Italians on the Western Front

The British chronology of the war records under 27 April 1918, with the reservation that the date is approximate, the arrival on the French front of the first contingent of Italian troops. According to Italian studies, 27 April was the day on which General Alberico Albricci’s Italian II Corps assembled in full at the Mailly-le-Camp training camp in Champagne, south of Châlons. It numbered about 25,000 men in two infantry divisions: General Vittorio Pittaluga’s 3rd Division with the “Napoli” and “Salerno” brigades, and General Giovanni Beruto’s 8th Division with the “Brescia” and “Alpi” brigades. They were accompanied by two squadrons of the “Lodi” light cavalry regiment and an arditi assault unit.

Sending the corps was the repayment of a debt. After the defeat at Caporetto in the autumn of 1917, six French divisions and five British divisions had come to Italy and helped to hold the front on the Piave. When on 21 March 1918 the Germans struck on the Somme, some of these troops, among them the British 5th Division and the French Tenth Army, returned to France. As early as March the Italian Supreme Command, headed since November by General Armando Diaz, decided to send a corps of its own to the Western Front. The choice fell on II Corps, experienced in the battles on the Isonzo and the Piave but badly thinned by losses. For reasons of prestige it was given the “Alpi” brigade, regarded as the heir of Garibaldi’s volunteers. It was commanded by Colonel-Brigadier Peppino Garibaldi, grandson of the hero of Italian unification, who in 1914 had fought in France at the head of a legion of volunteers. Also serving in the corps were the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti and the young Kurt Erich Suckert, later known as the writer Curzio Malaparte.

Entrainment took place from 18 to 23 April at stations around Brescia. According to Italian studies the move required 87 trains: 38 carrying the 8th Division went through the Fréjus rail tunnel, and 49 carrying the 3rd Division and the corps troops along the Riviera coast. The corps came under the French army and at Mailly was to undergo training and become familiar with French fighting methods.

These were not the first Italian soldiers in France. From the beginning of 1918 men of the Italian Auxiliary Troops in France (Truppe ausiliarie italiane in Francia, TAIF) had been arriving there. Under an agreement concluded in Rome in January, Italy undertook to send 60,000 men, mainly unfit for service in the trenches, to build and maintain fortifications behind the front. They were to replace French soldiers who were being sent to the front from the rear and from the factories. They worked in compact Italian companies under Italian officers, but under the direction of the French technical services.

Albricci’s corps went into action at the end of May, when the Germans broke through the front on the Aisne and approached Reims. In July, in the Second Battle of the Marne, it defended the valley of the river Ardre near Bligny, on the road to Épernay, and lost nearly a third of its strength. In the autumn it pursued the retreating Germans across the Chemin des Dames as far as the Meuse. According to Italian figures Italian losses in France in 1918 amounted to 4,375 killed and 6,359 wounded.