While I was out on vacation last week, my itinerary called for a one-day stopover in London. Somehow managed to miss most of the tourist attractions while I was actually living in the UK, so now I try and remedy that on visits. This time, we stopped by the Churchill War Rooms, the underground bunker used by the Prime Minister, his cabinet and military chiefs to direct the defense of the UK during World War II.
It's a facinating museum and well worth a visit for anyone with an interest in history, but as a data geek the Map Room in particular caught my eye. There you can see how an army of secretaries kept meticulous data on the impact of Hitler's attacks on London:
And then visualized the data for the war planners with time series, histograms, bar charts, and many other hand-crafted analyses:
The chart below, "German U-boat situation as assessed at 16th July 1945" was especially interesting. The whole wall was an analysis of the extent of the remaining Axis war vessels (perhaps based on intelligence like this):
Finally, it was interesting to see that BI Dashboards aren't as recent of an invention as we may think (here, showing up-to-date troop strengths in the Pacific theatre):
It's hard to believe that these analyses were created in the most difficult conditions, with intermittent power and bombs dropping all around, with narrow lines of communications ... and of course without any of the technological tools we take for granted today. No computers, no printers, no R ... not even calculators! And it's nice to know that Statistics and Data Visualization -- what today we'd call Data Science -- had a strategic part in the war effort. Keep Calm, and Carry on Charting!
Photos my me (David M Smith). Click to enlarge, and feel free to reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Pretty cool stuff, David.
Posted by: nick | June 17, 2011 at 16:42
Thank you for the post, this is another amazing example of how stats helped in WWII.
Here's another example if you're not aware of it, I've seen it used a few times in class during talks about sample size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
Posted by: Kris | June 19, 2011 at 06:11
Hi! The main statistician of Churchill was Lindermann. Some time ago I have made a post about him: http://winstonisback.blogspot.com/2010/01/statistics-at-war.html
Posted by: Raphael Saldanha | June 20, 2011 at 04:47
Thanks for the link about Lindermann, @Raphael. Really interesting to learn about him!
Posted by: David Smith | June 20, 2011 at 11:27
interesting post, we realize the role they had the statistics, clearly played and played, erganizar data not only in war but in everyday life
Posted by: comer para perder | June 25, 2011 at 00:51
The 'hero' Churchill was a war criminal. Pity they did not include the statistics of the more than 3 million Indians that he killed as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/books/review/Hari-t.html
Posted by: Stoc | June 29, 2011 at 11:51