"The biggest thing in my life was getting the troops ashore successfully," says Charles C. Bates, 87, a retired oceanographer whose calculations helped identify a safe window for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. Bates now lives with his wife, Bartie, in Green Valley. Bates still undertakes writing projects and works here on a vintage typewriter.

chris coduto / arizona daily star

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By June 6, 1944, 1st Lt. Charles C. Bates had evaluated dozens of charts and diagrams, had compared weather forecasts from different spots of the English Channel and had spent hours at the shore watching the waves roll in.

As a member of the Army in World War II, he specialized in oceanography, forecasting and analyzing sea, surf and swell conditions.

Around 3 a.m. that day, he entered the underground war room at the Admiralty Forecast Center in the London Citadel and saw British captains and commanders jumping around like teenagers. He knew then his work had paid off.

Bates and a handful of others predicted a small window of good weather that led to the successful invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

"The biggest thing in my life was getting the troops ashore successfully," recalled Bates, 87, who now lives with his wife, Bartie, in a Green Valley retirement community. "There were hundreds of thousands of lives at stake. We needed every hour."

Born on a dairy farm in northern Illinois, Bates was fascinated by both science and working outdoors. After earning a bachelor's degree in geology from DePauw University in Indiana, he worked as a trainee for the company now called Exxon, where he later helped design the first oil platform off the coast of Louisiana.

In 1941 Bates was drafted into the U.S. Army field artillery, where he earned $21 a month.

When the invasion drew closer, the military sent him to earn a master's degree from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Soon after, he was headed for England.

Looking back, Bates said he did not plan to spend a large part of his career in the armed forces. One after the other, he digs up and sifts through drawings, maps and notes that show background details of events others only read about in history books.

"I bounced around," he said. "I like starting things."

In the Army, Bates was shipped to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, China and the Philippines. In 1946 he forecast for the Navy the effects of the atomic bomb on water quality — its contamination and how it spread at the Bikini Atoll nuclear testing sites in the Pacific Ocean.

After five years of work in the Army, he wanted to go home — he was in a hurry and didn't wait to see the bombs blow up. Bartie was about to have their first daughter. The first one of three.

Bates kept working his way up to become deputy director of oceanography for the Navy in Maryland, while at the same time he had a flourishing off-shore forecasting business for oil companies. He worked at the Pentagon, took the first steps into space oceanography with NASA and was science advisor for the Coast Guard.

Walter Munk, an award-winning oceanographer and long-time friend of Bates, who is professor emeritus of geophysics at the Scripps Institution, said Bates has "a lot of drive."

"He pioneered wave prediction for the benefit of the oil industry," Munk, 88, wrote in an e-mail. "His work during WWII saved a lot of lives of young people. Nothing can be more important."

During his career, Bates restlessly crisscrossed the world and was sometimes away from his family for months at a time.

"That's the price you pay for being married to a sailor," he said about his endeavors. "A sailor is gone a lot and I was in the ocean business."

But in 1979 Bartie was the one who had to leave. Her health couldn't take the damp climate of Washington D.C., and the couple bought a home in the dry heat of Green Valley.

The move here has not muted Bates' voice in the science community.

He has co-authored three books and self-published his own in January, titled "HYDRO to NAVOCEANO: 175 Years of Ocean Survey and Prediction by the U.S. Navy."

On Aug. 21, a South Korean camera team flew in to interview him as part of a two-hour series on ocean wave predictability. He liked the idea and hopes it will be translated into English.

At 87, Bates said he is slowing down, but far from putting his work to rest.

"You do one thing at a time and you do the best," he said, looking back at his life and career. "And then usually there is something else that needs to be done."

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