In partnership with STUDIOCANAL and the Met Office, Imperial War Museums (IWM) will unveil a display of never-before and rarely seen collection items onboard the D-Day veteran ship, HMS Belfast, delving deeper into the true events behind Pressure, the new blockbuster film starring Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon and Damian Lewis.
Through fascinating objects and documents from the IWM and the Met Office archives, the display will explore how a range of disparate conditions – from the moon and tides to the wind direction and cloud cover – had to be in almost perfect alignment to ensure the long-awaited invasion of western Europe was successful.
On display for the first time will be a helmet worn by Sergeant Floyd Jakob ‘Bud’ Corrington, a member of the American 101st Airborne Division (made famous by ‘Band of Brothers’), who was tragically killed on D-Day. Other objects include a pocket watch used to time the naval artillery barrage from a ship off the Normandy coast – a bombardment that HMS Belfast itself took part in as the flagship of the bombardment supporting British and Canadian troops at Gold and Juno beaches on 6 June, and one of the first ships to open fire.
morning of D-Day 6 June 1944
Sergeant Floyd Jakob Corrington of the
101st Airborne Division
Historic documents, on loan from the Met Office National Meteorological Library and Archive, will appear alongside IWM items including Group Captain James Stagg’s personal diary covering the critical 72-hour period conveyed in Pressure. After advising Eisenhower to call off the invasion originally planned for 5 June, Stagg confides on these pages he is “getting rather stunned – it is all a nightmare”. The display will also showcase the original so-called ‘God of War memo’ on which Eisenhower scrawled a note to Stagg on the weather report he produced for 19 June (one of the only possible alternative dates for D-Day) thanking “the Gods of war that we went when we did”. This later date would see a once-in-a-generation storm hit the Normandy coastline.
IWM’s Head of Public History, Dr James Bulgin, commented: “It’s always fascinated me that even in a period of history as familiar as D-Day, there are pivotal details that remain little known. Stagg, and the forecasters he worked alongside, had a seismic impact on the way that the invasion – and ultimately the overall course of the war – unfolded, and yet they have been largely forgotten. Pressure does a fantastic job of bringing these individuals, and the compelling story that they were at the centre of, from the shadows and into the spotlight. Through this new display on HMS Belfast, we hope to deepen peoples understanding of how critical the unpredictable and uncontrollable forces of nature were in relation to the outcome of D-Day by showcasing incredible objects and documents from within IWM’s vast collection which haven’t been publicly displayed before.”
Pressure: The D-Day Decision, will open to visitors on HMS Belfast from 21 August 2026 – 11 April 2027.
Booking and full details: https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/pressure-the-d-day-decision
