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

by Simon Parkin

would have a far more meaningful effect on the broader war than in their current deployment, bombing German cities. Even with meticulous statistical analysis Blackett struggled, as he later put it, ‘to get the figures believed’. By January 1943, just one squadron of twelve bombers supported the escorting of convoys. As Churchill’s chief of military operations later concluded, the prime minister’s ‘obsession for bombing Germany’ resulted in ‘the navy being very short of long-range bombers’, which was ‘the only well-founded ground for criticism of our central war direction’.16 All of this was not lost on those who had to fight at sea. The convoy commander Peter Gretton, who became one of WATU’s most distinguished students, later said that ‘co-operation between the Navy and the Air Force in the field was very bad indeed, mainly due to stupid quarrels between senior officers in Whitehall.’ The bombers may have been absent, but WATU’s work was aided in other ways. There was the invention and introduction of the ship-mounted high-frequency direction finder (HF/DF), a piece of equipment known to sailors by the nickname ‘huff-duff’. Two ships equipped with this vessel-mounted direction-finding gear could pinpoint a U-boat location by detecting and triangulating the source of the high-frequency radio transmissions it was