Saturday,
September 06, 2008
Book: "The White War" - The
Italy-Austrian Front in WWI
The
ANNOTICO Report
For
too long there has been a fatuous contempt for the Italian soldier in
Anglophone countries, largely as a result of systemic Italian failures during
the Second World War, which Allied propaganda played up.
The
truth is that Italians were tough and hardy, and on many occasions fought with
a bravery to match any soldier in the world. It takes more courage, not less,
to enter battle with obsolete, second-rate equipment and an inept doctrine. Far
too many people forget that, during the First World War,
September
6, 2008
Jon Latimer on life and death on the Italian front
For too long there has been a fatuous contempt for the Italian soldier in Anglophone countries, largely as a result of systemic Italian failures during the Second World War, which Allied propaganda played up.
The truth is that Italians were
tough and hardy, and on many occasions fought with a bravery to match any
soldier in the world. It takes more courage, not less, to enter battle with
obsolete, second-rate equipment and an inept doctrine. Far too many people
forget that, during the First World War,
Mark Thompson has addressed a gap in our understanding with this study of the Italian front, written largely from the Italian perspective. He begins by addressing motivation for joining the war: mainly self-interest and the dream of "redeeming" lands from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
However, the demands of bourgeois nationalists were of little concern to the peasantry, and no one told them why they had to fight and die in such numbers; government and press lied to them, they were under-paid, under-equipped and under-fed.
For most Italians, the war was "an experience marked by brutality, contempt, corruption and oppression".
The dominating figure was the chief of general staff, General Luigi Cadorna, a man of colossal arrogance who cared not a fig for his men, and regarded his abilities as verging on the Napoleonic, despite his only method being to deploy as many troops along as broad a sector as possible, in the hope that the Austrian lines would crack somewhere.
Egged on by nationalists, he
attacked again and again along the Isonzo valley, in
a vain attempt to reach
How he retained control for so long can be traced to the mixture of militarism and nationalism that took Italy into the war, and presaged the rise to power of Benito Mussolini shortly afterwards.
For if the war itself was tragic
then, as one survivor recalled: "Everything we hated about
Our view of the war has been
framed by British poets but Italian experiences affected their national
consciousness quite differently. This
is partly due to political developments, for the sense of
If today
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/09/06/botho106.xml
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