Women who outwitted Hitler

THE HEROIC WRENS WHO WORKED OUT HOW TO DEFEAT U-BOATS

- AMANDA KILLELEA and MATTHEW PRESCH

THEY were a secret group of women who achieved what senior naval officers could not outwitting the Nazis to win the Battle of the Atlantic.

It was 1942 and Germany had brought Britain to the brink of starvation by sinking Allied merchant ships crossing the Atlantic with food and vital supplies on board.

The deadly U-boats were Hitler's secret weapon, stalking the depths of the seas in packs, ready to torpedo the merchant convoys.

Allied losses were mounting and the Royal Navy could not work out how to stop the U-boats.

Tasked by Prime Minister Winston Churchill with sinking the enemy's fleet, veteran wargamer Commander Gilbert Roberts travelled to the Western Approaches command centre in Liverpool.

There he asked the admiral for mathematicians and specialists to join a crack wargaming unit - only to be told there were no spare men.

So he turned to the head of the Women's Royal Naval Service, Vera Laughton Matthews, who seized her moment.

The Royal Navy mainly viewed female staff as typists and car drivers, but Vera had been recruiting the cream of the crop as Wrens - women such as mathematicians, linguists and sporting stars, some as young as 17.

Historian Dr Tessa Dunlop says: "Women were totally undervalued before the war. There was a hierarchy of what men did and what women did, and basically women were like chattel that stayed at home.

"But Vera was an early-doors feminist. She was writing for the Suffragette, she was pushing the envelope for women." The First World War saw women engaged in military services. But the view after 1918 was that there would never be another conflict like it, so the female services were disbanded.

However mum-of-three Vera, a Wren in the First World War, continued to push for women's active involvement after 1939.