How Allies Used Math Against German Tanks 330
Pepebuho writes "This an article about how the allies were able to estimate the number of German tanks produced in World War 2 based on the serial numbers of the tanks. Neat! Godwin does not apply."
Godwin does not apply? (Score:3, Funny)
If I want to quote Mike Godwin, you quote-Nazis aren't going to stop me. All he said was, the longer an Internet discussion goes on, the more likely it is that someone will mention Hitler. Well, duh.
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Re:Godwin does not apply? (Score:5, Funny)
there will be a comparison to Hitler
Math > Hitler
Q.E.D.
Re:Godwin does not apply? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Godwin does not apply? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Godwin does not apply? (Score:4, Funny)
Also, in any Slashdot discussion, the probability that an XKCD strip [xkcd.com] will be linked approaches 1 extremely rapidly.
Re:Godwin does not apply? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here we go. Only three posts in, proving the point that any Internet discussion about Nazis inevitably produces a debate about the applicability of Godwin's Law.
- RG>
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Jehova! Jehova! Jehova!
Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s! (Score:5, Insightful)
Note to self for world domination plans: don't stamp my robots/tanks/drones with plain text serial numbers, always encrypt! :-)
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:5, Funny)
Try something like 24370239.
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of the prank where you release 3 goats with the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on them and watch while everybody searches for the one with the number 3 on it.
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no, no, no
the prank is you release 3 sharks with the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on them and watch while everybody searches for the one with the number 3 on it...
in all seriousness WHO THE BLEEP EVER HEARD OF THAT PRANK BEFORE
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a simply ploy on misdirection. It's been around in one form or another for years. Back in grade school, we had word problems that played on this where we had to select the proper information to solve a math problem.
It can be done/demonstrated easier with coins and not harming any animals. Assemble 3 coins (US currency) a penny, a nickle, and a quarter.
Now tell them that Johny's mom had three kids. Point to the penny and say the name Penny, point to the nickle and say the name Nicolas, then point to the Quarter and ask what the third one's name is. Most people will spend a considerable time attempting to work quarter or some variation of it into a name even after repeating that Johny's mom had three kids. Eventually they give up.
(in case anyone is wondering, the third one's name if Johny- as in Johny's mom). It's a little easier then how far can a dog run into the woods.
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:5, Funny)
You mean the prank where you release 3 goats, and everyone just looks at you and says "Wow, sucks that your goats got loose. Good luck catching them," and then goes back to playing beach volleyball?
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:4, Funny)
Reminds me of the prank where you release 3 goats with the numbers 1, 2 and 4 on them and watch while everybody searches for the one with the number 3 on it.
I'm a programmer, I'd be looking for the one with number 8.
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Supposedly, there was an underground fibre optic install running between several of the Las Vegas casinos back in the 1980's, where every box junction and repeater had a serial number that fit some zany formula, i.e. for anything that really belonged in the system, the sum of the first and fourth digits was always twice the absolute value of the difference of the third and eighth digits. The system was used for something like sending pictures of suspected card counters and other cheats back and forth, and p
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Then you just do the analysis twice, once calculating the upper estimate and once calculating a lower estimate. You increase the variance but don't really prevent the attack from working. To prevent the mathletes from doing the analysis at all you need to either encrypt it (in which case the crypto-letes move in) or use randomly generated serial numbers, which might get interesting using WWII technology with production spread out over a war torn continent.
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Also the first tank serial # should not be 1. Try something like 24370239.
Hitler knew this trick: he was member number 555 of the DAP [wikipedia.org], the first member had number 501. When the DAP changed into the NSDAP, he became member number 1.
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That way, you don't need any particularly privileged crypto keys floating around(only the plaintext serials, and each one of them only reveals one hashed serial) and a logistics officer in possession of a plaintext serial can trivially generate the hashed serial and verify it against a piece of hardware. People below a certain security level can just be handed the hashed serials for the stuff they are supposed to keep track of, thus preventing large lists of plaintext serials f
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:5, Funny)
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I am implementing this at my factory. In fact, tanks c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b, c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c, eccbc87e4b5ce2fe28308fd9f2a7baf3, a87ff679a2f3e71d9181a67b7542122c, and e4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5 just rolled off of the the assembly line.
You should at least use some salt if you just use md5 on those serial numbers... I could decode your serial numbers just by using publicly available reverse md5 lookup table...
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, I guess that means the "real" serial numbers will have to be encrypted...
Why not inflate your numbers? (Score:2)
Or do what the leader of Seal Team Six did.
Supposedly he named the team 6 to create the false impression there were 6 seal teams when the number was less.
So couldn't you just inflate the numbers of your World Dominating machines... heck the first 6 digits could be a model number or something.
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Or do what the leader of Seal Team Six did.
That would be Richard Marcinko [wikipedia.org] and explains it all rather well in his book 'Rogue Warrior [wikipedia.org]'.
Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:5, Interesting)
That's exactly why the Soviet Navy gave their ships non-sequential pennant (hull) numbers, and frequently re-assigned them. They would also sometimes paint one number on one side of the bow, and different on the other.
Security is a difficult business.
Intelligence can also be a weird business... I once read an account of how the CIA broke into a warehouse rented by the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in order to examine (very closeup and very clandestinely) a high fidelity mock-up/prototype of a satellite the Soviets had on tour. The idea was to gather information on any real cable, connectors, or other hardware on the bird - as well as to collect any serial numbers, drawing numbers, etc.. that they could find. (It's not uncommon for such to contain 'real' items that have been discarded from production or operational use.)
You'd be surprised what a trained and knowledgeable analyst can derive from just a few seemingly unconnected bits of information.
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Damm if I know. The account was written by one of guys doing the breaking in, not by one of the analysts.
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Re:Note for world domination: encrypt serial no.'s (Score:4, Insightful)
original source (Score:5, Informative)
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we had this story on slashdot some years ago but i can't find it right now.
Did they share data with the Russians? (Score:2)
minimum-variance unbiased estimator (MVUE, or UMVU estimator)
I think this only works if most of the tanks that are no longer in service, are in your collection of serial numbers. If you send your first 1K produced to the western front and the next 1K produced to the eastern front, the US/English/etc are going to calculate a number about 1/2 as high as the Russians.
So, in theory either the Germans sent certain model of tank only to certain fronts, or the western and eastern guys were sharing data, or maybe the Germans sent all the odds west and all the evens east or
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with each factory/complex serializing independently
with pre-assigned blocks of serial numbers, if I recall correctly, so if you saw the output of only one factory you might get a slightly low number (unless you saw the product of the factory with the highest serial number block).
It's all probabilistic, and the variance calculation is documented in the article for a very good reason.
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huh? Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator is a mathematical/statistical property that guarantees that your estimate will have small variance(basically small standard deviation), and is also unbiased (the estimate isn't systematically high or low). What you are trying to say is there was a possibility for sampling error/bias.
I see your point with respect to the sample though, but it obviously wasn't an issue since the article states that the true maximum was very near the estimate. 1000 tanks is a lot; the
Godwin doesn't apply? (Score:4, Funny)
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Hirohito?
Don't start counting at 1 (Score:5, Interesting)
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So long as he does not claim to have more then 5 trucks where is the issue?
No law against labeling truck number 1 as number 6.
Same method used for Soviet Bombers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Same method used for Soviet Bombers (Score:4, Informative)
in the 1950s
so they started looking at satellite photos of the Russian bombers
Hmm. Correct theory, but wrong implementation.
Re:Same method used for Soviet Bombers (Score:5, Funny)
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Do you have a source because what you are saying is physically impossible?
Tail numbers are on the vertical stabilizer. You can only read them from the side not from the top. Think about the slant range involved and do the math. We are talking about 1950s/ tech so think solid lenses and film with not digital image processing.
Now if the pictures where from a U2 or if they put the numbers on the wing, that is a bit more reasonable but not from an early spy satellite.
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I do agree that satellite photo evidence would have been rather hard to come by in 1950 though.
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At least at some point it weren't mistake, but deliberate falsifications:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B [wikipedia.org]
(just look at the names involved...)
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Um, Sputnik was launched in 1957.
Small problem, that was a USSR sat not CIA. I suppose the CIA could have been ahead of their time in outsourcing...
Nothing very new in this - Verdun (Score:5, Interesting)
Off By One Error and Power of Two (Score:2)
They used it to estimate that the Germans produced 255 tanks per month between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1942. Turns out the serial-number methodology was spot on. After the war, internal German data put der Führer's production at 256 tanks per month -- one more than the estimate.
It's comforting to realize I'm not the only one plagued by off-by-one errors!
And what's with the power-of-two number--Numerology or what?
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I am just amazed one single methhead was able to make over 200 tanks a month. I would have thought they had some lackeys to do that sort of work.
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What was the number of the first tank? zero, or one?
256 tanks per turn? Impossible! (Score:4, Funny)
256 tanks per turn? Impossible! That would take a regular supply of 1280 IPCs...
The Germans don't have "Tanks" (Score:2)
They have "Panzers". Know the difference between your Civilizations. Yeesh!
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Yeah, it's not soap, it's Dove.
Can US win a future war like it did in WW II? (Score:2)
Now we are fighting two wars (Afghanistan and Pakistan). Even that is proving to be a handful. Can USA stand up to a mighty enemy likes of WW II Germany or J
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it takes so long to produce a tank that you have to have everything ready and made before you go to war
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Afghanistan doesn't threaten the existence of US, therefore you can't beat them. Just like Vietnam.
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Totally different kind of War. No amount of production can win when you are wasting a million dollar missile on a guy, his camel and their tent.
Bombing also fails in those regions, you cannot bomb people who have no infrastructure to lose in any effective manner. We are repeating the mistakes of Vietnam.
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With a few hundred long range Nukes at the US's disposal, signs point to "Yes, easily.".
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Maybe someone in the government will finally learn the lesson that fighting insurgencies is just not worth the effort and avoid any
Re:Can US win a future war like it did in WW II? (Score:4, Interesting)
If North Korea decides to invade South Korea, that's the sort of war we can fight. One with a clear goal and somebody who has the kind of authority needed to stop hostilities once you negotiate a peace (even if it's unconditional surrender). You can't do that with insurgencies, because there is nobody in charge and they're run more like criminal gangs than actual armies.
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The wars in Iraq (which is all but over for the US, good luck with that INA) and Afghanistan are very different from World War Two. If the US had fought Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan with the same disregard for civilian casualties and overwhelming firepower there wouldn't be a problem.
Modern Mindset - Isolate Fallujah, tell the civilians to get out, then go house to house to secure the city with Marines and Army.
World War Two Mindset - Mass on one side of Fallujah, carpet bomb the far side of the city for a
Houses too (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is, the German tanks had bigger guns and longer ranges - significantly longer. There was apparently a speed advantage to the British tank (I'm going by what I was told, again I'm not a WWII-buff by any means) though, so what they used to do was lure the German tank into a village, then drive round back of them. The German guns were so big they couldn't turn them in in a normal street with buildings on either side whereas the smaller British tank certainly could. Not sure this was by design, but they took any advantage they could of course and I'm told that this trick was used by my dad a number of times.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Houses too (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065938/ [imdb.com]
Is your dad's name Sgt. Oddball ? :)
Re:Houses too (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a WWII buff.
If your dad drove a tank that was faster than German tanks, it probably wasn't a Churchill. Could it have been a Cromwell? Those also showed up in Normandy, were still in service at the end of the war, and were pretty fast.
The tactic you describe was used against the bigger German tanks, as the ones the size of most Allied tanks didn't have especially long guns. He probably used it the most in the Normandy fighting, as that's when the Germans concentrated heavily against the British and Canadian armies.
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Cheers,
Ian
Re:Houses too (Score:4, Informative)
Bluntly, you are being daft. Did you not notice the language I couched it in? I'm no WWII expert and don't intend to be one, I'm recounting stories I was told as a kid by my dad. There'll be people who know more than me about this and will correct me - 'lying' doesn't begin to come into it.
Here's my dad guarding Belson [hmd.org.uk], by the way. Picture 1 [eruvia.org] and Picture 2 [eruvia.org]. They were one of the first forces into the area - please let me know when you've achieved a tenth as much.
Anyway, that link shows my dad to have been in the 11th Armoured Division [wikipedia.org]. It seems you're right - not Berlin, but Lubeck and Neustadt. So yes, turns out I'm inaccurate. But lying? No.
Cheers,
Ian
Tanks, Planes and Supply Trucks (Score:2)
Meth (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the title as 'Meth':
For once a misreading made perfect sense in the summary title's context: use of amphetamines throughout World War II on land and air personnel is well-documented. There's a phrase one hears infrequently that amphetamines 'won the Battle of Britain' - fending off constant attack from the Luftwaffe made necessary the use of stimulants as hiring and training a new pilot took too long. Whether it really did tip the scales in that battle we'll never know. As one would expect abuse orose within both Allied and Axis forces, and the spike in use persisted after the war. The Vietnam conflict saw American troops use methamphetamine very widely, and today the drug is popular amongst the poor as a relatively inexpensive stimulant.
If there's anything that isn't widely known by the public and merits publicizing it's history of drugs such as this in the context of 20th century events like warfare. What laid ground for a forerunner to the modern drugs situation to me represents a phenomena of greater gravity than the serial numbers of tanks which one would expect would be used simply through using good old oxymoronic common sense.
Presently there's a drug by the name of 'Modafinil' which mimics amphetamine but removes almost entirely the euphoric element and much of the crash that accompanies sudden cessation. It has been around for a number of years, and sees much use in modern conflicts. It also has much off-label use, and has even been used by astronauts to cope with heavy exercise regimens.
They certainly didn't use grammar... (Score:2)
This an article about how the allies where able to estimate the number of German Tanks produced based on the Serial Numbers of the Tanks. Neat!. Godwin does not apply.
Seriously?!?! Is there an editor in the house? Try:
This [is] an article about how the [Allies were] able to estimate the number of German Tanks produced based on the Serial Numbers of the Tanks. Neat!. Godwin does not apply.
Geesh!
And then there was the British condom (Score:5, Funny)
I read somewhere (maybe Max Hasting's book on Winston's War) about a problem the British had with some infantry equipment getting wet and non-functional. They supposedly solved it by going to condom makers, who made a several foot long condom to fit over the gear and keep it dry.
When Churchill saw this, he said that it wouldn't do at all - he wanted each pack labeled "British Condom. Size - Medium."
Re:Who's to say (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be so dismissive. Knowing how many tanks the Germans had in total is related to knowing how many they can marshal in a particular region. Also, part of the allies' goal was to figure out how many tanks the Germans could manufacture. If that number was high, then the Germans could have bolstered an undersupplied and perceived-to-be-weak region.
To be back on track, the math involved is pretty straightforward. For those interested, the Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] article has more information on the subject.
Re:Who's to say (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention, if you have an idea of how much total strength the enemy has, you know how committed they are to a location where you know their strength. If your enemy has 90% of their estimated force in one location, you know that you can (if you want) hit them with a counterattack in another location unopposed.
The information is far more relevant than the GP thinks.
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knowing how much they produce means you can estimate the time to replace destroyed tanks and plan accordingly. 90% of winning a war is mastering logistics
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Knowing tank concentration is NOT vastly more important than knowing the rate of tank production.
Adapting to tank concentrations invokes relatively short term planning concerns. This information is needed to help you decide your counter-concentrations. You know what they have and where they have it, and then you move your stuff in response.
But tank production is HUGELY important. You're talking about EXTREMELY complicated logistical problems there. How many tanks are you going to manufacture in response
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Yeah, I think he was trying to make a crude concentration camp tattoo joke.
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How about a small integer k times the real serial number plus a uniformly distributed random integer from 0 to k-1?
--
Mein Herr,
Your application for Grammar Fuhrer is rejected. You are otherwise highly qualified, but the post is occupied.
Re:Who's to say (Score:4, Funny)
You would get collisions, is why. Very dumb idea.
So what? If you're tank can't take a few collisions, then you've got serious problems.
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the only information needed to make this mathematical method work is that the serial numbers be sequential. As in auto-incrementing. Which is not data in a serial number.
but nevermind the facts, let us reconsider instead the choice to use or not to use 'intelligent' serial numbers back in 1942. Because it matters.
The world must know if the Nazi were bad database designers as well as genocidal sociopaths. Possibly the two are causal? No? Well, It was a theory.
Maybe some of the tradeoff costs have changed in
Re:Who's to say (Score:4, Insightful)
Only morons put data in a serial number, it's one of the most fundamental mistakes of database planning.
There are lots of valid reasons to put data in a serial number -- especially in 1941.
If you're maintaining a battalion's worth of tanks, it's useful to know where your tank was manufactured and if it was manufactured around the same time as the other 5 tanks in your battalion that had bad drive gears.
It's not like they could have done a simple database lookup to find the assembly history of each tank. And generating a unique series of serial numbers across multiple factories would not have been trivial.
Of course, they ended up in inadvertently revealing secret information, but maybe they didn't think it was all that secret and assumed that observation alone would provide that data. (which didn't turn out to be true).
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You may consider them morons but they didn't have the benefit of your knowledge.
If you look at the VIN number of your car, it still has plenty of information in it. Lets pick on a relativity recent Chevrolet [ehow.com]for instance. The information can tell you where it was made, what options was installed from the factory, what motor came with it, what year is was produced and so on. Unlike a serial number in a database, on material items it's important to carry some of this information in order to track down problem
Re:I'm guessing they were not gamers (Score:4, Funny)
The mistake they made was looking at middle manager numeric metric goal achievements. Anyone in modern corporate America knows it possible to generate amazing numbers, yet not really accomplish anything.
I have faith they were meeting the appropriate metric goals at a 1400 tanks/month pace for diversity training, staff meetings, coffee consumption, memos distributed per week, slashdot first posts, etc, yet at the same time have faith that they only shipped like 5 working tanks out the door.
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You could of course use this to make your enemy overestimate the number of tanks you have by incrementing serial numbers by a random number between 1 and 10 each time you make a tank.
You can also serial number stamp a critical part that is often F-ed up. So one factory creates and stamps 100 serial numbers on raw engine block iron castings, then ships them to factory #2 where the machinists and allied bombers F up about 50 of them. Ta Da, analysis shows you shipped 100 tank engines based on engine block serial numbers, even if only 50 actually made it out the door.
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Well... that notion about germans beeing gründlich has to come from somewhere....
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They were Germans. Case settled.
To this day German castles are restored to what they looked like in what ever year they want them to look like because they recored the location of every thing and number all the artworks and other items.
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It was quite typical for their excessive Ordnung to come bite them in the ass, in that war.
Another example: carefully chosen, way too descriptive (using characteristics from germanic mythology) codenames. Or one joke, AFAIK circling among the polish resistance, about how it was possible for a black man with a Panzerfaust to enter the chancellory of the Reich - if only he had proper papers (yes, a joke, but surely grounded in something). Or making sure the postal services will deliver [wikipedia.org], despite the circumstan
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Meanwhile in "Spy Catcher", Peter Wright explains how they put numbers 1, 3, 7, 8, etc. onto their bugging wires in an embassy, just for the psychological effect on anyone who found them all and would tear the building apart looking for the missing numbered wires
Now if you really want to mess with their heads, label one of the wires with the infinity symbol.
Really? (Score:2)
Even in 1945, the Allied advance was often held up for long periods by children with Panzerfausts. Militarily, the Sherman (and the British Churchill) were terrible mistakes.
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Right on the tanks, wrong on the ships. Had the subs not been moved England would have at the very least been in much worse condition.
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kekekekekekekekeke zergling rush?
Quantity over Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been telling people for years that WWII really came down to a battle of quantity over quality. Technologically, Germany was 10 years ahead of everyone else. Furthermore, their weapons were amazingly well-engineered. But they didn't have the facilities and infrastructure to produce in large quantities.
And that's what the USA had -- tons of natural resources, lots of factories, lots of fairly untouchable infrastructure with which to crank out a lot of weapons. Never mind the weapons were of inferior qual
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Your analysis is a little bit of an overstatement.
First, there were probably only a few technologies where the Germans were really that far ahead. Rocketry was one of them. However, while the V2 was great technology, without a more potent warhead (i.e. nuclear or chemical) and/or significantly better guidance it was nothing more than a tactically/strategically insignificant terror weapon.
The U.S. and Britain were pretty far along on jet technology. However, a full-scale roll-out of a jet fighter would have
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The Nazis never knew about Godwin's law, but they must have violated it constantly.
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analyzing the tatooed numbers on holocaust's survivors' arms to determine how many actually got killed [wikipedia.org]?
Unlike tanks, not all holocaust victims had serial numbers tattooed on their bodies. [wikipedia.org]
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You were probably joking when you posted, but there is a chess variant that looks interesting:
http://www.chessvariants.org/incinf.dir/kriegspiel.html [chessvariants.org]
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If you want a unique random number, just pick a random number and make sure it hasn't been used before. GUIDs aren't magical; they're actually less unique than the simple method I just described. Too many people used GUIDs for poor reasons.
Besides, if you used traditional GUIDs, you would not only be exposing when the tank was made, but also where it was made.
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NO CARRIER
Yup. That's the Nazis in WW2 alright.