Page 245 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

From the beginning of 1916, the
French - and other belligerent
armies immediately after that -
had encoded phonograms through
Trench Codes called Carnet de
chiffre or Carnet réduit . With
40
the spread of radiotelegraphy
across the subordinate combat
units, the Trench Codes ended
up being used for this purpose
as well. At the same time, they
became more complex and took
the form of real, small size codes.
As for restricted phonograms
within the higher echelons of the
Italian army, such codes with both
numerical and/or letter coding
groups spread in Corps and
Divisions.
The NEVEA Concealed Code,
taking its name from the high
mountain pass ‘Sella Nevea’, was
drafted by the Units deployed near
the Raccolana Valley, an area that
saw many fights. Code groups
contain a letter followed by a
one, two-, or three-digits number
11.7 Simple table of sentences turned in concealed language, 8 (picture 11.8) .
41
th
Italian army Several paged codes have been
found in the Historical Archives,
Army General Staff , such as the Special Code of the 7 Corps adopted in May 1916, the
42
th
Situational Code distributed in May 1917 to Liaison Officers, for their communication with the
Supreme Command and the already mentioned Green Code, which came into force in January
1918 in the 5 Corps and should not be confused with the code having the same colour and used,
th
from the war inception, for communications among the High Commands of the Army .
43
Other codes like the Z Code, given their cryptographic characteristics, seems have escaped any
breaking attempts from Austro-Hungarian analysts. The Z code for urgent reports in use by the
4 Army since the autumn of 1917 is an example of an Army ‘hybrid code’ because it applied
th
to communications via telephone, telegraph, radiotelegraph, flags, discs, lanterns, Morse flags,
Faini equipment, etc. Each word was encoded into a group of three digits and over-encoded using

40 Friedman stated that before and during the first two years of the war the codes were considered unsuitable for use on
battlefields (W. F. Friedman, Advanced Military, op.cit., p.2,3). Afterword, all belligerent armies used trench codes. See M.
Giviérge, op. cit. and F.L. Bauer, op. cit., p.76 -77.
41 AUSSME, Series H5, env.11. A very simple, one-part code that could only be used for phonograms.
42 Particularly in Series AUSSME, H5, env.11.
43 AUSSME, Series E1, Env.38. The M13 (i.e., the 1913 edition of Mengarini) is also sometimes called ‘the Green’ because
of the dark green colour of its cover.

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