24.5.2009

Achtung Pearl Harbor!

    

    Achtung Pearl Harbor!

http://www.netsaga.is/media/files/jamaicantechnoarabianrock.mp3


    On 2 November 1941-16 days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor-The New Yorker ran two advertisements for a new dice game called The Deadly Double. A boxed advertisement, carrying the name Monarch Publishing Co., New York (with no further address), appears as a pointer to the main advertisement on p. 86.

    This pointer has long been held to contain clues to the 7 December raid on Pearl Harbor. It is headed: Achtung, Warning, Alerte! In it are two dice, one black, one white, each with three faces showing. The white dice faces carry the numbers 12 and 24 and XX (twenty in Roman numerals) while on the black dice faces are the numbers 0, 5,7.

    The figures are supposed to represent a cryptic 'message' which has been interpreted a number of ways.

    In the authoritative The Pacific War (1981), author John Costello says the numbers on the faces appear to spell out O hour for a double cross on the 7 th day of the 12 th month at the 5 th hour out of 24. Another interpretation of the numbers'message is to be found in the Readers'Digest book Mysteries of the Unexplained (1982). It says there was speculation that 12 and 7 could have referred to the date of the attack, while 5 and 0 indicated the planned time of the attack and the XX stood for the approximate latitude of the target; the significance of the 24 was unknown.

    The main advertisement on p. 86 shows a mixed group of people tossing dice at a table in an air-raid shelter, while outside searchlights probe the night sky. A ground explosion and flak also feature. Under the same heading-Achtung, Warning, Alerte!-the copy begins: -We hope You'll never have to spend a long winter's night in an air-raid shelter, but we were just thinking... At the foot of the main advertisemen is a crest similar to that of the German double-headed eagle.

    The overall impression given may explain the suspision that the advertisements had been placed by the Axis powers to alert their agents to the forthcoming attack which was to precipitate America into the Second World War.

    There is general agreement that the FBI investigated the advertisement. However, Costello adds fuel to the mystery by sying that FBI agents found that the game was in fact non-existent and the Monarch Publishing Company (he calls the Monarch Trading Company) a dummy corporation. The agents further discovered that the advertisements had been placed by a white (sic) Caucasian who had delivered the fact that the man identified as the suspect died suddenly a few weeks later in a manner similar to that used by British secret agents to dispose of Nazi operatives in New York.

    Costello asks: -Was the New Yorker warning genuine and were the Germans responsible for trying to raise the alarm? He concludes that the fascination of the Pearl Harbor story lies in questions like these that still remain to be answered.

    However, Mysteries writers on this episode say the game of Deadly Double was legitimate and was being sold by several New York department stores in 1941. They add however that suspisions about the advertisement were so strong that FBI agents visited the people who had placed them, a Mr. and Mrs. Roger Craig-apparently not a mysterious Caucasian with his own printing plates an a wad of cash.

    Mysteries adds that the story of the FBI investigation did not break until 1967, when Ladislas Farago, formerly of thr Us Naval Intelligence Department, revealed details in the media release for this book the Broken Seal published that year. Interviewed by a reporter followingt up the release, Craig's widow said any connection between the advertisements and Pearl Harbor was simply one big coincidence.

    As you can see from the above, the incident is still very much a mystery and is full of contradictions. did the New Yorker carry out its own investigation? If so, what did it find? Was the advertisement run in more than one issue? I put these questions to the New Yorker in a letter but did not receive a reply.

 

Secret Clues

If an air of doubt hangs over the significance or otherwise the cryptic media message discussed above, no such doubt exists about what was revealed by some strange process in the story that follows concerning the codewords for the Allied invasion of Europe in the Second WW. The story involves not a magazine but a newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, and its crossword answers to clues just before the invasion on 6 June 1944. The codewords hid the invasion plans, which were the bwet-kept secrets of WWll in Europe. The codename for the total plan was Overlord, the naval operation was named Neptune and the two Normandy beaches on which members of the American forceswould land were Utah and Omaha. The artificial harbour which was to placed off the beaches was named Mulberry. On 3 May the first codeword appeared in the Telegraph's crossword solution-Utah; the second on 3 May- Omaha the third on 31 May-Mulberry; the fourth and the fifth, the major codewords, appeared together on 2 June, four days before D-Day-Neptune and Overlord. The series created near-panic among the military. As with the New Yorker advertisements, security officers (MI5) mounted an investigation, convinced there was a highly placed spy wirh access to the plans who was using the puzzle as a cunning means of communicating the most vital secrets to the enemy. Instead they found schoolmaster Leonard Dawe, the newspaper's senior crossword compiler for the previous twenty years, who was as baffled as the military. Dawe had no idea the answers were codewords and could give no explanation as to why they came into his mind when he was compiling the puzzles.

The mystery remained seemingly beyond rational explanation fo many years. Various references to it over the years sinde are offered without any logical explanation.

However in 1984 a letter fromRonald French was published in the Daily Telegraph which offered to offer a solutin. French said that he had been a student at Dawe's school in 1944 and had become friendly with some American and Canadian service People who were camped near by. He had learned the codewords from the soldiers and had contributed them to Dawe as answers to puzzles. Dave would often use his class to provide words and he would then devise the clues.

In his 1990 book Coincidences: A Matter of Chance-or synchronicity? author Brian Inglis cast doubts on French's explanation. French's account was made into a BBC TV programme in 1989 and the implication was that the matter was now settled. However, Inglis argues that the programme trivialized the story and that French's claim that he had kept silent because of a promise to Dawe sounds too glib. French was unable to produce satisfactory corroboration. Inglis goes on to say that French's claim that he recalled laughing at Koestler's explanation of telepathy did not promote trust in his memory, for Koestler gave no such explanation (Koestler, in fact, presents the story without any substantial comment).

Even if Fench's story is correct, there remains the timing coincidence. As with some other regular features in a newspaper-comic strips, astrology, guides, etc.-the puzzles are prepared months in advance. Yet the crosswords appeared within days of the invasion, which had also been twice postponed late in the day. Had the invasion gone ahead on either of the earlier occasions, the puzzles would have been seen as containing words that were on everybody's lips.

Anthony Ralph, Dawe's nephew, subsequently suggested to Sunday Times columnist Godfrey Smith another explanation. Dawe had been sharing a house at the time with a deputy director of naval construction who worked on the artificial harbour and therefore should have been aware of the codename, Mulberry. Smith explains that the words would have been in open use at the time. -After all that's what codenames are for. It is the things and places they describe which are really secret.

Against this , it can be argued that while a deputy director of naval construction may well have known the codename Mulberry, was security so lax that the other top-secret names-which did not directly concern him-were also bandied about? A prime rule in security is need-to-know. On balance, the mystery of the codewords in the crossword puzzles remains. I contacted the Daily Telegraph in 1993 to go over the details of the mystery. I asked whether there had beenany developments in recent years. There had not and added a senior executive, -We probably won't know the truth until MI5 opens its files.