  I was puzzled. Surely it would be best to invade under cover of darkness. ‘Why do you need the moon?’

  He looked as me as if I were stupid. ‘The need to have a full moon or be near one,’ he explained patiently, ‘is to ensure a time of low tide at sunrise on the invasion beaches, so that mines and tank traps and so on can be cleared. The RAF and US Air Force would prefer an outright full moon, so that gliders and other planes can land before sunrise – which doubles the odds again.’

  ‘Not exactly making it easy, are they?’

  Stagg shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s any less daunting for the brass hats than it is for me. I have to present to them regularly now: Eisenhower, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, General Bull, Admiral Creasy, Air Vice-Marshal Wigglesworth … and all the other chiefs and deputies of SHAEF divisions. The first time was terrifying. Eisenhower looked at me and said: “Whenever you see a good spell that would be suitable coming along during the next month or so I want you to tell us. Give us as much notice as you can.”’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Suggested a date.’

  ‘Not yet. None of the forecasters can agree. And there isn’t enough data. We don’t have enough weather ships in the Atlantic. Sir Peter has promised more.’

  He stood up and went to a map on the wall, showing me where ships, marked out with flags, were dispersed across the ocean. ‘This whole area has no weather ships. The only good news is that the Germans are in a worse position. More or less the whole remaining Atlantic U-boat fleet is now concerned with sending weather information. They know just as we do that the Atlantic weather is what will determine the weather in the Channel.’

  He sat down, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes with the backs of his fingers. ‘Where was I? We have three teams of forecasters. At Widewing – that’s the main US air base near here – there is a man called Krick and another, Holzman. Both colonels.’

  I smiled ruefully, remembering the Glasgow hotel. I hadn’t realised they held such high rank.

  ‘Krick has compiled a statistical index of weather patterns in northern Europe going back forty years or so. He uses the analogue method.’

  The analogue method involved selecting weather types from past periods that most closely matched the current weather and seeing what happened before. It was a bit like case law. The future is extrapolated from the past, with the forecast extending to as long as six days ahead.

  ‘I’ve met them,’ I explained, remembering with a
nauseous twinge the poker game and the terrible hangover which followed it. ‘Krick and Holzman. By chance, at Prestwick airport. Krick seems a jolly fellow, but as for the analogue method, if that is what he practises, I’m not persuaded. Nature does not repeat itself like a workshop press; identical patterns do not develop identically; and it’s not really possible to forecast more than two days ahead. Three days, max.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Stagg. ‘That is just what Charles Douglas says. Well, he’s opposed to anything over two, in fact. He’s pretty much made that the rule at Dunstable, as you will know from your time under him there. Fancy some tea?’

  He stood up again, unbundling his long limbs like a praying mantis on a leaf.

  ‘Yes please.’

  He flipped a switch on an electric kettle. ‘A gift from the Americans,’ he explained.

  I remembered Douglas running round the table, his tie and the tails of his suit jacket flying behind him. I suppose it must have been what’s now called stress which made him do this, as well as the aeroplane crash in which he had been involved during his combat training as a fighter pilot. He was wounded five times in incidents after the crash, and that can’t have helped either.

  Like Stagg, Douglas had a thin face and a moustache. Well, lots of people had moustaches in those days. I considered him a man of tremendous skill and judgement, and to some people’s mind he is still the greatest British practical weather forecaster of the century, with Ryman taking the palm for theory. Very sound, very careful. He tended to start with the present weather data then would apply weather memory and weather theory by common sense, rather than according to a particular philosophy.

  ‘Douglas doesn’t apply past situations religiously, like Krick, or rely totally on theory, like Petterssen,’ Stagg continued, shaking loose tea into a pot. ‘He allows a kind of jiggle, a wrinkle, into his system, a space for his own intuition, and he admits of theory whatever he is personally convinced by.’