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

by Simon Parkin

While the British could see from intercepted radio transmissions that U-boats were increasingly working together, providing the German vessels with safety in numbers, the specifics of their highly effective tactics could only be guessed at. The Admiralty graph that showed the number of merchant ships the U-boats had sunk each month was drawing close to the threshold of defeat. Pre-war Britain was the recipient of 68 million tons of imports. Usborne revealed to Roberts that this number had now more than halved, to just 26 million tons.18 Desperate to find ways in which to reduce the tonnage of inessential imports, and thereby free up space in the holds of merchant ships, Cabinet Office economists frantically noted that animals were being allowed to ‘eat shipping space… at a rate comparable with the rate at which submarines are destroying it’.19 ‘Unless something was done in the Battle of the Atlantic,’ Roberts was told, ‘we were going to lose [the war], merely because vital food and war supplies would not arrive.’ Moreover, ships were being sunk by U-boats at a faster rate than they could be built,* and the U-boats were now operating principally at night. Churchill was fretfully preoccupied with the situation. A few months earlier he had set up the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, which had focused its attention on the inefficient running of the docks, where weary and disenfranchised workers had been causing those imports that successfully made it to port to pile up on the...

1941 was horrendous in the Battle of the Atlantic