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

by Simon Parkin

target. It was therefore possible to outrun a torpedo, providing the target executed a particular zigzag pattern. To teach the men this evasive manoeuvre, Poole was given a giant simulator. A ship’s bridge, almost full size, was built and installed in the warehouse at Gladstone Dock. It sat within a see-saw mechanism that allowed it to simulate the movement of the sea. Poole would run the game with a ship’s captain, flag lieutenant and navigator, who were used to working together at sea. ‘The [players] would all be swanning around doing nothing, then the ASDIC would pick up the torpedo,’ Poole recalled. ‘Then it was action stations, and all began to happen.’ Through a pair of speakers, the warning signal would sound and a pre-recorded ASDIC ‘hit’ would play, indicating the angle of the incoming torpedo. The crew would have to perform evasive manoeuvres using the giant apparatus. If they failed to outrun or dodge the torpedo, an obnoxiously loud banger known as a thunder-flash was let off by one of Poole’s fifteen staff members.* They would also release smoke capsules to mimic the disorientating effects of a direct hit, when the alarms howled, the floor tipped and, in the most extreme cases, visibility shrank to a few feet.