Italy declares war on Germany

On Sunday 27 August 1916 the Italian foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, had a short declaration delivered to the federal government of Switzerland, with a request that it be passed on to the government of the Reich. It ended with the statement that, in the name of the King, the Italian government considered the Kingdom of Italy to be at war with the German Empire from 28 August. That evening the late editions of the Rome newspapers announced it officially, and the United States embassy at once cabled Washington that the Italian government had sent a declaration of war on Germany through Switzerland, effective from the next day. The following day the Italian ambassador in Washington, Vincenzo Macchi di Cellere, informed the Secretary of State of his government’s decision by note.

At the same time Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary, and Germany responded by declaring war on Romania. In Italy 28 August is sometimes called “the day of three wars”.

The war that was not

Italy had been fighting Austria-Hungary since May 1915. It had declared war only on the Habsburg monarchy, although only a few weeks earlier it had still been bound to Vienna and Berlin by the Triple Alliance. Later the Italians declared war on the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, but not on Germany. Berlin broke off diplomatic relations with Rome, the ambassadors left, and Switzerland took over the protection of both states’ interests. Yet neither side declared war.

This state of affairs suited the government of Antonio Salandra. It presented the war as the final act of the country’s unification, a struggle for Trento and Trieste against the age-old enemy in Vienna. Italy had no border disputes with Germany, but it did have strong economic ties: German capital was present in Italian banks and industry, and many Italian workers had worked in Germany before the war. As late as 21 May 1915 the German ambassador, Prince Bernhard von Bülow, had brought about an agreement concluded by the Secretary of State Gottlieb von Jagow with the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Riccardo Bollati. In it both states undertook to respect the private property and rights of the other side’s citizens.

Peace only on paper

In practice the Germans and Italians stood on opposite sides from the start. At the end of May 1915 the German Alpine Corps (Alpenkorps) arrived in the Tyrol and for several months defended the Dolomite passes together with the Austrians. In the Mediterranean, German submarines sailed under the Austro-Hungarian flag. One of them, U-38, sank the Italian liner Ancona in November 1915, with the loss of some two hundred people. Arms and ammunition flowed from Germany to Austria-Hungary.

At the beginning of 1916 Italy began to harden its course. In February it banned the import of German goods, and according to an American yearbook of 1916 it requisitioned several dozen German ships lying in its ports. In April Sonnino announced reprisals against the property of enemy subjects. Germany answered in its own way. According to the same yearbook, on 8 June the Reich’s supreme court in Leipzig ruled that Germany was in fact, though not formally, at war with Italy. In mid-July the Berlin bankers’ association, at the request of the German foreign ministry, instructed banks to stop payments to Italians and to treat them as enemy subjects. Italy responded by denouncing the agreement of May 1915, and in August it also denounced its commercial treaty with Germany.

Allied pressure

Italian restraint had long irritated its allies. In the Treaty of London of April 1915 Italy had undertaken to wage war jointly with France, Britain and Russia against all their enemies. In Paris and London it was repeated that the Italians were fighting only the Austrians and sparing the Entente’s main enemy. The editors of the Italian diplomatic documents write of the allies’ growing dissatisfaction that Rome was not declaring war on Germany in breach of its London commitments. In 1916 the allies coordinated their actions ever more closely. In February the French prime minister Aristide Briand came to Rome, in March the Italians took part in the Allied conference in Paris, which proclaimed unity of military, economic and diplomatic action, and at the turn of March and April the British prime minister Herbert Asquith visited Rome. War with Austria-Hungary combined with formal peace with Germany fitted this community ever worse. In June, at the Paris Economic Conference, the Italians agreed with the allies on economic war against the Central Powers, although they were still formally at peace with Germany.

There was pressure in Italy itself too. Supporters of the war outside the government majority, radicals, republicans and reformist socialists, accused the government of weakness. According to the British political yearbook, the Annual Register, in March 1916 the cabinet was criticised in the Chamber also for not having declared war on Germany. The leader of this group, Leonida Bissolati, who had himself fought at the front as a volunteer, declared at the time that his friends voted for the government only out of patriotism. In June the Salandra government fell, and in the new cabinet of Paolo Boselli Bissolati became minister without portfolio. The same yearbook wrote that the new government was distinctly more anti-German in character than its predecessor. According to the Italian Dizionario Biografico, Boselli himself, like most politicians of the time, was not enthusiastic about declaring war. Sonnino, who from the start had preferred a war limited to Italian aims, gave way, as the Treccani encyclopaedia writes, “after strong Anglo-French pressure”.

Why August

Several matters decided the timing. The Annual Register states that the government in Rome deliberately timed its step to coincide with Romania’s entry. Italy was one of the four powers that on 17 August signed the treaty with Romania in Bucharest, and it knew that Romania’s declaration of war on Austria-Hungary was a matter of days. At the beginning of August the Italian army, for the first time since entering the war, won a clear success: it took Gorizia, which raised spirits at home and Rome’s standing among the allies. An Italian division had just landed on the Salonika front, where it might face German troops. An American military commentator wrote a month later that sooner or later the Italians would have come into contact with the Germans there, and that keeping up the appearance of peace would then have been a farce.

Sonnino was also thinking of future negotiations. According to Italian accounts, on 28 August he telegraphed the ambassador in Paris, Tommaso Tittoni, that the declaration of war on Germany ought to deprive the allies of any pretext for concealing from Italy the agreements concluded and intentions concerning the Straits and the Near East, in which Italy was keenly interested. Rome suspected that France, Britain and Russia were reaching agreements behind its back on the partition of Turkey’s Asian possessions, and did not want to be left out.

The indictment

The declaration, passed to Germany by the Swiss, listed Germany’s offences. It began by stating that hostile acts of the German government against Italy were following one another ever more frequently, both in the form of actual participation in the war and of the most varied economic measures. It cited the repeated deliveries of arms and war material, for land and sea, from Germany to Austria-Hungary, and the uninterrupted participation of German officers, soldiers and sailors in military operations against Italy. It added that only thanks to German help had Austria-Hungary recently been able to concentrate its greatest effort against Italy. The Italian government also complained that Germany had handed over to the Austrians Italian prisoners who had escaped from Austro-Hungarian camps and taken refuge on the territory of the Reich.

Among the economic charges, the declaration cited the call made, on the initiative of the German foreign ministry, to banks and bankers to treat every Italian citizen as an enemy alien and to stop payments due to him, and the suspension of the pensions due to Italian workers under German law. The royal government, it went on, could no longer tolerate a state of affairs which, solely to Italy’s detriment, deepened the contradiction between the situation in fact and in law that already arose from Italy and Germany belonging to two groups of states at war with each other. Therefore from 28 August Italy considered itself at war with Germany.

Reception at home

According to the Annual Register, most Italians welcomed the extension of the war, and almost the entire press supported the government. The exceptions were the organs of the Italian Socialist Party, which had opposed the war from the start, and a few conservative dailies, whose comments were heavily cut by the censor. The interventionists triumphed most loudly. Benito Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia proclaimed the war with Germany its own victory and wrote about it in so bloodthirsty a tone that the Catholic weekly from Padua, La Difesa del Popolo, reprinted passages only in order to condemn them. The Catholic press, for its part, attended to practical matters: in September the Padua weekly advised Italian workers who had worked in Germany how to continue claiming their pensions.

In Paris, London and Petrograd the news from Rome and Bucharest was received with evident satisfaction. Italy at last stood in the same position towards Germany as the other allies.

Significance

Militarily the declaration changed little at once. An American commentator called it a pure formality, since a state of war between the two countries had in fact existed for a long time. There were no German divisions on the Italian front at the time. The declaration of war nevertheless had great political significance. Italy ceased to be a “part-time” ally waging its own war against Austria-Hungary, and could demand a full share in the Entente’s decisions, including on the partition of Turkey. The bill came only a year later. In the autumn of 1917 the Fourteenth Army, made up of German and Austro-Hungarian divisions, took up position on the Isonzo, and its attack at Caporetto in October 1917 brought Italy its heaviest defeat of the whole war.