Seeing the battle from a crow’s-nest perspective above the board, a question formed in his mind. They would take turns to make their moves, firing torpedoes, dropping depth charges, the U-boats diving and surfacing to make their attacks, the escort ships wheeling around in great arcs as each side hunted the other.īlow by blow, Roberts imitated the action, as per the official reports. One team would play as the escort commanders, the other as the U-boat captains. Using the floor as a giant board, the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, or WATU, would design a game that approximated a wolfpack attack on a convoy in the Atlantic. Stinging from Noble’s remark, which reignited the dismay that he felt from his earlier dismissal from the navy, Roberts labored his way upstairs to the top floor of the building. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter “You can carry on but don’t bother me with it.” “Well,” Roberts recorded his new commander-in-chief saying. Still, he couldn’t quite mask his skepticism toward Roberts’ enterprise. Noble – 52 with a headful of hair and a trim waistline - was well liked and respected by his staff, whose opinions he would often seek regardless of their rank or seniority. Roberts and the Wrens planned to use wargames to identify this tactic. The U-boats, it seemed, had developed an effective tactic that had, to date, evaded the Allied navy, tasked with repelling their attacks. There, using wargames, Roberts and his team of Wrens, young members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, were to get to work on the problem of the U-boats which had, for the past three years, sunk millions of tons of essential food and fuel making its way from the east coast of America via merchant ships.
Noble explained that he had been instructed to give Roberts the entire top floor of Derby House, comprising eight rooms.
“I thought the Admiralty were sending me a captain,” he said, woundingly. The admiral was greying but still youthful, and wore his authority with, as one observer put it, “naturalness.” That day, however, Noble was in a hostile mood. On the first day of 1942, Gilbert Roberts, a 41-year-old retired British naval officer turned game designer, arrived at Derby House, in Liverpool, for his inaugural meeting with his new boss, Sir Percy Noble.
0 kommentar(er)
