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

by Simon Parkin

War, in its way, imposes a certain form on the formlessness of life; it binds people with a common purpose, a project into which each person lends their particular strengths, be it fighting in the trenches or mending uniforms. When war ends there is, seemingly, a first flush of relief, a joyous moment in which to celebrate the birth of this new, longed-for peace, seen in every VE Day photograph, with its smiles and streamers. Then more complicated feelings arrive, ones that cannot be so easily captured on film. These feelings have to do with the death of a shared resolve, one that for six painful, perilous years, transcended generations, class and gender.

‘Whether they can put it into words or not, this was the tremendous gain: the sense of having taken part in something of enormous importance, of having justified their existence,’

Peace had come, but at the cost of purpose. This was the unmentionable loss of the Second World War, the death that could not be mourned. After all, the purpose of the war was to bring about precisely such an ending. Neve...

‘Everybody felt the same. It was the end of a completely different way of living, like coming back to earth again. The missing went on for years.’9