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

by Simon Parkin

In a speech at Mansion House on 20th January 1940, at a moment when British forces had sunk just nine of Germany’s fifty-seven U-boats, Churchill claimed to have sunk ‘half the U-boats with which Germany began the war’. To arrive at this dishonest conclusion, Churchill had added sixteen U-boats that the Admiralty believed may have been sunk to the nine U-boats known to have been sunk. To this number, for good measure, Churchill also added a further ten U-boats of his own imagining, to bring the total to more than half of the U-boat fleet as British intelligence understood it to be. This exaggeration of gains and suppression of losses, be it by accident or scheme, had, as the author of a classified inquiry into publicity around the Battle of the Atlantic wrote