Page 313 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PeculIar and sIgnIfIcanT InforMaTIon
The Italian operators often listened to Austro-Hungarian telephone conversations, where often
even just a few words were encoded by means of simple tables or using concealed languages well
known by Italian interpreters because captured in various ways (picture 13.15) or rebuilt based
on enemy phonograms . The Intelligence Offices of Corps and Armies filled several reports with
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precise information on the tables and small ciphers they had captured. In 1918, the French army in
Italy too seized a telephone cipher where letters had been transformed into numbers incremented
by 3 – namely: a=2; b=5; c=7;...., z=77 - and then each number was converted again into a letter
according to the following scheme:

h a b e l f r a n z
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0.

13.15 Lists of concealed names used in telephone communications by an Austro - Hungarian unit, seized and
translated by the Italians

From phonograms and enemy conversations, the Italian learnt more and more frequent complaints
- already started on the previous year - about the uneatable rations, the scarcity of bread and even

57 ibidem.

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