A Game of Birds and Wolves Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Simon Parkin

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  First ebook edition, January 2020

  First published in Great Britain in November 2019 by Sceptre

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  ISBN 978-0-316-49208-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954815

  E3-20191202-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I

  Last Man Standing

  PART ONE

  II

  As You Wave Me Goodbye

  III

  They Will Come

  IV

  Wolves

  V

  Pineapples and Champagne

  VI

  Never at Sea

  PART TWO

  VII

  Roberts

  VIII

  Oak Leaves and Christmas Trees

  IX

  The Aces and the Note

  X

  The Citadel

  XI

  Raspberry

  XII

  The Royal Key

  PART THREE

  XIII

  The Elephant Has Landed

  XIV

  Nulli Secundus

  XV

  The Battle of Birds and Wolves: Part I

  XVI

  The Battle of Birds and Wolves: Part II

  XVII

  Honours

  XVIII

  The Gun in the Night

  XIX

  The Sisterhood of the Linoleum

  Postscript

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Acknowledgements

  Discover More

  A Note on Sources

  Select Bibliography

  Notes

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Also by Simon Parkin

  For Estelle Parkin

  May you find thrilling answers in the games you play

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  I

  Last Man Standing

  23RD MAY 1945

  Gilbert Roberts, a retired British naval officer turned game designer, stepped onto the gangway leading up to the ocean liner, then immediately stopped. If he was not mistaken the man making his way down the plank, labouring under the weight of a suitcase, was Karl Doenitz, a German admiral who, twenty-three days earlier, following the suicide of Adolf Hitler, had become Nazi Germany’s new head of state.

  The men drew close, then stopped in front of one another, suspended, as they had been for much of the war, in a liminal space, neither fully on land nor fully at sea. For a moment, in the mid-afternoon sunlight, the creak and slop of the dockside was the only sound.

  Each man looked at least one size too small for his uniform. It was misfortune, not restraint that had helped them avoid the thickening torsos worn by most who reach a high rank and all its associated comforts. For forty-four-year-old Roberts, a violent battle with illness had left him wheezy. At eight stone and five feet eleven, he was also perilously underweight. Doenitz, meanwhile, had spent the month bearing the pressure of trying to broker the surrender of his beleaguered nation. Then there was the unquenchable pain of having lost not one but two sons to war within a year of each other. Moreover, both the boys had died while serving in the U-boat division, which Doenitz had founded and tenaciously commanded at every step of his rise. He had been twice responsible for their lives: as their father, and as their commander.

  Catastrophe and a talent for endurance were not all that the two men shared. For the last three years Roberts and Doenitz had also been adversaries in a vast and deadly game of U-boats and battleships, played out on the Atlantic Ocean, an arena so treacherous and capricious that it was considered, by all those who fought there, to be the third adversary in their war.

  Roberts, having been discharged from the navy in the summer of 1938, the day after his tuberculosis was diagnosed, had been brought back into service seven months into the war. ‘Game designer’ was not a job description used by the navy at the time, but this was the nature of the role given to Roberts by Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill. He was to create a game that would enable the British to understand why they were losing so many ships to German U-boat attacks. Teamed with a clutch of bright, astute young naval women known as Wrens, many of whom were barely out of school, Roberts had, in the months that followed, restaged countless ocean battles using his game. Through play he had developed anti-U-boat tactics that, once proven, had been taught to thousands of naval officers before they headed to sea.

  Doenitz also knew the curious value of play during wartime. He too had designed games to test and refine tactics that, from his HQ in the bunker beneath an elegant nineteenth-century villa in occupied France, could be issued to his beloved U-boat captains. These would aid the crews in their ultimate aim: to sink Allied merchant ships, thereby preventing food and supplies from reaching British shores, in order to starve the islanders and win the war.

  Both men had orchestrated their feints and attacks by shunting wooden tokens around maps of the ocean, known as plots, like pieces on a watery chessboard. The stakes were mortal; many thousands of Britons and Germans had died, including men whom Roberts and Doenitz had each personally known and instructed.

  ‘Good afternoon, Admiral,’ said Roberts, who was flanked by a young American interrogator and former FBI agent.1

  Doenitz, who immediately recognised his rival from a photograph printed in a British magazine article the previous year, nodded respectfully.2 He knew why Roberts had come to the German port of Flensburg: to salvage any evidence that might show whether or not his theories about secret U-boat tactics, deduced via the crucible of his games, were accurate.

  In his pocket Roberts, a fluent German-speaker, felt his ‘Ike’s pass’, a document issued and signed by the general of the US Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that bestowed on him authority to interrogate anybody related to his investigation. How Roberts longed to quiz Doenitz about the U-boat tactics–the wolfpacks, the torpedo attacks, the underwater getaways–and, moreover, to discover how much the admiral knew about the countermeasures he and the Wrens had designed. But Doenitz was needed in Luxembourg, where he was to join the other captured Nazi Party and SS leaders, army chiefs and ministers and await trial for war crimes.

  ‘We will supply you with everything you need to make your visit pleasant and efficient,’ Doenitz said, before continuing down the ramp towards the pier.

  As an a
rmed guard led Doenitz past a phalanx of British tanks toward the nearby police station where he was to be searched for hidden phials of poison,3 Roberts and the FBI interrogator boarded the ship. It was called the Patria, the last vestige, as the name implied, of Hitler’s crumbled Fatherland.

  Aboard the liner, which could accommodate close to six hundred crew and passengers, Roberts was shown to his quarters. It was a first-class suite comprising a sleeping cabin, private bathroom and sitting room, where he planned to interview surrendered U-boat officers. As he walked through the door, Roberts was greeted by a handsome young German naval officer, with slicked hair and a determined brow. The man introduced himself as Heinz Walkerling. He was, he explained, to be Roberts’ assistant for the duration of the mission.

  Walkerling, who had celebrated his thirtieth birthday just four days earlier,4 was one of the U-boat captains who, for the past three years, Roberts had been diligently trying to kill. This German had been one of the lucky ones. After successfully torpedoing and sinking five Allied ships–two British, two American and one Canadian–Walkerling had been transferred to a torpedo school at Mürwik, where he had taught trainee U-boatmen how to shoot straight. As the FBI man set up his tape recorder, which was disguised as a suitcase, under Roberts’ bunk, Walkerling asked whether his new boss had a gun to keep him safe.

  ‘No,’ said Roberts, who had turned down the offer of a weapon before leaving London.

  At five o’clock that afternoon, Roberts conducted his first interrogation, with Doenitz’s chief of staff, the man responsible for the organisation and operation of all U-boats. After two hours’ intensive questioning, Roberts switched off his tape recorder and, accompanied by Walkerling, made his way to the officers’ mess for some food.

  The atmosphere in the room was confused. The Germans, a mixture of naval captains and dockyard officers, joshed at tables on the periphery of the room. Roberts perceived in their deep and easy laughs an accent of hysteria, a tell, he reasoned, of the relief that follows the lifting of an immense psychological burden.5 The British officers, by contrast, sat in sombre quiet around a table in the middle of the room, 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.

  In almost silence Roberts and the others ate black bread dipped in thin cabbage soup. Still hungry, Roberts retired to his suite. The next day he would begin the task of interviewing and recording U-boat officers in earnest. He was also desperate to visit the plot from which Doenitz had conducted the Battle of the Atlantic, a chance to compare the German nerve centre with that of the British equivalent, in Liverpool, which had been Roberts’ home for the last three years.

  When Roberts reached his bedroom, Walkerling asked whether he might be able to sleep on the settee in Roberts’ cabin.

  ‘I have nowhere else to go,’ the U-boat captain said, ruefully.

  Roberts refused, but secured his unlikely aide a cabin nearby and ordered that a sign be placed on the door that read: ‘German Assistant to Captain Roberts’.

  Finally, Roberts lay down in his bunk. He was tired in complicated ways. There were the long-term rigours of the five-year-old war, of course, with its daily rations and, for city-dwellers like Roberts, its nightly bombings. But he had additional reasons to be weary: the long-term strain of a collapsing marriage and the short-term exhaustion of the previous night, which Roberts had spent in a Belgian hotel, cringing while American bombers thundered over Brussels in one of the final raids of the war.

  Roberts fell into the impregnable sleep of the spent. He did not hear the latch to his cabin click. Neither did he see the flickering silhouette of a man caught in the light spilled through the crack in the door. Nor did he see, in the figure’s hand, the outline of a Luger pistol.

  PART ONE

  We have fed our sea for a thousand years,

  And she calls us, still unfed

  ‘The Song of the Dead’, Rudyard Kipling

  II

  As You Wave Me Goodbye

  FIVE YEARS EARLIER

  Lulled by the creak and sway of the cabin, with a comic book splayed open beside him, Colin Ryder Richardson was dozing when he felt a dull thud somewhere deep beneath his bunk.1 The clock beside him read 00:03. At home in London, the eleven-year-old would normally be asleep by now. Here on the ship, however, there were no parents to nag about forbidden lights and early rises. When they met for the first time, four days earlier, Colin’s Hungarian chaperone and cabin mate, a young journalist named Laszlo Raskai, had decided that the boy with blond hair and intelligent eyes didn’t seem to need much adult supervision. Short of toppling overboard, what was the worst that could happen on a transatlantic luxury liner?

  Free from adult supervision, Colin had earlier in the week placed a ball bearing he found stuck in the furrow between planks on the ship’s deck into the drawer of the writing desk that separated his and Raskai’s bunks.2 The roll and clack the ball made as it tipped from one end of the drawer to the other was soothing and besides, Raskai was never around to complain. Moments after the muffled thud woke him, the ball suddenly clacked loudly, then not at all, as the ship, imperceptibly at first, then in more pronounced terms, began to list. The first strains of shouting drifted into Colin’s cabin. Then he noticed the distinct smell of nail polish.

  In early September Colin’s parents had sat him down after dinner at the family’s farmhouse in Wales–a temporary bolthole away from bomb-shaken London–and asked how he felt about taking a trip to America. Colin pictured Hollywood lettering and cowboys keeling from balconies–an eleven-year-old’s romantic vision of the country. He responded enthusiastically only to be told that he would be staying not in Beverly Hills, but in New York. Not quite what the boy had in mind, perhaps, but with rationing in full effect, British meals had become monotonous and insipid. To Colin, the ‘Big Apple’ bespoke a city of food and plenty.

  Although his parents did not let on, preparations for Colin’s journey were already set in motion. He would travel alone, by ship, to Montreal. From there, the boy would journey south to Long Island, where one of the many well-to-do New York couples who had offered refuge to British evacuee children awaited.

  The decision to send their son away had been difficult at first, then less so. The Second World War was a year old. That summer, after a brief six-week stand, France had fallen to the Nazis, removing the last bulwark standing between Britain and the German army and rendering Britain’s strategic assumptions obsolete. Like many families, Colin’s parents believed the Germans, who had driven the British back from Dunkirk in June 1940, were poised to cross the English Channel, a mere thirty-mile ribbon of sea at its slenderest, in an invasion that would almost inevitably prove successful. In recent weeks the British Ministry of Information had begun circulating leaflets titled ‘If the Invader Comes: What to Do and How to Do It’.

  Most persuasively, for parents like Colin’s, morgues were currently lined with the bodies of children, losers in the grim household lottery of the London Blitz, where, night after night, German planes dropped bombs to topple the city. Families who, a few months earlier, would not have contemplated sending their children off to who-knows-whom for who-knows-how-long, were now desperate to spirit their sons and daughters away from harm, regardless of the emotional toll.

  The Ryder Richardsons’ idea to send their child abroad was not unique. In June the British government announced a bold, controversial and, for the parents who applied to it, heartbreaking scheme, to evacuate children from London, Liverpool and other imperilled targets of the Luftwaffe. The response was immense: close to a quarter of a million children applied for just 20,000 places.

  The plan was simple, and proven. Since the beginning of the war, merchant ships had been ferrying food, fuel and supplies into Britain, an island nation that, without these imports, would go hungry. Sailors knew from the experience of the First World War that the safest way to cross the Atlantic Ocean was to move in
convoys, finding safety in numbers. The Royal Navy sent warships to protect them. The ‘escorts’, as these ships were known, carried nothing but men and weapons. They encircled the convoy as it plodded its heavy-laden course, and, like sheepdogs facing down wolves threatening a herd, fended off any enemy attacks. First introduced in 1917, convoys were initially centred on the English Channel, but as the efficacy of the tactic was proven, the system was used to protect ships as they crossed the deep and wide waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Colin’s evacuee ship was just like any other member of the convoy. Except, instead of wood, coal, oil or pork chops, the SS City of Benares carried a cargo of children.

  The trip, designed to evade danger at home, would not be without its risks at sea. All year U-boats–short for ‘Unterseeboot’, the German word for submarine–had been attacking Allied vessels wherever they found them. These attacks had intensified when, a few weeks earlier, in early August, Hitler had declared unrestricted submarine warfare around Britain.

  On 29th August 1940, seventy miles off Ireland’s Donegal Coast, a U-boat torpedo struck the SS Volendam, the first convoy ship to leave filled with evacuees.3 The ship was abandoned,* but all 321 children aboard were successfully rescued. While news of the attack made clear the dangers of the scheme, even in disaster, a ship seemed a safer bet than a London bed.

  On Thursday 12th September 1940, Colin and his mother took the train to Liverpool. The plan was set: he, along with eighty-nine other children (two of whom had survived the sinking of the Volendam a fortnight earlier), would sail for Canada that day.