A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II

by Simon Parkin

Two months later, in July 1943, the tonnage of Allied ships launched, principally from American shipyards, finally overtook the figures of tonnage sunk. Doenitz, whose stated aim had always been to sink more ships than the enemy could build (‘a continual bloodletting which must cause even the strongest body to bleed to death’,22 as he described it), and who avidly studied the monthly statistics kept by his staff,23 had lost. The combination of WATU-developed tactics, the newly minted support groups and the closing of the air gap combined to make May 1943 the month in which the U-boats lost the Battle of the Atlantic, the war within a war. That month, which the Germans subsequently dubbed ‘Black May’, Doenitz lost forty-one U-boats. It was a decisive tally on this, the impersonal scoresheet of war. The grand admiral of the German navy, who never lost his first love for U-boats or the young men who crewed