London Daily Mail crossword puzzle and D-Day

Dear Mr. Alice: I love crossword puzzles. Someone once told me they were invented during World War II to send coded messages. I think that’s wrong, but I don’t know the real origin. Can you help? — One Across, University City

You’re right, it’s wrong. But I do know where the misinformation came from. Word puzzles and other verbal brain-twisters go back as far as the history of written language. Even the walls of ancient Rome and Pompeii contain word-puzzle graffiti. Newspapers in the 1800s published rebuses and anagrams for their readers’ amusement, but the crossword puzzle didn’t come along until 1913, when the puzzle editor of the New York World devised what he called the “Word-Cross.” Much to his typesetter’s dismay, it was an instant hit.

Crosswords crossed paths with the modern urban legend shortly before the Normandy Invasion of WWII. The situation was so coincidental that it even had British intelligence on high alert, scrutinizing the staff of the London Daily Mail for spies. Five puzzles published in that paper during the month before D-Day contained solutions that happened to be code words associated with the planned invasion. First came “Utah” and “Omaha,” code names for the beaches involved in the operation. Next came “overlord” (code name for the entire D-Day operation) and “mulberry” (a strategic harbor). By the time the code name for the naval operations (“Neptune”) appeared, seven days before the invasion, British code-crackers were beside themselves. Military intelligence dispatched an officer to the home of the Daily Mail's hapless puzzle editor and sweated him for a few days until they were convinced it was all just a merry mixup.