Between 1915 and 1919 more than a million people were killed on the Italian-Austrian border fighting in conditions as unimaginably horrific as anything on the Somme, Passchendale and Verdun.  Yet while those names are still etched onto the collective consciousness the best part of a century later, the story of slaughter, heroism and sacrifice on the Italian Front remains largely untold. Mark Thompson succeeds so well in rectifying this anomaly that The White War can immediately take its place alongside the best of Keegan, Beevor, Gilbert and Overy in the front rank of histories of warfare in the 20th Century.

The conflict between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had its seeds in nineteenth century grand strategy. By 1915 Italy had been a country for less than 50 years, and had yet to fully define itself as a unified geographic, social or political entity.  Yet there had already been time enough for Italy to have been humiliated in its imperial and military ambitions and the new country lagged way behind other major European nations in industrial and military development.

As the First World War erupted Italy was actually an ally of Austria-Hungary but morbidly psychotic glory hunting factions surrounding the top of Italian society saw an opportunity to seize new territory and catapult Italy to the top table of European nations. What resulted was a virtual coup d’etat that meant Italy became the sole combatant of the Great War to explicitly fight for naked imperial expansion, without the merest hint  of a diplomatic slight or non reversible mobilisation timetable to serve as a fig leaf of an excuse.

The territory Italy coveted was chiefly made up of high mountain ridges, escarpments and passes, each of which would need to be taken by uphill frontal assault that in many places approached the vertical. Yet the Italian forces did not have modern equipment and if they were trained at all were not trained for modern warfare, let alone modern warfare in high mountain ranges.

The high command, in the form of General Luigi Cadorna, tried to make up for these defects, by substituting equipment and training with discipline and will power, even practising the arbitrary Roman punishment of decimation to instill blind obedience in his regiments. What followed were suicidal uphill assaults, shoulder to shoulder advances led by sword-brandishing officers against the well dug-in Austrians with their well dug-in machine guns. The results were predictable to all but the Italian High Command who then covered their mistake by throwing more and more soldiers into the fray backed by a litany of lies communicated to the nation via a supine press.

Impossible territory, deluded politicians, untrained officers, ill-equipped soldiers without even a language in common and a nation utterly unprepared for war – a perfect recipe for the disaster that followed, a disaster that was directly responsible for the rise of Fascism in Italy just four years after the end of the slaughter. This is no side show, but history red in tooth and claw at the heart of 20th century events and The White War is the book this story deserves. It is definitively authoritative, highly readable and hugely enjoyable modern history.

Bookmark to