Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 1, February–March 2009, pp. 215–220
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The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919
Mark Thompson. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. £25.00. 464 pp.
In the spring of 1945 the Allied Armies in Italy at last levered the Wehrmacht out of the mountain south of Bologna which they had held all winter, swept across the Po valley and headed past Venice into the Julian Alps en route for Vienna. My own unit had a more limited role: to get to Trieste and the valley of the Isonzo before Tito’s partisans did. We spent the next year sitting in the bleak hinterland of Trieste to prevent the Yugoslavs from ‘liberating’ the territories that the Italians had ‘liberated’ from the Austrians 30 years earlier. We had not yet heard of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ but we saw what it meant, close up. The Italians had done their best to ‘cleanse’ the Slavic population from the land they regarded as Italia irredenda: now the Yugoslavs were repaying in kind, and we could do little to stop them.
This was my own introduction to the Brave New World we had been fighting to create. But we also found a different kind of testimony to the region’s tormented past. On our way through Friuli we briefly halted in the village of Redipuglia outside the largest war memorial I have ever seen, equal to if not dwarfing those on the Western Front: a vast staircase of terraces, each a hundred yards wide, containing the bones of over a hundred thousand Italian soldiers who had died on those huge, and to us unknown, battlefields in the First World War.
All that I, like most of my countrymen, then knew about the Italian performance in that war was that their army had shamefully disintegrated at the battle of Caporetto in 1917 and had to be rescued by British and French troops; a performance they had repeated more recently when they had tamely surrendered to the forces of General Wavell in the Western Desert. We had no idea that between 1915 and 1917 the Italian army had launched 11 successive offensives across the stony plateau of the Carso that now confronted us; attacks on the same scale, and with much the same results, as our own Battle of the Somme. When finally in November 1917 an Austro-German army launched their counter-offensive the Italian army had already been eviscerated. By the end of the war it had lost nearly half a million dead, most of them on the Carso. In 1918 Italy was able with Allied help to defeat an Austrian army as exhausted as her own and earn her place at the top table at the peace conference. But although the Italian prime minister declared that Italy’s victory was ‘one of the greatest that history has ever recorded’, nobody, least of all his allies, believed him, or treated the country as if it were. In fact Italy had been as broken by her ‘victory’ as Germany by her defeat.
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Michael Howard is President Emeritus of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
