Well, “won” may be an exaggeration, but apparently a certain statistical formula certainly helped. Curious? Read on:
A simple statistical formula successfully estimated the number of tanks
the enemy was producing, at a time when this could not be directly
observed by the allied spy network.By 1941-42, the allies knew that
US and even British tanks had been technically superior to German Panzer
tanks in combat, but they were worried about the capabilities of the
new marks IV and V. More troubling, they had really very little idea of
how many tanks the enemy was capable of producing in a year. Without
this information, they were unsure whether any invasion of the continent
on the western front could succeed.One solution was to ask
intelligence to guess the number by secretly observing the output of
German factories, or by trying to count tanks on the battlefield. Both
the British and the Americans tried this, but they found that the
estimates returned by intelligence were contradictory and unreliable.
Therefore they asked statistical intelligence to see whether the
accuracy of the estimates could be improved.The statisticians had
one key piece of information, which was the serial numbers on captured
mark V tanks. The statisticians believed that the Germans, being
Germans, had logically numbered their tanks in the order in which they
were produced. And this deduction turned out to be right. It was enough
to enable them to make an estimate of the total number of tanks that had
been produced up to any given moment.
You can read the whole story here. Personally, I find this sort of thing fascinating. Scientists, mathematicians, and indeed statisticians made extremely important contributions to the Allied war effort, and while these contributions are easily overlooked and often forgotten, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that the war would’ve gone very differently without them. Civilians cracked both the German Enigma and the Japanese cryptography, preventing thousands of Allied casualties. I’m very glad that, at long last, the scientists and mathematicians behind these efforts are finally getting the recognition they deserve. (Particularly Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence and computer science, who despite cracking Enigma was persecuted by the British government to the point of suicide because he was gay.)
