"A Game of Birds and Wolves"

[fiefoe]

I really enjoyed the first half of Simon Parkin's book about the Battle of the Atlantic, but somehow things got anti-climatic later on. The subtitle, "The Ingenious Young Women Whose Secret Board Game Helped Win World War II" is girl-power bait.

• The British officers, by contrast, sat in sombre quiet around a table.. contemplating the gravity of the victor's clean-up task. The ecstasy of the vanquished; the misery of the vanquisher: the curious paradoxes of war.
• With six weeks' worth of fuel, a single U-boat could roam the entire Atlantic span.. The radius of the war now spanned the ocean. There was no longer a safe spot where the convoy flock would be free from trouble.
• It was on the water surface that U-boats were, paradoxically, most at ease, able to travel at their top speeds... Each man would hop-bunk, feeling the warmth of the last occupant's body fading in the sheets, a sensation in equal parts comforting and repellent.
• Of the 39,000 men who went to sea in U-boats during the WII, 70% were killed in action.
• Until one or two eels have been fired, there wasn't even enough room for the occupants to stand upright to change their clothes, adding a further incentive to find and attack an enemy ship at the earliest opportunity.
• Britain was utterly reliant on imports. 95% of fuel came into the country from trading partners and colonies; while 70% of the nation's food supply was imported. If the graph exceeded the red-line whereby the Germans sank ships at a faster rate than the Allies could build them, the country could no longer continue to participate in the war.
• Britain could not make do and amend, as the slogan went indefinitely. The government would be forced to impose on the British people an 18th century peasant style vegetarian diet. After poverty and privation, surrender would soon follow. This was the battle within the battle, a contest known to commanders on both sides of the conflict as simply the tonnage war.
• during night storms that were so dark that in the words of one coxswain, you'd struggle to see a sixpence on a chimney-sweep's arse,
• where it sank a harbour's worth 42 Allied ships / as dusk bruised into night / under a sky of buckshot stars  / confetti of war
• While it made sense that coordinated assaults would be more effective than lone-wolf attacks, there was an equally logical concern that the radio signals necessary to organise the U-boats into a pack could, if intercepted by British technology, forfeit any element of surprise and aid detection of the vessels by the enemy.
• (The) survivors of the City of Benares could see lumps of wreckage in the water: deckchairs, shoes, oil clinging to bobbing corpses and other linger traces of violence, yet to be swallowed up by the sea. The ocean was mottled gray and white as if, like those who had survived its lashings, it too had aged during the night.
• (their names-Bergman and Clasen, Schnabel and Kassel- have the rhythmic quality of characters in a cautionary fairy tale)
• One operator described operating ASDIC (sonar) as like playing the harp, a skill that required dexterity and endurance,
• Many younger men believed it was farcical to shoot at a man when he had a deck under his feet and show mercy when he did not, while the older hands cleaved to the old mariner's credo that concern for the fate of the shipwrecked is the first duty of every seaman.
• Seventy-seven pf the ninety children who sailed on the City of Benares did not return home. How they must have wondered, in their final moments, why they were being made to die. How might any of us answer their question, then or now? Our adult wars are incomprehensible from anything but the stratospheric vantage point. There, where the grotesque detail of war's human impact--the blitzed nursery, the mother's hysterical phone calls, the lifeboats filled with slipper-less corpses--can no longer be made out, a war can be viewed as a conflict of ideas. Close up, however, war is senseless.
• By the end of the year, the U-boats had sunk more than 1,200 ships, about 5 years' worth of construction work in regular peace-time conditions, and more than the rest of the German navy and Luftwaffe combined.
• Principled, idealistic and youthfully confrontational-the necessary characteristics for any young activist
• The Wrens' motto at the time was 'Never At Sea', a pledge that also carries with it a sort of negative space assurance: we know our place.
• It is one of the 20th century's great curiosities that a branch of the British naval establishment, one of the most conservative organisations in the world, should come to be led by a battle-scarred activist and self-identifying feminist, and should prove so astonishingly successful.
• who advised her to take a shorthand-typing course, obtain a job in an office, then 'lose the typewriter'. ('Oh perfidious Albion', Osborn recalled murmuring under her breath.)
• .. to learn not only nautical terms and naval traditions, but also, in that nobly stifling British way, the rules of civility and decorum. In the Painted Hall, a room of tear-jerking beauty designed by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor


• For all the wolfpack's power and menace, it had one key weakness. In order to organise their U-boats for an attack, the captains needed to communicate at regular intervals, initially to report the sighting of a convoy, and then to invite other boats to join.
• As such, the exchange of wedding vows would be organised remotely, over the radio. Each party would exchange the words 'I do' at the appropriate moment in the proceedings, which were conducted by a priest.
• For many young men the Second World War wiped out a multitude of possibilities. For many young women, however, war obliterated previously impenetrable barriers.
• booted (many young men) firmly from the dawdling plains of adolescence
• To write of sunken ships in these numerical terms is to be somehow complicit with a dehumanising tactic used by warmongers.
• War inevitably brings provocations to bravery, tests that allow no room for considered thought, forcing individuals to act on character and instinct.
• With each step change the attacker is removed yet farther from the material effects of his actions. At a distance, it is harder to properly count the cost. It is, surely, our obligation to count the cost.
• London's streets, newly seasoned with shards of shopfront glass, glinting shrapnel and lunar hollows,
• 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.
• He would be at home among the lost men who had found in war the renewed purpose that, when combined with boiler-room pressure, occasionally agitates brilliance.
• the assumption that an aptitude for mathematics, like height or temper, runs in the family.
• The game occupied an unusual position between reality and make-believe. No limbs or lives were lost here on the linoleum ocean. But neither was the game fully abstracted,
• The Air Ministry's political superiority was made clear in the autumn of 1942 when the Admiralty's chief of operational research, Professor Patrick Blacket, .. who later won the Nobel Prize for Physics, presented.. an analysis of the situation.. that a force of 200 long-range bombers would make a decisive contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic. Moreover, using aircrafts this way would have a far more meaningful effect on the broader war than their current deployment - bombing German cities.
• the competing demands of troop, food, armaments and resources had racketed tension in the supply chain
• Kindness to the incompetent seldom provides a dividend, whereas severity invariably pays.
• 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.. the rubble was then used to build jetties in (New York's) docks, a patch of Scotland forever embedded in Manhattan's waterfront.