Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

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Charles Sebold sent me a great story:

"I was just listening to my local NPR station, and they had an interview with a lawyer (here in St. Louis) in his 90's who played a large strategic role in D-Day.  Apparently at some point the military realized they didn't know enough about the tides in the Channel (the worst tides in the world, apparently), and they asked this man, a recent Yale grad before he was drafted, to research them and write what we would now call a 'white paper' on them for the upper echelons.  He parked himself in a British library for months reading everything he could get his hands on, in English and French, about the tides.  He said in the interview that he couldn't have accomplished it without a British man, one of the librarians, that was sworn to secrecy.

Eventually they finished a 70-80 page paper, with footnotes and all, outlining the tidal problem and giving recommendations as to when to land (they advocated going in at high tide, I guess?  I was in the car when I heard this, and couldn't take notes - apparently landings like this were usually at low tide), and where.  High Command apparently liked the paper and edited it to give the beaches code names, and offered the author the post of beachmaster during the assault.  Later they decided that he was too important as a source of information, so they stashed him in an underground bunker (presumably in England) with a radio so he could direct the forces and answer questions as the assault progressed."

Listen to the interview for yourself. Thanks, Charles!

Addendum: Rafe provides a correction that the landing was at low tide.

comments < 8:05:16 PM        >

Dell picks Intel over IBM in server design. The company has dumped a deal to sell high-end Intel servers using IBM's "Summit" technology and is jointly developing a new chipset with Intel, an exec says. [CNET News.com]
comments < 8:02:29 PM        >