Surf Forecasting for Invasions during World War II

In July, 1942, John Crowell joined the US Army Air Corps as a cadet to become a weather officer and was sent to UCLA and the University of Chicago for training in meteorology, studied oceanographic meteorology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, and was sent to England in October to work on wave forecasting for the planned Allied Invasion of Normandy. With two other officers he forecast surf conditions on the landing sites until December 1944. In early 1945 he was based in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) visiting sites for wave observation stations around the Bay of Bengal for the May invasion of Burma (Myanmar). After leading a US Army convoy across the Ledo-Burma Road from India into China, he was working on the forthcoming invasion of Japan based at Manila, Philippines, when the war ended.