Turbulence

by Giles Foden

  ‘Christ, Sverre,’ drawled Krick. ‘Let the boy try.’ I guess this remark was why I continued to visit him after the war.

  ‘I am not letting him not try!’ said Petterssen.

  ‘Gentlemen, please, can we now proceed on that basis to a working forecast, something which, if I may remind you, General Eisenhower expects first thing tomorrow morning?’

  Eventually Stagg smoothed out everyone’s differences and we botched together something which contained bits of all the forecasts, reducing our confidence in the last three days of the forecast to placate Douglas.

  Once the phones were down Stagg gave me a weary look that required no explanation.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked.

  ‘The atmosphere of the conference is always a little … aggravated,’ he said.

  ‘Look, with your permission, I really would like to have a go at applying Ryman’s method.’

  ‘All right, take a stab at it,’ said Stagg, though without much enthusiasm. ‘But mainly I want you to take over the work of preparation for each conference and deal with any enquiries that come into the office. I also want you to go through what we’ve done so far, comparing our forecasts with reality. See how accurate we’ve been.’

  We were still heading for a five-day forecast, despite Douglas’s doubts. I tested the rolling forecasts as we were making them against the minimum conditions that Stagg had showed me on the BIGOT sheet. On day one, did we forecast whether the minimum conditions would be met or not? On day two, was the forecast right or was it wrong? Day three, etc.

  I soon discovered that the forecasts were accurate for the first day, but became increasingly less reliable after that. For the second day they were merely useful. By the third, fourth and fifth days, D-Day itself in our model, they had entered the realms of speculative fiction.

  5

  The telephone conferences continued, with a view towards 5 June as the most likely invasion date. This was the putative ‘D-Day’ towards which all our plans were being directed. I struggled at first to keep up with the discussion and actually had very little time in which to try to apply the Ryman number on my own initiative; but during the fourth week of May I began to find my feet.

  I noticed more and more that Petterssen and Krick were prepared to forecast the weather with confidence, using long chains of intricate causation, theoretical or statistical, to back up their assertions. Douglas and the navy people, Hogben and Wolfe, were more usually correct in their forecasts, but again only for one day, two at the most. It was not enough for Eisenhower. He needed five days lead time to mount an invasion.

  Stagg became very irritable. I, too, began to feel the strain. I redeveloped an inconvenient condition which caused me to have embarrassing nosebleeds while under pressure. Many a weather chart bore the signs of this indisposition, and during conferences I often had to pinch my nose with one hand as I listened to the voices squabbling on the other end of the phone. Surely, I worried, I was not also to have a return to those bouts of dizziness I suffered as a young man, in the wake of the mudslide?

  It wasn’t just me and the other forecasters. Everyone at SHAEF was strung tight as a tripwire, from the lowliest mess waiter (there was one who invariably served us with a dewdrop on the end of his nose) to Eisenhower himself. I often saw the supreme commander smoking furiously under the fir trees near his caravan.

  Beyond the confines of military bases, the roads were filling up with more convoys of men and machines on the move towards the south coast. In a few days’ time Eisenhower and some of SHAEF itself would do the same.

  The weather was actually favourable in the early weeks of May. There were about eighteen possible days that month. The tide was low enough to remove defensive obstacles from the beaches, the wind and moonlight perfect for airborne operations – we really could have gone. But the millions of tons of aircraft and shipping, and more than two million men who would be involved in the operation, were not yet ready. And the Germans were on high alert exactly because of the good weather. It was not until the fourth week of May that the logistical aspects coincided to produce a target date of the fifth, sixth or seventh of June.

  Whether the weather would hold for any of those dates was another matter. On 28 May (a Sunday), Stagg went down from Bushey to recce Eisenhower’s advance command post at Southwick House, near Portsmouth, where we would be berthed during the week of the invasion. It was assumed that the supreme commander and his chief meteorologist should be near the main bulk of troops. Before that day’s first conference (led by Stagg from Portsmouth, with me listening in at Bushey Park), Stagg told me how the whole surface of the navy’s main harbour, every inch of it, was now covered with a fleet of ships. ‘I had never seen so many,’ he told me. ‘It’s a majestic sight. Like a city on the water.’

  As for the conference itself, generally the participants agreed that the probable lines of weather evolution were still anticy clonic, that is, veering towards settled weather, as one would expect in summer. But looking out of the window I thought even as we spoke that I could see the sky darkening – not in a unidimensional order, but in variegated fashion, shreds and patches of cloud taking on a blacker tinge as they moved across the sky. A camouflaging of light.

  Sitting alone in Stagg’s office, between two conferences, I looked at applying the range of Ryman numbers for the forecast conditions. It was no easy task, complicated by the fact that the moment I started the weather did change, just I had felt it would. The long spell of settled, mainly anticyclonic conditions we had been enjoying – during which the Germans had strengthened their defences along the Channel – was about to break. I went to the teleprinter to check new observations as they came in, and was horrified by what I read as the paper jerked through my hands. The new situation developing could only be described as very turbulent, even by winter standards, never mind those of high summer.

  It did not help that we seemed to be getting erroneous pressure and wind-speed readings from a single but crucial weather ship to the south of Iceland, codenamed WANTAC. The data it sent was slightly different from that provided by other ships nearby. Was it too large a difference to attribute to a wrinkle in the instrument calibration? All wind measurements from ships must account for the airflow distortion caused by the ship itself, otherwise large errors can occur. When radioing in the readings the crew swore blind the readings were correct and that the anemometers were in a position in which they were not being unduly disturbed by the ship’s presence.

  Nonetheless I felt strongly there was something that needed looking at with regards to WANTAC’s aneroid barometers and air-speed indicators. I sat wondering, immobile, about the ship, imagining its masts rising from the foam-barred waves of the Atlantic as if they were the immortal pinnacles of an ancient palace, archetype of that which governs mighty empires.

  Stirring from my reverie, I made a mental note to speak to Stagg about WANTAC, but I was nervous as he had become ferociously bad tempered. On one occasion about this time I spilled some coffee on a weather chart he was examining. ‘For the love of Mike!’ he howled at me. ‘Will you please try to be more careful, Meadows? It’s bad enough having you bleed all over these things without you throwing coffee at them as well.’

  In conferences, I could see him biting his lip beside me and covering up the mouthpiece to let out explosive sighs. During a second conference that Sunday night of 28 May, after Stagg had returned from Portsmouth, we tried to formulate a forecast up to Friday, 2 June and beyond to a possible D-Day. Most of us accepted that bad weather was on the way. Petterssen said he expected thunderstorms, as did I, and Hogben at the Admiralty predicted strong winds and deep depressions. But Krick was typically optimistic, still saying it was all just going to stay fine.

  ‘You haven’t taken into account the upper air,’ snapped Petterssen. ‘I have reviewed your forecast and found it to be correct. Except in this crucial aspect of upper-air effects on the surface, which will definitely result in thunderstorms.�
�

  There was a short silence. The phone line wailed and clicked.

  ‘I agree on the upper-air issue,’ said Stagg, ‘and my own view is that the balance of probability is against Widewing in this case.’

  ‘Oh it is, is it?’ said Krick. ‘This is crazy. You are just ganging up on me because I’m American.’

  Petterssen said something in Norwegian, clearly a swearword.

  So it continued for another two hours, with no agreement about what lay ahead. Amid the to and fro of argument, I forgot to ask Stagg about the erroneous readings from WANTAC.

  After another nosebleed I went to bed feeling as if my head were a kaleidoscope of numbers. I was terrified the kizunguzungu feeling might return, but I was determined not to start drinking again. The word, which had the same root as that for white men (mzungu), stuck in my head as I dozed off, involving itself in its own etymology like a dust-devil chasing its tail across the veldt.

  It is said they – we – were called mzungu because white men ran around so much and to so little purpose they made Africans dizzy. Or it was because white men came from more than one direction and with more than one motive. A third explanation was that mzungu and kizunguzungu both had their origins in descriptions of the ocean, from where foreign ships came. Some days, having whirled itself into a frenzy, the ocean is like a big, dizzy bowl of foam, impossible to decipher. That white foam is mzungu.

  But what I saw that night as I fell asleep was the froth of a pint glass of beer, leading – like some oversized sergeant major at the head of a column of troops – a long line of whisky chasers.

  6

  We started again early the next morning. Monday, 29 May, according to my diary. There were fewer arguments this time, but only because we were all exhausted. Stagg finally managed to get the participants to agree he could tell Eisenhower and the other brass hats that the weather would be settled during the coming week, followed by some disturbed weather at the weekend.

  Around lunchtime, having driven down to Portsmouth again, Stagg saw Eisenhower and the other generals, admirals and air vice-marshals, who were now fully installed at Southwick House.

  The meeting took place in the library, ‘surrounded by empty bookshelves on three sides of the room’, as Stagg reported to me later. ‘They implied to me strongly again that they want to go a week today.’

  That would be 5 June. ‘How long will the bad weather at the weekend last?’ the generals asked him.

  ‘At this time of year continuous spells of more than a few days of really stormy weather are infrequent,’ he replied. ‘If the disturbed weather starts on Friday it is unlikely to last through both Monday and Tuesday … but if it starts on Saturday or Sunday, Monday or Tuesday could well be stormy.’

  The bigwigs just about seemed to accept it, he said, without saying whether his information would affect the decision to go on the following Monday.

  Stagg motored back to Bushey for the evening conference. To everyone’s surprise, as soon as it began Petterssen predicted that there would not be a deterioration of the weather at the weekend after all. Krick, too, reversed his position, saying that Petterssen had been right in his previous incarnation and there would be storms.

  I couldn’t believe this double volte-face, and neither could Stagg. Once the phones were down, the strain showed on his face. He was shaking with anger and anxiety. Watching him, I realised Sir Peter was living in a land of fantasy. Perhaps there was nothing that I could bring to this situation that would help it. Would Ryman’s own presence have helped, I wondered. I doubted it now. The last thing we needed was another view. But still I wished I could have had him sitting next to me in his crisp grey suit, advising and guiding as we fought our way through the thicket of indecision.

  It was not the best time to ask Stagg about WANTAC, but the issue could be ignored no longer. Checking the ship’s pressure readings at its station off Iceland during the day, I had seen that they were still anomalous: they were higher than they should be, different from what might be expected, given the readings from other ships nearby. The wind speeds, meanwhile, were marginally lower, which probably suggested the area was a conduit for calmer weather. What if these readings were the explanation for the disparity between Widewing and Dunstable? What if they signified one of those narrow tubes that Ryman had talked of? The ones that seem like barriers between two opposing weather systems but are actually corridors for a third? Either that, or the instruments were wrong. What if ice, that powerful force I now know all too well, had upset the gauges on the ship?

  ‘I could fly up there, you know,’ I said to Stagg, after explaining my concerns to him. ‘I could check the tolerances of the instruments myself, and then we would be sure.’

  His response was to start shouting at me. ‘Are you mad? The invasion will most likely be over by the time you are back. You know how busy we are. I can’t spare you. You don’t seem to have got anywhere with your Ryman number and I don’t see that this is going to be any different.’

  ‘I do think those readings are important, sir. We can’t just ignore them.’

  As I was speaking I suddenly remembered what Reynolds, the pilot who had flown me from London to Prestwick, had said about picking up broken equipment from these ships from a floating line and dropping down new ones.

  It had to be worth a try. ‘You know, we replace these instruments using aircraft from the reconnaissance flights and collect the old ones for repair. What if I was to put in a request that they do so with WANTAC’s? It could be done on the BISMUTH track, which goes out towards Iceland. Then the old ones could be brought straight down here and I could test them.’

  Calming down, Stagg thought for a moment, stroking his moustache. ‘Yes. All right, Meadows. But don’t spend too much time on it.’

  7

  Stagg was more sober-tempered the next day, but I dared not bring up the subject again. Early that morning, I had arranged through the RAF people at Southwick and Met Office headquarters for new instruments for WANTAC to be flown up to Stornoway and be dropped at the weather ship and for the old ones to be picked up and returned to me. The operation would use up quite a lot of resources, but one thing about being at SHAEF was that nobody outside it dared say no to you. Even so, the whole thing was going to take three or four days; it would be a close-run thing.

  Once the conference was finished, I got the chance of an intimate chat with Sverre Petterssen, who of all the participants was, with his strong theoretical underpinning, the nearest thing we had to a Ryman on the team. It turned out that he knew Pyke. This came up because I said Stagg wanted us to describe in some detail the chain of mental processes that led to our forecasts. Petterssen replied he knew a genius called Pyke who liked to do that, but it didn’t necessarily help with the end product.

  Amazed, I half turned the mouthpiece to look at it, as if the mechanism itself was responsible for this coincidence. Then, through its little grille, I told him about the sea lion at Kilmun, also mentioning ‘something about ice’ which I had briefly been involved in, taking care to divulge no detail.

  ‘Oh, I know all about it,’ he said airily. ‘The berg ship. Project Habbakuk. But I wasn’t concerned with it myself. I briefly helped him in designing a snow vehicle of high performance characteristics. It was to be powered by an Archimedean screw. I believe he is still working on it.’

  ‘The Habbakuk project was stopped,’ I said. ‘Pyke just disappeared. I was left high and dry. That was just before I came here.’

  ‘Typical Pyke. Do you know where he is himself?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have heard nothing from him.’

  ‘The last I heard he was in Belsize Park.’

  There was a faint click on the line. Petterssen muttered something in Norwegian.

  ‘What was that?’ I said.

  ‘I said, “We can hear you.” Intelligence listening in. Apparently someone heard me tell Larry Hogben I am a pacifist. I had a visit from them telling me off for it.’

&
nbsp; ‘Are you?’ I asked, thinking of Ryman.

  ‘I am a pacifist only in the sense that I believe fascism tends to war, so one must do one’s best to counter it. I would fire a gun in the right circumstances. And do so in anger. My family are still in Norway, you see, under German occupation.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It is not just for them,’ he said more urgently. ‘D-Day has to succeed for all of us. Nazism is a kind of formless spreading horror which will eventually touch everybody unless it is stopped.’

  There was a pause, during which – by the wonderful sorcery of the telephone – I imagined the huts at Dunstable from which he was speaking. ‘How is Douglas?’ I asked.

  Petterssen’s counterpart had been very quiet at the last few conferences.

  ‘Same as ever. Well, no, he is feeling the strain just the same as the rest of us. The other day he took his baby out in its pram and walked to the top of Dunstable Downs, the highest point around here, to study the clouds. He noted the direction and strength of the wind, using the branch of a tree as a nephoscope – he told me all this later – and became so absorbed in making these observations, and thinking about what they implied for the invasion, that he went home leaving baby and pram at the top of the Downs! Do you have children, Meadows?’

  ‘No.’ Right then it seemed a preposterous idea that I might have, though I have since often regretted their absence.

  ‘I have two daughters, Eileen and Liv,’ said the Norwegian, his voice breaking with emotion. ‘Trapped in my own country. I long for this war to be over, for them to be free again. When it is your own family, your own children … well, you would fight with your bare hands, scratch with your nails …’