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.
Background
, Telegraphcrossword compiler, created these puzzles at his home in Leatherhead. Dawe was headmaster of Strand School, which had been evacuated to Effingham, Surrey. Next to the school was a big camp of US and Canadian troops preparing for D-Day, and security round the camp was lax. There was much contact between the schoolboys and soldiers, and soldiers' talk, including D-Day codewords, may thus have been heard and learnt by some of the schoolboys. On 18 August 1942, a day before the Dieppe raid, 'Dieppe' appeared as an answer in a Daily Telegraph crossword , 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".
D-Day alarm
In the months before D-Day the solution words 'Gold' and 'Sword' and 'Juno' appeared in Daily Telegraph crossword solutions, but they are common words in crosswords, and it was treated as coincidences. 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. The run of D-Day codewords as Daily Telegraph crossword solutions continued:
2 May 1944: 'Utah' : code name for the D-Day beach assigned to the US 4th Infantry Division. This would have been treated as another coincidence.
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 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 told publicly that the leakage of codenames was coincidence. Dawe kept his interrogation secret until he described it in a BBC interview in 1958.
Aftermath
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 Daily Telegraph crosswords set around the time of that war; none was found. 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. A fictionalised version of the story appeared in The Mountain and the Molehill in series 1 of the BBC OneScreen Oneanthology 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. Richard Denham's book Weird War Two questions the veracity of the accepted set of events. The anthology questions whether, in a country paranoid to the point of obsession in which 'careless talk costs lives', ordinary soldiers would have known the codewords for Operation Overlord and talked about them openly to schoolboys, and they would find them so compelling as to pass them on unwittingly to Dawe.
