The White War

by Mark Thompson

  Under Mussolini, the myth of a military strike was discouraged; it undermined the Fascists’ very different myth of the war as the foundation of modern Italy, a blood rite that re-created the nation. The fact of defeat at Caporetto had to be swallowed: a sour pill that could be sweetened by blaming the government’s weakness. Fascist accounts of the Twelfth Battle tended to whitewash Cadorna and defend the honour of the army (‘great even in misfortune’) while incriminating Capello and indicting the government in Rome for tolerating defeatists, profiteers and bourgeois draft-dodgers. Boselli (‘tearful helmsman of the ship of state’) and his successor Orlando were particularly lampooned. One valiant historian in the 1930s turned the narrative of defeat inside out by hailing Caporetto as a deliberate trap set and sprung by Cadorna, ‘the greatest strategist of our times’. The Duce himself called Caporetto ‘a reverse’ that was ‘absolutely military in nature’, produced by ‘an initial tactical success of the enemy’. Britain and France could also be condemned for recalling, in early October 1917, most of the 140 guns they had lent Cadorna earlier in the year. Even so, the defeat was not to be examined too closely. When Colonel Gatti wanted to write a history of Caporetto, in 1925, Mussolini granted access to the archives in the Ministry of War. Then he had second thoughts; summoning Gatti to Rome, he said it was a time for myths, not history. After 1945, leftist historians argued that large parts of the army had indeed ‘gone on strike’, not due to cowardice or socialism, but as a spontaneous rebellion against the war as it was led by Cadorna and the government.

  That primal fear of dissolution survives in metaphor. Corruption scandals are still branded ‘a moral Caporetto’. Politicians accuse each other of facing an ‘electoral Caporetto’. When small businesses are snarled up in Italy’s notorious red tape, they complain about an ‘administrative Caporetto’. When England lost to Northern Ireland at football, it was ‘the English Caporetto’. This figure of speech stands for more than simple defeat; it involves a hint of stomach-churning exposure – rottenness laid bare.

  Source Notes

  TWENTY-FIVE Caporetto: The Flashing Sword of Vengeance

  1 the greatest army in Italy since the Caesars: Rocca, 3.

  2 ‘re-establish the links’: Strachan, 182.

  3 Russians discovered other elements: Stevenson, 165.

  4 ‘crumbling or incomplete’: Griffith. See also, 53–7, 59–64, 97–100, 194, 196.

  5 recognised a century earlier by Napoleon: Reynolds, 241.

  6 ‘as bad as could be imagined’: Ludendorff, 212.

  7 the attack should proceed along the valley floors: Weber, 378.

  8 over a six-day period, to avoid alerting: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 16.

  9 ‘in excellent spirits’: Gatti [1997], 196.

  10 ‘as if the mountains themselves’: Krafft von Dellmensingen, quoted by Pavan, 104.

  11 ‘our offensive intentions’: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 37.

  12 ‘the thunderbolt of the counter-offensive’: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 39.

  13 Cadorna unambiguously rejected: According to Gatti’s diary for 20 October. Gatti [1997], 196.

  14 fewer than half of the division’s battalions: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 41.

  15 saw soldiers at their posts: Comisso, 301.

  16 ‘to the point of cretinism’: Roscioni, 135.

  17 ‘that stuttering idiot of a King’: Dombroski, 27.

  18 he had let another officer take: Gorni, 163.

  19 the last Italian veteran of the Twelfth Battle: From the ‘Cime e trincee’ website http://www.cimeetrincee.it/delfino.htm, accessed June 2007. Also: Paolo Rumiz, ‘Quei maledetti giorni che vissi a Caporetto’, La Repubblica, 24 May 2005; Bultrini & Casarola; Elena Percivaldi, interview with Borroni, October 2004, ‘In Memoriam’ website, http://blog.libero.it/grandeguerra1418/, accessed June 2007.

  20 they start throwing away their rifles: Frescura, 249.

  21 ‘to welcome their German liberators’: Krafft von Dellmensingen, quoted by Pavan, 111.

  22 ‘The country has the right to know’: De Simone, 38.

  23 ‘finds us strong and well prepared’: Gatti [1997], 202.

  24 ‘Napoleon himself could not’: Gatti [1997], 204.

  25 They walk the plank: Ungarelli, 29–48.

  26 ‘The men are not fighting’: De Simone, 45.

  27 ‘Why doesn’t someone shoot them?’: De Simone, 58

  28 ‘infantry, alpini, gunners, endlessly’: Frescura, 254–253.

  29 ‘the panic blast ran through’: Winthrop Young, 322, 323.

  30 ‘in good order, unbroken and undefeated’: Quotations from Lt. Hugh Dalton, then serving with a British battery that was retreating with the Third Army. Dalton, 110, 108.

  31 as if they had found the solution: De Simone. From Freya Stark’s diary, 29 October: ‘Only the officers look unhappy about the war.’

  32 ‘Then we’re going too,’ someone said: De Simone, 75.

  33 not ‘very vigorous in combat’: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 140.

  34 affirmations of complete confidence: Gatti [1997], 212.

  35 ‘almost deserted with broken windows’: Wilks & Wilks [2001], 121.

  36 ‘After five days of fighting’: De Simone, 98.

  37 ‘This is how he repays your valour!’: Cicchino & Olivo, 233–4.

  38 ‘The wooden bridge was nearly’: Hemingway, 234.

  39 ‘Anger was washed away’: Hemingway, 242.

  40 Ludendorff was not yet convinced: On 3 November, Ludendorff stated that the River Piave had to be the final objective of the offensive. Stevenson, 379.

  41 ‘The Italians seem a wretched people’: Winter, 26.

  42 ‘ablaze from end to end’: From the diary of Giuseppina Bauzon, of Versa, quoted by Fabi [1991b], 108.

  43 ready to trust their troops to the bravery of the Italian soldiers but: Sonnino’s diary, quoted by Morselli.

  44 ‘At the last the great victory’: Hindenburg, 287.

  45 Krauss accused Boroević: Rothenberg [1976], 208.

  46 ‘the annihilating mentality’: Pieri [1986], 355.

  47 these works were hardly in hand: Pieri [1986], 315.

  48 loathed his tall, handsome cousin: Bosworth [1979], 15.

  49 land, home, family and honour – in that order: Minniti, 31.

  50 he once explained to the King: De Simone, 96.

  51 ‘almost nobody remembered’: Cadorna [1967].

  52 a fist punching through a barrier: Weber, 382.

  53 ‘a shaped charge’: Ullman & Wade. Available at http://www.dodccrp.org/files/pdf/Ullman_Shock.pdf, accessed in May 2007.

  54 Probably he was scoring points: This is Isnenghi’s argument in Cimprič.

  55 parroted the conspiracy theory: Cornwall [2000], 44.

  56 ‘contributed to the disaster’: Buchan, 326.

  57. For a recent contention that ‘a widespread attitude of defeatism’ was partly responsible for Caporetto, see Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 44. Dunnage, however, concedes that ‘bad military leadership and training were equally to blame’.

  58 ‘The fate of Italy is being decided’: Minniti, 106.

  59 many officials believed: Procacci [1999], 134.

  60 the essence of Caporetto lay: Isnenghi & Rochat, 396.

  61 ‘a people of stragglers’: Revelli.

  62 ‘great even in misfortune’: Piazzoni.

  63 One valiant historian: Fabio Todero [1999]. The historian was Fernando Agnoletti.

  64 ‘a reverse’: Preface to Alberti.

  65 it was a time for myths, not history: Gatti [1997], xii.

  66 a spontaneous rebellion against the war: De Simone, 46

  1 Gadda served on the eastern Carso in August 1916, when Ungaretti was on Mount San Michele. It is as if James Joyce and T. S. Eliot – equivalent innovators in English prose and poetry – both volunteered, fought on the Somme, and survived.

  2 Badoglio’s promotion less than a fortnight after a
bandoning his command and his corps disintegrated, leading to the suicide of two generals, has never been fully explained. The records of XXVII Corps were lost in the retreat and, uniquely among senior commanders, he never publicly discussed his role. Criticism at his expense was dropped from the report of the official commission of inquiry into the causes of Caporetto, published in 1919; this was General Diaz’s reward for Badoglio’s efficient performance as his deputy in 1918. The deleted chapter has not been recovered; presumably it was mislaid during Badoglio’s long tenure as chief of the general staff (1924–40). Badoglio, limitlessly vain, was also a Marshal of Italy, the Marquis of Sabotino, the first Viceroy of Ethiopia and Duke of Addis Ababa, and Prime Minister (1943–44).

  3 Cadorna spent his retirement writing mendacious memoirs, a biography of his father, and sparring with his critics in print. He died in 1928, a month after the tenth anniversary of Italy’s victory, when ‘almost nobody remembered that I’m still alive … I am supremely indifferent,’ he wrote, self-deceiving to the last.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Resurrection

  Troops are never in better spirits for fighting

  than when they have to wipe out a stain

  CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

  The new lines had settled by the end of the year. From the Swiss border to the Asiago plateau, the front was unchanged. From Asiago to the sea, it now ran east to Mount Grappa, then swung south-eastwards for 130 kilometres along the River Piave. Fortunately for Diaz, defeat had cropped 170 kilometres from the front: otherwise his much-reduced army might not have blocked the last Austro-German thrusts at the Piave line.

  The German guns were transferred to the Western Front during November, followed in mid-December by the troops. The Austrians were on their own again. Not so the Italians, who benefited from several Allied divisions and their batteries: 130,000 French and 110,000 British troops by the end of the year, deployed as a strategic reserve. Other Allied support in the form of munitions, shipping and extra loans ensured that coal and food shortages did not become acute.

  Arriving from France and Flanders, the British soldiers were touched by their warm welcome. Battalions of the Royal Fusiliers were greeted at Ventimiglia with ‘extravagant fervour’, ‘showered with carnations, and barrels of wine stood waiting for them at the official welcoming ceremony’. After the dull tones of Flanders, the Britons were captivated by the scenery. Moving along the Riviera to Genoa, Gunner James Blackburn (197th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery) gazed at the ‘red tiled roofs, pale pink and pale green buildings, the blue sky, green fields, greener trees and hedgerows’. The longest-lived British veteran to serve in Italy was Gunner Alfred Finnigan, who in 2005 still remembered the ‘absolute joy’ of seeing the Mediterranean and the sun in December. The Italians, too, were fascinating: the carabinieri on Monte Carlo station who conjured oranges from under their capes, and the shopkeeper in Genoa who ‘danced with delight’ when she saw the Tommies and, having nothing else, gave away straw hats.

  Some, like Captain L. Ferguson (1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment), felt embarrassed by the largesse – ‘we found the troops getting pelted with oranges and figs’ – and distributed corned beef and biscuits to the children around the train. After the dismal sight of Italian soldiers begging for bread at Verona station, he was cheered to meet some alpini who spoke enough English to blame southerners for Caporetto and to promise that ‘the armies now have no idea of retreating an inch more’.

  To Major Arthur Acland (Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry), the land up to the Piave was ‘flatter than you would think it possible for any country to be’. South of Mount Grappa, where the Piave emerged onto the plains, the river flowed to the sea in tresses or braids along a wide stony course, around low islets of shingle and boulders, sometimes topped with scrubby vegetation. In spate, the Piave was several kilometres wide in some places, ‘a mighty expanse of water’. In summer, it could safely be waded. A river that rose and fell by a metre or more in a day was a tricky proposition for bridging engineers.

  The soft muddy banks of the Piave presented other problems after Carso limestone. Water constantly seeped into the trenches, which collapsed without constant revetting. The men appreciated the distance between the front lines, but keeping healthy was another challenge; it was almost impossible to stay dry, and the swamps on the lower Piave were malarial. Things were easier further from the sea. Acland’s division was deployed on a whaleback hill called the Montello, ‘some seven miles long, broadening to four miles at its widest and rising to about 800 feet, a pleasant hill, covered with vineyards and cultivated fields, interspersed with small woods … The northern slopes fell steeply to the river bank, above which they towered like cliffs.’ This was the last Alpine ripple before the maritime plain, and it gave good observation of the enemy lines. The Tommies liked the posting; by day, they strengthened the communications and defences on the hill; by night, they ‘played in the waters of the Piave’. The Indian summer days were hot, the nights bitingly clear, and there was ample wood to burn. Christmas Day was so warm that ‘we could sit around with our shirts off to deal with our vermin’. The rear lines were of poor quality, but it hardly seemed to matter: the enemy showed no intention of attacking again, and Allied planes controlled the sky. All in all, ‘it was such a gorgeous rest after Flanders’. Until Haig recalled two of the five British divisions at the end of February, the main challenge, much of the time, was to keep the men busy.

  The British troops only knew the Italians had taken a hard knock, not how close they had come to collapse or the scale of the task facing Diaz, who had to consolidate the new line with only 33 intact divisions, half the number before Caporetto. His priorities were to restore discipline, rebuild disintegrated units, then raise morale. The first task was unexpectedly straightforward. The fear early in November that the army might unravel had passed by the end of the month. After the front settled in December, Diaz rounded up the soldiers who had dispersed, resurrecting 25 infantry divisions and more than 30 artillery regiments by the end of February 1918. Some of the men who were judged less reliable were sent to serve in labour units in France. He restructured his forces into six armies, none of them unmanageably huge as Capello’s Second Army had been. He reinstated the organic connection between divisional infantry and their artillery. Taking a leaf out of the German book, he devolved more operational decision-making authority to lower levels. Training and equipment were improved.

  At the Supreme Command, Diaz restored responsibility to the competent offices, decentralising the authority that Cadorna had gathered in his fist. The Operations Office could play its proper part for the first time. A network of liaison officers ensured a flow of information between the Supreme Command and the front-line units. Badoglio became a trusted and effective deputy, not a stuffed shirt as General Porro had been. Although he had never been interested in politics, or perhaps because of this, Diaz’s attitude to the state authorities was co-operative without being submissive. He lunched with the King twice a week and met the Prime Minister several times a month. He had no objection to the formation of a war committee inside the cabinet, and was always ready to brief politicians.

  Diaz’s strategic priority was purely defensive, so he did not need to devise offensive tactics. On the other hand, he could not yield any ground: if the Piave line broke, the Italians would probably lose Venice, Padua and Vicenza – the whole of the Veneto, maybe more. Also, he faced an imminent shortage of manpower; after the class of 1899 was drafted at the end of 1917, he had only the 260,000-strong class of 1900 (called up in February) as a reserve for the following year. Diaz knew that his overall strength would probably decline over the coming months, and that substantial losses could not be made good.

  In the first months of 1918, while the rear defences were prepared behind Venice, Diaz tested his army by launching limited operations to strengthen the crucial sector between the Asiago plateau and Mount Grappa. Involving the specialist assault teams called arditi, these o
perations succeeded well enough to raise the army’s self-confidence. Otherwise, he would not be drawn into offensive action before he was ready. When General Foch, as Allied Supreme Commander, hard-pressed by the German spring offensives, implored Diaz to launch a diversionary action in May, he refused.

  Diaz took steps to reform the conditions and treatment of his men. In December 1917, the rations were increased and made more varied. Pay was increased. Canteens were placed near the front, selling food and useful goods at discounted prices. Annual leave was raised from 15 to 25 days, and older draft classes were granted extra leave to work their land. All soldiers were provided with free insurance policies, and death benefits were paid to the families without delay. From May 1918, soldiers’ families in hardship could apply for emergency relief. As for discipline, Diaz did not repeal Cadorna’s rulings; he simply forbore to use his most savage methods. There would be no more decimations.

  He took a rational approach to military morale. Although morale was seen as the key to victory, the men had been expected to supply their own. Under Diaz, the soldiers’ attitude to the war – hitherto a vast neglected hinterland – became a bright arena, crowded with officers taking notes. An internal report in November and December 1917 found that the men were physically inert and morally apathetic; their letters home proved that they did not identify with the war and its aims; while there was no organised anti-war propaganda, passivity and resignation were widespread. Many of them believed rumours that the government would sue for peace before the year was out. There was no conviction that the war was necessary and must be won.

  Against this alarming background, Diaz issued directives and guidelines on vigilance, propaganda and care for the troops. Propa ganda would be channelled through newspapers, posters and leaflets, theatre and cinema. Meetings should be organised to learn the men’s views and to impart ‘a healthy, fortifying word’. Each army should have its own newspaper, with a humorous angle on army life, written by the men themselves where possible. ‘Care’ referred to material and moral wellbeing, such as hygienic accommodation and palatable rations. ‘The best system for fighting anti-war propaganda’, Diaz stated, ‘is the elimination, as far as possible, of the causes of discontent.’ This approach was unthinkable before Caporetto.