* The forsaken Volendam was towed by HMS Salvonia, beached on the Isle of Bute and later refloated and repaired.
* According to the U-boat ace Günther Prien’s contemporaneous memoir, Jellicoe’s words were well known to the German captains, who used them as motivation to send, as their battle cry went, ‘any ship in convoy to the bottom’.
* Much of the labour on the growing British farms was provided by the 8,000 ‘land girls’ of the Women’s Land Army, whose tenacity in executing their exhausting work was both invaluable and, subsequently, often overlooked.
* Cost of the G7a, the standard-issue Kriegsmarine torpedo. The later G7e cost 25,000 Reichsmarks. The cost of an MKVII depth charge as used by the Royal Navy was, by comparison, around £22.
* In the 1943 edition of The Submarine Commander’s Handbook this suggested range had reduced to 300 metres.
* The German journalist Lothar-Günther Buchheim fictionalised one of those wartime debates, on which he had eavesdropped, in his 1973 novel, Das Boot.
* Shortly thereafter Colin was sent to St Andrew’s school, near Pangbourne, Berkshire, where he studied alongside David Cornwell, better known as the novelist John le Carré.
* Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, is said to have based the character ‘M’ on Godfrey, who was Fleming’s boss during the war.
* In June 1944, when the organisation was at its height, 74,620 Wrens were in active service, more than ten times as many as served in the First World War.
* GCHQ Scarborough is now the largest continuous serving site for signals intelligence anywhere.
* The faces of the two missing chief Wrens, who joined the delegation at Liverpool, were later superimposed.
* A reference to the wave-like bars displayed on an RNR cuff.
* The name of every Wren to have died in active service is recorded in a book of remembrance, held in central London at St Mary le Strand, the official church of the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
* This line appears only in the UK edition of the book. The American edition reads: ‘The men of tomorrow will gain new strength.’
* Neither did the Royal Navy players anticipate the fall of France, and its effect in expanding the German operation range.
* The German command eventually permitted the Stabshelfesinnen to engage in tactical analysis in 1944. In this task the women proved skilful, albeit too late in the war to be effective.
* The British shipbuilding industry entered a recession in the 1930s from which it had not emerged by the time of war’s outbreak.
* Problematically for the British, the noise of a depth charge explosion would temporarily ‘blind’ the ship’s ASDIC officer.
* Fourteen years later Macintyre returned the binoculars to Kretschmer, which now bore the conciliatory inscription, etched on a silver plate: ‘Returned to Otto Kretschmer–A Gallant Foe.’
* The Derby House plot can be seen briefly in the 1944 colour-film docudrama Western Approaches.
* The route of a particularly sensitive convoy was only marked on the plot after the ships had departed.
* Some of the surviving Wrens who worked at Derby House recall that, in addition to the top floor office, WATU also ran games in a temporary building erected in Exchange Flags Square.
* Not all of Osborne’s choices were ideal. Roberts took an instant dislike to the most senior member of the group, whose name, he wrote, he would ‘prefer to forget,’ and which accordingly went un-recorded in his diaries. She stayed only a short time and, following ‘a social error’, as Roberts put it, was relieved of her duties, to be replaced by Nancy Wales.
* HMS Audacity was a German merchant ship, captured in 1941 and converted for this new purpose.
* First cousin of the father of Donald ‘Bulldog’ Macintyre, who captured Otto Kretschmer.
* Roberts’ diary account differs from that of his biographer, which states that the team met with Noble the morning after their discovery. In Roberts’ account, WATU takes two days to test the theory before summoning its commander-in-chief to see the results.
* Roberts recorded that on Sundays the team would often be called upon to give demonstrations to visiting Americans. The hours were long and gruelling and at least one of the Wrens, June Duncan, was signed off for work-related sickness.
* ‘If we lose the war at sea, we lose the war,’ said Pound in his opening remarks at the thirtieth meeting of the Battle of the Atlantic Committee on 10th February 1942.
* Richard Dimbleby’s son, the broadcaster Jonathan, has no knowledge of the film, which is mentioned in Roberts’ diary. ‘Maybe he was discussing it as a proposal but, so far as I know, no such thing happened,’ Jonathan told me.
* In his memoir Fred Osborne mentions that Raspberry and other WATU operations were illustrated by Captain John ‘Jack’ Broome, a former submarine captain. Broome, who became a celebrated cartoonist after the war, served as staff officer to Sir Percy Noble in Derby House, and likely illustrated the flick-book. Some years earlier, Broome had drawn an illustration of Roberts as Commander of HMS Fearless, so the two men knew one another. According to Broome’s grandson, Andrew, the Broome estate does not possess any illustrations related to WATU’s work.
* Huff-duff was initially used by coastal sites early in the war.
* HMS Glasgow’s bow and stern were patched up in Singapore after the ship was hit by two torpedoes in the Mediterranean, but it soon became clear that it needed further repairs.
* Nast died of a heart attack four months later.
* In Horton’s brief telling of the anecdote, via his biographer, the pair played the game three times, not five.
* Poole does not record the model of this captured torpedo but, considering the date of her arrival to Liverpool, it was likely to be the Federapparat.
* No fewer than ten of Poole’s staff were Wrens ratings.
* A forebear of The Goon Show, which begat That Was the Week That Was, which begat Monty Python’s Flying Circus and so on, the ghost of ITMA and, it follows, Handley’s likeness can be seen down British comedy’s family tree to today.
* Prince Philip remained in contact with Roberts throughout his life and sent a written message of condolence to Roberts’ wife upon hearing news of his death. At the time of writing this book, however, the prince wrote to say that he could no longer reliably recall specifics about his time at WATU.
* The raincoat was presumably intended to be used as an impromptu blanket, on which a couple might lie.
* This shipping tension was, arguably, the primary reason behind the decision to invade North Africa at this moment in the war, as it would require fewer resources than the Allies’ original plan to invade France.
* ON.178, ONS.3 and ONS.4.
* One of Gretton’s Commanding Officers at the time, Robert Atkinson of HMS Pink, became the Chief Executive of the nationalised British Shipbuilders, and lifelong friends with Gretton’s son, Mike. ‘Do you know Mike, I respected your father more than I liked him’, the late Atkinson would tell the younger Gretton, whenever the pair met.
* Lieutenant Commander Ericson, one of the principal protagonists in Monsarrat’s novel The Cruel Sea, was based on Cuthbertson, and the sinking of HMS Sorrel based on that of HMS Zinnia.
* That same day, unknown to Gretton, his fiancée Judy Du Vivier was promoted to leading Wren, all memory of her apparent falling out with the unnamed officer at Derby House forgotten.
* All of those who were rescued survived the battle and Northern Spray arrived at St John’s, Newfoundland on 8th May.
* The prosecutor was correct. During a later trial, in October 1945, Kapitänleutnant Heinz Eck of U-852 confirmed that U-boat command had issued a directive stating: ‘No attempt of any kind should be made at rescuing members of ships sunk, and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats and handing over food and water… Be harsh, having in mind that the enemy takes no regard of women and children in his bombing attacks of German cities.’ Eck and three U-boatmen, who were accused of firing on survivors in the water, were convicted and, the following month, executed by firing squad.
* Winn’s assessment was only made public in 1975, after it was released by the Public Record Office.
* As a senior officer, Doenitz had special dispensation to withdraw a son from the front, in order to ensure that, according to Nazi ideology, the best of German blood would survive the war to enrich the race. Following Peter’s death, Doenitz sent his elder son, Klaus, to train as a naval doctor. On 13th May 1944, during a holiday visit to Cherbourg, France, Klaus was invited to accompany friends on a reconnaissance sortie on a torpedo boat along the English coast. At 00:30, the boat came under fire from a French destroyer. The vessel was hit twice and began to sink. According to survivor reports, Klaus, who was an epileptic, had a fit in the water and drowned.
* The British government was also accountable for ensuring its colonial subjects had food during wartime, a responsibility in which it often failed. In Bengal, for example, between two and three million Indians died of preventable famine in 1943 after the British government prioritised distribution of food supplies to the military, civil servants and other ‘priority classes’. This tragic fact must temper any sense of national pride at this moment of overcoming wartime hunger on the home front that same year.
* Walker, the oldest of the three men, suffered a stroke, attributed to exhaustion, on 7th July 1944, and died two days later. Despite the issues with some of his tactical operations, Walker sank more U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic than any other British or Allied commander. More than a thousand people attended his funeral at Liverpool cathedral, including his rival, Captain Roberts, who never publicly spoke or wrote of their professional clashes.
* The precise timing of the breakdown of Roberts’ marriage is unclear; it is, decorously, not referenced in his papers. A contemporary newspaper report mentions that he invited Laidlaw and another Wren to accompany him to the Palace at his wife’s urging; eighteen months later, Roberts left WATU and moved into a new house, alone.
† The Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood records that Roberts was presented with his insignia at an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace, by King George VI. It holds no record of the name of the second Wren who accompanied Roberts and Laidlaw to the ceremony.
* Roberts claimed that after September 1943, no escort vessel was sunk by a ‘Wren’ after the introduction of his evasive tactic, ‘Step Aside’. For a full description of the tactic, refer to Paul Strong’s 2017 paper, ‘Wargaming the Atlantic War’.
† A trove of these images, most of which were inexpertly taken, at least compared to Reuben Saidman’s beautifully framed shots, can be found in the Imperial War Museum archives.
* A 2,000lb Armour bomb, the largest used by the R.A.F., dropped from a height of 20,000 feet, would penetrate eight feet of concrete roof.
* Mention of the inscription appears only in Captain Gilbert Roberts R.N. and the Anti-U-Boat School, a 1979 biography by Mark Williams, a writer Roberts later accused of being prone to ‘glib exaggeration’. In turn, Williams’ book does not mention that Roberts made the effort to sign the photo, a detail exclusive to his unpublished diaries.
* Luftwaffe officers who transferred to the U-boat arm were subject to just three weeks’ training at sea after which, Godt sneeringly told Roberts, they ‘thought they knew it all’.
* Vera Laughton Mathews briefly mentions this incident in her autobiography Blue Tapestry (p. 245). She identifies the admiral as Sir Carlisle Swabey, contradicting the contemporaneous newspaper report, used here as the source.
* Stephanie Higham, née Pigott, who worked as Max Horton’s Assistant Duty Staff Officer from September 1944 onwards, was also sent to Germany as an interpreter Wren at the end of the war. She attended the Nuremburg trials each morning, then rode, sailed or skiied in the afternoons before the evening parties began.
* In his diaries Roberts claims that Okell, along with Doris Lawford, was made an officer at the end of the war. There is no evidence to corroborate this claim. Neither Okell nor Lawford’s names feature in the Navy lists for July or October 1945, nor January or April 1946. It was, perhaps, wishful thinking on Roberts’ part.
* According to a report in The Times, civil servants ‘role-played’ as leading figures in the Brexit drama, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson.
* The Joint Warfare Center.
* Paid for by the Shipping Companies of Britain.
† ‘It is most unusual to find people who speak a script without it sounding read,’ wrote H. Lynton Fletcher, who recorded Roberts’ commentary, in a 1959 letter congratulating him on the exhibit. ‘Even more difficult to get a virile, objective interpretation. I do congratulate you.’ In a magnanimous gesture, Roberts included his former rival Captain Walker’s support group EG2 on the model.
‡ While pondering how much scholastic work remains to be carried out on the Battle of the Atlantic, the Canadian historian Marc Milner noted in the afterword of his 2003 book Battle of the Atlantic: ‘American and British literature on the Atlantic… has been moribund for decades.’ Moreover, he argued, ‘the development of tactics and doctrines within Western Approaches command [have] never been looked at by modern scholars’.
* Susan was thirty-six-years old before her mother revealed to her the date of the secretive wedding, a measure of the debilitating shame associated with many second marriages at the time.
* Roberts’ indignation was compounded by the fact that the award had initially been granted to an Admiralty staff officer. When a friend mentioned what had happened, Roberts produced evidence that the officer in question ‘had nothing whatsoever’ to do with WATU. Only then was the financial award redirected. ‘In such ways does the Navy regard its retired,’ he wrote in his diary.