Science - 31 January 2020

516 31 JANUARY 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6477 sciencemag.org SCIENCE

PHOTO: ARCHIVE/NATIONAL SCIENCE AND MEDIA MUSEUM/SCIENCE & SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY

I

n A Game of Birds and Wolves, journal-

ist Simon Parkin reports on a long over-

looked piece of World War II’s Battle of

the Atlantic, focusing on a war game that

helped the British counter Nazi U-boats

threatening Britain’s vital sea lines.

The first part of the book will be familiar

to war scholars and history buffs, offering

an overview of German Admiral Karl Doe-

nitz’s plan to use a fleet of U-boats to cut off

commerce to the United Kingdom, which

the island nation needed to stay in the war.

Although a similar strategy had been tried

unsuccessfully in World War I, Doenitz be-

lieved that improved communications would

enable groups of U-boats to operate together,

WAR GAMES

By Stacie L. Pettyjohn

During this game, the two sides maneu-

vered their respective vessels, dropped depth

charges, and fired torpedoes on a linoleum

floor, where each 10-inch square represented

one nautical mile. The British team com-

manded their escorts from behind white

sheets designed to limit their line of sight to

replicate the view from a ship’s bridge. While

British ships were outlined in conspicuous

white chalk, the U-boats were marked in

green, rendering them invisible. Throughout

the game, the Wrens measured and marked

the ships’ movements, provided intelligence,

guided discussions, and played as the Ger-

man team. Roberts presided over the game

and the postgame discussion.

Parkin nicely highlights how this war game

was used for multiple purposes at different

times during the war. Roberts and the Wrens

first used the game to uncover Kretschmer’s

tactical innovation, for example. They then

used it to develop and test countermeasures.

Additionally, the game was used to teach

skeptical audiences the superiority of WATU’s

countermeasures when compared with ex-

isting tactics. By the war’s end, nearly 5000

sailors had taken WATU’s weeklong course

covering four different battle scenarios.

The book’s third and final section  details

the apex of the war at sea, when British con-

voys used WATU-developed tactics and, bol-

stered by aircraft and naval support groups,

fended off the largest wolf-pack

attacks of World War II. After 41

U-boats were sunk in May 1943,

the Battle of the Atlantic turned

decisively toward the Allies. 

A Game of Birds and Wolves is

extensively researched and well

written, and it tells an engrossing

story of a little-known topic. Still,

war gamers and those interested

in the role of women in war games

are likely to be disappointed. The

book’s actual discussion of war

games is relegated to a relatively

small section in the middle of the book, and

Parkin’s protagonists are Doenitz and Rob-

erts. A dearth of firsthand accounts from the

Wrens hampered Parkin’s research, and the

women are rendered in broad strokes as a

supporting cast of characters.

Sa dly, the Wrens were an anomaly, reflect-

ing a brief moment when women were war

gamers out of necessity, operating in a field

that to this day is dominated by men. Yet gen-

der diversity has been shown to yield better

and more innovative solutions in such set-

tings, and achieving it should be a priority. j

10.1126/science.aba2874

Members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service trace

the paths of hypothetical British and German vessels.

A high-stakes game

of battleship helped turn

the tide in World War II’s

Battle of the Atlantic

BOOKS et al.

The reviewer is director of Project AIR FORCE’s Strategy

and Doctrine Program and codirector of the Center

for Gaming, RAND Corporation, Arlington, VA 22202, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Game over

like a wolf pack, and allow them to coordi-

nate and defeat escorted convoys.

Doenitz’s plan, devised in 1937, was not

realized until June 1940, when Germany’s oc-

cupation of France gave it Atlantic bases. Na-

zis called this the “happy time” because their

U-boats roamed the seas with

impunity, sinking civilian vessels

carrying cargo and, notably, the

passenger ship SS City of Benares,

which was carrying 90 children

fleeing the United Kingdom.

(Parkin’s vivid description of the

Benares’s fate is, at times, a dis-

traction from the larger narrative.)

According to Parkin, this success

was largely due to bold tactics de-

veloped by German Captain Otto

Kretschmer, who launched night

attacks within the columns of a

convoy, firing torpedoes at point-blank range,

then submerging until the convoy dispersed. 

In January 1942, Winston Churchill en-

listed Captain Gilbert Roberts to lead a small

organization—the Western Approaches Tacti-

cal Unit (WATU)—charged with identifying

U-boat tactics, developing effective counter-

measures, and teaching British sailors to use

new countermaneuvers. Lacking competent

men to staff WATU, Roberts turned to the

Women’s Royal Naval Service (known as the

“Wrens”), which assigned women who had a

“keen mind for numbers” to build and run

a game modeling a two-sided tactical fight

between British escorts and German U-boats.

A Game of

Birds and Wolves

Simon Parkin

Little, Brown, 2020.

336 pp.

Published by AAAS