Sneaky's Daily Did You Know....? What a Coincidence

The Allied preparations for D-Day in 1944 were nearly wrecked by the Daily Telegraph crossword. The code name for D-Day was "Operation Overlord" and each stage had its individual code name.

Neptune was the naval initiative, Omaha and Utah were the code names for two French beached where landings were to take place, and Mulberry was the secret name for the artificial harbours to be used for supplies.

Just over a month before the planned invasion date, these answers began to appear as answers in the Telegraph crossword puzzle. Security forces descended on the Telegraph office expecting to find a German spy.

Instead they found bewildered school teacher Leonard Dawe, the man who had compiled the papers crosswords for 20 years. The fact that the answers to five of his clues had matched the carefully guarded code names had been a pure coincidence.