10 Amazing Coincidences From History

In 1944, D-Day codenames started to appear as solutions in the Daily Telegraph’s crosswords.

The crosswords were created by Leonard Dawe. When not creating puzzles, Dawe was the headmaster at Strand School in Leatherhead. Next to the school was a large camp of US and Canadian troops getting ready for D-Day. The security at the camp was so lax that school boys were able to enter the camp and hang around with the soldiers. The boys overheard codenames for D-Day landing sites, and spoke about them at school.

Looking for new words for the crossword, Leonard Dawe decided to include some of these leaked codewords.

For a few months leading up to the D-Day landings, the words 'Gold', 'Sword', and 'Juno' all appeared - all secret names for landing sites. The British Secret Service put it down to coincidence but a full investigation was launched when things got more specific. 'Overlord', 'Utah', 'Neptune', 'Mulberry', 'Omaha', and 'Dieppe' all appeared as solutions, again, all codenames for different aspects of the attack.

The War Office called for an investigation and Leonard Dawe was interrogated by MI5. They concluded that Leonard had no idea he was leaking British secrets and the whole thing was put down to coincidence. Lucky lad.