Science Talk! John E. Ross: Here’s to the Weather Warriors!

Please join us on Tuesday, November 11th, at 7 pm for a special Veteran’s Day Science Talk at the Wayne Theatre.

John E. Ross will give a talk titled Here’s to the Weather Warriors!

All was ready for D-day. Aboard ships steaming in the English Channel, thousands of troops waited anxiously. In their camps by air fields, hundreds of paratroopers sat sharpening bayonets and writing that last-minute letter home. Overhead droned hundreds of bombers and fighters bound for targets behind the beaches. At SHAEF’s advanced headquarters, generals and admirals hashed out final details and worried about the one element of the invasion beyond their control – the weather. If the forecast was wrong, D-day would fail.

Ike’s weatherman was James Martin Stagg. The US Army Air Force, the Royal Navy, and the British Met Office each prepared independent weather forecasts for D-day from data gathered by weather reconnaissance aircraft, ships in the north Atlantic, weathermen who fled Nazi’s invasion of Belgium but parachuted back home, and interception of German weather reports. Stagg’s job was to meld them into one forecast and it absolutely had to be right.

Had the forecast been wrong, D-day would have failed. At least one year would have been required to gather men and materials to mount a second attempt. The delay would have meant that the Russians would have occupied all of Germany – no West Germany. Communists, the strongest force in the French resistance, would have dominated the French national assembly – no NATO. Imagine world history without West Germany and NATO.

John E. Ross, the author of The Forecast for D-day and the Weatherman behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble, interviewed many men and women who actually made the pivotal forecast as well as a German meteorologist who provided forecasts for the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht in France. The book has been widely quoted in D-day anniversary stories by USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Weather Channel, BBC and Associated Press-Europe. 

Among the reasons for writing the book, John wanted to express gratitude to all those veterans and the Grey Berets of today, who quietly and without recognition provide tactical and strategic weather forecasts on which successful military campaigns rely.

John is no stranger to Waynesboro. He was the founding co-chair of the Center for Coldwaters Restoration which was largely responsible for generating the opportunity for the Virginia Museum of Natural History to locate a proposed branch museum in downtown Waynesboro.

If you can’t make it in person, you can find stream the live video on both the Wayne Theatre and VMNH Facebook pages. You can also view all our past Science Talks on the Virginia Museum of Natural History YouTube Channel.