Question about WW2 radio codes

[DONJCH]

Welcome!

Steganography is certainly possible, though it would be wasteful: the plaintext to VMs text ratio would be very low. This seems unlikely, when the standard practice was to use abbreviations in order to save space. The rule for extracting the meaningful part of the text could be arbitrarily hard, could depend on graphical placement or small irregularities in the writing, making it unlikely that it will ever be found. It could also be something very simple like an acrostic, or a bit more complex like taking the nth glyph (modulo the length of the word) of the nth word, who knows...

It seems to me that the gap between a simple substitution cipher (or no cipher at all, or substitution ciphers with homophones and nulls) and more secure but unwieldy, anachronistic or wasteful techniques such as nomenclators, codes, and stenography needs to be investigated more.

A nice article by Nick Pelling about cryptography in the 15th century:
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Steganography! That is the word I was searching for! Thanks for the link too, I read it all (including all the comments).

You talk about extracting the meaningful part of the text being hard - there was a thread I think by Anton where there was a highly suspicious chunk of text marked out by pilcrows and with the same word along the diagonal - I would start there or somewhere similar.

I agree that more investigation is needed in the gap between the very simple and the very hard (anachronistic) code/cipher methods.

But then again, I don't know - people acknowledge that pinyun could explain the low entropy of the VMS but has anybody fluent in Mandarin actually given that a serious go?

There are a bazillion ethnic minorities in China, not to mention Mongolia - I recall there was a horde of those in Europe at one point!

I would love it if there was an Easter Egg somewhere like

NI HAO ROGER BACON APRIL FIRST 1260 XIE XIE HA HA

- which would make the VMS a copy of course.