6 ms·

The Unsolved Mystery of the D-Day Puzzles

75 points by TrueJane 5y ago

thundrio 5y ago
Seems like statistics would help figure out if it was coincidence. What are the odds that ~6 months worth of daily crossword answers will contain 6-7 specific commonly used words?
- brk 5y ago
  From TFA it sounds like it was not coincidence at all.
  - addingnumbers 5y ago
    I'm skeptical of that Ronald French story. Wikipedia, and all the journalists recently covering the story, take all his assertions at face value and don't seem to question whether it's a simple spotlight-seeking tall tale. It seems like he told his story after everyone who could corroborate or disprove it was already dead.
    - csilverman 5y ago
      I was wondering about that. The idea that a kid could wander into a military base at the height of the war and just wander around unchallenged—and that these top-secret codenames would be bandied about by low-level soldiers—seems very odd. He did say he was wearing a uniform (albeit, I assume, a British one) and most of those soldiers were basically kids anyway, so maybe he really did just walk in there and nobody noticed. Does sound pretty wild, though.
      - Archelaos 5y ago
        > The idea that a kid could wander into a military base at the height of the war and just wander around unchallenged I grew up in a small village just a few kilometers from the Iron Curtain. At one of the heights of the cold war, during the big NATO manoeuvres in the early 80s we had often American camps next to the village. After school or during weekends we kids went to the camp every day. I remember that we secretly brought beer (as a present) to the GIs so that their officers didn't notice and that I played chess with them in their tents. So the part of the story about kids wandering around military camps sounds pretty convincing to me.
        skinkestek 5y ago
        > After school or during weekends we kids went to the camp every day. I remember that we secretly brought beer (as a present) to the GIs so that their officers didn't notice and that I played chess with them in their tents. So, now you kids today know another reason why we old timers are like we are. I didn't do exactly this, but I will admit now, 25 years later that I collected unused cartridges after military exercises and brought loads of them in my bag at the plane :-)
- fred_is_fred 5y ago
  I've thought about this some. Utah and Juno are specific place names in the United States. Would the average British person in 1944 have even known what Juno is (or where)? This not "New York City" and "Miami". Overlord is not a common word either. The others are more common in usage. Edit: missed the roman goddess not alaska town bit my fault
  - adsche 5y ago
    Juno (as the name of a Roman goddess) is a common crossword answer, as also noted in the article.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  If you do enough daily crosswords you see a lot of the same words, especially ones that have atypical placement of vowels. Omaha. Utah. Juno. Mulberry. I recall seeing "Charlie Chaplin's wife" ("Oona") almost once a month. Get yourself painted into a corner? Oona. I'd say it was selection bias.
anonymousiam 5y ago
Fortunately, the codewords themselves would have been useless to the enemy without context.
- fred_is_fred 5y ago
  The code words all being in the crossword is a sign though that you might have a serious information leak - perhaps not that the crossword was a secret message out to Germany.
- jmvoodoo 5y ago
  I imagine if you knew those were codewords likely to appear in a cypher it could certainly help with cryptanalysis.
- mike_d 5y ago
  The opposite is true, actually. Imagine dealing with thousands of incoming data streams from spies, communication intercepts, and battlefield reports without the aid of computers. You have a classic needle-in-a-haystack data discovery problem. Being able to communicate to your entire intelligence apparatus "hey send me everything you see about OMAHA or SWORD" might get you hundreds of small pieces of intel that would be too trivial to forward to command alone - but taken together could have laid out the entire battle plan.
jt2190 5y ago
An interesting bit of history. A small nit: The assertion that secrecy, i.e. absence of information was the key espionage tactic at play here is not quite right. Instead, the allies put a massive amount of effort into misinformation. Going from memory… In his book, The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan reported that the Germans knew the location, the approximate dates, and had even determined what signal would be sent to the French Resistance (a particular stanza in a poem read in a radio broadcast.) Getting higher ups in the German apparatus to believe that they had figured it all out was the main failure.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  The key piece of info was that the Germans had details of a few plans, some of which were engineered to appeal to what the Germans wanted to hear. The Normandy landing in many ways was a dumb place to land. The allies also had the benefit of experience in the Pacific. They knew that once you had a beachhead, victory was a matter of stuffing enough troops over the line and slogging through attrition. There were more American replacements than Germans.
  - mandevil 5y ago
    The US unit with the most experience in amphibious assaults in WW2 was in Europe: between Operations Hammer, Menace, Appearance, Ironclad, Jubilee, Torch, Husky, Avalanche, Accolade and Shingle by the time that Overlord came around there was an enormous amount of accumulated experience in how to do amphibious assaults without need to consult the people in the PTO. The US Army borrowed a pre-war manual from the Marine Corps, but that was about the extent of it. As for the value of attrition, it seems to me it was the Germans who chose attritional warfare not the Allies. They fought a largely attritional battle, then ran like hell the moment it turned to maneuver.
    - worik 5y ago
      My father spent a chunk of the war in the Pacific with the New Zealand forces. The Americans had a pattern: bombardment, storm beaches, fight fight fight.... The New Zealand forces used this to their advantage. When they had to take an Island they would row ashore in the night with some howitzers, sneak up the beech. They knew where their enemy camped, relative to the beech, where they were waiting for teh naval bombardment to start, then stop, whence they planned to go down to the beech and machine gun the American troops coming ashore. The New Zealand forces would already be ashore, dug in, and wake their enemy up with howitzers from the shore based dug in positions. All his life he had a contempt for American culture based on that experience. "They depend so much on technology" he would say. Yes. They (the Americans) had a lot of experience. But they were not the best.
jonshariat 5y ago
Was D-day really deemed a success? Yes we succeeded in establishing a beachhead but wasn't the human cost much higher than anticipated? I'm honestly curious and don't know, would love to read more on that topic if anyone has more info.
- SolarNet 5y ago
  I think it was seen as a success since it was the event that turned the war around and led to the eventual victory of the Allies. Sort of a vacuously true type of success, the operation might have failed to meet most of it's objectives (I don't actually know) but that doesn't really matter since it led to "winning" the war. However, of course, the truism that there are no winners in war remains. No military operation is going to have a low cost of human life, even a successful one.
- dogma1138 5y ago
  4400 dead on D-Day, total casualties, much fewer than in outright failures such market garden. Whilst without D-Day the allies would still have likely won but it quite likely would’ve involved nuking Berlin and far more massive air raids an German occupied Europe.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  D-Day failed to achieve most of its operational objectives on day 1. However, this is mostly a case of "running behind schedule" rather than outright failure; three months later, the Falaise Pocket is closed and the Germans no longer had the ability to even contain the Allies to Normandy. Concomitant with the closure of the Falaise Pocket, the Allies landed on the Gold Coast of France (Operation Dragoon), and this forced the Germans out of the rest of the France. However, for an amphibious assault, especially one against a prepared and well-fortified enemy, "not being pushed back into the sea" is by far the most important operational objective to succeed, and D-Day succeeded very much at that.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I'm a little surprised the Germans didn't direct all their V1 and V2 production at the D-Day staging areas along the British coast. I doubt it could have stopped the invasion, but would have made it much more costly.
fiftyacorn 5y ago
I'm surprised the article didn't mention but Dieppe was also in a crossword a few days before the Dieppe raid. I think it was the same crossword maker too
- ch4s3 5y ago
  > Did foreign agents plant the words there or were they a case of unbelievable coincidence? Remarkably a similar event had occurred before Dieppe in 1942. The day before the failed raid took place, the word 'Dieppe' appeared as an answer once again in the Daily Telegraph crossword.
  - fiftyacorn 5y ago
    Sorry Im on my phone and missed a bit between the ads

75 points by TrueJane 5y ago

Seems like statistics would help figure out if it was coincidence. What are the odds that ~6 months worth of daily crossword answers will contain 6-7 specific commonly used words?

brk 5y ago
From TFA it sounds like it was not coincidence at all.
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  I'm skeptical of that Ronald French story. Wikipedia, and all the journalists recently covering the story, take all his assertions at face value and don't seem to question whether it's a simple spotlight-seeking tall tale. It seems like he told his story after everyone who could corroborate or disprove it was already dead.
  - csilverman 5y ago
    I was wondering about that. The idea that a kid could wander into a military base at the height of the war and just wander around unchallenged—and that these top-secret codenames would be bandied about by low-level soldiers—seems very odd. He did say he was wearing a uniform (albeit, I assume, a British one) and most of those soldiers were basically kids anyway, so maybe he really did just walk in there and nobody noticed. Does sound pretty wild, though.
    - Archelaos 5y ago
      > The idea that a kid could wander into a military base at the height of the war and just wander around unchallenged I grew up in a small village just a few kilometers from the Iron Curtain. At one of the heights of the cold war, during the big NATO manoeuvres in the early 80s we had often American camps next to the village. After school or during weekends we kids went to the camp every day. I remember that we secretly brought beer (as a present) to the GIs so that their officers didn't notice and that I played chess with them in their tents. So the part of the story about kids wandering around military camps sounds pretty convincing to me.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        > After school or during weekends we kids went to the camp every day. I remember that we secretly brought beer (as a present) to the GIs so that their officers didn't notice and that I played chess with them in their tents. So, now you kids today know another reason why we old timers are like we are. I didn't do exactly this, but I will admit now, 25 years later that I collected unused cartridges after military exercises and brought loads of them in my bag at the plane :-)
fred_is_fred 5y ago
I've thought about this some. Utah and Juno are specific place names in the United States. Would the average British person in 1944 have even known what Juno is (or where)? This not "New York City" and "Miami". Overlord is not a common word either. The others are more common in usage. Edit: missed the roman goddess not alaska town bit my fault
- adsche 5y ago
  Juno (as the name of a Roman goddess) is a common crossword answer, as also noted in the article.
joezydeco 5y ago
If you do enough daily crosswords you see a lot of the same words, especially ones that have atypical placement of vowels. Omaha. Utah. Juno. Mulberry. I recall seeing "Charlie Chaplin's wife" ("Oona") almost once a month. Get yourself painted into a corner? Oona. I'd say it was selection bias.

anonymousiam 5y ago

Fortunately, the codewords themselves would have been useless to the enemy without context.

fred_is_fred 5y ago
The code words all being in the crossword is a sign though that you might have a serious information leak - perhaps not that the crossword was a secret message out to Germany.
jmvoodoo 5y ago
I imagine if you knew those were codewords likely to appear in a cypher it could certainly help with cryptanalysis.
mike_d 5y ago
The opposite is true, actually. Imagine dealing with thousands of incoming data streams from spies, communication intercepts, and battlefield reports without the aid of computers. You have a classic needle-in-a-haystack data discovery problem. Being able to communicate to your entire intelligence apparatus "hey send me everything you see about OMAHA or SWORD" might get you hundreds of small pieces of intel that would be too trivial to forward to command alone - but taken together could have laid out the entire battle plan.

jt2190 5y ago

An interesting bit of history. A small nit: The assertion that secrecy, i.e. absence of information was the key espionage tactic at play here is not quite right. Instead, the allies put a massive amount of effort into misinformation. Going from memory… In his book, The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan reported that the Germans knew the location, the approximate dates, and had even determined what signal would be sent to the French Resistance (a particular stanza in a poem read in a radio broadcast.) Getting higher ups in the German apparatus to believe that they had figured it all out was the main failure.

Spooky23 5y ago
The key piece of info was that the Germans had details of a few plans, some of which were engineered to appeal to what the Germans wanted to hear. The Normandy landing in many ways was a dumb place to land. The allies also had the benefit of experience in the Pacific. They knew that once you had a beachhead, victory was a matter of stuffing enough troops over the line and slogging through attrition. There were more American replacements than Germans.
- mandevil 5y ago
  The US unit with the most experience in amphibious assaults in WW2 was in Europe: between Operations Hammer, Menace, Appearance, Ironclad, Jubilee, Torch, Husky, Avalanche, Accolade and Shingle by the time that Overlord came around there was an enormous amount of accumulated experience in how to do amphibious assaults without need to consult the people in the PTO. The US Army borrowed a pre-war manual from the Marine Corps, but that was about the extent of it. As for the value of attrition, it seems to me it was the Germans who chose attritional warfare not the Allies. They fought a largely attritional battle, then ran like hell the moment it turned to maneuver.
  - worik 5y ago
    My father spent a chunk of the war in the Pacific with the New Zealand forces. The Americans had a pattern: bombardment, storm beaches, fight fight fight.... The New Zealand forces used this to their advantage. When they had to take an Island they would row ashore in the night with some howitzers, sneak up the beech. They knew where their enemy camped, relative to the beech, where they were waiting for teh naval bombardment to start, then stop, whence they planned to go down to the beech and machine gun the American troops coming ashore. The New Zealand forces would already be ashore, dug in, and wake their enemy up with howitzers from the shore based dug in positions. All his life he had a contempt for American culture based on that experience. "They depend so much on technology" he would say. Yes. They (the Americans) had a lot of experience. But they were not the best.

jonshariat 5y ago

Was D-day really deemed a success? Yes we succeeded in establishing a beachhead but wasn't the human cost much higher than anticipated? I'm honestly curious and don't know, would love to read more on that topic if anyone has more info.

SolarNet 5y ago
I think it was seen as a success since it was the event that turned the war around and led to the eventual victory of the Allies. Sort of a vacuously true type of success, the operation might have failed to meet most of it's objectives (I don't actually know) but that doesn't really matter since it led to "winning" the war. However, of course, the truism that there are no winners in war remains. No military operation is going to have a low cost of human life, even a successful one.
dogma1138 5y ago
4400 dead on D-Day, total casualties, much fewer than in outright failures such market garden. Whilst without D-Day the allies would still have likely won but it quite likely would’ve involved nuking Berlin and far more massive air raids an German occupied Europe.
jcranmer 5y ago
D-Day failed to achieve most of its operational objectives on day 1. However, this is mostly a case of "running behind schedule" rather than outright failure; three months later, the Falaise Pocket is closed and the Germans no longer had the ability to even contain the Allies to Normandy. Concomitant with the closure of the Falaise Pocket, the Allies landed on the Gold Coast of France (Operation Dragoon), and this forced the Germans out of the rest of the France. However, for an amphibious assault, especially one against a prepared and well-fortified enemy, "not being pushed back into the sea" is by far the most important operational objective to succeed, and D-Day succeeded very much at that.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I'm a little surprised the Germans didn't direct all their V1 and V2 production at the D-Day staging areas along the British coast. I doubt it could have stopped the invasion, but would have made it much more costly.

fiftyacorn 5y ago

I'm surprised the article didn't mention but Dieppe was also in a crossword a few days before the Dieppe raid. I think it was the same crossword maker too

ch4s3 5y ago
> Did foreign agents plant the words there or were they a case of unbelievable coincidence? Remarkably a similar event had occurred before Dieppe in 1942. The day before the failed raid took place, the word 'Dieppe' appeared as an answer once again in the Daily Telegraph crossword.
- fiftyacorn 5y ago
  Sorry Im on my phone and missed a bit between the ads