The Battle of the Atlantic raged from the opening shots of the Second World War in 1939 until its end six years later, making it the longest military campaign of the conflict. If German U-boats had prevented British merchant ships from carrying food, raw materials and later troops and their equipment from the Empire and America to Britain, the outcome of the war could have been very different. During the early years of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic hung in the balance and was Germany’s best hope of defeating Britain by starving the country into submission. In his memoirs Winston Churchill famously wrote, ‘the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.’
As well as the Battle of the Atlantic another lesser-known sea battle was fought in the English Channel, a conflict described by Sir Peter Scott (1909–1989), the famous ornithologist and captain of a gunboat, as the ‘Battle of the Narrow Seas’. During the early years of the war, it was as strategically important as the Battle of the Atlantic, the Germans calling it the Kanalkampf (Channel battle). After the fall of France in June 1940 U-boats and the Luftwaffe took part in combined attacks against British coastal targets and convoys beginning on 4 July. This soon became a battle for control of not just the Channel waters but the air space, the Germans needing to achieve air superiority over England before they could invade.
To help win the battle in 1940, the Sunday Pictorial paper produced its own game called Sea Battle! The paper was launched on 14 March 1915 by 1st Viscount Rothermere (Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1868–1940)25 and combined socially responsible reporting with entertainment, especially sport. The first editor was F. R. Sanderson who led with topical war stories on the front page, one being the ‘The task of the Red Cross’ and another ‘All that was left of a Big Gun’. From its launch the paper was a huge success and within six months was selling more than one million copies, boosted by articles from a disillusioned Winston Churchill after he had resigned from the Cabinet in 1915 (The Sunday Pictorial, or Sunday Pic for short, was the original name of the Sunday Mirror). Despite its initial success, by the mid-1930s the paper had begun to flounder until a new editor, Hugh Cudlipp, took over in 1937. Within three years of taking the helm he had revived its fortunes so by the start of the Second World War its circulation stood at more than 1.7 million.26
To help win the Battle of the Atlantic, in 1940 the Sunday Pictorial paper produced its own game called Sea Battle!, featuring enemy planes falling from the sky in flames and U-boats being attacked.
Cudlipp wanted his paper to appeal to the whole family and realised that producing a game aimed at children would boost circulation as they would badger their parents to buy it. The game was manufactured by British Games Limited who were based in Clerkenwell, London, and who boasted on the cover it was ‘The Great Sunday Pictorial War Game’. The artwork featured a spectacular mock sea battle with a salvo from a British warship, enemy planes falling from the sky in flames and merchant ships going down after being torpedoed. The game was based on snakes and ladders, the aim being to manoeuvre your ship from Dover to Calais. There were 165 squares to navigate, ships advancing by landing on C for Convoys but going backwards if they encountered sea mines, fog, torpedoes, bombers and U-boats en route. It could be played by two to four players and was by wartime economy standards a well-produced game, the box and the artwork being manufactured to a high standard and the ships, which were used as counters, unusually being made of metal.
In real life a much more complex version of the game was used by the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU) based in Derby House, Liverpool. Launched by the Royal Navy in 1942, it was created to counter the German submarine attacks on convoys. Led by Captain Gilbert Roberts (1900–1986), WATU was staffed by the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) who successfully used war games to test tactics and train naval officers. The strategic role of WATU and their use of war games helped to turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic.
The game was based on snakes and ladders, ships advancing by landing on a C for convoys but going backwards if they landed on sea mines, fog, torpedoes, bombers or U-boats.