Chiefs of staff and the hidden war of fleet allocation

Simon Parkin's account of Atlantic wargaming and plotting shifts attention from ships at sea to the control rooms tracking convoys and submarines. Staff officers had to combine incomplete intelligence with the demands of many simultaneous operations. A chief of staff determined how many ships an admiral could receive, whether those ships were needed more urgently for convoy protection, and whether the commitment could be sustained. The job therefore required more than tactical skill: logistics, infrastructure, economics, and political judgment shaped every allocation. This was the organizational machinery behind apparently independent fleet actions.