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

by Simon Parkin

A few months later, in May 1939, Doenitz restaged the Red vs Blue training exercise, this time transposing the scenario from the board to the ocean.15 In the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of Portugal, he summoned fifteen U-boats to comprise the Blue team’s fleet. The Red team, playing as the British, consisted of two helpless merchant supply vessels and two well-armed escort ships, the Saar and the Erwin Wasser. This game was intended to be played out on the entire expanse of the sea. Nevertheless, after just four hours one of the U-boats spotted the pretend ‘convoy’. Doenitz watched while, as the hours passed, the U-boats congregated and tracked the convoy, first in a group of seven then, by the end of the game, in a pack consisting of no fewer than thirteen boats. Doenitz’s conclusion was foregone. In his report, he wrote that success against the enemy could only be achieved when ‘a great number of U-boats can be successfully set on the convoy’. Both the game played on the water and the game played on the board had proven the effectiveness of his tactic.