Lawrence Hogben

Lawrence Hogben was the first Royal Naval Instructor Officer ever to win a DSC. Subsequently, his forecasts helped persuade Eisenhower to postpone D-Day from the stormy 5 June to the more clement 6 June (an episode he recounted in the LRB in 1994).

Letter

Der Tag

26 May 1994

J.M.C. Burton (Letters, 23 June) is quite right to find excuses for the German D-Day meteorologists because Zentralwetterdienstgruppe data for the period, whose existence Burton denies and which I have examined, demonstrate that their short-range forecasts of the weather elements were reasonably accurate. But for operational success, more than this was needed – the implications of a forecast for...

Diary: Sinking the ‘Bismarck’

Lawrence Hogben, 19 April 2001

Map adapted from Ludovic Kennedy’s ‘Pursuit’ (1974).

Sixty years ago, on Sunday, 18 May 1941, Admiral Lutjens took the battleship Bismarck, the pride of the German Navy, out to sea from Gdynia in the Gulf of Danzig, along with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. His mission was to sink as many ships of the vital Atlantic convoys as possible. He hoped to skirt the Norwegian...

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