Page 149 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER SEVEN

The red code
The second edition of the Red Code, published on 30 June 1915, derived directly from the first
edition of 1898, when the Intelligence Office included only one Official, the Colonel Felice De
Chaurand de Saint Eustache. The new edition of the Red Code - which the Austrians called ‘Red
15’ - differs slightly from the 1898 one, because of some amendments and additions.
It could be preliminary remarked that this Code, like the Pocket Military Cipher had been in
service for many years already, providing the Intelligence of potential enemy Countries with
the opportunity to steal them, in addition with offering a considerable quantity of homogeneous
cryptographic material. Regardless of their cryptographic validity, it would have been imperative
to completely replace all codes and ciphers at the beginning of the war, to avoid serious risks on the
communication security.
The cover and the first page
of the 1915 edition (picture
7.9) show that the Red
Code was a publication of
the Ministry of War . The
40
book was distributed to
many bodies, including the
Presidency of the Council
of Ministers, the major
Ministries, the Office of
King’s aid-de-camp, the
Headquarters of the armies,
of army corps and divisions,
down to several lower-
level units, such as military
healthcare directorates and 7.9 Cover and first page of the Red Code
some hospitals. The number
of circulating copies
amounted to a few thousand, not always used in a rigorous manner, with serious consequences
for the protection of the secrecy, which had been in any case compromised long before the war
because of the acquisition by the Evdenzbureau.
From a cryptographic point of view, the Red Code belongs to the category of ‘one-part paged
code’ . It was regular because to each plaintext items (words, numbers, short sentences, etc.)
41
following an alphabetical order, corresponds an orderly progressive group of five digits (code
group). Three digits represent the progressive number of pages, reason of the ‘paged’ name given
to the code. The other two digits identify 100 items on each page, corresponding to numbers from
00 to 99 in ascending order on odd pages and to numbers from 99 to 00 in descending order on
even pages .
42
The 1915 edition comprises a 235 pages dictionary and an appendix listing the names of the
General Officers of the Army and Admirals still serving as of the date of reprint, the ships of
the Royal navy, the radio stations and semaphores, geographical names (country towns, regional

40 Some specimens of the Red Code are preserved in AUSSME, Series F3, env.28.
41 In the following the short term ‘paged code’ is often used.
42 Several “Commercial codes” available on the free market and private and business telegraphy, were paged codes.

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