Page 342 - The Secret War in the Italian front in WWI (1915-1918)

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

Therefore, despite the crises and uncertainties caused by persistent overlaps and contrasts between
different intelligence sectors, the final comment of the Commission of enquiry on the Battle of
Caporetto, stating that until October 1917, “overall, no significant debits can be attributed to the
Intelligence Service, in its organisation and operations” can be justified.

In the field of communications security, being aware of the weakness of most Italian codes and
ciphers, in September 1916, Luigi Sacco had drafted a report about the flaws of the Italian sys-
tems and set out the principles to be followed to increase dispatches security. On that occasion, he
created - and not just as an example - an innovative ‘trench code’, adopting cryptographic criteria
later applied to divisional and regimental codes that, due to their ‘temporary’ nature, represented
an insurmountable obstacle to a systematic cryptanalysis.
In addition to the divisional code, during the spring-summer of 1917 the Cryptographic Unit
produced a code for the Intelligence Service as well as encoding and decoding tables for protecting
the codebook most widely used by the Army Headquarters. The Austrian analysts succeeded
in breaking them only at the end of November, proving the groundless nature of the negative
judgement of the Commission on the Battle of Caporetto about the Italian Army cryptography. In
fact, at the beginning of the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, during the later shifting of the front, and
for much of the First Battle of the Piave river, some of the most important Italian coding systems
had not been forced by the Austro-Hungarians.
On the other side, since radio silence was not always observed, the Italians carefully monitored the
sparse field communications on their front and the most frequent Austro-Hungarian dispatches on
other fronts or originated by the Navy, managing to interpret their contents. The Unit’s decrypting
activity increased in October - November 1917 when, as the Austro-German offensive and war of
movement began, the German army, but also very sparingly the Austro-Hungarian army and navy,
were forced to employ radio communications.
However, the German generals of the 14 Army - which prevailed in breaking the front in
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Caporetto - recalled in their memoirs the significant delays in transmitting orders along the Austro-
Hungarian army chains of command, as the front shifted from the Isonzo to the Piave river. The
Austro-Hungarian strategy of using radio - even through their advance - for intercepting enemy
communication more than for orders transmission, could have caused those drawbacks, leading
to significant operational consequences.
In the early months of 1918, probably because of the insistence of German allies who were conducting
the war, the Austro-Hungarian Headquarters authorised a wider usage of radio transmission firstly
for ‘Divisions and above’, and then for ‘Divisions and below’. From this moment on, the Italian
analysts could rely on more abundant cryptographic material and obtained significant success in
forcing some Austrian field coding systems. One of these had been introduced in service just at the
beginning of the Second Battle of the Piave river, while others entered service during the following
events on the Italian front.
The favourable results came, partially, from the deployment on the front of some Italian cryptanalysis
resources, started during the First Battle of the Piave river and continued in the spring of 1918,
as cryptologic capabilities were set within the Armies in coincidence with the increase of Austro-
Hungarian radio stations and traffic.

At the beginning of 1918, significant reform was enacted also within the Italian Intelligence or-
ganization that put an end to the dualism between the Intelligence Service and the Situation Office,
by the suppression of the latter and the transfer of its main functions to the Operations Division.
A more rational tasks allocation ended the duplication of the intelligence architecture - in fact, a

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