Page 219 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER TEN

the 36-letter version, Dora for 49 and so
on .
45
Sacco’s notebook shows that rotating
grilles were most likely used also by the
Austrian-Hungarian navy. The fact that
the Austrian army did not employ the
grilles during WWI is seemingly proven
by a sentence in one of Ronge’s letters,
where he rejected the suggestion to adopt
rotating grilles by declaring that they had
never been used before . However, the
46
same source quotes a report of August
1918 by the 48 Division of the Austrian
th
infantry clearly indicating that method as
the most recommendable as compared to 10.7 Table underlying the grille in picture 10.6
any other one in battle .
47

sMall ausTrIan codes

The “three-figure syllabic code of the Austro-Hungarian army (small stations)” that was the sixth
on Sacco’s list discussed in the previous chapter, is recalled here to analyse the dictionary structure
as it can be inferred from the telegram reported in the notebook.
Plaintext terms - alphabet letters, syllables, groups of two, three and sometimes four letters
(bigrams, trigrams, etc.) - are listed in a single book, in alphabetical order along with ciphering
groups made up of 3 figures between 001 and 999 reported in an increasing order. It is a one-part
code not longer than thirty pages, which might have been rebuilt by Sacco or seized during the war.
Furthermore, in the above-mentioned document that Section R sent to the Allies, six codes are
listed that were known and broken by the Italians. Firstly, it should be noticed that the names given
to the six codes - Carnia, CW, “Stern”, Tunis, SH, AK, and the already-known Ignaz - did not
probably coincide with the original Austrian names, known in only a few cases .
48
The codes indicated as AK and SH might date back to 1916 and result to be even simpler than a
syllabic code: letters, numbers, some syllables, and commonly used words are replaced by random
couples of letters whose number is 50 for the AK and 57 for the SH . In the former, the couples
49
of letters were transmitted as such, in the latter they were grouped on a five-letter basis. The
Section R document includes tables and examples of decrypted radio telegrams for those codes,
characterised by remarkably simple cryptology features and easy usability, so we can plausibly
infer their assignment to radio stations as Service Ciphers. Annex B shows the SH table (picture
B2), while other codes listed above will be discussed in the following chapters.

45 W.F. Friedman, Advanced, op. cit., p.30; D. Kahn, op. cit., p. 308 - 309. According to Kahn, the German used them for
about 4 months between late 1916 and early 1917.
46 J. Prikowitsch, op. cit., p.435 - 436.
47 J. Prikowitsch, op. cit., p. 448.
48 General Headquarters, Intelligence Service, Section R, Notes on Radio Telegraphy, op. cit.
49 It is possible that the number of groups in the original cipher was higher than 50, yet the groups interpreted by the
cryptographic unit were enough to decrypt whole radio telegrams.

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