CROSS WORDS And the D-Day Invasion

I would say, with apologies to Winston Churchill,  that never have so many labored so hard to obscure what was so obvious to so many as during the spring of 1944. Every school child in Europe knew that soon the allies were going to hurl themselves against the Nazi held Atlantic coast of France. 

And there were only two places with beaches close enough for unlimited air support from Britain and wide enough for major military operations - the Pa de Calais, just 20 miles across the channel, and 75 miles away, in Normandy. But it was vital the 400,000 German defenders not know which of these two spots was the eventual target, or exactly when the invasion would occur. The planned date and location of the invasion was maybe the second biggest secret of the 20^th century.

It would take 1 ½ million military personnel, and probably another 2 million civilians to prepare and launch the invasion. And 4 million people can not keep a secret. So, like a puzzle the invasion was divided into pieces, each given a code name to disguise how it fit into all the others. 

The over all plan was code named “Overlord”. 

Misinformation fed to confuse the Germans was code named “Bodyguard”.  Bombing to isolate the beaches was code named “Point Blank”. 

Naval operations were code named “Neptune”. Operation “Tonga” was the code name for the British parachute and glider attacks designed to be launched before dawn behind the beaches. 

The British beaches were “Gold” and “Sword”, the Canadian beach “Juno”, and the American beaches “Utah” and “Omaha”. 

Architectural drawings for the two floating harbors built in England and towed across the channel were code named “Mulberry”.

And the flexible gasoline pipeline to be rolled out and laid down under the channel after the invasion was named “Pluto”.

Out of the millions of documents generated for “Overlord” - the U.S. 9^th Air Force's plan for the airborne troops parachute  drop alone was 1,376 pages and weighed 10 pounds - ranged from shipping bills of lading to company rosters. Only a few hundred of these referred to the actual time and place of the invasion. But almost all of them hinted at one or both. 

Besides being stamped with “Top Secret” and "Eyes Only", the most sensitive documents also had the word “Bigot” stamped on them. Only a few hundred people with an absolute “need to know” were allowed to handle or read “Bigot” papers. Those people were given special security clearances, and were described as “Bigots or “Bigoted”.

There were, of course, slip ups. In March a U.S. sergeant accidental used “Bigot” papers as packing material for a present sent to his sister. When the package broke open in transit, workers in the Chicago Post Office were put under FBI surveillance. Some wind and an open window forced British staffers to spend two hours recovering 12 copies of a “Bigot” memo from a Whitehall street.  An abandoned briefcase containing “Bigot” papers left on a train in Southern England was turned in to the station master. The last owner of those was reduced in rank and placed under detention.  And several officers were reduced in rank and relieved for talking too much at a cocktail party . But the British domestic Military Intelligence Service - MI 5 - thought all of those leaks had been plugged.  At least until they picked up a copy of the Daily Telegraph newspaper on 2 May, 1944, a little over a month before the invasion date.

The Daily Telegraph - “The Largest, Best, and Cheapest Newspaper in the World” - started out as a penny tabloid in the 1850's.  By the 1930's it had built a circulation of almost 1 million readers by assuming its audience was intelligent, middle class and progressively conservative.  The Telegraph helped make Winston Churchill Prime Minister in May of 1940., and in late 1941 the paper printed an offer to donate £100 to charity for each person who could solve the paper's crossword puzzle in less than 12 minutes. Winners were then ordered to report as code breakers to Beletchley Park, home to the Twentieth Century's ultimate secret, the breaking of Germany's top secret code machines. 

On that Tuesday, 2 May, 1944, a “Bigoted” officer was solving the Telegraph crossword and stumbled over the clue for 17 across - “One of the U.S. (4 letters)” 

The next day the paper published the solution -  “Utah” - which happened to be the codename for one of the intended American invasion beaches (above).

It was most likely  a coincidence. Right? Well, paranoia being an occupation hazard for intelligence officers, this hyper vigilant Bigot decided to look closer.  And ominously,  a review of solutions to April's crosswords turned up more invasion beach code names - “Gold”, “Sword” and “Juno” 

Well,  gold and sword were common in all crossword puzzles, and even if Juno was unusual it was decided a full investigation might draw too much attention  So the officials kept their eye on the puzzle page. And for ten days the Telegraph crosswords were clueless, as least as far as military intelligence was concerned. 

And then on Monday, 22 May, 1944, the clue for 3 down - “Red Indian on the Missouri (5 letters) – led to the obvious solution published on Tuesday, “Omaha”. -  the other intended American invasion beach (above) code name. And now that their suspicions had been aroused, in the same puzzle the word “dives” appeared, which might refer to the Normandy river named Dives, at the eastern edge of the invasion area. And also in the puzzle there was the name “Dover” which did not have any special importance to the invasion, but which, at this point just sounded suspicious. MI 5 decided to assign two agents to investigate.

It didn't seem the newspaper itself could be responsible. The owner and editor-in-chief, William Berry, was so trusted he had briefly served as the Minister of Information. But agents learned the crosswords were written ahead of time not by a Telegraph staffer, but by a 54 year old freelance “compiler”, a legendary English amateur football player and “stern disciplinarian” headmaster of the Strand School for boys, Mr. Leonard Sydney Dawe (above). And the agents had questioned Dawe once before when his crosswords had seemed to violate security.

On Sunday, 17 August, 1942, a puzzle composed by Mister Dawe contained the clue “French Port (5 letters), with the answered confirmed on Monday, 18 August, by the word “Dieppe”. At 5:30 in the morning of Wednesday 19 August, 1942 (two days later) , 5,000 men from the 2nd Canadian infantry Division, 1,000 British Commandos and 500 U.S. Army Rangers landed on the stone beaches of the French harbor of “Dieppe” (above). Their objective was to seize and hold the port for 24 hours.

But the Nazis were waiting as if they had been forewarned. Less than 6 hours after landing the Canadians had suffered 50% causalities (above) and the surviving men had to be withdrawn. After that disaster MI 5 had interrogated Dawe for several hours, and come to the conclusion that the use of the word “Dieppe” had been “a coincidence”. But as they say in the intelligence game, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice and you are in BIG trouble.

The puzzle published on Saturday, 27 May, 1944 was the final straw. Almost as if Dawe were taunting officials one of the clues to that day's puzzle was “...some bigwig like this...”(8 letters)”, which led to the solution on Sunday, 28 May of “Overlord” - code name for the entire invasion! Leonard Dawe was arrested at the school's temporary home in Effing and brought in for questioning. As he had two years earlier, Dawe denied having any inside knowledge, and kept denying it  “They turned me inside out,” he said later. “But they eventually decided not to shoot me after all.”

Meanwhile Dawe's crosswords kept indicting him. Tuesday, 30 May the clue was “This bush is the center of nursery revolutions”. The answer, printed on Wednesday 31 May  was “Mulberry” - the code name for the floating artificial  harbors. And then on Thursday, 1 June the clue for 15 down was “Britannia and he hold the same thing.” The solution published on 2 June was “Neptune” - code name for the naval operations within Overlord. It seemed to some that disaster was certain. But shortly after that the Daily Telegraph crossword didn't matter anymore.

Just fifteen minutes into Tuesday, 6 June, 1944 the first paratroops landed on French soil. At 5:45 in the morning the Operation Neptune bombardment began. And at 6:30 troops began landing on the American beaches of Omaha (above) and Utah . An hour later the British and Canadians followed. 

By 3:00 that afternoon the first sections of a Mulberry harbor breakwater were sunk off the beaches. By nightfall, the allies had landed 156,000 men along 50 miles of Normandy coast, and penetrated up to 6 miles inland. The invasion was a success, so far..

On Wednesday, 7 June, Leonard Dawes was released by MI 5, and after reporting to the schools managing board - who were close to firing him - the first person he wanted to see was a 14 year old student named Ronald French.  Having called the boy into his office, Dawe immediately, “...asked me point blank where I had got the words from. "I told him all I knew...” And what young Mr. French knew would have sent the spooks from MI 5 into a faint.

According to Roland, the school's temporary home (they had been bombed out of their original  structure) was surrounded by Canadian and American military camps, filled with young soldiers, most no more than four or five years older than Roland, all in training for the invasion.  ”I was totally obsessed about the whole thing", Roland admitted recently. "I would play truant from school to visit the camp. I used to spend evenings with them and even whole weekends...I became a sort of dogs-body about the place, running errands and even, once, driving a tank.” 

He explained that the soldiers talked freely in front of him... "because I was obviously not a German spy. Hundreds of kids must have known what I knew.". Bryan Belfont, another  student, recalled, “The soldiers were obviously lonely...they more or less adopted us. We’d sit and chat and they’d give us chocolate.” But just how much did these children know?

“Everyone knew the outline of the invasion plan and they knew the code words”, said Roland. “Omaha and Utah were the beaches, and these men knew the names but not the locations. We all knew the nickname for the operation was Overlord....Hundreds of kids must have known what I knew.” As proof Roland showed Dawes the composition books he had filled with diary like notes. According to Roland, Mr. Dawe “was horrified and said the books must be burned at once.” And while  the book burned, Dawes lectured the boy on national security, and war time censorship. “He made me swear on the Bible I would tell no one about it.” Roland was so traumatized he stopped doing all crossword puzzles, himself.

So there was the great leak, the hole in the allied security net. Thousand of young soldiers talking to other young soldiers, overheard by even younger boys.  It was to be expected.  It was even allowed for. Knowing the code words would tell the Germans almost nothing essential. But after 6 June 1944 the invasion was no longer a great secret. Why did Leonard Dawe insist the boy swear never to reveal the details? The answer was that Dawes was protecting  his own “Butt” (1 down, 3 letters) . Because Leonard Dawes was a bit of an “ass” (1 across, 3 letters).

Dawes had created more than 5,000 crosswords for the Telegraph since 1925, and over the following decade had stumbled upon the easiest working method. He would lay out the crossword grid on a sheet of paper pinned to his wall. There were no letters or numbers in the grid, just empty squares with some blacked out for random aesthetics. And he would then invite his students to fill in the blocks, telling them it was a to improve their “mental discipline”.  In truth it was to improve his income. Dawes would then write clues to match the words provided by his 14 and 15 year old wordsmiths. In their naivety they considered him “...a man of extremely high principle.” But if the truth had come out the newspaper would have fired him for plagiary, and the school for lying.

Leonard Sydney Dawe died in January of 1963. But Roland French, like the other adolescent wordsmiths, kept his school master's secret for another two decades, finally revealing the truth in an interview in 1984. And only then did Roland French feel he could start enjoying solving crossword puzzles again.

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SOME GOD DAMNED THINGS - Called L-S-T s.

 

I don't think they even saw each other. The German sailors were shooting at blips on a primitive radar screen, and shadows in the dark. The British and Americans were just panicking, like chickens with a fox in their house. But in that confused melee on a moonless April night ten miles out in Lyme Bay off the English coast, Nazi Germany might have come within one torpedo of winning the Second World War. 

All they had to do was sink just one more of those lethargic targets waddling across their sights at ten knots, and the Allied invasion of France would have been delayed for months, perhaps forever. But how could they know that, when the vital importance of these fat clumsy ships came as a surprise even to the man who inspired their creation? A year earlier Winston Churchill had complained that “ the destinies of two great empires . . . seemed to be tied up in some god-dammed things called LST's”

The need for such a ship occurred to the British Prime Minister  in June of 1940 when 300, 000 British and French soldiers were rescued off the beaches of Dunkurque, France. The men were saved, but all their trucks and tanks and cannon had to be left behind. So, the need was simple - a vessel which could run up on a beach to directly load or disgorge heavy tanks. Of course in practice things were more complicated. 

The ship would require a shallow draft to “beach” itself, but a deep draft to remain stable while crossing the open sea. While loading and unloading it had to remain level with its stern afloat and its bow on dry land and pointing “up” the beach. Naval Architect Rowland Baker was ordered to design this floating contradiction. Luckily, he knew enough about ships to be a genius.

Like all engineering problems, the most elegant solution was the source of the problem, in this case sea water – too little or too much. Impact with the land would require the strength of a double hull, while pumping sea water between the hulls would lower the draft, making the ship more stable in the open sea. Selectively pumping that water out of compartments between the hulls would allow the ship to come inshore, while balancing level. 

All it required was a bit of plumbing, which Baker ingeniously provided. Britain managed to convert three small oil tankers to the new design (above), but their ship yards were already stretched thin. So, in October of 1941 Baker was sent to Washington on a Lend -Lease shopping spree.

The U.S. Bureau of Ships did not like the design submitted by Baker, and they assigned John Niedermair to fix it. He made the ship bigger (330 feet long), which allowed it to carry 2,100 tons of equipment, and he added a winch system to the anchor chain to help drag the ship off the beach. He even made the bow doors wider. 

In early November of 1941, Britain immediately ordered 200 of the new Landing Ship Tanks. And then in December Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and then Hitler, for some insane reason, declared war on America, as well. And suddenly the US Army and Marine Corps were  also demanding as many of these ships as possible. Two short months earlier no one had even  heard of an LST.. And that created a new problem.

The U.S. Navy went from 790 active ships in December of 1941, to  6,700 by August of 1945. There was no room in U.S. shipyards for the last minute orders for LST's for our own military, let alone the British. So the decision was to open “cornfield shipyards”, with companies like Chicago Bridge and Iron on the Sennica River in Illinois, Dravo in Pittsburgh and American Bridge in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, and the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron works in Evansville, Indiana. - all on the Ohio River, and all now building LSTs.  The economics of this was described as "Cost Plus". The Government would pay whatever it cost, plus a  profit margin. It took them six months to build the first ones, from keel to christening. That was incredibly fast for ship building, but not fast enough.

The original plan to invade France called for just three divisions in the first wave, and the only American division was to land on the beach code named Omaha. It was clear, that would not be a strong enough force to guarantee success, but with only 300 LST's  anticipated as arriving in Europe in time, they could not land more. In September of 1943 the head of the U.S. War Production Board, Donald Nelson, visited London and experienced Churchill's panic first hand.. Nelson cabled his staff that LST's were “most important single instrument of war”, and he added “the need for these ships has been grossly understated”

On 8 September, 1943 work began on LST number 507 at the Jefferson Boat and Machine Corporation in Jeffersonville, Indiana, on a bend in the Ohio River, just upstream from Evensville. Like all 117 of her sister ships built here – like the 1,000 of her sisters built in America -  the Jefferson Boat LST's were  assembled from 30,000 separate parts, and built in 3 sections, which were then welded together, mostly by women earning $1.20 and hour and working 9 hour shifts and a 54 hour work week. (Building an LST ) 

Ten weeks after beginning, LST number 507 was launched sideways into the Wabash River, and after fitting out with her deck guns, she sailed down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, where she officially joined the U.S. Navy on 10 January, 1944 - 124 days from laying keel to joining a convoy. She was just one of 62 brand new LST's that reached England that winter.

This amazing influx of LST's allowed allied planners to add two divisions to the first wave, and a second American beach on Omaha's right, this one to be named Utah.  But just inland from Utah beach, the Germans had flooded the land, leaving only two roads off the beach. 

That tactical problem could be solved, but the Americans needed someplace to practice, someplace with a tidal marsh just inland of a beach. 

And in December of 1943, three thousand British citizens were evacuated from the south coast of Devon in southwest England, around an area called Slapton Sands.

It was almost a duplicate of the topography of Utah Beach in Normandy. It was here,  in April of 1944, the allies staged Operation Tiger, a full scale live-fire practice of the landing on Utah Beach.

At 7:30 in the morning of Thursday, 27 April, 1944, 30,000 men of the U.S. 4^th division were to rush ashore on Slapton Sands from, among other ships, 300 LST's.  But a glitch had thrown off the time table for the first wave. 

The gunnery ships were half an hour late, while most of the landing craft stayed on the original schedule. The gunnery officer on the cruiser HMS Hawkins, noted, “they had a white tape line beyond which the Americans should not cross until the live firing had finished. But...they were going straight through the white tape line and getting blown up.” 

About 300 men were killed or wounded. After that “glitch”, the rest of the first day's operations went smoothly, at least until after midnight, when the follow up units were preparing to practice their part of the invasion.

It was after one in the morning of Friday 28 April, 1944^, that eight LST's were plowing broad circles at ten knots in the calm, cold waters of Lyme bay, off Slapton Sands. These eight ships carried quartermasters, engineers, and even a graves registration unit, the house-keeping support without which an army cannot fight for very long. Their crews joked that the ship's initials actually stood for “Large Slow Target” or “Large Stationary Target”. This morning they were about to be proven correct. 

Bearing down on them were nine German Schnellbootes, (fast boats), each 120 feet long, each armed with four torpedoes and cannon and machine guns and capable of 42 knots – or four times the top speed of the LST's. All of the German boats carried radar. Only one of the LST's did.

According to the official U.S. naval history, issued in 1946, “LST 507, the first attacked, was hit by several torpedoes which failed to explode, then was set afire by a direct torpedo hit which did. Another struck five minutes later. 

The enemy craft strafed the decks with machine guns, and fired on men who had jumped into the water. LST 507 began to settle.

About the same time, LST 531 was hit and set afire.

About 0210(am), LST 289 was hit by a torpedo which destroyed the crew's quarters, the rudder and the rear guns...” Amazingly, with its stern almost blown off, LST 289 was able to make it safely back to port. But after burning for two hours, LST 531 sank. Eventually a British destroyer arrived to pick up survivors, and was ordered to sink the wreckage of the pride of Jeffersonville, Indiana, LST 507. She had been in existence for six months, from birth to death. Her remains now lay 200 feet beneath Lyme bay, at 50°29′N, 2°52′W. 

The cost of that April night was 198 dead American sailors, and 551 dead American soldiers – 749 total, plus wounded. So tight was security surrounding the invasion that all survivors, the wounded and their doctors and nurses were sworn to secrecy, and many of the dead were buried in unmarked graves.

For the planners, the loss of three LST's meant that on D-Day, 6 June, 1944, there were no LST's in reserve. One more sinking would have meant a weakening of the invasion, and maybe the loss of Utah Beach. 

That was how close the German sailors came to stopping D-Day. They never knew it, of course. They never saw what kind of ships they were shooting at. On 6 June, 1944, the landings on Omaha Beach came perilously close to a disaster themselves. After losing 3,000 casualties, American troops were able to push barely 1 ½ miles inland. 

Meanwhile, on Utah, the beach added because of the rush the previous summer to produced LST's, 23,000 troops and 1,700 vehicles pushed almost 5 miles inland on the first day, at the cost of only 200 casualties.

As of 1 May,  1944, the full production of LSTs was assigned to the Pacific.  Looking back after the war, it was clear the invasion of Normandy was the product of total war -  in this case, the genius of a British design, improved by an American, implemented by the thousands of  American women who had never before had a job outside the home, and never dreamed they would build a sea going ship, who strained to build enough, to build that one ship more than was needed to give the allies a chance at victory. 

When you speak of war, any war, it is best to remember not only how many lives it costs, but also the unimagined demands it makes upon a nation. Because you can never know in advance, what God-damned thing will be vital the next time.

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