Cadorna dismissed

On the evening of 8 November 1917 King Victor Emmanuel III removed General Luigi Cadorna from the post of chief of staff of the Italian Army. A royal decree made his successor General Armando Diaz, until then commander of XXIII Corps on the Karst plateau, and Generals Pietro Badoglio and Gaetano Giardino became Diaz’s deputies. Cadorna, who had headed the army since July 1914 and for two and a half years had directed Italy’s war, was from then on to represent Italy on the new inter-Allied war council at Versailles. He handed over command to his successor on 9 November, which is why some sources, including the Italian Biographical Dictionary published by Treccani, date the change to that day.

Why Cadorna had to go

The immediate cause was the defeat at Caporetto. Within two weeks of the breakthrough of 24 October the Italian army had fallen back from the Isonzo by over a hundred kilometres, lost nearly 300,000 prisoners and almost half its artillery. Cadorna was accused of ignoring warnings of the offensive, of failing to ensure that his own orders to go over to the defensive were carried out, and of blaming the soldiers of the Second Army in his communiqué of 28 October, accusing them of cowardice. According to the Treccani Biographical Dictionary, the government of Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, formed at the end of October, intended from the outset to replace him, not so much because of the defeat itself as because with this hard general, distrustful of politicians, no working relationship between the government and the supreme command could be established. The candidacies of Diaz and Giardino already had the King’s backing, but the decision was put off until the front had stabilised, and on 30 October Orlando even assured Cadorna by telegram of his confidence.

The Allies settled the matter. At the Rapallo conference the British prime minister David Lloyd George and the French prime minister Paul Painlevé made Cadorna’s immediate removal a condition for sending British and French divisions to Italy. They blamed him for the chaos of the retreat and the poor work of the supreme command. Cadorna did not come to the conference, and his representative, General Carlo Porro, aroused the distrust of the Allied chiefs of staff by presenting greatly inflated figures for the enemy’s strength. On 8 November the participants of the conference met the King at Peschiera del Garda on Lake Garda. According to the accounts of those present, Victor Emmanuel III spoke of the situation calmly and confidently, making a good impression on the British and French, and approved the decisions of Rapallo. That same evening Cadorna was dismissed.

Cadorna’s last days

Paradoxically, the general was leaving at a moment when the worst was already behind the army. On 4 November he ordered the retreat from the Tagliamento to the Piave, and by 9 November the main forces of the Second and Third Armies had crossed to the west bank of the river. The new defensive line from the sea along the Piave through the Monte Grappa massif to the Asiago plateau had been chosen and prepared by him, and in the Grappa massif he had already had roads, caverns and cableways built in the autumn of 1916. On 3 November, in a letter to the prime minister, he admitted openly how deeply shaken the army was, and announced that he would fight a decisive battle on the Piave, because a further retreat would mean the loss of the rest of the artillery. He added that the government should also consider steps beyond his competence, which some Italian historians read as a suggestion of peace talks. When the army reached the Piave, Cadorna regained his self-confidence and called for resistance to the last with the words: “nothing is lost if the spirit of revival is ready and the will does not bend”. His dismissal, however, had already been decided.

According to his Italian biographers, Cadorna took his removal bitterly and at first did not want to accept the post at Versailles, but in the end agreed. During the war he had dismissed 206 generals and 255 colonels, expanded the army from 548 to 867 infantry battalions and led eleven bloody battles on the Isonzo. The commission of inquiry that examined the defeat at Caporetto placed the main responsibility on him in 1919, but the dispute over his record continued for decades, and in 1924 he received the baton of a Marshal of Italy.

The new chief of staff

Armando Diaz was 55 and eleven years younger than Cadorna. Born in 1861 in Naples, he was an artillery officer and staff officer, and in 1915 worked in the operations department of Cadorna’s supreme command. In June 1916 he himself asked to be posted to the line, commanded the 49th Division and from April 1917 XXIII Corps, which fought on the Karst plateau in the Tenth and Eleventh Battles of the Isonzo; he was wounded in the arm at that time. Unlike his predecessor, he therefore knew trench warfare at first hand. On taking up the post he declared briefly: “I take up the office of chief of staff of the army. I count on the faith and self-sacrifice of all.” According to tradition, he also said that the weapon he had been handed was blunted, but would be sharpened anew.

Diaz took over his predecessor’s defence plan and firmly rejected suggestions that the army should fall back even further, to the Adige or the Mincio. He did, however, change the style of command: he gave more freedom to army and corps commanders, relied on his deputies and looked after the soldiers’ morale. The first test of the new command was the fighting that flared up within a few days on the Piave, in the Grappa massif and on the Asiago plateau.