1917 October 24:The battle of Caporetto begins.
By that time, World War I had been slogging along in Europe for almost three years with little to show for it other than senseless slaughter of a generation of young men and a spate of patriotic and morale-boosting songs. The war on the Western front (essentially France and Belgium) for the past few years had degenerated into a contest between the homicidal maniacs on the Allied side (France, Britain and recently the US) and their counterparts from the Central Powers (Primarily Germany) to see how many of their troops they could slaughter by pitting flesh against machine guns in a futile attempt to gain a few yard of militarily worthless ground, a strategy a grammar school child could soon recognize as silly. While both Britain, France and Germany were gradually exhausting themselves by the horrendous loss of manpower and material, the interjection by the US of an almost unlimited supply of cannon fodder and war material, although not actually altering the war on the ground, prompted the German High Command, which in general was smarter than their counterparts among the allies, to realize that they will exhaust their men and material sooner than their opponents.
The southern flank of the war was fought basically by Italy on behalf of the Allies and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on behalf of the Central Powers. It was somewhat more mobile, but no less wasteful of men and material and if it were at all possible conducted by general staffs even more homicidal and less competent that their Western and Germanic allies.
Caporetto: Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany) administers a divisive defeat to the Italian Army (a member of the Allied forces, Britain, France and the US).
The Italian commander Marshal Luigi Cadorna prepared for the battle by sacking 217 generals, 255 colonels and 355 battalion commanders. He also believed that soldiers fought better out of fear than out of commitment resulting in his troops intense hatred of him. He assembled his forces in a defensive line with no mobile reserves.
Consequently, when the Central Powers launched the world’s first blitzkrieg there were no forces to move into action at the point of the breakthrough. Finally, he firmly believed that the place for a general was far enough behind the lines to be safely out of danger and mobile enough to be able to retreat faster than the rest of his army.
As a result, the Italian army dissolved, losing over 300,000 men. Marshall Luigi was fired instead of shot, which only proves how much better it is to be a member of the ruling class than say a trooper who Marshall Luigi would have had shot for faltering in an advance into the throat of machine-gun fire. Over 250,000 Italian troops immediately surrendered as soon as the enemy blitzkrieg broke through their lines probably due as much to Marshall Luigi's theories of military discipline as to his martial acumen.
Ernest Hemingway in his novel “A Farewell to Arms,” immortalized this infamous battle.
Following the disastrous defeat and collapse of the Italian Army at Caporetto the supreme commander of the Italian military forces was cashiered and a new general staff put in place.
Battle of the Piave River
The Italian army was reconstituted with troops and officers from other parts of Italy and rushed north to the River Piave, a few miles from Venice, to form a defensive line about 140 kilometers west of Caporetto. The Piave was a river on a semi-arid outwash plain and drained the Dolomites, and the foothills to the Alps.
Rejecting advice that the Italian forces retreat even further south, the new Italian general in charge, Armando Diaz, believed that the Austro-Hungarian troops were exhausted from their rapid advance from Caporetto. Their supply lines he reasoned were stretched so thin that along with the effects of the Allied blockade of Germany’s ports, the supply of men and material to the army of the Central Powers in the quantity necessary for a prolonged campaign was effectively limited. In addition, the Piave River bed was generally a wide stoney empty expanse providing clear sight lines and with the river bisecting it, it seemed to him a relatively strong position to defend.
Between their horrendous defeat at Caporetto and the stabilization of the new defensive line on the south bank of the Piave River, the italian high command decided that the strategy of driving the troops into battle through fear (by, for example, shooting any trooper who waivers during a charge) was not working and instituted the tried and true motivation for young men to risk death: an abstraction, in this case patriotism. So, learning from their allies, they cranked up their propaganda forces, directed it at their own people and managed to assemble a new army, slightly more willing to die.
A little side note as to why the Italian government was so obsessed by this stretch of terrain, after all it was mountainous and arid and at that time produced little more than emigrants. The reason was that about 60 years or so prior to this the movement to reunify Italy (although there never had been an “Italy” to re unify) called the “Risorgimento,” envisioned the historical Italy to include everything up to the crest of the Alps and for some the Tyrol beyond. It also included western Slovenia where many so-called ethnic italians resided*. Apparently the idea was to restore some semblance of ethnic homogeneity (although the people of the peninsular were anything but homogeneous and to this day have little in common with each other except corrupt governance) and restore some aspect of the Roman Empire (although the old Romans never let anything as puny as the Alps stop them).
Also the people in this area were in constant rebellion against the efficient tax collection administration of the Austro-Hungarians, preferring the culture of tax evasion endemic to Italian society.
Anyway, Diaz, the Allied commander, rather than attack, gambled on the Central Powers exhausting themselves assaulting his increasingly strong defensive position. The Austro-Hungarian Central Command recognized that by waiting it would only give the Italians time to strengthen themselves further, struck on June 1918 attempting to force a crossing of the river. The blitz failed with their already stretched forces losing 100,000 more men.
Vittorio Veneto
Diaz had prepared a counter-attack should the assault by the Imperial Armies falter. On October 24, 1918, (exactly one year from the commencement of the festivities at Caporetto), the strengthened Allied Army punched, across the river and a few days later decisively defeated the Austro-Hungarian army near the town of Veneto. (Veneto was later reamed Vittorio Veneto in honor or the victory and the date made into on one of Italy’s major patriotic holidays and doomed several generations of Italian men to bear the name Vittorio.)
That same day, following the defeat of their army, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed with Austria and Hungary forming their own national states and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia declaring independence.
The Imperial forces that had lost between 300,000-500,000 men, split in two like their countries and signed an armistice on November 3. The Imperial commander requested that the Italians terminate their advance since the Imperial Armies had already laid down their arms. The Italians were having none of that. They realized they were faced with an opponent that a military leader could only dream about, a non-existent army for a non-existent nation, and promptly advanced, occupied the Tyrol and Western Slovenia and settled down to await developments elsewhere.
The War Ends
The German Empire, beset with internal disorder and already contemplating ending the war by years end, saw its southern front dissolve almost over-night. They recognized that shifting a portion of their already beleaguered troops from the Western Front to protect their southern border spelled disaster on both fronts. The country's political leadership desperately wanted to be able to tell the German people that their country had not been invaded and German arms remained strong. Unfortunately with the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Army, avoidance of invasion of the homeland by the allies could not be delayed much longer. Germany sued for peace two weeks later.
Although, the history books in the United States (and to some extent Britain and France as well) appear to claim that almost magically the sudden appearance of American troops in France futilely flinging their bodies on to German barbed wire caused the Germans to surrender in terror, it was the internal turmoil in the country caused by the conflict and the defection of many of their allies combined with the collapse of the Southern Front that prompted the German high command to recognize at that moment that further resistance was futile.
*(Note, these final two paragraphs ends in bitter sarcasm. A warning to those confirmed literalists who are unable to distinguish cynical disgust from from affirmation.)
As a footnote to the Horrors of War, a little less than 30 years later, after the collapse of the Italian Fascist State during World War II in 1943, the Yugoslav Army under Marshall Tito marched into Western Slovenia and cleansed it of its ethnic italian population by shooting those who had not fled their homes in terror. In order I guess to save bullets, those unfortunates who surrendered or were otherwise captured (about 20,000 in all) were tied together and marched to the mouths of several deep mine shafts where the first few were shot and toppled into the mine shaft pulling the rest of the wretches in with them.
Given the brutal imagination applied to ethnic cleansing by peoples everywhere (e.g., Throwing smallpox blankets into Native American towns, or slaughtering those Irish unwilling to die of starvation in Connaught, or machine gunning the Greek and Armenian residents who failed to depart their two thousand-year old ancestral homes quickly enough and so on) one wonders if gas chambers were, if no less horrid, considered more effective by the ever efficient Germans. After all, some of the Italians crawled out of the mines, a few Indians survived and some people were always able to fake their death if the bullets missed. Since genocide and ethnic cleansing seems to me to be a major preoccupation of humanity less satisfying only than the senseless slaughter of their own youth, perhaps someone can propose a treaty in which only ethnic cleansing by lethal injection would be allowed.