Woman of the Day WRNS officer Jean Laidlaw (circa 1921-2008) of Scotland, the first Wren seconded to the Western Approaches Tactical Unit during WW2 and the brains behind Operation Raspberry which foiled German U-boats sinking Merchant Navy convoys in the Atlantic. Information about Jean is sketchy but apparently she was later the first woman to qualify as a chartered accountant in the UK and it was her fine methodical brain that devised a tactic so successful in foiling and sinking U-boats that it caused them to be withdrawn from the Atlantic. British convoy losses to Nazi submarines were brutal. Between 1939 and 1945, 3,500 Allied merchant ships and 175 Allied warships were sunk, and 72,200 Allied naval and merchant seamen lost their lives. My uncle was a 16 year old lad in the Merchant Navy on the Liverpool to Murmansk run and he survived the torpedoing of three ships but it cost him his health physically and mentally. Winston Churchill said in his memoirs that the only thing that kept him awake at night was the convoy losses. WATU was set up in 1942 under the leadership of Commander Gilbert Roberts, an expert on board game-style wargaming exercises. The only tactic the Royal Navy had was the Buttercup tactic, devised by an escort ship commander – escort ships moved outside a convoy whenever a U-boat was spotted and fired flares to highlight them. It helped but it wasn’t anywhere near enough. Losses continued. Roberts needed mathematicians and wargaming specialists but he was told there were no men available. Vera Laughton Matthews, head of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, seized her chance. A feminist who wrote for The Suffragette and a former WW1 Wren herself, she had been waiting for this moment. The Royal Navy saw Wrens as typists and car drivers but Vera had been recruiting bright young women who were mathematicians and linguists. She had a free hand; after all, the Wrens were not subject to military rules because the War Office didn’t take them seriously. She sent Jean on secondment to WATU, followed by 66 other Wrens. Using models, chalk and string, Jean and her colleagues analysed U-boat and Buttercup tactics and it was when she learned the range of a U-boat torpedo – one mile – that she realised that enemy submarines could only be effective if they had already infiltrated the miles-long convoys. But how? Jean worked late into the night going over and over the problem. Once she worked out that U-boats travelled faster on the surface than they did underwater and usually approached at night, that’s when she had a revelation. They approached on the surface, shot their torpedoes, submerged to 720ft (out of Royal Navy radar range), lay doggo until the rest of the convoy passed over them, then resurfaced. All the Royal Navy had to do was to send its escort ships to the back of the convoy, wait for the U-boat to pop up and hey presto! Fire at will. Jean saw it as blowing a raspberry at Hitler. Operation Raspberry started in May 1943 and the Royal Navy reversed the heavy losses. Thirteen Allied ships were lost but so were 14 U-boats. Hitler realised it was unsustainable and Admiral Donitz was ordered to withdraw them from the Atlantic. After the war, Gilbert Roberts was awarded a CBE. What about Jean? She went back to accountancy, lived a quiet life with her partner and died in 2008.

Article courtesy of Attagirls on X