Italy in the First World War

Italy, linked to Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance since 1882, declared its neutrality in 1914, and in May 1915 entered the war on the side of the Entente in return for the promise of Trentino, Trieste and the Adriatic coast. For two and a half years it attacked on the Isonzo and in the Alps; in 1917 it suffered defeat at Caporetto but held the front on the Piave, and in the autumn of 1918 it shattered the Austro-Hungarian army at Vittorio Veneto. Depending on the method of counting, the war cost it between 460,000 and 651,000 soldiers killed and dead.

The road to war

On 20 May 1882 Italy joined an alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, which promised it help if France attacked it. With Austria, however, Italy had long been a rival, and many Italian circles demanded the annexation of Trento and Trieste, largely inhabited by Italians but belonging to the Habsburg monarchy. On 29 September 1911 Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire in order to seize Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The war gave it Libya and the Dodecanese, but the army had not made good the shortages of weapons and ammunition that it exposed before the Great War.

Neutrality and entry into the war

On 3 August 1914 the government of Antonio Salandra declared neutrality. It argued that the Triple Alliance was a defensive alliance and that the war had been started by Austria-Hungary, which had not even warned Rome of its ultimatum to Serbia. In the autumn Salandra announced that Italy would be guided by “sacred egoism”, and the Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino, bargained with both sides. Vienna agreed to small concessions, and only after the war. The Entente could offer more, because it was promising other people’s land.

On 26 April 1915 Italy signed a secret agreement in London. For entering the war within a month it was to receive Trentino and South Tyrol up to the Brenner Pass, Trieste, Gorizia, all of Istria and northern Dalmatia. The promises went far beyond the lands inhabited by Italians: according to historians’ calculations the areas Rome demanded were home to about 650,000 Italians, but also to more than 700,000 Slovenes and Croats and about 230,000 Tyrolean Germans.

The majority of deputies, gathered around former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, still wanted neutrality. On 4 May Rome declared the alliance with Austria-Hungary void, and on 13 May Salandra resigned. King Victor Emmanuel III refused the resignation, demonstrations by supporters of war took over the streets of the big cities, and parliament granted the government full powers.

On 23 May 1915 the ambassador in Vienna delivered the declaration of war: from the following day Italy considered itself at war with Austria-Hungary. Italy declared war on the other Central Powers step by step: on Turkey in August 1915, on Bulgaria on 19 October, and on Germany only on 28 August 1916.

On the Isonzo and in the Alps

The Italian front ran through the Alps from the Stelvio Pass to the Adriatic coast. The commander-in-chief, General Luigi Cadorna, directed the main effort to the Soča, or Isonzo, towards Trieste and Ljubljana. From June 1915 to September 1917 the Italians attacked eleven times on this river and on the rocky Karst plateau. On 9 August 1916 they entered Gorizia, the first large Austro-Hungarian town taken by the Italians, but they never took Trieste. In the first eleven battles they lost about 645,000 killed, wounded and missing.

In the Alps trenches were dug in rock and glaciers, even at altitudes of 3,000 metres, and single peaks were fought over for months: the Italians took Col di Lana in the Dolomites only in April 1916, by blowing it up with a mine. In the spring of 1916 Conrad attacked from the Tyrol in order to descend to the Venetian plain and cut off the army on the Isonzo. He took Asiago and Arsiero but stalled on the last ridges. The Italians also fought beyond their own front: from December 1914 they held Vlorë in Albania, and in August 1916 their 35th Division landed at Salonika.

From Caporetto to Vittorio Veneto

On 24 October 1917 the Germans and Austrians broke through the front at Caporetto. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo the Italians lost between 265,000 and nearly 300,000 prisoners and more than 3,000 guns, almost half of their artillery. By 9 November the army had fallen back behind the Piave. At the Rapallo Conference the Allies promised help, and six French divisions and five British arrived in Italy. On 8 November the King dismissed Cadorna, and General Armando Diaz became chief of staff. The class of 1899 was called up, and the new line on the Piave, on Monte Grappa and on the Asiago plateau held.

In June 1918 Austria-Hungary attacked for the last time. In the Second Battle of the Piave its divisions crossed the river, but the swollen Piave and counter-attacks forced them to withdraw. On 10 June Luigi Rizzo’s motor torpedo boat sank the dreadnought Szent István. On 24 October the Italians and their allies launched the offensive that went down in history as the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The Austro-Hungarian army disintegrated together with the monarchy, and between about 400,000 and 480,000 of its soldiers were taken prisoner. On 3 November General Pietro Badoglio signed the armistice at Villa Giusti near Padua. Before the fighting stopped at 3 p.m. on 4 November, the Italians entered Trento and Trieste.

Beyond their own front the Italians also fought in France. From April 1918 the Italian II Corps of General Albricci was there; in July it defended the valley of the Ardre at Bligny, and in the autumn, in the Hundred Days Offensive, it pursued the Germans as far as the Meuse. For the corps the war ended only with the armistice with Germany on 11 November. The Italians lost 4,375 killed and 6,359 wounded in France.

The home front

Italy went to war divided. The Socialist Party was the only one in Western Europe that did not support the war, and protests against it continued throughout 1915–1918. The country depended on imports: it brought as much as 90 per cent of its coal from Britain, and the economic help of the Allies, who supplied steel, coal and grain, mattered more to the war effort than their divisions. Strikes and clashes grew in the spring and summer of 1917, and their climax was the August riots in Turin, which, like the February Revolution in Russia, began with a protest against food shortages.

Paolo Boselli’s government of national unity, formed in June 1916, fell on 25 October 1917, just as the front was being broken at Caporetto. The new prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, took office when the Germans were already occupying Udine. The defeat turned the war into a defence of Italy’s own soil and forced the state into a fuller mobilisation, including stricter food rationing. On 22 December Orlando called in parliament for resistance with the words “Resistere! resistere! resistere!”, which became the watchword of that winter.

Italy and the Polish question

On 30 October 1917, during the defeat at Caporetto, Italy recognised the Polish National Committee in Paris, and Konstanty Skirmunt became its representative in Rome. Prisoner-of-war camps across the Italian peninsula held thousands of Poles captured in the uniforms of the Austro-Hungarian army. Sonnino agreed to the formation of Polish units from them only in September 1918. More than 30,000 soldiers of the Polish Army later came out of the camps in Italy, most of them sent to France, to the army of General Józef Haller.

The end of the war and the cost

Italy mobilised 5,615,000 soldiers. The British War Office counted 460,000 killed and dead, and the Italian government’s figures, including invalids who died up to April 1920, 651,000. Nearly six hundred thousand Italians were taken prisoner, of whom between ninety and a hundred thousand died. According to demographic estimates, wartime privation and the influenza epidemic killed from about six hundred thousand to more than a million civilians.

At the peace conference Orlando sat among the “Big Four”. Italy received Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste and Istria, but of Dalmatia only Zadar and a few islands, because the promises of London were opposed by President Woodrow Wilson and by the new State of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The dispute over Fiume, which Italy had not even been promised in London, and the disappointed hopes gave rise to the myth of the “mutilated victory”, on which Italian fascism grew.