D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [7]
Early the next morning, Saturday, 3 June, the news could hardly have been worse. The weather station at Blacksod Point in western Ireland had just reported a rapidly falling barometer and a force six wind. Stagg felt ‘all but physically nauseated’ by the weather charts and the way the teams still analysed the same data in different ways. That evening, at 21.30 hours, he and Yates were summoned. They entered the library, its shelves emptied of books. Mess armchairs were arranged in concentric arcs, with commanders-in-chief in the front row and their chiefs of staff and subordinate commanders behind. Eisenhower, his chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, and Tedder sat on three chairs facing the audience.
‘Gentlemen,’ Stagg began. ‘The fears my colleagues and I had yesterday about the weather for the next three or four days have been confirmed.’ He then launched into a detailed forecast. It was a gloomy picture of rough seas, winds up to force six and low cloud. ‘Throughout this recital,’ Stagg wrote later, ‘General Eisenhower sat motionless, with his head slightly to one side resting on his hand, staring steadily towards me. All in the room seemed to be temporarily stunned.’ Not surprisingly, Eisenhower felt compelled to recommend a provisional postponement.
It was not a good night for Eisenhower. His aide, Commander Harry Butcher, came to him later with the news that Associated Press had put out a tape stating, ‘Eisenhower’s forces are landing in France.’ Even though the agency cancelled the story twenty-three minutes later, it had been picked up by CBS and Radio Moscow. ‘He sort of grunted,’ Butcher noted in his diary.
When Stagg went off to his tent at about midnight, having heard of the provisional postponement, it was strange to look up between the trees and see that ‘the sky was almost clear and everything around was still and quiet’. Stagg did not attempt to sleep. He spent the early hours of the morning writing up detailed notes of all discussions. When he had finished the forecast was no better, even though outside all remained calm.
At 04.15 hours on the Sunday, 4 June, at yet another meeting, Eisenhower decided that the twenty-four-hour postponement provisionally agreed the night before must stand. Without maximum air support, the risks were too great. The order went out to call back the convoys. Destroyers set to sea at full speed to round up landing craft which could not be contacted by radio and shepherd them back.
Stagg, who had then gone back to his camp bed exhausted, was taken aback when he awoke a few hours later to find that the sky was still clear and there seemed to be little wind. He could not face the other officers at breakfast. But later in the day he felt a certain shamefaced relief when the cloud and wind began to increase from the west.
That Sunday was a day of endless questions. Surely the tens of thousands of men could not be kept cooped up on their landing craft? And what of all the ships which had put to sea and had now been ordered back? They would need to refuel. And if the bad weather were to continue, then the tides would be wrong. In fact, if conditions did not improve within forty-eight hours, Overlord would have to be postponed for two weeks. Secrecy would be hard to maintain and the effect on morale could be devastating.
2
Bearing the Cross of Lorraine
Eisenhower was far from being the only one to be awed by the enormity of what they were launching. Churchill, who had always been dubious about the whole plan of a cross-Channel invasion, was now working himself up into a nervous state of irrational optimism, while Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke confided to his diary that there was ‘an empty feeling at the pit of one’s stomach’. ‘It is very hard to believe that in a few hours the cross Channel