Maureen Flavin Sweeney, whose weather report delayed D-Day, dies at age 100

On certain rare occasions, ordinary people have changed history in the middle of an average day.

In 1947, Muhammad edh-Dhib, a young Bedouin shepherd searching for a lost sheep, discovered a hidden cave containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known version of most of the Hebrew Bible. While on his rounds in 1972, Frank Wills, a Washington DC security guard, noticed a piece of 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 president’s resignation Richard M Nixon.

But neither has shaped so many lives as directly as Maureen Flavin, a postal worker on a remote stretch of the northwestern Irish coast who, in 1944, on her 21st birthday, helped decide the outcome of World War II.

She died Dec. 17 at a nursing home in Belmullet, Ireland, near the post office where she worked, her grandson Fergus Sweeney said. She was 100.

The events that brought Ms. Flavin to her unforeseeable moment of global impact began in 1942 when she saw an advertisement for a job at the post office in the coastal town of Blacksod Point.

She got the job and discovered that the remote post office also served as a weather station. Her duties include recording and transmitting weather data. She did that work diligently, even though she didn’t even know where her 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 by sharing weather data with Britain. Ireland’s location on the northwestern edge of Europe gave the country an early sense that the weather would turn towards the continent. Blacksod Point was just about the westernmost point of the coast.

Weather forecasting proved to be an essential part of the Allies’ most famous war game: D-Day, the invasion aimed at gaining a foothold on mainland Europe.

It took two years of meticulous planning. American General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led the attack, decided to send more than 160,000 troops, nearly 12,000 aircraft, and nearly 7,000 seagoing vessels to invade an 50-mile stretch of beach along the Normandy region of the French coast.

The Allies settled on June 5, 1944, which promised a full moon, which improved visibility, and low tide, which made access to the beach easier.

A successful invasion would also depend on clear skies for the Allies’ air attacks and calm seas for their landing. And the relatively primitive technology of the time – no satellites, no computer models – meant that the Allies would have only a few days’ warning about the weather.

By 1944, Ms. Flavin’s work orders had increased from the top down: she and her colleagues now sent weather reports not every six hours, but every hour of the day.

“You wouldn’t have finished one until it was time to do the next one,” she recalled in a documentary made by RTÉ, Ireland’s public broadcaster, in 2019.

On her birthday, June 3, she had a night shift: from 12 noon to 4 a.m. When she checked her barometer, she registered a rapid drop in pressure, indicating a chance of impending rain or stormy weather.

The report went from Dublin to Dunstable, the town where the English meteorological headquarters were located.

Ms. Flavin then received an unusual series of phone calls about her work. A woman with an English accent asked her, “Please check this.” Please repeat!”

She asked the son of Blacksod postmistress and lighthouse keeper Ted Sweeney if she was making a mistake.

“We checked and checked again, and the figures were the same both times, so we were happy enough,” she later told Ireland’s Eye magazine.

That same day, General Eisenhower and his advisors met at their base in England. James Stagg, a British military meteorologist, reported that bad weather was expected based on Ms. Flavin’s readings. He advised General Eisenhower to postpone the invasion by one day.

The general agreed. On June 5 there were rough seas, strong winds and thick clouds. Some commentators – including John Ross, the author of “Forecast for D-Day: And the Weatherman Behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble” (2014) – have argued that the invasion could well have failed if it had taken place that day.

Delaying the invasion after the 6th brought other problems. The tides and the moon would not have been favorable for several weeks, when the Germans expected an attack. The element of surprise would have been lost. Mr. Ross told USA Today might have postponed that victory in Europe for a year.

Yet Mrs. Flavin’s reports indicated not only that June 5 would be disastrous, but also that the weather on June 6 would be just good enough. General Eisenhower ordered an invasion stating, “We will accept nothing less than complete victory.”

By noon on the 6th the sky cleared. The Allies suffered thousands of casualties, but captured a European bridgehead.

‘We owe a lot to Maureen from the west of Ireland, to us who invaded France on D-Day’ Joe Cattini, a British D-Day veteran, said in the RTÉ documentary“for if she had not read the weather, we should have perished in the storms.”

Maureen Flavin was born on June 3, 1923 in the southwestern village of Knockanure, Ireland, where she grew up. Her parents, Michael and Mary (Mullvihill) Flavin, owned a store.

She married Mr Sweeney, the lighthouse keeper, in 1946. When his mother, the postmistress, died, Mrs. Sweeney succeeded her in the job.

She first learned about the significance of her weather forecast in 1956, when officials discussed it after moving the local weather station from Blacksod Point to a nearby town. It received 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 worked in the Irish Lighthouse Service; a daughter, Emer Schlueter; 12 other grandchildren; 20 great-grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

In interviews, Ms. Sweeney marveled at the contrast between the immense forces in need of a weather forecast and the small world of the Blacksod Point Post Office.

“There were thousands of planes there and they couldn’t tolerate low clouds,” she says said on Irish public radio in 2006. “We’re glad we put them on the right track. Ultimately, we had the final say.”