Nicola Labanca and Oswald Übregger
Ed. Il Mulino
pp. 379
For Italy and for the Italians the First World War was for countless verses the Italian-Arian war that, compared to the Great War (1914 - 1918), "covers a minor span and extension: chronologically only the 1915 - 1918 and geographically above all, if not really, the karstic-alpine-Trentino front." One hundred years later, this volume collects the writings of a dozen scholars of the two nations involved, thus giving rise to "an Italian and Austrian transnational project aimed at examining, studying and overcoming nationalisms and national approaches of the past. A century after the 1914, and at least among historians and historians, the time of nationalisms should be over. "
With the assassination of the successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne - Archduke Francesco Ferdinando - by some young people of Serbian origin, Vienna had the pretext "for a rendering of the general accounts, long sought after, with the near Serbian restlessness, which through nationalistic action threatened to destabilize the order in the southern Slavic provinces of the monarchy. "
The declaration of war against Serbia of 28 July 1914 promptly caused a shortage of male labor for domestic production in Austria, as millions of men left for the front. "In the primary sector, horses and animals were missing from the army requirements, fertilizer production was reduced in favor of that of explosives."
Italy, which in the 1882 had fired a defensive alliance with Germany and Austria (the Triple Alliance), was not at all questioned at the time of the war declaration to Serbia, and remained neutral because "Austria-Hungary did not come attacked by Serbia but declared itself war on that state. " In return for its neutrality, however, Italy began to demand from Vienna territorial compensation which did not arrive. Therefore, the 23 May 1915 war declaration of Italy, preceded, three weeks earlier, by a rescission from the Triple Alliance, did not surprise Vienna. Reported this behavior as an untold betrayal, it "influenced for years, if not for decades, the way in which the Italians were perceived by the Austrians." On the other hand, despite Sidney Sonnino, Italian Foreign Minister, was a convinced triplicist, "Austria's resistance to any concession induced him to open a diplomatic confrontation with the Threefold Understanding and the process that would then lead Italy to war . [...]
The London Pact, signed April 26 with France, Great Britain and Russia, pledged the Italian government to declare the start of hostilities within a month next to the Interstate. [...] With this secret treaty, Italy sanctioned its definitive exit from the Triple Alliance. "Austro-Hungarian forces, having General Army Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf," despite the scary high losses, greatly touched on eleven Elephant battles and prevented Cadorna from achieving its strategic goal, which consisted in breaking the front line to advance to the heart of the Habsburg monarchy. "
The defeat of Caporetto provoked in Italy the fall of the Boselli government (which was replaced by Vittorio Emanuele Orlando) and the replacement of General Luigi Cadorna with General Armando Diaz as Army Chief of Staff. He also marked the passage by Italy of an offensive war on a defensive war on the Piave line. "Almost 120 thousands of men who, among the dead, wounded, and prisoners, Austria-Hungary lost in the Piave offensive, represented a heavy loss, impossible to recover." On the other hand, "the demographic, economic and financial disparity of the two blocs of the Central Intelligence and Central Empire had to decide the outcome of the war sooner or later". For Italy, the result of forty-one months of war against Austria - Hungary, contrary to any prediction, was a complete military success achieved "during a victorious battle, behind which was the sum of the outcomes of those virtuous processes by doing leverage on which the military institutions deserved the victory - that is, a strategically renewed war of conduct after an almost fatal disaster, the selection not without errors of an official body capable of expressing younger and more dynamic commanders, the ability to renew resources humans and committed materials, in co-operation with the allies. " And if the war cost 1,45 to the Habsburg Empire millions of fallen (on 9 millions of gunmen), Italy cost 650 thousand (on 4,2 million called at the front), a blood toll that was paid mainly by most young people: the Italian fall had averaged twenty-five years. If, on the one hand, "war will prove to be an incentive to learn rudiments or refinement of writing, and the four billion letters that have crossed the peninsula during the war years are proof of it," on the other, it has accentuated the internal fragmentation, between north and south, between city and country, between social classes and political movements, leading to a process of delegitimization of the ruling class, opening the "path that would lead to the crisis of the democratic system and the inauguration [...] of the age of tyrannies. "
Gianlorenzo Capano
