The Italian front was the Italian theater of operations of World War I, which began with the Kingdom of Italy's declaration of war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915, and concluded with the cessation of hostilities on 6 November 1918, five days before the Central Powers signed an armistice with the Entente powers in France. The campaign was marked by attritional warfare between the Italian and Austrian armies, who fought twelve battles at the Isonzo River. Millions of Italian peasant soldiers, fighting under a nationalist high command and Piedmontese officers who did not share their regional dialects, charged into battle with poor training and inferior equipment, being used as cannon fodder in pointless assaults on Austro-Hungarian positions manned by Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Romanians. Rigor and order was maintained in the Italian trenches through harassment by officers, shootings by the Carabinieri, and exemplary punishments, resulting in mass demoralization. In spite of several costly battles, most notably the disastrous Battle of Caporetto in 1917, Italy was formally a victor in the war, acquiring South Tyrol, Trentino, Istria, and Trieste from Austria-Hungary. However, the Royal Italian Army's mass demobilization amid an economic crisis exacerbated social conditions in Italy and resulted in a period of revolution known as the "Biennio Rosso" (the "Two Red Years" of 1919-1920), during which time disgruntled war veterans - embittered by the war and by Italy's meagre gains at its end - played a major role in the rise of the National Fascist Party.
History[]
Prior to the outbreak of World War I, Italy was nominally allied to the German Empire and Austria-Hungary under the "Triple Alliance" treaty of 1882. However, Italian nationalism and irridentism had taken root in the country's political elite starting in the 1880s and peaking in the 1910s, and the irridentist movement sought to annex the Austrian Littoral along the Adriatic Sea, northern Dalmatia, and Trentino and South Tyrol in the Alps, where 45% of the 1.5 million-strong population were Italian-speakers. With the outbreak of World War I, the Entente powers of Britain and France attempted to secure Italy's participation in the war, and Prime Minister Antonio Salandra - encouraged by Russia's victories against the Austro-Hungarians in the Carpathians, ultimately agreed. On 26 April 1915, Italy signed the Treaty of London, renouncing her obligations to the Triple Alliance, and, on 23 May, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary.
At the start of the campaign, the Royal Italian Army outnumbered its Austro-Hungarian opponents by a margin of three-to-one, but, in June-July 1915, the Italian offensive at the First Battle of the Isonzo was fought to a stalemate, setting the stage for three years of failed and deadly offensives at the Isonzo River. Twelve battles were fought at the Isonzo River, with the final, also called the Battle of Caporetto (24 October-19 November 1917), resulting in the German-reinforced Austro-Hungarian army advancing 93 miles into Italy and reaching the Piave River. In May 1916, aiming to break the stalemate in Veneto, the Austro-Hungarians launched the Trentino offensive, but, after some initial successes, the Austro-Hungarian offensive was repulsed and the Italians advanced into South Tyrol. The failure of the Russian Kerensky Offensive of 1917 enabled the Imperial German Army to redeploy 5 divisions from the Eastern Front to support the faltering Austro-Hungarian armies, resulting in the victory at Caporetto, but the new Italian commander, Armando Diaz, halted the Italian retreat at the fortified defenses around the Monte Grappa summit. The Austro-Hungarian advance led to the Austro-Hungarians outrunning their supply lines; by November 1917, Italy had also lost 600,000 men in battle, forcing them to call up the Ragazzi del '99 ("1899 boys"), a new class of conscripts who had just turned 18. They were reinforced by 3 British and 2 French divisions, and Germany's withdrawal of its divisions from the Italian front to take part in the Spring Offensive of 1918 enabled the Italians to launch a massive counteroffensive against the Austro-Hungarians at the Second Battle of the Piave River in June 1918. The Italians suffered heavy losses, but they pressed their offensive in October 1918 after receiving reinforcements (including American troops and Czechoslovak defectors), resulting in the decisive Battle of Vittorio Veneto. On 31 October, the Italian army launched a full-scale attack; that same day, Hungary declared its independence from Austria-Hungary, having already been preceded by Czechoslovakia, Croatia, and Slovenia. On 3 November, 300,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers surrendered, and the Italian army concurrently entered Trento and Trieste. That same day, the Austro-Hungarians concluded an armistice with the Allied command in Paris, and Austria and Hungary signed separate treaties with the Allies. From 5 to 6 November, the Italians occupied Lissa (Vis), Lagosta (Lastovo), and Sebenico (Sibenik) on the Dalmatian coast, as well as Innsbruck and all Tyrol.
The Italian front left 834 Italian senior officers and generals, 16,872 junior officers, 16,302 non-commissioner officers, and 497,103 enlisted men killed in action, 257,418 of whom were Northern Italians, 117,480 Central Italians, and 156,251 Southern Italians. Austria-Hungary lost 4,538 officers and 150,812 enlisted men killed in action. As Austria-Hungary withdrew from the Eastern Front and focused its attention on Italy, the percentage of its World War I casualties lost in Italy rose from 18% in 1915 to 41% in 1916, 64% in 1917, and 84% in 1918.
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