Stagg, James Martin

James Martin Stagg, (born June 30, 1900, Dalkeith, Midlothian, Scotland—died June 1975, England), British meteorologist who, as the chief weather forecaster to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, gave crucial advice on weather conditions for the Normandy Invasion during World War II.

Stagg, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, became an assistant in Britain’s Meteorological Office in 1924. He led the British Polar Year Expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1932–33, and he served as superintendent of the Kew Gardens Observatory in 1939. In 1943 he was given the rank of group captain and appointed the chief meteorological adviser to Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the projected Allied invasion of northern France. Stagg headed the committee of meteorologists who forecast weather conditions in the English Channel in the weeks leading up to the D-Day landings. These landings were projected for any day between June 5 and 7, but the first days of June saw low-lying rain clouds, high winds, and stormy seas that would disrupt an amphibious assault across the Channel and ground the Allies’ air cover over the invasion beaches. With the invasion forces already having embarked from the Channel ports, the weather was still so poor on the morning of June 4 that Eisenhower postponed the landings from June 5 to the following day. At this point the prospects for the invasion’s actually taking place looked as bleak as the weather. On the night of June 4, however, Stagg informed Eisenhower that a temporary break in the weather might allow the invasion to go ahead on June 6. The following morning Eisenhower decided to proceed with the landings on June 6. As it happened, weather did not seriously disrupt the D-Day landings, though the poor conditions had lulled the German defenders into thinking that an Allied landing was impossible that day.

Stagg was knighted in 1954 and served as director of services at the Meteorological Office until 1960. He was also president of the Royal Meteorological Society in 1959. Excerpts from his diary were published in Forecast for Overlord, June 6, 1944 (1971).