“The Allies had Better Meteorologists Than the Germans"

A Review of the Film “Pressure” and an Attempt to Work Out what Professionalism is 

Boris Bondarev 

 

Among Russian-speakers in exile, an entire cottage industry has grown up on YouTube whose stock-in-trade is forecasting the imminent fall of Putin's regime — the economy about to collapse, the elites about to split, in the more lurid corners the president himself already secretly dead. Their predictions rarely come true and their audiences rarely seem to mind. A modest film about a wartime weatherman is an unlikely place to examine why — but it turns out to be a remarkably precise one.

Anthony Maras’s Pressure has arrived in cinemas — a chamber drama about the three days before the Allied landing in Normandy in June 1944. The whole of the action unfolds in Southwick House, the manor where the Allied command waits for a weather forecast in order to decide, once and for all, when and how to carry out the vast amphibious operation.

Andrew Scott plays James Stagg, chief meteorologist at the headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe. The plot fits into a single sentence: Stagg sees, in the data coming off the Atlantic, a storm bearing down on the Channel, and insists on postponing the landing set for 5 June.

Everything else is pressure. Atmospheric, but more than that, human.

General Montgomery (Damian Lewis) presses — impatient to attack, and already knowing the answer he wants: we go on the fifth, and let the weatherman bend the forecast to fit the plan. Eisenhower presses: every day of delay is a risk of a leak and of the whole operation collapsing. Colonel Irving Krick presses — Stagg’s American rival, who before the war advised Hollywood studios: he pulls matching weather charts out of the past and blithely promises his superiors exactly what they want to hear — the fifth will be clear. And finally the sheer scale of the decision presses: an error would mean either a missed window and a ruined operation, or an operation that fails at the very outset. Either way the cost of a mistake is colossal.

But Stagg does not yield. Not out of stubbornness, and not because he thinks himself infallible — simply because the data say what they say, and a professional has nothing else to stand on. The landing is put back by a day. The storm arrives exactly when Stagg expected it, and on 6 June a brief weather window opens — one the German meteorologists failed to see. Eisenhower is credited with a remark made many years later: “the Allies won the war because their meteorologists were better than the Germans”.

The film is solidly made, in the workplace-drama genre the Americans mastered long ago. But its real subject is neither the weather nor the war. It is two ways of dealing with reality, embodied in two men. Stagg moves from the data to the conclusion those data compel. Krick moves toward the conclusion his client wants. The question the film poses runs far wider than a landing on the Normandy coast: which of these two deserves to be called a professional?

Why Eisenhower listened to Stagg

It is tempting to answer: because Eisenhower was wise and Stagg was honest. A convenient answer, but an empty one.

Had Eisenhower listened to Krick and gone on the fifth, it would not have been Krick who answered for it first — it would have been “Ike” himself, before Roosevelt, Churchill and the entire Allied coalition. And so the one who pays for the mistake is the one who has to get to the bottom of the forecasts. Eisenhower cannot simply take whichever answer is the more pleasant. He needs the most realistic forecast possible.

For all that, Krick is far from a charlatan. His forecasts in North Africa came true, and Eisenhower reminds Stagg of this directly. The method of old charts works — where the weather repeats. Over North Africa it repeats. Over the Atlantic in early June it does not: there everything changes within hours, and past charts are useless.

On the other hand, however, Krick’s priority is to give the kind of answer his client will like. Which is precisely why he simply throws out of his sample June 1916, when that same region, on those same dates, had foul weather: an inconvenient chart might spoil the optimistic forecast.

The man who started keeping score

In 1984 the psychologist Philip Tetlock did to the experts what they had so carefully avoided: he began writing down their forecasts and checking which came true. For twenty years he collected predictions from 284 professionals — political scientists, economists, analysts, journalists.

He published the results in 2005. The average expert predicted the future only slightly better than chance — but, as it turned out, “average” here concealed two entirely different breeds, and the whole difference lay in them.

Tetlock divided the experts into “hedgehogs” and “foxes,” after Isaiah Berlin’s old formula. The hedgehog knows one big thing: he has a grand theory that explains everything, and he bends every fact to fit it. The fox knows many small things: she hesitates, weighs, revises her estimate when new data arrive. The foxes predicted markedly more accurately. The hedgehog is precisely Krick: the conclusion first, the supporting evidence after.

Here it is important not to draw the false conclusion that foresight is impossible altogether. It is possible — but it depends what, and over what horizon. Stagg names a specific day, 6 June, and turns out to be right: the weather three days out is predictable, because it obeys physics, and he can see the approaching front. Rain in a given area tomorrow will be forecast fairly accurately. But the more complex and “wilful” the system, the shorter the horizon and the vaguer the timing. To name the day of a military coup or an armed uprising is all but impossible — because the event itself hangs on a mass of secret decisions and accidents invisible from outside. One can only estimate a probability. What distinguishes the professional is that he knows where the zone in which concrete forecasts can be made ends, and the zone in which they cannot begins.

It also emerged that the more famous the expert, the worse he predicted. The explanation proved simple: television selects for confidence, vividness and one neatly stated idea — that is, it selects for hedgehogs. The cautious fox, with her “about sixty percent, but a lot depends on three factors,” loses the casting to the hedgehog, who knows for certain that everything will collapse by spring.

The public market for expertise, Tetlock showed, rewards precisely the qualities that kill serious forecasting. It is not that foresight is impossible — the foxes managed it, and markedly better than the rest. It is that publicity selects for hedgehogs, and the fox, with her caveats, is not invited on air.

What the audience wants

Now the question that usually goes unasked. If failed forecasts do not bring down reputations, then the audience is buying something else from the experts. What?

The answer is simpler than it seems, and it is in the film itself. Eisenhower had an interest in the most realistic forecast possible, because the success of the whole operation — and his own career — depended on it.

The viewer who switches on yet another broadcast about the regime’s inevitable collapse is not planning to decide anything. He is planning no landing operation. What he wants is intellectual entertainment and reassurance — everything is moving in the right direction, all will be well, “you just have to wait.”

A symbiosis takes shape: the audience gets consolation and permission to do nothing, and the expert gets a fame that can be converted into income.

This mechanism has a textbook example. In the autumn of 2023 the political analyst Valery Solovey announced that Putin had died — and named the date, the place, and even the manner in which the body was being kept: a freezer at the Valdai residence. “Putin is dead, dead beyond recall, he’ll stay in the freezer” — here there is not even a forecast left. This is a report of a supposedly accomplished fact: no “perhaps,” no probabilities, no “medium-term perspective.” The deceased is now stood in for by a double — a Belarusian carpenter by the name of Yevgeny Vasilyevich.

Almost three years have passed. Putin appears, speaks, travels, wages a war. One would think a categorical claim about his death ought to have ended the career of the man who made it. Instead — broadcasts, interviews, hundreds of thousands of views. Each fresh appearance by Putin does not refute the theory but feeds it: it’s the double, of course. A claim that ought to have been tested by simple comparison with reality is shielded from any test by an added theory explaining why the obvious refutation in fact refutes nothing.

And the freezer was not his debut. Before it there had been Putin’s departure “on the Yeltsin scenario,” a political crisis promised for 2019, Putin’s replacement by Medvedev in 2020.

Solovey is the most absurd example. Even those who watch him chuckle at the freezer.

But the same mechanics work in far more respectable genres. Take the two most common storylines in Russian-language analysis.

“The economy is on the brink of collapse.” Behind this forecast there usually stands an economist with real qualifications, who does indeed see in the figures what he sees: falling incomes, deficits, the running-down of reserves. But the question posed is a different one: not “will the indicators worsen” — they will — but “will worsening indicators lead to a political decision to end the war.” That is already far from economics alone. It is a question of what level of impoverishment the regime is prepared to impose on the population, and the population to endure, and no macroeconomic model holds the answer. The economist answers all the same — and answers with the same confidence he brought to the questions his discipline can actually resolve.

“The split in the elites.” Here it is the same, only in place of figures there is political-science theory. The elites do indeed split, and in many well-known cases it was precisely a split at the top that accompanied or hastened the fall of authoritarian regimes. But this method explains what has already happened rather better than it forecasts how a situation will develop — the more so with structures as opaque and closed as today’s autocracies. Can it simply be applied to any autocracy now living, without adapting it to that autocracy’s particular features? This is Krick’s approach in its purest form: what works in North Africa will (supposedly) work exactly the same way in any other region.

Withstanding the pressure

From the film it is easy to draw a narrow moral about how to tell a good expert from a bad one. But Pressure speaks of something wider — of professionalism as such, and of what happens to a person when his professional conclusion collides with the wishes of those he serves.

What marks the professional is a readiness to use his knowledge and experience honestly, to formulate the conclusion they lead him to, to explain that conclusion — and to hold to it until new data give grounds to revise it.

Far more often one meets a different type of behaviour. A person may have an excellent education, wide experience, an impeccable résumé. He genuinely knows his trade. But the moment his superiors or his client need a particular answer, he puts his knowledge in the service of that answer. The command wants to attack — so he must explain why an attack is possible. The political leadership has chosen a course — and the task reduces to finding a convincing justification for a decision already taken. A plainly impossible task has been set — and the officer reports that work is under way, the difficulties are surmountable, and all that is needed is a little more time.

A justification can always be found: “We’re small people. The decision was made at the top. We’re under pressure. If not me, they’ll find someone else. My job is not to argue but to carry out. They know better up there. The bosses know best. They have a plan.”

As another fine workplace drama — Thirteen Days (2000) — puts it, there is something immoral about abandoning one’s own judgment. 

Whoever has done that ceases to be a professional. And it is not only a matter of the quality of the work. Professionalism is also self-respect: a person who betrays his own conclusion and his own reasoned opinion, again and again, to please his superiors, ceases to respect himself, however his rank and salary may climb. Either you are the author of your own conclusion, or you are the executor of another’s wishes, going against your own views merely to oblige. For the one who chooses the second, knowledge is no salvation: it stays with him, but it now serves not to see reality but to make it easier for the boss to turn away from it.

A professional is needed by a state, an army, a company or any other complex organisation above all in order to see what the leadership does not see or does not wish to see, and to say so clearly enough. At times his entire professional work comes down to a few deeply unwelcome sentences: this task cannot be done; this plan rests on false premises; the chosen course leads to the opposite result; the decision must be reconsidered.

Holding such a position can, of course, come dear. One may spoil relations with the leadership, earn a reputation as a difficult man, lose a promotion or a post, be squeezed out of the profession. In some systems the price is considerably higher — up to persecution and repression. In any case one must, again and again, defend one’s conclusion before people who outrank you and who are waiting to hear something pleasant. James Stagg withstands all of it — and does not retreat.

This is what the word “professional” means. Knowledge alone does not make a professional if, at the decisive moment, the person tailors the picture to the desired result. The official who thinks the policy being pursued mistaken and harmful, yet obediently justifies it; the officer who thinks the order impossible, yet reports his readiness; the expert who dresses a decision already taken “at the top” in the language of expertise — all of them remain educated and experienced people. They cease to be professionals.

The film is worth seeing, if only to watch what a person looks like who does not sell his superiors hope and does not tailor his knowledge to the order, but does the very thing a professional is for: says what he holds to be true, even when what is wanted from him is something else entirely.