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

by Simon Parkin, Elliot Fitzpatrick (Reading)

The triumphant story of a group of young women who helped devised a winning strategy to defeat the Nazi U-boats and deliver a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic

By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of ten Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-believe ocean in a manner reminiscent of the childhood game, Battleship. Through play, the designers developed Operation Raspberry, a countermaneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II.



Combining vibrant novelistic storytelling with extensive research, interviews, and previously unpublished accounts, Simon Parkin describes for the first time the role that women played in developing the Allied strategy that, in the words of one admiral, contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany. Rich with unforgettable cinematic detail and larger-than-life characters, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a heart-wrenching tale of ingenuity, dedication, perseverance, and love, bringing to life the imagination and sacrifice required to defeat the Nazis at sea.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, War, Military Fiction, Audiobook, Military History

1 pages, Audio CD

First published November 7, 2019

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unevenness is the name of the game in this apparently revelatory account of Operation Raspberry. Some sections are thrillingly told, but the book's formatting works against even that. It's choppy, flicking between multiple perspectives so that even in the midst of the action, it will break for unrelated or unnecessary side stories. There's a good deal of padding, with both the WRENs and WATU lightly done. Honestly, there were some downright weird choices made when deciding how to put this book together. It has sparked my interest, I'll give it that, but I have no doubt there are better books out there.

ARC. via Netgalley

[Caroline]

Disappointing. Charitably, due partly to the sparsity of primary source material, since the women were barred from talking about their activity for fifty years and male military leaders and war historians ignored it.

As a result, this is mistitled. It’s mostly about the actual Atlantic convoy battles of WWII and their strategists. And about Gilbert Roberts, who devised and ran the war games school. The relatively small part about the women is padded out with their backstories and romantic lives. There just isn’t enough documentation about how large a role they played to support the hype. At least not here.

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

These two books are really difficult for me to review.

The first book, A Game of Birds and Wolves reads like a thriller and I would give it a very solid four-stars. The British, out maneuvered and out gunned, are this close to losing WWII because Germany is throwing up a barricade of u-boats, cutting off supplies, sinking supply ships and killing huge numbers of sailors and civilian passengers. The Germans are surely and steadily winning the Battle of the Atlantic. They have Supreme Commander of the Navy Admiral Karl Doenitz running the show and they have deadly, skilled submarine captains like Otto Kretschmer and Wolfgang Lüth playing for their team. The German u-boat captains had already made a game out of it -- awarding points for every ton of British ship they send to the bottom. Sink 100,000 tons and Admiral Doenitz pins a medal on your chest.

Captain Schnee sinks the SS Aguila, killing 70 young women and gets 9,000 points. Captain Bleichrodt sinks the SS City of Benares, killing over 250 people, including 77 small children, and is awarded 11,000 points. Bleichrodt trades in his points for the Iron Cross. Captain Hardegen sinks the oil tanker Norness, resulting in the deaths of two crew members and a puppy and giving him a whopping 12,000 points.

Inexplicably, Britain recruits Gilbert Roberts to head up a group to figure out how to push the Germans back. Still dangerously underweight, Roberts' had previously been mustered out of the service because he is suffering from tuberculosis. On top of that, the team he will be leading consists almost entirely of young WRENS (Women's Royal Naval Service) whose training, such as it was, consisted mostly of typing and other skills that were considered appropriate for females of the day. Even though we know how it turned out, The Germans lost the Battle of the Atlantic. it's still pretty exciting to see how it was done. Lots of this was top secret until pretty recently.

The second book, The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II is pretty much a two-star book, or an episode of "Ripping Yarns." There are a couple of pages scattered here and there about two outstanding WRENS, Jean Laidlaw and Janet Okell, and a handful of other WRENS flit through various chapters like ghosts. There is some chit chat about their designer uniforms and engagements to fellow naval personnel. There is a lot of lip service given to their importance to the success of the mission but not much information that actually backs it up. Really, the only thing that's new is the extent to which women are allowed to participate at all.

Are there really two books? No, it just seems like it. Now the publisher is probably sorry that I was sent a free copy. Well, I gave 1/2 of the book a 4-star review ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .

My peeve: An interminable anecdote in Chapter 13 about John Lamb partying in NYC is very entertaining but had only the most tenuous connection to the game of birds and wolves. The footnote there that the editor of Vogue magazine, who was at the party, died four months later is only half as interesting and twice as irrelevant.

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a child, my introduction to the Battle of the Atlantic was the film version of Nicolas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea. I recall the voice of Jack Hawkins – he of the terribly stiff upper lip – declaring, ‘The men were the heroes, the ships were the only heroines …’ But as I’ve been recently discovering, there were indeed women who were also heroines, the women of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Wrens, of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, who not only plotted the locations of the convoys and U-boats, but trained the escort officers in anti-submarine tactics. My engagement with naval history seems to be moving up close and personal, from reading about campaigns such as the Battle of the Atlantic to the particularly climactic encounter between two convoys and the U-boats recounted in Martin Middlebrook’s wonderful reconstruction Convoy. With A Game of Birds and Wolves, the birds were the Wrens, and the wolves the German U-boats. The setting was Derby House, an office block converted into the bomb-proof headquarters of the C-in-C Western Approaches, the admiral commanding the battle. The enemy were commanded by Admiral Doenitz, whose wolf-pack tactics nearly succeeded in cutting Britain’s supply lines. The heroes were such men as Captain F. J. ‘Johnnie’ Walker, commander of the sloop Starling who racked up the highest total of U-boat kills in the war (an iconic photo of him with his duffle-coated RNVR officers on the bridge taking a bearing on a U-boat whilst eating an egg sandwich can be found online). But the hero of this book had been invalided out of the Navy with tuberculosis before the war began. Ironically, the war made the Navy find a use of him – playing war games. Commander Gilbert Roberts was charged with studying convoy loses as the U-boats were enjoying an open season on merchantmen in the Atlantic. With the aid of wooden ship models and chalk lines on the linoleum floor, carefully reproducing angles of attack and distances, Roberts and his Wrens worked out what the successful U-boat tactics were and how to counter them. I must confess always imagining submarine attack all wrong – firing torpedoes from the periphery of the convoy like the Indians riding round the circled wagon train in an old western movie. Actually, the trick was to get into the middle of the convoy and after a successful kill dive deep to avoid the depth charges of the escorts and when it was safe, surface astern of the convoy and then follow it. As U-boats on the surface could outrun the merchantmen, they could return to inflict further mayhem till their supply of torpedoes was exhausted. Gilbert and the Wrens devised counter-tactics for the escorts with catchy names such as raspberry, artichoke and observant. Since the climactic battles against the U-boat wolf-packs were fought far from land, their only names are those of the convoys involved. Middlebrook (and John Keegan in The Price of Admiralty) recount the fight for the convoys HX-229 and SC-122 in March 1943. In this book, Simon Parkin devotes two chapters to the battle involving convoy ONS-5 at the end of April. I suspect for the U-boat battle they could be termed ‘the end of the beginning’ and ‘the beginning of the end’ – not of course that Doenitz and his men in any way gave up to the very end. But after these two encounters the wolf-packs never again were able to attack in such strength. No merchantmen were lost in the next three months. It was especially poignant that two of the escort captains guarding ONS-5 were then engaged to marry Wrens actually plotting the battle from their shore stations in what we would call ‘real time’. It makes one think Homer’s Iliad and the women of Troy watching the battles from the ramparts. Unfortunately, there aren’t many surviving memoirs by former Wrens. I intend to do some further research into what I can find. But as so often reading accounts of that period, I wonder how many of us men and women today could equal their patriotism and their fortitude.

[Book2Dragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really liked this book. I was lucky to win it, and this review has nothing to do with that. The story of the U-Boats in WWII is not one I had delved into much, although the German movie 'Das Boot' was all about submarines. But the story of the women (WRENs) of England, many quite young, who assisted with the games that turned the Battle of the Atlantic around is one I definitely did not know about. Apparently not many people did, and I am grateful to the author for his studious research and excellent presentation of this part of history.
He presents the facts in a way that kept me interested, both of the men and women who worked so hard to bring success to this goal, and he also presents the enemy without indiscriminately painting them all as monsters. He stops occasionally to lament that wars happen at all, and for those killed, he presents deaths so that they are personal, not just numbers (although the numbers are sobering.) It also brings to light just how much the British suffered during the war, and how close the allies came to losing.
I'd highly recommend this book to everyone: current and former sailors, history professors and buffs, anyone studying or interested in World War II, young people who don't really remember the war or know much about it, and anyone who just wants to increase their knowledge of how the world works. History is there for us to learn.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

At first I was mighty peeved with Simon Park. The story starts in May 1945, with Gilbert Roberts, a retired British naval officer meeting Karl Doenitz, a German admiral another at a dockyard in Flensburg, Germany. We find out a few things about each that we retold later down the line. We then flit off to the Atlantic in 1940, when eleven-year-old Colin is woken by a torpedo hitting the hull of the luxury cruise liner he’s travelling on. Then we flit to Plymouth, when, I don’t know, two young ladies are serving drinks on a docked vessel. Then to France to hear about Doenitz in his underground headquarters, then to the Admiralty, London. When, I don’t know. This continues and continues. Flitting here, there and everywhere. I gave up on it, made the tea, ate some cake and glowered at my screen (I’m on kindle). Miffed, I was. What happened to little Colin, I wondered?

Grouchy, I went back to it. Little Colin? Best I don’t say. I might be accused of being a spoiler.

This is a thriller. It’s how true life unfolds. Things happen in different parts of the world, at the same time, at different times, and these things are the ripples that spread out and affect outcomes.

Simon Park (my apologies Si) has in his flitting (which I now fully appreciate) brought to life this account of how a few well-chosen people, some very clever and dedicated WRENS (navy gals), beat the odds and saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

The outcome of the war, it has been said by some, rested on these guys and gals figuring this out. I’m not going to mention the figuring, the arguments, the rivalry, the pressures, the work ethic, the outcomes. I’ll just say, honestly, this is a cracking read. It becomes so exciting. The flitting, you see, put me in the middle of the crisis: not sat outside of it looking on.

The gals (WRENS) were hand-picked, proved their worth, stood tall and argued with battle hardened naval officers over tactics at sea, when they’d never actually been to sea, challenging the decisions made when in contact with the enemy and all because they had proven through their gaming that they had the answers.

I love these stories.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Battle of the Atlantic was one of the few truly critical campaigns of the war. While other campaigns mattered, especially to the people who fought in them, ultimately the material superiority of the Allies meant the initiative would return, the Axis would be pushed back eventually. But if the Atlantic convoys did not get through, England would have starved. Russia would not have gotten its Lend-Lease trucks and locomotives that supported the Red Army. The state of the Battle of the Atlantic was one of the few things which scared Winston Churchill during the war.


Tom Hanks in Greyhound, a damn good movie about North Atlantic convoys

Parkin makes a strong case that the key piece in this allied victory was the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, a wargame training team in Liverpool lead by Captain Gilbert Roberts, who had been invalided out of the Royal Navy due to tuberculosis pre-war, and was staffed mostly by the young women of the Wrens (Women's Royal Navy Auxiliary). Roberts and his Wrens created and ran a series of intensive tabletop exercises to teach anti-submarine tactics, training 5000 officers from January 1942 till victory.

The game itself was played on an immense linoleum floor strewn with models and chalk tracks. Players stood around the perimeter of the room, peering though canvas sheets with holes in them that simulated the limited situational of a ship in the tossing seas. U-boat tracks were marked in green chalk, invisible from a distance, while the convoy and its escorts were indicated in white chalk. Players had two minutes to evaluate the situation and give their orders for the turn, after which the Wrens would advance the board and repeat until debrief.

The WATU game has moments of hilarity. A 20 year-old Wren with no combat experience who had possibly never been to sea telling a grizzled destroyer captain, "I wouldn't do that, sir," and being right. Or proving the effectiveness of a new "Beta search pattern" by putting Admiral Max Horton, England's most decorated submariner and then-Atlantic escorts commander, as the U-boats player and having the Wrens depth-charge him five times in a row. But the WATU game is enough for a short article (Strong, 2017, "Wargaming the Atlantic War: Captain Gilbert Roberts and the Wrens of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit", Military Operations Research Society), and this book covers the unit in context.

This historical non-fiction approach is both a strength and a weakness, as other reviewers have noted. Parkin writes with novelistic flair, mining memoirs and contemporary articles for dialog and detail. Some of this works: sections on the torpedoing of the SS City of Benares, carrying British children to America, and the SS Aguila taking Wrens to Gibraltar, makes the human terror of the U-boat war real in a way that tallies of tonnage sunk doesn't. Details of romances and daily life among the Wrens make their service feel more real, though there were tens of thousands of Wrens, and only 64 served in the WATU. The weakness is a certain floppiness in chronology: I remember a one year jump between a bet between U-boat aces over who would hit 250,000 tons and an Admiralty response at one point, and the first chapter ends which a cheap scare of a stranger with a gun entering Captain Parker's quarters which does not pay off. While I am confident in Parkin's sources and methods having checked the footnotes, this is not an academic work. Someone looking for a complete history of the Wrens or the Battle of the Atlantic may feel disappointed.

Like most historians, Parkin puts the critical moment of the Battle of the Atlantic in May 1943, but he focuses down even more to the action of Convoy ONS.5, where over seven days multiple escort groups managed to defend the America bound ships from a super-wolfpack of fifty U-boats. The convoy took losses, but the escorts sunk a U-boat for every two Allied ships lost. After the painful losses of May, Admiral Donitz ordered a 17 week pause in U-boat operations, and even when the U-boat returned it was a far cry from the deadly "happy days" of the early war, with perilous losses for few successes. There are many contributing factors to this Allied victory: a critical density of escort ships, long-range aircraft that could plug the 500 mile gap in the mid-Atlantic previously out of air surveillance, better radar and weapons like the Hedgehog mortar, breaking the Enigma code and conversely securing Allied codes against Nazi codebreakers.

Parkin makes the compelling case that it was teamwork among escort commanders that was the critical factor, and this teamwork was learned at WATU, from young women in uniform, by playing a game.

[Kathryn Bashaar · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early, dark days of WWII, Great Britain's survival balanced on a knife edge. The German Luftwaffe famously rained bombs on Britain's cities nightly. The battle to keep the island nation fed is not as widely known. For food and fuel, Britain depended on convoys from Canada and the U.S. Those convoys, from 1940 until 1942, were the targets of highly effective "wolf packs" of German U-boats. The British government kept a secret chart of how low food supplies could fall before starvation threatened. Several times during those three dark years, supplies fell perilously close to the chart's red line.

Even less well-known is the story of the British naval officer and the Women's Royal Naval Service ("Wrens") who played a large role in solving the problem of the wolf packs. Captain Gilbert Roberts invented a war game that trained the merchant marine and their protective convoys how to both evade the wolf packs and turn the tables on them. Over the years between 1941 and the end of the war, Roberts and his Wrens taught the game to thousands of seamen and officers. By 1943, the wolf packs were barely a threat.

Parkin did a good job of setting up the problem and introducing the reader to Roberts. I also liked how he provided the perspectives of both the British and the Germans. But I am mostly a reader of fiction, so I would have liked this book better if it had read more like a novel. Parkin introduced more characters than he really needed to tell this story. I think he wanted to give credit to as many as possible of these forgotten heroes. But I'd have enjoyed the book more if he had focused on a few key characters and their stories. I also got a little bored by some of the military detail. On the other hand, my husband, who is a military history buff and also read the book, loved that stuff.

A very interesting book that tells a story that was sadly forgotten for too long.

Like my reviews? Check out my blog at http://www.kathrynbashaar.com/blog/
Author of The Saints Mistress https://camcatbooks.com/Books/T/The-S...

[Jessica Senn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was a FANTASTIC book, but the title and description were a little misleading. I felt that the book focused more on the u-boats and convoys than the WRENS. The WRENS felt like just a bit role in a book that is supposedly about them. I did enjoy the afterward that followed up on some of the girls that were mentioned and the explanation of why there isn't much historical record or personal recollections.

All in all, a GREAT book that I feel like is being marketed to young women that would be enjoyed by a FAR broader audience. Don't let the title throw you off! If you enjoy WWII, Battle of the Atlantic, submarines, or war strategy, this is the book for you!

*Coming back into to add: After reading this book, I ended up in Liverpool on a trip and found out that you can visit where all this happened! It was a GREAT experience--if you get the chance, check out https://liverpoolwarmuseum.co.uk/

[Historyguy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Told in vivid, thrilling detail, A Game of Birds and Wolves shines a light into one of the forgotten tactical units of the Second World War and the core role the men and women who worked there played in driving the U-boats from the Atlantic. The book often reads like a thriller, with well-rounded, memorable characters on both sides of the conflict, and high-stakes, but is clearly rooted in painstaking archival research and interview. A gripping, tight-focus expose, not only of the role of wargames in the battle of the Atlantic, but also of their usefulness to both sides in the wider war.

[Linden · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up to 4 stars. The Battle of the Atlantic and the wargame devised by Gilbert Roberts which was implemented by Wrens to outmaneuver the Nazi U-boats.

[Sherrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars.

What a disappointment. The title, no doubt hoping to cash in on the recent spate of women in WW2 books, promises stories about how the WRENS won the war. At least 3/4 of the book is about the German U boat commanders, and the British politicians and sailors who strove to defeat them. As you might guess, these people were all men. The WRENS are at least referred to, and occasionally their contributions to the efforts are mentioned. But more than anything else, the WRENS' stories were who they were dating or marrying, and in one case, the repeated labeling of one WREN as a lesbian. (The entire book is written in that British "stiff upper lip" fashion, which also means more than a hint of misogyny and classism find their way into the pages.)
The story itself is quite interesting, and brought home the reality that Great Britain faced--starvation--if the U boats could not be contained. The leader of the WRENS and the war games, Captain Roberts, was an interesting man described in great detail--far more so than the "ingenious young women" whom the book purports to be about.
Toward the end of the book, the author spends a couple of paragraphs writing of the re-adjustment to civilian life the WRENS faced. This would have been a fascinating subject, but the author immediately plunged back into a wedding story. To be fair, it appears most WRENS did not share their stories with families and friends, but that doesn't excuse the misdirection of the title.
In one final irony, the Epilogue speaks at length about how little known the WRENS' contributions were, and how no one seems to know about them. If any book about them is written like this one, small wonder; the author is guilty of exactly what he claims to be working against.

[Michael Whitehead · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable book that tells an untold story about the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII. I have read a lot, and I mean A LOT, of books about WWII and I was amazed at the information and insight revealed. A big part of the story is the heretofore little told history of the role of the Wrens, the female component of the Royal Navy, and the important role they played in support of the convoys struggling to supply the British Islands against the ferocious German submarine wolf packs.

The second part of the story is the history of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (or WATU), in which the Wrens played a critical role. Captain Roberts, a retired RN officer, was recalled to duty at the beginning of the war to devise a war game to help the convoys and their escorts defeat the tactics of the U-Boats. This game was amazingly successful, and was used to train the convoy escort commanders in tactics, devised by CPT Roberts and the Wrens who worked for him, to successfully defeat the German submarine threat.

The author was able to glean a lot of important information from the Germans side of the battle as well. A lot of this information was new and insightful to me, and gave me a better appreciation and understanding of the German side of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Great book.

[Barb in Maryland · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my kind of history book--an absolutely riveting story that kept me glued to the book coupled with a subject that I knew little about.
Subgenre: book highlighting the essential contributions of a group of women who received very little official credit for what they did.

Highly recommended for history buffs who are looking to expand their knowledge of WWII and/or women in the military.

[Celia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this after going to a talk on the book by Simon Parkin at Canterbury Waterstones last year. The talk was fascinating in its own right but the book is even better! Such a fascinating and, as detailed in the book, relatively unknown section of the war. Well worth a read whether you are interested in the naval aspects of the Second World War or not. Highly recommend it.

[Rosario · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating subject matter, but I didn't feel it was well executed.

I loved hearing more about the Battle of the Atlantic, something that has not been given the prominence it deserves in the history of WWII that most people learn. I also really enjoyed learning more about how games were used to inform the tactics used by the convoys to resist the attacks of U-boats. I'm always up for learning more about the work women did at that time, work that has been devalued and hidden over the year. And on a personal note, having lived in Liverpool for a decade and visited the Western Approaches museum a fair few times, it was particularly interesting to understand more about the work being done there. I'm afraid that while I remember very well seeing the room with the map on the wall, and even the office in the mezzanine from which Sir Percy Noble and his successor watched the situation develop, I don't remember a thing about the room in the attic where Robert and those amazing Wrens ran the games (looking at the museum's website, it doesn't appear at all... or at least, I can't find anything).

The thing is, however interested I was in the content of the book, I really struggled reading it and had to drag myself through most of it. Lots of problems with the writing. First, the deadening way in which Parkin switches from one point of view to the other, which means that whenever we get some momentum going on a topic, that gets sabotaged. There was a single point when the book came alive and really delivered on its promise, and that was the point when the game-playing revealed the U-boats' tactics and suggested better ones. I was riveted for about 30 pages. But then the whole thing died again, and even the titular battle was done in a very underwhelming way.

There was also a lack of filter about what anecdotes were included. It felt like the author just put in everything, whereas any anecdotes included really should be there for a reason, to illustrate something. There were too many tiny details that really didn't add anything, and just slowed things down.

And just as there were too many details, I felt there were too many characters. Well, maybe it was more that none of the characters came alive. By the end of the book, I felt I knew a tiny bit about Roberts' personality, but everyone else blurred together. Unfortunately, this was particularly the case for the Wrens. It may have been a better approach to concentrate on one or two and really concentrate on their characterisation (assuming there was enough material to do that, which may have been the problem).

Oh, and finally, I felt what the author did with the 'cliffhanger' in the first chapter was a bit childish. It simply annoyed me.

So in the end, this was a C+ for me. Such a shame. This could have been so much better.

[Travis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disjointed spaghetti of a book that needed more of an editor or focus to be great.

The book overall does a lot of telling but little showing. The point of the narrative is that this “game” developed by the Royal Navy helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic, but glosses over what tactics where really innovated. All we are told is they developed tactics like”Raspberry” but never got the notion that the author knew what that was. The other strategies discovered by the team are never even explained.

The focus on the wrens was interesting and that is a needed element of WW2 history that can be expanded upon, but again after developing several of them it then seems to gloss over contributions. In essence it was: Here is this interesting person who broke through into a masculine world by being tenacious, and then they were in this room where something happened.

There are baseline historical elements that are seemingly left out, We never get a table for the Allied shipping losses, despite the repeated emphasis that this WAS a big deal that the UK leadership focused on. We never get a sense of the ebbs and flow of the battle.

The beginning setup with a cliff hanger was cheesy and would have been REALLY annoying had I bothered to remember it. That goes for the whole book that seems to jump around in time that it’s not clear when things are happening.

I feel like this book is a great idea of an interesting subject, but it needed to either be a 30 page history article, or a 300 page book with charts/graphs.

[Ransom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simon Parkin carefully and captivatingly shares the history of WATU (Western Advances Tactical Unit) and how the development of board game-style war games impacted the Battle of the Atlantic against the German U-Boats. Parkin has done an incredible amount of primary research to fill the book with as much detail and realism as possible. He's visited museums and scoured unpublished diaries and memoirs and his dedicated work shows. He writes with a style that is gripping, expertly sewing together different threads to make a complete picture. As deftly as Parkin shares the story, my one complaint is that at times, there are almost too many characters and individuals dropping in and out. It feels a little like Parkin is trying to show off all the details that he's discovered. As a result, the flow and drive of the book suffers occasionally. It becomes difficult to keep straight the many Wrens (Women's Royal Navy Service) as they pop in and out of the story and figure out how their side stories contribute to the main focus of the book. Roberts (the head of WATU) and Doenitz (head of German U-boats) are the two dueling minds and focusing on them more could have made for better overall flow. Despite this, I really enjoyed the book and felt like I learned a lot about this frequently overlooked (yet critical) aspect of WWII.
I received this as a Goodreads Giveaway.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty cool book that could have been subtitled something like, “How a group of ingenious young women outfoxed Nazi Germany’s ace U-boat commanders and saved civilization.” It’s highly probable that that isn’t even an exaggeration.

Once again, we have another one of those “untold” stories because of misogyny. That’s pretty clear even to me, a guy. You couldn’t tell stories about how women did jobs that otherwise would have been given to men if they weren’t off fighting a war, and it turned out they did it just as well as any man could have. You couldn’t tell those stories because that would’ve messed up the whole “back to the kitchen with you” or “back to the secretarial pool with you” that they had planned for when the war was over.

This is a terrific story and I’m glad I had a chance to read it. The power of wargames, who would’ve thought.

My only beef with this one is that it was told in a bit of a choppy fashion with a lot of digressions. I understand why you might do that in fiction as a way to ramp up the suspense, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for a nonfiction book, at least not as much as it was done here.

Still, this was a story that needed to be told.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a boring book with the most boring narrator...well here it is. So why did I listen to it until the end? It was background noise for when my morning walks were arduous. I thought it was going to be more about how women designed strategies for merchant ships to escape attack from German U-boats. Nope, somehow the story always focused on the men! Interesting parts...there were a few, such as the design and mechanics of some of the advanced U-boats (those Germans were SMART cookies) and at the end a description of a late 1940's early 1950's board game of battleship. Sounded like a really cool design with a spring loaded mechanism that would make the playing piece fly up in the air if it was hit by a bomb.

[Fred Lente · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great look at an aspect of history I knew nothing about. Would have been nice to have more nuts-and-bolts about the rules and play of the wargame itself, but maybe that's limited to gaming fanatics like myself.

[Mal Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books about women in World War II are popular these days, and the latest one I’ve come across — A Game of Birds and Wolves by Simon Parkin — is a good one, up to a point. Parkin tells the story of several dozen mostly very young women who participated in a little-recognized but vital aspect of the Allied victory. They were recruits to an auxiliary of the British Navy known as the Wrens (Women’s Royal Navy Service). However, in reality, A Game of Birds and Wolves is, more properly, about the man who founded and commanded the top-secret unit in which they served. Unfortunately, partly because the women were never publicly recognized or rewarded for their service and were forced to keep their work secret for fifty years following the war, and partly because apparently the publisher felt the need to mislead readers to boost sales, the subtitle is The Ingenious Young Women Whose Board Game Helped Win World War II. Still, the book really does tell the tale of how wargames helped win World War II, and Parkin tells it well.

World War II hung in the balance in the Battle of the Atlantic
Most accounts of the war in Europe dwell on the conflict on land, focusing on such pivotal events as the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, the Normandy Invasion, and the Battle of the Bulge as well as the secret war carried on by intelligence agents and partisans. The Battle of the Atlantic is all too often lost in this narrative. Yet in the early years, when Great Britain was struggling to survive in the face of a threatened Nazi invasion, the British came perilously close to losing World War II because Germany’s U-boats were sinking prodigious numbers of merchant ships carrying essential food and fuel to the island — 2,603 merchant ships and 175 of their escorts.

At the time, however, both the Germans and the British tallied losses not in numbers of ships sunk but in the tonnage of food and supplies lost, a bloodless conception reminiscent of the “body count” of the Vietnam War. The threat was so great that for years the British government kept secret how enormous the losses had been. Even some members of Churchill’s cabinet were kept in the dark — yet the people of the UK came perilously close to starvation. And A Game of Birds and Wolves is the story of how the British Royal Navy eventually prevented that by winning the Battle of the Atlantic.

A strategy born out of desperation won the Battle of the Atlantic
Parkin tells the tale of a top-secret unit established deep underground in Liverpool. There, a small staff developed wargames to help develop new antisubmarine tactics, eventually training thousands of British naval officers who commanded escort vessels protecting the convoys of merchant ships who traversed the Atlantic throughout the war. A retired officer turned game designer named Gilbert Roberts masterminded the effort, working with a staff composed largely of young Wrens, some of them barely out of secondary school. The Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), as it was called, arose out of desperation. Winston Churchill personally set WATU in motion, ordering Roberts to “‘Find out what is happening and sink the U-boats.”

WATU’s wargames helped win World War II
In fact, “the first fruits of WATU’s work began to be seen in summer 1942, when escort ships 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.” And by March 1943, the inventive tactics WATU had designed allowed the British to win “‘the greatest convoy battle of all time.'” In May of that year, Admiral Karl Doenitz, the supreme commander of the German Navy and the architect of the “wolfpack” strategy that had proved so deadly, admitted that he had lost the Battle of the Atlantic and recalled his boats to shore.

The critical role of the Wrens
Throughout A Game of Birds and Wolves, Parkin valiantly tries to highlight the experiences of the young women who served with Roberts (and later his successor) in WATU. He dwells on the contributions of several individuals, but there is now apparently little information available. “Not one of the Wrens involved was to receive public recognition for her contribution,” so there is virtually nothing in the official record. And, as he notes, “captains at sea and the anxious admirals at home were all granted special dispensation to tell their stories soon after the war; everyone else involved, including the Wrens, was forbidden from talking or writing about their work for fifty years.” By which time, of course, many of them had died.

However, Parkin makes absolutely clear that the Wrens’s contributions were huge. As one example, he tells the tale of a nineteen-year-old Wren recruit who had gained such expertise in playing the games they devised that she beat the most celebrated submarine ace in the Royal Navy — five times in a row. WATU was Roberts’s masterstroke, but the intelligence and resourcefulness the Wrens brought to the unit made its success possible.

The long history of wargames
As Parkin reports, “archaeologists have unearthed sets of miniature soldiers that represent Sumerian and Egyptian armies. Many of the earliest board games that, like chess and go, are still played today are either military-themed, or explore concepts of strategy and tactics.” Chess is believed to have originated in the early years of the first millennium CE in northern India, while go was first played in China in the fourth century BCE. But the first board game specifically designed to explore military strategy and tactics was invented in Prussia in 1780. Ever since then, armies and navies alike around the world have organized wargames to test new tactics and probe for weaknesses in their strategies. The British Navy’s effort in World War II continued a long tradition.

About the author
Simon Parkin has been a contributor to the New Yorker since 2013. Much of his writing is about technology. He is also a video game critic: his first book was Death by Video Game. A Game of Birds and Wolves is his second.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

After seeing Simon Parkin give a talk about this book I had to purchase it to find out more.

It's a fascinating account about a group of WRENS (Women's Royal Naval Service) who alongside Captain Roberts devised a strategy through playing war games (Operation Raspberry) to win against the German U-boats in the battle for the Atlantic. I also found his coverage of what was happening on the German side as an interesting and important contrast.

Unfortunately there are few sources for the work performed by these WRENS but Parkin does an excellent job in putting them together to provide a narrative.

[Katharine Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A Game of Birds and Wolves" - written by Simon Parkin and published in 2020 by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group. Parkin describes and celebrates a little-known (at least on this side of the pond) effort that helped win the WWII Battle of the Atlantic. German U-boats were devastating ships carrying much-needed food and supplies to Great Britain and a dedicated group led by Capt Gilbert Roberts and some hand-picked Wrens (Women's Royal Navy Service) devised a series of war games played on a linoleum floor to try to suss out a way to take the upper hand. "A formidable RN captain was in charge; and a large number of patient Wrens stood by, moving the ship models, bringing the latest "signals" and sometimes discreetly advising the next course of action." The effort was a secret one and not greatly publicized after the war - many of the women had difficulty fitting into life after war. "But I would not have missed this wonderful experience, this great sisterhood, for anything." The text was somewhat repetitive, but the story was very instructive.

[Laura Hoffman Brauman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Game of Birds and Wolves was a fascinating look at a behind the scenes story from WWII. The Wrens were a group of women in the British Royal Navy who were part of a group that developed strategies to help the British and American ships outmaneuver the German U-Boats. If you like WWII history or stories of women defying stereotypes, this is a perfect read for you.

[Emil Schmemil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spannend aber die (hin und her springende) Struktur macht das lesen manchmal sehr schwer

[Jaxon Reed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a fan of nautical non-fiction, and I have a more than passing interest in games applications. And of course who doesn't like World War II books? So when I found Simon Parkin's new book combining all three of these topics, it became a must-read.

Wargaming is old and has taken multiple forms down through the ages. Boardgames representing the battlefield help leaders understand strategy. With that simple concept, using games in the North Atlantic battlefield and leveraging them to understand how Nazi U-boats were successfully decimating British and American convoys, as well as developing strategies to defeat them, were all logical leaps. Parkin does a great job of holding the reader's interest in the build-up to the war's climax at sea, when the tide finally changed against German submarine warfare.

The book is extremely well-crafted, with polished prose, zero to no grammatical errors, and a bevy of wonderful Briticisms. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. As far as complaints, I would have preferred even more discussion of the thought processes leading Doenitz to practically abandon his submarine wolf packs after seemingly one major defeat. This was never fully explained by Parkin.

Inevitably, modern politics creeps in a bit, although Parkin does a good job of holding down the modern lens on a past time throughout most of the book. This is an effort to celebrate the Wrens, those often under-appreciated British female service members. The author does as well as could be expected with a paucity of source material, drawing from diaries and other unpublished materials as well as records in the Imperial War Museum, conversations with the few living Wrens from the era and their relatives, and more. However, we hardly need to be informed in great detail of which Wrens were lesbians, nor reminded of the fact that just as the Brits were winning the Battle of the Atlantic, other parts of the empire were starving. I also wish the author had spent more time on the game mechanics, although I suspect part of that might have to do with a lack of clear information. We are treated to a variety of photographs from the time, though, and can see the game in action for ourselves even if we don't clearly understand precisely how it was played. It's like observing a car without fully understanding the engine under the hood. We know it works, but understanding the "how" requires much more discussion.

The whole idea of using wargames in the effort against U-boats sprang from a British naval officer by the name of Gilbert Roberts, who had earlier been forcibly retired from service due to tuberculosis. He managed quite admirably and relatively anonymously in the role of training other officers how to handle submarine attacks by playing this giant boardgame. He also was forward thinking enough for his time (there's that modern lens again) to accept women into his ranks. Some of these young and bright Wrens had never actually been to sea, but they understood naval strategies and helped effectively teach officers going through Robert's gaming course. The book does a good job of finally offering Captain Roberts overdue recognition for his service.

With so many other things going on in the war, and so many people contributing, it's refreshing to find the overlooked and take a "deep dive" into their efforts. With such a splendid and well-written book, Simon Parkin should be celebrated. With action swinging back from the pitching decks at sea in the midst of battle, to the personal struggles of Captain Roberts on shore as well as the women serving with him, this makes for a compelling true life story.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book, providing both a history of the Royal Navy’s WRNS (Women’s Royal Navy Service) and a study of the use of tactical wargames in WWII’s Battle of Atlantic. The title itself only refers to the May 1942 fighting which took place around Convoy ONS-5, considered by many the pivotal turning point in the battle against the U-Boats. But the book covers a much broader scope, giving both detailed insights into the actions and motivations of the WRNS volunteers as well as the background and machinations surrounding the use of wargames to devise Anti-Submarine Warfare tactics. Captain Gilbert Roberts was the RN Officer who led the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, or WATU (Western Approaches being the RN’s primary command element fighting the U-Boats). Captain Roberts had to fight a command culture which disdained simulation and initially looked askance at the tactics he put forth. This was not helped by his being an invalided Officer, denied the chance for active service. But, after developing the successful Raspberry tactic and achieving the support of a few critical tactical leaders, Captain Roberts was able to implement across the Fleet additional tactics from his wargame and use his facility as the premier training course for ASW units. He was ably assisted in this effort by a group of youthful but very smart female RN personnel; in fact, they became so good at “the game” that they themselves devised most of the new tactics. The author does add in a number of accounts from the ‘frontlines,’ the experience of being torpedoed or depth-charged, as well as some accounts of life and operations in the U-Boat Force. These insertions slightly offset the main thrust of the story, but overall the book is helped by this additional color and variety. The book ends in a solid tribute to the many WRNS officers and ratings who played a major role in the allied naval victory in the Atlantic. Highly recommended for those wanting to better understand the RN’s tactical ASW development in WWII.

[Vintagebooklvr · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brings to life and to view a vital and forgotten part of WWII: the overwhelming effect the U-boats had on merchant shipping to Britain with the essential food supplies they needed brought in or they would starve and the desperate battle of overlooked men and especially women to come up with a strategy to save the nation. In 1941, Britain lost something like 1300 ships in one year alone and had sunk only about a dozen U-boats. They were weeks away from the line that would force them to surrender.

Captain Gilbert with a group of 10 Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) devised a strategy game that would reveal the methods the U-boats were using to such devastating effect and to devise a counter-measure which then they taught to captains and spread it throughout the navy. It changed the course of the war and this book details the forgotten people and their techniques which were usually overlooked and forgotten because of the bias against women structured into the armed services and society at the time and later because it was not as exciting as descriptions of battles at seas.

It is time that their stories are told and these people are able to take their place in history recognized for the vital role they played. It is a story filled with resolve, dedication, ingenuity, sacrifice, patriotism, overcoming the odds, and love. And it is true.

The book is an easy read and interesting--not all histories are--without being needlessly theatrical.

[Alexander Peck · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing. The topic interested me and when I learned about WATU last year, I wanted to read a book about it. I think at least one of the above stars I gave just because I like the subject.

The book tells both sides of the story well the Nazi and British knowledge and actions are displayed side by side which I found pleasing. The end of part two and the beginning of part three are incredibly well written.

On the other hand, Early on ( and a little at the end but that's more forgivable) the book waxes poetically pedantic frequently. It will demonstrate and explain a tragic situation (and do a good job at it) but then just flatly evaluate the situation by stating it was tragic and war is bad. The first third of the book does this all the time. It made it clunky. and hard to read, made otherwise good writing quite juvenile.

All history books these days seem to have the model where they begin by describing the climax of the action up until the resolution to hook you then they go back to a more standard beginning and eventually get you back there. This is probably unnecessary in a book with at least one boat explosion every five pages and just offensive when the book attempts to do this trick twice.

On page 107 the book says "Hitler believed women's lives should revolve around three Ks: 'Kinder', Küche and Kirche'"

No, he didn't.