Italian front (WW I) If it were not for Hemingway's novel A Farewell to Arms, few English-speakers would know, or care very much, about the Italian contribution to WW I. This is unfortunate, because the war fought on the north-east frontier against the Austro-Hungarians, reinforced on occasion by the Germans, was one of the nastiest in a very nasty war and witnessed the use of deliberately provoked avalanches to kill thousands of Italian troops, a ‘natural disaster weapon’ unique in the history of warfare. It was also the reason why Austria-Hungary did not drop out of the war over a year before the end, and created the medium that spawned fascism. It killed 600, 000 Italians, who emerged from the war with an undeserved but lingering reputation for cowardice, about as many Austro-Hungarians, and was the only front on which Allied troops set foot on the territory of the Central Powers before the Armistice. Not bad for a backwater.
The diplomatic background was suitably Byzantine. Italy had belonged to the Triple Alliance since 1882, which committed her and Germany to aid each other militarily if either were attacked by France, and promised neutrality if Austria-Hungary went to war with Russia, freeing the latter from the prospect of a war on two fronts or, since she chose to attack Serbia, three. When WW I broke out none of the conditions of the treaty compelled Italy to act, so she negotiated with both sides to see the best deal she could get, dubbed ‘sacro egoismo’ by foreign minister Sonnino. The Central Powers grudgingly offered the Trentino, but the Entente, in the secret Treaty of London in April 1915, promised South Tyrol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and northern Dalmatia as well, to be carved out of the Austro-Hungarian empire after the war was won. There was also, certainly, a powerful current of opinion in Italy that a major war would bring the disparate elements of the new Italian nation together and forge a new and improved identity. It was while the ministers who had negotiated the London treaty were trying to sell the war (without mentioning the treaty) to a chamber of deputies largely opposed to it, that Entente funds were secretly passed to Benito Mussolini, expelled from his post as editor of the Socialist Party's newspaper because of his pro-war views, to found the rabble-rousing Il popolo d'Italia which was to be his sounding board for the ideas that later became fascism, and provided him with his post-war power base.
In late May 1915, the war party had its way and a desperately ill-equipped, untrained, and badly led Italian army set out to attack up some of the steepest mountains in Europe, where artillery spotters could bring down accurate indirect fire on them (and, in winter, on the snow and ice slopes above them) in perfect comfort and safety. The C-in-C Cadorna was an unimaginative pounder, but he could see that to attack along the narrow coastal strip towards Trieste was an invitation to cut him off that even the Austro-Hungarians could not resist. Accordingly, he launched ten consecutive uphill offensives on the Izonso front, exhausting the morale of troops who mostly did not understand what they were fighting for and compounding his brutal ineptitude by never getting his logistics properly balanced, so that the men were also ill-clothed and ill-fed.
Nor was Austro-Hungarian policy much better. Austria's long-term relationship with Italy—part of which had been under Austrian rule for much of the 19th century—meant that, as Gordon Brook-Shepherd points out, ‘The Italian front … became the only really “popular” one.’ The CGS, Conrad von Hotzendorf, had argued in favour of a preventive war against Italy or Serbia before 1914. When Italy entered the war his focus on the Balkans and the Adriatic made it impossible for the Germans to achieve a consistent strategic approach in which the eastern front was properly of far greater significance than Italy.
As the third miserable winter of the war grew closer, a combined Austro-German counter-offensive fell upon the Italians at Caporetto and they broke, surrendering by the thousand or fleeing to the Piave river where some semblance of a line was restored with a stiffening of eleven Anglo-French divisions rushed from the western front. But before this, in one of history's greater might-have-beens, peace feelers from the new Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles through Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma and the Swiss had been rejected by the Entente because of the terms of the Treaty of London, which of course could only be imposed on a totally defeated Austria. The treaty was also to cause problems with US Pres Woodrow Wilson who was shocked to discover the grubby material reasons for which his new allies were fighting. He was, nonetheless, to consent to the handing over of half a million German-speakers to Italy after the war.
At the battle of the Piave in June 1918, the reinforced Italians under their new C-in-C Armando Díaz defeated a renewed offensive, and in October they returned the favour for Caporetto by shattering the Austro-Hungarians in the battle of Vittorio Veneto, after which they surged back to the pre-war frontier and in the last days before the Armistice finally entered enemy territory. At the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919, the Italians received South Tyrol (Alto Adige), the Trentino, Trieste, and Istria, but not north Dalmatia or the largely Italian-speaking city of Fiume in Croatia. The result was that Italy, along with Japan, was both on the winning side and felt she had been stabbed in the back, laying the foundation for the WW II Axis.
Bibliography
- Brook-Shepherd, Gordon, The Last Habsburg (New York, 1968)
— Hugh Bicheno/Richard Holmes
