THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE SNAFU

Public Domain

On August 19, 1942, over 6,000 Allied troops, primarily Canadian, invaded the French coastal town of Dieppe. The attack was a total disaster, as the Germans had been forewarned, and the Canadians suffered over 60% casualties before they were able to retreat. Allied intelligence officers were shocked to discover that one of the answers in the August 17, 1942 crossword puzzle of the London Daily Telegraph was “DIEPPE.” The authorities descended on the offices of the Daily Telegraph and, after intensive interrogation, concluded that the inclusion of the term was a coincidence and that the crossword puzzle was not the source of information upon which the Nazis had relied.

Fast forward to the spring of 1944. The same newspaper had in the crossword puzzle the terms “JUNO,” “SWORD,” and “GOLD”--all code names for specific landing sites of the upcoming D-Day invasion. British Secret Service MI5 agents realized that these were all potentially legitimate answers for a crossword and did nothing other than to keep an eye on the situation. When the remaining two invasion sites (“UTAH” and “OMAHA”) appeared in the puzzle on May 3, 1944 and May 22, 1944, respectively, MI5 began to get really concerned. Finally, when the crossword puzzle yielded the code name of the entire operation (“OVERLORD”) on May 27, the code name for the floating harbors “MULBERRY”) on May 30, and the code name for the naval phase of the invasion (“NEPTUNE”) on June 1, the British Secret Service, quite understandably, freaked out.

MI5 agents located Leonard Dawe, the author of the crossword puzzles, in the town of Leatherhead and were all over him like scum on a pond. After a vigorous exchange of ideas and intense sharing of feelings, Dawe was able to convince the agents that he was not sending information to the Germans.

Nonetheless, the inclusion of the D-Day terms was, in fact, not a coincidence. Dawe's day job, when he was not writing crosswords for the London Daily Telegraph, was that of Headmaster of Strand School, which had been evacuated to the Surrey village of Effingham after the Blitz commenced. Dawe routinely asked his students to provide words to put into the puzzles, and Dawe would then write the clues. A couple of Dawe's charges enjoyed spending their free time in the company of American soldiers who were bivouacked nearby waiting for the invasion. In 1984, these students revealed that they had heard the Americans freely throw around the code words, which students then repeated to Dawe, who had no idea of their ultimate source.

While the American troops should have been more circumspect about using the code phrases, there is a reason, after all, why the terms were in code in the first place. Had the soldiers, for example, uttered the term “Normandy Invasion” instead of “Operation Overlord,” that could have been very bad.