On Tuesday, The New York Times published an obituary of Maureen Flavin Sweeney, who died on December 17th at a nursing home in Belmullet, Ireland. She was 100 years old.
I had not known of Ms. Sweeney, or of the remarkable role she played during World War Two.
In 1942, as the Times reported, she took a job at the post office of Blacksod Point, an Irish coastal village. Her name, at the time--she was not yet married--was Maureen Flavin.
The Times wrote that the "remote post office also served as a weather station. Her duties included recording and transmitting weather data. She did that work diligently, though she did not even know where her weather reports were going.
"In fact," Times reporter Alex Traub noted, "they were part of the Allied war effort."
Then, in June of 1944, days before the D-Day invasion--originally planned for June 5th--her weather data altered history. "On her 21st birthday, June 3, she had a late-night shift: 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. Checking her barometer, she saw that it registered a rapid drop in pressure, indicating a likelihood of approaching rain or stormy weather."
The Times story continued:
The report went from Dublin to Dunstable, the town 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 her: “Please check. Please repeat!”
Ms. Flavin asked the postmistress’s son and Blacksod’s lighthouse keeper, Ted Sweeney [whom she would marry in 1946], if she was making a mistake.
“We checked and rechecked, and the figures were the same both times, so we were happy enough,” she later told Ireland’s Eye magazine.
The Times wrote:
That same day, [General] Eisenhower and his advisers were meeting at their base in England. James Stagg, a British military meteorologist, reported that, based on Ms. Flavin’s readings, bad weather was expected. He advised Eisenhower to postpone the invasion by a day.
The general agreed. June 5 saw rough seas, high winds and thick cloud cover.
D-Day took place on June 6th. "Some commentators," Times reporter Traub wrote, "...have argued that the invasion could well have failed if it had occurred [on June 5th]."
The obituary notes that Ms. Sweeney only learned of the importance of her weather reporting years later, in 1956.
Here is the link to the June 2nd story about her, from the Times:
