What would benefit from advanced battery technology?

[Michele]

Originally Posted by dcarson

IIRC England with some imports from Ireland could feed itself. It would have been a fairly minimal diet but no starvation. Trying to stop shipping between Ireland and England with U-boats would lead to a lot of lost U-boats.

I attributed a general sense to "starvation", beyond Irish-field-to-British-mouth foodstuffs. Industries had to be supported, as well as the joint Allied build-up.

[Darkwalker]

Originally Posted by copeab

You didn't need to have the codebreaking eliminated as such; you just needed to have German high command be willing to admit their codes *were* being broken and change them every now and then..

The DID change their codes at least once a day, sometimes more often. And used more than one set of codebooks. Breaking Enigma is not as simple as some sources make it. Enigma uses two sets of encryption

a) The 3 or 4 interlocking wheels
b) A wire-matrix that allows changing of the results coming in from a)

Pre WWII a polish mathematician realised that he can separate a) and b) thus reducing the effort to break the system by a few orders of magnitude. At the same time polish intelligence (having access to the CODEBOOKS and an Enigma) realised the germans had some faults in the way they USE the system. In 1939 those informations made it to Great Britain (together with an Enigma)

With this information and the german errors in usage Bletchley was able to decode messages. Sometimes even with a useable speed. Later Turing was abel to build the Bomba to automate part of the process. Even then the "Crib", the educated guess based on German usage errors where part of the process and a good "Crib" (and reliable german radioman) made the difference between a timely decryption and one a few days late.

Some of the errors made where:

+ Initially the germans broadcasted the starting key setting twice at message start allowing a "known plaintext" attack

+ Some german reports where quite static in time and content allowing "known plaintext" attacks

+ The germans had decided that no letter could by cyphered into itself reducing the keyspace

+ The allies got their hands on Enigmas and codebooks a few times.

Some of the Enigma "rings" where harder to break than others i.e the airforce made it difficult with a less formal radio protocol than say the very formal navy.

"The Codebook" has a lengthy and quite current explanation on the whole stuff. It's available online somewhere (legally!)


A lot of the submarine war was won due to quick, reliable HF direction finders that could detect the submarine giving it's necessary report on position etc. even when the germans started using a "compression"/"burst" system. And since the "Wolfpack" relied on steady data flow the subs had to radio in.