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

by Simon Parkin

Poole, like Roberts, designed a clutch of different fake battle scenarios–eight in total, which lasted forty-five minutes each–and the ship’s crews would often return to replay through each variation. As with WATU, word of Poole’s game spread quickly. Soon she was training the majority of escort crews that came through Liverpool, including those of aircraft carriers and, much later in February 1944, the senior officers of the giant battleship HMS King George V, who took three lessons in total. Unlike WATU, however, Poole’s outfit was never given a formal title. To allocate a woman to such an operation was unprecedented and represented a significant victory for Laughton Mathews in her secondary campaign to loosen the tight constrictions on female opportunity. Poole was one of the many Wrens who, as Laughton Mathews later put it, ‘had started in very junior positions and had developed ability and qualities of leadership of which they themselves were quite unaware’.19 Her role was significant, her work vital and yet, without a man like Roberts at the project’s centre to fight for legacy, Poole’s work was forgotten.