Page 298 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

line, and to decentralise the service to exploit results in a faster and more productive
manner .
14
A Radiotelegraphic Interception Service was therefore set up within each Army, equipped with
direction finding stations. Moreover, at least one Officer - a cryptography specialist - was detached
from the Cryptographic Unit and assigned to the Army Intelligence Service with the mission to
decrypt, when possible, the enemy dispatches and forwarded them, along with the encrypted ones
to the Cryptographic Unit in Rome. In addition, he had to “study the enemy ciphers and sharing
the results with the Armies”.
The functional relationships and the flowchart of the new organisation, are shown in the graph of
picture 13.7 .
15
The implementation programme envisaged a gradual but quick creation of 18 listening
stations and eight detached radio goniometric stations, in addition to those managed directly
by the 1 Radio goniometric Section. All data collected by the new stations were sent also
st
to this Section which issued daily bulletins of enemy radiotelegraphic communications and
graphical representations of the positions of Austrian radiotelegraphic stations on the Italian
front every ten days.
To support the realization of the new organization and to train its personnel, Sacco reached the
war zone where he remained from 8 through 15 March and then again from 24 March to 9 April,
delivering specialisation courses to instruct cryptographic officers and personnel assigned to the
new tasks .
16

13.2 “UNBREAKABLE” CODES

The dIffusIon of The d code
The specimens adopted by several division Headquarters and preserved in the archives of the
Italian army, highlight the widespread adoption of the D code. Picture 13.8 shows the first page of
the encoding and decoding parts used by the 53 Division.
rd
The Headquarters always kept a backup version available to replace the one in service as soon
as they suspected it had fallen in enemy hands. In case the replacement of the version in use was
unfeasible, over-encoding with a daily variable key had to be applied .
17
All the operating units equivalent to Divisions, even if not equipped with wireless equipment,
adopted the D code for transmitting phonograms, and the usage of this code gradually became
common in other groups at levels above Division as well. For example, and this is by no means
an isolated case, the 4 Army Artillery Command applied the D code for all communications with
th
subordinate units, from the Corps’ Artillery Command down to the observers. The Cryptographic

14 Intelligence Service, Ordinamento Servizio Intercettazioni Radiotelegrafiche, (New Regulation for Radio Interception
Service), Circular Letter no. 2438P, 22 April 1918, ISCAG, Coll. 226.
15 ibidem.
16 Section R logs, op. cit., 15 April 1918, AUSSME, Series B1, 101S, Vol.315d; Section U logs, op. cit., 24 March 1918,
AUSSME, Series B1, 101D, Vol.360d.
17 The adoption of an additive numerical key was suggested. In dispatches, the encoding groups could be further grouped in
pairs, thus creating six-digit groups.

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