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

23RD MAY 1945

Gilbert Roberts, a retired British naval officer turned game designer, stepped onto the gangway leading up to the ocean liner, then immediately stopped. If he was not mistaken the man making his way down the plank, labouring under the weight of a suitcase, was Karl Doenitz, a German admiral who, twenty-three days earlier, following the suicide of Adolf Hitler, had become Nazi Germanys new head of state.

The men drew close, then stopped in front of one another, suspended, as they had been for much of the war, in a liminal space, neither fully on land nor fully at sea. For a moment, in the mid-afternoon sunlight, the creak and slop of the dockside was the only sound.

Each man looked at least one size too small for his uniform. It was misfortune, not restraint that had helped them avoid the thickening torsos worn by most who reach a high rank and all its associated comforts. For forty-four-year-old Roberts, a violent battle with illness had left him wheezy. At eight stone and five feet eleven, he was also perilously underweight. Doenitz, meanwhile, had spent the month bearing the pressure of trying to broker the surrender of his beleaguered nation. Then there was the unquenchable pain of having lost not one but two sons to war within a year of each other. Moreover, both the boys had died while serving in the U-boat division, which Doenitz had founded and tenaciously commanded at every step of his rise. He had been twice responsible for their lives: as their father, and as their commander.

Catastrophe and a talent for endurance were not all that the two men shared. For the last three years Roberts and Doenitz had also been adversaries in a vast and deadly game of U-boats and battleships, played out on the Atlantic Ocean, an arena so treacherous and capricious that it was considered, by all those who fought there, to be the third adversary in their war.

Roberts, having been discharged from the navy in the summer of 1938, the day after his tuberculosis was diagnosed, had been brought back into service seven months into the war. Game designer was not a job description used by the navy at the time, but this was the nature of the role given to Roberts by Britains prime minister, Winston Churchill. He was to create a game that would enable the British to understand why they were losing so many ships to German U-boat attacks. Teamed with a clutch of bright, astute young naval women known as Wrens, many of whom were barely out of school, Roberts had, in the months that followed, restaged countless ocean battles using his game. Through play he had developed anti-U-boat tactics that, once proven, had been taught to thousands of naval officers before they headed to sea.

Doenitz also knew the curious value of play during wartime. He too had designed games to test and refine tactics that, from his HQ in the bunker beneath an elegant nineteenth-century villa in occupied France, could be issued to his beloved U-boat captains. These would aid the crews in their ultimate aim: to sink Allied merchant ships, thereby preventing food and supplies from reaching British shores, in order to starve the islanders and win the war.

Both men had orchestrated their feints and attacks by shunting wooden tokens around maps of the ocean, known as plots, like pieces on a watery chessboard. The stakes were mortal; many thousands of Britons and Germans had died, including men whom Roberts and Doenitz had each personally known and instructed.

Good afternoon, Admiral, said Roberts, who was flanked by a young American interrogator and former FBI agent.

Doenitz, who immediately recognised his rival from a photograph printed in a British magazine article the previous year, nodded respectfully.not his theories about secret U-boat tactics, deduced via the crucible of his games, were accurate.

In his pocket Roberts, a fluent German-speaker, felt his Ikes pass, a document issued and signed by the general of the US Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that bestowed on him authority to interrogate anybody related to his investigation. How Roberts longed to quiz Doenitz about the U-boat tacticsthe wolfpacks, the torpedo attacks, the underwater getawaysand, moreover, to discover how much the admiral knew about the countermeasures he and the Wrens had designed. But Doenitz was needed in Luxembourg, where he was to join the other captured Nazi Party and SS leaders, army chiefs and ministers and await trial for war crimes.

We will supply you with everything you need to make your visit pleasant and efficient, Doenitz said, before continuing down the ramp towards the pier.

As an armed guard led Doenitz past a phalanx of British tanks toward the nearby police station where he was to be searched for hidden phials of poison, Roberts and the FBI interrogator boarded the ship. It was called the Patria, the last vestige, as the name implied, of Hitlers crumbled Fatherland.

Aboard the liner, which could accommodate close to six hundred crew and passengers, Roberts was shown to his quarters. It was a first-class suite comprising a sleeping cabin, private bathroom and sitting room, where he planned to interview surrendered U-boat officers. As he walked through the door, Roberts was greeted by a handsome young German naval officer, with slicked hair and a determined brow. The man introduced himself as Heinz Walkerling. He was, he explained, to be Roberts assistant for the duration of the mission.

Walkerling, who had celebrated his thirtieth birthday just four days earlier,straight. As the FBI man set up his tape recorder, which was disguised as a suitcase, under Roberts bunk, Walkerling asked whether his new boss had a gun to keep him safe.

No, said Roberts, who had turned down the offer of a weapon before leaving London.

At five oclock that afternoon, Roberts conducted his first interrogation, with Doenitzs chief of staff, the man responsible for the organisation and operation of all U-boats. After two hours intensive questioning, Roberts switched off his tape recorder and, accompanied by Walkerling, made his way to the officers mess for some food.