When I was a child, my brother and I played a variation of Battleship on the floor of my grandparents’ house in Devon. Theirs was an elaborate, quasi-luxurious version of the game, stored in a leather trunk in the corner of a mildew-scented dining room, along with a tatty copy of Monopoly and a war-era toy farm (the plastic pig minus a trotter or two, the red tractor with its acne’d paint).
It was certainly a grander proposition than the one my brother and I played at home, which used grey plastic tokens to represent the ships and brightly coloured pegs to mark torpedo strikes. Theirs was played out on a crinkled map spread across the floor. We’d take turns to throw the dice and manoeuvre our ships into position. Then, at the press of a button on a destroyer, a small plastic disc would tear along the glossy board like a miniature hockey puck. Each ship had a hole in the base of the plastic, where hull met map. If your aim was true, the disc would slot snugly into this hole. Through some toymaker’s magic, a direct hit would cause the top of the model to spring into the air, like a cap rocketing from the top of a dropped bottle of lemonade. It didn’t always work; sometimes the disc would lodge halfway into the hole, causing the double irritation of failing to set off the exploding mechanism and blocking further attacks. But when everything went to plan, the effect was thrilling.
My brother and I would play, in our short shorts, until we tired of it and ran outdoors. It kept our attention for long enough to occupy chunks of time from the grand expanse of those early summer holidays. I didn’t stop to consider why, of all games, my grandparents owned this one.
My grandfather, Dynely Parkin, didn’t speak much about the war. His role, like that of all the other merchant sailors who sailed from Liverpool to America and back again, was to ferry vital food and fuel supplies across the Atlantic. It was essential work but did not fit the image of heroism promoted by the post-war books and films.
Three years younger than Wren Janet Okell, my grandfather was not quite fourteen years old at the outbreak of the Second World War. That month he was stationed in Kent on the training ship HMS Worcester, which was narrowly missed by numerous bombs dropped by German planes. At seventeen years old, on 11th June 1943 he joined his first ship, the Empire Castle, a 7,000-ton refrigerated cargo liner that, six months earlier, had been launched for the first time within sight of Christian Lamb’s position at Belfast Castle.
On its maiden voyage, a few months before my grandfather joined her crew, Empire Castle sailed out of Liverpool to New York as a member of convoy UC.001.1 Seven days into the journey, the convoy of thirty-three ships was spotted by a wolfpack, Gruppe Rochen (‘Skate’, after the fish), which sank three ships and damaged four the following day. The Empire Castle survived its inaugural encounter with a U-boat pack and returned safely to England. By the time my grandfather boarded it, the ship was still unscathed by the ravages of the Atlantic Ocean, both man-made and natural.
Five days after my grandfather joined the crew, Empire Castle set sail in convoy ON.189, bound for New York. The journey across the Atlantic plotted a similar route to that which convoy ONS.5 had taken directly into the Battle of Birds and Wolves, just four weeks earlier.
To weigh down the empty ship on its outbound route, the Empire Castle’s hold was filled with ballast, the rubble of bombed Glasgow houses, due to be emptied on arrival in New York and switched with food and other supplies for the onward journey. (The rubble was then used to build jetties in the city’s docks, a patch of Scotland forever embedded in Manhattan’s waterfront.)
‘We steamed at the speed of the slowest ship along a prearranged course, sailing as far north as was practical to keep out of the way of any lurking U-boats,’ my grandfather wrote of his inaugural voyage.2 The enormous challenge of coordinating manoeuvres between more than fifty ships was clear even to a seventeen-year-old.
‘We sometimes had to zigzag: a monumental task,’ he wrote.
Thanks, in major part, to the decisive victory in the battle for ONS.5 the previous month, my grandfather sailed into the miracle of a clear ocean. On 1st July he and the Scottish rubble arrived in New York untouched.
Survival in a time of war is more often the result of dull serendipity, not wit or tactics. It is the fuse that fails to detonate the oil bomb embedded in the pavement outside your front door; it is the letter announcing that you are to sail to Gibraltar, as part of a doomed contingent of Wrens; it is the angle at which the destroyer strikes your U-boat’s conning tower, where you stand.
My grandfather joined the crew of Empire Castle nineteen days after Doenitz ordered his U-boats to retreat. It is a matter of providential timing that he made safe passage to America on his maiden voyage, and was not counted among the 30,248 merchant seamen who lost their lives during the war.3 He and, it follows, I, owe our lives to the Royal Naval escorts that deployed WATU’s tactics with such precision and accuracy.
In his house in Devon, close to where Captain Roberts began his post-war life, my grandfather would sometimes watch as, like the Wrens, my brother and I pushed our toy ships across the griefless cardboard ocean.
On a damp spring night in 2018, I drove into the British Defence Academy in Shrivenham outside Oxford. Here, at a rambling military complex set behind a series of tall, barbed-wire fences and tilting CCTV cameras, soldiers young and old come to study the art, science and technology of warfare. Somewhere near the middle of the grounds, behind a hedge and beneath a thicket of trees, I found a chilly cabin, buzzing with fluorescent strip lights, where a group of bearded academics and clean-shaven retired officers hunched around a table.
They mumbled and joked, munching on crisps, noting but barely acknowledging my arrival, in that wary way groups of older, hobbyist men often do. Earlier that day, the British prime minister at the time, Theresa May, had expelled twelve Russian diplomats from Britain in retaliation for a nerve-agent attack carried out, in broad daylight, on two Russian nationals who fell unconscious on a bench in the centre of the town of Salisbury. The government believed beyond all reasonable doubt that the poison used in the attack, Novichok, was produced at a Russian laboratory. The poisoning had to be the work of Russian agents, therefore the diplomats had to go.
The men in the cabin were assembled not to discuss the Russian case, or the equanimity of Britain’s response, but to play a wargame based on the day’s events. Each man assumed the role of an interested nation. Russia picked at his nails in the seat next to Ukraine, who eyed Greece on the left, who furtively checked out the United States in the seat opposite who was looking rather smug about the powerful role he’d been given.
A large laminated map was spread across the table in front of the men, and around this were scores of coloured cards and counters representing assets ranging from battleships to social media accounts, that could be used by players in the game.
From chess to Space Invaders, war has always been a central theme in play. Professional wargames, such as the one that I had come to watch that night, are something else: a playful means by which governments and militaries might peer into the future by winding the clock forward on current events. How might the Americans respond to a Russian nerve-agent attack on British soil? Would Russia accept culpability or protest its innocence when accused? Games like these provide military officers and diplomats with the opportunity to consider an issue from a foreign perspective.
Just as Captain Roberts discovered in the Second World War, wargames have their sceptics, and fade in and out of fashion across the decades. As one analyst put it to me, wargames tend to be in greater demand in times of chaos. Even when there is an appetite among military commanders to test out their plans and strategies, doing so within the context of a game can be risky. ‘The commander and his planning staff often get to see their plan methodically destroyed,’ Paul Strong, a wargame designer and analyst from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), told me. ‘No one enjoys that experience, even if skilled commanders recognise the value of their operational concept being tested to destruction.’
At a time of international uncertainty, wargames are unusually popular and widespread. In 2017 the Kremlin created a wide-scale wargame in which the Russians engaged in a conflict with a fictional country, Veishnoriya.4 The designers of this game made fake social media accounts for the country. (‘Foreign Office of one of the most invaded lands in history, make you plan visit scenic Veishnoriya today!’ reads the Twitter bio of one such account.5) As one New York Times headline put it, ‘Russia’s War Games With Fake Enemies Cause Real Alarm’.6
Outside of the realm of professional sport, with its stratospheric salaries and legitimising sheen of advertising, games are usually viewed as childish diversions. But in the military and in government, games are seen differently. Playing games is how theories grand and small are tested and refined, and through which vital, potentially life-saving experience is gained in an affordable and secretive manner. Wargames, for example, were used by the British government to simulate potential public protests to President Trump’s visit to London in July 2018, and to imagine the potential effects on social stability of a second referendum on the Brexit vote*.
Wargames have the power not only to shape policy, but also to introduce entirely novel ideas. During the Cold War, US Army officers decided that in a world where nuclear war could be started (and ended) with the press of a button, it might be sensible for the president to be able to call the Kremlin without having to wend through diplomatic channels. This resulted in the installation of a hotline between the White House and the Russian president’s office, often represented in films as a red telephone.
The fictional stories wargames propose must be both believable and relevant. The Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California often puts the US military in touch with Hollywood writers, while NATO runs a writers’ room, much like that which you might find on a hit television show, employing no fewer than fifteen writers.*
Wargames also incidentally feature in my family history. My grandfather’s younger brother Anthony, who was nine years old when war broke out, later became a major in the British Army. When he died, I found a document stamped ‘Top Secret’ among his papers. The rules and scenario of a wargame from the 1970s involving the British Army and a fictional European country, just like Veishnoriya, were printed inside. The game’s Cold War scenario included pages and pages of arcane backstory. Like the Wrens before him, he had never mentioned it to his family.
I had come to Shrivenham to learn more about wargames in the military today. The British Army would not allow me to watch a ‘real’ example, as the subject matter is often classified, but I had been permitted to sit in on a variation designed for practice play, and to speak with its designer, one of a few modern-day designers who work in Britain today, following in Captain Roberts’ tradition.
Like my late great-uncle, Tom Mouat is a former army major. Following retirement, Major Tom briefly set up a private detective agency, before being re-recruited into the military to become, essentially, Her Majesty’s commander-in-chief of board games. He speaks with the clear, easy voice of someone who understands and is comfortable with his position in the hierarchy in which he operates. Experts like Major Tom, who run these games in various countries around the world, have exclusive access to rooms that most people never have the chance to enter. They are privileged to witness how history-changing decisions are made, and what role, alongside argument and logic, fallible human traits of personality, hubris and tact play in war rooms.
That night in Shrivenham, Major Tom stood at one end of the table, crunching a pair of dice in one hand. He set out the game’s premise–the nerve-agent attack, the foreign ministries’ retaliation, Russia’s public displays of indignation and protestation. Then, one by one, each of the players proposed a ‘move’ in the interests of the nation they represented, provocatively moving troops from here to there, offering aid to neighbours, usually with an ulterior motive in mind. The other players would then discuss the proposed move and its likelihood of success. Then Major Tom would crystallise all of the discussion into a number that the player must roll on his pair of perfectly balanced casino dice in order for the proposed action to prove successful. Hinging the success and failure on a dice roll might seem to undermine the role of diplomacy in the game, but Major Tom is unequivocal in his belief that only by introducing this element of chance can the game properly simulate the capriciousness of reality.
‘Some people might say: “If you’re using dice then it’s nothing more than a game of chance”,’ he said. ‘But if you think that, then you don’t understand risk. And if you don’t understand risk, then perhaps you really ought to be in another job.’
During the course of two hours, I watched as six consecutive turns were played out. America moved one of his aircraft carriers into the Baltic Sea. Britain expelled yet more diplomats. Russia held indignant press conferences in which he claimed to have been vindictively demonised. Greece tried to make profitable alliances with anyone who’d take a meeting. Between turns, the players would mingle, in character, around the room, making deals in grubby corners, often while munching on handfuls of salt and vinegar crisps. These men were the latest characters in a long, clandestine tradition of wargamers, reaching back to Roberts and the Wrens, and beyond.
Information regarding the existence of WATU has been in the public domain since 1944, but Roberts, the Wrens and their unit never gained much attention.
In the spring of 1948, Admiral Sir Martin Dunbar Nasmith, the first commander-in-chief of Western Approaches, asked Roberts to design and install an exhibit to be displayed at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.7 The exhibit, which took a year to make at a cost of £14,000*, showed, behind glass, a bird’s-eye view of a miniaturised sea battle using tiny models of convoy and escort ships, in battle with U-boats. The model was as large as three billiard tables placed side by side and surrounded by tiered seats where visitors could sit and listen to Roberts’ recorded commentary, in which he explained some of the tactics he had devised.†
In a letter dated 24th July 1948, the director of the museum described the exhibit as ‘an invaluable piece of contemporary evidence which will show how a Convoy was organized, and how the perils which it had to meet… were dealt with and defeated in the Battle of the Atlantic’.8
WATU’s specific role in the campaign, however, earned only a brief mention in the biographies of the major naval players. Those determined captains at sea and the anxious admirals at home were all granted special dispensation to tell their stories soon after the war; everyone else involved, including the Wrens, was forbidden from talking or writing about their work for fifty years.‡
Sensing the whitewashing of his and the Wrens’ role in the war, in the 1970s Roberts, who was by now in poor health, agreed to grant a historian, Mark Williams, a series of interviews and access to his personal papers. Williams wrote a biography of Roberts under the stuffily grandiose title ‘In Service to the Crown’, but the manuscript was rejected by its intended publisher, W. H. Allen, in 1975. It took four years for Williams to find a new publisher, who released the book under the reworked title Captain Gilbert Roberts R.N. and the Anti-U-Boat School.
Roberts was ‘disappointed’ 9 with the book, and his relationship with Williams, whom he believed to have stolen and sold one of his prized photographs, soured prior to publication. The author, Roberts wrote in his diary, ‘doesn’t know the meaning of the word “truth”,’ and was prone to ‘glib exaggeration’.10 In relation to the biography, at least, this was its own exaggeration. The author, Williams, misspells the names of some of the Wrens who are glancingly referenced, including both Janet Okell (who becomes ‘O’kell’) and Nancy Wales (who becomes ‘Wailes’), but these are straightforward factual errors rather than malicious fabrications. And while some of the anecdotes contained in the book deviate from Roberts’ own telling of the same stories in his diaries, the book provided a valuable first account of, among other things, WATU’s largely forgotten role in the war.
After the war’s end, on 15th August 1945 Roberts packed his belongings into a box and left Liverpool for good. As with his former rival Captain Walker, who had died in 1944 from exhaustion, the effort of war had left Roberts wearied and sick. Since its founding in January 1942, WATU had remained open every day of every week.
‘Like the classic London music hall “The Windmill”,’ Roberts wrote, ‘we never closed.’
Gravely underweight, Roberts was admitted to hospital to recuperate from the cost of his ceaseless effort. When he was released by the doctors, he headed south to begin a new life in Devon.11 His marriage had fallen apart and, with the Allied victory, the role he had filled with such determination for the previous three and a half years had gone too. There wasn’t much need for wargame designers in late 1945.
One day, while out walking, he started chatting over the fence with a little girl, Susan, who lived a few doors down the road with her mother, Jean. Roberts and Jean soon began a relationship and, to abide by the social expectations of the time, married quietly on 23rd August 1947.* They moved to a new town where they could pretend that they were each other’s first loves, and that Susan was their only child. Roberts built a house for the three of them and their dogs, Sailor and Tuppence. Perhaps to compensate for the loss of his career at sea, like the admiral in Mary Poppins who converts the roof of his town house to look like a boat’s deck, Roberts designed the house in the style of a ship’s cabin.
‘Like the American pioneers who created rich farms from desolate plains of the Mid-West,’ a local newspaper report read, ‘a former naval captain has turned a derelict wood and two fields on the Moor… into a prosperous produce farm… with a drawingroom reminiscent of a sea-captain’s cabin.’12
Still, while Roberts had experienced an extraordinary turnaround in his career, from the abandonment he had felt following his diagnosis through to the exhilaration of receiving his CBE from the king, he continued to feel underappreciated. On 8th May 1951, Roberts received an unexpected letter from the Admiralty offering him a modest award of £200 from the Herbert Lott Naval Trust Fund for ‘most valuable contributions to anti-submarine tactical development’. In the margin of the letter Roberts wrote, sarcastically, ‘Just a little late.’*
The greatest blow to Roberts’ self-esteem came, however, two decades later when on 4th January 1965 he received a letter informing him that he was to receive a knighthood. It was a gesture that vindicated Roberts’ work and promised to erase, finally, the scar he still bore from his dismissal from the navy so many years earlier. The following day the phone rang. The letter, the caller explained, had been sent in error; the invitation was retracted.
‘Why didn’t they just let him have it anyway?’ his daughter Susan asked me (in a later conversation she speculated that the honour may have been rescinded because her father was divorced and estranged from his first family). This final betrayal precipitated a decline in Roberts’ health. It was a cruelty, she said, from which her father never recovered. Through the souring of his biography project, the navy’s parsimonious recompense and the lost knighthood, Roberts died on 22nd January 1986 feeling that his role in the war, and that of the Wrens who served alongside him, had never been fully recognised.
Throughout his life, Roberts had fought relentlessly for WATU’s legacy. He saved it all, every memory, every clipping, all stored in a brown leather trunk stamped with his name, a one-man campaign for posterity and a trove without which the writing of this book would not have been possible. But it was a losing battle. WATU’s story was but a thread in the larger forgotten tapestry of the Battle of the Atlantic, a campaign that all but vanished from the public eye. What hope would Roberts and the Wrens have, when the entire sea war was overlooked? As Paul Strong, whose 2016 article ‘Wrens of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit’ first reignited interest in the unit’s history, put it to me, ‘even when the campaign was remembered, the heroic work of the escort commanders and merchantmen was easier to visualise than the patient efforts of WATU’.
When writing the screenplay for Nicholas Monsarrat’s novel The Cruel Sea, the studio cut the wargaming scene that was based on WATU. The image of a group of men and women standing around a board game surely did not chime with the public’s expectation of what it looked like to fight a war. Besides, games are childish things, are they not? Nobody takes them seriously.
While Roberts may have felt dismay at the speed and totality at which his contribution was forgotten, it was nothing compared to the disappearance of the women’s role. Not one of the Wrens of WATU received any individual accolade for her contribution. The only recognition came on 8th May 1945, when the Board of Admiralty sent a general message of thanks to the Wrens at all stations at home and abroad. It read: ‘The loyalty, zeal and efficiency with which the officers and ratings of the Women’s Royal Naval Service have shared the burdens and upheld the traditions of the Naval Service through more than five and a half years of war have earned the gratitude of the Royal Navy.’
It was a tribute that placed the women’s role as both subservient to and separate from that of the men. For the vast majority of young women, this was the only formal acknowledgement of the role they had played during the war.
In the 1940s, the Royal Navy was still reckoning with the idea of women performing the duties of its men; it was not ready to record their heroic stories of doing so. In the years that followed, scores of books recounting the exploits of key men in the drama–Admiral Sir Max Horton, Sir Peter Gretton, Donald Macintyre, Otto Kretschmer–were published. In some cases, the biographers sought permission from the navy to memorialise sensitive material from the war in this way, an exemption from the rule by which other officers and sailors, including the Wrens, had to abide.
Some of the surviving Wrens told me that they never spoke to their husbands about what they had done in the war. And so their stories were mostly lost, resulting in an agonising lacuna of detail about the role of these women in war. None of the families of the WATU Wrens I spoke to knew anything about the specific work their relatives had performed during the war.
Outside of WATU’s doors, a few notable voices broke the silence. Vera Laughton Mathews, as the second founder of the Wrens, wrote a vivid memoir in 1948. Nancy Spain, who had been a sporadically successful freelance journalist at war’s outbreak, wrote one of the only contemporaneous accounts of life at war as a Wren. Thank You, Nelson, a riotous short book, published in 1942, is filled with the kind of grubby, tactile detail of what it is to live among sailors that is absent from the stately, sterilised memoirs of the admirals. The majority of other books written by Wrens about their work in the Second World War, however, appeared fifty-odd years later, toward the end of their lives, a position of remove at which names, dates and the sequence of events can become unreliable. The authors often appear to share details between their books, no doubt to compensate for time’s smudging effect on memory.
Undoubtedly many Wrens simply believed that their stories weren’t worth memorialising, or that perhaps they weren’t theirs to tell. While, personally, their experiences had usually been life-transforming (and, in the case of WATU especially, had shown the power of unlikely partnerships, and the good that can come from citizens intent on sharing their unique gifts), some simultaneously viewed their work as routine.
‘An awful lot of people don’t know what the women did during the war,’ said Carol Duffus, a Wren who helped run The Game at WATU’s satellite school based in Canada. ‘[But] I felt that I was able to do something useful… There are an awful lot of other women who did useful things and they will never probably be recognised. I’d like to have people know that they were important.’13
In some cases, the memories of Wrens who made the effort to record their experiences were outright discarded. After the death of her partner Beryl in the 1970s, Jean Laidlaw, Captain Roberts’ right-hand woman, lived alone, in the same London house in Maida Vale into which she had moved with her parents as a teenager. While clearing the house after her death in August 2008, Laidlaw’s nephew found a sheaf of papers. His aunt, he discovered, had typed up her memoirs from the war. It is a document that surely held tremendous value in offering a perspective of one of the WATU Wrens. Not appreciating the document’s historical value, Laidlaw’s nephew told me that he either sent the memoir to the Association of Wrens or, more likely, binned it. Neither the Association of Wrens nor the National Museum of the Royal Navy have any record of receiving the memoir.
Among the core WATU team, only June Duncan’s memories survived. She kept a diary and ensured her family knew about its existence, an act no doubt inspired by her proximity to the world of journalism (she was, for a time, an assistant editor at Harper’s Bazaar14). Less than a paragraph, however, was dedicated to her time at Derby House.
Liz Drake, the last surviving of the WATU Wrens, who died during the writing of this book, captured her life story in just three pages. Of her time at WATU Drake recorded no more than her date of arrival at Derby House in 1942 and the date of her departure two years later, in January 1944.
All that happened in the intervening months was omitted, a maddening stretch of empty space that says so much.