Crosswords and Crossed Wires

Photo: Craig Sunter

Commuters today are more likely to be seen on their phones playing Candy Crush Saga or Flappy Bird than they are to be caught tutting over 8 Down in a crossword. But in May 1944 crosswords were the morning’s pastime for millions of Britons. Which is why MI5 became particularly concerned when their top-secret codenames kept on appearing in the Telegraph’s daily puzzle.

It started innocently enough, with a few words appearing over several months’ worth of crosswords. ‘Juno’. ‘Gold’. ‘Sword’. Though it was likely noticed that the answers were also codenames for several of the beaches earmarked for the following month’s D-day landings, it seems little heed was paid. After all, back in 1942 the town of Dieppe had appeared in the same puzzle just two days before the failed raid on the region and that occurrence had been judged an unhappy coincidence.

When, a few days later, another beach was mentioned in the crossword (‘One of the U.S. (four)’ – you can work that one out) eyebrows were raised. Four more clues followed in the days leading up to D-Day. The first was another beach, two were the codenames of the operations themselves – Overlord and Neptune, and one seemingly referred to the ‘mulberry’ harbours that the Allies planned to erect upon landing on the Normandy coast.

MI5 were dispatched to investigate, and Leonard Dawe, who set the crosswords (and was also a headteacher and a former amateur footballer who had spent the 1912 Olympics on the bench for the national team) was arrested. Despite in-depth interrogations, it was decided that Dawe had not been aware of the significance of the words he chose, and that the Daily Telegraph’s crossword probably wasn’t being used as a tool for international espionage.

It was only forty years later that the truth came out for everyone to see when Ronald French, a former pupil of Dawe’s, came clean. French told of how his school, headed by Dawe, had been evacuated to Surrey during World War Two, and placed besides a large military camp. At the same time as the young schoolboys were picking up the various code-words soldiers in the camp were using, Dawe was encouraging the boys to fill in blank crossword puzzles as a school activity. A pollution of Dawe’s own crosswords, once examined with such context, seems inevitable.

The story of Leonard Dawe's suspicious crosswords features in both André Deutsch's new collector's edition of 'The Longest Day', and John Halpern's fascinating book 'The Centenary of the Crossword'. You can buy them both at the links above.

Mulberries and Gooseberries

Courtesy of US National Archives

There’s a long-standing tradition amongst Britons abroad – we are renowned for bringing with us the commodities we can’t do without but won’t have readily available. These days this might amount to a jar of Marmite, or a box of PG Tips. In 1944, the necessary commodity we took with us to France was an entire harbour. Two, in fact.

As soon as the Allies had decided to invade Normandy they were aware that they had a problem. The operation’s first two weeks alone would see some six hundred thousand troops and around ninety thousand vehicles land upon French shores, but every major port was heavily defended by German troops. It soon became apparent that the only way to accommodate so large an invasion would be to bring the ports we needed with us.

With codenames likely to get your stomach rumbling, the Allies started by sending ‘Corn Cobs’ to meet the troops landing on Normandy shores. These were block ships – large, mainly concrete boats that had been built with the sole purpose of being sunk (or ‘scuttled’).  The effect of this mass sinking was to create a number of five artificial bays, sheltered from the choppy waters of the Channel.

And it was in these bays, codenamed ‘Gooseberries’, that two ‘Mulberry’ harbours were built. Incredible structures – pontoons, piers and bridges – were dragged slowly across from England and constructed off the shores of Omaha and Gold Beaches. Within days of the D-Day invasion, fully constructed ports allowed hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers access to Normandy. Though one of the two ports would be destroyed in a storm two weeks later, Mulberry B lasted for months beyond its original intended period of usage. The audacious floating ports were the gateway to France for over two and a half million men.