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

by Simon Parkin

With the rudiments of the game in place, Roberts spent a great deal of his time studying after-action reports written by naval officers who had battled U-boats and survived, in search of clues to their tactics. Being ideally situated to meet and quiz any and every naval officer passing through Western Approaches Command, Roberts did not have to rely solely on the rather staid written testimony of sailors; he could also listen to first-hand accounts by interviewing men as they returned from sea. During the course of several interviews a chaotic picture emerged, not only of the sea battles themselves but also of the training process. Before deployment every sailor–an estimated 200,000 men by the end of the war8–underwent a two-week crash course in Tobermory harbour, on the Isle of Mull, under the gruelling tutelage of Sir Gilbert Stephenson (nicknamed, variously, ‘Puggy’, ‘Monkey’ and ‘The Terror’). Stephenson’s course was intended to build and improve efficiency among an individual ship’s crew, but it did not address the effectiveness