Designing the Secret Game that Helped Win World War II

[Music] hi there hello and welcome my name is simon parkin uh and this is my talk for gdc 2021 uh on designing the secret game that helped to win world war ii this is a talk that's based on a book i've written called a game of birds and wolves which is available online and in all good bookstores so if you want to read more then please go find that um and without further ado i'll get into the talk when i was a child my brother and i spent our summer holidays at our grandparents house in devon they loved board games and they had an old wooden chest filled with them and one day in amongst the boxes of scrabble monopoly and bagatelle we found a copy of battleships now this wasn't the plasticky tabletop version with which

we're all familiar but rather a luxurious version of the game that was played out on a giant map that had to be spread across the floor we'd take turns to throw our dice and maneuver the ships um uh into opposing positions and then at the press of a button on a destroyer a small plastic disc would fire along the glossy board like a miniature hockey puck if your aim was true the disc would slot into a hole at the base of your target and then through some toy maker's magic the top of the ship would explode into the air like a cap rocketing from a the top of a shaken bottle of lemonade my grandfather never spoke much about the war i knew that he'd been a merchant seaman but not when or where he had sailed or even if he had seen combat at sea and as such i never put together why he might own this particular game or why he would often watch from the doorway while we played

a couple of years ago i started working on a documentary radio documentary for the new yorker on wargaming wargaming if you don't know is a tool that's used by politicians civil servants and the military to explore via the medium of dice and play the potential effects of world events throughout the last few years for example the british government has used war games to envision the potential effects of a second referendum on brexit or what might happen in the event of a numerous lockdowns for the pandemic um with you know forcing civil servants to play as key politicians and the same is true in america and many other countries around the world during the making of the radio program i visited the defense academy in shrivernam and there i met a man called major tom muatt major tom is essentially her majesty's game designer in chief a kaino of dungeons and dragons moderator dressed

in khaki fatigues he's designed and run war games everywhere from the pentagon to beijing i asked tom if he had an example of where something learned in the crucible of a war game had gone on to be used to great effect in the real world he explained to me that the the hotline that links the white house to the kremlin which is often represented in in hollywood films by red telephone was an idea that came out of war games played during the cold war then he mentioned a little known story about a retired naval captain called gilbert roberts and a group of young women who together invented a war game that radically changed the course of the second world war in the last week of 1941 britain had come perilously close to defeat the uk is an island nation reliant on imported goods for many of its resources and at that time in fact no less than 95 of britain's fuel came to the country

from trading partners and colonies while 70 of its food supply was imported in total an average of 68 million tons of food and fuel was delivered by a 3 000 strong merchant shipping fleet the sailors of these ships knew from the bitter experience of the first world war that the safest way to cross the atlantic ocean was to move in convoys finding safety in numbers so the ships would gather together in groups sometimes consisting of more than 60 vessels and they'd sail across the atlantic from the um from the west coast of of britain across the east coast of america usually in tight formation the royal navy then sent warships that would protect these flocks of boats these ships were known as escorts the protectors and they would encircle the convoy as it plodded along its course a bit like sheepdogs protecting a herd of

sheep ready to fend off any attacks now even before the outbreak of the second world war karl dornitz who was leader of the u-boat arm of the german navy reason that if his fleet of submarines could block and sink these convoy ships britain which is an island unable to sustain its people without imports would starve in this way hunger the blunt persistent weapon of war could be deployed against germany's enemy from a position of remove denits had long believed that the most effective way to attack the british ships was to organize his u-boats into packs a bit like wolves hunting sheep it was a tactic that he had tentatively explored as captain of his own u-boat in the first world war just before he was captured by the british and sent to a prisoner of war camp in sheffield where incidentally he managed to earn a prison transfer to a lunatic asylum after he pretended to be a u-boat convincing his captors

that he had lost his mind the tactic that donitz pioneered was dubbed the rudel tactic or wolf pack tactic which was borrowed from the wolves of donitz's childhood fairy tales wolves has done its new hunt cooperatively by working together as a pack they can bewilder and run down prey that would be too large to tackle alone togetherness also affords the animals the ability to care for wounded pack members without sacrificing momentum what better way than it's reason for u-boats to hunt not as loners picking off stragglers but as an organized pack touring the sea with shared focus and intention able to take down much stronger foes than they might otherwise denise's belief that if britain's supply lines were broken then britain's defeat would soon follow was not limited to the germans the british prime minister winston churchill described merchant shipping as at once the stranglehold and

the sole foundation of our war strategy this fundamental truth was acknowledged in a chart that took up almost the entirety of a wall in the operations room at the admiralty the navy's london headquarters this graph charted the number of ships that have been sunk at sea to u-boats and it showed in the starkest terms imaginable the stakes at play the top quarter of the map was divided by a thin red line that marked the narrow threshold between victory and defeat if the rate of ship sinking stayed below the line then the british people could survive on the amount of food and fuel that was making it through but if the graph exceeded the red line the country could no longer continue to participate in the war while denis was not given anywhere close to the 300 u-boats that he estimated via his own war games that he needed to blockade britain the embryonic wolf pack attacks that began towards the end of 1940 immediately showed their effectiveness in british shops fish became scarce and

expensive butter bacon and sugar could only be bought with coupons onions which prior to the war were imported from spain france and the channel islands vanished from green grocers and so too did lemons and bananas the frequency and success of the u-boat attacks steadily climbed and by the end of 1940 the u-boats had successfully sunk more than 1200 ships about five years worth of construction work in typical peacetime conditions and more than the rest of the entire german navy and air force combined the numbers told if not the whole story of the battle of the atlantic then the salient point the british were losing catastrophically someone had to figure out what was making the u-boats so effective and what if anything might be done to upturn that success gilbert roberts was a 41 year old former naval commander who had been discharged

from the navy in 1938 following a bout of tuberculosis after he recovered from his illness roberts found himself a young retiree without a ship or a purpose he joined the home guard for a stint and then worked as a police officer in devon but neither of these roles particularly suited roberts he was a talented tactician and war game designer he was also a heroic man even before the arrival of war and his inevitable provocations towards courage once while reading a book on a cornish cliffside roberts spied a group of walkers as they struggled to climb from the mouth of a cave against the tides rushing roberts tripped down the cliff plunged into the water and for more than an hour for the waves to recover one of the sightseers in the early months of the second world war roberts was further tested by circumstance one night during the blitz while he was sheltering in the basement of a london apartment roberts heard a thud on the

ground above he climbed the stairs looked through the window and there in the white light of an overhead flare saw a bent oiled german bomb half buried in the pavement with its fuse still sparking roberts ran towards the danger snatched out the fuse and burnt his fingers badly in the process then in the last week of 1941 roberts received an unexpected summon to the admiralty's office he was told to bring an overnight bag and when he arrived he met two of the navy's most senior officers one of whom was an aide to winston churchill himself the two men described the extent of britain's ongoing losses in the atlantic the fact that britain had come so close to starvation had in fact been deliberately kept from the british public churchill would routinely exaggerate the number of u-boat losses in public speeches for example at mansion house on the 20th of january 1940 at a moment when the british forces had sunk just

nine of germany's 57 operational u-boats churchill claimed to have sunk half the u-boats with which germany began the war to arrive at this conclusion he added 16 u-boats that the admiralty believed may have been sunk to the nine u-boats known to have been sunk and to this number for good measure he added a further 10 of his own imagining as such when roberts was told the awful truth of the situation he was astonished he was then informed that because of his achievements in running war games he had been chosen to figure out the secret to the u-boat success in the atlantic robert's task was threefold to discover the secret of how the u-boats were operating to develop effective countermeasures and finally to teach these new tactics whatever they may be to any and every captain who was sailing the atlantic tuberculosis may have robbed him of the chance to serve at sea but it had in this unlikely way provided

him with an opportunity by which he could make his presence felt on every destroyer and corvette on the ocean before he left the admiralty to catch the midnight train to liverpool roberts was led into an office where he came face to face with prime minister churchill who barked find out what is happening and sink the u-boats roberts arrived in liverpool to a beleaguered city hitler later admitted that he had targeted the city with his bombers because he believed it housed the headquarters from which the battle of the atlantic was being orchestrated his guess was correct in fact derby house which was home to this command center had already been hit successfully hit by a german incendiary although the bombers wouldn't have known it when robertson arrived he was informed that he would be given eight rooms on the top floor of the building he could move in just as soon as the roof had been repaired robert's first meeting with the commander-in-chief sir percy noble was a

complete disaster after dismissively asking what precisely robert's plan to do with his games noble told him well you can carry on but don't bother me with it i'm busy the next question was who precisely was going to assist roberts in his work by 1942 most men who were able to serve in the navy had been enlisted and deployed the navy then in its desperation to find workers turned to young women advertising posts in the wrens with the slogan joined the wrens and free a man for the fleet the ren's motto at the time was never at sea a pledge that also carries with it a sort of negative space assurance that we know our place what other organization has ever been defined by what its members have forbidden from doing rather than what they hope to achieve nevertheless under the stewardship of vera lawton matthews a former activist for the suffragettes the rens were gradually deployed to all manner of

interesting and essential roles some became welders others became carpenters some loaded torpedoes onto submarines and many plotted the progress of live sea battles on maps that were hung in operation operations rooms just like the giant plot at derby house the ren's heroism often matched that of the men they had freed for duty in 1942 for example pamela mcgeorge was asked to deliver an important dispatch from one side of plymouth to the commander-in-chief at the other she drove her motorcycle through the night while german bombers dropped their weapons on the city when one of these bombs landed close to the road mcgeorge was blown from her bike and its wheels were mangled beyond repair but undeterred she continued on foot to admiralty house with the letter in hand when she arrived she offered immediately to head out again with the response

in liverpool at derby house roberts was introduced to 10 of these young rands some of whom had only recently left school and they were to be his supporting team the young women have been hand-picked for their aptitude in mathematics statistics and even gamesmanship the first most senior woman assigned to the team was gene laidlaw a deciduous 21 year old who is obsessed with ships and sailing and who later became one of britain's first female chartered accountants then there was laura janet house who had come to england from antigua just four years earlier howes was a mathematical vunderkind and at school while her teachers were off sick she would teach the maths class in her teacher's stead elizabeth drake was next drake's father charles worked as an actuary for the prudential insurance company drake was chosen to work with roberts based on the assumption that an aptitude for mathematics like height or temper

runs in the family and the last of the rent officers was a sports woman nancy wales nan as she was known to her friends was older than the others at 27 but she was a formidable tennis player and competed in badminton at county level hockey was her true passion and two years later she would go on to play for lancashire and then earn the unique distinction of being the only player to play for their arch rivals yorkshire a team that she then captained for many years the unit which became known as the western approach approaches tactical unit or watu for short was given the top floor of derby house as robert's first dismal meeting with his superior percy noble demonstrated the unit was viewed with tremendous skepticism by many senior officers who wondered what these people were doing playing games while there was a war on as such roberts and his team of wrens worked quietly in their top floor home trying to not attract too much attention

until they had something concrete to bring to their superiors watu's office resembled something between a school gymnasium and thanks to the scattered sticks of chalk and tumbles of string laying around a child's playroom the linoleum floor was divided into sections a bit like a giant chessboard each line was spaced 10 inches apart which represented a distance of one nautical mile and the counters laid out on the floor represented ships and surfaced german u-boats around the edges of the room stood great sheets of white canvas they were arranged into enclosures a bit like voting booths with each one with a peephole cut into it at eye level the average visibility from the bridge of a warship is five miles and the canvas sheets were positioned in such a way that when a player peeked through the slit he or she could see the equivalent of a five mile view of the tiny wooden ships sitting on the floor

linen sidewires which could be bent to adjust visibility depending on the game scenario that was being played held the apertures open one team was positioned behind the canvas sheets at desks and they played as the royal naval escort captains the sheepdogs guarding the flock the other team which was usually captained by roberts or his right-hand woman jean laidlaw played as the u-boats and as in the real battle of the atlantic each size objective was focused on the convoy these were the ships carrying those essential food and fuel supplies the task of the team playing as the escorts was put to protect them and the task of the u-boats was to attack them and each side also had a secondary objective for the naval team this was to sync as many u-boats as possible and for the u-boats the aim was to avoid detection and exit the battlefield unharmed in other words it was a

an asymmetrical game each team with different abilities and objectives the convoy ships which was the prize in play for both sides uh weren't controlled by a player they would just that would just move automatically forward at each turn of the game towards their destination with the battle raging on around them just as it did at sea players were given two minutes in which to submit their orders for their next turn to replicate the urgency of a real battlefield and the movements of the u-boats were drawn in green chalk on the floor this colour was chosen as it was almost impossible to make out against the floor's brown tint when viewed from an angle and ensured that u-boat positions were undetectable to the players who were looking through the canvas screens by contrast the escort ships movements were added to the floor in white chalk which uh unlike the green markings was legible to those looking from the canvas booths

now turn by turn the pieces would move around the floor as the escort ships dashed to the site of an explosion and dropped their depth charges while the u-boats performed their faints and dodges in an effort to pick off the envoy the convoy ships all while evading detection and the depth charges of the escort ships the role of the wrens in the game was something like umpires they would measure distances and mark the movements in the chalk to ensure that the game played out as accurately as possible then finally after an hour or 90 minutes when the game was complete the players would all come together stand or sit around the board which was now crisscrossed with chalk markings and captain roberts would reveal how everyone had fared the game of course was a simplification of real u-boat action but it was enough here for roberts to begin staging recent sea battles that had happened actually

on the ocean to recreate them in the game his objective here was to experience the action from the perspective of the u-boats and using that knowledge assess what the escort commanders might have done differently to save ships supplies and lives with the rudiments of the game in place roberts now spent a great deal of his time studying the after-action reports that had been written by naval officers who had battled u-boats and survived he was searching for clues to their tactics his position in liverpool at derby house meant that he was ideally situated to meet and quiz any and every naval officer who passed through western approaches command this meant that roberts did not have to rely solely on the rather stayed written testimony of the sailors he could also listen to first-hand accounts interviewing men as they returned from sea during the course of several interviews a rather chaotic picture emerged not

only was there no set of tactics by which the royal naval ships were fighting u-boats neither was there any training for how the ships should work together as a team the destroyers and the corvettes it seemed to roberts were broadly free to direct their response according to each ship's captain's we're more notion fred osborne first lieutenant of the corvette hms gentian who later worked at watu for a number of months described convoy defense at the time as difficult and haphazard and in the in the absence of collective countermeasures he wrote no clear doctrine for combating attacks on convoys had been formulated or taught and as such the losses were appalling roberts asked every captain that he interviewed the same question what do you do when one of your merchant ships in the middle of the convoy is torpedoed some of the captains spoke of going to action stations others about increasing

their speed but when pressed most of them just shrugged in resignation what could you do in the middle of the night blind explosions sounding all around when your radar operator was unable to distinguish the sound of a u-boat in the water from the noise of a choppy sea or even a shoal of fish there was another reason why the naval escorts were having such an awful time hunting the u-boats this was an incorrect assumption about the way in which the u-boats were attacking and it had resulted in thousands of deaths at sea roberts didn't know it yet but his primary task in turning around allied fortunes at sea would rest on his successfully spotting this cardinal error in the british understanding of how u-boats operated now to understand this cardinal era we need to meet this man 28 year old otto kretschmer perhaps the most famous of germany's u-boat aces

the young u-boat commander was taciturn and focused one of his nicknames in fact was silent otto but he inspired utter loyalty from his crew many of whom were like lorenz very young people who were barely out of school kreshma's contribution to you german u-boat strategy was profound in the early months of the war the u-boat captains would attack allied ships from outside the boundary of the convoy this was to abide by the recommendation of the manufacturer of the torpedoes that they used which advised that they were insured a distance of no less than one kilometer between the u-boat and its target there was uncertainty as well about the effectiveness of british sonar detection which was known at the time as azdek and that led to many u-boats firing their torpedoes from well outside the range of the detection the detection range of the escorts at you know sometimes a range of three kilometers or even more

now kretschmer wanted to see what would happen if he could slip past the naval escort ships enter the lanes of the convoy in amongst the merchant ships and fire practically from point-blank range he had a motto one ship one torpedo and of course the less distance between his u-boat and the target the easier it would be to adhere to that motto kretschmer first attempted this maneuver in september 1940 one night he slunk in between the escort ships in the cover of darkness on the surface of the water where he could evade detection by the allied sonar and then like a fox inside a hen house he successfully sank three ships firing his torpedoes at a very close distance when he returned to his u-boat base in the captured french port of l'oreal later that month kretschmer wrote up his findings in a set of standing orders for

his crew this document laid out the rules for the efficient and successful running of a u-boat it was a 12-point plan covered everything from the need for an effective lookout to the requirement that the men set aside time to clean their dishes most of these instructions were commonsensical but kretschmer's 0.9 went against the written advice that the u-boats captains maintain a minimum distance of a thousand meters between their vessel and its target kretschmer wrote plainly that at every given opportunity the torpedo should be fired at extreme close range this can only be done he wrote by penetrating the escort's anti-submarine screen and getting inside the convoy's lanes this he added should be the objective of all our attacks in just two sentences kretschmer had outlined a tactic that would in the months to come lead to the deaths of thousands of allied soldiers and raise the line on the chart of shipping losses at

admiralty in london perilously close to the threshold of defeat one of watu's first tasks was to restage a battle from a few weeks earlier in december 1941 where the british ships had actually successfully sunk three u-boats roberts and his team believe that this the battle for convoy hg 76 held some of the secrets they were looking for so the team arranged 48 miniature ships in 12 columns on the floor they added the tracks of the three u-boats that were known to have participated in the battle u434 574-131 with the stage set roberts now began to move the convoy which spread across six white lines on the floor to represent a six mile width in two minute intervals at a simulated rate of 10 knots each move was made on the floor in precisely the same pattern as the actual escort had moved a few weeks earlier at

sea in this way blow by blow roberts imitated the action as per the official reports he was able to see the battle from a crow's nest perspective above the board and as he did a question formed in his mind if the u-boats had been firing from outside the perimeter of the convoy as was widely believed how had one of the british ships which was at the center of the convoy been sunk the distance just seemed too too far might it be possible then he wondered that the u-boat had attacked this ship not from outside the convoy but right from inside the columns from point blank range there was a simple way he reasoned to prove his theory hold everything he told his staff he rushed into his office to make a phone call roberts picked up the receiver and asked the operator to put him through to the flag officer submarines in london hoping to speak to its chief of staff and old friend captain ian mcintyre

to robert's astonishment the flag officer himself admiral sir max horton picked up horton was an officer of foreboding distinction as a young submarine commander in the british navy he had scored the first kill of the great war and on return to port he would signal success to the cheering onlookers by flying the pirates flag the jolly roger making a tradition that would continue thereafter to the end of the falklands war and even more recently horton's talent as a submariner propelled him up the ranks and years later his biographer described him as the greatest authority on submarine warfare so on the phone roberts explained who he was and asked horton if he could ask a question during the last war roberts asked would you ever have crept among the ships of a convoy to fire your torpedoes of course replied horton it's the only way of pressing home in attack thank you cersei roberts and hung up

it was late but roberts asked laidlaw and one of the younger ends janet o'kell if they might stay behind with him reset the game and run a new ran a new version of it on the giant board the two women who were infused with robert's excitement agreed and together they hurriedly reset the game this time roberts placed a u-boat model right in the center of the convoy and ran the events of the battle in reverse if the range of the torpedoes was around two and a half miles it was reason reasonable to imagine that u-boat captains would try to fire from less than half that distance in order to maximize their chances of scoring a hit between them roberts and the wrens began to plot different scenarios that might have enabled the u-boat to sneak inside the lanes of the convoy without being detected only one of these scenarios checked out one of the u-boats must have entered the column from the rear it must have done so on the surface of

the water where it would have been able to travel a little faster than the ships it pursued and by approaching from this direction where the lookouts rarely checked it would have done so without being detected robertson lorenz headed to the kitchen to make coffee and a round of corned beef sandwiches the conversation continued to center on the battle they had left suspended on the floor of the game room the group discussed how if they were a u-boat captain having made a point-blank range attack on a merchant ship they might then attempt to escape the battle unharmed the game had enabled these fledgling tacticians to begin to think like u-boat captains from that perspective the answer suddenly seemed obvious having made your attack you would just simply dive and you'd sit there and wait for all the ships to roll on overhead and eventually roberts concluded in his diary i would emerge deep from the stern of the convoy and he would get away unharmed

kretshma's u-boat tactic had been abruptly unveiled now roberts wanted to try out some potential countermeasures that might foil the plan the team returned to the game room and roberts assumed the role of a u-work captain while laidlaw and o'kale played as the escort ships a countermeasure revealed itself immediately rather than splay out from the convoy at speed and drop depth charges at random as was the current common practice laidlaw and o'kell lined up the escort ships around the convoy and while the convoy continued on its way each escort ship performed a series of triangular sweeps listening for the u-boats trying to flush it out from its position beneath the convoy with a mounting sense of excitement the team ran the procedure twice more and in both instances robert's u-boat was detected and sunk it was by now the early hours of the morning and all the excitement time had passed unnoticed

roberts ordered a staff car to return the two young women home the next morning roberts sent an invitation to the skeptical admiral percy noble his boss to come up to wattu's office and watch a demonstration of their findings noble entered the game room flanked by his staff the commander-in-chief wearily eyed the chalk markings on the floor the canvas sheets that were decked out like ship portholes what was all this make-believe nonsense undeterred roberts began to explain their discoveries how the u-boats would slip between the convoy ships on the surface of water at night when they were unlikely to be spotted how they would make their attacks and then dive to wait until the danger had passed the atmosphere was frosty noble had made no secret of his condescending skepticism towards wattu's work roberts detected a tone in noble's manatee manner of snootiness as he put

it how could this former naval officer with his knobs of chalk and jumbles of string contribute anything useful to the real battles being waged at sea but as the game played out on the floor the admiral began to sit forward in his chair in astonishment one of the wrens playing as a u-boat fired a torpedo from within the convoy's columns and then dove roberts performed the team's newly developed counter-tactic moving the escort ships in triangular sweeping patterns designed to flush out the hidden u-boat and while performing these sweeps one of the ships picked up the german's position on its radar as he watched noble saw for the first time the errors that had been responsible for such a tremendous loss of life at sea when the demonstration was finished the admiral stood to his feet congratulated roberts and asked what this new maneuver was to be called jean laidlaw the 21 year old woman responsible for statistical analysis at

watu explained that she had christened it raspberry it was she said a ras of contempt aimed at hitler and his u-boat fleet noble the commander-in-chief then turned to one of his men and told him to take down a message to be sent immediately to the prime minister the first investigations have shown it read a cardinal error in u-boat tactics a new immediate and concerted counter-attack will be signaled to the fleet within 24 hours raspberry was a revolutionary tactic and its effect on the war at sea was immediate shortly after the demonstration to noble water began running week-long courses for naval officers who would play out imaginary battles and learn how to perform the counter tactics which soon included a variety of other operations each named after a different fruit for the officers who were playing as

escort commanders behind the canvas peepholes the games were keenly intense the pressure of those two minute intervals between turns mimicked the stress stress of action against u-boats at sea and each officer would often be caught up in the fiction no longer viewing the pieces on the floor or the chalk lines as game pieces but as real ships real wakes and real explosions that they represented the game occupied an unusual position between reality and make-believe no limbs or lives were lost here on the linoleum ocean of course but neither was the game fully abstracted in the way that monopoly is based on but distinct from the property business for the men who played wattu's game and who would often return from sea just a few days earlier and who were due to sail again a few days later the game had this unsettling quality the choices they made on the floor reflected each officer's current

tactical thinking if his ship was lost during the game he had to cope with the knowledge that had the same situation arisen at sea he would have probably acted in the exact same way and may well have died make your mistakes here and you won't make them at sea roberts was fond of saying a euphemistic way of pointing out the scale of risk against which the game was attempting to insure its players for all robert's engaging presentation a man who failed to drive off a u-boat or worse still who lost his ship in the game would leave watu feeling sternly chastened we destroy u-boats out on the oceans wrote one journalist who sat in on a round of the game but the death sentence is delivered miles away in the assais court in an old building erected on the banks of the river mersey watu's courses which lasted from monday through to saturday which ran weekly

without interruption from the first week of february 1942 to the last week of july 1945 involved up to 50 officers at once each course consisted of four game scenarios which vary details such as weather conditions visibility time of day and the size speed and start point of the convoy and finally when the game was finished the officers would step from behind the canvas screens and together with the wrens sit in a square of chairs around the room with a 10-foot wooden pole roberts would commentate on the preceding battle blow by blow like a sports pundit delivering his post-match verdict roberts would draw attention to moments of particular brilliance moments of particular disaster and the turning point of each game these summations were for roberts one of the most enjoyable aspects of the work he relished the opportunity to build a

picture of the battle much more vivid and engaging than the rather stale reports that were written by officers who would return from action at sea as we listened to him he made the most difficult situation appear simple said vice admiral gilbert stevenson of robert's flair he appreciated the difficulty that hundreds of commanding officers had in deciding what to do when faced with any of the surprises that war at sea constantly presented and he taught them how to meet those surprises until they were ready for anything still the combination of ministration and expertise was not always welcomed by the experienced officers on the receiving end of advice from these young women often the men would resent being told what to do no matter how gently by teenagers some of whom were barely out of school and who in most cases had never even been to see during one 1942 game for example bob

winnie who captained the destroyer hms wandra in which he sank three u-boats handed his instructions to one of the wren's judy davier who he describes as a particularly clued up girl who he had been assigned no sir said judy of winnie's chosen move i don't think you should do that good god you later recalled thinking of her firm and plight request what on earth does this girl know about it but so confident and tactful was uh devious tone that when winnie chose to hear her out he listened to her convincing explanation and astonishment from his perspective a battle-worn captain was being tutored on the finer points of u-boat warfare by an inexperienced young woman for roberts this exchange vindicated a long-held belief that with careful design games had the capacity to make experts of amateurs into instilling players invaluable potentially life-saving battle-winning experience

in the summer of 1942 the escort ship sank four times as many u-boats as the previous month beginning an upward trend that would continue broadly for the rest of the year in the months that followed the development of raspberry using information gleaned via debriefs robertson lorenz developed numerous other tactical maneuvers that would suit the expanding variety of wolfpack attacks most of these maneuvers which involve the escort ships performing various different shapes and varieties of coordinated sweeps to find and flush out the lurking u-boats were given the names of fruit and vegetables there was pineapple there was gooseberry there was strawberry and artichoke and a modification to the original maneuver that was known as a half raspberry the unit revolutionized british anti-submarine warfare by the summer of 1943 the u-boats had been decisively driven from the atlantic during the period that the germans

subsequently dubbed black may the german navy lost 41 u-boats many to watu coined operations it was a decisive tally on this the impersonal scoresheet of war khal darnitz who by now was the grand admiral of the german navy and who never lost his first love for u-boats or the young men who crewed them ordered the withdrawal of wolf packs from the atlantic battlefield in the summer of 1943. it was he urged merely a temporary partial change of operations area but four months later the u.s admiral ernest king downgraded the u-boats from the category of menace to a mere problem in the 17 weeks that followed the 17th of may 1943 the allies sailed 62 east and westbound convoys along the north atlantic routes without losing a single ship to a u-boat more than 12 million tons of food and supplies arrived unimpeded into britain

from eastbound convoys seizing the opportunity senior officers at the admiralty then increased the size of the convoys which by june 1943 averaged 62 merchant ships compared to just 43 the previous month the so-called tonnage war was finished and with it in most ways that mattered the battle of the atlantic between the first week of february 42 and the last of july 45 when watu officially closed close to 5 000 naval officers played the game run by captain roberts and lorenz during more than 130 courses graduates of the game included the ornithologists and painter peter scott remembered by one of the wrens for having drawn ducks all over his navigational chart there was a young philip mountbatten too future husband to queen elizabeth ii whose presence around the unit brought many of the reins unending delight as

one put it and there was the writer nicholas monserrat who had gone to describe in his 1951 novel the cruel sea a convoy game played out with model ships on the floor of an empty room that was clearly based on his experience at watu in addition to the thousands of british naval officers who completed the course roberts and the lorenz trained delegates from everywhere from the united states to india malaya to norway and four university professors many graduates of the game credited the battles they waged on the floor as being instrumental in their subsequent victories during encounters with the u-boats at sea similar tactical units sprang up across the british empire some of which were also staffed by young wrens who by playing the game time and time again also became experts in anti-submarine warfare by 1945 a total of 66 wrens had completed the course themselves in order to become staff at watu or one of its

sister units two thousand three so 2603 merchant ships and 175 of the escorting naval vessels were sunk in the battle of the atlantic which was the longest continuous military campaign in the second world war more than thirty thousand merchant seamen and more than six thousand royal navy save sailors died in the atlantic during the war many in attacks by u-boats it was an astonishing loss of life that was tempered by the work of the men and women of watu and the sailors who deployed their tactics at sea at the end of the war sir max horton the commander-in-chief of western approaches who had been defeated in a game by two of watu's rents himself sent the following personal signal directed to all those who had served in the unit an incandescent tribute to their quiet momentous achievements on the closing down of watu he wrote i wish to express my gratitude and high

appreciation of the magnificent work of captain roberts and his staff which has contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of germany later churchill famously wrote that the only thing that ever really frightened him during the war was the u-boat peril without roberts and the ren's work the battle of the atlantic may have been lost and perhaps even the war with it four weeks after the u-boats retreated from the atlantic in 1943 my grandfather who was 17 years old at the time made his inaugural journey across the ocean in a merchant ship protected by naval officers trained by watu thanks in major part to their work he arrived in new york untouched many of those involved in watu's work never spoke of their role in the war while the group's feat and contribution is barely remembered by the fallen fall of berlin in 1945 the u-boat

commanders were intimately familiar with roberts his team and their tactics roberts spoke fluent german and he was one of the first british officers to land in germany following the surrender of the nazis he was in fact in berlin the night the americans performed their final raid of the war the following day roberts eagerly traveled to the u-boat headquarters in the german town of flensburg there he met the veteran submarine commander architect of the wolfpack tactic and the man who later that week would become hitler's successor as president of germany admiral karl denis the two men exchanged respectful salutes the other u-boat captains however appeared to blanch at the sight of roberts and their fear was soon explained roberts began a tour of the facility and he visited the u-boat operations room itself and there enlarged and tacked to a wall he saw his own photograph which had been taken out of a magazine article

beneath the image there was a handwritten caption this is your enemy captain roberts director of anti-u-boat tactics games and video games are usually dismissed as childish pursuits something to be set down in adolescence and may be picked up again in retirement but as major tom explained to me in shrivernam in times of great turmoil war games rise in popularity and they rise in importance that was true in 1942 and as office rooms in the pentagon and in whitehall resound with the rattle of dice it's equally true today thank you very much for listening [Music] you