June 5th 1944 was supposed to be D-Day.
It was until Maureen Flavin effectively waved a red flag.
Maureen, a postal clerk in Blacksod Bay, County Mayo, was celebrating her 21st birthday on June 3. It should have been a joyous, carefree day. But history intervened.
Hundreds of miles away the Allied invasion fleet was straining at anchor in English Channel ports.
The assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe was set for dawn on June 5th. And then it wasn't. This was due to the reading of the weather in faraway Blacksod Bay.
As the New York Times reported in Maureen's obituary last December, when she died at the age of 100: "She got the job and learned that the 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."
Among other places they were going to London.
As Maureen later stated to historian and author Garrett M. Graff and as published this week in the Washington Post: "Our reports were the first to show any change coming in for good weather or bad weather. There was a query [from London] at around 11 o’clock. And then there was a second query. A lady with a distinct English accent requested me to 'Please Check. Please Repeat!' We began to look at the figures again. We checked and rechecked and the figures were the same both times so we were happy enough then."
Happy enough to report that stormy weather was coming in from the Atlantic. The storm would have wreaked havoc with an invasion on June 5 so "Operation Overlord" was put off for 24 hours when there would be a window of relative calm.
The rest, as they say, is history.
