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

by Simon Parkin

During a Trade Protection committee meeting in autumn 1941, one member suggested the idea of a game that could be played aboard ships during training exercises, to simulate a U-boat sighting, and the ensuing cat-and-mouse hunt. A discussion followed on how a game might specifically improve the cooperation of the bridge team, from where a vessel is commanded by the ship’s captain, watchkeeper, lookout and pilot so that ‘the commanding officer and his anti-submarine control officer were left free to attack the submarine, and relieved of the necessity of attending to details such as the housing of the correct signal’.15 At a training facility in Londonderry, the development of a game with precisely this aim was already underway, led by Lieutenant Commander I. M. Carrs, an anti-submarine officer. By early September 1941, a few weeks after the sinking of the SS Aguila and its cargo of young Wrens, he had completed a prototype. His invention was designed to be played not on the floor, like those which Roberts had run prior to the war, but aboard an anchored ship. The crew would take their usual stations while