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

by Simon Parkin

The company also published a game titled Jutland, similar in rules to the modern game of Battleship. Two players each mark out the position of their warships on a ten-by-ten grid, hidden to their opponent. Once their ships are positioned, each player takes turns to fire a salvo of six missiles at their opponent’s grid, hoping to strike a ship rather than the sea. ‘A lot of skill can be exercised in finding the position of one’s opponent’s ships,’ states the game’s manual, reassuring the reader that this is no game of mere chance. The progenitor of the wargame on which Roberts based his games in Portsmouth was Fred Jane, a failed novelist who, in 1898, published the rules of a boardgame-style naval wargame in the Engineering Journal.16 Later that year, his books, Jane Naval Wargame and Fighting Ships, provided a formal set of rules, scorecards and ship diagrams, which were subsequently adapted by the navy. The game, which used scale ship models, a squared board and even some ping-pong-like bats to fire projectiles, was notable for its flexibility and realism. Jane tested the game aboard warships docked in Portsmouth Harbour and, four years later, a modified version was issued to HM Ships for training. It was a version of the Jane Naval Wargame that Roberts adapted at his posting in Portsmouth, more than three decades later.

The history of Jane’s