A Game of Birds and Wolves: The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II
By: Simon Parkin / Narrated By: Elliot Fitzpatrick
Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
Misleading subtitle but a jolly grand WWII story!
I get it, really I do: Scant little has been written documenting the courage, dedication, and exploits of women in our history, so much so that when one sees a subtitle that gives women a sound Huzzah one can expect that the story reeeeeally isn’t gonna be THAT much about women.
A Game of Birds and Wolves is no different.
It is a vast history of the Allied (Mainly British) struggles to get a handle on the U-boat wolf packs that roamed the Atlantic and that struck convoys, sinking merchant mariners, torpedoing war vessels and civilian ships alike. It opens with German command meeting their rivals and conquerors in British command. And by the way? It opens with a kinda bang, leaving those of us not in the Know hanging and on the edge of our seats (Right about that point, since I’m not into delayed gratification and flunked The Marshmallow Test, I googled my brains out, and I hit Wikipedia something fierce!).
The Secret Board Game mentioned comes from the wargames that Captain Gilbert Roberts promoted and was pegged to carry out at WATU (Western Approaches Tactical Unit) whereby he and a select group of AWEsome Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service) studied past true life battles and skirmishes between German U-boats and Royal Navy convoys, leading them to plot movement and actions on floor grids. They studied the battles over and over and, with the help of some decoding and some recorded confessions by captured Germans, came to discover new tricks and tactics in Karl Dönitz’s planning. Prior to this, Great Britain went on the assumption that the Germans were operating U-boats just as they had during WWI… and they were verrry mistaken. Nazi U-boats were sneaking into the convoys and torpedoing ships from there rather than from the periphery.
Wren Jean Laidlaw does get some airtime as a planner and strategist, and it was she who dubbed their first response/tactic as The Raspberry (This being a rather whimsical raspberry splatted in the Hitler/Dönitz face). Also getting a good shoutout is Wren Janet Okell, tho’ all I gathered from her here and in Wikipedia and a few articles is she’s best known for: a) Beating Admiral Max Horton in 5 out of 5 wargames, sinking his U-boat each time, leading to disbelief then respect, and b) Getting lost as her teen-aged self hit her first day of work and bursting most summarily into tears. Jeez, ya beat an Admiral but what they remember is that ya wept your face off first day out!
The stories are rousers indeed as I’m soooo into WWII and Military History, and it was spectacular and enlightening to learn about clever maneuvers that women had a most definite hand in creating. There are side stories, and there are followups given at the end. Most interesting is that Roberts never got the attention for his efforts that he felt he deserved in stumping Dönitz to the point where the only response Dönitz could muster was: Must have more U-boats! And while Roberts was a steadfast supporter of the women who made up his team, I dunno, but it didn’t seem like, while he thought HE was overlooked, THEY DEFinitely were.
Elliot Fitzpatrick does a bang-up job with the narration as the exploits of different people were told, and major engagements were relayed so that the listener does indeed feel like part of the action. He does, however, from the get-go display what I at first thought was going to be a dealbreaker for the whole audiobook: He takes sharp inhalations of breath before each sentence, and it’s sooo audible. Now, I’m kinda sorta a hater of mouth noises, disliking it greatly when I hear mouth breathing, and lip smacking, and swallowed gulps, and spit forming in the back of a narrator’s mouth, so I really did think I wouldn’t be able to stand it. Fortunately, it’s a subject area that fascinates me, and it’s very much engaging with the experiences of so many people covered and so many really cool maritime skirmishes and battles. And it was awfully exciting to see how new tactics were implemented in real time, for major battles.
It’s just that I was hoping for more of the women as they were such an integral part of engineering those responses, of developing those pre-assault techniques.
Still, as I scrolled through info after info, it’s pretty safe to say that these women simply served to the best of their abilities, relishing the excitement of the moment, saying simply: I did what I could do, and the heady rush was worth it. And to give this book its due, a huuuuge part of the info out there uses A Game of Birds and Wolves as source material.
And in the end? I’m so glad there’s SOMEthing out there, SOME part of their service was acknowledged and celebrated.
Brava!!!
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