Factual Fictions: ‘Pressure’: How a Team of Weathermen Fought the Nazis

A fine drama about one of the most crucial decisions of World War II captures the outline of events while rearranging the details.

(One a little too tall, the other a ittle too short; Credit: Studio Canal)

“We had better meteorologists,” Dwight Eisenhower on D-Day.

The first question I ask about any factual fiction is, “Is it a good film? Was I absorbed and entertained? Are all the elements that engage my artistic spirit present?” In the case of a great work of cinema (My Darling Clementine, 1946; Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) I’m inclined to both celebrate its artistry and forgive its fumbling of the facts.

No matter its historical wrong-headedness about the Earp-Clanton feud, Clementine remains one of director John Ford’s masterpieces. Meanwhile, Bonnie and Clyde still ranks as a great film, despite the fact that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were grubby murderers and the most feared and loathed of Depression-era outlaws, even within the larger community of bandits.

Pressure (2026), a new factual fiction (now streaming), is, I’m happy to say, a fine movie. It’s also a useful example of the challenges that filmmakers face when they try to adapt real history to a popular medium.

For the most part, this is a highly polished, well-acted, and suspenseful account of one of the more obscure but crucial moments of World War II: the final decision that enabled the D-Day landing on June 6, 1944, on the beaches of Normandy, the beginning of the end for the Nazi death machine.

Operation Overlord, the Allies’ code name, was an event so epic, few films have attempted to portray it: most notably The Longest Day (1962), the HBO series Band of Brothers (2001), and Saving Private Ryan (1994), the last of which was centered around a complete (and unbelievable) fiction but gets credit for its incredibly disturbing reenactment of the battle of Omaha Beach that brings us close to the experience of war as any movie can hope.

Pressure takes a fresh angle on Overlord by focusing on the behind-the-lines drama in the seventy-two hours leading up to what was the largest seaborne invasion in history. The Allies faced a near impossible task of enormous complexity involving the deployment of 156,000 soldiers, a multinational effort comprised of troops from the US, Britain, Canada, France, Holland, and Poland.

We open with an overhead medium shot of a young soldier floating in foaming, bloody surf as life fades from his eyes. The camera then rises to reveal he is only one among dozens of soldiers lying dead and wounded on a beach while their blood washes out to sea. This was the result of Exercise Tiger, a bungled training exercise that ended with the deaths of nearly 750 Allied servicemen in the weeks leading up to D-Day.

We’re then taken away from the battlefield to the cozy English home of newly appointed RAF Group Captain and meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott) as he prepares to leave his very pregnant wife, Liz (Tamsin Topolski), to fulfill his duty to King and Country. From behind his stiff Scottish façade we glimpse a tender and adoring husband. He’ll be gone for a while, he gently tells her. A major operation is underway, though what it is, secrecy forbids him to say.

Once Stagg (said to be Winston Churchill’s favorite meteorologist) arrives at Southwick House, the forward command post for the D-Day operation, his polite manner falls away and the brusque ramrod within emerges to take command as he breaks up a Casual Friday office party and sends his team of meteorologists, British and American, back to their desks. His first day on the job is a demoralizing one for his subordinates. There’ll be no fun on Stagg’s watch. He won’t be a popular commander.

You can’t blame Stagg too much. These are urgent times. It’s Friday, June 2, 1944, with the invasion scheduled for three days hence, on Monday, June 5, at 6:30 am. After nearly a year of intense and careful preparation, the hundreds of thousands of moving parts have all been brought together: thousands of troops, the thousands of ships that will transport and support them, the multitude of planes and gliders tasked with dropping troops behind enemy lines and bombing roads and enemy supply lines, are all on their marks: ready and aimed. Up and down the line, everyone is fighting boredom from the endless waiting in place while anticipating the order to battle, not to mention dreading the unknown horrors awaiting them on Normandy’s beaches.

There’s only one obstacle: massive, nearly invisible, and almost completely unpredictable: the weather. Right now, the skies around Southwick, within a stone’s throw of the embarkation point on the English Channel, are sunny and bright. It looks like Monday morning, June 5, will be a fine day to invade Europe, as American meteorologist Irving Krick (Chris Messina) cheerfully proclaims.

James Stagg, however, believes otherwise: today’s sunny weather will be gone by Monday as a new storm rolls in over the English channel. If he’s right, the invasion will have to be postponed.

He doesn’t know this, like we all know the weather outside our windows right now. He is only confident, the confidence of one who knows his job from every possible angle. His years of experience have taught him weather’s limited predictability as storm systems churn their way across the North Atlantic and down from the Arctic. Even the very best meteorologist, he warns, can predict the weather only two days out, at most.

But confidence is not what his commanding officers, first among them Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) need. They need certainty, something Stagg, a meticulous, honest scientist cannot provide. Bob Dylan once wrote, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing” . . . but under these circumstances these people need one, and badly.

But we can no more blame them for their impatience than we can blame Stagg for his uncertainty. The stakes are simply too high. The weather must be just right for a successful invasion. Rain, low cloud cover, high winds, wrong tidal conditions could cause the operation to fail, ending in the Allies being driven off the beach along with an enormous loss of life and material; or else be postponed to a later date (as late as July) making it nearly impossible to keep the operation a secret from the Germans, who’ve been tricked into anticipating the attack at Pas de Calais, far to the east along the French coast. Though the Nazis already face certain defeat in the long run, failure at Normandy would drag the war out for years.

Among all the talk about high-pressure and low-pressure systems, Stagg faces intense pressure to come up with a solid forecast and fast. He also faces opposition, both personal and professional, from his subordinate meteorologists who loathe Stagg’s high-handed ways and the fact that he was drafted from civilian ranks and promoted over them.

To a man, they strongly oppose Stagg’s doubts about their sunny forecast. Krick, for one, loudly boasts that his forecasts, based on historical models going back decades, correctly predict the same sunny, clear skies on June 5, 1944, that occurred on, say, June 5, 1934. (Even this amateur could sense the faulty assumptions underlying his arguments).

Stagg also faces a personal crisis when news arrives that a German bomb has struck the hospital where his pregnant wife is about to deliver their child. But thanks to the strict (and necessary) secrecy he and everyone else lives under, he must keep his upper-lip stiff and silent.

There’s a little bit of sunshine provided by Eisenhower’s Irish chauffeur and personal secretary Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon) who races back and forth in her efforts to keep up the spirits of both Stagg and Eisenhower, who is haunted by memories of the Exercise Tiger catastrophe and worries if he’ll be able to once again order the men under his command to certain death.

The drama builds to a stormy confrontation where Stagg makes his stand before a roomful of Allied commanders, including Eisenhower and British Field Marshal Bernard Motngomery (Damien Lewis). In the end, Stagg is proved right as a sudden, violent storm blows in, convincing Eisenhower to reschedule the invasion for what we now commemorate as D-Day, Tuesday, June 6, 1944.

At the end, the film completes its narrative arc from the Exercise Tiger disaster to the Omaha Beach landing, which is briefly captured with the chaos and brutality modern audiences have come to expect from today’s war films.

Pressure is a very good movie, if not a great one. Adapted from a London stage hit by playwright (and noted character actor) David Haig, in collaboration with director Anthony Parras, the film takes us through the crucial three days at a smooth, solemn tempo. Like one of Howard Hawks’ classic films, it’s both a portrait of, and tribute to, professionals working together; people you can trust to always try to do the right thing, even at the risk of getting it wrong.

Alex Parras’ direction is solid, and the performances are mostly good, with Anthony Scott, as Stagg, delivering yet another of his incisive performances. He turns with masterful ease from Stagg’s tenderness toward his family to his brittle treatment of his subordinates, a mostly colorless lot among whom Chris Messina, as Krick, stands out as gladhander whose American enthusiasm and over-confidence provide a strong contrast with Stagg’s crisp severity. Other performances are fine, though the film makes one serious stumble with the casting of Eisenhower.

While most of us are at least acquainted with D-Day, Pressure does a fine job of introducing us to a little-known corner in this epic story. But an introduction is all it is. A look at the recorded history inevitably reveals an interesting variety of nips and tucks.

(RAF Group Captain and meteorologist, J.M. Stagg; credit: BBC.com)

While documentaries, with their obligation to stick to the facts play an essential role in learning history, factional fictions can sometimes bring us closer to the center of events to create an illusion of being there.

Pressure needed more than disputes over the weather, no matter how vehement they were. Like all historical dramas, this one faced the challenge of transmitting the distant past into an entertainment that will absorb modern audiences. Under this kind of pressure, Haig’s screenplay makes some typical distortions of the facts for the sake of drama. Some of the changes are understandable and acceptable, while others are contrivances.

Pressure follows the general outlines of the D-Day invasion: The timing was indeed in grave doubt in the seventy-two hours leading up to it, all thanks to the weather, as told in The Forecast for D-day by John Ross (Lyons Press, 2014), which, like Haig’s script, was drawn in part from James Stagg’s out-of-print 1971 memoir.

As Ross’s book tells it, the drama of those three days centered entirely around the weather forecast. It was an often-furious clash among meteorologists over a complex, dense, and difficult topic to grasp for many of us, your correspondent included.

Instead of a group of men stuck together under one roof, as they were in the film, there actually were three separate teams of meteorologists under Stagg who worked in separate locations. Thanks to this geographical barrier, many of the disputes took place during conference calls.

Sticking strictly to the facts would have made Pressure into a long slog featuring a bunch of guys talking on the phone about the weather. This might have earned whoops and hollers from weather nerds and other fusspots, but it would leave the rest of us in a doze.

As good history doesn’t always make for good cinematic storytelling, co-writers Haig and Parras sharpened the drama by cutting out some of the staff involved (among them noted meteorologist Sverre Peterssen), and bringing the rest under one roof, opening up opportunities for a wider range of dramatic conflicts.

Some of the events are telescoped. Stagg does not seem to have been a Churchill acolyte, for one. He didn’t start out as a meteorologist, but he was already a highly regarded civilian working for the Supreme Headquarters for the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at the time he was formally drafted into the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as group captain in November 1943.

The promotion gave him assured authority as military commanders squirmed at taking orders from a civilian outside the command structure. To them, it was easier to accept advice from a soldier in uniform. No one seems to have objected, even when Stagg was given command as Chief Meteorological Officer over the three separate forecasting teams.

Considering the dismal reputation of weather forecasting back then, it’s a wonder that any credibility was given to Stagg and his men. In the 1940s, weather forecasting was still an infant science mistrusted by almost everybody. Between weather forecasters and the neighborhood soothsayer, many would have chosen the crystal ball. Without the advanced technology we have now, forecasters were flying blind, and tragedy often resulted from incorrect forecasts. (Among the countless wrong forecasts was the one that led to the deaths of nearly five hundred civilians in the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935.)

Military leaders, pragmatic, strict utilitarians, were especially skeptical and allergic to any hint of waffling or uncertainty. They made their decisions in terms of “yes” and “no,” not “could be” or “maybe.” And so, Stagg and his men faced much resistance. But Allied commanders needed someone to guide them in their decisions, even if they didn’t completely trust the source.

Weather is among the most unpredictable features of life on Earth. Our existence depends on a fantastically complex system, an ever-shifting web of interrelationships, especially over stormy areas like the Northern Atlantic and Western Europe. As an illustration of the uncertainty they faced, Stagg’s three teams came up with three separate forecasts for the weather on the morning of June 5. Stagg’s, the fourth, was the most pessimistic.

Again, this is all rather complicated for a two-hour film, so the script boils the argument down from four forecasts to two. The film has Krick, a controversial figure who was General George Patton’s favorite forecaster during the 1943 Mediterranean campaign, base his prediction on the more stable patterns he found in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea along with a stubborn adherence to historical forecasts.

In reality, Stagg took multiple factors into account in making his forecast to the brass, including historical patterns. He considered weather data from all over the North Atlantic, from ships at sea to, crucially, a weather station on the coast of Northern Ireland. In contrast to Krick, he’d already had years of experience with the tumultuous weather patterns of the area. The film summarizes this issue well.

No one was partying it up when Stagg arrived at Southwick. The men were already hard at work. They needed Stagg’s leadership, dour as he was, to tie their work together and present a united front to their commanders. In no way could they present four separate forecasts to Eisenhower. They could only present him with one, right or wrong. Respecting Stagg’s rank, the other three teams got behind their captain, despite their disagreements.

While there were interpersonal squalls at first, they passed quickly, by Ross’s account. Stagg’s teams, Krick included, simply adapted to Stagg’s stern ways and “got on with it,” as the British so nicely put it. They were under plenty of pressure already. As one general half-jokingly warned Stagg: “Good luck . . . . May all your depressions be nice little ones: But remember, we’ll string you up from the nearest lamp post if you don’t read the omens right.”

Stagg did not pull rank, as the film claims, by deliberately excluding his team from a meeting with Eisenhower, as they weren’t stationed on the base anyway. He behaved professionally throughout. He likely attended the climactic meeting with the commanders all properly buttoned up, unlike in the film where his collar buttons have sprung loose to emphasize his exhaustion. As one expert in military decorum indicated to me, he likely would have been called on it.

In the end, Eisenhower relied primarily on Stagg’s experience as the deciding factor in his decision to delay the invasion for the next morning, Tuesday, June 6th. This turned out to be a close call in any event as the “good weather” was actually a lull between two storms.

While greatly improved from the day before, the weather was far from perfect, leading to a distressing number of fatal incidents: overladen soldiers drowning, newly developed floating tanks and other equipment going under as the troops struggled through the choppy surf to Omaha Beach in the face of brutal German fire. And yet, they succeeded.

Among the more curious liberties taken to heighten the drama is the role of Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s driver and personal secretary, as muse and moral support to both Stagg and Eisenhower. It’s extremely unlikely that Stagg would have contact with her, though her intense, romantic (but likely unconsummated) relationship with Eisenhower rings true.

As for the characterizations, while he’s on the short side, Anthony Scott gets James Stagg exactly right and earns our sympathy as a stiff-necked Scottish pedant devoted to his family while struggling to relate to his team. Together, they all faced enormous pressure from above, including Eisenhower who was camped out at Southwick mere yards away from Stagg and his assistant, and once popped by their quarters for an update (a potentially amusing moment that the script fails to capitalize on). Stagg was the lightning rod for his men. No wonder he was so crabby.

(A most serious man; credit: encyclopedia.ushmm.org)

Good as it is, though, Pressure stumbles badly with Brendan Fraser as Dwight Eisenhower, the weirdest casting decision I’ve seen in a while. Sure, we all like Brendan Fraser, but he’s simply unsuited for the role. At a trim 5’ 10”, Eisenhower was anything but a hulking bellowing bear. He was a much more subdued figure whose enormously winning smile and image of quiet and steely confidence played a major role in his success as supreme commander of the Allied forces. Fraser, despite an honest effort, turns him into someone unrecognizable.

No one during World War II was under pressure like Dwight D. Eisenhower, a most remarkable and admirable man who succeeded in an impossible task. The war in Europe was all on him and he shouldered his responsibilities with honor and courage.

Yet, thanks to his staid Midwestern demeanor, Eisenhower has attracted little attention from filmmakers, unlike flamboyant (and dangerous) showboats such as George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, both of whom have received epic film portraits. (His 1952 presidential campaign, the first to employ the new medium of television shows a remarkably stiff and crusty personality as seen in this campaign clip. He wouldn’t stand a chance in today’s Hollywoodized election landscape.)

Eisenhower has been played by only three other actors, two of them being a de-mustached Tom Selleck (Ike: Countdown to D-Day, 2004) and, incredibly, Robin Williams (The Butler, 2013). The third is Robert Duvall in Ike: The War Years, a 1979 TV miniseries. While I haven’t seen it, Duvall sounds like a good match for Eisenhower. (A younger Ed Harris would also have been good while others have suggested Bryan Cranston.). Fraser, unfortunately, nearly bursts the buttons on Ike’s uniform. They need to think it through next time.

Bibliography

BOOKS:

Ambrose, Stephen, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight D. Eisenhower, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Beevor, Anthony, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, Viking Press, 2009.

Ross, John, The Forecast for D-Day and the Weathermen Behind Ike’s Greatest Gamble, Lyon’s Press, 2014.

FILM/VIDEO:

D-Day Plus 20 Years — Eisenhower Returns to Normandy, CBS Reports, 1964, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNaxTXfjfXk (Highly recommended).

How a Weatherman Saved the D-Day Invasion from Catastrophe, The Operation Room, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVgmA-_UYH4

Interview with J.M. Stagg, World at War, Thames TV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7nvdgeDExI

Three Days in June: The Story of the D-Day Forecast, BBC Select https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zssv2imYR_Q

Thomas Burchfield has published short stories and articles in such publications as Mystery Tribune, Noir City magazine, and the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020). A novelist (*Butchertown and [Dragon’s Ark](http://www.blogger.com/goog_1438986906)) *and former screenwriter, he reviews movies regularly on Medium and can be found on Facebook.