Once they had the game truly seaworthy, playing it over and over and over, Roberts and the Wrens demonstrated it to Admiral Percy Noble, commander in chief of Western Approaches, who had been condescending and skeptical of Roberts’ assignment. The escort ships’ movements were plotted with white chalk, which was visible through the peepholes.Īt the end of the game, the players sat in a circle and rehashed what happened. Their progress was marked in colored chalk that the Wrens looking through the peepholes could not detect. Each side took turns maneuvering, escort ships dropping depth charges and U-boats dodging under the surface. One team behind the canvas played escort-ship captains, and the other played the U-boats. The sheets were positioned so that when a player looked through the peephole, she could see the equivalent of the 5-mile view that the model ships would have from the floor. Canvas-covered enclosures circled the “ocean.” Each canvas had a peephole. Each white line was spaced 10 inches apart to represent one nautical mile. Wooden models of ships were set onto the map of the ocean, with real-time detection technology. The game covered a brown linoleum gymnasium-sized floor. He was charged with figuring out how the U-boats were succeeding, devising a strategy to stop them and imparting the strategy to all British naval vessels. The Royal British Navy, which had relieved him of duty when he contracted tuberculosis, called him back to conduct training exercises in 1940, but he was upgraded the next year to a task that would prove his tactical prowess. This work of nonfiction reads in part like a thriller, but it is the reader’s thrill to learn about Roberts, his luminous mind, his persuasive narrative gifts and the many setbacks he endured before being called back to service in 1940. The subjects of A Game of Birds and Wolves are the brilliant and creative Gilbert Roberts and a team of young women whose strategic war games simulations uncovered why German U-boats were so adept at taking out British ships in the early years of the war - more than 1,200 in 1940 alone, with relatively few losses of U-boats. 'A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II' by Simon Parkin is a nonfiction book that reads like a thriller.

Navy movies sub.war world war 2