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TICOM history addition?

Discussion in 'HyperWar GHQ' started by Publius, May 6, 2020.

  1. Publius

    Publius New Member

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    DoD released the final reports and some of the working documents of the Target Intelligence Committee about eight years ago (IIRC) which has a lot of useful information about European Axis and cobelligerent (... Finnish) signals intelligence and cryptographic practices and organization during the Second World War. I'd be interested in transcribing some of this to HTML for Hyperwar's use, or we could just link to the original resources or one of the sites that summarizes the material.

    TICOM Archive (TICOM Archive) has a fairly good summary, but some of their links are dead since apparently NSA.gov decided to move resources around (and possibly delete some).

    NARA holdings are here, also archive.org has what looks like most of the collection (probably everything that's been digitized anyway) here: TICOM Archive : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.

    Not sure how Hyperwar would want to handle this but I'd be happy to work on taking it in whichever direction Otto would like. TICOM Archive is a nice site, but is very much a summary and doesn't really integrate the information available with other sources. On the German side, in particular, this fills out some interesting additional information about the structure of OKW and OKH.

    Edit: Ugh, sorry, you guys will learn fairly quickly that I have a bad tendency to hit post just before I've actually found all the resources I actually mean to use. Added the NARA link for the documents and modified that sentence to make sense. That said, their search function is still useless, I found the collection in a link from an NSA press release.
     
    Last edited: May 6, 2020
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  2. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    If the links are dead, you can try archive.org's "Wayback Machine"
    Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
    To see past website pages. However you must have the webpage address.
    Often , though photographs are not archived, but odd files are.
     
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  3. Publius

    Publius New Member

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    Yes, I had looked at that. At this point, since all of the contents is available at Archive.org as a collection and at NARA as a collection I'm more interested in working from those resources than just piecing back together what TICOM Archive was doing. I should have been more clear in saying that, while TICOM Archive is a good summary of the material, it doesn't actually provide transcripts of the material in HTML as Hyperwar does, so we could work on the same corpus of material as them without just duplicating work. Also, as they haven't fixed their dead links, I'm not sure they will do so in future (either by linking to the Archive.org images of nsa.gov or to the Archive.org collection of TICOM documents).
     
  4. TD-Tommy776

    TD-Tommy776 Man of Constant Sorrow

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    I've been fortunate to find photos on most of the defunct websites I've looked up. However, you are correct that there are no guarantees.
     
  5. von Poop

    von Poop Waspish

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    Fascinating website, Publius.
    Hadn't seen it & read most all now, so cheers for sharing.

    Good luck with the archive sorting. Tagging @Otto & @OpanaPointer for Hyperwar connection.

    ~A
     
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  6. Publius

    Publius New Member

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    Unfortunately, one of the things TICOM Archive doesn't discuss (so far as I've seen) is the fact that OKW/Chi (IIRC) determined that ENIGMA was insecure and agitated for its replacement (or at least the adoption of additional security measures) but they were resisted by Heere (Army) signals personnel, who didn't believe that OKW/Chi's theoretical attacks would be used in practice, since they required a lot of resources. That proved to be both an underestimate of Allied resolve and of British and American engineering expertise (they couldn't conceive of bombes even though German SIGINT organizations were using IBM sorting machines for their work).

    Additionally, the TICOM reports deal with the activities of other Axis powers and Finland (a cobelligerent) which is fascinating but not covered in the TICOM Archive website.
     
  7. OpanaPointer

    OpanaPointer I Point at Opana Staff Member WW2|ORG Editor

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    It's Otto's baby now, I'm enjoying my senility.
     

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