This posting will chronicle one of those little, forgotten stories of the Second World War. It is one of the greatest examples that I can think of, where the old saying that ‘Truth is stranger than Fiction’, was never more true in the history of the world.

What Happened?

It is Mid-1944. The Second World War is reaching the beginning of the end. In just weeks, the Allies will make their great push towards France, blasting through Hitler’s famous line of defenses known as the “Atlantic Wall”. Spearheading the way is their mighty invasion force and their grand battle-plans, collectively known as “Operation Overlord”.

Joseph Stalin had been begging the Western allies to open up a Western front on the German war for years now, as the Red Army was being decimated by the rapidly advancing Germans. Although the Soviets had held off the Germans and forced them back from the city of Stalingrad in 1943, the Russians could not hope to take on the full force of the German war-machine on their own. To aid them, the Western powers had to divide and conquer the Germans, by splitting their forces. To do this, they had to force them to fight on two fronts at once: The Eastern Front, against the Russians, and the Western Front, against the British, American, French, Commonwealth and various free forces and resistance-groups in Europe.

Hence the necessity for Operation Overlord and all that it entailed.

The invasion was of course, a closely guarded secret. People who didn’t need to know about it were kept strictly in the dark. People who were working on it were never told what it was. And the people who knew what was going on were never allowed to tell anybody anything about it. As they say: “Loose lips sink ships”.

So…onto the Panic of 1944.

Across and Down

So closely guarded were all the aspects of the Invasion of Normandy, that it was inconceivable that anyone apart from the king, the prime minister and top military officials would know anything more about it than what the king, the prime minister and top military officials were want to tell them.

So, imagine their horror when the following chain of events took place…

May, 1944. Counter-espionage agents working for the British Security Service (more commonly known as ‘MI-5′, not, please, to be confused with the British Secret Intelligence Service…’MI-6’) could get incredibly bored on the job. Sometimes there just wasn’t anything to do around the office! So…what do you do when there’s nothing else to do? You read the newspaper.

By chance, some of the MI-5 chaps decided to have a shot at a few crosswords. After all, it was important to keep their minds sharp, and what better way than to test themselves with a few puzzles from the local papers? The papers which they had close to hand were those of the Daily Telegraph, a prominent London newspaper. Picking out the crosswords page, they started to solve the clues…

To their great alarm, the agents found that the answers to many of the clues were the codenames given to vital D-Day operations! Names such as…

‘Utah’ (Landing beach).

‘Juno’ (Landing beach).

‘Gold’ (Landing beach).

‘Sword’ (Landing beach).

‘Utah’ (Landing beach)

‘Omaha’ (Landing beach)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 22nd May, 1944.

‘Overlord’ (Codename for the Invasion)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 27th May, 1944.

‘Mulberry’ (Floating harbour)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 30th May, 1944.

‘Neptune’ (Naval support for the invasion)…appeared in Daily Telegraph, 1st June, 1944.

Unsurprisingly, these results set off alarm-bells throughout MI-5! It now seemed that a German spy was using the newspaper crosswords to send vital information back to his masters in Berlin! Or possibly to other enemy agents working in Britain! If the enemy put two-and-two together, they could piece together the entire invasion-plan!

The Crossword Culprit

Acting swiftly, but most importantly, discreetly, MI-5 agents launched an investigation. The Daily Telegraph accepted crosswords sent into it by its readers. The agents tracked down the contributor who had sent in all the crosswords with the offending answers, and traced him to the quiet (just under 10,000 inhabitants as of 2012) town of Leatherhead, in Surrey.

The man they were seeking turned out to be Leonard Dawe. Dawe was a schoolmaster. In his spare time, he kept his mind active by writing up crossword puzzles and sending them to the Daily Telegraph as a way to earn a bit of extra money. He was interrogated relentlessly by the agents who captured him, and when they asked him why he chose those particular answers for his crosswords, he indignantly asked why he shouldn’t! There wasn’t a law against words…was there?

Well alright then…The agents then asked him who had supplied him with those words! Dawe had no idea what was going on, but told the truth anyway…his students from the local schoolhouse had suggested them!

As to where they heard them from, if they did at all…that’s anybody’s guess!

Dawe was found not guilty of any charges that the agents could try to pin on him and lived out the rest of the war. He died in January, 1963 at the age of seventy-three.

An amazing case of truth really being stranger than fiction…