mr. atkinson: thank you for having me here. it is good to be in atlanta and thank you, i am grateful for the conversation. i think the anxiety level is about as high as it could possibly be. put yourself in their shoes. they don't know where they are going, with few exceptions. they just referred to the destination as the far shore because they know they are probably going across the english channel somewhere but they are not sure where. they trained a lot, but in some cases they had only recently arrived in england. they are pouring into britain by the tens of thousands every week in the spring of 1944. arriving 15,000 at a time on the two queens, the queen mary and the queen elizabeth, ocean liners that could carry an entire division and outrun german submarines to make the crossing from new york to britain in five days. so i think as we get into june, they know something is happening. ships have been loaded since early may because there is a lot to get on those ships. you need 7000 combat necessities , from bazooka rockets t

mr. atkinson: i think you described it pretty well. the weather is just about as bad as it gets in the english channel and the early summer. it was an unusual storm that was blowing through. they are watching barometric pressure. they have a sophisticated weather system that has been set up and they are tracking fronts coming across the north atlantic and they know what the weather is like south of greenland and there are planes out doing the kind of weather testing that is required of the time. still, it is a fairly primitive art in 1944. you don't have satellites that we have today, and they still miss things today. the decision has been made correctly that the conditions are just too harsh for the invasion to go forward on june 5. there are certain parameters that are required. the wind can't be too high for the paratroopers, otherwise it could be catastrophic for men jumping out of airplanes with parachutes on. the waves have to be below a certain level, the seas have to be calm enough for the landing craft to go in. there are a lo