A Puzzle Goes Public

Often I try to find two very different topics to write about and connect them. With various levels of success or failure. The subject of today gives me an instant and unexpected success: the first published crossword-puzzle by Arthur Wynne in the New York World, today, in 1913. Innocent as they might seem, these crossword-puzzles became a worry to the allied staff some thirty years later. More particular: just about 1 month before the D-Day invasion. At the time a series of crosswords appeared with code names such as ‘Utah’, ‘Omaha’ and ‘Overlord’ for these ever decisive and top secret operations in the London Daily Telegraph. The author of the puzzles, a schoolteacher, was arrested and interrogated. The investigators concluded that the appearance of the words was just a coincidence.

But, there’s a ‘but’: in 1984 the schoolteacher revealed that one of his students had picked up the words while hanging around the allied army camps. Which wasn’t hard to do, the UK was literally dotted with them. Having asked his students to provide unusual words as ingredients for his puzzles, this student had innocently passed them on to him. It reminds me of those posters that were hanging at every street corner by then, warning not to speak, because the enemy had ears. With a few more German puzzle addicts that invasion could have got a different ending.