Make sure you take advantage of the "Normandy Pass" scheme, which gives you a substantial discount on entry to the museums etc. Use this page to design your own self-guided tour of the Normandy Landing Beaches and key sites related to Operation Overlord, the Allied Invasion of Normandy.
There are also Battle of Normandy sites between us and the coast, such as the Canadian War Cemetery at Cintheau (Bretteville-sur-Laize), the Polish War Cemetery at Langannerie-Urville and the Falaise Visitor Centre at Mont Ormel near Falaise, the site of the bloody German retreat from Normandy. The D-Day beaches are 90 minutes from our bed and breakfast near Alençon but some of our guests drive to the Normandy Landing Beaches so we compiled this D-Day map of sites to visit. If you plan your own visit then you will see more than any tour offers, and you can visit sites tailored to your personal interest. Office.You can take a guided tour of the Normandy Beaches with various D-Day tour companies or hire a personal guide, but these are expensive. (Extract from the forward by Professor Julian Hunt).ĭ-Day, 6 June 1944: the role of the Met. I dedicate this booklet to the meteorologists of all nations who took part in the Second World War, but especially to the seventy members of the Meteorological Office who gave their lives. In some ways wartime meteorology laid the foundations of modern weather forecasting throughout the world. Please address all enquiries regarding publication to The German charts have been kindly provided by DWD. As a result Stagg was able to advise that conditions on the 6th June would be marginal but sufficient to launch the invasion and in so doing the D-Day forecasters made perhaps the most important forecast in history.ĭaily weather reports for 1944 in the Digitial Library & Archive. Having access to this additional data gave the allied forecasters sufficient information to be able to plot the location and movement of the low pressure and cold front which forced the landings to be moved from the 5th to the 6th, and the ridge of high pressure which enabled them to predict better weather for the 6th with far greater accuracy than their German counterparts.
By contrast the German charts reveal that they had been unable to crack the Allied codes and as a result there are virtually no observations for the UK and surrounding waters. The allied charts contain a wealth of observations from across both the UK and Europe and also some observations from the Atlantic, the area from with the D-Day weather would come. Comparison of the synoptic charts held in the Met Office archives and the archives of Deutscher Wetterdienst clearly shows this placed the Allied forecasters at a significant advantage over the German forecasters in terms of being able to spot a suitable weather window for the invasion.
These charts identified both the bad weather which resulted in the postponement of the invasion on the 5th and identified the weather window which enabled it to go ahead on the 6th.Ĭharts in the Met Office National Meteorological Archive in Exeter reveal that the allies had cracked the German Enigma code thus allowing the D-Day forecasters access not only to observations from Allied observers and reconnaissance flights but also to all the German meteorological observations. Stagg and his teams relied on the synoptic charts to provide the information they needed. Conditions in early June were extremely unsettled and the forecasters on both sides needed all the information they could get in order to predict when the invasion might occur.
In spite of meticulous planning surrounding all other aspects of the invasion the commanders could not control the weather and for advice on this they looked to a team of meteorologists led by Group Captain J.