Page 199 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER NINE

Picture 5

BEI ORSOVA HABEN UNSERE TRUPPEN WIEDER GELÄNDE GEWONNEN. SÜDLICH
VON HATZEG VERLOREN DIE RUMEN (near Orsova our troops have gained ground again.
South of Hatzeg romanians have lost [it]).
The reference to the two Romanian towns of Orsova and Hatzeg is interesting, since after the
initial Romanian advance, Falkenhayn’s counterattack had started on 18 September 1916 exactly
in the area between those towns. The two pages of the notebook seem to include dispatches of
the German army operating in the Balkan peninsula, transmitted a few days after the mentioned
events.
Other pages (picture 6) display the decryption of a message made of 74 letters and reported at the
51
top left of the page. This kind of encryption, too, is based on transposition by means of irregular
rectangles, with key, that is with columns mixed according to a set order that is the key order .
52
Obviously, this kind of ciphering is more difficult to decrypt than the previous one.
On the left, bottom of the page, the plaintext reads:
ERBITTE MITTEILUNG UBER VORAUSICHTLICHE VERWENDUNG DER RESERVE
53
EISENBAHN KOMPAGNIE (Communication is urged regarding the predictable use of the
railway company in reserve).

51 The page has no date yet, as the previous one, can be dated back to early October 1916.
52 Key-transposed encoding was described in paragraph 6.4.
53 This is a misprint: “vorausichtlich” instead of “voraussichtlich”.

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