Why didn't they use randomized and scrambled serial numbers? Sort of like what Amazon does to their order numbers. I know it can still be cracked but serially numbering military equipment is not very smart. I was setting up a Shopify store the other day and it doesn't allow for a lookup table to be used for order numbers. I don't want competitors to know that I've sold so many X items. Same thing with Squarespace and Square e-commerce stores. It blows my mind that a multi-billion dollar ecom giant has not implemented despite of forum posts and requests from users.
World War II was (at least one of) the first industrialized war. So the whole situation was genuinely novel to most participants.
Additionally, the German army command didn't think that way. Where the US relied on overpowering by materiel dominance, and the Soviets fought and won through unimaginable human sacrifice, the considerable initial success of the German army was based on better, smarter tactics, individual leadership, bravery, ruthlessness, etc. The leadership assumed they'd be able to win the war that way, even when the war had turned into a much more industrial operation.
You can see that in operations such as the Battle of the Bulge, the war in Normandy, and most importantly in the the Russian campaign.
This is of course over-generalizing, but I believe the general mode of thinking was there, and that'd explain the lack of attention on such details.
Don't underestimate Soviet industrial capabilities during the war. The Soviets produced over 58K T-34 type tanks compared to Germany producing 37K (PzIII through Pz6).
You're correct, the Soviets outproduced Germany as well as being willing to run much higher losses. E.g. in the Battle of Kursk, the Soviets outnumbered the Germans by x2 in just about everything (tanks, planes, men). They won, but lost x2-x4 in tanks, planes, men.
In either case, terrible times that we should be thankful not to have been born into.
At the point of German-Soviet conflict, the US had about six times the steel production of the USSR, six times the iron production, eight times the oil production, and three to four times the coal production. It definitely wouldn't be surprising if US steel was a large share of Soviet figures.
The scale of resources delivered to prop up the Soviets was extraordinary, including what the British sent them.
In just 3 1/2 years the British sent them[1]:
3,000+ Hurricanes aircraft, 4,000+ other aircraft, 27 naval vessels, 5,218 tanks, 5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 1,212 Universal Carriers and Loyd Carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, £1.15bn worth of aircraft engines, 1,474 radar sets, 4,338 radio sets, 600 naval radar and sonar sets
And the US sent them:
427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel,[32] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic production
Beyond Russia also notes:
"The USSR received a total of 44,000 American jeeps, 375,883 cargo trucks, 8,071 tractors and 12,700 tanks. Additionally, 1,541,590 blankets, 331,066 liters of alcohol, 15,417,000 pairs of army boots, 106,893 tons of cotton, 2,670,000 tons of petroleum products and 4,478,000 tons of food supplies"
The notion of sending a country 375,000 trucks and 1,900 locomotives in just three years, is incredible to think of today.
While the Soviet Union lost a huge number of people, the 25-30 million dead is an inflated estimate because it counts people living in areas that were conquered by the Soviet Union. Polish people by and large do not appreciate being lumped in with the people who had invaded them the year before.
First, they probably didn't consider that serial numbers might be an information leak.
Second, all calculations were done by hand in those days (and documents that weren't printed in bulk had tp be retyped by hand) so sequential numbers were not only easier to issue but to track (e.g. if you have a production problem you can say "let's check all tanks with S/Ns between A and B" rather than having to maintain a list mapping production dates to serial numbers that might be in a file cabinet somewhere distant from where you are.
Why didn't they use randomized and scrambled serial numbers?
Because there weren't well-known examples of the risk of not doing that, and not doing it is the easy and obvious thing if you have no clear reason to do it, and makes lots of things you might use those numbers for yourself easier (and if it wasn't for your own use, you wouldn't issue the numbers at all.)
Because supply chain logistics. The Germans in WWII were world leaders in manufacturing (perhaps bested only by the US), and one of the elements of that manufacturing quality is the ability to trace individual parts back to the exact manufacturing batch to figure out why particular batches go wrong.
The Germans did (eventually) make some effort to obscure details of their supply chain--they forced manufacturers to use three-letter codes instead of their normal trademarks--but that still suffered from poor operational security which allowed the codes to be quickly matched up to manufacturers. It didn't help that the British analysts meticulously kept track of everything, allowing them to identify the manufacturer of one unlabelled part by the inspector's number.
They might have had good equipment sometimes, but they had nowhere near enough of it. They were outproduced by Britain “alone” (counting the colonies) in most areas, most the time, and often by considerable margins.
The German army was not particularly mechanised or well equipped as a whole, relying on a lot of horse draw vehicles for the entire war.
When you look at the war from a manufacturing perspective, the question is more about how Germany survived for so long again it’s such huge manufacturing nations.
For a seemingly dry subject, David Edgerton’s book on this is very readable. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/27/britains-war-m...
I should say that Germany was a leader in manufacturing quality, not so much quantity, although I believe they did comparatively well there considering that they were facing down the gargantuan industrialized economies of the US, UK, and USSR.
It's also worth point out that Germany suffered from a severe lack of resources, particularly oil and rubber (although everyone in WWII was short on rubber). While they did have synthetic fuel and rubber plants that they made excellent use of (part of the reason for German superiority in the chemical industry was their need for it), these synthetic routes are not really sustainable for a massive war effort, and Germany ran out of their stockpiled reserves by 1942. Case Blue, the second offensive in the USSR, had obtaining the Baku oil fields as its main objective.
Even quality I'm not so sure. Because quality largely depends on the intended use. And if that use is to shoot at things an be shot at in return in abysmal operating conditions the traditional German quality standard is just over the top and unsuited. And while quality beets quantity on a per unit basis, globally there is inly so much quantity difference quality can make up. Something Germans seem incapable of culturally understanding even today the concept of "good enough" is beyond the understanding for a lot of my fellow country men.
German quality was largely a myth. Examine tanks; they need to be survivable, reliable, and potent. Without all three, they're useless. German tanks were rarely the best on the battlefield when measured this way.
Aircraft (especially fighters) have the same three requirements: until the ME-262 was deployed, Germany was only on par with the allies.
Artillery? Other than the feared 88mm, its artillery was clearly second fiddle to the Allies.
What enabled Germany to have any success was the initial training of its NCOs and officer corp. This allowed them to exploit opportunities faster than their opponents (think of Boyd's OODA cycle).
But all the oft-touted German "super-weapons" were usually over-engineered stuff that didn't work reliably. Note that the ME-109 flew until the end of the war since it was reliable, and effective against bombers until they were escorted by Mustangs and Thunderbolts.
It wasn't about lack of industrial know how, it was the policy of Autarky. The Nazi regime literally starved itself of essential manufacturing and war time resources.
They knew for example that they only had enough oil, with the limited mechanized forces they had, for operational effectiveness until autumn 1941. After that Germany would never again have the resources for grand operations on the strategic level of operation barbarossa. They needed to get to the oil fields of the Caucasus region which they did not even get close to due to some screwed up leadership decisions.
Fall blau was a pale comparison to the earlier operations and Germany's logistics system and resources were beyond tipping point.
And then when it came to Kursk all they could really manage was a single limited scope battle.
They did, sort of, starting in the 1940s. The tank make/model were replaced by arbitrary codes, but it was done sloppily and many of the tanks could be re-identified. (See page 80 of the paper @dooglius posted above).
Still, the idea that this could leak valuable information is probably more obvious in hindsight, and sequential serial numbers do have some upsides. If there's a design flaw in one version of the gearboxes, you can just pull everything with a serial number between XXXX and YYYY. With randomized numbers, you'd have to maintain some master database, which is a lot harder when most of logging is done with pen-and-ink ledgers, carbon copies, and maybe punchcards.
Naively, it would inflate the absolute values, but you might be able to correct for it in various ways. Still, knowing that tank production fell 50% is probably useful, even if you don't know what exactly it fell from....
It's interesting to see other commenters saying that manipulating IDs wouldn't occur to the Germans, it reminded me of an interesting anecdote from Hitler's rise to power: "It was in January 1920 when a numeration was issued for the first time and listed in alphabetical order Hitler received the number 555. In reality, he had been the 55th member, but the counting started at the number 501 in order to make the party appear larger." [0]
I think it's more likely that many were aware of the security issues, but it wasn't worth the coordination of coming up with a scheme, giving it to all spare parts suppliers in a secure way, etc. potentially slowing down the war effort. I bet the Allies used a lot of serial numbers too, despite this work.
Why didn't they use randomized and scrambled serial numbers?
Because it happened 80 years ago, when German army (or any other) did not understand statistics as well as they do today.
It was a groundbreaking achievement by allies.
They did know about encryption and developed the Enigma machine.
I don't think you need deep statistics knowledge to know that if the enemy captured Serial # 0020, 0120, 0439, 1293 and 1356; they would at least have some hint that the lower bound is 1356 tanks.
Sure, but as the article points out, that's not a great bound—and you really care about the expected number of tanks (or the upper bound), rather than the lower. The Allies had drastically overestimated this, by about fivefold.
Furthermore, the interesting part isn't just the number of tanks or planes—though that has obvious strategic uses too— but the insight it gives you into their industrial production. What's the limiting factor in getting a tank to the front--machining the parts? assembly? fuel? Which of our raids affected that?
Comments
Why didn't they use randomized and scrambled serial numbers? Sort of like what Amazon does to their order numbers. I know it can still be cracked but serially numbering military equipment is not very smart. I was setting up a Shopify store the other day and it doesn't allow for a lookup table to be used for order numbers. I don't want competitors to know that I've sold so many X items. Same thing with Squarespace and Square e-commerce stores. It blows my mind that a multi-billion dollar ecom giant has not implemented despite of forum posts and requests from users.
World War II was (at least one of) the first industrialized war. So the whole situation was genuinely novel to most participants.
Additionally, the German army command didn't think that way. Where the US relied on overpowering by materiel dominance, and the Soviets fought and won through unimaginable human sacrifice, the considerable initial success of the German army was based on better, smarter tactics, individual leadership, bravery, ruthlessness, etc. The leadership assumed they'd be able to win the war that way, even when the war had turned into a much more industrial operation.
You can see that in operations such as the Battle of the Bulge, the war in Normandy, and most importantly in the the Russian campaign.
This is of course over-generalizing, but I believe the general mode of thinking was there, and that'd explain the lack of attention on such details.
Don't underestimate Soviet industrial capabilities during the war. The Soviets produced over 58K T-34 type tanks compared to Germany producing 37K (PzIII through Pz6).
You're correct, the Soviets outproduced Germany as well as being willing to run much higher losses. E.g. in the Battle of Kursk, the Soviets outnumbered the Germans by x2 in just about everything (tanks, planes, men). They won, but lost x2-x4 in tanks, planes, men.
In either case, terrible times that we should be thankful not to have been born into.
Though a substantial part of the steel used to make those tanks came from USA. As did much of the trucks and other equipment used by Soviets.
I recall seeing actual numbers (proportion of American steel in Soviet production), but couldn't find them, does someone have a source?
Anyway, e.g. this article talks about it:
https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/03/14/lend-lease-how-ameri...
At the point of German-Soviet conflict, the US had about six times the steel production of the USSR, six times the iron production, eight times the oil production, and three to four times the coal production. It definitely wouldn't be surprising if US steel was a large share of Soviet figures.
The scale of resources delivered to prop up the Soviets was extraordinary, including what the British sent them.
In just 3 1/2 years the British sent them[1]:
3,000+ Hurricanes aircraft, 4,000+ other aircraft, 27 naval vessels, 5,218 tanks, 5,000+ anti-tank guns, 4,020 ambulances and trucks, 323 machinery trucks, 1,212 Universal Carriers and Loyd Carriers, 1,721 motorcycles, £1.15bn worth of aircraft engines, 1,474 radar sets, 4,338 radio sets, 600 naval radar and sonar sets
And the US sent them:
427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel,[32] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic production
Beyond Russia also notes:
"The USSR received a total of 44,000 American jeeps, 375,883 cargo trucks, 8,071 tractors and 12,700 tanks. Additionally, 1,541,590 blankets, 331,066 liters of alcohol, 15,417,000 pairs of army boots, 106,893 tons of cotton, 2,670,000 tons of petroleum products and 4,478,000 tons of food supplies"
The notion of sending a country 375,000 trucks and 1,900 locomotives in just three years, is incredible to think of today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
The Soviets repaid the debt with unimaginable human losses: 25-30 MILLION war dead.
80 percent of all German military casualties occurred on the Eastern Front.
Just think about those numbers.
While the Soviet Union lost a huge number of people, the 25-30 million dead is an inflated estimate because it counts people living in areas that were conquered by the Soviet Union. Polish people by and large do not appreciate being lumped in with the people who had invaded them the year before.
And quite many of the dead of course died with a bullet from behind, or in slave labor camps run by Soviets themselves.
First, they probably didn't consider that serial numbers might be an information leak.
Second, all calculations were done by hand in those days (and documents that weren't printed in bulk had tp be retyped by hand) so sequential numbers were not only easier to issue but to track (e.g. if you have a production problem you can say "let's check all tanks with S/Ns between A and B" rather than having to maintain a list mapping production dates to serial numbers that might be in a file cabinet somewhere distant from where you are.
Because there weren't well-known examples of the risk of not doing that, and not doing it is the easy and obvious thing if you have no clear reason to do it, and makes lots of things you might use those numbers for yourself easier (and if it wasn't for your own use, you wouldn't issue the numbers at all.)
Because supply chain logistics. The Germans in WWII were world leaders in manufacturing (perhaps bested only by the US), and one of the elements of that manufacturing quality is the ability to trace individual parts back to the exact manufacturing batch to figure out why particular batches go wrong.
The Germans did (eventually) make some effort to obscure details of their supply chain--they forced manufacturers to use three-letter codes instead of their normal trademarks--but that still suffered from poor operational security which allowed the codes to be quickly matched up to manufacturers. It didn't help that the British analysts meticulously kept track of everything, allowing them to identify the manufacturer of one unlabelled part by the inspector's number.
They might have had good equipment sometimes, but they had nowhere near enough of it. They were outproduced by Britain “alone” (counting the colonies) in most areas, most the time, and often by considerable margins.
The German army was not particularly mechanised or well equipped as a whole, relying on a lot of horse draw vehicles for the entire war.
When you look at the war from a manufacturing perspective, the question is more about how Germany survived for so long again it’s such huge manufacturing nations. For a seemingly dry subject, David Edgerton’s book on this is very readable. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/mar/27/britains-war-m...
I should say that Germany was a leader in manufacturing quality, not so much quantity, although I believe they did comparatively well there considering that they were facing down the gargantuan industrialized economies of the US, UK, and USSR.
It's also worth point out that Germany suffered from a severe lack of resources, particularly oil and rubber (although everyone in WWII was short on rubber). While they did have synthetic fuel and rubber plants that they made excellent use of (part of the reason for German superiority in the chemical industry was their need for it), these synthetic routes are not really sustainable for a massive war effort, and Germany ran out of their stockpiled reserves by 1942. Case Blue, the second offensive in the USSR, had obtaining the Baku oil fields as its main objective.
Even quality I'm not so sure. Because quality largely depends on the intended use. And if that use is to shoot at things an be shot at in return in abysmal operating conditions the traditional German quality standard is just over the top and unsuited. And while quality beets quantity on a per unit basis, globally there is inly so much quantity difference quality can make up. Something Germans seem incapable of culturally understanding even today the concept of "good enough" is beyond the understanding for a lot of my fellow country men.
German quality was largely a myth. Examine tanks; they need to be survivable, reliable, and potent. Without all three, they're useless. German tanks were rarely the best on the battlefield when measured this way.
Aircraft (especially fighters) have the same three requirements: until the ME-262 was deployed, Germany was only on par with the allies.
Artillery? Other than the feared 88mm, its artillery was clearly second fiddle to the Allies.
What enabled Germany to have any success was the initial training of its NCOs and officer corp. This allowed them to exploit opportunities faster than their opponents (think of Boyd's OODA cycle).
But all the oft-touted German "super-weapons" were usually over-engineered stuff that didn't work reliably. Note that the ME-109 flew until the end of the war since it was reliable, and effective against bombers until they were escorted by Mustangs and Thunderbolts.
It wasn't about lack of industrial know how, it was the policy of Autarky. The Nazi regime literally starved itself of essential manufacturing and war time resources.
They knew for example that they only had enough oil, with the limited mechanized forces they had, for operational effectiveness until autumn 1941. After that Germany would never again have the resources for grand operations on the strategic level of operation barbarossa. They needed to get to the oil fields of the Caucasus region which they did not even get close to due to some screwed up leadership decisions.
Fall blau was a pale comparison to the earlier operations and Germany's logistics system and resources were beyond tipping point.
And then when it came to Kursk all they could really manage was a single limited scope battle.
They did, sort of, starting in the 1940s. The tank make/model were replaced by arbitrary codes, but it was done sloppily and many of the tanks could be re-identified. (See page 80 of the paper @dooglius posted above).
Still, the idea that this could leak valuable information is probably more obvious in hindsight, and sequential serial numbers do have some upsides. If there's a design flaw in one version of the gearboxes, you can just pull everything with a serial number between XXXX and YYYY. With randomized numbers, you'd have to maintain some master database, which is a lot harder when most of logging is done with pen-and-ink ledgers, carbon copies, and maybe punchcards.
They could just randomly skip some numbers. That would maintain the XXX to YYY advantage.
Does that resolve the problem, or just add another variable to the analysis?
Naively, it would inflate the absolute values, but you might be able to correct for it in various ways. Still, knowing that tank production fell 50% is probably useful, even if you don't know what exactly it fell from....
You could increase the average spacing when production slows down.
It's interesting to see other commenters saying that manipulating IDs wouldn't occur to the Germans, it reminded me of an interesting anecdote from Hitler's rise to power: "It was in January 1920 when a numeration was issued for the first time and listed in alphabetical order Hitler received the number 555. In reality, he had been the 55th member, but the counting started at the number 501 in order to make the party appear larger." [0]
I think it's more likely that many were aware of the security issues, but it wasn't worth the coordination of coming up with a scheme, giving it to all spare parts suppliers in a secure way, etc. potentially slowing down the war effort. I bet the Allies used a lot of serial numbers too, despite this work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Workers%27_Party#Adolf_...
Because it happened 80 years ago, when German army (or any other) did not understand statistics as well as they do today. It was a groundbreaking achievement by allies.
They did know about encryption and developed the Enigma machine.
I don't think you need deep statistics knowledge to know that if the enemy captured Serial # 0020, 0120, 0439, 1293 and 1356; they would at least have some hint that the lower bound is 1356 tanks.
Sure, but as the article points out, that's not a great bound—and you really care about the expected number of tanks (or the upper bound), rather than the lower. The Allies had drastically overestimated this, by about fivefold.
Furthermore, the interesting part isn't just the number of tanks or planes—though that has obvious strategic uses too— but the insight it gives you into their industrial production. What's the limiting factor in getting a tank to the front--machining the parts? assembly? fuel? Which of our raids affected that?
Because they were Germans.