Battle Code

[gashford]

Hello all,

When FCOs call in a mission on a certain area how is the mission called in, would it be in clear or would it use some form of batco (battle code).

I am particularly interested in this at the moment as I am learning about cryptoanalysis for work and spent sometime in the forces using the batco of the then modern British forces (late 80s early 90s).

Many found the batco very difficult to get a good grip of in the classroom let alone under stressed conditions.

To this end I am wondering whether:

1. Anyone has any information on the 'batco' used during the second world war on the front lines when clear would have been too insecure.

2. Whether information exists on how the FCOs would coordinate their missions quickly using some form of 'batco' bearing in mind the urgency of the required mission.

Thanks for any help with this, I have always assumed that the time taken by the FCO in the game is due in part to this problem?

Yours

Graham

[Mobius]

More to the point , hurry up and reply to my PBEM files I sent you

[tss]

gashford wrote:

When FCOs call in a mission on a certain area how is the mission called in, would it be in clear or would it use some form of batco (battle code).

The Finnish army used simple codes for most low level communication. Landmarks, positions, units, and common commands would have a code name. The code names were sometimes used for way too long so the enemy probably could decode an intercepted message relatively easily. For example, Lt. Keinonen's bicycle company was called "Pinna" for the whole 1941 and probably long afterwards.

The simple codes were used in front line units, maybe upto batallion or so. For more important communications, especially via radio, a real cypher was used. The cypher was based on a code wheel that was regularly changed. I don't remember the exact details of the code wheel right now (it has been a long time since I saw a picture of one), but its operated basically as a many-time-pad. However, the wheels were changed so often that in practice it was almost an one-time-pad. In particular, each long-range patrol behind Soviet lines had its own wheel that was used only on one mission, so unless the patrol was exceptionally long, their messages were pretty close to be unbreakable.

The Soviet army used five different cyphers and the Soviet diplomats one more. The diplomatic code was a true one-time-pad (in theory, sometimes they re-used the pads) so it couldn't be broken without capturing the pads intact.

The army ciphers were basically different forms of substitution cyphers combined with a list of code words. Finns managed to break three of them on their own (IIRC), and got details of one from the Japanese and the Germans (first from the Japanese, and when the Red Army changed the corresponding code, the Germans told the new code).

I'm not a particularly good cryptanalyst (a pretty poor one, actually), but if someone used the two simplest Red Army codes to encode messages in some language that I understand (poof, goes Russian), I could break them in relatively short time. They were that simple. In fact, probably anyone who knew how substitution cyphers work could crack the simplest one in few hours.

The more complex cyphers used keys that were changed daily. During the first phase of the war Finns could break the third code very quickly, because the Russian commander of the Sortavala area sent each morning a detailed report of a fixed form to his superiors, by radio.

Finns could also read the American STRIPS diplomatic code. Again, the code was given to Finns by Germans. How Germans got it is not known, but the best guess is that Soviets managed to capture the code book of American embassy in Lithuania. One American embassy courier was flying in the passenger plane Kaleva that Soviets shot down few days before Estonia was occupied. A Soviet submarine was seen in the scene collecting the debris of the plane crash. It is possible that the code book was among that debris. The Soviets would then have given the code to Germans, for some reason.

- Tommi