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.
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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.
The first thing they figured out is that standard naval doctrine in response to u-boat attacks was pretty ineffectual. So what *would* work? After a few weeks they came up with a protocol, which team member Jean Laidlaw named “raspberry”, as in “blowing a raspberry at Hitler". Incredible.
And it worked amazingly well in real life. Over time, the Kriegsmarine developed countermeasures, and WATU developed counter-countermeasures. And named them after fruit too. I shit you not - Pineapple, Strawberry and Banana were all real.
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