The weatherman crucial to D-Day victory

On his inauguration day, in 1961, John F Kennedy asked the outgoing president, Dwight D Eisenhower, what had given him the advantage over the Nazis on D-Day, when Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. “We had better meteorologists than the Germans,” Eisenhower said. That anecdote is cited at the end of the new film Pressure, which suggests that Eisenhower’s reply was not much of an exaggeration. The film tells the true story of the life-or-death decisions the Allies’ chief meteorologist, Scottish Royal Air Force Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), and Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) had to make in the three days leading up to the Allied invasion of Normandy, which historian Antony Beevor, in his authoritative D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, calls “almost certainly the most ambitious operation in the history of warfare”.