Europe and the Pacific were the two primary arenas in World War II,
but the battle was also one of technological achievement. Airplanes,
submarines, and of course the development of the atomic bomb were core
markers to the arms race within the War. Similar, tank warfare was as
much a function of innovation as it was anything else. Allied forces
readily admitted that the enemy German tanks, such as the Tiger and
Panther, were superior to their own. The big question for Allied
forces, then, was not how to counter the Tiger and its progeny, but how
many tanks Germany was able to produce.
To solve this problem, the Allies first turned to conventional
intelligence gathering: spying, intercepting and decoding transmissions,
interrogating captured enemies, etc. Via this method, the Allies
deduced that from June 1940 to September 1942, the German military
industrial complex was churning out roughly 1,400 tanks each month -- an
enormous amount. By comparison, the Axis forces used "only" 1,200
tanks during the Battle of Stalingrad, an eight month battle with a
total casualty count nearing 2 million people.
Perhaps skeptical of the above result, the Allies looked for other
methods of estimation. And then they found a critical clue: serial
numbers. Specifically, Allied intelligence noticed that each captured
German tank (and wreckage thereof) contained a serial number unique to
that tank. With a bit of careful observation, the Allies were able to
determine that the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of
tank production.
Using this data, the Allies were able to create a mathematical model
to determine the rate of German tank production, and estimated that,
during the same summer 1940 to fall 1942 time period, the Germans
actually produced 255 tanks per month -- a fraction of the 1,400
estimate produced by conventional intelligence. (Want to see the math?
Click here.) And it turns out, this method worked best: after the War, internal German data put the number at 256 tanks per month.
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