Page 254 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

THE SECRET WAR ON THE ITALIAN FRONT IN WWI (1915 – 1918)

had adopted neither claimed he could force the tables, as typically happened when he or his
team were successful .
68
Only discussing his cryptologic activity in November 1917, after Caporetto, Figl speaks about the
tables for the Special code, which concerns, indeed, a new version that has replaced the previous
one, as we will show below . It is therefore interesting to note that, for almost three months,
69
including the period before the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo and a large part of the First Battle of
the Piave river, the Special Code, that is, the Red Code with coding/decoding tables, remained a
mystery for Austrian analysts.
Some rather strange news appears in the same passage of Figl’s memoirs. It seems he have
discovered the existence of the Blue Code - which had been in service from the beginning of the
conflict - only in August 1917. Having noted its similarity with the Red Code, he wondered if the
Italians had adopted it with deception intention.

The enTry InTo servIce of The code d

The correspondence addressed to the STM Inspectorate shows that several combat units had
requested a new cipher to replace the Pocket Military Cipher because many copies of it had fallen
into enemy hands on several occasions. Then, the Cryptographic Unit - beginning from June 1917,
together with many other issues at hand - started to deal with drafting a code for the Divisions
and asked some of them to send the collections of their phonograms to extract the recurring terms
which could be included in the dictionary .
70
This procedure, adopted also for the SI first edition, was consistent with the general principle of
“adapting the code to the phrasebook and the communications style for which it is intended [...].
A different procedure would create many useless entries and exclude several recurring ones to be
encrypted forcing to devide them into parts, which in turn makes the cryptograms longer and less
secret” .
71
The September logs of Section refer to the advanced preparation of the Divisional Code
D and inform about its sending to Section U on 7 October. It took about two weeks before
the code was transmitted back to Rome with some amendments requested by the Head of
Operations.
At the same time, a thousand copies of the first version of Code D had already been printed at
the Ministry of War, and in part distributed , while Section U was promising the new version
72
would have been dispatched promptly to the units waiting for it. Meanwhile, the 14 Army Corps
th
requested the authorisation to start using some of the already printed 1.000 copies, as most likely
it did, like other units .
73

68 O.J. Horak, Oberst a. D. Andreas Figl, op. cit., p.186. Figl apparently indicated 26 September as the date when the daily
change of code groups occurred, i.e., about a month later than the date of the table introduction in service.
69 Intelligence Service, Section U, Letter no.14080, 2 November, AUSSME, Series F2, env.117; Section U logs, 4 November
1917, AUSSME, Series B1,101D, Vol. 349d. The new tables entered service on 5 November for the mobilised units and on
8 November for the territorial units.
70 Section U logs, 20 June 1917, AUSSME, Series B1,101D, Vol. 349 d. The terms used in radiograms and phonograms were
the same.
71 L Sacco, Manuale, op. cit., p.114.
72 Section U log, op. cit., 19 and 21 October 1917, AUSSME, Series B1,101D, Vol. 359d.
73 ibidem, 7 and 11 November 1917; 13, 18, and 20 September 1917, AUSSME, Series B1, 101 D, Vol.355d.

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