Talk:Cipher Department of the High Command of the Luftwaffe

Duplicated section headings

There are many sections with the same headings, eg 'Referat A', 'General'. This makes it impossible to make a WL to the correct section. MinorProphet (talk) 19:06, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: What are you looking to anchor from? scope_creep^Talk 19:59, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

@Scope creep: Hi, thanks for your mention of my WLs to the Canaris article. Would you agree that the sections of this current article need fixing? I inserted the {{anchor}} while I was hoping to expand an entry in our Operation Tidal Wave#Flight to Romania, using Kahn, David (1967). The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. New York: Macmillan Company, pp. 461–4, adding links to the units which intercepted the message, eg Luftnachrichten Abteilung 352 (later part of Luftnachrichten Abteilung 350). However, Zaloga, Steven J. (2019). Ploesti 1943: The great raid on Hitler's Romanian oil refineries. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, pp 40–42 questions whether the Luftwaffe Signal Intelligence Service actually broke the 9th Air Force's ciphers: "While some American accounts suggest that Luftwaffe cryptologists had broken the Ninth Air Force code, German accounts suggest that the meaning of the message was discerned simply by routine traffic analysis." Zaloga may mean Kahn, who he doesn't credit in the bibliography although he quotes from him: but Kahn doesn't suggest this anyway. I'm still trying to find out whether the Germans did crack the American high-level codes like they did the simpler Syko Cipher Device which Kahn mentions. As usual, checking even a couple of sentences on WP has already resulted in several hours' research (not all fruitless), but I'm not sure if it's worth it anyway. Cheers, MinorProphet (talk) 21:17, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: On sections. Whats your plan? They just came out like that, when I wrote it. Not much choice really. You could pivot the whole and make date the primary section, and the referats the secondary section. But that would leave a problem. I took out that anchor as it looked odd, but fire it back in when needed. I haven't read about 9th airforce codes. Quite interesting. I'd like to see something more on that. No, Germans didnt break the American high-level codes. scope_creep^Talk 22:24, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

@Scope creep: I found Vol. 1 of the Seabourne report[1] which shows from [pdf] p. 137 which US codes were read/compromised by the Axis. Kahn's book is here You may have come across German Radio Intelligence by Gen. Albert Praun here one of those reports made by captured German generals after the war.

Almost the only solution I can imagine to make the section headings WL-able would be eg ===Referat A, 1940–1941=== but that would be particularly ugly. Anchors would be ideal but they are hidden and are unlikely to be found, unless someone else actually edits a section. Maybe leave the layout as it is for the moment. I notice that 'What links here' lists only one or two pages, it could perhaps be linked to some other articles to make it more popular.

I saw that the cited IF-180 (Vol. 5) only contains Part 1 - its title on google docs is "IF-180 Searbourn Report Vol 5, PT. 1" (note spelling) but I had no luck finding "IF-180 Searbourne report Vol 5, PT. 2" which contains the biography and more of Karl Jering, the actual author. Any thoughts? MinorProphet (talk) 02:40, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: Sounds alright on the anchors. The TICOM archive at [2] may have the Seabourne reports. If there not there, I may have them and can forward them to you. At one point they were stored in a Google drive by a crypto guy I collaborated on but when they were moved to the internet archive when he shut down his site. Several documents never made it across for some reason. I put a load of foi request to the library of congress to get the stuff released, but I'd been working on it for a three years writing articles and got tired of it by then. I did a lot of work on these from about 2014 working first on the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht and then on B-Dienst which is still to be finished. It missing the details around the whole thing about created the Kriegmarine Engima cipher nets and when/why and by who. I've actually still got it on my todo list. On the General Pruan doc, I created the German radio intelligence operations during World War II from that document. I had a conversation around that time with various copyright folk about whether the document and the TICOM stuff was copyright and it decided it was, so went ahead and created that article. Its rough. I split this off from the Luftnachrichten Abteilung 350 article to make it shorter, but I've still to put this article into the template at Template:German signal intelligence organisations before and during World War II. On Karl Jering I'm not so sure. Is that the right name? scope_creep^Talk 14:04, 27 September 2024 (UTC)

For Jering, see last para. of IF-180 (Vol. 5), p. 2 by Seabourne, and p. 3 for his name: "Technical Sergeant Karl Jering - Chi-Stelle, Luftwaffe SIS". Haha, found it deep in the TICOM archive you linked: IF-180 Searbourne Report Vol. 5, PT. 2 Thanks very much! What a vast load of info in that archive...
Well done with your articles, you're lucky to concentrate on a specific topic. I would have thought there must be loads of stuff on the Kriegsmarine Enigma around these days. It's easy to get tired by a particular article. I often lose impetus, then come across something else just as interesting, spend some time on that, and suddenly I'm just not interested any more in the original article, despite the fun I had at the beginning. Ah, well. MinorProphet (talk) 01:17, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: It looks like a lot of articles on the stuff, but its not. There is so much there, even just on Luftwaffe side. For example there is nothing Luftwaffe tactics, the Luftwaffe in the middle east, American airforce in the middle east war, RAF in the middle east war. There is so many article still to be written on it. 1000's really and there more around all the stuff I did. I could have spent a lifetime writing on it. I encourage you to follow it. It great discovering what when on. scope_creep^Talk 08:05, 28 September 2024 (UTC)