Abstract
It is a truism that Italy’s experience of the First World War has been neglected in English-language scholarship, certainly in comparison to other Great Powers such as France and Germany. This has been as true of the military history of the war as of other fields of research. With this long-overdue study of the Italian army, published to coincide with the war’s centenary as part of Cambridge University Press’ Armies of the Great War series, John Gooch has taken an important step towards rectifying this omission.
Gooch has previously analysed the Italian armed forces before the war (Army, State and Society in Italy 1870–1915, Macmillan, 1989) and in the years after it (Mussolini and His Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922–1940, Cambridge University Press, 2007) with two works which analysed not only the internal dynamics of the armed forces but their relationship with civilian authorities, policymaking and wider society. This approach also shapes The Italian Army and the First World War, with the result that a good deal of broader political, social and even cultural history finds its way into the volume. Gooch synthesizes a vast range of material with concision, ranging from the causes and origins of Italian intervention into the war through to its social and political legacies, though the strongest sections are those on the war years themselves, where the analysis relies on extensive original research in the archives of the historical office of the Italian General Staff.
The book is arranged chronologically, beginning with pre-war military planning and an astute critique of military culture in Liberal Italy, before proceeding through neutrality and intervention and then a year-by-year narrative of the army’s endeavours. Analysis of the major battles is interspersed with thoughtful assessments of Italian strategy, doctrine, training, weaponry, equipment, discipline and more besides, to provide a comprehensive assessment of the army’s performance. While not downplaying the failures and inadequacies shown on many occasions, Gooch clearly emphasizes the enormous difficulties the army faced: a recent history of colonial embarrassments had damaged military confidence, the majority of recruits were unenthusiastic, the industrial base of the country was wholly unprepared for the rigours of modern war, and above all the terrain in which operations took place was among the most challenging of all European theatres of the war.
The figure who looms largest in this story, unsurprisingly, is Luigi Cadorna, Chief of General Staff from 1914–17, long a controversial figure within Italy. Gooch does not hesitate to condemn his ‘irascibility and paranoia’, describing him as ‘difficult, opinionated, quarrelsome and highly sensitive to any slights, real or imagined’ (pp.54–5). At the same time he gives credit where it is due, acknowledging Cadorna’s great bureaucratic talents, and avoiding the stereotyped depictions to which the Italian general has often been subjected. While it is clear that Comando Supremo was in many ways inadequately prepared for the war and learned lessons only slowly – especially on the Isonzo front, where 11 very similar offensives were launched between 1915 and 1917 – Cadorna was operating in the most challenging of circumstances. When he was replaced after the Italian humiliation at Caporetto in 1917, the new commander Armando Diaz ushered in ‘a revolution in military affairs, invisible to outsiders’ (p.247). His greatest reforms came in the management of morale, an area consistently neglected if not actively undermined by his predecessor, and one of critical importance to the effectiveness of the army.
A change of leadership could not fix everything. Many of the Italian army’s flaws were due to deep-seated structural problems which could not easily be solved in wartime, while the problems of climate, terrain and industrial weakness were impossible to overcome. Gooch suggests that the army fought as well as might be expected under these circumstances, and perhaps even better. He rightly emphasizes the importance of the Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto in 1918, which showed considerable improvements in performance including significant successes for the Arditi (storm troopers) and the air force. To salvage the much-besmirched reputation of the twentieth-century Italian army would be a vast undertaking which Gooch carefully sidesteps, but specialists and general readers alike will come away from this excellent work with a finely nuanced and balanced view of the true strengths and weaknesses of the Italian army in the First World War.