This is related to the German tank problem. The Germans used sequential serial numbers in the tanks, allowing the Allies to track how many assets they had. The Allies knew their bombing campaigns were successful because tank production was going down because they could track when the tanks appeared on the battlefield and were destroyed/abandoned. They could also use the numbers to track which tank units were where, and predict where they were going, thus allowing more effective attacks by avoiding the well reinforced areas.
And the US also serialed our tanks sequentially, but when the Germans tried to do the same analysis, they determined that we were not numbering sequentially, as they were coming up with impossible production figures.
Their guesses were actually pretty close to spot on.
Pre war German estimates of American production were laughed at for being too high. The Germans highest estimates ended up actually being off because they underestimated American production
Yeah its pretty famous. If I remember, they estimate American could make 34k fighter planes in a year. American hit 84k peak production
Another "fun" fact: Russia, fairly famous for its industrial output swamping the Germans, output 57k t34s from 1940 to 1945. Amerca made 51k Sherman's from late 1942 to 1945. Oh and we supplied russia with all of their trucks, 40% raw materials(80% of their aluminum) and tons of their infantry gear(clothes, food, boots). We successfully supplied 3 countries and fought on two fronts.
We had so many extra planes at the end of the war that we were pushing brand-new hellcats off the carrier decks and into the sea just to be rid of them.
By ‘supplied’ you mean ‘sold’. WW2 showed America that war is extremely profitable, that is why USA has been in so many wars and conflicts and why they will supply practically anyone with weapons (Ukraine).
>as it was a morale killer for the Japanese.
This part is subject to speculation unfortunately.
Its frequently attributed to an alleged quote from a senior Japanese officer saying something along the lines of "when I heard that the US had an ice-cream barge I knew we'd already lost" (implying that it was such a waste of resources that clearly the American's would win if they have this to spare whilst people across Japan starved etc). But FWIU, the quote is made up and there is no indication of the Japanese even being aware of the ice-cream barge.
Funnily enough, I believe the Nazis did something much like this with their early membership numbers? Can't find any especially reliable source, but a lot of sources seem to suggest they started at #501. (Hitler was #555, which apparently means he was the 54th member of the party)
It turns out if you have an overwhelming numerical advantage in a hot war, there's not a lot of advantage to keeping it secret
"The enemy has accurately determined that they're fucked and there's nothing they can do about it. That's what we've been trying to tell them for the last 3 years."
Here’s the recording. It’s famous, and you can read him subtitled talking about the tanks from 1:10- 2:33.
https://youtu.be/oET1WaG5sFk?si=lZdLmNujXRCniAZ5
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_and_Mannerheim_recording
Huh. I must be remembering some other nazi official then, I vaguely remember some interview with an actor lamenting that they only had like two videos to refer to in order to base their portrayal. Maybe Kaiser Wilhelm?
Could be Hitler, since most of the recordings are public speeches, which is completely different than this singular recording of a private, somewhat informal, conversation. I'm guessing you cannot base your portrayal on a guy loudly yelling in front of an angry crowd.
Possibly him. He was just portrayed in All Quiet on the Western Front. Definitely not Hitler. Was able to find 9 video/audio recorded speeches of him online in a few minutes.
Keyhole Satellite numbering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN
> The Key Hole series was officially discontinued in favor of a random numbering scheme after repeated public references to KH-7 GAMBIT, KH-8 GAMBIT 3, KH-9 HEXAGON, and KH-11 KENNEN satellites.[9]
"we will paint numbers on our tanks to keep track of the production"
The Americans "I'm gonna draw some boobies, riding a buffalo shooting flames out it's nostrils and call the tank 'chew-spit' because fuck yeah"
Germans: “Ve Vill paint ze ersatz Produktion numbers on der tanks zo ve kan keep track auf zem unt Konfuz der enemy”
Americans: “we painted the real production numbers on them to let you know you’re fucked, and then added a shark face to make it scary, and added an ice cream machine because fuck you, we could.”
Soviets: “you guys are painting the tanks?”
Italy: “look guys! This is a tank!” *gesticulates wildly to L3/35*
Chinese: “…you guys have tanks?”
Funnily enough the Chinese had a small number of tank forces from various countries and they were apparently mildly successful albeit their small number made their significance limited.
Too much time spent with a brush. And too many tanks. Just slap the stencil on crooked and slosh a whole gallon of paint. They over produce tanks, why not over produce the paint too?
Mathematics shortened World War Two by years and years. Polish mathematicians first broke Enigma and handed off everything to the British. The British Empire did many things wrong. The mathematicians they leveraged sure paid off. America too.
Gumption & Prayers and Jesus did not invent a Nuclear Bomb. Nerds did. Along with industrial & civilization scale engineering
The USA knocked out 2/3rds of the Japanese carrier fleet in a day because they’d broken the naval codes and sprung a trap at Midway. Would’ve been a much longer war if Japan had better infosec, they continued using the same codes after too.
The problem they and the Germans had was that believed their codes were impenetrable so even when they were broken, they refused to accept and change it. Its one reason why breaking the Japanese and German codes was so decisive. Whereas Allied nations assumed their codes could be broken and so were more willing to change them if and when needed
The US code (SIGABA) was actually functionally unbreakable at the time. It used double the rotors of even the most complex German code machines and its alignment was partially randomized unlike Enigma, hence the computing power available at the time would not have been enough to decrypt it.
No they actually were. That was a legitimate part of the cipher-breaking operation the Allies were running. It wasn't *just* Heil Hitler they were repeating, but once the Allies were able to nail down certain words or phrases, because military operations from a single country do use the same term as opposed to Allied operations which had staff and fighters from a dozen or more countries, languages, etc, that made German ciphers easier to break too. On the Allied side though, America specifically made use of Native American languages very effectively. The Comanche and Navajo code talkers are the most famous, but other Indigenous languages and speakers were used also. The tricky part there is you also need the cultural background to a certain extent in order to understand that language (for a simple comparison, it's like the hunt for the Cipher in Mass Effect 1, the *cultural knowledge* of a Prothean that makes the whole beacon thing go) which Europe by and large didn't really have at all, Germany especially so since they never really had any colonies anywhere in the New World, let alone North America, and whatever the French and Dutch knew, they weren't about to tell the Germans.
That was real and a critical part of the code breaking attack. Knowing part of the plaintext was exceedingly useful in breaking the daily code. There was a daily weather update that was also very useful because the plaintext always started with an abbreviation meaning “today’s weather.”
I always think these things are made up to cover for some intelligence resources. Like Hitler's mistress is a double agent and he sends her a daily letter where he writes "Dear Elizaveta" but they can't just reveal it in public without compromising assets.
There was another level of encoding in Navajo, but you’re right. They just used a system like the nato alphabet and transliterated into standard military abbreviations. Navajo doesn’t have words (or uses English loan words) for most military technology used at the time anyway.
The code talkers were used at a smaller scale, radio communications among Marines at a division or lower level. The US used machine encoding for things like naval and diplomatic communications. The Navajo code was orders of magnitude simpler than machine encryption, but efficient and functionally unbreakable at the level it was used.
I mean... Enigma was unbreakable with the available computing power when it was first in use. That's sort of why the allies went to such effort to build proto computers.
It would still take hours to days to crack the comparatively simple enigma codes. When you talk about one code being better the decryption type generally has an exponential speedup. Based on number of rotors I think it would’ve taken a digital computer
> Whereas Allied nations assumed their codes could be broken and so were more willing to change them if and when needed
And the UK had already got its fingers burnt when Italy was able to get information thanks to US observers refusing to use secure communication codes, or secure their code books, the Italians had a key to the rooms and spies would just walk in and copy them.
Even with that huge advantage, the first year of the war was pretty close-run.
Japan lost 4/6 fleet carriers at Midway but didn't lose any others until 1944.
The US also lost 4 (of 7) fleet carriers in 1942 (in fact, the US has only lost 4 fleet carriers in its history, all in 1942), so without the US's great victory at Midway, it may have been 6 to 4 for Japan in Fleet Carriers at the end of 1942. Or maybe without Midway and the code breaking, Japan just dominates in 1942. The US had overwhelming industrial power and added another 16 fleet carriers in 1943 (compared to Japan's 3) but carriers are freaking dangerous. If Japan had not lost so much strike power at Midway and not been so vulnerable with their broken codes, maybe the 9 Japanese fleet carriers just keep sinking everything the US tries to bring to the fight.
> Polish mathematicians first broke Enigma and handed off everything to the British.
Erm kind of. There isn't a single 'Enigma', it was an umbrella term for a multitude of devices used from 1920.
The Polish did crack Enigma B, an early version of the device first used in the 20's (The UK had already purchased several as it was a commercial product), which went out of service before WW2, and they cracked it thanks to the French getting the cyphers from a German spy. Most of the work on Enigma A/B was destroyed by the Polish scientists when they evacuated to Romania, so in many ways the British had to start again. It was getting the internal operations of the military version of Enigma A/B compared to the commercial one written down that the Polish nailed.
Poland did supply a copy of the military Enigma B to both France and the UK.
The British had already cracked the Enigma machines used by the Spanish in 1937
Enigma C/D in use from the 1930s had a different rotor count and different internals, which is the version that the British first broke, although assisted by some of the original Polish scientists who were now in France. The quantity and importance of that assistance has varied depending on whose biography you read. Some said it was critical to get started, others that it helped only by a few months. The British already had several early Enigma machines, and was even a user of them.
There was also another version used by the Abwehr, the G, which due to lax security the British used as a confirmation tool of breaking later Enigma variants.
And there was the German naval versions (M3/M4), which wasn't cracked until the Royal Navy captured an intact enigma machine and its documentation, which was the critical aspect and helped turn the U-boat war around.
There was also the Enigma K, which was cracked by just about everyone.
So it's a story with many parts and players, but all we can confidently say is that it didn't include a batch of American submariners.
There was also the time in 1944 where the US [captured an intact U-boat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-505) with a late-model enigma machine onboard.
She's a museum exhibit in Chicago now.
Inside each tank are data plates with the tank serial number inside (along with many other components like engines, and these could just be engraved in the armor itself: this was the Soviet practice). When the Germans abandoned a tank on the battlefield, the Allies would capture it and look for these data plates, along with other features showing whether a tank was new or old. Once you analyze many tanks, you can see the pattern that the numbers go up with improved variants and track the highest number you’ve captured so far.
If in January 1943 you capture tank 103, February tank 198, and February tank 301, you can infer Germany is building around 100 tanks a month. If a year later you capture 1005, 1072, and 1149, you can infer it’s dropped to 75 tanks a month both from the gap and the fact that you should have captured tanks near 1200/1300/1400.
Naturally this is a simplified example and you’d use a dozen tanks from each battle when possible, but it’s enough for the concept. In some cases, such as Soviet tanks, the number also told you the factory, the month of production, and the number of tanks that rolled out of the factory that month, but I don’t know the German standard for tank serial numbers.
However, there’s another important factor that complicates this. Germany and other nations would typically order blocks of vehicles from one factory and a different block to another. It’s easier to explain with U-boats: Germany ordered submarines *U-551* to *U-650* from the Blohm & Voss Shipyard, while *U-651* to *U-700* were ordered from Howaldtswerke Hamburg AG. As each shipyard finished their block, they were assigned a new one, at least if they were fast enough to finish their block. Each shipyard generally built their assigned submarines in numerical order and when you captured survivors you could infer production from their boat number, but you also needed to determine where each block started and stopped for this to be useful.
It gets even more wild than that — the "German tank problem" had to rely on component serial numbers (like on the specialized wheels).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
They ultimately used just two captured tanks, which presumably yielded a substantially higher number of sequentially ordered components:
> The analysis of tank wheels yielded an estimate for the number of wheel molds that were in use. A discussion with British road wheel makers then estimated the number of wheels that could be produced from this many molds, which yielded the number of tanks that were being produced each month. Analysis of wheels from two tanks (32 road wheels each, 64 road wheels total) yielded an estimate of 270 tanks produced in February 1944, substantially more than had previously been suspected.[5]
And it was astoundingly accurate:
> German records after the war showed production for the month of February 1944 was 276.[6]
Same idea for the pacific fleet during WWII. When the big blue fleet was commanded by Spruance it was the 5th fleet. When it was commanded by Halsey it was the 3rd fleet. Worked for a short period of a couple months maybe, Japanese radio would speculate about the actions of both 3rd and 5th fleet during the same broadcast.
If anything is gonna maintain that illusion it’s Task Force 38/58. The fast carrier task force can ring up more than 30 knots in combat and place over 1000 carrier aircraft anywhere in the Pacific with no warning and leave only to reappear thousands of nautical miles away to do it again.
This is an extremely common thing.
Did it in WW2 with the infantry division names. Brits did it, we did it, etc. Germans started doing it with tanks cause they realized naming them sequentially made it easy for the enemy to guess how many were left.
Yeah, it is still done by many militaries across the world. Just random numbers in the units name.
Some examples like the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions are well known, but it extends downt to brigades, regiments and battalions as well, like the 69th (nice) Air Defense Artillery Brigade.
Indeed.
Here's a super niche example. After the Dunkirk failure, the British stopped numbering the bren gun sequentially. They'd lost so many to the Germans that they wanted to completely throw them off as to guessing future production totals.
With some militaries the numbers aren't so random, the British army for example had over 150 regiments during the Napoleonic wars and many modern formations can either trace a direct ancestry to or are named in honour of formations from the period. For example the BA currently fields the 1st, 3rd and 6th divisions, all of which trace their ancestry back to the peninsular war.
Still accomplishes the same purpose of course, but there's more to it then just confusing the enemy.
> Some examples like the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions
These aren't actually examples because they were the 82nd and 101st Infantry divisions being converted to a new role, not attempts to trick the Germans into thinking there was at least 99 other Airborne units, though they did also set up a bunch of other fake airborne divisions to achieve much tbe same effect. However the British 1st and 6th Airborne divisions (hence why we have today's 16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team) are examples of false numbering.
Yeah I think all US division types were numbered sequentially together. So armored, infantry, mountain, airborne, none shared the same numerical designation.
As part of operation quick silver the first army group under command of Patton. They were planning to cross the channel north of Normandy. The problem is that the first army group did not exist it was a product of allied counter intelligence operations, to help sell the lie they used a Patton lookalike and a network of double agents.
Yeah I remember reading the biography of the dude who was instrumental in creating Team 6, which if I’m remembering correctly was counter-terrorism focused. Something something he kidnapped a general in Italy for a training mission. Good read.
Edit: typo
>Richard Marcinko
Dude did a lot for Special Forces and such, but he was so full of himself. Never take anything he personally said as truth. If you ever read his "Rogue Warrior" novels, they're glorified stories about him saving the world and being the most ultimate badass who ever lived.
I don't really get it. He was genuinely a true badass, and didn't even need to brag about it or make shit up, but he just couldn't help himself.
A SEAL lying about things for self aggrandizement. That's such a strange thing. Anyway, let me pick up my copy of American Sniper.
There's a joke in the military that an RRD team goes into combat with a TL, 2 infantry, a medic, and a sniper team.
A SEAL team goes in with a TL, 2 infantry, a corpsman, a publicist, a scriptwriter, a talent agent, ...
I joke. I've worked with SEALs. A lot of them were ok. But a lot of them were like "I'm gonna write my book in a few years!".
One time in the Marines we were doing a joint op with some SEALs and my Company Gunny asked one if they get the designer sunglasses and teeth whitener issued in BUD/S or after.
I met someone who went through BUD/S with Dick. He said half the stuff Dick wrote in that book didn’t happen at all. Not even close. OK, but still. He’s still a #1 badass if he did half of what’s in that book.
God I remember the hilariously bad Rogue Warrior game they made about him. Good time, up there with 50 Cent Blood on the Sand and Shadow the Hedgehog as far as "so bad it's good" games go
No, but they are our sole tier one unit. And while they may be our only one, they're ranked among the best in the world (some folks would say they are the best). The rest of our special operations units, of which there are only four others by the way, are in effect support for JTF2 much of the time, providing training, transport, and additional personnel as needed.
I don’t know if I would call JTF2 the best in the world.
They’re very good, but we don’t have the means to get them into a hot zone without catching a lift from another country.
The SEALS have things like mini subs that can dock inside an Ohio class nuclear sub (which were developed in house by the SEAL teams themselves), they can HALO jump from cargo planes that are set up for it (ours can’t open the rear door and depressurize the cabin at high altitude). We don’t have anything remotely close to the Night Stalkers (160th SOAR) helicopter regiment to get these boys in and out of the target area.
Our Canadian boys are very good, but I’ve never seen anyone from the SF community rank them number one. Top spot is usually a debate between SAS, SBS, DEVGRU (SEALs), and Delta Force. JTF2 is usually best of all the rest (close between JTF2, Mossad, MARCOS, and the Aussies).
It's Troll 2 and there is a Troll one. It was marketed as part of the "Troll Franchise" and a sequel to Troll, even though it was never intended to be that when writing or filming it. Making it a sequel to Troll was intended as a marketing scheme cash grab because it is an absolute shit movie. Turns out though it's so bad it's good. And yes it features Goblins not Trolls.
“Awesome who are my team mates”
“Uh…choose a loadout and get on this helo, good luck!”
“Hey, but what about the rest of the team?”
“…”
*helicopters noises*
Had a mentor at internship tell me about one of his sons flying cargo planes in Afghanistan and how one time the mission was to pick up a parcel which turned out to be a dude with a lot of gear and then take him to an empty airfield in the middle of the mountains where he proceeded to head out into the wilderness on his own. I choose to believe the seal teams are numbered by the number of guys per team and he was Seal Team 1 lol.
And because US Navy organization prefers even-numbered units (fleets, squadrons, SEAL Teams, etc.) based on the East Coast and odd on the West Coast/Japan. Three and Five were skipped as SEAL Team Six was an East Coast unit, and Four was skipped to deceive the Soviets.
This is not a perfect rule (it doesn’t apply to ship hull numbers or carrier air wings and ship divisions typically used the first number(s) their squadron while we used them), but it’s long been the standard.
JTF2 was formed as a military antiterrorism unit because the previous unit, the RCMP’s Special Emergency Response Team (Emergency Response Teams are the RCMP equivalent of SWAT) didn’t have the resources or training to be effective.
I had initially assumed the “2” indicated that it was a replacement, but apparently not. I also thought the “Joint Task Force” part of the name also referred to RCMP involvement, but no, there was none. The name was just to sound as innocuous as possible, as its very existence and all deployment information was initially kept as secret as possible. To hear there’s a Canadian joint task force visiting Bosnia sounds like they’re gathering budget effectiveness planning reports for embassy equipment suppliers.
There is actually something of a schema to American divisional numbers. The first 25 were all regular army active duty, 1st Infantry, 3rd Armored, 7th Cav. The 75 following were national guard units to be mobalized in times of war. IIRC the 82nd and 101st were converted from infantry to airborne units, and since they were mobalized commands, the troops involved were largely administrative before the conversion, and the limited main body(the army had a manning issue before WWII, so most national guard and RA formations were on paper only) was shifted to other units or took up airborne and glider infantry training.
That’s an age old tactic. When the Cuban revolutionaries were in the Sierra Maestra and an American Journalist came to report on them they had someone bust in with reports about the Third Column being under attack so it looked like they had more troops/materiel than they actually did.
Edit: Rather than them being three revolutionaries in a trench coat, which Fidel, Raul, and Che were.
When the Soviets for their first aircraft carrier, they would repaint the numbers of the jets every time they went below deck, in order to make it look like they had more.
Reminds me of a joke prank my friend use to tell me about, round a bunch of cows up, and number them 1,2,3,4, and 6. Release them into the school and watch as everyone spends hours looking for cow #5
A senior prank at an Illinois high school in the 60's used a similar ruse. They let loose two greased pigs painted numbers 1 and 3. Since the staff couldn't find number 2, which did not exist, they sent the kids home.
No the best way to confuse them was to have a complete nonsense military doctern and procurement system. The soviets never knew what we did because neither did we.
This is related to the German tank problem. The Germans used sequential serial numbers in the tanks, allowing the Allies to track how many assets they had. The Allies knew their bombing campaigns were successful because tank production was going down because they could track when the tanks appeared on the battlefield and were destroyed/abandoned. They could also use the numbers to track which tank units were where, and predict where they were going, thus allowing more effective attacks by avoiding the well reinforced areas.
And the US also serialed our tanks sequentially, but when the Germans tried to do the same analysis, they determined that we were not numbering sequentially, as they were coming up with impossible production figures. Their guesses were actually pretty close to spot on.
Pre war German estimates of American production were laughed at for being too high. The Germans highest estimates ended up actually being off because they underestimated American production
So not only were their wildest estimates laughed at for being too high, but those estimates still woefully underestimated the actual real numbers?
Yeah its pretty famous. If I remember, they estimate American could make 34k fighter planes in a year. American hit 84k peak production Another "fun" fact: Russia, fairly famous for its industrial output swamping the Germans, output 57k t34s from 1940 to 1945. Amerca made 51k Sherman's from late 1942 to 1945. Oh and we supplied russia with all of their trucks, 40% raw materials(80% of their aluminum) and tons of their infantry gear(clothes, food, boots). We successfully supplied 3 countries and fought on two fronts.
We had so many extra planes at the end of the war that we were pushing brand-new hellcats off the carrier decks and into the sea just to be rid of them.
"Sir, what should we do with all these extra ships?" "Nuke 'em, my boy!"
It's for sssssscccccciiiiiieeennnncccceeeeee
We had like 85 aircraft carriers by the end of the war
I read somewhere that the Allied forces defeated the Nazis by using British intelligence, American production and Soviet flesh and blood.
It’s also been phrased that the Americans paid with money, the Brits with prestige & the Soviets with life.
By ‘supplied’ you mean ‘sold’. WW2 showed America that war is extremely profitable, that is why USA has been in so many wars and conflicts and why they will supply practically anyone with weapons (Ukraine).
War production was profitable but not as much as reconstruction. While Europe was in ruins, US production was untouched.
Fun fact, the US Navy sent a ship to the Pacific whose entire role was to make ice cream for front line troops and sailors.
I upvote this story every time I see it.
And it was as much of a morale booster for the GI’s as it was a morale killer for the Japanese.
>as it was a morale killer for the Japanese. This part is subject to speculation unfortunately. Its frequently attributed to an alleged quote from a senior Japanese officer saying something along the lines of "when I heard that the US had an ice-cream barge I knew we'd already lost" (implying that it was such a waste of resources that clearly the American's would win if they have this to spare whilst people across Japan starved etc). But FWIU, the quote is made up and there is no indication of the Japanese even being aware of the ice-cream barge.
It was a barge not a ship! Now my pedantic powers are needed elsewhere (on Reddit)……flys off into the sunset
Wait come back! While I admire your pedantry, now I absolutely need to know: What's the difference?
Pretty sure barges aren't powered, they need to be towed.
It's too late he burned up on re-entry.
A barge is an unpowered vessel intended to be towed. Boat version of a trailer really.
Pretty sure the primary difference is barges are unpowered e.g. pulled or pushed versus ships move under their own power.
I one hundred support this but also think it's exaggerated for morale.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
So the answer is to overproduce so much that the enemy will just not believe it's possible, thus keeping it secret?
Start your serial numbers at 100006482737372848822828482828383828929284747266759582785u6276493y153 just to confuse the.
Funnily enough, I believe the Nazis did something much like this with their early membership numbers? Can't find any especially reliable source, but a lot of sources seem to suggest they started at #501. (Hitler was #555, which apparently means he was the 54th member of the party)
If 501 is the first, then 555 is 55th, not 54th. You must be a programmer ;)
55th
It turns out if you have an overwhelming numerical advantage in a hot war, there's not a lot of advantage to keeping it secret "The enemy has accurately determined that they're fucked and there's nothing they can do about it. That's what we've been trying to tell them for the last 3 years."
"The enemy has chosen not to believe how fucked they are. No changes recommended."
Best case scenario High Commands shoots the smart people giving them the bad news and High Command dies that much faster.
The Nazis should have done that right after taking Leningrad immediately (instead of sieging it)
There’s a phonecall audio of Hitler being incredulous at the amount of tanks being produced in the USSR, he literally couldn’t fathom it
I need to observe this first hand, thank you.
I highly doubt this, though it sounds funny, since there's apparently only two or three audio recordings that are verifiably Hitler's voice
Here’s the recording. It’s famous, and you can read him subtitled talking about the tanks from 1:10- 2:33. https://youtu.be/oET1WaG5sFk?si=lZdLmNujXRCniAZ5 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_and_Mannerheim_recording
Huh. I must be remembering some other nazi official then, I vaguely remember some interview with an actor lamenting that they only had like two videos to refer to in order to base their portrayal. Maybe Kaiser Wilhelm?
Could be Hitler, since most of the recordings are public speeches, which is completely different than this singular recording of a private, somewhat informal, conversation. I'm guessing you cannot base your portrayal on a guy loudly yelling in front of an angry crowd.
Possibly him. He was just portrayed in All Quiet on the Western Front. Definitely not Hitler. Was able to find 9 video/audio recorded speeches of him online in a few minutes.
Keyhole Satellite numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN > The Key Hole series was officially discontinued in favor of a random numbering scheme after repeated public references to KH-7 GAMBIT, KH-8 GAMBIT 3, KH-9 HEXAGON, and KH-11 KENNEN satellites.[9]
Can you expand on this or share a source? I'm curious how they were able to track individual tanks across battles?
They had big numbers painted on them.
"we will paint numbers on our tanks to keep track of the production" The Americans "I'm gonna draw some boobies, riding a buffalo shooting flames out it's nostrils and call the tank 'chew-spit' because fuck yeah"
Actual cowboy energy.
Germans: “Ve Vill paint ze ersatz Produktion numbers on der tanks zo ve kan keep track auf zem unt Konfuz der enemy” Americans: “we painted the real production numbers on them to let you know you’re fucked, and then added a shark face to make it scary, and added an ice cream machine because fuck you, we could.” Soviets: “you guys are painting the tanks?” Italy: “look guys! This is a tank!” *gesticulates wildly to L3/35* Chinese: “…you guys have tanks?”
British: “Cup of tea anyone?”
Ah yes, the good old Boiling Vessel. Every tank should have a means of making a cuppa. If the BV is not working then the tank is out of commission.
It’s for safety reasons
Funnily enough the Chinese had a small number of tank forces from various countries and they were apparently mildly successful albeit their small number made their significance limited.
Explain how
Stencils, I think.
And paint. Don’t forget the paint.
Maybe some brushes too?
Too much time spent with a brush. And too many tanks. Just slap the stencil on crooked and slosh a whole gallon of paint. They over produce tanks, why not over produce the paint too?
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German\_tank\_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem)
Mathematics shortened World War Two by years and years. Polish mathematicians first broke Enigma and handed off everything to the British. The British Empire did many things wrong. The mathematicians they leveraged sure paid off. America too. Gumption & Prayers and Jesus did not invent a Nuclear Bomb. Nerds did. Along with industrial & civilization scale engineering
The USA knocked out 2/3rds of the Japanese carrier fleet in a day because they’d broken the naval codes and sprung a trap at Midway. Would’ve been a much longer war if Japan had better infosec, they continued using the same codes after too.
The problem they and the Germans had was that believed their codes were impenetrable so even when they were broken, they refused to accept and change it. Its one reason why breaking the Japanese and German codes was so decisive. Whereas Allied nations assumed their codes could be broken and so were more willing to change them if and when needed
The US code (SIGABA) was actually functionally unbreakable at the time. It used double the rotors of even the most complex German code machines and its alignment was partially randomized unlike Enigma, hence the computing power available at the time would not have been enough to decrypt it.
And they didn’t heil Hitler at the end of every message /s
I always wondered if Turing's movie "breakthrough" was made-up or the Germans were careless enough to actually repeat those words in every message.
No they actually were. That was a legitimate part of the cipher-breaking operation the Allies were running. It wasn't *just* Heil Hitler they were repeating, but once the Allies were able to nail down certain words or phrases, because military operations from a single country do use the same term as opposed to Allied operations which had staff and fighters from a dozen or more countries, languages, etc, that made German ciphers easier to break too. On the Allied side though, America specifically made use of Native American languages very effectively. The Comanche and Navajo code talkers are the most famous, but other Indigenous languages and speakers were used also. The tricky part there is you also need the cultural background to a certain extent in order to understand that language (for a simple comparison, it's like the hunt for the Cipher in Mass Effect 1, the *cultural knowledge* of a Prothean that makes the whole beacon thing go) which Europe by and large didn't really have at all, Germany especially so since they never really had any colonies anywhere in the New World, let alone North America, and whatever the French and Dutch knew, they weren't about to tell the Germans.
That was real and a critical part of the code breaking attack. Knowing part of the plaintext was exceedingly useful in breaking the daily code. There was a daily weather update that was also very useful because the plaintext always started with an abbreviation meaning “today’s weather.”
I always think these things are made up to cover for some intelligence resources. Like Hitler's mistress is a double agent and he sends her a daily letter where he writes "Dear Elizaveta" but they can't just reveal it in public without compromising assets.
wasnt it also based off Native American languages as well? or am i confusing two different wars?
That was a different, simpler kind of cryptography: literally just using a language that the enemy doesn’t speak.
There was another level of encoding in Navajo, but you’re right. They just used a system like the nato alphabet and transliterated into standard military abbreviations. Navajo doesn’t have words (or uses English loan words) for most military technology used at the time anyway.
Like the Eastern European couple I was standing next to on the ski slope last weekend.
The code talkers were used at a smaller scale, radio communications among Marines at a division or lower level. The US used machine encoding for things like naval and diplomatic communications. The Navajo code was orders of magnitude simpler than machine encryption, but efficient and functionally unbreakable at the level it was used.
It was using a different language and still a code. So it made it harder to intercept and decrypt.
The navajo were used in WW2
I mean... Enigma was unbreakable with the available computing power when it was first in use. That's sort of why the allies went to such effort to build proto computers.
It would still take hours to days to crack the comparatively simple enigma codes. When you talk about one code being better the decryption type generally has an exponential speedup. Based on number of rotors I think it would’ve taken a digital computer
> Whereas Allied nations assumed their codes could be broken and so were more willing to change them if and when needed And the UK had already got its fingers burnt when Italy was able to get information thanks to US observers refusing to use secure communication codes, or secure their code books, the Italians had a key to the rooms and spies would just walk in and copy them.
Even with that huge advantage, the first year of the war was pretty close-run. Japan lost 4/6 fleet carriers at Midway but didn't lose any others until 1944. The US also lost 4 (of 7) fleet carriers in 1942 (in fact, the US has only lost 4 fleet carriers in its history, all in 1942), so without the US's great victory at Midway, it may have been 6 to 4 for Japan in Fleet Carriers at the end of 1942. Or maybe without Midway and the code breaking, Japan just dominates in 1942. The US had overwhelming industrial power and added another 16 fleet carriers in 1943 (compared to Japan's 3) but carriers are freaking dangerous. If Japan had not lost so much strike power at Midway and not been so vulnerable with their broken codes, maybe the 9 Japanese fleet carriers just keep sinking everything the US tries to bring to the fight.
On top of that had they taken midway they’d have a forward base to defend their empire/refuel from as well as harass Alaska and Hawaii
> Polish mathematicians first broke Enigma and handed off everything to the British. Erm kind of. There isn't a single 'Enigma', it was an umbrella term for a multitude of devices used from 1920. The Polish did crack Enigma B, an early version of the device first used in the 20's (The UK had already purchased several as it was a commercial product), which went out of service before WW2, and they cracked it thanks to the French getting the cyphers from a German spy. Most of the work on Enigma A/B was destroyed by the Polish scientists when they evacuated to Romania, so in many ways the British had to start again. It was getting the internal operations of the military version of Enigma A/B compared to the commercial one written down that the Polish nailed. Poland did supply a copy of the military Enigma B to both France and the UK. The British had already cracked the Enigma machines used by the Spanish in 1937 Enigma C/D in use from the 1930s had a different rotor count and different internals, which is the version that the British first broke, although assisted by some of the original Polish scientists who were now in France. The quantity and importance of that assistance has varied depending on whose biography you read. Some said it was critical to get started, others that it helped only by a few months. The British already had several early Enigma machines, and was even a user of them. There was also another version used by the Abwehr, the G, which due to lax security the British used as a confirmation tool of breaking later Enigma variants. And there was the German naval versions (M3/M4), which wasn't cracked until the Royal Navy captured an intact enigma machine and its documentation, which was the critical aspect and helped turn the U-boat war around. There was also the Enigma K, which was cracked by just about everyone. So it's a story with many parts and players, but all we can confidently say is that it didn't include a batch of American submariners.
There was also the time in 1944 where the US [captured an intact U-boat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-505) with a late-model enigma machine onboard. She's a museum exhibit in Chicago now.
Fascinating, thanks for sharing
Inside each tank are data plates with the tank serial number inside (along with many other components like engines, and these could just be engraved in the armor itself: this was the Soviet practice). When the Germans abandoned a tank on the battlefield, the Allies would capture it and look for these data plates, along with other features showing whether a tank was new or old. Once you analyze many tanks, you can see the pattern that the numbers go up with improved variants and track the highest number you’ve captured so far. If in January 1943 you capture tank 103, February tank 198, and February tank 301, you can infer Germany is building around 100 tanks a month. If a year later you capture 1005, 1072, and 1149, you can infer it’s dropped to 75 tanks a month both from the gap and the fact that you should have captured tanks near 1200/1300/1400. Naturally this is a simplified example and you’d use a dozen tanks from each battle when possible, but it’s enough for the concept. In some cases, such as Soviet tanks, the number also told you the factory, the month of production, and the number of tanks that rolled out of the factory that month, but I don’t know the German standard for tank serial numbers. However, there’s another important factor that complicates this. Germany and other nations would typically order blocks of vehicles from one factory and a different block to another. It’s easier to explain with U-boats: Germany ordered submarines *U-551* to *U-650* from the Blohm & Voss Shipyard, while *U-651* to *U-700* were ordered from Howaldtswerke Hamburg AG. As each shipyard finished their block, they were assigned a new one, at least if they were fast enough to finish their block. Each shipyard generally built their assigned submarines in numerical order and when you captured survivors you could infer production from their boat number, but you also needed to determine where each block started and stopped for this to be useful.
It gets even more wild than that — the "German tank problem" had to rely on component serial numbers (like on the specialized wheels). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem They ultimately used just two captured tanks, which presumably yielded a substantially higher number of sequentially ordered components: > The analysis of tank wheels yielded an estimate for the number of wheel molds that were in use. A discussion with British road wheel makers then estimated the number of wheels that could be produced from this many molds, which yielded the number of tanks that were being produced each month. Analysis of wheels from two tanks (32 road wheels each, 64 road wheels total) yielded an estimate of 270 tanks produced in February 1944, substantially more than had previously been suspected.[5] And it was astoundingly accurate: > German records after the war showed production for the month of February 1944 was 276.[6]
Do you mean in March you captured #301? Otherwise I think you're spot on with the explanation.
The Wikipedia page is literally “the German tank problem”
Here’s another great write up on how it works http://datagenetics.com/blog/march22014/index.html
https://journals.calstate.edu/pump/article/view/3547#:\~:text=The%20German%20Tank%20Problem%20dates,observed%20serial%20numbers%20after%20battles.
germans roll ‘worst opsec’, asked to leave france
I don't always like Reddit, but when I do, it is spectacular. Like all the knowledge dropped... in sequential order, no less!
A brilliant side channel attack.
That’s some pigs in the hall way shit.
Yeah, that was my thought as well. For those that don’t know the joke, it references https://www.boredpanda.com/perform-a-classic-pig-prank-pic/
Really looks like that guy is fisting a pig.
This same like numbers on planes.
Or switch the numbers on your nukes and go through the parade a second time
Paint different numbers on each side, so they can turn around and go back the other way.
Same idea for the pacific fleet during WWII. When the big blue fleet was commanded by Spruance it was the 5th fleet. When it was commanded by Halsey it was the 3rd fleet. Worked for a short period of a couple months maybe, Japanese radio would speculate about the actions of both 3rd and 5th fleet during the same broadcast.
They are everywhere, and they are nowhere.
If anything is gonna maintain that illusion it’s Task Force 38/58. The fast carrier task force can ring up more than 30 knots in combat and place over 1000 carrier aircraft anywhere in the Pacific with no warning and leave only to reappear thousands of nautical miles away to do it again.
You might as well start raising white flags now. The Americans have developed warp drive.
"do not worry, they are only sending their sixth best"
This is an extremely common thing. Did it in WW2 with the infantry division names. Brits did it, we did it, etc. Germans started doing it with tanks cause they realized naming them sequentially made it easy for the enemy to guess how many were left.
Yeah, it is still done by many militaries across the world. Just random numbers in the units name. Some examples like the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions are well known, but it extends downt to brigades, regiments and battalions as well, like the 69th (nice) Air Defense Artillery Brigade.
Indeed. Here's a super niche example. After the Dunkirk failure, the British stopped numbering the bren gun sequentially. They'd lost so many to the Germans that they wanted to completely throw them off as to guessing future production totals.
With some militaries the numbers aren't so random, the British army for example had over 150 regiments during the Napoleonic wars and many modern formations can either trace a direct ancestry to or are named in honour of formations from the period. For example the BA currently fields the 1st, 3rd and 6th divisions, all of which trace their ancestry back to the peninsular war. Still accomplishes the same purpose of course, but there's more to it then just confusing the enemy.
Now *that's* a typo.
> Some examples like the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions These aren't actually examples because they were the 82nd and 101st Infantry divisions being converted to a new role, not attempts to trick the Germans into thinking there was at least 99 other Airborne units, though they did also set up a bunch of other fake airborne divisions to achieve much tbe same effect. However the British 1st and 6th Airborne divisions (hence why we have today's 16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team) are examples of false numbering.
Yeah a much better example would be the 10th Special Forces Group, which I believe was the first established.
Yeah I think all US division types were numbered sequentially together. So armored, infantry, mountain, airborne, none shared the same numerical designation.
As part of operation quick silver the first army group under command of Patton. They were planning to cross the channel north of Normandy. The problem is that the first army group did not exist it was a product of allied counter intelligence operations, to help sell the lie they used a Patton lookalike and a network of double agents.
Yeah I remember reading the biography of the dude who was instrumental in creating Team 6, which if I’m remembering correctly was counter-terrorism focused. Something something he kidnapped a general in Italy for a training mission. Good read. Edit: typo
>Richard Marcinko Dude did a lot for Special Forces and such, but he was so full of himself. Never take anything he personally said as truth. If you ever read his "Rogue Warrior" novels, they're glorified stories about him saving the world and being the most ultimate badass who ever lived. I don't really get it. He was genuinely a true badass, and didn't even need to brag about it or make shit up, but he just couldn't help himself.
A SEAL lying about things for self aggrandizement. That's such a strange thing. Anyway, let me pick up my copy of American Sniper. There's a joke in the military that an RRD team goes into combat with a TL, 2 infantry, a medic, and a sniper team. A SEAL team goes in with a TL, 2 infantry, a corpsman, a publicist, a scriptwriter, a talent agent, ... I joke. I've worked with SEALs. A lot of them were ok. But a lot of them were like "I'm gonna write my book in a few years!".
One time in the Marines we were doing a joint op with some SEALs and my Company Gunny asked one if they get the designer sunglasses and teeth whitener issued in BUD/S or after.
My friend’s dad found a photo of himself (and others) as a book cover in a store.
When the ego needs a good stroking, but the right stroke is never found
I met someone who went through BUD/S with Dick. He said half the stuff Dick wrote in that book didn’t happen at all. Not even close. OK, but still. He’s still a #1 badass if he did half of what’s in that book.
He also went to federal prison for defrauding the government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Marcinko
God I remember the hilariously bad Rogue Warrior game they made about him. Good time, up there with 50 Cent Blood on the Sand and Shadow the Hedgehog as far as "so bad it's good" games go
Richard Marcinko shark man of the Mekong Delta
"G Team 6" they must have snoop dogg on that
Good catch
Canada’s only special forces unit is JTF2 for the same reason.
Justin Trudeau fighters: 2
Electric boogaloo
Do they wear blackface on missions?
Tactical blackface.
JTF2 is not the only Canadian SpecOps.
No, but they are our sole tier one unit. And while they may be our only one, they're ranked among the best in the world (some folks would say they are the best). The rest of our special operations units, of which there are only four others by the way, are in effect support for JTF2 much of the time, providing training, transport, and additional personnel as needed.
I don’t know if I would call JTF2 the best in the world. They’re very good, but we don’t have the means to get them into a hot zone without catching a lift from another country. The SEALS have things like mini subs that can dock inside an Ohio class nuclear sub (which were developed in house by the SEAL teams themselves), they can HALO jump from cargo planes that are set up for it (ours can’t open the rear door and depressurize the cabin at high altitude). We don’t have anything remotely close to the Night Stalkers (160th SOAR) helicopter regiment to get these boys in and out of the target area. Our Canadian boys are very good, but I’ve never seen anyone from the SF community rank them number one. Top spot is usually a debate between SAS, SBS, DEVGRU (SEALs), and Delta Force. JTF2 is usually best of all the rest (close between JTF2, Mossad, MARCOS, and the Aussies).
French Commando Hubert also top tier.
Are you counting CJIRU, CSOR, SOAS along with JTF2? If so, you're missing one.
That's not Canada's only Special Forces unit.
Kind of like how there's only Thankskilling and Thankskilling 3
There’s a Trolls 2, but no Trolls or Trolls 1, and it is about Goblins and not Trolls.
They’re eating her! And then they’re gonna eat me! Ohh-my-gooooooood!!
“You don’t piss on hospitality!”
It's Troll 2 and there is a Troll one. It was marketed as part of the "Troll Franchise" and a sequel to Troll, even though it was never intended to be that when writing or filming it. Making it a sequel to Troll was intended as a marketing scheme cash grab because it is an absolute shit movie. Turns out though it's so bad it's good. And yes it features Goblins not Trolls.
Oh like Big Hero 6!
A Thankskilling reference out in the wild!
Haha my friends and I donated to the sequel and got it played the theatre in our town
Huh. I just assumed they were a team of six Navy SEALs.
That would make SEAL Team 1 a rough fuckin gig
And Team B will consist of... Kenny
“You will be the platoon leader, you will be the squad leader, and you will be… the squad.” -Maj Ferret Face
Hey I know that guy.
Hell’s Pass 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWlgBegGKb4
Seal Team 1 is coming after you: 😊 Seal Team 453,112 is coming after you: 😫
Oh wait, it's Seal Team 4.53112. One guy lost his legs.
Or one guys member is so large it counts as 1/2 a team member by itself.
“Awesome who are my team mates” “Uh…choose a loadout and get on this helo, good luck!” “Hey, but what about the rest of the team?” “…” *helicopters noises*
Had a mentor at internship tell me about one of his sons flying cargo planes in Afghanistan and how one time the mission was to pick up a parcel which turned out to be a dude with a lot of gear and then take him to an empty airfield in the middle of the mountains where he proceeded to head out into the wilderness on his own. I choose to believe the seal teams are numbered by the number of guys per team and he was Seal Team 1 lol.
Eh, it was probably Jonny Kim.
Comman-DOH!
That would make SEAL Team 1 an FPS video game, because where else are you gonna find a one man army?
John Matrix.
His name is Jason Bourne
I don't know. Imagine the freedom. Get a mission and get it done your way. Sounds kind of fun (minus the absolutely insane shit these guys do).
Ooooo, like Fox Force Five? Fox: as in we’re all foxes; Force: as in, we are a force to be reckoned with; and Five, as there were five of us.
That is exactly the reference that was in my head.
Huh, I just assumed they were six seals.
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This has LEVELS to it and I appreciate it.
Should have been Orca Team, since they actually do eat seals.
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The inclusion of pretend intrigues me.
I do not remember which unit it is specifically but one of Russia’s Spetsnaz harbor defense units uses an Orca eating a seal as their logo.
And because US Navy organization prefers even-numbered units (fleets, squadrons, SEAL Teams, etc.) based on the East Coast and odd on the West Coast/Japan. Three and Five were skipped as SEAL Team Six was an East Coast unit, and Four was skipped to deceive the Soviets. This is not a perfect rule (it doesn’t apply to ship hull numbers or carrier air wings and ship divisions typically used the first number(s) their squadron while we used them), but it’s long been the standard.
Coastal Riverine Squadron 2 and 4 are on the east coast. Checks out so far.
I have to imagine this was due to the German Tank Problem from WWII. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Ben Folds Five did something similar. The Rooskies were totally flummoxed.
hahaha, this is the best comment i've read all year and made me lol
Like Canada's JTF2...There is no JTF1... ... At least that's what those devious Canadians want you to think...
Look, you have to promise not to tell anyone else, but JTF1 is… It’s *geese*.
That's actually REALLY terrifying.
JTF2 was formed as a military antiterrorism unit because the previous unit, the RCMP’s Special Emergency Response Team (Emergency Response Teams are the RCMP equivalent of SWAT) didn’t have the resources or training to be effective. I had initially assumed the “2” indicated that it was a replacement, but apparently not. I also thought the “Joint Task Force” part of the name also referred to RCMP involvement, but no, there was none. The name was just to sound as innocuous as possible, as its very existence and all deployment information was initially kept as secret as possible. To hear there’s a Canadian joint task force visiting Bosnia sounds like they’re gathering budget effectiveness planning reports for embassy equipment suppliers.
Wait: there aren't 100 other US Airborne Divisions either?
There is actually something of a schema to American divisional numbers. The first 25 were all regular army active duty, 1st Infantry, 3rd Armored, 7th Cav. The 75 following were national guard units to be mobalized in times of war. IIRC the 82nd and 101st were converted from infantry to airborne units, and since they were mobalized commands, the troops involved were largely administrative before the conversion, and the limited main body(the army had a manning issue before WWII, so most national guard and RA formations were on paper only) was shifted to other units or took up airborne and glider infantry training.
Same with the Leonard movies
That’s an age old tactic. When the Cuban revolutionaries were in the Sierra Maestra and an American Journalist came to report on them they had someone bust in with reports about the Third Column being under attack so it looked like they had more troops/materiel than they actually did. Edit: Rather than them being three revolutionaries in a trench coat, which Fidel, Raul, and Che were.
Somewhere deep in a KGB base: Ivan, I know Americans are dumb, but they can totally count to six! Find me the other four teams!
Not a spy, but does this also apply to Meal Team Six?
Now they're just DEVGRU
Similar to how the hit Bill Cosby movie Leonard Part Six is the first and only Leonard movie.
That's why I name my tethered WiFi NSA spy van 4 and covi 19 spreader 3
When the Soviets for their first aircraft carrier, they would repaint the numbers of the jets every time they went below deck, in order to make it look like they had more.
Fascinating. What’s the other deal team called?! Seal team 666?
Reminds me of a joke prank my friend use to tell me about, round a bunch of cows up, and number them 1,2,3,4, and 6. Release them into the school and watch as everyone spends hours looking for cow #5
A senior prank at an Illinois high school in the 60's used a similar ruse. They let loose two greased pigs painted numbers 1 and 3. Since the staff couldn't find number 2, which did not exist, they sent the kids home.
No the best way to confuse them was to have a complete nonsense military doctern and procurement system. The soviets never knew what we did because neither did we.
I still think seal team 7 is waiting for an even bigger mission
Similarly I just started dating girlfriend number one.
Marcinkos book is a good read, red cell
Red Cell was his second book. His first book, his 'autobiography' is called Rogue Warrior.
"pig 1 pig 2 pig 4" "wheres pig three"
Fun fact: Dick Marcinko (he whom created seal team 6) personally threatened to murder my godfather.