Systems can be complicated and even the smallest detail can be dangerously revealing to a scrutinizing eye.
"Allied intelligence noticed each captured tank had a unique serial number. With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production. Using this data, the Allies created a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production. They used it to estimate that the Germans produced 255 tanks per month between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1942."
Indeed. If you look at any report/book/etc about the strategic production of war goods in WW2, you'll quickly realize that the Germans over-engineered most of their equipment. This resulted in fewer weapons and more maintenance for said weapons. The famous Tiger II tank (and most of their other planes/tanks) took longer to make, required more maintenance, consumed more fuel (a precious commodity for Germany at the time), and required more one-off spare parts (even the tracks were designed for one specific side of the tank). On top of this, Germany had more tank models than the rest of the allies combined. The allied tanks were simpler and could be mass-produced at insane quantities, parts were interchangeable, and could more easily be taken from disabled machines.
The Russians even went further, specifically engineering their tanks to only pass QA to last a very short amount of time (as little as a few dozen KM of use) during the first half of their involvement in the war because they'd be destroyed before then on average anyways.
It should be noted however that the Axis could never compete with the Allies in terms of quantity - America alone had over 5 times the industrial capacity of the entire Axis in 1944, and Germany was critically limited in resources like oil. Germany needed weapons that could get 10+:1 kill ratios. Further most of the late war German equipment was designed during the early war when they were doing well: it looked like their industrial base was expanding and they mostly needed equipment for well supported offensive actions. If germany had spammed tanks like the Russians did, they'ed just run out of fuel sooner. It was a gamble to go for over-engineered equipment, but it was rational even if it ultimately didn't pan out.
This and similar stories should really be interpreted more as british intelligence being brilliant than the germans being dumb. It's almost scary how many times the allies produced paradigm-shifting hacks in record time throughout the war.
Nice, I hadn't heard that one. I did hear that they always ended encoded messages with "heil hitler", giving the decoders a solid lead and verification that the key used was correct.
On that note, using UUIDs would be more 'secure' than auto incremented numbers, wouldn't it? I don't like how much space they take up in my URLs though.
> On that note, using UUIDs would be more 'secure' than auto incremented numbers, wouldn't it? I don't like how much space they take up in my URLs though.
Or just assign them in blocks that are out of order. Any intelligence gained from the leakage of such blocks would be misleading. Misleading is often even better than non-existent.
But it is, as is WW I. The latter ended 102 years ago and set in motion many of the technological developments which define our current world, WW II refined these to a level which is recognisable and often still useable today. Electronic warfare, programmable computers, jet-powered aircraft, nuclear weapons - all of these were used in WW II. Modern computers are faster, modern jets are more reliable and more fuel efficient, modern nuclear weapons are more compact and modern electronic warfare has kept up with the development of computers and electronics but as wars go WW I and WW II were the first - and possibly last [1] - "modern" large wars.
[1] - modern weaponry makes large-scale land war difficult to survive, e.g. the average survival time of a main battlefield tank is counted in minutes.
