Europe: The Green Winter

A light frost dappled the fields of western France. In Scotland and Nor way it snowed. Along the normally frigid beaches of the North Sea, water temperature dipped to a bone-chilling 59°, five degrees below average, and vacancy signs begged forlornly from windows of usually crowded tourist houses and pensions. From Land's End to the Moscow River, from Scandinavia to northern Italy, the story was the same — Europe's coldest, wettest, dreariest summer of the 20th century.

A steady downpour sent affluent Swedes to airline offices for reservations to distant Rhodes, Majorca and the Canary Islands. Londoners, who hoard summer sunshine for the cheerless English winter, were shortchanged with a meager 112 hours in July — 52% of normal — and gloomily settled down for the darkest summer since sunshine records were started in 1880. Resorts in Normandy reported a probable 50% drop in tourist business because of the cold and rain, and Paris recorded the coldest July in its history.

Dutch television, which regularly broadcasts only at night during the week, scheduled rainy-afternoon programs for shut-in tourists, and German resort directors hurriedly fattened concert afternoons with movies, slides, dances and quizzes. In Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, steady rains flooded the Danube and its tributaries.

As if to add a grim symmetry to the misery, the French Riviera—one of the Continent's few sunny spots—was seared by one of the worst forest fires in its history. Flames, swept on by a 60-mile-an-hour mistral from the Rhone Valley, devoured 32,000 acres of tinder-dry pine forest and sent tourists scurrying to the beaches, where a flotilla of French navy vessels and pleasure boats ferried them to safety.

Altogether, the summer of 1965 was not likely to be forgotten. As if to tease Continentals, a dazzling sun broke through the clouds at midweek—only to disappear by week's end in the accustomed gloom. For the French, the season had been un été pourri (a rotten summer). The Germans said it wasn't a summer at all—they called it "the green winter."