The Forecaster: The Man Who Decided D-Day | Hacker News Reader

The Forecaster: The Man Who Decided D-Day

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91 pointsedward10 comments

My grandfather was a weatherman stationed on an island in the south pacific. He almost never talked about his experiences in the war, but he once told us that he was asked to give a weather report for Hiroshima on the day the bomb was dropped. He didn't understand the significance of why they wanted the weather for Hiroshima until later. Though he did say that he and a buddy went to a hill to look over the airfield after being told that the area was restricted all of the sudden. They saw a bomber, but he said he didn't know if it was actually the Enola Gay or some sort of decoy bomber.

Its funny I was just reading Timmy Mallett, who was a morning TV host during the early-90's, tweet that his mum was Stagg's secretary during this time, ad witnessed the decision to go -

https://twitter.com/TimmyMallett/status/1136194279439831041

Another Timmy Mallett footnote is Mike Myers got his break on TV doing sketches on Timmy's saturday morning show

Fun fact - there is some disagreement as to what the "D" in D-Day stands for. It seems most people agree it's just D for Day (so Day Day, sort of like how the LA Angels translates to the the angels angels), although some people think it's short for decision.

https://time.com/5599811/d-day-meaning/

Is the way this piece presents, e.g., "D-Day -21" and "D-Day +2" historically accurate? I had always thought it was D-21 and D+2, explaining D-Day as being the D±0.

In french, we say "le jour J" (literally "the D Day") to mean "the day where the thing happens" without knowing the actual date, J is like a variable here. Then you can talk about "le jour J-1", "J-2"...

I suspected it meant Doomsday, when I was little (too much Superfriends on TV).

However, I believe it's just military lingo, as the military seems to treat acronyms and symbols as an art of functional entertainment.

https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-d-day

I was told that in addition to codifying D+1 etc that "D-Day" was also phonetically derived from the term "the day", pronounced "thee" indicating a significant day in a still somewhat ambiguous way.

As I recall it's for Day, because there's also H-hour for the time of the day to start, per Oxford Dictionaries "the time of day at which an attack, landing, or other military operation is scheduled to begin." "they assured the Marines that at H-hour the reef would be covered by five feet of water"

Pity they didn't see fit to mention Walter Munk in there. He only died in February. https://theconversation.com/hang-ten-decades-walter-munk-inv...

Short reenactment of the final decision to postpone for one day this at today's ceremonies:

https://youtu.be/mSL9NJ8WJMM?t=3808

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