Mark Thompson (3) (1959–)

This is a comprehensive look at the Italian fronts from WW I. In addition to covering the battles, the book also discusses the Italian politics around the war. Austrian politics and strategy are also discussed but only briefly. What was particularly useful in the book were the discussions of Italian literature, art, and journalism as impacted by the war.

Focusing on Italy actually helped me understand the wider picture of WW I. I had recently taken a long hiking trip along the Isonzo front so was familiar with many of the battle sites. Slovenia and Italy have created a memorial hike called the Walk of Peace that visits many of the WW I battle scenes.

The biggest weakness of the book is the lack of maps and the exclusive use of Italian place names. The Italians and Austrians had very different names for towns and mountains. Most of the area covered in the book is in present-day Slovenia so the Italian place names are not used in any of the current maps of the area. The maps included in the book are too few to make up for this deficiency.… (more)

An excellent account of a forgotten front. Italy entered the war in hope of gaining territory, and the secret Treaty of London agreed with the French and the British, who had no great respect for Italy or the Italian military but hoped they could tie up sufficient Austro Hungarian troops to make life easier on the Western front, promised an unlikely grab bag of territories including Greek islands and the coast of Turkey. The best that can be said is, yes, they did tie up enough Austro Hungarian troops to make a significant contribution to the eventual collapse of the empire - but at what frightful cost.

All of the conflict took place either on the unforgiving Carso above Trieste, or in the Dolomites. I've been to some of the Dolomite war sites, and the task Italian troops were set by their commanders looks inhuman. The Austro Hungarians basically held all the high ground. The Italian troops were invited to charge uphill, across vast no man's land, in snow mist and fog, through barbed wire they had no means of cutting, whilst being machine gunned. It was a slaughter. And one that happened again and again and again.

Unlike the Western Front, where commanders did eventually realise that mass attacks in formation across no mans land were senseless, the Italian command had no such moment of illumination. Thompson identifies 6 specific occasions where the slaughter was so bad, and so pointless, that the Austrians ordered their soldiers to stop shooting and shouted to the Italians to go back to their trenches and stop throwing their lives away. This is unparalleled in the history of warfare.

The Italian army lost nearly 700,000 men killed in the war for a gain of almost nothing. The pride, incompetence and heartlessness on many fronts that led to this is exposed by Thompson but the majority of his barbs are reserved for the Commander of the Italian Armies, Luigi Cardona. Leaders of the massed armies on the Western front were careless with their men's lives as well, but very few would have made the suicidal loss of thousands of men per day such a point of pride. Combining a fatal measure of arrogance and imbecility, a great number of the lives of the dead were his responsibility. Especially when you consider that the brutal, Roman custom of decimation (killing one in every 10 of deserting or disgraced groups of soldiers) was in place, and that as well as being shot at from the front and sides by the Austrians, the Italian soldier was shot at from behind by the carabinieri and frequently bombed by his own artillery.

But Thompson also has huge contempt for the odious Gabrielle D'Annunzio (the description of his occupation of Fiume his very amusingly told) and for the Italian political class in general.

Its a sad story, beautifully told. Wherever possible Thompson brings individual soldiers, and their stories, into the limelight. Almost inevitably they were mistaken idealists. Almost inevitably , they died on the Carso. Of the illiterate multitudes who made up the majority of the army, we get a very different picture. Mostly, they had no idea what they were fighting for. Mostly they were from the South and the displaced Italian communities of Istria that were the casus belli for the war, meant nothing to them. Mostly they wanted to go home but died in silence in pointless mass slaughter

Did this lead to the mistrust in institutions that exists in Italy even today? That's hard to say. But it would have been very difficult for the average soldier not to draw the conclusion that their government cared only for its own interests and not for theirs. And as such, perhaps the state of Italy today is another long consequence of the war… (more)