Naming military operations

Independent:

In 1943, always circumspect about his place in the history books, Winston Churchill sent a memo to his top military commanders. He was addressing the issue of how the British Army should name its military operations. At the time, names were selected at random. But the nomenclature of war, he insisted, should strike a tone between the boastful and banal. At all costs, he wrote, they should not "enable some widow or mother to say their son was killed in an operation called Bunnyhug".

These days the question of what to call your invasion, liberation or peace-keeping force is trickier than christening a baby; a suitable name for an angelic newborn might not be appropriate when it becomes a troublesome teenager. Keen to keep the public onside, the US administration has announced that, in acknowledgement of the gradual withdrawal of its troops, Operation Iraqi Freedom – the umbrella term for all US operations in Iraq – will now be rebranded Operation New Dawn. "It sends a strong signal that Operation Iraqi Freedom has ended, and that our forces are operating under a new mission," wrote US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, in a memo leaked to ABC News.

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In the Second World War, the US military decided to use a system borrowed from the British in which they randomly selected names from a list of 10,000 common nouns and adjectives (Cornflakes, Magic). But in exceptional cases, Churchill stepped in to name operations himself. Operation Overlord, the label given to the 1944 invasion of western Europe that began with the Normandy landings, went on to become one of the war's most memorable monikers.

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The battlefield of history is littered with notable naming mistakes. In 1940, the British deduced the intent of the Germans' Operation Sea Lion (a marine invasion of Britain) from its name....

There is more including some names that were not real winners that seem to match the results of the operation. The Germans named their invasion of Russia Operation Barbarossa, after a king in the Middle Ages.