The Crossword Panic of '44

     The element of surprise can be one of the greatest advantages a military force has when facing a battle. While they were planning for D-Day during World War II, the allies jealously guarded any and all information about the then upcoming invasion, and any suspected leaks were swiftly investigated and dealt with. Even a major-general was not immune to the secrecy fervor when he was demoted and sent home for merely speculating about what date the invasion was going to happen while he was at a cocktail party. With this in mind, it can be reasonably understood that the spies at MI5, the British internal counter intelligence and security agency, became more than a little worried when key code names for different aspects of the invasion began to appear in The Daily Telegraphs crossword puzzle.
     In the months before May of 1944 the codewords for the beaches assigned to the British (Juno, Gold, and Sword) appeared in the crossword but drew no major attention, as they were relatively common words. However, as the planned day of the invasion, June 5th, drew closer, more and more codewords started to appear. On May 3rd, one of the answers was Utah, the beach assigned to the 4th U.S. Assault Division. Next came Omaha on the 22nd, the beach assigned to the 1st U.S. Assault Division. Then on the 27th, the codename for the entire operation, Overlord, appeared, and was then followed by Mulberry, then codename given to specially constructed floating harbors, on the 30th. Finally, on June 1st, four days before the invasion was to occur, Neptune, which was the codeword for the naval assault appeared in the puzzle. While to the casual observer, this may just seem like it was an amazing fluke, MI5 had reason to worry. This wasn't the first time that the crossword puzzle had drawn their attention.
     Two years previously, the crossword had been investigated after a failed battle on the French port of Dieppe . A day before the raid took place, the name of the town appeared as one of the answers in the crossword. The puzzle makers were eventually cleared, with the whole incident being written off as a strange coincidence. However, with the emergence of seemingly classified data appearing again in the same papers crossword puzzle, it is no wonder that MI5 was a little on edge.
     In response to seeing the codewords, MI5 sent two men to question the man who had made the puzzles, a school headmaster by the name of Leonard Dawe. After some time was spent talking to Dawe, the investigators could find no evidence that Dawe was a spy. The concluded that the appearance of the code words was another coincidence similar to the Dieppe incident. But, unlike the earlier puzzle, there is more to the story of the D-Day crosswords.
     In 1984, when a story about the D-Day crosswords was published, Ronald French, a man who had been a student at Dawe's school at the time came forward to solve the mystery of how the codewords came to be in the puzzle. As it turns out, Dawe had a habit of calling upon the children at his school to supply him with words to use and to help him create some of the crossword puzzles. As American and Canadian soldiers were camped near the school, preparing for D-Day, many of the students overheard the codewords being used on an almost daily basis. French recalled that while many of the children there knew of the codewords, they didn't know what they meant. Also, while he could not remember if he was the one who supplied the codewords or not, French clearly remembered being called to Dawe's office and being made to swear on the Bible that he wouldn't tell a soul about anything he knew. The only reason French felt safe coming forward then was that it had been thirty some odd years after it had happened.
     The generation that fought in World War II has been called the greatest generation. The fact that they could keep something as big as D-Day secret for as long as they did, makes me want to believe that claim. I have a hard time believing the only the code names for something that big would leak out in our day. Between twitter, facebook, and the 24 hour news cycle that we live under, it is a minor miracle that we keep any thing secret anymore.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0206/feature1/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1460892/D-Day-crosswords-are-still-a-few-clues-short-of-a-solution.html
http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Crossword-Panic-of-1944/