Our story begins in the Atlantic during World War 2, against the backdrop of German U-boats decimating convoys of merchant shipping crucial to the British war effort.
All able-bodied men were basically already committed to the war, so tasked with finding a way to stop this was Captain Gilbert Roberts, whose tuberculosis prevented him from going to sea.
In total, 66 women served in what became known as the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), picked for their skill in logic, mathematics and strategy, not (and I can’t stress this enough) their naval skill. Many had never even _been_ on a ship.
They took over a floor of an office in Liverpool, cleared everything away, and spent hours at a time drawing maps and plans on the floor in chalk, moving model ships around, and taking turns commanding either the destroyers, or their u-boat targets, and trying to devise new approaches and tactics.
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