19 ms·

Electronic warfare history of the Battle of the Bulge

78 points by aaronsdevera 5y ago

margalabargala 5y ago
This is fascinating and would make for an excellent long-form article. Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic warfare going on. It's a shame this is presented as a twitter thread.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic warfare going on. Ehh? At a minimum, WWII was when cryptography and code-breaking became popular. The Battle of Midway was an overwhelming American victory because the USA effectively hacked the Japanese codes and reversed the trap. Thousands of code-breakers were employed to try to crack the Enigma machine, and only one exotic project by Mr. Alan Turing (THE Alan Turing, the father of modern computers) was able to break it. ------ While radios existed in WWI, they were still somewhat exotic. By WWII, every single tank, ship, and airplane was equipped with radios, and those communications were 100% the target of many exotic attacks. England experimented on new forms of Radio, such as RADAR. Germany began to use radio-guided missiles (the V1 "Flying Bombs" were radio-guided by Morse Code... primitive by today's standards but obviously open to electronic attack if you could just figure out the codes). WW2 was the start of electronic warfare on every front. Radio-guided weapons, jamming, radar, even cryptography and information security. Sure: these electronics in WW2 were pretty bad by modern standards. But they were still electronics and computers and integral to both the Pacific and European theaters. I'd argue that cryptography and code-breaking is one of the highest forms of electronic warfare, its practically the invention of the information-security fields (HTTPS, SSL, TLS, etc. etc.) that we use to... well... chat on Hacker News, among other things.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Fortunately Turing was given complete method to crack Enigma before the war started, eh? (Turing is responsible for bringing the computational complexity down and figuring Turing Machine from the multi-team work on Bombe, Colossus and other automated code breaking machines).
  - onecommentman 5y ago
    “Alan Turing, the father of modern computers”? A (very important) father of modern computers. Canonization is unnecessary.
- deeviant 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - onecommentman 5y ago
    True, but in this case the comments really aren’t about this single Twitter thread, but the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage. This discussion is of current and general relevance about that particular format, using this great content as an example. It’s not that common in this case. Not a topic hijacking, but indirectly meeting a need that hasn’t been met by anyone posting an article addressing the Twitter thread issue as it has evolved over the last several months. This discussion has the benefit of a concrete example. Perhaps someone could post an article that focuses just on Twitter threads and the discussion can continue there?
    - dang 5y ago
      > the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage Yes, this is an extremely common complaint which has taken so many HN threads so far off topic that it just needs to stop. Nothing so repetitive is interesting. Some people choose to post great content in a series of tweets—for whatever reason. It's the way the world is and complaining about it on HN doesn't help. We specifically changed that guideline to say "article or website formats" in order to clearly cover this case.
  - margalabargala 5y ago
    You're right, sorry about that.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  Luckily there are some good links to 'proper' PDF sources, e.g. [0] [0] https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-ops-18-nov-20.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-op...
Luc 5y ago
Lots about radar and jamming in "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones. Also fun to read for its description of all the petty infighting that went on.
dboreham 5y ago
Recommend R V Jones' book as a "from the horse's mouth" account of WWII tech (written in the window after much of the relevant material was declassified, but before he died, obviously). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0033806QY https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0033806QY
- smilespray 5y ago
  For more R V Jones goodness, watch "The Secret War" from 1977. The two first segments, "The Battle of the Beams" and "To See for a Hundred Miles" should be of interest, but all of it is great, really. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8 Bonus: It includes interviews with Albert Speer. More info about the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_(TV_series)
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
TIL: Donald Trump's uncle was the "salesman" for the US / UK Electronic Jamming squadron. Life is surprising.
- ttyprintk 5y ago
  Nephews are weird. For example, Billy Hitler, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
The fascinating takeaway is the failure of "command". It is something we all see every day in companies large and small(ish). And it rarely is the fault of "some idiot" - it is just that one person cannot attend to all the issues. Which tends to suggest not to look for better generals, but to push the decisions downwards and "outwards" (ie transparency - so that everyone has access to all data used to make decisions)
- thatfunkymunki 5y ago
  there is a term in use in today's US military - "centralized command, decentralized execution" that mostly captures this sentiment
  - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    Honestly I am dubious. There is a Norwegian military doctrine that has the mission objectives set and then the "unit" being expected to be autonomous to achieve those objectives. But this was in a time when the Norwegians expected Russia / Germany to take the country and then a Quisling government to issue a recall. The idea was that when a free Norway set objectives they would be carried out even if the capital fell. Does the UMC think that marines should take one set of orders and then ignore any counter-marding orders? It's probably not what that term means. Traditionally command / management has had three goals - co-ordination - resource allocation - decision making in uncertainty The first one is useful, but even in slow moving environments like business it's almost impossible to imagine up then down orders being more effective than horizontal. This is the meaning of your slogan and modern military have learnt this lesson well.(maybe the battle of Jutland ?). It's very dubious any major enterprise has learnt this lesson but I will take suggestions. (Just to expand on this - many business claim to push decisions down to lowest level. As do many militaries. In my experience this is really relegation by negligence - that the upper levels simply do not have the mental bandwidth / time / reporting chains to interfere. For example look at how empires before the age of telegraphy ran themselves - the Satrap was empowered to make wide ranging decisions - but as soon as communication went from weeks to minutes Prime Ministers and Presidents interfered all be time. If your CEO could interfere in your weekly stand up meetings, trust me he would.) This is the essential difference between some new model of organisation (cf Norwegian Mission) and the current one which is just the central office has not automated away your decision making power yet. See Amazon warehouses for an example of how oddly effective that has been (to date) Resource allocation is mostly what we are talking about here. This project gets funding this does not. The failure here was a failure to appreciate the extreme value of anyone doing radio jamming versus that bomber squadron, abs the failure to appreciate the bulge was a counter attack. I am not sure any other system of command (distributed / bottom up / democracy) would do much better. Something tells me a software model of the whole "system" set up and distributed to all decision makers (voters?) would allow a sensible discussion. Not sure it would make a better army. But if it did that army would be terrifying. And decision making in uncertainty is covered above I guess. It is IMO the only truly valuable thing for a hierarchical organisation. And it is so horribly dependant on the taste and capacity of the apex of the organisation. None of these are easy fixes - this is very very much a 20/20 hindsight example - and yet we have to ask does software and the internet open up how we organise large groups of people into new forms. We have run armies and civil services like this for tens of thousands of years. Is it how we should arrange a 21 C business ? Starter for ten: if every body in a SV start up got even shares - that is hiring the fifth person meant your shares went from 25% to 20%. Even founders. Would SV grow fast through automation or through hiring? What other minor changes to incentives will massively chnage how we organise?
JoeDaDude 5y ago
Another, excellent source for historical use of EW in World War II: the book Instruments of Darkness by Alfred Price [1]. In fact, the Association of Old Crows, a US professional and lobbying organization for EW includes it, as well as several others, in their recommended reading section on History [2]. [1]. https://www.amazon.com/Instruments-Darkness-History-Electronic-1939-1945/dp/1473895642 https://www.amazon.com/Instruments-Darkness-History-Electron... [2]. https://www.crows.org/page/recommendedbooks https://www.crows.org/page/recommendedbooks
chiph 5y ago
Dad was there, in the 99th Infantry Division. They were a green unit (never fought before), yet were one of the few that did not give up any ground to the Germans. He was wounded and received his Purple Heart there [0] Just to piggyback on what everyone else has said: 1. The other more experienced units in the area absolutely knew without a doubt that the Germans were on the run and that they were going to be crossing the Rhine any day now. The commanders of those units were overconfident [1] and forgot that war is a democracy, and the enemy gets a vote too. 2. The 99th had set up pre-planned artillery targets. So all they had to do was call the artillery unit and tell them what fire-plan to execute. A significant time-saver when presented with oncoming tanks. 3. They had also dug their foxholes correctly (by The Book), so they had protected positions they could fire from. This also gave them concealment, making them more effective when they did open fire. 4. Redundant communication wire was run, in case it was cut by incoming rounds/shells. The importance of being able to coordinate efforts with easy and reliable communication can't be overstated. 5. The VT Fuses were present in theater, but had not been authorized for use until this battle for fear of duds being found by the Germans and sent for analysis and reverse-engineering. The shells equipped with the VT fuses would explode at a predetermined height above the ground, so they made sheltering in foxholes and behind walls mostly ineffective. They really were a game-changer, and the Allies were right to withhold their use until truly needed. If you ever get the chance to visit southeastern Belgium, you should. There are a number of excellent museums in the Bastogne area, and pretty much every town has an M4 Sherman tank on display. Plus the beer, fries, and waffles are excellent. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge [1] I am of the opinion that the 101st Airborne gains ground by becoming trapped and forcing the rest of the army to go rescue them. As happened in Bastogne.
hughrr 5y ago
I really like this content but the medium and presentation destroys it.
- vinceguidry 5y ago
  Beats having to jump on a plane and visit a military archive.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    Bit of html with some img tags beats both.
    - vinceguidry 5y ago
      You try having two careers. The entitlement of HN never fails to get me.
- rexreed 5y ago
  I've been seeing increasing use of the phrase: TT;DR (Twitter Thread, Didn't Read). I'd like to understand what motivates people to publish content like this in numbered Twitter threads instead of blog posts. Is it because of the virality of twitter? Is it because it's easier to write or read snippet bites of text and images? Is it because they don't have a blogging platform? Is it something to do with comments or sharing? For those that write and prefer Twitter threads - what motivates that style instead of blog posts?
  - joshmlewis 5y ago
    Twitter has really become a platform for professionals to make a name for themselves in a relatively short time period. There's also a general trend the past few years of society pushing people to build a community (followers, subscribers, etc) online using whatever niche skills they have. I've seen it over and over in the real estate / SMB side of Twitter in the past year. Someone talks about the secrets of the storage rental business, laundry mat business, or house cleaning business using threads and they're able to gain a "community" of followers relatively quickly and then a few months later capitalize on it with intros or selling a course. So back to the original question, I believe the reasoning for people to publish stuff like this on Twitter is to build up a following and their public presence.
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
It would have been interesting if there were any detail about the effects of the jamming on the ground. Did they actually interfere with communication or tactics much?
mwattsun 5y ago
Thread unrolled https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1475994609549557761.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1475994609549557761.html Paper mentioned in the last tweet: The Unseen Fight: USAAF radio counter-measure operations in Europe, 1943 to 1945 by William Cahill https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-ops-18-nov-20.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-op...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ant6n 5y ago
  Thread unrolled without pictures
  - mwattsun 5y ago
    javascript:(function(){var imgs=document.getElementsByTagName("img");for(var i=0;i<imgs.length;i++)imgs[i].style.visibility="hidden"}()); Source: Javascript bookmarklet to hide all images from current webpage? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3623640/javascript-bookmarklet-to-hide-all-images-from-current-webpage https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3623640/javascript-bookm...
yourapostasy 5y ago
For those unfamiliar with the term "penny packet", see this article that goes into quite a bit of detail for an introductory overview. https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0610penny/ https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0610penny/ There are some lessons here (in the OP's submission and the discussion about penny packets) for software engineering projects.
dogma1138 5y ago
The third largest US military expense in WW2 was on computers both mechanical and electronic. The US perfecting the proximity fuse was probably one of the single most important advancements during the war and was a major factor as to why allied artillery was so much more effective. I wonder how many people realize that artillery shells in WW2 had bloody vacuum tubes in them, or that the US had targeting computers for their naval AA guns that (combined with proximity fuses) lowered the average the rounds per kill from a few 1000’s to under 100… by the end of the war US naval AA could shoot down a Japanese aircraft with an average of 30 rounds fired. The Brits weren’t too shabby either, Bletchley Park the Chain Home early warning radar and much more. In fact the Brits pretty much invented modern radar… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-controlled_interception https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-controlled_intercepti... The truth was that Germans really didn’t managed to compete with the Allies when it came to technology despite the popular depiction of them in some circles of popular culture. They Nazi’s “dejewification” of science and the pursuit of “German science” reeked havoc within their scientific community breaking down the scientific method and its core institutions and many of the scientists from the Great War and interwar period who remained either weren’t supporting the German war machine or were actively sabotaging it.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > They Nazi’s “dejewification” of science and the pursuit of “German science” reeked havoc within their scientific community... Wreaked havoc. It also "reeked" (stunk). So what you said, while it was a mistake, it was also perfect.
- mzs 5y ago
  VT Fuzes For Projectiles and Spin-Stabilized Rockets , OP 1480, 1946 https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm
- 62951413 5y ago
  "didn’t manage to compete" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262? the V-2? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 ? The A-bomb seems to be the only technology they failed to build. But it played no role on the European theatre in WWII anyway. Don't forget that American reliance on foreigners led directly to leaking the atomic secrets to the Soviets.
fmajid 5y ago
Then as always flyboys were reluctant to support the grunts doing the actual fighting on the ground, just as they are trying to kill the A-10 Warthog today.
- p_l 5y ago
  USAF was originally primarily a bomber force, even as USAAF at the time. They want to get rid of Warthog because it was a suicide plane from the day it was delivered, it's just that congress either pushes continued use of the inadequate plane and only allowed option at one point was to go with JSF, because it was the only plane in this weight class they were allowed to procure. There were at least few attempts to build a better plane than A-10 for the specific use case where it's actually good (shooting at lightly armed forces) without much of the unnecessary price tag and maintenance, but all got shot down by bean counters.
ckozlowski 5y ago
I'm really interested to read this, but good gosh, do I despise al this working going into something as inaccessible for long form as Twitter. As an aside however, when I saw this topic, I immediately thought of Steve Blank's website, who goes into quite a great deal of depth on the history of Electronic Warfare and how Silicon Valley rose from the WWII infrastructure created for it. He has a number of articles here: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ If you like this topic, you'll find those to be a good read.
- Fatnino 5y ago
  Some people are good at making a long Twitter thread work. This guy is not one of those people.

78 points by aaronsdevera 5y ago

This is fascinating and would make for an excellent long-form article. Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic warfare going on. It's a shame this is presented as a twitter thread.

dragontamer 5y ago
> Most people don't think of WWII as being a theater with particularly advanced electronic warfare going on. Ehh? At a minimum, WWII was when cryptography and code-breaking became popular. The Battle of Midway was an overwhelming American victory because the USA effectively hacked the Japanese codes and reversed the trap. Thousands of code-breakers were employed to try to crack the Enigma machine, and only one exotic project by Mr. Alan Turing (THE Alan Turing, the father of modern computers) was able to break it. ------ While radios existed in WWI, they were still somewhat exotic. By WWII, every single tank, ship, and airplane was equipped with radios, and those communications were 100% the target of many exotic attacks. England experimented on new forms of Radio, such as RADAR. Germany began to use radio-guided missiles (the V1 "Flying Bombs" were radio-guided by Morse Code... primitive by today's standards but obviously open to electronic attack if you could just figure out the codes). WW2 was the start of electronic warfare on every front. Radio-guided weapons, jamming, radar, even cryptography and information security. Sure: these electronics in WW2 were pretty bad by modern standards. But they were still electronics and computers and integral to both the Pacific and European theaters. I'd argue that cryptography and code-breaking is one of the highest forms of electronic warfare, its practically the invention of the information-security fields (HTTPS, SSL, TLS, etc. etc.) that we use to... well... chat on Hacker News, among other things.
- p_l 5y ago
  Fortunately Turing was given complete method to crack Enigma before the war started, eh? (Turing is responsible for bringing the computational complexity down and figuring Turing Machine from the multi-team work on Bombe, Colossus and other automated code breaking machines).
- onecommentman 5y ago
  “Alan Turing, the father of modern computers”? A (very important) father of modern computers. Canonization is unnecessary.
deeviant 5y ago
dang 5y ago
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- onecommentman 5y ago
  True, but in this case the comments really aren’t about this single Twitter thread, but the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage. This discussion is of current and general relevance about that particular format, using this great content as an example. It’s not that common in this case. Not a topic hijacking, but indirectly meeting a need that hasn’t been met by anyone posting an article addressing the Twitter thread issue as it has evolved over the last several months. This discussion has the benefit of a concrete example. Perhaps someone could post an article that focuses just on Twitter threads and the discussion can continue there?
  - dang 5y ago
    > the use of Twitter threads in lieu of a Webpage Yes, this is an extremely common complaint which has taken so many HN threads so far off topic that it just needs to stop. Nothing so repetitive is interesting. Some people choose to post great content in a series of tweets—for whatever reason. It's the way the world is and complaining about it on HN doesn't help. We specifically changed that guideline to say "article or website formats" in order to clearly cover this case.
- margalabargala 5y ago
  You're right, sorry about that.
KineticLensman 5y ago
Luckily there are some good links to 'proper' PDF sources, e.g. [0] [0] https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-ops-18-nov-20.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-op...

Luc 5y ago

Lots about radar and jamming in "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones. Also fun to read for its description of all the petty infighting that went on.

dboreham 5y ago

Recommend R V Jones' book as a "from the horse's mouth" account of WWII tech (written in the window after much of the relevant material was declassified, but before he died, obviously). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0033806QY https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0033806QY

smilespray 5y ago
For more R V Jones goodness, watch "The Secret War" from 1977. The two first segments, "The Battle of the Beams" and "To See for a Hundred Miles" should be of interest, but all of it is great, really. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8 Bonus: It includes interviews with Albert Speer. More info about the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_(TV_series)

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

TIL: Donald Trump's uncle was the "salesman" for the US / UK Electronic Jamming squadron. Life is surprising.

ttyprintk 5y ago
Nephews are weird. For example, Billy Hitler, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stuart-Houston

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

The fascinating takeaway is the failure of "command". It is something we all see every day in companies large and small(ish). And it rarely is the fault of "some idiot" - it is just that one person cannot attend to all the issues. Which tends to suggest not to look for better generals, but to push the decisions downwards and "outwards" (ie transparency - so that everyone has access to all data used to make decisions)

thatfunkymunki 5y ago
there is a term in use in today's US military - "centralized command, decentralized execution" that mostly captures this sentiment
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  Honestly I am dubious. There is a Norwegian military doctrine that has the mission objectives set and then the "unit" being expected to be autonomous to achieve those objectives. But this was in a time when the Norwegians expected Russia / Germany to take the country and then a Quisling government to issue a recall. The idea was that when a free Norway set objectives they would be carried out even if the capital fell. Does the UMC think that marines should take one set of orders and then ignore any counter-marding orders? It's probably not what that term means. Traditionally command / management has had three goals - co-ordination - resource allocation - decision making in uncertainty The first one is useful, but even in slow moving environments like business it's almost impossible to imagine up then down orders being more effective than horizontal. This is the meaning of your slogan and modern military have learnt this lesson well.(maybe the battle of Jutland ?). It's very dubious any major enterprise has learnt this lesson but I will take suggestions. (Just to expand on this - many business claim to push decisions down to lowest level. As do many militaries. In my experience this is really relegation by negligence - that the upper levels simply do not have the mental bandwidth / time / reporting chains to interfere. For example look at how empires before the age of telegraphy ran themselves - the Satrap was empowered to make wide ranging decisions - but as soon as communication went from weeks to minutes Prime Ministers and Presidents interfered all be time. If your CEO could interfere in your weekly stand up meetings, trust me he would.) This is the essential difference between some new model of organisation (cf Norwegian Mission) and the current one which is just the central office has not automated away your decision making power yet. See Amazon warehouses for an example of how oddly effective that has been (to date) Resource allocation is mostly what we are talking about here. This project gets funding this does not. The failure here was a failure to appreciate the extreme value of anyone doing radio jamming versus that bomber squadron, abs the failure to appreciate the bulge was a counter attack. I am not sure any other system of command (distributed / bottom up / democracy) would do much better. Something tells me a software model of the whole "system" set up and distributed to all decision makers (voters?) would allow a sensible discussion. Not sure it would make a better army. But if it did that army would be terrifying. And decision making in uncertainty is covered above I guess. It is IMO the only truly valuable thing for a hierarchical organisation. And it is so horribly dependant on the taste and capacity of the apex of the organisation. None of these are easy fixes - this is very very much a 20/20 hindsight example - and yet we have to ask does software and the internet open up how we organise large groups of people into new forms. We have run armies and civil services like this for tens of thousands of years. Is it how we should arrange a 21 C business ? Starter for ten: if every body in a SV start up got even shares - that is hiring the fifth person meant your shares went from 25% to 20%. Even founders. Would SV grow fast through automation or through hiring? What other minor changes to incentives will massively chnage how we organise?

JoeDaDude 5y ago

Another, excellent source for historical use of EW in World War II: the book Instruments of Darkness by Alfred Price [1]. In fact, the Association of Old Crows, a US professional and lobbying organization for EW includes it, as well as several others, in their recommended reading section on History [2]. [1]. https://www.amazon.com/Instruments-Darkness-History-Electronic-1939-1945/dp/1473895642 https://www.amazon.com/Instruments-Darkness-History-Electron... [2]. https://www.crows.org/page/recommendedbooks https://www.crows.org/page/recommendedbooks

chiph 5y ago

Dad was there, in the 99th Infantry Division. They were a green unit (never fought before), yet were one of the few that did not give up any ground to the Germans. He was wounded and received his Purple Heart there [0] Just to piggyback on what everyone else has said: 1. The other more experienced units in the area absolutely knew without a doubt that the Germans were on the run and that they were going to be crossing the Rhine any day now. The commanders of those units were overconfident [1] and forgot that war is a democracy, and the enemy gets a vote too. 2. The 99th had set up pre-planned artillery targets. So all they had to do was call the artillery unit and tell them what fire-plan to execute. A significant time-saver when presented with oncoming tanks. 3. They had also dug their foxholes correctly (by The Book), so they had protected positions they could fire from. This also gave them concealment, making them more effective when they did open fire. 4. Redundant communication wire was run, in case it was cut by incoming rounds/shells. The importance of being able to coordinate efforts with easy and reliable communication can't be overstated. 5. The VT Fuses were present in theater, but had not been authorized for use until this battle for fear of duds being found by the Germans and sent for analysis and reverse-engineering. The shells equipped with the VT fuses would explode at a predetermined height above the ground, so they made sheltering in foxholes and behind walls mostly ineffective. They really were a game-changer, and the Allies were right to withhold their use until truly needed. If you ever get the chance to visit southeastern Belgium, you should. There are a number of excellent museums in the Bastogne area, and pretty much every town has an M4 Sherman tank on display. Plus the beer, fries, and waffles are excellent. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elsenborn_Ridge [1] I am of the opinion that the 101st Airborne gains ground by becoming trapped and forcing the rest of the army to go rescue them. As happened in Bastogne.

hughrr 5y ago

I really like this content but the medium and presentation destroys it.

vinceguidry 5y ago
Beats having to jump on a plane and visit a military archive.
- hughrr 5y ago
  Bit of html with some img tags beats both.
  - vinceguidry 5y ago
    You try having two careers. The entitlement of HN never fails to get me.
rexreed 5y ago
I've been seeing increasing use of the phrase: TT;DR (Twitter Thread, Didn't Read). I'd like to understand what motivates people to publish content like this in numbered Twitter threads instead of blog posts. Is it because of the virality of twitter? Is it because it's easier to write or read snippet bites of text and images? Is it because they don't have a blogging platform? Is it something to do with comments or sharing? For those that write and prefer Twitter threads - what motivates that style instead of blog posts?
- joshmlewis 5y ago
  Twitter has really become a platform for professionals to make a name for themselves in a relatively short time period. There's also a general trend the past few years of society pushing people to build a community (followers, subscribers, etc) online using whatever niche skills they have. I've seen it over and over in the real estate / SMB side of Twitter in the past year. Someone talks about the secrets of the storage rental business, laundry mat business, or house cleaning business using threads and they're able to gain a "community" of followers relatively quickly and then a few months later capitalize on it with intros or selling a course. So back to the original question, I believe the reasoning for people to publish stuff like this on Twitter is to build up a following and their public presence.

ProjectArcturis 5y ago

It would have been interesting if there were any detail about the effects of the jamming on the ground. Did they actually interfere with communication or tactics much?

mwattsun 5y ago

Thread unrolled https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1475994609549557761.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1475994609549557761.html Paper mentioned in the last tweet: The Unseen Fight: USAAF radio counter-measure operations in Europe, 1943 to 1945 by William Cahill https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-ops-18-nov-20.pdf https://www.aerosociety.com/media/15088/2020-06-36-bs-rcm-op...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ant6n 5y ago
Thread unrolled without pictures
- mwattsun 5y ago
  javascript:(function(){var imgs=document.getElementsByTagName("img");for(var i=0;i<imgs.length;i++)imgs[i].style.visibility="hidden"}()); Source: Javascript bookmarklet to hide all images from current webpage? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3623640/javascript-bookmarklet-to-hide-all-images-from-current-webpage https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3623640/javascript-bookm...

yourapostasy 5y ago

For those unfamiliar with the term "penny packet", see this article that goes into quite a bit of detail for an introductory overview. https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0610penny/ https://www.airforcemag.com/article/0610penny/ There are some lessons here (in the OP's submission and the discussion about penny packets) for software engineering projects.

dogma1138 5y ago

The third largest US military expense in WW2 was on computers both mechanical and electronic. The US perfecting the proximity fuse was probably one of the single most important advancements during the war and was a major factor as to why allied artillery was so much more effective. I wonder how many people realize that artillery shells in WW2 had bloody vacuum tubes in them, or that the US had targeting computers for their naval AA guns that (combined with proximity fuses) lowered the average the rounds per kill from a few 1000’s to under 100… by the end of the war US naval AA could shoot down a Japanese aircraft with an average of 30 rounds fired. The Brits weren’t too shabby either, Bletchley Park the Chain Home early warning radar and much more. In fact the Brits pretty much invented modern radar… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-controlled_interception https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-controlled_intercepti... The truth was that Germans really didn’t managed to compete with the Allies when it came to technology despite the popular depiction of them in some circles of popular culture. They Nazi’s “dejewification” of science and the pursuit of “German science” reeked havoc within their scientific community breaking down the scientific method and its core institutions and many of the scientists from the Great War and interwar period who remained either weren’t supporting the German war machine or were actively sabotaging it.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> They Nazi’s “dejewification” of science and the pursuit of “German science” reeked havoc within their scientific community... Wreaked havoc. It also "reeked" (stunk). So what you said, while it was a mistake, it was also perfect.
mzs 5y ago
VT Fuzes For Projectiles and Spin-Stabilized Rockets , OP 1480, 1946 https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm
62951413 5y ago
"didn’t manage to compete" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262? the V-2? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 ? The A-bomb seems to be the only technology they failed to build. But it played no role on the European theatre in WWII anyway. Don't forget that American reliance on foreigners led directly to leaking the atomic secrets to the Soviets.

fmajid 5y ago

Then as always flyboys were reluctant to support the grunts doing the actual fighting on the ground, just as they are trying to kill the A-10 Warthog today.

p_l 5y ago
USAF was originally primarily a bomber force, even as USAAF at the time. They want to get rid of Warthog because it was a suicide plane from the day it was delivered, it's just that congress either pushes continued use of the inadequate plane and only allowed option at one point was to go with JSF, because it was the only plane in this weight class they were allowed to procure. There were at least few attempts to build a better plane than A-10 for the specific use case where it's actually good (shooting at lightly armed forces) without much of the unnecessary price tag and maintenance, but all got shot down by bean counters.

ckozlowski 5y ago

I'm really interested to read this, but good gosh, do I despise al this working going into something as inaccessible for long form as Twitter. As an aside however, when I saw this topic, I immediately thought of Steve Blank's website, who goes into quite a great deal of depth on the history of Electronic Warfare and how Silicon Valley rose from the WWII infrastructure created for it. He has a number of articles here: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ If you like this topic, you'll find those to be a good read.

Fatnino 5y ago
Some people are good at making a long Twitter thread work. This guy is not one of those people.