Page 284 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

many communications such those coming from the Headquarters, 4 Corps , or by the Medical
th
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Directorate of the 8 Corps which admitted to have lost “the Red code containing the old encoding
th
and decoding tables and the Pocket Military Cipher” . As a consequence, new tables were quickly
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issued and distributed between 5 and 8 October to replace the old ones.
The Austrian sources nicknamed the new tables as Special Red Code II, following the Special Red
Code I with simple group swap and addition key, which they had easily broken in June , while
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the encoding/decoding tables issued in August were not included in their numbering, confirming
the lack of knowledge about those tables.
Breaking the second version of the tables required great efforts and unspecified time which, with a
safe guess, could be estimated around two weeks . In this respect, Figl described the method used
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to rebuild the tables at length, without making any mention of the quite probable availability of the
previous version captured during the battle, which made the breaking task more straightforward,
since the new version of tables could not be very different from the previous one, due to the
minimal time available to generate them.
Ronge stated that the three Penkalas deployed in Udine, San Vito al Tagliamento, and Vittorio
Veneto worked in parallel coordinated by Figl and faced strong difficulties in breaking the new
tables. Conversely, in describing the method used to unveil the secrete of the tables, Figl alluded
only to his own work and affirmed his visit to Penkalas was only to teach them on how to use the
broken tables .
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During the time required to cracking the code no Italian dispatch encoded with the Special code
could have been decrypted, as happened in the previous two months .
83
Similar reasons led to replacing the Service Cipher after redeployment. On 2 November, the Chief
Inspector of the STM ordered the radio stations to replace the C2 and C4 ciphers with the CFbis
because he believed “that the radiotelegraphic station of the 2 Army in Drezenka, equipped with
nd
a copy of the C2, had fallen in enemy hands, and that a 0.5 kW station of the 3 Army had lost a
rd
copy of the C4” . Therefore, no evidence supports Ronge’s statement that the reason for replacing
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the ciphers was the “stronger attention of Italians to enemy decryption” .
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In his memoirs, Andreas Figl highlighted the difficulties in grasping the structure of the new
cipher because a daily changing over-encoding caused serious issues. From the scarce information
available, it seems this method made the Austrian understanding of the dispatches meaning neither
quick nor complete. “With the new CFbis cipher”, Figl said, “they put an end to the previous 1-part,
fine-looking, predictable systems as the CII (C1) and C IV (C2)” . Once again, the evaluation
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of Ronge - who believed the Italians were “wasting time” replacing their ciphers - was incorrect.

78 Intelligence Office, Section U, Lettera all’Ufficio Coordinamento e Mobilitazione (Letter from Coordination and
Mobilization Office), 2 novembre 1917, AUSSME, Series F4, env.260.
79 Section U logss, op cit., 4 novembre 1917, AUSSME, Series B1,101D Vol. 349d.
80 M. Ronge, Der Radiohorch, op cit., p. 52.
81 O.J. Horak, Oberst a. D. Andreas Figl, op. cit., p.193 -194. Figl’s departure on 24 November probably coincided with the
end of the process.
82 ibid., p. 23.
83 O.J. Horak, Oberst a. D, Andreas Figl, op. cit., p. 193. The method Figl affirms to have used could rise raise some doubts,
especially when he mentioned as the ‘hint’ to start codebreaking, the correspondence between row numbers 00 to 35, i.e, the
original row in the Red Code and the corresponding encoding, respectively.
84 Inspectorate General of the STM, Diario storico, 1 November 1917, AUSSME, Series B1, 105 S, Vol. 90.
85 M. Ronge, Der Radiohorch, op cit., p. 23.
86 O.J. Horak, Oberst a. D, Andreas Figl, op. cit., p. 193.

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