The self-effacing Otto Kretschmer, great ace of the German fleet, had come to hate the ceremonious homecomings that welcomed his U-boat each time it chugged into Lorient. The grinning girls with their bouquets of flowers, the tooting brass bands, the scribbling journalists–it all seemed to Kretschmer a corrupting indulgence. This time, however, he knew that he would be unable to avoid the inevitable fuss. In the weeks following the embryonic wolfpack attack on convoy HX.72, Kretschmer had carried out two further patrols, during which he sank no fewer than eleven Allied vessels.
Kretschmer had continued to develop his pioneering technique of firing on targets at point-blank range, sinking the British armed merchant cruiser HMS Laurentic from a distance of just 250 metres. So compelling was the news of these winter victories that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, described them in a radio broadcast as ‘the greatest adventure story of the war’. Then, on 4th November 1940, while Kretschmer was still at sea, Hitler awarded him the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross, the highest decoration a German could receive for valour in the face of the enemy.
Four days later U-99 slunk into harbour at Lorient. Kassel, the petty officer who had given the concussed Briton, Joseph Byrne, a tin of pineapple a few weeks earlier, took down an incoming signal from Doenitz, notifying Kretschmer of the award and the order that he was to travel to Berlin to receive it from Hitler in person. On his previous return to port, and much to the consternation of his crew, when Kretschmer had spied the waiting crowds he had pointed U-99 toward a little-used Lorient jetty, unpopular with U-boat crews as it was such a long walk from town. Having tied up, Kretschmer was preparing to disembark when a launch sped up alongside the submarine.
‘Commander Kretschmer, there has been a mistake,’ cried the officer aboard. ‘Admiral Doenitz and the military command have turned out to greet you. You are to take your ship over to the main berth now.’ Having been caught out, Kretschmer decided to give the onlookers a show, and, in a wide, frothing arc, made toward the main jetty at full speed, before slamming the engines into reverse to come to a shuddering halt a few feet from the quay.
Today, fearing more of Kretschmer’s self-effacing tricks, Doenitz had his ace captain escorted from U-99 to a waiting plane, to take him directly to Paris for a face-to-face debrief. There, after providing a rundown of the ships he had sunk on U-99’s most recent sortie, Doenitz asked Kretschmer to select five other members of his crew for decoration. With characteristic magnanimity, Kretschmer argued that it was an unfair request: all of his crew, he said, were deserving of recognition. Finally, when pressed, Kretschmer conceded that his petty officer Kassel should be the first in line for an Iron Cross.
That night Kretschmer sat in the corner table in the Parisian club Chez Elle. He had enjoyed little sleep during the past week, and the emotional bends caused by the lurch from the Atlantic battlefront to the clubs of Paris were only heightened by the knowledge that tomorrow he was to meet with the Führer. In this psychic anteroom, caught between the depths of the ocean and the heights of political power, Kretschmer drank his champagne in lusty, nerve-quietening gulps.
The following morning, 12th November 1940, Kretschmer arrived in Berlin and disembarked the five-seater plane on which he was the sole passenger. It was the first time the twenty-eight-year-old had stepped onto German soil since moving to France, but any warm sense of homecoming ran cold from Kretschmer’s mind the moment he saw the car waiting to escort him to the luxurious Kaiserhof Hotel. There he bathed and, after a brief meeting with Grand Admiral Raeder, leader of the Kriegsmarine, was escorted 200 yards to the Reich Chancellery by car, an extravagance that, considering the shortages of oil and petrol in France, rankled the U-boat captain.
Hitler’s naval aide, Captain Puttkamer, whose job was to drill Kretschmer for the day’s ceremony, led him into the Chancellery, past a giant eagle, through the lobby into the high-ceilinged reception room. Four and a half years later this room was where Berlin’s soldiers would make their final stand, in a mesh of fallen crossbeams, the frail walls pocked with shrapnel. It would be a scene of utter destruction, one that the Soviet foreign minister, who visited shortly after the fighting ended, described as an illustration of Dante’s hell. That day, however, it was pristine and palatial, the walls hung with tapestries of pastoral scenes, the floor thick with miles of yielding Persian rugs.
At noon Kretschmer’s chaperone, Puttkamer, left the room. After a few nervous minutes, Kretschmer watched the tall swing doors open. Hitler walked into the room, Puttkamer at his side, holding a small, gold-edged box in his hands. Kretschmer stood and greeted the Führer, who offered his leading U-boat ace a few words of praise before presenting him with the box, inside of which nestled the Oak Leaves.
The brisk ceremony complete, Hitler motioned Kretschmer to the settee. For a while the U-boat officer listened while Hitler spoke of the campaign, boasting of how the fortuitous taking of the French ports had been his plan all along. Kretschmer did not let on, but in private he was weary. A few months later a secret recording of a conversation between the captain and one of his crew was made by the British in which Kretschmer admitted: ‘For a long time I have felt no enthusiasm for the war.’1
It was this fatigue that motivated Kretschmer, when Hitler asked how the U-boat war was progressing, into a mode of courageous forthrightness. There were too few U-boats, Kretschmer said, pointedly. Since the beginning of the war, neither Doenitz nor Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had been able to convince Hitler to fully back naval economic warfare. As such, Kiel’s shipyards had insufficient steel and labour to build the fleet of 300 U-boats that Doenitz estimated he required to deal a critical and sustained setback to Britain’s imports. Kretschmer was surely aware of Doenitz’s frustration, and took the opportunity to reaffirm his superior’s appeal.
‘The quicker they build them,’ he said, ‘the more possible it will be to press home night surface attacks and produce wolfpacks large enough to wipe out convoys.’
Boldness begat boldness and Kretschmer, warming to his subject, moved on to the urgent need for large-scale air reconnaissance in the Atlantic. With a squadron of planes searching for convoys, and a large number of U-boats waiting patiently at sea, the Germans’ current advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic could be pressed, he said. Hitler nodded, rose to his feet.
‘Thank you, Commander,’ he said. ‘You have been admirably frank, and I shall do what I can for you and your colleagues.’
Before he left the room, Hitler informed Kretschmer that they were to take lunch together. A guard escorted Kretschmer to the dining hall. There, around a large round table, a dozen or so aides stood behind their chairs, awaiting Hitler’s arrival. Kretschmer was shown to his chair. It was the seat of honour, at Hitler’s right-hand side. Kretschmer had no experience of stately meals, and realised that neither meat nor alcohol, which Hitler despised, was to be served. Worse still, as he looked around at the other guests he correctly guessed that smoking was forbidden, a realisation that only heightened his pangs of nicotine withdrawal, after weeks chain-smoking cheroots at sea.
While lunch was served by wide-set SS guards, Kretschmer listened as talk turned to the subject of the arrival in Germany of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian premier. Molotov and his entourage, one adjutant explained, had arrived at the German border by train from Moscow, then changed trains. Once aboard the Berlin-bound train, they had refused to eat the German food, and had instead brought their own breakfast baskets.
‘Wise,’ said Hitler, ‘if a little theatrical.’
Finally, the adjutant noted the number of women that Molotov had brought with them. The rumour was that the delegation feared that German women might stab them while in bed. Not wanting to sleep alone, the Russians had brought their own companions.
‘Are they pretty?’ asked Hitler.
When the adjutant failed to hear the question, Hitler repeated, more sharply: ‘Are they pretty?’
The Nazis believed the role of women was, as Goebbels put it, ‘to be beautiful and to bring children into the world’. One hand-drawn propaganda poster at the time showed an Aryan woman in a blue dress, framed by a yellow sun, breastfeeding a plump baby. Guidelines for how German women should live were issued, urging them never to wear trousers, make-up or high-heeled shoes, or to dye or perm their hair.
Hitler believed women’s lives should revolve around three Ks: ‘Kinder’, ‘Küche’ and ‘Kirche’–‘children’, ‘kitchen’ and ‘church’. The party systemised this belief in society in various ways. The Law for the Encouragement of Marriage presented newlywed couples with a loan of 1,000 marks, of which they were permitted to keep a quarter for each child the woman bore. Women were further incentivised by the Mutterkreuz, the Mother’s Cross, a matronly equivalent to the Oak Leaves that was awarded to those mothers who bore a large number of Aryan children. Single women were permitted to have a baby for a member of the SS.
Further financial incentives were offered to those women who chose not to work. While female auxiliary staff had been used in the German army for decades, there was no provision for the recruitment and employment of women to the war effort until after the fall of France in the summer of 1940, when the demands of occupation and prolonged war made Hitler’s position on women untenable. Even then, women’s roles were broadly limited to the menial.
Members of the Wirtschaftshelferinnen, for example, worked as cleaners and kitchen staff. The Stabshelferinnen, staff auxiliaries, were women between the ages of eighteen and forty who served as clerical workers in army administration posts.* While the German navy had a long history of employing female auxiliary staff, the Marinehelferinnen, the closest German equivalent to the Wrens, wasn’t founded until July 1942.2 Unlike the Wrens, who were encouraged to feel a sense of belonging and sorority from their clothes, a Marinehelferinnen-specific uniform was not issued till September 1943; prior to this the women wore Luftwaffe pattern uniforms.
While, with historical distance, the British might feel proud of the progressive way in which women were welcomed into the services, the German attitude was matched in Britain by a robust institutional resistance to the allocation of Wrens into senior roles of responsibility during the early years of the war. One naval captain later articulated this pervasive attitude as ‘Wrens can’t do this, can’t do that; can’t go here, can’t go there; what–send them abroad? Never!’3 While conscription for women came to Britain sooner than in Germany, there was widespread opposition to the idea, which some argued strongly would undermine the role of women within the home.
‘War is not a woman’s job,’ said Agnes Hardie of the Labour Party. ‘Women share the bearing and rearing of children and should be exempt from war.’4 (Hardie, it should be noted, also campaigned for sexual equality, and recommended equal compensation for war injuries, which at the time favoured men by seven shillings.5)
In Germany, however, the resistance sprang from a sterner form of ideological misogyny, rooted in the corrupt soil of Nazism. Moreover, there was no German equivalent to Vera Laughton Mathews, a leader quietly yet determinedly campaigning for women to be included in all strata of the war effort.
‘I have not seen them myself,’ replied the adjutant, in reply to Hitler’s enquiry about the women. ‘But I will find out this afternoon.’
‘Do that before Molotov comes to see me,’ said Hitler. ‘I should like to taunt him with some of our beauties.’
The meal finished, Hitler rose to his feet, shook Kretschmer’s hand for what would be the final time and wished the captain good hunting at sea. Kretschmer returned to his hotel. A few hours later he was driven to the state opera for a staging of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. He was shown to the state box, typically only used by Hitler or visiting representatives of foreign powers. Beneath him, audience members whispered to one another: was that really the U-boat ace?
There Kretschmer sat, among cascading blooms and bouquets, peering down at the stage. From his enviable vantage, he was free to contemplate both the contrast of this week compared to the last, and the fact that here, as at sea, he remained both the focal point of everyone’s attention, and utterly alone.
The bomb wedged in the concrete outside Roberts’ front door, smoke curling from its fuse, was one of the latest yet most unreliable weapons in the Luftwaffe’s arsenal. A bloated incendiary device, the oil bomb was known to the Germans as the Flam or Flammenbombe and contained an oil mixture and a high-explosive bursting charge. Many of the forty-two oil bombs that were dropped during the Blitz on the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where Roberts was staying, failed to detonate, splitting the case open to spill gallons of fuel.6 As such, in January 1941, just a few months after its introduction, the Flam was withdrawn from widespread use.
While 244 people were killed and 770 houses demolished by bombs in Kensington during the Blitz, Londoners were at a greater risk from rounds fired by the British high-calibre anti-aircraft guns; when the bullets missed their targets, they would fall, like coins spilled from a purse, back toward the city at deadly velocity.
Right now, however, Roberts knew that he and everyone else in the vicinity was in grave danger: should the spark from the fuse reach the casing, the oil would catch fire and set the entire street ablaze.
War inevitably brings provocations to bravery, tests that allow no room for considered thought, forcing individuals to act on character and instinct. Roberts grasped the fuse in his hand and pulled hard. It came free, and as the pain from its heat lit up in his hand, Roberts threw it into the road before kicking it into the gutter, where a bystander ran to stamp it out.
With the sounds of planes still screeching in the sky, his shoes covered in oil and three of his fingers burned, Roberts returned to the house and climbed up to the room he had previously used as a bedroom. After he had washed the oil from his hands, and bound his burned fingers with cloth, he returned to the basement.
Moments after he closed the hatch, ten minutes after the first bomb landed, there was a thwomp and Roberts and the others listened as part of the front basement ceiling collapsed. In the dark, as he listened out for the telltale hiss of a leaking gas pipe, Roberts felt not only curiously calm but also curiously exhilarated. After the past few years of feeling like a discarded cog, with no place in the machinery of his country’s war effort, he was back where it mattered, in the middle of the action, even if, right now, that meant spending the night half-buried in a basement.
Across London, on the other side of the River Thames, Christian Oldham arrived at Greenwich to begin officer training. At her previous digs in Campden Hill Road, having failed to learn to touch-type, Oldham had spent much of her time under the direction of the strict and disapproving Hilda Buckmaster, scrubbing floors as punishment for her various misdemeanours. Inside these insalubrious premises, she would duck through a coal hole to reach the canteen, where she and the other Wrens would race to be the first to finish their meagre plates of food in order to claim one of the few second helpings. She had shared a room with three other Wrens, at least one of whom never removed her vest and, as a result, hummed with the vinegary sweet smell of body odour.7 During a chance meeting with Nancy Osborne, chief officer of the headquarters staff of the Wrens, who had first interviewed Oldham, the young Wren pleaded for a transfer.
Osborne took pity on Oldham and invited her to join the team at Wrens HQ, where she took up residence in an office next to Diana Churchill, Winston’s eldest daughter, who, in her early thirties, seemed implausibly ancient to the twenty-year-old. After a stint running the degaussing range on the Thames, where ships would be fitted with wire coils designed to foil German magnetic mines, Oldham was put forward for promotion to officer.
Oldham arrived at Greenwich via ferry, disembarking at the same pier that kings, queens and many of Britain’s most accomplished naval commanders had journeyed to for centuries. Nancy Spain, who, like Monsarrat, had been an up-and-coming freelance journalist before the war (and who, after the war, became a celebrated newspaper columnist), wrote of her arrival at Greenwich, of the astonishing feeling of being cosmically reconnected to her country’s past, seeing ‘like a conception of God… all English history spread before my eyes’.
The Painted Hall was a place for which, as Nancy Spain put it, ‘no contemporary eulogy, nor nineteenth-century engraving had wholly prepared me’. Here, Oldham and the other scores of Wrens would eat in the flattering light of a thousand candles, from tables carved from the timbers of ships that had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, as the sound of jingling cutlery was joined by the sotto bass rumble of London’s flak cannons. During the Blitz, the Wrens at Greenwich slept down in the deep stone cellars. When the arrangement became too uncomfortable, balancing risk with the need for comfort they moved to the games rooms, where the women slept beneath the billiards tables.
Oldham quickly earned her promotion to third officer and was informed that she was to be transferred to Plymouth as a plotter. It was, she thought, the pick of the limited selection of jobs available to Wrens in the early months of war, not least because plotters had access to the so-called Pink List, a document that listed the whereabouts of every ship within the navy, an invaluable resource for any young Wren who, as Oldham put it, wanted to keep tracks on her ‘latest young man’.8
At Plymouth Oldham learned the art of plotting by surreptitiously watching her fellow Wrens, and soon began working watches, shunting tokens to represent the convoys and U-boats. The hours were long and the work demanding. After a few nights of being awoken from her on-site mattress by a frantic admiral, wanting her to retrieve some sea chart or another from the chart cabinet, Oldham took to dozing and reading novels in a plotting-room chair. Her watches would sometimes last for two days at a time, with little opportunity for sleep. Thereafter, the Wrens plotters would enjoy two days to recuperate and attend parties on the ships and submarines docked nearby.
For Oldham, the submarine crews were the elite of the Navy, and had a certain romantic appeal. Technology’s distancing effect on all forms of warfare, including that waged at sea, had removed the fighting sailor from the nexus of battle. As Donald Macintyre, one of the three most famous and successful U-boat hunters, later put it in regretful tones, sea warfare had become ‘largely a matter of mathematical computation, of aiming guns accurately at a barely visible target some dozen miles away’.9
Submarining was similarly work defined by gauges and read-outs, but something tactile and immediate remained to the art, which, as a result, attracted men of a certain dauntless temperament. It was during a party in the cramped wardroom of the minelaying submarine HMS Rorqual, docked in Plymouth harbour in between sorties to the Mediterranean, that Oldham met one such man, its captain, Lennox Napier.
Napier was a bright character, bristling with verve and anecdotes, who ran his submarine with equal vim. HMS Rorqual spent much of the war supplying fuel and food to the beleaguered island of Malta, while simultaneously laying mines for the encircling Italian and German ships. On one occasion he attempted the pioneering act of sending a kit of carrier pigeons from the submarine’s conning tower, only for the birds to refuse to leave the vessel. Christian and Lennox became increasingly close, taking long walks across the wuthering Dartmoor in the gaps between war work.
As they strode and chatted, the young Wren felt the frisson of feelings. Later she wrote that she considered Napier to be ‘from that rather romantic genre who would not commit himself to any course of action he could not be sure of carrying out’. Whatever his reasons, if Napier felt an equivalent attraction toward Oldham, it was left unacknowledged. Still, after departing Plymouth, he wrote to Oldham regularly. A lively writer and cartoonist, who drew scratchy, humorous illustrations in the margins of his letters, Napier signed off each of them ‘with love’ to Oldham. These documents sustained and deepened her feelings toward Napier.
On the long nights of her watch, Oldham pondered not only the question of whether or not Napier would return to and for her, but also the question of whether or not she would wait for him. Then, before the matter could be settled, Oldham received the news that, once again, she was to be moved on. After brief stints in Edinburgh and Newcastle, Oldham was told she was to be moved a third time. Would she prefer to return to Plymouth, or to go elsewhere? By now, Oldham’s friends had all been redeployed, and, with Napier back at sea, she decided to undertake a new adventure. Oldham left for Belfast and began working the plot there, shunting the little ships across the panoramic map in an almost real-time representation of what was occurring at sea.
From the walls of her new base in Belfast Castle, she could watch the ships in the Irish Sea below, slicing to and from Liverpool.
The morning after the bomb, Roberts moved out of Courtfield Gardens, and relocated to Dolphin Square. His new home in Frobisher, one of the estate’s thirteen blocks, each named after a famous navigator or admiral, was hit no fewer than twelve times. One incident on 5th November, 1940 involved a two-and-a-half-thousand-pound bomb and left Roberts with a splinter in his neck that had to be surgically removed. Despite the ongoing risks, it provided him with a haven for the remainder of the year.
Three months later, in December 1940, Londoners were preparing for their first hidden Christmas since the Blitz began. Not wanting to provide the Luftwaffe pilots with a twinkling target, there would be no lights strung up on Regent Street this year. In the fields outside London, the Norwegian pines were kept small; there was no room for the six-foot trees in the Blitz basements and bunkers; it was to be, as one American commentator put it, a Christmas of contrasts, of ‘holly and barbed wire’, of ‘guns and tinsel’.10
In central London, windows usually filled with baubles were shattered, and stock ruined, many customers dead or departed. The ground, covered in the confetti of war, crunched underfoot. Streamers hung damp in blackened shopfronts. The toys reflected the new martial reality of life in Britain: model Spitfire and Messerschmitt fighter planes, little tin hats and miniature soldiers’ uniforms so that children might dress as their serving sisters, brothers and fathers.
There was no ringing of church bells in England that Christmas. In war, their meaning had changed: a toll no longer issued a call to worship, but rather a warning of overheard dangers, a ringing intended not to pull the community into pews, but to drive it underground. Similarly, no Londoners prayed for a chance to see the stars. All they wanted for Christmas was a cloudy night, the weather turned ally, to keep the enemy planes at home.
One night, Roberts’ friend Bernard Stubbs asked whether the pair could visit South Kensington underground station. Stubbs, a former BBC correspondent, was, like Monsarrat, compiling notes for a war book. That night he hoped to see the blanketed crowds, shifting and snuffling on the tracks, which had been switched off in order to turn the station into a mass bunker.
‘He wanted to grasp the silence,’ Roberts wrote in his diary.11
When they reached the platform, Roberts counted twelve little Christmas trees. The two men stood by one of the trees, watching the children ‘sitting on the bunks in amazement’ while their mothers knitted; leaning against the tiles, moustachioed men slept on their backs, still in their caps, upon piles of blankets.
After a while, Roberts spied through the branches a face he recognised, and blanched. The man, wearing plain clothes and cap, and carrying a walking stick, circled the tree. The trio stood in silence till the man asked, in a quiet voice, whether the uniformed Roberts and Stubbs could accompany him back to ground level. At the base of the silent, frozen escalator, the man was recognised by others too. ‘There were no cheers,’ Roberts wrote. ‘But they bowed as he climbed up the middle row of stairs [while] saying “Happy Christmas, Your Majesty.”’
At the top of the stairs the king turned, looked back at the crowds and murmured: ‘Aren’t they wonderful?’
Outside, George VI shook hands with Roberts and Stubbs, climbed into a grey Hillman car and drove away. The two men stood at the entrance to the station, ‘quite overcome’, until a policeman ordered them to move on. It was to be one of the last nights either man spent in London. Stubbs was posted to the battlecruiser HMS Hood and, five months later, along with all but three of the 1,400 crew members, was killed when the ship was sunk during action with Germany’s doomed battleship the Bismarck. He never completed his book.
On the last day of 1940 the Second Sea Lord sent for Roberts and informed him that he was to be posted to Portsmouth, where there was a shortage of ships and a surplus of men with little to do. Roberts was to train the men as an anti-invasion force. Of leaving London, Roberts wrote in his diary: ‘I shall never forget the attack on London, and the unprovoked cruelty let loose on those without weapons, the children, and the aged.’
For the next twelve months Roberts drilled the men in Portsmouth, training them in close combat (how to strangle a man in the dark using a fifteen-inch length of degaussing wire, for example) as well as stalking, infiltration and techniques of nature-craft survival.
‘It was better than I expected,’ Roberts wrote, ‘coming back from the Retired List.’
While Roberts busily turned a ragtag band of men into something approaching a Home Guard force, consternation at the Admiralty in London grew. The grand chart showing losses in the Atlantic loomed like a calendar outlining the schedule of a death sentence. Throughout 1941 Allied shipping losses steadily increased from 2.5 million tons in January to an average of 4 million tons of food, fuel and building materials a month by the autumn. Successively, meat, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereals, cheese, eggs, lard, milk and canned and dried fruit were subject to rationing. The Ministry of Food’s Department of Scientific and Industrial Research developed techniques to spray-dry eggs, converting them into a powder that took up just twenty per cent of the shipping space required for fresh eggs. Powders and pastes were designed to approximate scarce or vanished foodstuffs such as bananas and cheese. Hotels and restaurants were limited to offering meals that cost no more than five shillings, and which consisted of no more than three courses, of which only one could contain meat, fish or poultry.12
In December 1939, researchers from the University of Cambridge had tested whether Britain could survive with only domestic food production if U-boats forced an end to all imports. After subjecting themselves to a tough regime of work and a minimal diet, the researchers and their volunteers found that they could survive, while noting a ‘remarkable’ increase in flatulence and a 250 per cent increase in the volume of stools.13
If the gassy nation could survive, for a time, on only home-grown produce, clothing and fuel were another matter. On 1st June 1941 clothing was rationed and, by the following summer, Allied shipping losses had led to the abolishment of the basic civilian petrol ration. Thereafter fuel was available only to official users, such as the emergency services, bus companies and farmers.
The majority of the 1,300 merchant ships sunk in 194114 were attributed to U-boats and, in this fight, the Allied score looked pitiful: just twelve U-boats were sunk in the first half of the year, with none at all in January, February or July. As such, naval commanders continued to contemplate how, in the face of devastating losses in the Atlantic, they might improve the training of escort-ship crews. Lacking a coherent set of effective tactics, the ships remained woefully unprepared for encounters with U-boats at sea.
During a Trade Protection committee meeting in autumn 1941, one member suggested the idea of a game that could be played aboard ships during training exercises, to simulate a U-boat sighting, and the ensuing cat-and-mouse hunt. A discussion followed on how a game might specifically improve the cooperation of the bridge team, from where a vessel is commanded by the ship’s captain, watchkeeper, lookout and pilot so that ‘the commanding officer and his anti-submarine control officer were left free to attack the submarine, and relieved of the necessity of attending to details such as the housing of the correct signal’.15
At a training facility in Londonderry, the development of a game with precisely this aim was already underway, led by Lieutenant Commander I. M. Carrs, an anti-submarine officer. By early September 1941, a few weeks after the sinking of the SS Aguila and its cargo of young Wrens, he had completed a prototype.
His invention was designed to be played not on the floor, like those which Roberts had run prior to the war, but aboard an anchored ship. The crew would take their usual stations while a U-boat sighting and attack was simulated. They would have to respond exactly as they would in a genuine U-boat encounter. The only difference was that the ship would remain stationary; the players would merely imagine it was moving around the water, with its position and the suspected position of the U-boat denoted by tokens on a map. In this way the captain and crew could picture the hunt in their imaginations, while using a ‘small device’ that worked much like a gyro compass, to help everyone envision what was happening at sea.
The game would come with a box of pre-written orders that the commanding officer on the ship would need to follow, a celluloid protractor engraved with time distancer scales and various turning circles. Lastly, there would be a transparent sheet covered in lines and markings that acted as a ‘master plot’, to show how the hunt, ideally, should play out. This would be placed over the ship’s plot at the end of the game, to allow players to check how closely their actions correlated to the optimal course of action. The exercise was designed to test the commander’s tactical ability, as well as to expose any weaknesses in the crew’s capacity to work effectively together in the stress of battle.
Unlike previous training exercises the pieces for the game would come in a box much like a board game, mass-produced and sent out to every escort ship in the navy. Its development, Carrs’ commanding officer explained in a letter to the director of anti-submarine warfare at the Admiralty, would require the cooperation of various anti-submarine departments. In his letter, the CO requested the loan of young game designer Lieutenant M. E. Impey to join the project for a month from his current posting in Portsmouth, where Roberts was then working. Lastly, the captain wrote, ‘The Director of A/S Warfare is requested to obtain provisional approval for six gramophone records.’ Carrs’ and Impey’s game, it seemed, was to have audio accompaniment.
A month later, on 15th October 1941, Impey flew from London-derry to Liverpool and on to London, arriving at the Admiralty the following day carrying under his arm a prototype of the game. After he outlined its workings, he explained that the gramophone record, which was to be played during the game, was needed to help increase the sense of realism for the ship’s crew. This was not to provide a stirring soundtrack, but rather the ‘ping’ and ‘tong’ of the ASDIC apparatus, the early form of sonar used to detect submarines, which would be synched up with periods of the game in order to provide participants with an accurate reading of the simulated U-boat’s position. For those playing in the plotting room of the ship, away from the portholes, any differences between playing the game and hunting a real-life U-boat would be almost imperceptible.
Six days after Impey’s presentation, the game, plainly named ‘A Portable Anti-Submarine Trainer’, was green-lit for production. Three variants would be produced, one for destroyer crews, one for corvette crews and a third for trawlers, at a cost of £5 per set (not including the extra reels of paper rolls and traces that would be required for any subsequent play-throughs). Such was the expense of manufacturing the ASDIC gramophones that only a few select crews were issued with these. In all, fifty-two sets were made for destroyers, thirty-eight for corvettes and sixty for the trawlers, at a total cost of £750.
Just as Doenitz had used games to prepare for the tactical and operational challenges of the U-boat war in the Atlantic, now games were being used to prepare the Allied crews hunting down those very same U-boats. Carrs’ and Impey’s game proved a useful resource, revealing snags and pitfalls in the consequence-free arena of play, so that they might be avoided in the consequence-rich arena of battle. But while ‘A Portable Anti-Submarine Trainer’ was able to improve and perfect an escort crew’s procedures, it did nothing to expose the tactics being so effectively deployed by the U-boat captains. And neither did it train escort ships on how to work together. A well-trained crew could only do so much while working as an individual unit. True effectiveness, as the wolfpack had so clearly demonstrated, required teamwork. And for that, a different kind of game was needed.
The spectre of scepticism that hung over the use of games in wartime, even after the success of Carrs’ and Impey’s work, could not withstand the desperation of the situation at sea. Anything and, indeed, anyone that might give Britain an advantage was worthy of consideration.
On the first day of 1942, Roberts was told to report to the Admiralty offices with an overnight bag. On arrival he met two of the navy’s most senior officers, the Second Sea Lord, Sir Charles Little, and Admiral Cecil Usborne, the former director of naval intelligence, now an aide to Winston Churchill. Usborne was responsible for overseeing the development of anti-U-boat weapons. To Roberts’ astonishment, the men began to describe, ‘most clearly’, the true extent of Britain’s ongoing losses in the Atlantic, and the Allied force’s miserable performance in battling the U-boats.
The clues were there, at a granular level, in every bare larder and forsaken storeroom.
‘We are not starving,’ wrote freelance journalist Maggie Joy Blunt in 1941, ‘but our usually well-stocked food shops have an empty and anxious air. Cheese, eggs, onions, oranges, luxury fruits and vegetables are practically unavailable… Housewives are having to queue for essential foods… Prices are rising… the outlook really seems very grim indeed.’16
Still, the true picture was, at the time, known to only a clutch of senior naval officers and those who had access to the portentous chart of shipping losses, with its thin red line that showed the upper limit of cost to food and supplies that Britain could afford. Even some senior members of the Cabinet were ignorant of the desperation of the collective situation that Britain faced.
The truth was, Sir Charles Little told Roberts, that German U-boat losses had been gravely exaggerated, and Allied convoy losses equally downplayed. Next Little offered a glimmer of hope. Britain’s fortunes in the Atlantic, he said, were poised to change. The capture in May 1941 of an Enigma machine–one of the contraptions used by the Nazis to encode their communications–had hastened the breaking of the code that underpinned the cryptic messages that passed between U-boats at sea and Doenitz at his headquarters.
Messages intercepted by Wrens in Scarborough were passed to Bletchley Park. There a staff of Wrens led by the genius cryptographer Alan Turing would decipher the U-boatmen’s messages. Once translated, information was passed to the commander-in-chief of Western Approaches, who could then more intelligently direct his escort ships in the Atlantic either to avoid U-boats when in convoy, or to pursue them. Prior to the breaking of the Enigma code, the position of U-boats could only be added to the plots once they were spotted at sea; now the maps were pocked with U-boat markers, based on messages intercepted as they passed between Doenitz and his captains.
Procedures at Western Approaches had improved too, following the move to Liverpool, and the promotion of Sir Percy Noble to commander-in-chief. Noble was a battleship commander who had served in the Grand Fleet during the First World War. Prior to his arrival in February 1941, officers such as Donald Macintyre, captain of the destroyer HMS Walker, had been frustrated by what they viewed as the ‘mistaken tactics’ issued by Western Approaches command, which often resulted in ‘exasperating, futile days’.17 Like Doenitz, Noble was a brilliant, experienced sea captain, well respected by his fellow officers and someone who, despite his seniority, would readily seek the opinion and insight of his subordinates.
One of Noble’s first acts in his new role was to sail the Atlantic aboard an escort ship, HMS Veteran, to see for himself the interplay between shore command and those at sea who had to act upon the orders. Noble watched first-hand the way in which command sent conflicting or confusing orders, forbidding senior officers from using their own judgement, and the way in which the set-up often led to vain chases, fragmenting the convoy till, at one point, Noble’s was the only escort ship guarding the merchant vessels. He returned to Western Approaches determined to ‘bring this nonsense to an end’. The promise was upheld.
‘A new feeling of intelligent purpose was in the air,’ wrote Macintyre. ‘Our sudden dashes across the ocean were not so aimless and each time we returned to harbour it was evident that headquarters was more on its toes.’
Despite these improvements and advantages, Britain remained at high risk of undernourishment. In many households, hunger had become the dominant sensation of war. While the British could see from intercepted radio transmissions that U-boats were increasingly working together, providing the German vessels with safety in numbers, the specifics of their highly effective tactics could only be guessed at. The Admiralty graph that showed the number of merchant ships the U-boats had sunk each month was drawing close to the threshold of defeat. Pre-war Britain was the recipient of 68 million tons of imports. Usborne revealed to Roberts that this number had now more than halved, to just 26 million tons.18
Desperate to find ways in which to reduce the tonnage of inessential imports, and thereby free up space in the holds of merchant ships, Cabinet Office economists frantically noted that animals were being allowed to ‘eat shipping space… at a rate comparable with the rate at which submarines are destroying it’.19
‘Unless something was done in the Battle of the Atlantic,’ Roberts was told, ‘we were going to lose [the war], merely because vital food and war supplies would not arrive.’
Moreover, ships were being sunk by U-boats at a faster rate than they could be built,* and the U-boats were now operating principally at night. Churchill was fretfully preoccupied with the situation. A few months earlier he had set up the Battle of the Atlantic Committee, which had focused its attention on the inefficient running of the docks, where weary and disenfranchised workers had been causing those imports that successfully made it to port to pile up on the dockside. Forty thousand men from the armed forces had been released to work in shipyards repairing a vast backlog of weather- and torpedo-damaged ships. Despite these logistical improvements, Churchill had come to question the efficiency of Allied weapons and technology, as well as the tactics that were being employed whenever a convoy was attacked.
Usborne motioned Roberts out of the office, and the two men went to the canteen to eat. There, over the course of two hours, Usborne explained what was needed of Roberts. He was to take the train to Liverpool, and report to Noble at the new Western Approaches HQ, which had been established in a building called Derby House, nicknamed ‘the Citadel’. He was to take charge of a large room on the top floor. Roberts would be assigned a group of young staff. Then, using any and every means necessary, he and his staff were to get to work on the U-boat problem.
Churchill’s aide believed that Roberts, who had shown himself to be a talented strategist in Portsmouth and an enthusiastic proponent of games as a way to prepare for war, was the ideal person to evolve anti-U-boat tactics. Moreover, as a gifted communicator he was qualified to train escort commanders in those tactics.
Roberts’ new boss, Percy Noble, Usborne warned, was under tremendous pressure and would likely not take kindly to the presence of an officer commandeering part of Derby House who was both his junior and, to make matters worse, retired. Noble had agreed to the formation of the unit, but had told Usborne: ‘Don’t bother me with it.’ You are, Usborne told Roberts, going to be ‘unpopular’.
‘Plan very quietly,’ Usborne advised. ‘And correct mistakes later.’20
Roberts would command this unit, but would remain on the ‘retired list’, a distinction that placed him beneath those in active, ongoing service. When the war ended, Roberts was in no doubt that his role would end with it; it was to be a temporary posting. Before Roberts left for the train station, he was led into a nearby office room. Inside, sitting at a desk in harrumphing contemplation, he met Churchill. The prime minister looked up at Roberts.
‘Find out what is happening and sink the U-boats,’ he said.
Roberts left the building, his mind swirling, and almost missed the midnight train to Liverpool.21