Didn’t Eisenhower pray for the weather to cooperate on D-Day?
While D-Day was obviously aided in a miraculous break in the weather, Eisenhower was known to pray before battles, and the website below did quote Eisenhower many years afterwards saying something like “that break in the weather proved there is a God.” I recalled a “National Day of Prayer” for some WWII event, it looks like I might be remembering the one about Dunkirk. From a website talking about the weather, the hand of God, and wars throughout history:
http://www.tomorrowsworld.org/cgi-bin/tw/tw-mag.cgi?category=Magazine33&item=1104261795
During two short weeks in May 1940, the Germans launched a blitzkrieg offensive that broke through French lines, defeated the Belgians and pinned a reeling British army against the ocean at Dunkirk. Several British generals said that “only a miracle” could save their beleaguered forces.
Yet with certain victory within their grasp, Hitler suddenly halted German tanks just 20 miles from Dunkirk, fearing that they were dangerously exposed and had outrun their supply lines. During this lull, a severe thunderstorm grounded German planes, allowing Allied troops to move toward Dunkirk and set up a defense perimeter.
Following a National Day of Prayer led by King George VI for the hopelessly trapped army, the British began an evacuation effort that lasted for nine days, during which the normally rough and unpredictable English Channel remained as smooth as a “mill pond.” Yet, the day after the evacuation ended, “the wind moved to the north, and giant breakers came rolling over the empty beaches” (The Miracle of Dunkirk, Lord, p. 272).
A British general recorded that “the evacuation of Dunkirk was surely a miracle” and Churchill called the evacuation of more than 330,000 soldiers (almost the entire British army) a “miracle of deliverance.” The Daily Telegraph described the thankfulness of “officers and men who have seen the hand of God delivering them from the hand of a mighty foe” (June 8, 1940). The British people knew that God had unmistakably intervened!