Leaders ignore the weather at their peril

Weather forecasters rarely feature among the heroes of history. So it was good to hear that James Stagg, who persuaded General Eisenhower to postpone D-Day in June 1944, has received an unusual honour, having been included on the Met Office’s list of future storm names.
When Storm James strikes, then, we should spare a thought for the meteorologist whose forecast meant the Allies avoided the heavy clouds and roiling seas that would have meant disaster.
It’s no wonder Eisenhower placed so much store by Stagg’s forecasts. As a cadet at West Point, Eisenhower had been obsessed by history, devouring books about Greece, Rome and the campaigns of Napoleon. So he knew how much the weather matters, especially at sea.
He undoubtedly remembered, for example, that in 1588 the Spanish Armada had been destroyed by an Atlantic storm that wrecked 28 ships and killed about 5,000 sailors. Similarly, he must have known of the gales that had blighted Xerxes’s invasion of Greece, provoking the Persian king to have the waters of the Hellespont “whipped with three hundred lashes”. And with his countrymen fighting in the Pacific, Eisenhower was surely aware of the two storms that had saved Japan from invasion in 1274 and 1281, when Kublai Khan’s Mongol admirals were planning the largest amphibious landings in history. Later, the Japanese talked of the “divine winds”, or kamikaze: hence the nickname they gave their bravest pilots.
On land, too, generals have always known that a change in the weather could mean the difference between life and death. Heavy rain had been falling for days before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and as Henry V’s outnumbered archers prepared to face the French, most were thoroughly soaked. But the conditions worked in Henry’s favour. As the French vanguard launched their attack, the sodden ground quickly became a quagmire. The next wave of Frenchmen slipped and fell in the sludge and as the arrows rained down, many died where they lay, literally drowning in mud.
At least the French could see what they were doing, which was a fatal problem for the Lancastrians a generation later. At the Battle of Barnet in April 1471, Warwick the Kingmaker looked forward to a crushing victory over his Yorkist adversary Edward IV. But even though Warwick had a heavy numerical advantage, the weather gods were against him. As the fighting began, a thick fog fell over the battlefield and some of Warwick’s troops completely lost their bearings. In the mist they mistook the star badge of his ally, the Earl of Oxford, for Edward’s badge, a sun in splendour. As confusion turned to panic, the Lancastrians turned on one another, before their discipline cracked and thousands fled the field. Somewhere in the gloom, Warwick was struck down and that was the end of that.
Indeed, not even the most formidable commander can defy the elements. When Charles XII of Sweden invaded Russia in early 1708 he was the most brilliant captain of the age, renowned across Europe for his dash and vigour. But his timing was horrendous. The next winter was the coldest for five centuries, with the Thames, the Seine and even Venice’s canals frozen solid. “People are dying of the cold like flies,” wrote one German princess. “The windmill sails are dying in their sockets, no corn can be ground and thus many people are dying of starvation.”
As the snow drifted relentlessly down, some 3,000 Swedish soldiers froze to death, while thousands more lost fingers and toes to frostbite. “Earth, sky and air,” remembered one of Charles’s officers, “were now against us.”
By the time they met Peter the Great’s army at Poltava, now in Ukraine, Charles’s men were in a wretched state and the result was a catastrophe. So the golden age of the Swedish Empire ended and the rise of Russia began. But with a fairer wind and a little sunshine, things might have been very different.
What about life beyond the battlefield? Here too the weather has always mattered. In his titanic book Global Crisis, the historian Geoffrey Parker blames the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures dipped by about 1C, for the political turbulence of the 17th century, an age of famines, witch-hunts, cults and civil wars.
Even the defining political episode of the modern age, the French Revolution, was a story about the weather, since Louis XVI might have coped with his financial problems had it not been for a freak hailstorm in the summer of 1788. As the historian Robert Darnton writes: “The stones broke windows, smashed tiles on roofs, razed fields, destroyed vineyards, stripped bare fruit trees, struck horses dead and even killed some peasants who were preparing to harvest what had promised to be an excellent crop of wheat.”
Crucially, the storm annihilated France’s grain supply for the next 12 months. Then came an equally punishing winter, in which the Seine froze, the temperature dropped to minus 23C and snow fell every other day until mid-April. As millions went hungry, the price of bread rose and rose. On July 14 it reached its peak, almost double the pre-storm level, triggering outrage in the Paris markets. That afternoon crowds broke into the Bastille — and with that, the revolution was under way.
What about British politics? Well, if Sir Keir Starmer is ever tempted to ignore the weather forecast, he should reflect on the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79, when crippling public sector strikes were exacerbated by pouring rain and driving snow.
The strikes were always bound to be a dreadful setback for Jim Callaghan’s Labour government. But coupled with freezing temperatures, burst pipes, blocked roads and cancelled trains, they became a generational political disaster.
“The country was paralysed again this morning,” Callaghan’s policy chief, Bernard Donoughue, recorded in early 1979. “It took me two hours to get to work, walking much of the way through beleaguered London … It was a nightmare.”
Would his boss still have lost that spring’s election if the trains had been running? Would anybody remember Margaret Thatcher today if the snow had stopped falling? Probably, but as every weather forecaster knows, you can never be entirely certain.