We Were Astonished He Was a Traitor: How a Teacher and His Crossword Puzzles Almost Doomed D-Day Before it Started

 

Fifty-four year old Leonard Dawe has worked for the Daily Telegraph of London as a crossword puzzle compiler for nearly twenty years.  

In that time, by June of 1944,  he had created over 5000 crossword puzzles.  Earlier, as a young man he served with distinction in the British Army during the First World War and also represented Great Britain as a footballer during the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm Sweden.  Up until that point, no one dared question Leonard Dawe’s patriotism or loyalty to Great Britain.   

He also worked as a Science teacher at the prestigious Strand School, a grammar school for boys, in south London a position that he has held since 1926.

But by early June of 1944, unassuming crossword puzzle compiler and school teacher Leonard Dawe, is a person of interest to Mi5, the British Intelligence Agency tasked with protecting the homefront from enemy espionage and fifth column activities.

Dawe in 1913

Only days before the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944 to liberate Nazi held Europe are launched, two plain clothes Mi5 agents in a Rolls Royce show up at the school where Dawe teaches and they arrest him.

Years later a student of Dawe’s named Tom Weston recalled that, “An official looking car showed.  I was interested so I kept watching.  After a time, I saw Mr. Dawe go off in the car with whoever it was.  We were astonished that he was a traitor.  After all, he was a member of our local golf club!”

Hours later, Dawes’ crossword puzzle compiling colleague from the Daily Telegraph, Melville Jones is also taken into custody.  Both are held, without warrant or formal charges, and subjected to intense interrogation.

British intelligence had noticed some suspicious answers over the course of the last month contained within the crossword puzzles of the Daily Telegraph.  Over the past five plus weeks codewords pertaining to the Normandy Invasion, words supposed to be known only to those directly involved in the planning and leadership of the D-Day landings, had begun to appear, seemingly at random, in the crossword puzzles attributed to Leonard Dawe and Melville Jones.

On May 2, 1944 the clue for 17 across, “One of the United States” Answer: Utah--a codename for one of the American landing beaches appeared.

Then on May 22, 1944 the clue for 3 down, “Red Indian on the Missouri”, Answer: Omaha--the codename for the other American landing beach appeared.

And most alarmingly of all, in the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle for the 27th of May 1944, only a little over a week prior to the D-Day landings, the answer to the clue for 11 across was “Overlord” the codename for the entire joint American, British and Canadian invasion to liberate Nazi occupied Europe.

Other words, representing other landing beaches like “Gold”, “Sword” and “Juno”, codewords designated for the British and Canadian landing beaches had also appeared earlier that year as answers to clues in Daily Telegraph crossword puzzles.

Compilation of Daily Telegraph Puzzles

Almost immediately, the Mi5 investigation begins to zero in specifically on Dawe, who the agents instantly recognize as a man of immense intelligence and possessing a near photographic memory.

Dawe is questioned for hours under intense pressure but the agents of Mi5 can’t reach any concrete conclusions.  On the one hand, given his high intelligence and access to publication in one of London’s most widely read newspapers Leonard Dawe seems like the perfect person for the Nazis to at least attempt to turn, or to use as some sort of espionage agent.  But on the other hand, Dawe seems so unassuming and so steadfastly honest and consistent in all of his answers, that Mi5 can’t make heads or tails of the circumstantially improbable and strange coincidence surrounding the crossword puzzle answers.

Mi5 and the American Office of Special Services or OSS, a precursor to the CIA, have cause to worry that the largest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare, an operation to save the free world from Nazi oppresion  and end the Second World War in Europe that the combined armies of the United States and the United Kingdom have been working on for nearly two years, may have been completely compromised by some seemingly innocuous newspaper crossword puzzles before it even hit the beaches.

At the beginning of 1944 a Nazi propaganda leaflet that boasted of the, “German inventive genius,” and pointed out how the black squares of one such puzzle had been used by Nazi espionage agents to spell out “V1” the acronym for one of history’s first ballistic missiles and one of Hitler’s secret wonder weapons, had been dropped into Sussex in the south of England.

V1 Rocket

Mi5 agents were aware of this earlier leaflet and upon the arrest of Leonard Dawe, mere hours before the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944 they believed they had finally gotten the man who was behind this boast of “German inventive genius”.

After days of questioning though, with no leads to go on, and nothing but circumstantial, mere coincidental evidence, the authorities are not so sure anymore.

As it turned out, Hitler and the Nazis misjudged the allied landings in Normandy.  Hitler incorrectly believed that the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944 were a merely a feint, designed to draw Nazi attention away from the Calais area, where the English channel between England and France is the most narrow, and where he along with other Nazi leadership believed an allied invasion of occupied Europe was most likely to occur.  For that reason, Hitler chose to hold back key German reserves for nearly twelve hours after the landings of June 6, 1944, and the combined American, British and Canadian assault was able to gain a foothold on the coast of France and eventually lead to allied victory in the Second World War.

Under the intense questioning by Mi5, though he fervently proclaimed his innocence and steadfastly denied taking part in any espionage activities on behalf of Nazi Germany, or any other nation for that matter, Leonard Dawe did admit that, “It was often his practice to call on students in the 6th form to come up with possible clues or words for inclusion in the puzzles.”

The 6th form in a British grammar school of the time is generally analogous to that of an American high school senior and is typically composed of boys ranging in age from 16 to 18 who are preparing for studies at the university level.

Dawe admitted that this was a practice that he had engaged in for years because the combined demands of teaching and compiling daily crosswords for the Daily Telegraph were sometimes too much for him to fulfill all on his own.

Unable to hold Dawe without any further evidence against him, with the D-Day landings having taken place and been successful and after over a week of interrogation, Dawe was released from Mi5 custody without any charges against him.

Mi5 officially stated that the appearance of top secret words pertaining to the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944 in the crossword puzzles of the Daily Telegraph in the weeks and months prior to the invasion were nothing more than a highly improbable coincidence.

British investigative agents theorized that since Surrey was home to many American military bases and high ranking officers in the early part of 1944 that the boys Dawe used for help compiling his crossword puzzles had simply overheard these words in casual conversation among the Americans and then unwittingly passed them on to their school teacher for inclusion in his daily crossword puzzles.

In fact, on the forty year anniversary of D-Day in 1984 a then property manager named Ronald French who had been a fourteen year old student at the Strand School where Leonard Dawe taught admitted that he knew all the codewords pertaining to the D-Day landings prior to the invasion and that he, “assumed there must have been hundreds of boys around Surrey who knew what he knew at the time.”

The Strand School

Though exonerated by coincidence, Leonard Dawe suffered a sense of great shame after being arrested by Mi5 for the answers that had unwittingly appeared in the crossword puzzles he created for the Daily Telegraph.  As a result of what happened he nearly lost his position as a teacher at the Strand School.

And it would take nearly a decade before the cloud of suspicion that hung over his head finally began to lift when he gave a public interview to the BBC in 1958 about his questioning by Mi5.

Does the story of the infamous Crossword Panic of 1944 end there?  Was it merely coincidence that top secret codewords assigned to the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944 appeared in daily newspaper crossword puzzles?  Was it all due to carelessly uttered words on the part of American soldiers casually overheard by British schoolboys or is there more to the whole thing?

Maybe.  It should be remembered that prior to the 1942 allied raid on the French port of Dieppe, the word “Dieppe” had appeared as an answer in another crossword puzzle in a British daily newspaper, and of course, the leaflets dropped by the Nazis that hinted at the V1 rocket cannot be discounted.

It is almost certain that by questioning Leonard Dawe, Mi5 was probably after the wrong man.   It is highly likely that the “German Inventive Genius” behind the secrets hidden in crossword puzzles remained at large for the duration of the war, but thankfully, ingenious crossword clues were not nearly enough to stop the advance of the allied armies or the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.