The Bell Curve:

Tomorrow will be Pearl Harbor Day — the 66th anniversary of the Japanese attack that brought the United States abruptly into World War II. The ritual game to play among those of us old enough to remember is where-were-you-when-you heard-the-news? But this year’s anniversary reminded me of something quite different, a mystery I’ve carried in my head for more than six decades.

In 1944, I was flying Navy transport planes in the South Pacific. Along with the wounded we carried out of combat areas, we sometimes had military passengers, and I’d go back into the cabin to talk with them when the co-pilot took over. That’s how I met a naval intelligence officer with time to kill and a provocative story about an assignment that had him baffled.

He told me that the Nov. 22, 1941, issue of the New Yorker magazine — two weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor — carried an advertisement that in retrospect was full of double meanings and was seen by the intelligence community as a possible warning to someone about the timing of the upcoming Japanese offensive.

He described the ad as best he could from memory and said it was accompanied by a half-dozen identical small ads showing only a pair of dice with the numbers 12 and 7 — the date of the Pearl Harbor attack — exposed.

His investigation had run into nothing but dead-ends.

He found that the ad had been placed across the counter in New York and paid for in cash.

Both the main ad and the small lead-in ads had been set in type somewhere else and a matrix pulled for delivery to the New Yorker.

The clerk who had accepted the ads had no recollection of who placed them, and neither the board game that was offered in the double-entendre copy nor the company whose signature was on the ad existed.

I never forgot that conversation, and when I returned to college after the war, I went to the library and found bound editions of the New Yorker. Although it was only a half-page ad in a thick magazine, it was easy to spot and every bit as mysterious as the intelligence agent had described it.

The illustration above the ad copy showed an air raid in progress.

Immediately below it, a group of people in an air-raid shelter were playing a dice game.