 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(June 2019) |
In 1944, codenames related to the D-Day plans appeared as solutions in crosswords in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph , which the British Secret Services initially suspected to be a form of espionage.
Leonard Dawe, Telegraph crossword compiler, created these puzzles at his home in Leatherhead. Dawe was headmaster of Strand School, which had been evacuated to Effingham, Surrey. Adjacent to the school was a large camp of US and Canadian troops preparing for D-Day, and as security around the camp was lax, there was unrestricted contact between the schoolboys and soldiers. Some of the soldiers' chatter, including D-Day codewords, may thus have been heard and learnt by some of the schoolboys.
Dawe had developed a habit of saving his crossword-compiling work time by calling boys into his study to fill crossword blanks with words; afterwards Dawe would provide clues for those words. As a result, war-related words including those codenames got into the crosswords; Dawe said later that at the time he did not know that these words were military codewords.
On 18 August 1942, a day before the Dieppe raid, 'Dieppe' appeared as an answer in The Daily Telegraph crossword (set on 17 August 1942) (clued "French port"), causing a security alarm. The War Office suspected that the crossword had been used to pass intelligence to the enemy and called upon Lord Tweedsmuir, then a senior intelligence officer attached to the Canadian Army, to investigate the crossword. Tweedsmuir, the son of author John Buchan, later commented: "We noticed that the crossword contained the word "Dieppe", and there was an immediate and exhaustive inquiry which also involved MI5. But in the end it was concluded that it was just a remarkable coincidence – a complete fluke". [1]
In the months before D-Day the solution words 'Gold' and 'Sword' (codenames for the two D-Day beaches assigned to the British) and 'Juno' (codename for the D-Day beach assigned to Canada) appeared in The Daily Telegraph crossword solutions, but they are common words in crosswords, and were treated as coincidences. The run of D-Day codewords as The Daily Telegraph crossword solutions continued:
MI5 became involved and arrested Dawe and a senior colleague, crossword compiler Melville Jones. Both were interrogated intensively, but it was decided that they were innocent, although Dawe nearly lost his job as a headmaster. Afterwards, Dawe asked at least one of the boys (Ronald French) where he had got these codewords from, and he was alarmed at the contents of the boy's notebook. He gave him a severe reprimand about secrecy and national security during wartime, ordered the notebook to be burnt, and ordered the boy to swear secrecy on the Bible. It was announced publicly that the leakage of codenames was a coincidence. Dawe kept his interrogation secret until he described it in a BBC interview in 1958.
In 1984, the approach of the 40th anniversary of D-Day reminded people of the crossword incident, causing a check for any codewords related to the 1982 Falklands War in The Daily Telegraph crosswords set around the time of that war; none were found. [2] That induced Ronald French, then a property manager in Wolverhampton, to come forward to say that in 1944, when he was a 14-year-old at the Strand School, he inserted D-Day codenames into crosswords. He believed that hundreds of children must have known what he knew. [3] [4]
A fictionalised version of the story appeared in The Mountain and the Molehill in series 1 of the BBC One Screen One anthology series, first broadcast on 15 October 1989. Written by David Reid and directed by Moira Armstrong, it starred Michael Gough as Mr Maggs, a school headmaster based on Dawe. Another fictionalised version appeared in the Norwegian children's book Kodeord Overlord(Codeword Overlord), written by Tor Arve Røssland and published by Vigmostad&Bjørke publishing house in 2019, whose main character is also based on Dawe.
Juan Pujol García, also known as Joan Pujol i García, was a Spanish spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for the Germans. He was given the codename Garbo by the British; their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as "Arabal".
A crossword is a word game consisting of a grid of black and white squares, into which solvers enter words or phrases ("entries") crossing each other horizontally ("across") and vertically ("down") according to a set of clues. Each white square is typically filled with one letter, while the black squares are used to separate entries. The first white square in each entry is typically numbered to correspond to its clue.
A cryptic crossword is a crossword puzzle in which each clue is a word puzzle. Cryptic crosswords are particularly popular in the United Kingdom, where they originated, as well as Ireland, the Netherlands, and in several Commonwealth nations, including Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malta, New Zealand, and South Africa. Compilers of cryptic crosswords are commonly called setters in the UK and constructors in the US. Particularly in the UK, a distinction may be made between cryptics and quick crosswords, and sometimes two sets of clues are given for a single puzzle grid.
The Normandy landings were the landing operations and associated airborne operations on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, it is the largest seaborne invasion in history. The operation began the liberation of France, and the rest of Western Europe, and laid the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front.
Mulberry harbours were two temporary portable harbours developed by the British Admiralty and War Office during the Second World War to facilitate the rapid offloading of cargo onto beaches during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Designed in 1942 and then built in under a year in great secrecy, within hours of the Allies successfully creating beachheads following D-Day, sections of the two prefabricated harbours and old ships, to be sunk to create breakwaters, were being towed across the English Channel from southern England and placed in position off Omaha Beach and Gold Beach.
Operation Jubilee or the Dieppe Raid was a disastrous Allied amphibious attack on the German-occupied port of Dieppe in northern France, during the Second World War. Over 6,050 infantry, predominantly Canadian, supported by a regiment of tanks, were put ashore from a naval force operating under protection of Royal Air Force (RAF) fighters.
John Galbraith Graham MBE was a British crossword compiler, best known as Araucaria of The Guardian. He was also, like his father Eric Graham, a Church of England priest.
Final Conflict are a British neo-prog band based in Staffordshire.
Operation Overlord was the codename for the Battle of Normandy, the Allied operation that launched the successful liberation of German-occupied Western Europe during World War II. The operation was launched on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) with the Normandy landings. A 1,200-plane airborne assault preceded an amphibious assault involving more than 5,000 vessels. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on 6 June, and more than two million Allied troops were in France by the end of August.
The New York Times Crossword is a daily American-style crossword puzzle published in The New York Times as part of The New York Times Games, online on the newspaper's website, syndicated to more than 300 other newspapers and journals, and on mobile apps.
Derrick Somerset Macnutt (1902–1971) was a British crossword compiler who provided crosswords for The Observer newspaper under the pseudonym Ximenes. His main oeuvre was blocked-grid and "specialty" puzzles. Even though he only provided conventional blocked puzzles once a week for the Observer Everyman series for about two years his strong views on clueing, expressed in his 1966 book, have been a source of debate in the cryptic crossword world ever since.
John Derek Crozier, under the pseudonym "Crosaire", was the compiler of the cryptic crossword in The Irish Times from its inception in 1943 until the year after his death. It was formally named "The Irish Times Crossword", as opposed to the non-cryptic "Simplex crossword" which was published alongside it from 1951. As Crozier was the sole cryptic compiler for 68 years, the crossword itself became known as "the Crosaire" by metonymy. The pseudonym "Crosaire" is a play on his own surname and crosaire, the Irish for "crossroad". After Crozier's death, The Irish Times formally renamed its cryptic crossword in his honour.
Roger Squires was a British crossword compiler/setter, who lived in Ironbridge, Shropshire. He was best known for being the world's most prolific compiler. He compiled under the pseudonym Rufus in The Guardian, Dante in The Financial Times and was the Monday setter for the Daily Telegraph.
William James de L'Aigle Buchan, 3rd Baron Tweedsmuir, also known as William Tweedsmuir, was an English peer and author of novels, short stories, memoirs and verse. He was the second son of the writer and Governor General of Canada, John Buchan.
Leonard Sydney Dawe was an English amateur footballer who played in the Southern League for Southampton between 1912 and 1913, and made one appearance for the England national amateur football team in 1912. He later became a schoolteacher and crossword compiler for The Daily Telegraph newspaper and in 1944 was interrogated on suspicion of espionage in the run-up to the D-Day landings.
Nathalie "Lily" Sergueiew was a double agent who worked for MI5 during World War II under the codename "Treasure". She played a significant role in the Double-Cross System, particularly by deceiving the Germans about the location of the D-Day landings.
John Halpern is a cryptic crossword compiler for newspapers including The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, the Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times.
British logistics played a key role in the success of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France in June 1944. The objective of the campaign was to secure a lodgement on the mainland of Europe for further operations. The Allies had to land sufficient forces to overcome the initial opposition and build them up faster than the Germans could respond. Planning for this operation had begun in 1942. The Anglo-Canadian force, the 21st Army Group, consisted of the British Second Army and Canadian First Army. Between them, they had six armoured divisions, ten infantry divisions, two airborne divisions, nine independent armoured brigades and two commando brigades. Logistical units included six supply unit headquarters, 25 Base Supply Depots (BSDs), 83 Detail Issue Depots (DIDs), 25 field bakeries, 14 field butcheries and 18 port detachments. The army group was supported over the beaches and through the Mulberry artificial port specially constructed for the purpose.
American logistics played a key role in the success of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northwest Europe during World War II. The campaign officially commenced on D-Day, 6 June 1944, and ended on 24 July, the day before the launch of Operation Cobra. The Services of Supply (SOS) was formed under the command of Major General John C. H. Lee in May 1942 to provide logistical support to the European Theater of Operations, United States Army. From February 1944 on, the SOS was increasingly referred to as the Communications Zone (COMZ). Between May 1942 and May 1944, Operation Bolero, the buildup of American troops and supplies in the UK, proceeded fitfully and by June 1944 1,526,965 US troops were in the UK, of whom 459,511 were part of the COMZ.
Nuala Considine was an Irish woman considered to be the world's most prolific crossword compiler. She produced crossword puzzles for newspapers and magazines across Europe and the United States, including The Irish Times, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Financial Times, Woman's Realm, The Washington Post and New Scientist. Her first crossword was published when she was 18, and she continued to produce them by hand until shortly before her death, aged 90. She used the noms de plume Excalibur and Alaun to create cryptic puzzles with names such as The Toughie and The Stinker.