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How Allies Used Math Against German Tanks
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."
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Note to self for world domination plans: don't stamp my robots/tanks/drones with plain text serial numbers, always encrypt! :-)
Actually, I think the best course of action would be to stamp false serial numbers / easy-to-decrypt serial numbers. Giving the enemy false information is likely better than none at all.
Of course, I guess that means the "real" serial numbers will have to be encrypted...
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>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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).
If the Nazis had taken Britain and the Caucasus, what do you think are the chances that the US would have tried to invade from across the Atlantic? It's one thing to island hop the Pacific; it's another to jump the entire Atlantic in one go.