Italy’s War Aims and Strategy, 1915–1918
The historian assumes that all his individual characters are mad. The important question is, why did their madness take this particular form?
A. J. P. Taylor
The manner in which Italy entered into the First World War in May 1915 seems on the face of things to be yet one more example of her propensity for rash and dam-aging international action. Guilty, it has been said, in 1911 of “arguably the most cynical and dangerous act of imperialist aggression in the whole pre-war period”, her decision to defect from the Triple Alliance – technically just about justifiable within its terms and scarcely surprising in view of the history of Austro-Italian re-lations – has been variously described as another cynically Machiavellian act typi-cal of Italian diplomatic practice, a “polititypi-cal gamble”, and an “act of madness (fol-lia)”. Diplomatic madness would appear to have been matched by strategic mad-ness in the form of Italy’s own version of the “short war illusion” that flew in the face of a mounting pile of contemporary evidence accumulated between Decem-ber 1914 and May 1915 which seemed to point ineluctably to battlefronts shaped and determined by static warfare and not by manoeuvre. The consequence of ill-advised decisions (if that is indeed what they were) was the subsequent slaugh-ter of half a million of their own citizens by an incompetent ruling oligarchy ably assisted, it has been claimed, by an incompetent military caste.1 The war consumed large numbers of men and more materials than Italy herself possessed and resulted in fewer and less rewarding prizes than the statesmen sought and the public ex-pected, making it in the view of Denis Mack Smith “one of the great disasters of her [Italy’s] history”.2 Hindsight would therefore appear to suggest that for Italy
1 Paul W. Schroeder: Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War: http://
www.vlib.us/wwi/resources/archives/texts/t040829a/counter.html (accessed on 20. 4. 2015); Gian Enrico Rusconi: L’azzardo del 1915. Come l’Italia decide l’intervento nella Grande guerra. In: Jo-hannes Hürter/id. (eds.): L’entrata in guerra dell’Italia nel 1915. Bologna 2005, pp. 15–74, here:
p. 61; Holger Afflerbach: Da alleato a nemico. Cause e conseguenze dell’entrata in guerra dell’Italia nel Maggio 1915. In: ibid., pp. 75–101, here: p. 75, p. 89, pp. 90–94, p. 99; Lorenzo Del Boca: Gran-de guerra, piccoli generali. Una cronaca feroce Gran-della Prima guerra mondiale.Turin 2007, passim.
2 Denis Mack Smith: Italy and Its Monarchy. New Haven, CT 1989, p. 313.
joining and fighting the war was not a good idea – but in 1915 hindsight was an advantage that neither Italian diplomats nor Italian soldiers could call on. The questions to be answered therefore are: was joining the war a rational, or at least an explicable, act; and once involved in it why did Italy’s statesmen and generals per-sist in following what appears to have been a foredoomed military strategy until forced by near disaster to re-think their war – but not their war aims?
War Aims and War Objectives
Italy’s decision to join the war on the side of the Triple Entente was certainly a gamble – but by the time that the Great War broke out gambles by great powers were a well-established phenomenon, so we should not be unduly surprised at or critical of Italy for doing what she had done in 1911 when she launched on the Lib-yan war, and what Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary were all doing in July–
August 1914. Rome’s was however a calculated gamble. Unlike other contending powers, Italy was looking for relative advantage from her participation in the war, not outright victory and the dissolution of an enemy polity. The aim of Italian for-eign policy during the July crisis was to secure territorial compensation from Austria-Hungary; the foreign minister, Antonino Di San Giuliano, set that condi-tion before he knew of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia and stuck to it thereafter.
When the European war began, Rome looked for the best available odds.
Di San Giuliano asked himself the “what if?” questions that historians are now encouraged to explore, but once he decided on immediate neutrality he could find no easy answers. If the Central Powers won an absolute or a partial victory there would be no compensation for Italy, and if they lost the Entente would have no reason to compensate her. Going with the Entente had two very considerable drawbacks: it would strengthen France’s position in the Mediterranean and weak-en Italy’s, and it would make Germany and Austria-Hungary into implacable weak- en-emies. One thing seemed clear and in the circumstances entirely reasonable: if Ita-ly did take the gamble, she should join the war onIta-ly when there was the certainty, or near certainty, of winning and when events had swung the final outcome against the Central Powers. To help him work out the answer to his dilemma Di San Giuliano sought a military assessment from general Luigi Cadorna, chief of the Italian general staff, and diplomatic advice from his ambassadors. None can have helped him much. Cadorna’s advice amounted to making sure that Russia attacked Austria-Hungary at the same time as Italy and as strongly as possible;
Ambassador Bollati in Berlin thought the Germans were likely to win even if Austria-Hungary was defeated, in which case Italy would suffer; and Ambassador Tittoni in Bordeaux offered the opinion that either the war would last a long time and end indecisively or the Entente would win.3
3 Di Sangiuliano to Salandra, 9. 8. 1914; Di Sangiuliano to Salandra, 27. 8. 1914, encl. Cadorna to Di Sangiuliano, 27. 8. 1914; Bollati to Di Sangiuliano, 31. 8. 1914; Tittoni to Di Sangiuliano, 15. 9.
“An Act of Madness”? 189 The political process of deciding and developing a programme of war aims which now began was influenced by the past as well as by the present. In the de-cades following Unification Italian soldiers, sailors, diplomats and politicians shared a widespread perception that their country was geographically, strategical-ly and socialstrategical-ly vulnerable. For years the authorities had worried that unified Itastrategical-ly was too fragile and her social cohesion too feeble to put up much resistance if an enemy threatened her coasts. At the start of the twentieth century they believed Italy to be less vulnerable socially but not strategically. In 1907 the navy said that it could not protect the piazza marritime (coastal fortresses) or even defend Rome without a bigger fleet, and in 1913 the army pushed the case for more defensive fortifications on the north-western border. Despite Italy’s membership of the Tri-ple Alliance and her participation in the naval convention in June 1913, admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, chief of the naval general staff, was at least as worried by the Austrian as by the French fleet. In July 1913 he proposed a five year building programme that would give the Italian navy a 4:3 advantage over the Austrians:
and while at the cabinet meeting on 1 August 1914 that decided on neutrality he emphasised the dangers of going to war against the British and French navies.4 Such was his obsession with Italy’s eastern seaboard that he would later be de-scribed as suffering from scabbia adriatica (“Adriatic itch”).
Di San Giuliano died on 14 October 1914, leaving his successor Sidney Sonni-no to grapple with the twin problems of defining Italy’s war aims and choosing a side. When he explained the course of his negotiations to parliament on the eve of the war, Sonnino spoke of Italy’s situation in the Mediterranean and the “pos-sible” development of her colonies, but “security and relative strength in the Adriatic” came first. As he told Colonel House, President Wilson’s aide, much later but in broadly similar terms, his foremost concerns were “nationality and independence, but also security”.5 For Sonnino Italy’s “declaratory” war aims centred on security. How it was to be achieved was a matter for practical geo-strategic calculation with an admixture of economic interest. The army, whose contribution to the list of territorial acquisitions compiled over the winter of 1914–1915 appears to have been limited, wanted defensible land frontiers, which in practical terms meant control of the watersheds in the Dolomites, and by the war’s end a firm foothold on the Istrian peninsula too. The navy, backed by the king, demanded as a minimum control of the Adriatic, which meant pos-session of the Dalmatian coast, and looked askance at the actuality of the French
1914; all: I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani (hereafter D.D.I.). 5th series, vol. 1. Rome 1954, no. 151, no. 468, no. 526, no. 691, p. 83, pp. 255–257, p. 295, p. 402; William A. Renzi: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War. A Re-Examination. In: AHR 67 (1968), pp. 1414–1432, here:
p. 1419.
4 Ezio Ferrante: Il grande ammiraglio Paolo Thaon di Revel. Rome 1989, pp. 50–54, pp. 184 f.
5 Notes for a parliamentary speech, 20. 5. 1915, D.D.I., 5th series, vol. 3. Rome 1985, no. 735, pp. 577–581; Pietro Pastorelli (ed.): Sidney Sonnino. Diario 1916–1922. Bari 1972, p. 314 (15. 11.
1918). On the primacy of the Adriatic, see Sonnino to Tittoni et al., 26. 10. 1914, D.D.I. (see note 3), 5th series, vol. 2. Rome 1984, no. 43, pp. 29–31.
naval presence in the Mediterranean and the possibility that the Russian fleet might arrive there too.
At the Consulta Sonnino focused on the Balkans, where for more than a doz-en years he had bedoz-en attracted by Greek coal, Montdoz-enegrin tobacco and the possi-bilities for railway building. Italian possession of Albania was at the head of his wish list, not least as a barrier against both Serbian and Greek expansionism. He also took on ambitions in Asiatic Turkey which his predecessor, Di San Giuliano, had considered “a vital economic and political interest”.6 Although the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 undoubtedly reinforced Sonnino’s priorities, not much of this was new: talk of supremacy in the Adriatic and Italian possession of Albania dat-ed back at least thirty years, though interest in the economic possibilities of Tur-key only went back to 1907. Whether the army – and the navy – were actually capable of achieving Italy’s war aims was a question that no-one seems to have confronted directly.
Italy did not enter the war in 1915 in pursuit of empire. For the first eigh-teen months colonial acquisitions were not seen as a matter of any great impor-tance. Wanting to use the opportunity to settle some overhanging issues from the past, Ferdinando Martini and his advisers at the Colonial Ministry came up with a list of desiderata in November 1914 that included French Somaliland, Kassala, bor-der modifications with Egypt, and the formal acknowledgement of “rights and in-terests” in Ethiopia that Italy had written into the treaty of Uccialli (Wichale) in 1891 and lost in 1896. Sonnino, never inclined to give colonial war aims much time, was happy to leave the issue to be settled after the war via Article 13 of the Treaty of London, which simply stipulated “compensation” if Great Britain and France extended their colonial dominions in Africa. In mid-1916, however, Italy’s war aims agenda expanded. After the conquest of the German Cameroons in Febru-ary 1916 only German East Africa still held out, raising the possibility of a share-out of the spoils. The Italian declaration of war on Germany on 28 August 1916 opened that particular door and three months later Martini’s successor, Gaspare Colosimo, handed Sonnino the first definitive statement of Italy’s colonial war aims. A “maximum” programme staked a claim on 2,947,000 square kilometres of East and sub-Saharan Africa, while the “minimum” programme cut that amount to 722,000 kilometres, chiefly by reducing Italy’s claims in the Libyan hinterland.
Sonnino waited three months before responding. When he did so, he refused to take a definite stand and would go no further than allowing that some parts of the colonial wish list might be fulfilled as part of the general peace settlement. In his view, the colonial programme could not be allowed to compromise Italian de-mands in the eastern Mediterranean; and as far as officialdom’s colonial war aims went, that was more or less that until the fighting stopped and the peace process
6 Riccardo Faucci: Elementi di imperialismo nell’Italia prefascista. In: Massimo Pacetti (ed.):
L’imperialismo italiano e la Jugoslavia. Urbino 1977, pp. 15–82, here: pp. 38–39, pp. 52–56; Marta Petricioli: L’Italia in Asia Minore. Equilibrio mediterraneo e ambizioni imperialiste alla vigilia della prima guerra mondiale. Florenz 1983, p. 15 et passim.