by On rare occasions, ordinary people, in the middle of an ordinary day, have changed history.
In 1947, Muhammad edh-Dhib, a young Bedouin shepherd searching for a stray sheep, discovered a hidden cave containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known version of most of the Hebrew Bible. One night in 1972, while making his rounds, Frank Wills, a security guard in Washington, D.C., noticed a piece of duct tape holding open a lock in a building where he worked and, as a result, exposed the Watergate break-in. which ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
But none of them shaped as many lives as directly as Maureen Flavin, a postal worker on a remote stretch of Ireland’s northwest coast who, in 1944, on her 21st birthday, helped determine the outcome of World War II.
He died Dec. 17 at a nursing home in Belmullet, Ireland, near the post office where he used to work, said his grandson Fergus Sweeney. She was 100 years old.
The events that led Mrs. Flavin to her unpredictable moment of global consequence began in 1942, when she saw a job advertisement at the post office in the coastal town of Blacksod Point.
He got the job and learned that the remote post office also served as a weather station. Its functions included recording and transmitting meteorological data. He did that job diligently, although he didn’t even know where his weather reports were going.
In fact, they were part of the Allied war effort.
Ireland was neutral in World War II, but quietly helped the Allies in various ways, including sharing weather data with Britain. Ireland’s position at the north-west edge of Europe gave it an early sense that time was moving towards the continent. Blacksod Point was practically the westernmost point on the coast.
Weather forecasting turned out to be an essential part of the Allies’ most famous tactic of the war: D-Day, the invasion intended to gain a foothold on the European continent.
It took two years of meticulous planning. American General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led the assault, decided to send more than 160,000 troops, nearly 12,000 aircraft and nearly 7,000 sea vessels to invade a 50-mile stretch of beach along the Normandy region on the French coast.
The Allies established themselves on June 5, 1944, which promised a full moon, which would favor visibility, and low tides, which would facilitate access to the beach.
A successful invasion would also depend on clear skies for the Allied air assault and calm seas for their landing. And the relatively primitive technology of the time (no satellites or computer models) meant that the Allies would have only a few days’ warning of the weather.
By 1944, Ms. Flavin’s work orders had increased from the top: she and her colleagues were now sending weather reports not every six hours, but every hour of the day.
“You would only have one finished when the time came to make another,” he recalled in a documentary made by RTÉ, Ireland’s public broadcaster, in 2019.
On his birthday, June 3, he had a night shift: 12 am to 4 am. Checking his barometer, she recorded a rapid drop in pressure indicating the likelihood of approaching rain or storm.
The report ran from Dublin to Dunstable, the city that housed England’s meteorological headquarters.
Ms. Flavin then received an unusual series of calls about her work. A woman with an English accent asked: “Please check it. Please repeat it!”
He asked the son of Blacksod postmistress and lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney if he was making a mistake.
“We checked and rechecked, and the figures were the same both times, so we were quite happy,” he later told Ireland’s Eye magazine.
On the same day, General Eisenhower and his advisors met at their base in England. James Stagg, a British military meteorologist, reported based on Ms. Flavin’s readings that bad weather was expected. He advised General Eisenhower to postpone the invasion for one day.
The general agreed. On June 5 there were rough seas, strong winds and thick cloud cover. Some commentators, including John Ross, author of “Forecast for D-Day: And the Weatherman Behind Ike’s Big Gamble” (2014), have argued that the invasion may well have failed if it had occurred that day.
Postponing the invasion beyond the 6th presented other problems. The tides and moon would not be favorable again for several weeks, when the Germans expected an attack. The element of surprise would have been lost. mr ross said According to USA Today, the victory in Europe could have been delayed by a year.
However, Mrs. Flavin’s reports indicated not only that June 5 would be disastrous, but also that the weather on June 6 would be good enough. General Eisenhower ordered an invasion in which he proclaimed: “We will accept nothing less than total victory.”
At noon on the 6th, the sky cleared. The Allies suffered thousands of casualties, but gained a European beachhead.
“We owe a lot to Maureen from the west of Ireland, who invaded France on D-Day,” Joe Cattini, a British D-Day veteran, said in the RTÉ documentary“because if it had not been for his reading of the weather we would have perished in the storms.”
Maureen Flavin was born on June 3, 1923 in the village of Knockanure, southwest Ireland, where she grew up. Her parents, Michael and Mary (Mullvihill) Flavin, owned a general store.
She married Mr Sweeney, the lighthouse keeper, in 1946. When her mother, the postmistress, died, Mrs Sweeney succeeded her in the job.
He first heard about the importance of his weather forecast in 1956, when officials discussed it after moving the local weather station from Blacksod Point to a nearby town. He gained further publicity during the 50th anniversary of D-Day, when meteorologist Brendan McWilliams wrote about the episode in The Irish Times.
Mr Sweeney died in 2001. In addition to Fergus Sweeney, Mrs Sweeney is survived by three sons, Ted, Gerry and Vincent, all of whom have worked in the Irish lighthouse service; a daughter, Emer Schlueter; 12 other grandchildren; 20 great-grandchildren; and two great-great-grandchildren.
In interviews, Ms. Sweeney marveled at the contrast between the immense forces that need a weather forecast and the small world of the Blacksod Point post office.
“There they were with thousands of planes and they couldn’t tolerate the low clouds,” he said. saying on Irish public radio in 2006. “We are delighted to have put them on the right path. In the end we had the last word.”
