After the map was folded up and the pieces packed away, Doenitz wrote a report describing what had happened. The Blue team’s failure, he surmised, lay not in any particular tactical mistakes but in the ‘emptiness of the sea’, as he put it. The German fleet was simply spread too thinly. None of this was surprising to Doenitz, who, since becoming the head of the U-boat division in 1935, had been urging his superiors to build more–and better–U-boats. But the game provided evidence to support his arguments. In his written summary, Doenitz drew the conclusion the Germans would require ‘at least
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