[HN Gopher] The Unsolved Mystery of the D-Day Puzzles
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The Unsolved Mystery of the D-Day Puzzles
Author : TrueJane
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-08-30 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.history.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.history.co.uk)
| thundrio wrote:
| 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?
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Juno (as the name of a Roman goddess) is a common crossword
| answer, as also noted in the article.
| brk wrote:
| From TFA it sounds like it was not coincidence at all.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 :-)
| jonshariat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| 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.
| chris_j wrote:
| It was a success in the sense that it got the Western allies
| ashore, leading to the liberation of France a few months later
| and the end of the war in Europe the following spring.
|
| More importantly than that, it meant that Nazi Germany's
| eventual defeat, which was probably inevitable at that point
| anyway, did not come solely at the hands of the Red Army. I
| imagine the scenario that really kept Roosevelt and Churchill
| up at night was one where the Soviets defeated Germany and then
| kept going until they reached the Atlantic, with France and the
| Low Countries falling under Soviet domination the way that the
| countries of Eastern Europe ultimately did. The success of the
| D-Day landings meant that the iron curtain ran down the middle
| of Europe and not down its Western shore.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Fortunately, the codewords themselves would have been useless to
| the enemy without context.
| jmvoodoo wrote:
| I imagine if you knew those were codewords likely to appear in
| a cypher it could certainly help with cryptanalysis.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| 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.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Sorry Im on my phone and missed a bit between the ads
| jt2190 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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 failure to take armour has been blamed as a cause of
| the huge casualties the US took. However the weather was
| terrible, so it might have exacerbated the problem.
| worik wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| One I liked: Earlier in the war the British threw the Germans
| off by dumping a dead homeless man's body off the Spanish
| coast, dressed as an officer. Documents on him were designed to
| cause troop movements that benefitted the allies, and it was
| corrected anticipated that these would be shared with the
| Germans.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
| [deleted]
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > In his book, The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan reported that
| the Germans knew the location, the approximate dates
|
| A lot of the German high command was convinced that the
| landings would be at the Pas de Calais (the shortest crossing).
| The Allies did a lot to support this view, including using Gen
| Patton as the commander of the fake army that would conduct
| this crossing. Even after the Normandy landings, the Germans
| were very reluctant to commit the forces that were ready for
| the 'fake' invasion (which of course never happened).
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(page generated 2021-08-30 23:01 UTC)