Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 14, 2009
I Swear...
D-Day Crosswords, Part 2
Vic Fleming
Last week, we began a recap of some puzzling events of 65 years ago.
In early 1944, over a period of several weeks before D-Day, the United Kingdom’s “Daily Telegraph” crossword contained Juno, Gold, Sword, Utah, Omaha, Overlord, Mulberry, NEPTUNE—all code words for things or places associated with the planned D-Day invasion.
Crosswords in British papers are smaller and contain fewer words than puzzles in the U.S.. Thus, the words in point were conspicuous by military intelligence standards.
MI officers interrogated the crossword editor, a mild-mannered headmaster of what we would call a middle school.
No charges were leveled in 1944, and virtually all details remained under wraps until a re-telling of the story in 1984. It was then that Ronald French came forward and said that, as a student, he had put these military code words into the puzzles in question.
According to Val Gilbert’s account in the “Telegraph” five years ago, French said that headmaster Leonard Dawe had students fill in the blank crossword patterns as a mental discipline. Dawe then would complete the grids and write the clues.
French claimed to have heard all the words in point from Canadian and American soldiers camped close to the school, awaiting the D-Day invasion.
French “was adamant,” wrote Gilbert, “that, in the final days before the landings, the words were well known and the only thing secret was the where and when.” No doubt the wartime atmosphere and the nearness of soldiers to the school was exciting for the pupils.
French claimed to have kept notebooks of information he gleaned. Saying he was “totally obsessed about the whole thing,” French claimed even to have cut school “to visit the camp and I used to spend evenings with them and even whole weekends there, dressed in my Army cadet uniform. I became a sort of dogsbody about the place, running errands and even, once, driving a tank.”
Everyone knew the general outline of the invasion plan, French said, as well as various code language. “Omaha and Utah were the beaches they were going to. They knew the names but not the locations. We all knew the operation was called Overlord.” The soldiers talked freely in front of him, he said, “because I was obviously not a German spy.”
French said that while he did not specifically recall writing the code names into the headmaster’s puzzle grids, he did remember the aftermath. “Soon after D-Day, Dawe sent for me and asked me point blank where I had got the words from. I told him all I knew and he asked to see my notebooks. He was horrified and said the books must be burned at once. He made me swear on the Bible I would tell no one about it. I have kept that oath until now.”
But that would not be the end of it. In 1995, Gilbert received a letter from another Strand alumnus, Ken Russell, “who also spent time filling in grids for Dawe.
He recalls reading a letter in The Times in 1980 — four years before French’s confession — in which yet another old boy owned up to being the perpetrator of the code names.”
Russell wrote that he was “surprised to see a letter” from someone confessing “to being the perpetrator of the code names in the crossword, but kept quiet.”
In January of 2004, Ronald French’s son, Simon, “took up the narrative.” Simon French remembered that “the headmaster was close to losing his job as a result. Intelligence officers interrogated my father but in the end, decided it was an innocent matter.”
© 2009 Vic Fleming
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