 result of accepting the tempting offer in 1915 was a national tragedy for Italy, terrible losses in one of the most completely forgotten fronts of the War, the Italian front, in the most difficult terrain of the War.
The Border between Italy and Austria
Imagine fighting trench warfare, not on a flat plain, but on a vertical incline: that was the obscure “White War.” Aside from the absorbing recent book By Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919, one of the best articles on this calamity of Alpine combat appeared in the Smithsonian Magazine in 2016. “An estimated 600,000 Italians and 400,000 Austrians would die on the Italian Front, many of them in a dozen battles along the Isonzo River in the far northeast. But the front zigzagged 400 miles—nearly as long as the Western Front, in France and Belgium—and much of that crossed rugged mountains, where the fighting was like none the world had ever seen or has seen since,” stated author Brian Mockenhaupt. On the one-hundredth anniversary of the Great War, we are experiencing a global warming that is melting the ice and snow along the Italian-Austrian Alpine border and corpses have been uncovered and the entire landscape of tunnels and warfare in the mountains are now accessible. For the inhabitants of the twenty-first century, such sad remains speak of a futile conflict that brought nothing but catastrophe upon the Italians. The corpses, as described by Mochenhaupt, with blond hair and blue eyes still intact in the skull, are victims of misguided bravery for an impossible cause, but for the citizen of the previous century, a mere decade later, these unknown and buried fields of suffering were sites of unrecognized and unrewarded bravery.
For the Italians, the War could have been an opportunity to take its place as an important force in European politics, not just a backwater where history lived. Unfortunately, the heroism that was dreamed of was bogged down in the White War, where seizing the high ground was literally the name of the game. The Italians lost the advantage to the Austrians and from then on, their fate was probably sealed. The soldiers could just as easily die from avalanches–many deliberated caused by cannon fire—as from snipers lurking in the crevices of the rock face. Thus the only positive news about the Fronte italiano was that the fighting was far less than four years. As Alex Arbuckle described the carnage:
Fighting on the elevated, mountainous terrain posed unique challenges and hazards. Troops often had to scale sheer cliff faces to reach enemy positions. Maintaining supply lines was a constant struggle. The rocky terrain made artillery shells even deadlier. Whereas the soft earth of the Western Front absorbed much of the shrapnel and concussive force of a shell, the brittle rock of the Italian Front shattered into vicious splinters, leading to 70 percent higher casualties per round. With overly confident commanders sending inexperienced soldiers into fruitless massacres, morale on the Italian side plummeted. Pope Benedict XV condemned the war as “horrible carnage that dishonors Europe,” thousands of soldiers deserted and peasants refused conscription orders..The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo in August 1916 resulted in modest Italian gains and slightly buoyed spirits, but was soon followed by more battles of brutal attrition and no winners. Even the smallest gains in territory had to be abandoned when supply lines failed to keep up..On Dec. 13, 1916, 10,000 men were buried by avalanches..In October 1917, exhausted Austro-Hungarian forces were reinforced by German troops and utterly routed the Italians at the Battle of Caporetto, pushing them back with poison gas and Germany’s newly-developed infiltration tactics. The Italians’ retreat was halted as Allied troops and materials came to their aid. When Germany sent its troops back to the Western Front, the Austro-Hungarians found themselves stalemated once again.
These terrible struggles over a strip of contested border land dragged on until the Hungarian-Austrian Empire col