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The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919

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It has been a privilege to read in the past year two sweeping, magisterial accounts of a sadly forgotten front, the Italian front in world war I. Last year i read the wonderfully detailed, blow by blow account by John Schindler, Isonzo the Forgotten Sacrifice and i loved it. I would have given it more then 5 stars if i could have. This year a second monumental work has come out. Mark Thompson's The White War is a triumph of artistic prose. This book goes into detail of the spirit, psyche, and morale of the Italian army and its people, as well as covering the Isonzo, Asiago, Ortigaro, and Dolomite fronts in good detail. This wonderful volume in tandem with Schindler's classic account are the two books to read on this front. Reading here about the savagery of Luigi Cadorna's command style, the duplicity of Antonio Salandra and Sidney Soninno, and the sheer lust for war embodied by the likes of Gabriele D'Annunzio, Benito Mussolini, Scipio Slataper and other paragons of early 20th century Italian history and culture are mind boggling in this day and age to comprehend. Contrasting sadly is the stoicism and heroic but silent sacrifices made by the men of the army, slaughtered for a few meters of blood soaked ground, usually in the rocky desolate Carso plateau, or the taking of an insignificant hill or rocky precipice at the cost of thousands of lives. The cost of all this was 700,000 Italian lives and over a million wounded. Austrian casualties were roughly half this number. The civilian dead was over half a million more. The bloodletting was savage and amazing, the gains trivial by comparison. In the end, Austria was destroyed, the Slavic nation state of Yugoslavia was born, and the Italians felt cheated by their own allies leading to the rise of Mussolini dominated Fascist Italy. This is a tale that should have been told decades ago, thank goodness it is coming to the English speaking world now. This book is destined to be a classic just as Schindler's book is. The difference between the two is Schindler's emphasis on the military aspects of the campaign, whereas Thompson emphasizes the human story although the military story is always present in his work as well. A wonderful story here, it should be read by all World War I buffs as well as those interested in Italian and Austro Hungarian, as well as Slavic history. This is a story that needs telling as both a cautionary and an inspirational tale of a nation coming of it's own for the first time since the days of the Caesars, and of the great war which brought out both the best and the worst of men in both Italy and Austria Hungary. All in a theatre little written about or read in the west, but a front which took more lives then in the American Civil War, and far more American lives then in all of America's 20th century wars combined. On a last personal note, my late grandfather, dead for many years before my birth unfortunately, on my mother's side, fought for the Italians on the great Isonzo front and later on Monte Grappa. He was wounded on Grappa and came to America shortly after the war. I believe he would have been proud of these two great works and proud of the fact that in Thompson's work the human tale of the common soldier is so well told and sympathetically done. I'm sure the war was the great and horrific defining point of his life, and it is high time justice is done to him and the veterans on both sides in this front. Kudos to Thompson for this masterpiece of writing.

I have just finished reading "The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1918 by Mark Thompson which is a study of a 1st World War front that is often forgotten but where Italy lost 689, 000 solders( Britain lost 662,000 + 140, 000 reported as missing). That we tend to associate the infantry war with the plains of Flanders and Russia reveals the common myth as this part of the struggle was mountain warfare albeit also with trenches.

The conduct of the war exposed the weak hold of liberal structures and politics on the Italian population and the defeat of victory quickly let in 20 years of fascist government. The collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and take over the successor national states by the communists has made it difficult to get a sense of what really went on: Italians and other non Germanic nationals did fight for the Emperor, many of the feature of Fascism (a puppet parliament, a muzzled press, a romantic nationalism, a militarised state) had their roots on the political conduct of the war.

What made the book an interesting read is that Mark Thomas does more then hold to the historical arc of the events from the turmoil in Italy leading to its ripping up of a long standing agreement to be allied with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary ( It took on a secret 30 pieces of silver territorial deal with the Allies). And ending with the desperate mad dash to occupy land vacated by the collapsing Hapsburg armies-it made the most of the cock-up where as the armistice agreement ended the war one day earlier for Austria-Hungary. What he does is switch the narrative in cinematographic terms from wide/long shots, medium to close-ups as the narrative unfolds. So we take the long view at the ideas affecting Italian practice in politics, art and military such as Romantic Vitalism or the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the impact of how Italian unification actually unfolded. We then have medium shot accounts of how individual battles unfolded from both of the combatant's perspectives or the power struggles and conduct at military and political levels. And finally the close-up accounts of artists, reporters, and survivors that expose the official accounts or help to explain the mindset of the elites.

It was this rounded and varied explanation that held my attention, as I tended to wander in the step by step of accounts of the battles(my attention span rather then the quality of the writing, although these are necessary to understand the appalling and arrogant way that the soldiers were used. For example, Military discipline justified the ancient Roman practice of randomly killing 1 in 10 solders if the platoon had infringed any rules which could be just turning up late from leave. The fact, with no interest shown in the reason was enough for summary execution. This is because the Italian army leadership took the most extreme view of all the armed forces in the 1st world war that the solders were only cannon fodder to do the will of the supreme commander. An attitude they paid for when Austria-Hungarian forces with direct support of Germany developed a forerunner of Blitzkrieg and took back all the territory fought over in the past three years and swept down to the pre 1866 national boundaries.

The resource imbalance between the foes and the deteriorating political realties for the Central Powers meant that this could not be turned into a knock-out blow. But with Russia out and embroiled in Revolution and no significant Allied victories, the collapse of the Central Powers as Germany struggled to avoid the fate of Austria- Hungary created the German Nazis myth of a stab in the back. It also confirmed the lack of democratic populist support for liberalism.

So why should you read this book? Well it gives you a clear account of one part of the wider First World War front that is only now becoming clear and even possible to study. (Attempts to clear the names of those summarily executed is still politically sensitive in Italy.) But a more important reason is that it offers insights into the conduct of events now. If History has anything to teach, its that we the ordinary people wont get a true picture what our masters have been doing in our name until we are pushing up the daisies.. In knowing what was going on behind closed doors then, we can question what the media, cultural elites, military strategists, politicians are doing now. But of course if you think we have the straight line on the War on Terror, then give it a miss.

This book is a welcome history on the fighting in Italy during the first world war. Its mostly well written and provides an understandable account of events. The book fills a large gap in terms of good accounts of this fighting. But there are major flaws that can't be ignored:

- Mark Thompson comes across as very pro-Italian and anti-Austrian in the book.
- His sources and his research are incredibly skewed toward works from Italy and in Italian.
- The book falls off at the end in quality. The book really ends at Caporetto. The final phase of the war just doesn't get the treatment the earlier portions of the war got.
- He doesn't visually show the war in terms of maps properly.

Its still a welcome book, especially up to Caporetto. He should have really stopped there and done another book covering the final years.

Although the First World War has attracted greater attention from historians in the past decade or so, the events on the Italian front are still extremely obscure to English-speaking audiences. Mark Thompson's The White War sets out to illuminate the reasons why Italy went to war with Austria-Hungary in 1915, what it hoped to gain and how it went about trying to gain these objectives. This is not a straight-up military history, although individual battles and actions are discussed in some detail. Rather, the author tries to examine the war through Italian lenses and provides broad nuances that are critical to understanding the political, social and intellectual factors underpinning the war. The title refers to the Carso region along the Isonzo River, marked by towering mountains capped with snow, where much of the fighting took place. Overall, parts of the book are brilliantly written, while some other parts are probably too divergent for readers expecting something like a military history. In terms of analysis, the author delivers some very pithy commentary, far from the rhetoric of official histories.
The White War consists of 28 sequential chapters and one appendix, with a total of 405 pages of text. The book has only six maps, which are of little use since they show only limits of advance, some of the key objectives and general dispositions of Italian armies. There are also 30 B/W photos, some interesting, some not. The author also provides 17 pages of footnotes, a lengthy bibliography and an index. Readers might want to read the appendix first, which covers the failed Italian participation in the Seven Weeks War in 1866, which really set the stage for their declaration of war in 1915.

In the first several chapters, the author outlines how an aggressive Italian nationalism, combined with a `mania for expansion,' pushed Italian political and intellectual leaders to seek expansion into the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite the fact that the Italian population in the border areas was a minority and not unhappy with Austrian rule, Italian nationalists became convinced that the `recovery' of the cities of Trieste and Trent were absolutely essential to making Italy complete. Even though Italy was allied with Germany and Austria at the beginning of the First World War, her leaders opportunistically switched sides to the Allies, who promised them the land they wanted. The author thus sets the stage on moral terms: Italy acted aggressively and without principle to seize something to which it had no right and which it did not need.

The author spends considerable space on the firebrand Gabriele D'Annunzio and other scheming politicians who maneuvered Italy into war. He then moves into a brilliantly-written chapter, "Cadorna's Clenched Fist," which is unfortunately only 8 pages long. In this chapter, he discusses how the Italian military commander, Luigi Cadorna, went to war with no war plan, a poorly equipped and trained army and an implicit faith in the frontal attack. Parts of this book remind me of Barbara Tuchmann's The Guns of August, beginning with this chapter. Despite the fact that the Austrian border was almost unguarded when Italy declared war, the Italian mobilization was slow and by the time that their forces began moving toward the Isonzo, the Austrians had managed to garrison the key mountain peaks.
Italy's first two years of campaigning on the Isonzo front is painful to read, for its implicit stupidity on Cadorna's part, in fighting eleven battles that sacrificed tens of thousands of his troops for negligible gains. The author details the results of each battle, but don't expect orders of battle or specific actions, since his coverage is high-level. Cadorna also added a great deal of brutality on top of this slaughter, by order units that performed poorly to be decimated and the author devotes an entire chapter to Italian military discipline, which was horrific. Adding on top of this, the author makes clear that the average Italian soldier had little idea why he was fighting.

The weakest point of this otherwise good book, is a failure to delve into pure military issues in any depth. Unlike Western Front histories which discuss how the British, French and German armies evolved new tactics and weapons to deal with trench warfare, the author spends little time on this subject. Indeed, the special Arditi units are only mentioned in passing a couple of times and the evolution of how Italian developed a heavy artillery force for breakthrough attacks really need elaboration. Nor is there any discussion of air or naval operations, although these were significant. Instead of spending an entire chapter on Italian war poets, a chapter on Italy's war economy would have been far more useful. I also had the sense that the author was willing to turn a blind eye to Italian military successes - they did have a few - in order to focus on their disasters.

The final third of the book deals with the catastrophic Italian defeat at Caporetto, followed by revival and victory in 1918. It is clear that the author wants to depict the Italian victory as filled with ashes, not only by the loss of over 600,000 soldiers but the increasing animosity with the Allies over post-war spoils. In short, the Italian victory is shown as contributing to the rise of fascism and a hunger for more unrealistic territorial demands. Overall, the author makes a good case that Italy fought poorly and for bad objectives, although it is also clear that the incessant Italian attacks did wear Austria down and thereby contributed to Allied victory. If Italy had remained neutral in 1915, the dozens of Austrian divisions on the Isonzo would have instead been in France in 1918, which would have greatly delayed an Allied victory. Thus, Italian war-making was certainly inefficient, but it did serve a purpose.

Great book. All I ever knew about the Italian front of WWI was this: the Italians lost a lot of men at the Isonzo river, then got beat at Caporetto. Well, this book filled in, in great detail, a true tragedy of World War I (as if there weren't enough of them!). How Italy got into the war, the mess they made of it, the incompetence of their leaders, and even the sorry aftermath of the war. It's all here in great detail.

Just one thing, if you're looking for a detailed operational military history, you know, where each division moved each week, well, this isn't a book about that. It's not a David Glantz book. But if you're willing to read the entire story of the Italian-Austrian front of wwI, please read this book.

First of all, the storytelling in this book is spectacular. Thompson is an excellent writer, downright beautiful at times. His well woven- narrative keeps this undertold story moving and the book reads surprisingly quickly.

Some flaws:

One, the author can be almost childishly judgmental of the actors at times, and sometimes it doesn't ring true. While there is no denying that Italy's war was an ill-conceived, bungled exercise in slaughter, sometimes the author seems to suggest that the whole thing was the product of a vast right-wing conspiracy of thoroughly contemptible people whose every word or action is base and vile. I have no doubt some of that is judgment is justified, but there's only so many times one can go to that well before it sounds over the top, and the author goes there way too often. Virtually no one is all good or all bad, let alone a vast group of people. The effect is that the actors in this tragedy seem less human, so the portrayals of them seem less believable.

Two, I would have appreciated more about the post-Caporetto/post-Cadorna campaigning, and how the significant changes in Italian military strategy which followed Cadorna's ouster changed the tactical balance sheet and enabled the final Italian victory. The author treats these issues very cursorily, so that the book kind of falls flat at the end. It's as if the Italian story ended with the defeat at Caporetto, and this was very much not the case.

This book was very well written, and it was excellent as history in many respects, especially in its description of the events leading to Italy's participation in the war and the beyond stupid generalship to which the Italian rank and file soldiers were subjected. However, just as the Austrian army fell apart after the Battle of Caporetto, so did this book. The post-Caporetto engagements on Monte Grappa, the Piave and Vittorio Veneto are given a cursory treatment, when to me, at least, they are perhaps the most interesting part of the story. Just how did a badly whipped Italian army turn itself around and defeat the Austrians within a year? I don't think this book adequately explains this phenomenon. The author could well have deleted the chapter devoted to war poetry and added a chapter devoted to Monte Grappa and its significance to future generations of Italians. I also think the maps in the book were just about useless--I had to consult my Michelin road atlas to Italy to follow the campaigns--which wasn't so easy when many of the places on the Isonzo front now have Slovenian names! And so, this book rates only 3.5 stars (Amazon will only let a reviewer go with 3 or 4). Let's hope for an improved second edition.

This fine book is a very well written study of the Italian experience in WWI. Despite the enormous literature on WWI, there is relatively little published in English on the conflict between Italy and the Central powers, primarily the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Based on a careful study of what is clearly a large Italian literature, this book nicely describes and analyzes the Italian experience in WWI. This is only partially a traditional military history. Thompson does provide good narrative and analysis of the campaigns, but he is concerned also with the causes of Italian involvement, the personal and social experience of the war, its ramifications throughout Italian society, and the severe adverse consequences of the war experience for Italian society. This is very much the Italian side of the story. Thompson provides enough information about the Austro-Hungarian experience to make the story intelligible but his focus in on Italy.

The Italian entry into WWI was entirely voluntary and essentially predatory. In the pre-war period, successive Italian governments had allied themselves with Germany and Austria-Hungary, though the terms of the alliance allowed Italy to escape involvement in a war initiated by the Central powers. In 1915, however, the politicians leading Italy calculated that the tide had turned against the German-Austrian alliance, that it was feasible for Italy to enter the war on the Allied side, and Austrian commitment to the Serbian and Russian fronts would allow rapid conquest of the Trentino, the South Tyrol (Alto Adige), Trieste, and much of what is now Northern Slovenia. Long coveted by the Italian state, some of these regions, notably the South Tyrol, were dominated by ethnic Italians while others were not. While irredentism was a focus of Italian politics, Thompson shows the decision for war was not truly popular and imposed on Italy by a minority. This minority included many members of the middle class and a variety of intellectuals who felt that war was necessary to build the Italian state and sense of nationhood, and by conservative politicians, including the sitting Prime Minister, who wished to use the war to forge a conservative coalition that could dominate liberal and socialist blocs. The King, who had considerable powers under the Italian constitution, also played a rather negative role.

The poorly equipped, poorly trained, and badly led Italian Army stumbled out of the starting blocks. With rapid, aggressive action, the Italians could have achieved all their territorial ambitions, and placed themselves in a position to enter the Austrian heartland. Disorganization and poor leadership gave the Austro-Hungarians enough time to transfer forces from other fronts and establish defensive lines in mountainous country that would have made offensive action difficult for a competently led and well. trained army. The Italian Army, led by the brutal and unimaginative Luigi Cadorna, would spend years battering against Austro-Hungarian defenses. Thompson does very well in showing the incredibly brutal nature of combat under these conditions. Cadorna and his commanders emerge as some of the most unintelligent and callous commanders of the war. To discourage surrender, for example, the Italians refused to send food parcels to Italian POWs held by the Austrians with the result that death rate of Italian POWs was horrendous. Benefiting greatly from natural geographic advantages, the Austro-Hungarians almost always had the best of the fighting. In addition, combat with the Italians excited Austro-Hungarian troops in way that aggression against Serbia and Russia did not. Many of the troops on the Italian front were Slovenians, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims with well justified fears of Italian imperialism.

This books is more than a narrative of the war. There is a good deal of topical analysis of different aspects of the war. Thompson does very well, for example, in describing the wellsprings of Italian irredentism. This includes his analysis of the role of the incredibly narcissistic poet Gabriele D'Annunzio and other intellectuals, as well as the role of the Italian press. The devastating consequences of the war for Italian society are laid out well. These include the compromise of political institutions and widespread corruption. Thompson does very well also in his analysis of the misadventure that was Italian participation in the Paris Peace conference. While Italy was on the winning side, the final settlement left many Italians with a sense of being cheated, a major factor in the rise of Fascism. Indeed, Thompson shows nicely how Fascism followed logically from much of what occurred during the war. Readers interested in an excellent continuation of the story should pick up RJB Bosworth's excellent Mussolini's Italy.

This is a history of Italy's involvement in the First World War. Italy had been a long term ally of Germany and Austria. However France and England offered them slabs of territory in what had been the Austro-Hungarian Empire if they entered the war on their side. Italy entered the war in a naked grab for spoils in 1914.



Most of the fighting took place in North Eastern Italy. The Austrians in 1915 were a fading power who were desperately stretched fighting both Russia and Serbia. For a good deal of the war the Austrians were outnumbered by about 4 to 1. (The term Austria is used to describe the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most of the soldiers fighting on the Italian front were of Croat or Slovenian background)



Luckily for the Austrians the Italian commander Cadorna was hopelessly inept. Offensive operations in the First World war were difficult because of the development of more lethal weapons. The primary development was the machine gun. Four or five people manning a machine gun could keep at bay many hundreds. However most other weapons had also improved. In previous decades artillery when it fired experienced a recoil and had to be dragged back into position. This slowed the firing rate to one round every couple of minutes. Before the war recoil mechanisms were added to all artillery which allowed firing rates of many times a minute with high degrees of accuracy. Infantry rifles were bolt operated with magazines containing numbers of bullets. They could fire accurately at long distances. Perhaps most importantly the development of barb wire made it difficult for infantry to attack fortified positions.



Cadorna wrote a book about the offense saying that the key was the level of spirit in the army. He ignored all of the developments which made attacks more difficult. He would order advances in which poorly trained infantry would advance be stalled by barbed wire and then massacred by well drilled Austrian infantry. Over time the lower ranks of the Italian army developed techniques to attack successfully. Working out ways to cut barbed wire entanglements, developing rolling artillery barrages to protect advancing infantry. However these developments only really matured in the last year of the war. From 1915 to 1918 the patter was the same. Poor executed attacks by large numbers of Italian infantry would be defeated by small numbers of Austrian troops.



One of the things that comes through in the book is the appalling treatment that Italian soldiers suffered from their own leaders. As the attacks were poorly thought out there was an ongoing morale problem. The response of the Italian higher command was to execute soldiers by lot. If a unit showed cowardly behavior some soldiers would be arbitrarily chosen and shot. This by the way was not allowed by Italian Military Law which stated that a solider could only be executed if they committed a crime. In the context of a war no one cared about what was a shocking illegality. In addition the Austrians and Germans were subject to a allied blockade. As a result they told the allies that they could not feed prisoners of war. In the west a deal was done by which the allies shipped food to Germany to feed their prisoners. The Italians refused a similar deal as they were concerned that it would encourage desertion. As a result large numbers of Italian prisoners of war suffered from starvation and malnutrition because of the failure of their own side to care.



The effect of the First World War was to destroy the old empires. Russia, Germany, the Austro-Hugarians and the Ottomans were beset by revolutions which swept away the old imperial order. The key to this was the loss of legitimacy of old ruling elites that had led their nations into a disastrous poorly run war.



Thompson the author of this book also outlines how the disaster of Italy's war effort led to the rise of fascism a few years later.

Many years ago, the late Barbara Tuchman published her last book. She had written a number of weighty tomes, dealing with everything from the 14 century to the World Wars. Her final book, though, was a collection of essays, titled "Practicing History". One of the essays in the book was a strong, passionate argument that historians didn't just need to learn to write history, they needed to learn to *write well*. I can still remember, after reading the book when I was in high school, being struck by the pithy observation that history wasn't any good if it was so poorly written that no one would read it. Whether he knows it or not, Mark Thompson has taken this advice to heart, and this is the first thing I wish to point out in this review: this is a well-written book, one of the best non-fiction battlefield narratives, in terms of writing style, that I've come across on many years. It's a really good book.

To top that off, it's about a subject that I suspect many military history buffs, like myself, know little or nothing about: the campaign that Italy fought in World War I. What I knew of this campaign was the 12 battles of the Isonzo (one for each day of Christmas!), Caporetto, Vitorio Veneto, and the fact that Erwin Rommel (later the famed Desert Fox of North Africa fame) and Mussolini were participants. Oh yeah, and the Hemingway novel, vaguely, though I'll confess I've never read it. Always meant to, but never got to it. The thing is, there's a lot more to the story than the above, and author Thompson spends a lot of time fleshing out the various maneuvers that led Italy to join the Allies rather than the Central Powers. It mainly came down to the fact that Italy's main aim, in the period post-1866, was to "redeem" various territories to its Northeast, in what was then Austria-Hungary and is now mostly Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Serbia. Italy was a relatively new country, in terms of it being a consolidated nation, having only unified finally in that fateful year of 1866, and some Italians had become very attached to the idea that *all* Italians should live within the borders of the nation of Italy. If they were outside those borders, then the borders should be moved, and if their neighbors weren't Italian...well they could be taught Italian and assimilated, persuaded to leave, or work as servants. This sentiment eventually led to the word "irredentist", which sounds like someone who works on your teeth, but is actually someone who holds this belief in a more general fashion--not just Italians, but Germans for instance and who knows who else. The word comes from the Italia Irredenta, the political party which was in favor of "redeeming" these Italians who lived outside Italy.

So Italy went to war on the side of the Allies. They did a terrible job preparing for the war (the army wasn't even equipped with hand grenades yet, and tools for cutting barbed wire were in short supply) and didn't mobilize before they declared war. As a result they only advanced a few miles across the border, and then began attacking across the Isonzo river. Over the next two and a half years they only managed to advance 4 miles, at best, and in some places the front moved not at all. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of soldiers were casualties during these campaigns, when the Italian chief general (an idiot named Cadorna) insisted on sending troops attacking right up the side of a cliff in some cases, in some of the most inhospitable terrain anyone has ever expected troops to fight in. There were parts of the front further north where the snow was on the ground all year round. The Italian army took a draconian view of soldiers' discipline and morale issues, and repeatedly resorted to what was termed "decimation", where the commanding officer would decide that a certain number of men in a particular unit needed to be executed, and they would be chosen by lot and then shot summarily. Only the Italian army did this during the war (even the Russians, normally the most brutal, never resorted to anything this indiscriminate) and they used it repeatedly. Cadorna was famously contemptuous of anyone who tried to show any empathy with the troops at all, insisting that the only way to get them to fight was to drive them into combat. The Italians used carabinieri (military police) posted behind attacking troops to "encourage" them to go forward. Again, they were pretty much unique in this regard. The Soviets did something similar during World War II, but that was later.

Because the battles of the Isonzo get so monotonous, the author chose (very wisely, in my view) to intersperse chapters on topical subjects (discipline, arts, politics, morale) between the narrative ones on the battles of the Isonzo. This breaks up the story into manageable parts, and makes the battles much more interesting. By the time you get to Caporetto, when the Italians were overwhelmed and almost driven from the war by a German-assisted Austrian offensive, the text is flying past you at lightning speed. You almost don't notice that those last two chapters are a hundred pages or so in length, combined.

I really enjoyed this book, in case I haven't made it clear yet. It's extremely well-written, covers a relatively obscure topic very well, and delineates all of the issues clearly. This book is highly recommended for those interested in World War I, Italy, military history in general, and frankly anyone interested in general history or even general non-fiction. It's a very good book.