D Day Weather
BY ED CURTIN
One hundred-year-old Maureen Flavin may now be living in a nursing home in Belmullet, County Mayo, Ireland, but her actions long ago on the day she turned 21 likely saved much of Europe from the continued horrors of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi war machine.
On that day, June 3, 1944, Maureen Flavin changed the course of history with meteorological information she recorded while working as a post office assistant at a weather station at Blacksod, County Mayo, on the far western coast.
That morning at 1, she had completed her daily task of examining air pressure and barometric readings and reported them by telegraph to the meteorological office in Dublin. The information indicated a major Atlantic storm was brewing and would hit this remote part of Ireland soon and would blow right across Western Europe for the next two days.
“Please check! Please repeat!” came an urgent telephone call to Maureen, directly from the British Meteorological Office in London and even bypassing the liaison office in Dublin. The readings were disturbing, the woman with an English accent on the other end of the line said.
Maureen checked her readings and confirmed: “Yes, the barometer is dropping rapidly and a major storm is coming.” New measurements made from 2 to 7 a.m. showed a continuing drop in pressure, a steady wind, and worsening rain.
What Maureen didn’t know was that her information, from the most westerly weather station in Europe, had been sent to the headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in England and had landed on the desk of United States Four Star General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was Supreme Commander of the combined Allied forces.
Her affirmation convinced meteorologists in Eisenhower’s office that it would be wise to postpone Operation Overlord – what later became known as the D-Day invasion — for 24 hours, and that the allies should stand down all associated activities until the weather cleared on June 6. That break in the weather, also forecasted by Maureen from Blacksod, allowed the invasion to commence, absent stormy waters in the English Channel.
Maureen Flavin was born in Knockanure, County Kerry, Irish Free State, on June 3, 1923. She passed her secondary school examinations there, and, at 18, found herself looking for employment. She had no family remaining in County Kerry, so her nearest relative, an uncle who owned a pub in Blacksod, offered her accommodations when she answered an advertisement offering a position as a clerk at the local post office. She travelled two days to reach Blacksod.
After being accepted for the post by postmistress Margaret Sweeney she discovered that the post office also operated a weather station, important for forecasting as it lay on one of the most westerly parts of Ireland. Under an August 1939 agreement, the station was one of a number in Ireland that provided daily weather readings to the British Meteorological Office. Measurements were taken from instruments housed on a corner of the nearby Blacksod lighthouse.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, the station, important as one of the first to warn of approaching westerly weather systems, was asked to make hourly weather reports, the ones Maureen sent early that fateful morning of her 21st birthday. As Allied forces planned Operation Overlord and the invasion approached, the Blacksod weather station was asked to make more detailed measurements.
Maureen went on to marry Ted Sweeney, son of the Blacksod postmistress, a few years after D-Day. They continued to operate the weather station at Blacksod until it was automated at Belmullet in 1956. It was at this point that the pair first became aware of the important role Maureen’s weather reports had on the planning of Operation Overlord. Maureen succeeded her mother-in-law as postmistress at Blacksod and retired in the early 2000s.