Europe and the Pacific were the two chief arenas in World War II , but the battle was also one of technical accomplishment . Airplanes , submarines , and of course the evolution of the nuclear bomb calorimeter were inwardness marker to the arms race within the War . Similar , armored combat vehicle warfare was as much a function of origination as it was anything else . Allied forces readily admit that the enemy German tanks , such as the Tiger and Panther , were superior to their own . The self-aggrandising doubt for Allied force , then , was not how to forestall the Tiger and its progeny , but how many tanks Germany was able to raise .
To solve this job , the Allies first plough to conventional intelligence gather : detection , bug and decoding transmissions , interrogate catch enemies , etc . Via this method , the Allies deduced that from June 1940 to September 1942 , the German military industrial coordination compound was churning out roughly 1,400 tank each month – an enormous amount . By comparison , the Axis forces used " only " 1,200 tanks during the Battle of Stalingrad , an eight calendar month battle with a total injured party count nearing 2 million people .
Perhaps skeptical of the above result , the Allies looked for other method of approximation . And then they find a critical clue : serial numbers . Specifically , confederative intelligence noticed that each captured German tank ( and wreckage thence ) stop a in series number unique to that army tank . With a second of measured observation , the Allies were able to find out that the consecutive numbers game had a design denoting the order of magnitude of armored combat vehicle production .
Using this information , the Allies were able to make a numerical model to determine the pace of German tank yield , and estimate that , during the same summertime 1940 to fall 1942 meter stop , 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 acting worked well : after the War , home German datum put the act at 256 tank per calendar month .
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