672. The First World War: Italy’s Doomed Campaign (Part 2)

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Companions, can it be true? We are fighting with arms. We are waging our war. The blood is spurting from the veins of Italy. We are the last to join this struggle. And already the first are meeting with glory. The slaughter begins. The destruction begins. One of our people has died at sea, another on land. All of these people who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of blood. And their blood begins to flow. We have no other value but that of our blood to be shed. So that was the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio with a, frankly, lunatic peroration. And he's addressing admirers at dawn on the 26th of May, 1915. And he's absolutely ecstatic at the news that Italy's soldiers have just fired their first shots and taken their first casualties after joining the First World War. And you would think that by May 1915, he would have worked out that joining the First World War maybe isn't a brilliant idea, but not a bit of it. He is all over it. And to quote Mark Thompson in his brilliant book, The White War on Italy's role in the First World War, has any artist played a more baleful part in decisions that led to violence and suffering on the larger scale? So, Dominic, are you a fan of D'Annunzio? I absolutely despise D'Annunzio, to be honest with you. I think he's one of the worst people we've ever done on The Rest Is History. And his lunatic rhetoric, as you correctly described it, will have terrible consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. are going to be what are we what dialect are we going to speak and so on and so forth what national dishes are we going to invent right we did a whole episode on this with friend of the show john dickey about the creation of italian identity through food now one very good way of welding together a new national identity is to have a common enemy and to have a sense of unfinished business a sense of kind of victimhood or whatever and in it is case this comes down to its northern frontier and when nationalists look at the map of the newly unified italy they say it's in the wrong place so one nationalist says the frontier is a metal wire planted haphazardly where nothing ends or begins an arbitrary division and amputation alien to nature law and logic and dominic what sharpens that sense is the fact that um on the other side of that border is austria yeah the austro-hungarian empire and that is the former imperial mistress of venice and other regions of italy exactly the ancestral enemy the austrians and what also sharpens it is that on the other side of that border there are some people who speak italian so people look at the border and they say well what we'd like is i'd like to get the south tyrol i mean there are a lot of german speakers in the south tyrol as well they say well that's never mind we can have them in italy uh we'd like the cities of trieste and gorizia ideally i think i'd like we'd like to have slovenia and i think a lot of modern croatia really should be part of italy so they want maybe gaul maybe they say we'd like the peninsula of um istria and we would like the coast of dalmatia so there are italian speakers in all of these areas that belong to the austro-hungarian empire and the nationalist slogan is unredeemed italy italia irredenta and it's from that expression that we get irredentism so this idea that i'm going to be a part of italy there's unfinished national business that we need to complete the nation and this is an idea that's politically very effective in the late 19th century it allows politicians to appeal across this newly united country to different classes to workers in their cities to farmers to urban intellectuals all of this kind of thing and as you said it's it there is a parallel in germany exactly now rather like the germans the italians feel they've they've united a little bit too late they've been shut out of the scramble for foreign colonies for example in africa and if they want to be a great power they need colonies so they look to north africa initially tom obviously this is um tom horan bingo the example of the roman empire is is hanging over them the whole time they want to basically rebuild the roman empire as much as possible they look to north africa but to their horror a much bigger power has already got stuck in in north africa and that's france and actually the french make it pretty obvious they don't want the italians getting involved and there's a little rivalry between the french and italians in north africa and as a result of that the italians sign a very implausible alliance in 1882 first of all with well with germany that's not so implausible but austria but with austria as well that's mad and this is basically to give them a bit more of a free hand in africa so that the french won't attack them and it's called the triple alliance a lot of nationalists are very uneasy about it what are we getting into bed with the austrians for they're our enemies however the french are not going to attack them they're not going to the upside this allows italy to pursue some colonial adventures so in eritrea in somaliland in abyssinia ethiopia and most obviously in libya and these go generally very badly i mean the italians do make inroads but their army consistently performs very badly so in abyssinia 6 000 italian soldiers were massacred in a single day at the battle of adwa in 1896 and there's still a sense when you get into the 20th century that the italians are going to be a bit more the italians are going to be a bit more aggressive in the battle of adwa in 1896 and there's still a sense when you get into the 20th century that the italians are going to be a bit more aggressive in the century that nationalist ambitions have not been sated that italy still needs to prove its virility on the world stage yeah because in in rome at this point they're building an enormous monument on the capital which is the great sacred hill of rome and this is a monument to victor emmanuel ii who'd been the king when italy had been united and there's a sense i mean anyone who's been to rome will immediately be able to picture it it looks like something out of a cecil b de mille film about ancient rome and it's a sense that it's a sense that it's a sense that it's a sense that it's kind of symbolically illustrating the fusion between the unity of italy and this kind of glorious roman past which it is assumed a united italy will be able to resurrect exactly and that's not completed i think until 1911 so just before before the outbreak of the war it's a monstrosity actually isn't it's a wedding cake yeah i think yes i think absolutely right that the sense of uh becoming a great power and building a united nation that those two things fused and there's this sort of sense of unfinished business this sense of pressure and of um slight disappointment almost hanging over the italian project as you enter the 20th century now at this point italy is changing a lot it's industrializing it's building railways and schools it is however a long way behind the other so-called great powers it's only got a very small urban middle class the vast majority of italians work on the land as peasants literacy rates are most people have only have a very vague sense of what the state is their horizons are bounded by the locality by the village by the farm all of this and only a tiny fraction of the population gets to vote so in 1913 eight million people out of 35 million people politics is a sort of endless as always in italy an endless sort of dance of coalition building politicians who are constantly kind of ditching their principles to meet the demands of the state at the moment and at the top is the king victor emmanuel the third so he's the grandson of the monument guy he is and he is a very short man he's very short he's very insecure he's a coin collector so he's like you tom collects uh coins yeah he fancies himself as an amateur photographer that's his his passion he has loads of power under the italian constitution so he can call parliament dismiss parliament he can appoint the ministers he directs foreign policy he commands the army he declares war but he doesn't like using his power in fact he wants politicians to do it for him and this in the long run will get him into trouble because he'll basically turn himself into benito marcellini's puppet in the 1920s and 1930s but at this point 19 let's go to 1914 when the first world war begins at this point his prime minister is a man called antonio salandra and salandra is a conservative lawyer and he's a conservative lawyer and he's a conservative lawyer and he's a conservative lawyer from a rich family land-owning family in puglia in the south of italy but he's backed by the big business elites in the industrial north because he's a conservative he's a sort of balding man with this absolutely gigantic mustache exactly as you would as you would want oh thank god it's so good to have an enormous mustache back on the rest of history it is of course haven't had one for a while uh he's a very ruthless and devious man and he is the man who is basically going to act as the head of the conspiracy and he's going to be the head of the conspiracy and he's going to be the to drag italy into the war against the wishes of its people now when franz ferdinand was assassinated in the summer of 1914 italy was going through all kinds of internal ructions massive strikes unrest talk of socialist and anarchist revolution and whatnot so salandra was distracted but his foreign minister who was the marquis of san giuliano who was a sicilian aristocrat said to the austrians i know we're in this alliance with you but i don't think we're going to be able to with you but if you attack serbia we will not support you and the reason we don't want to support you well basically the italians don't want to see austria expand in the balkans become more powerful i mean that would be mad no they don't and they say we might accept you attacking serbia if you gave us the south tyrol and the austria the germans actually said to the austrians would you think about it and the austrians said hold on we're about to enter a war to defend our empire we're not going to start giving bits away you know to our random neighbors so the first world war starts and italy declares itself neutral now under the triple alliance they didn't actually have to join the war because the triple alliance was meant to be a defensive pact not an offensive one but i guess it's kind of against the spirit if not the letter it is a bit i think the austrians and the germans are disappointed they say well this is really poor from the italians on the other hand it's the italians so you know you kind of know what you're saying the italians said well you took us for granted you didn't consult us you've got stuck in there's also good reasons for italy to stay out a public opinion people don't like the austrians also italy imports a lot of raw materials including this is a terrible indictment of italian agriculture including food from britain and france so if they went into the war on the side of the central powers the british and french would probably blockade their ports and people would starve and that would be a right mess and they don't fancy that so they say we're going to sit this one out fine just a week later the marquess of san giuliano sends salandra a note and he says i've been thinking i think if the allies look like they're going to win we should actually switch sides and pile in on their side against austria and the marquess has the excellent line this may not be heroic but it is wise and patriotic and the same day so the 9th of august the marquess starts to send out informal messages to London. If we were to change science, would you yeah just just wondering meanwhile they say to the chief military commander general codona who we'll talk about in the second half your plans for war against france just shift them yeah just update them a little bit so it's war now against austria anyway a month passes the germans of course have launched their great attack on france and they've been turned back at the river marne battle them on and salandra says to his cronies we should use this historic cataclysm to and i quote complete and enlarge the fatherland and you know he acknowledges people will say that we've been very sneaky and perfidious but he says italy's destiny should be guided by and he uses the phrase sacro egoismo sacred egoism and this becomes one of the most famous phrases in modern italian history and that idea of sacred egoism expresses the dare i say the sacral quality of italian nationalism sacral sacral poor behavior yes it is that they they believe they have a kind of divinely appointed mission to complete the unification of the nation and if that involves taking large parts of other people's countries and stabbing them in the back so much the better yeah so there's now a long complicated diplomatic dance in january 1915 salandra sends a message to vienna and he says i'd like you to give us uh trento the trentino this sort of area in the north and south tyrol we'd like a bit of slovenia please and we'd like trieste to be neutral and autonomous the austrians really like triest because it's their one big port they don't want to give that away and the austrians say we're not going to give you all that what you meant you were an ally only recently we're not going to give you large pits of our empire now salandra expects that to happen and in fact he doesn't mind because he's already eyeing up you know the adriatic coast are the austrians um kind of alerted by this to the possibility that they might jump ship yes they definitely are they can sort of feel it coming but they're not going to buy off the italians by giving them you know big chunks of their empire i'm just wondering if they're starting to beef up their defenses yeah they are but of course don't forget in this in this period of time this is the point that we talked about in our very first first world war series but the russians are coming aren't they and the russians are coming and tom you'll recall there's the tremendous battle for the city of prosimush of course how could i forget yeah where was the fortress city of prosimush uh great to have that back on the show so um late february 1915 salandra's envoys present a secret deal to the allies in london they say we'll enter the war on the allied side and in return here is our shopping list we'd like the south tyrol we'd like trentino we'd like trieste and gorizia we'd like istria now croatia we'd like dalmatia so that's the coast of croatia and the islands we'd like a little bit of albania we'd ideally like the dodecanese islands of roads costs patmos and so on and we'd like 50 million pounds to pay for the war now the germans have got wind of this they persuade the austrians to make a generous counteroffer at this point the austrians are actually saying to them okay we'll give you south tyrol we'll give you a bit of western slovenia we will make trieste autonomous we can even make a generous counteroffer to make a generous counteroffer to make a generous counteroffer let you have a little bit of albania at this point the italians are feeling very greedy and they don't want to accept the austrian offer and they say to the allies we'd really like to get into bed with you please if you give us all this we'll enter the war and this whole kind of getting into bed with people for money how does this go down with uh people in london and paris well i'm sorry to say that tom that it reinforces existing stereotypes of italian behavior among the policy makers of london and paris so when they look at the map they're not they say what you want dalmatia there are there are 18 000 italian speakers in dalmatia but half a million slavs it seems unreasonable for you to ask for this how can this be justified winston churchill said that uh italy was the harlot of europe so herbert henry asquith the british prime minister of course a man of the most impeccable moral uh sexual behavior yeah very much a friend of the show he's a man of the most impeccable moral uh sexual behavior he described italy as voracious slippery and perfidious he said right the excellent line it is so important to bring italy in at once as greedy and slippery as she is that we ought not to be too precise in haggling over this or that now of course this would create great problems in the future when the italians feel they've been cheated because at this point basically the allies say fine you can have everything you want yeah we'll give you everything you can have loads of croatia you can have loads of slovenia um you can actually rule a million germans and slavs if you like if you really want to that badly and actually do you know what if the ottoman empire falls apart you can have that as well you can have a bit of turkey as well go for it i think it's fair to say they don't really mean it they're just promising anything and so italy formally repudiates the triple alliance so now we're in may and the stage ought to be set for war but there is a problem first of all victor emmanuel the third with his coins and his very stature and whatnot he does not really want the war he doesn't like the idea of war at all more importantly the italian people don't really want a war so salandra asks his regional governors what do ordinary people think and the governors come back and they say actually most people say they don't want to fight they they've had a look at the first world war and they think he's possibly not brilliant it's probably best to sit this one out like gas and rats and mud and stuff right and in the south in the poorer part of the country people are really against it so the governor of naples says 90 of people in the city including all the social classes hate the thought of war and basically across the board the people who want war are intellectuals poets bad people tom if they're nothing they don't know how on earth is the italian government going to rouse the nation for war and the answer is by enlisting the most celebrated and colorful and controversial italian of his generation and this is this bloke who began with gabriele donald donunzio so donunzio we did a whole episode on him uh back in 2022 called the first fascist with his biographer lucy hughes hallett oh yeah the pike brilliant book yes now donunzio for those people who haven't heard that episode was the most famous italian in the world at this point he's a playwright and a poet he's a dandy he's a decadent he's always in the gossip columns he's he's a proper celebrity i mean we've been talking about mustaches yeah he has a brilliant mustache but it's not a kind of military mustache is it it's a kind of the excitement of the new faintly fascist flamboyant let's fly on a plane kind of a mustache exactly the weird thing about him is everyone says he's this sort of tremendous um he's always in and out of aristocratic women's bedrooms and stuff he's a very short man he's got no hair at all he's extremely ugly people always comment on how terrible his teeth are and he's so narcissistic and egotistical that he's practically sociopathic gives us all hope his life is strewn with wreckage so basically bad debts broken homes abandoned children he's just a terrible terrible person but because he writes i mean the stuff when you actually read it it's dated really badly it's so lush and ornate and stuff but he's very highly rated isn't he i mean joyce thinks he's great proust thinks he's great i mean they love him people think he's a genius people think he's one of the authentic literary geniuses of the early 20th century he's gone off to paris to escape his creditors but people adore him and women in particular can't get enough of him now donuncio is an ultra nationalist donuncio has been writing about glory national and personal since he was a little boy ever since the 1880s he's been pouring out newspaper articles wittering on about the army and the navy and the air force isn't it because he's very very keen on planes he never learns to fly but he's he's obsessed by air power he is he's very much of that kind of futurist mentality where everything is about new technology and the excitement of war and all of this although he is quite keen on kind of ancient dreams of empire as well isn't he he is it's the sort of fusion of the two yeah so that's how he's the proto-fascist quite fascistic he was very keen on conquering libya in 1911 he's been talking for ages let's have an empire in the balkans he was very keen on joining the first world war and he actually said i won't come home until we join the war but i fear that the italian political class are too weak and we never will and then in march 1915 he opens a letter in paris that has been lying around for weeks in this lane kind of unopened and it's an invitation to come and speak at an event in may just outside genoa this is the place from which gary baldy and his volunteers had sailed to sicily in 1860 and they're going to inaugurate a monument and they want donancio to come and give a talk and he thinks well this is it this is a brilliant opportunity to come and preach my warlike message to the italian people so he gets on a train in paris on the 3rd of may 1915 he crosses the italian border for the first time in five years he is met by colossal crowds he's he's a sort of lucy hughes hallett in a book calls him a nationalist messiah it's like the prophet returning to his people massive crowds of sort of poets and intellectuals cheering excitedly your vibe it's like when we arrive in a to do a rest of history tour surely he gets to genoa massive crowds and he gives the first there'll be a lot of blood-curdling speeches he gives the first of the series of mad speeches we shall not let italy be dishonored we shall not let the fatherland perish we shall have a greater italy not by acquisition but by conquest not measured in shame but as the price of blood and glory i mean nobody ever talks more enthusiastically about blood and glory than this bloke next day he goes to the monument to do the unveiling to give the speech and the speech is meant to be all about garibaldi and actually it's just all about war and how brilliant war is he ends with this peroration that even though i've you know read it many times written about it in my kids book about the first world war i still actually find shocking every time i look at it because it's a parody of the sermon on the mount in favor of fighting and killing blessed are the 20 year olds pure of mind well-tempered in body with courageous mothers blessed are the young who hunger and thirst for glory for they should be satisfied blessed are the merciful for they shall wipe away a splendid flow of blood and bind up their shining wounds blessed are they who return with victories for they shall see the new face of rome and all this and people complain don't they and he kind of basically says you know if it's if it's wrong to incite people to violence then so be it yeah i plead guilty brilliant let's have more of it exactly he does and one of the men in his audience that day as a young journalist with a very dark future and this is a young man 33 years old called benito mussolini and mussolini had been an editor of the socialist newspaper avanti he is absolutely typical of this intellectual class he's read marx and engels mussolini he's a big fan of italian futurist poetry like danunzio who's obsessed with nietzsche the sort of darwinian idea of struggle and will to power the will to power hates george elliott does mussolini hate george elliott yeah despises her wow why doesn't like middlemarch uh he thinks that um she's very ostentatiously given up christianity but she's still completely christian and she's an idiot because she hasn't realized that's a problem he's always going on about it crikey well mussolini um had always been a non-interventionist he'd been opposed to italy's adventures in africa he said he didn't want to join the first world war but then in october 1914 he sort of sensed the way the wind was blowing and he decided to completely change his mind i mean i guess that's that's the mark of a good journalist right i suppose yes i suppose that's one way of looking at it but i didn't think we'd be into rehabilitating mussolini well i'm not his journalistic acumen i mean newspapers have been known to kind of jump on bandwagons before they have indeed so he founds a new newspaper and he sets up his own political movement mussolini arguing for war with some french and british allied funding by the way and he calls it the leagues of revolutionary action the fasci dazione revolutionaria meaning the kind of bands or leagues and it's from that of course that we get the word fascism anyway at this point mussolini is just in the crowd the star is denuncio denuncio gives these impassioned speeches to vast crowds he gets a train to rome he arrives in rome a hundred thousand people are waiting massive crush massive crowds gives these speeches again now he's starting to denounce what he sees as the traitors the odor of treachery that is beginning to stifle us and by the traitors he means the politicians who might actually block the attempt to get into war because right now politics in rome is very delicately poised because the same day he arrives the 12th of may the italian parliament opens for a new session and the stakes are very high salandra has done this deal with the allies but he doesn't have a majority and rome is awash with rumors that he will fall from power and he will be replaced by the liberal leader who is a man called giovanni giulietti giulietti has been prime minister four times worldwide and he's going to be the first already and he does not want to enter the war so he's not a denuncio fan he's not a denuncio fan i think it would have been a lot better if giulietti had become prime minister unless he hadn't entered the war anyway the next day the 13th salandra pulls off a great political coup a great bit of political theater he unexpectedly resigns along with his whole cabinet and he's basically daring the king to appoint giulietti as prime minister and giulietti to accept the job and he's betting that they will be put off by the mood on the streets these huge crowds are pouring through the streets of rome shouting death to giulietti up with the war all this thing and denuncio is going around the city giving these bonkers speeches the treachery is blatant we don't only breathe in its horrid stench we feel its appalling weight i tell you there is treason here in rome we're being sold like a herd of diseased cattle and denuncio again a prefiguring of fascism he says to the crowds form squads lie in wait seize them by which he means giulietti and the anti-fascist movement he says to the crowds form squads lie in wait seize them by which he means giulietti and the anti-fascist movement he says to the crowds form squads lie in war politicians capture them and all this didn't musolini call him the john the baptist of fascism yes he did yeah well he absolutely is the john the baptist of fascism if denuncio had been left to his own devices he would have been the john the baptist and the jesus of fascism but he is outsmarted by musolini he goes on to set up um his uh kind of mad regime in fiume doesn't he after the after the war he does which is a massive prefiguring of musolini where he calls himself the duche so anyway he's giving these crazy speeches blood will flow but blood will be blessed all this kind of thing and the crowds are getting more and more impassioned giulietti the anti-war politician goes to see the king and he says i can't take office against this backdrop you know there'll be a nationalist rebellion there could be civil war i don't want to do it and so on the 16th the king reinstates salandra as prime minister and the king says to parliament i think you're just going to have to vote for the war and i'll abdicate if you don't because the king has lost his nerve himself as another nationalist journalist puts it in his newspaper either parliament will prostitute the sacred trembling body of the nation to the foreigner i mean that rhetoric is so kind of 1910s or the nation will overthrow parliament overturning the benches of the money lenders purifying the dens of the pimps and pandas with iron and fire i mean it is amazing the kind of the twisting of language from the new testament to promote war yeah i know i know it's extraordinary isn't it i mean of all these deranged speeches probably i mean i think this is one of the worst this is denuncio he goes to the capitoline hill where as you said they've been building that giant sort of wedding cake this sort of symbol of italian nationalism and he whips his crowd in this giant crowd into a frenzy he says the old order must be totally destroyed must cast aside the politicians like rotten meat sweep away all the filth into the sewer with all that is vile he says italy will be reborn in fire he he says again and again he calls it a holocaust it's one of denuncio's favorite words he says let's drive out the anti-war politicians yeah they're not just wrong they are sick they're diseased we should drive them out of politics forever make lists prescribe them be pitiless like sulla or the second triumvirate right then at the end i mean this is also it feels very roman he takes out a sword that had belonged to one of garibald's lieutenants and he says italy will be born again in blood i take the sword and draw it i press my lips to the naked blade i abandon my soul to delirium now that is what you call a far-right speech that is a far-right speech exactly the crowd goes berserk they kind of rampage through the streets of rome hundreds of people are arrested but obviously the politicians are never going to stand up to this kind of um pressure and on the 20th of may italy's parliament votes for war so the cliche of 1914 is that the crowds in london and berlin and whatever are terribly enthusiastic and baying for blood yeah which as we saw in the you know when we covered this was a myth it's ironic that rome seems to be the one capital where there is incredible enthusiasm and this is the one capital that actually had the chance of staying out of the war it is ironic i think it's ironic that it's ironic that it's a little bit misleading the people in the streets in rome that day i don't know if there's research being done how you would even do it on their social background or whatever i would guess a lot of these people as young students they're excited it's a day out um i think everything we know of italians who went to the front is that they didn't know what they were fighting for they were completely baffled and they didn't like it but they were kind of grudgingly went along because they thought they were fighting in defense of their native country the classic thing right i'm not i'm not disputing that i mean that's clearly the case that the vast majority of people in italy don't want it but it is amazing that the kind of the the stereotype of how the first world war breaks out which is not true capitals full of bay is true in rome yeah it is i mean i wouldn't have fancied being one of the in i mean it would be extraordinary to see it i suppose this sort of um impassioned feverish delirious atmosphere uh really really extraordinary and as you say there isn't really a lot of people in the world who are really passionate about the war and i mean i don't think it's really anything quite like it and in any of the other european capitals when uh the war breaks out so as i said on the 20th of may italy's parliament votes for war and that evening denuncio gives yet another insane speech the honor of the fatherland he says is saved our troops will march on the river isonzo which is in slovenia and we will turn it red with barbarian blood and two days later at the railway station in rome the triumphant prime minister salandra publicly embraces his supreme military commander general codona before codona gets on his the cheers of the crowds to head north to the war and it's a beautiful day the people are crying they're so excited they're crying with joy and there'll be plenty more crying to come and just as Donunzio had predicted the river Isonzo will indeed run red with blood but whose blood Dominic but whose blood exactly because if Salandra and Donunzio think this is going to be a triumphant story of Italian glory and Italian victory they are in for a heck of a shock well we will find out just how big a shock after a break this episode is brought to you by the times and by the Sunday Times now if there is one thing that history and indeed Bob Dylan teaches us it is that the times they are always a changing and Dominic I guess we're living in changing times now what with America attacking Iran and oil crises so do you think that the lessons of that for Keir Starmer are rosy so looking at the career of Edward Heath for instance who was prime minister in the previous oil crisis it didn't work out brilliantly for Ted Heath to be honest actually he and Keir Starmer I think are quite similar they're from relatively humble backgrounds and there's a slight sense of floundering which they have in common but their bigger point is you never really know what's around the corner do you because when you look at history the future is always pretty uncertain but you know the facts they shouldn't be uncertain and that of course is where the times and the Sunday Times come in yeah and I would say that understanding the news is absolutely vital when you're navigating increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world so to subscribe to the times and the Sunday Times visit thetimes.com this episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile right now all of Mint's plans are 15 dollars per month even unlimited so go to mintmobile.com slash history upfront payment of 45 dollars for three months 90 dollars for six months or 180 dollars for 12 months plan required 15 dollars per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy includes up to 20 gigabytes of hotspot capable device required availability speed and coverage varies see mintmobile.com this episode is supported by anthropic the team behind claude now history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked yeah there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century and the hard question in particular was what is out there beyond the atlantic ocean to the west and as you will know the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer christopher columbus and he realizes or rather everybody else realized that there is a vast continent out there and it is of course the americas so your anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why anthropic is founded on one hard question above all how can we ensure that the ai revolution really goes well for ordinary people so they asked over a hundred thousand people and what came back wasn't just fear there was hope as well people wanted to know will cancer ever be cured can kids have a better future it turns out that there is hope in hard questions ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking hello everyone and welcome back to the rest is history it is the 23rd of may 1915 and in vienna italy's ambassador has turned up to tell the austrian government that from midnight a state of war will exist between their two countries you the ambassador does this with no enthusiasm whatsoever in fact he's absolutely appalled isn't he um he privately thinks that um the italians have been and i quote swinish and faithless but he's an ambassador so he has to do his his master's bidding yeah um and meanwhile uh you mentioned general cardona general luigi cardona he's headed off from rome um and he has arrived at what are going to be his headquarters in the palace of the archbishop in udine in northern italy he's not going to be a ringing success is he in the forthcoming campaign it's a spoiler i mean he again we've been talking about these stereotypes that we have of the first world war and how how kind of terrible the generals on both sides are on the western front and we were talking in the previous episode that's not entirely fair cardona i mean he kind of is the stereotype of a hopeless general who just keeps hurling his troops forwards and forwards and forwards no matter how often they get what gunned down a dead right you're dead right he's he ticks every box he's got an absolute colossal mustache oh do you think i looked at him i thought it was not quite as big as it could be really yeah i was disappointed i think it's because you've been brutalized and desensitized by the russians mustaches yeah a flight poor von what's the general von renkamp's mustache or whatever these colossal mustaches and i think actually if you were to see cardona's mustache in the wild as it were yeah probably if a goldhanger producer turned out with that mustache oh for sure you'd raise an eyebrow for sure i mean by the standards of dom johnson's oswald mosley mustache yes it's much larger than that yeah but it's not as big as a russian general on the eastern front in 1914 that's all i'm saying no one will know what any of this means but that's fine let's just explain who cardona is and where he comes from he's from turin he was born in 1850 he's a very driven and prickly man um he's a very driven and prickly man um he's a very driven and prickly man um he's a mark thompson his brilliant book the white war says he's touchy unforgiving and unsociable with a reputation for ferocious discipline and inflexibility these are not things that massively endear him to us disastrously for his men cardona is obsessed by this idea of what he calls irresistible forward movement in battle he's written only one thing in his life and this is a which he published in 1898 and basically because he's published this he will never back down from the ideas within it so he has not absorbed the lessons of the russo-japanese war of indeed of it you know of any recent war or indeed of the events on the western front not at all so his plan is incredibly reckless uh he says the left flank of our army will go through the alps and it'll capture the alps alpine passes leading to austria the right flank of the army will capture trieste and then ljubljana and then zagreb now what he's not taking into account is italy's army is is fairly useless to be completely frank it's half the size of the armies of france and germany most of the ordinary italian soldiers can't read and write they can barely understand each other's dialects and they don't have enough guns they don't have enough artillery however cardona is saying to his political bosses with a fair wind we will reach quote the heart of the hapsburg monarchy which is to say vienna by the autumn we'll be there we could we will genuinely be there and done and dusted by christmas i mean an absolutely ridiculous thing for him to say the campaign starts badly as you might expect and it gets worse because the italian railways aren't really up to it the full mobilization that was meant to take three weeks goes on for more than six weeks we said that the austrians are distracted by fighting russia in the east so this was italy's moment italy actually outnumbered the austrians four to one on their kind of common frontier but because they're so slow and disorganized they don't exploit their advantage at all i mean let's cheer up the austrians up who've been completely useless so far in the war haven't they i have to find that they've got an enemy who are even worse than them we're going to see the austrians in a very different light in today's episode the austrians will appear to be the souls of sort of military competence martial competence yeah exactly so cardona's initial target he says well first the the river socha or esonzo so socho in slovenian esonzo in italian which goes through the valleys of western slovenia quite close to the border i was actually there last um summer this this part of the world it's very beautiful isn't it slovenia incredibly beautiful yeah i mean a brilliant place if i should be doing an advert for the slovenian tourist board well if the slovenian tourist board listening i would love to go i've always wanted to go i keep kind of mapping out you know fortnights when i could go and i never do it's gorgeous and it's they've turned the whole thing basically into a first world war sort of tourist attraction so there are military cemeteries there's amazing like trench networks and forts you can roam around to your heart's content in the most it's a lot better than the western front because it's much more beautiful it's brilliant actually i really recommend it and everything is really lovely nice weather nice people great but a very different scene back in 1915 right yes exactly yes but it's a very different scene back in 1915 right exactly yes but it's a very different not if you're italian in 1915 so basically the italians were meant to cross this river straight away the austrians blew up the bridges took the italians ages to get across by the time they get across the uh austrians are dug in on the mountains above and this will be the focus of the campaign for the next two years so the valley of this river the socha or the itzonzo and above it the jagged kind of limestone highlands of what is called the cast or the carso i mean that's what you want to see when you are launching a tour of this river so i'm going to show you a little bit of the a full frontal attack a jagged limestone highland yeah oh god last episode we did the western front and you probably thought that sounded bad with all the mud and the lice and stuff but at least it's flat yeah this is much worse much worse so basically in the summer it is ridiculously hot it's like the sun blazing down as you stagger up these kind of limestone hills in the winter it's ridiculously cold the wind whipping in off the adriatic or whatever because it's limestone you can't really dig proper trenches so you can dig a sort of little gully and lie down in this gully and when bullets and shells hit the ground they send up showers of fragments yeah limestone shards in your eye that's not what you want well these shards would kill people half a mile away oh god yeah if you're standing with your back to what's going on half a mile away this shard will hit you in the back of the head and that's the end of you do you remember in the previous series i asked why the um why the people didn't try and outflank the bottom of the western front by invading switzerland yes and i guess that this is the explanation yeah don't go through mountains no so for the first few weeks the italians go extremely slowly they capture only a few villages and a few small towns they lose 20 000 men in the first few weeks they show absolutely no sign of having any conception of how they're going to take on machine guns and barbed wire and all this kind of thing and codona general codona with his nice mustache and whatnot he looks at this and he says well i'm obviously not going to rethink my tactics are excellent what i should do is just start sacking generals so in two years he launches what mark thompson calls a rolling purge of his officers in two years he sacks 217 generals 255 colonels and 355 battalion commanders which seems a lot to me especially with this already disorganized army i mean 217 generals that's a lot of generals that's yeah i feel the italians probably have too many generals yeah it's like the royal navy now with about 700 admirals yeah three ships it's kind of on brand though for the italians to have loads of generals though isn't it yeah there's a lot of gold braid a lot of nice hats and feathers and stuff i imagine yeah now while the italians are sacking their generals and basically trudging very slowly up these hills the austrians have been moving reinforcements to the front now as we said people will recall the austrians have had an absolutely shocking start to the war they made an absolute spectacle of themselves against serbia and basically ends up losing to serbia which is even that was the point of the whole war then they had a nightmare against russia on the eastern front you will recall a very very fine mustache belonging to france conrad von hutzendorf the austrian supreme commander is he the guy who who is besotted with what's her name gina gina that's why he started the war and she he basically starts the first world war just to impress her yes he started the first war was impressed gina von reininghaus who is ironically italian oh i didn't know that yeah remember conrad von hutzendorf had wanted to invade everybody had demanded about 6 000 times to attack austria's neighbors before the war finally started by 1915 he's lost his youngest son on the eastern front and he's managed to mislay 800 000 men who've been killed basically the entire pre-war austro-hungarian army but this is the one thing that he gets right the italian campaign is gina impressed must be very impressed even though he's the italians her own people i think by this point she's gone native a bit but it's still tragic that the one thing he gets right is against gina's countrymen yeah maybe maybe it's a tragedy there um so what he does is conrad von hutzendorf he's finally learned the lessons and he says we're not going to attack we're just going to be on the defensive what we have we hold and he sends to defend the river isonzo the most senior south slav officer in the imperial army and dominic who is he and how do you pronounce his name he is a name to conjure with tom he's general svetozar borovitch so general borovitch is one of the outstanding generals of the first world war and he is the embodiment of austro-hungarian multi-ethnic unity because he was born in croatia to a serbian orthodox family he joined the army when he was 10 went to cadet school he was first decorated in the capture of sarajevo in 1878 in bosnia and because he's a south slav yeah because he's basically the embodiment of what would become yugoslavia he's really invested in this campaign because he's defending slavic territory he doesn't want to see the italians no don't have to seize all this and most of his men or at least a lot of his men are slovenes croats and bosnians so they're also fighting for land that feels like theirs so they're really invested in this general paul von hindenburg german walrus he said of the italians they fought the russians with their head but fought the italians with their whole soul and i guess that's because they're not actually really austro-hungarians as you said they are slavs defending a slav homeland exactly but also borovitch is a smart guy like he's one of the generals who's learned the lessons of the war he says okay what we'll do is we'll get as high as we can we'll have five lines of barbed wire let the italians come when they come wait until they're a hundred yards away only start firing then if they ever break through don't panic keep your positions i'll move up the reserves i'll plug the gaps we'll just stay calm we'll let them come to us and we'll kill them all and basically this is what they do so the first battle of the isonzo as it's called is launched by the italians on the 23rd of june 1915 and think of this river it's running just inside the border of slovenia so in the to the east of italy and the italians throw in more than 200 000 men which is more than twice as many as the austrians have got and the italians think well this will go this will be great and actually what happens they charge uphill and the austrians open fire with their machine guns and loads and loads of italians are killed straight away so i'll give you an example an account by an italian officer called renato distolfo and he's describing an attack on a mountain called monte samichelli distolfo is meant to be leading his men into battle with the italians and they're going to attack the italians with a pistol they've run out of pistols so he only has his sword it starts raining as soon as they set off so they're all completely sodden and waterlogged they draw their swords there's a band they're shouting savoy which is their kind of war cry the house of savoy they start to go off uphill they're all carrying backpacks that are 35 kilograms in weight what are they taking pots i eating pasta by this point or isn't that invented by americans in 1958 1964 yeah yeah invented in saint louis missouri but isn't that the way with all italian dishes i gather so that's what i vaguely remember um no but 35 kilograms you know when you check into a plane yeah i know and that the maximum is 23 or something i wouldn't want to be charging austrian machine gun placements you know with limestone shards going everywhere you've got the weight of two suitcases and you're like oh my god i'm going to die i'm going to die i'm going to die two full suitcases on your back staggering up this lime yeah it's raining soon the sun's going to come out and then you'll be steaming or whatever what the hell are they taking anyway they stagger up this hill then the austrians start shooting at them most of the officers were killed straight away the men are all scrambling around on their hands and knees to take cover and distolfo said in a whirl of death and glory within a few moments the epic garibaldian style of warfare is crushed and consigned to the shadow of history and basically there's then another rainstorm which stops the battle and the italian survivors sort of stagger back down the hill with their backpacks and they're back to where they started and this is the story of the entire first battle of the isonzo it takes two weeks the italians make about two yards and they take 15 000 casualties that's the first battle of the isonzo and how many how many are they going to be over the course of the war there's going to be 11 more of them you would think if you were general codona you would say well that didn't work i probably won't try that again he tries it 11 more times in the next two years or so well he's written his book he has written his book but also he's while this was happening he was at a conference with the with the allied generals the british and the french and they said to him we want you to you know if you now you've entered the war we've given you this money and these promises you need to you know produce results so he feels under pressure and so let's then two weeks later he launches the second battle of the isonzo again in the socha valley same story up they up the hill they go cut down by austrian machine guns and they haven't advanced at all i mean barely i mean you know if you got really into the weeds of this you'll find they've actually captured a village or something a village a hill here a hill there but on the in the grand scheme of things they've made no progress whatsoever the sun has come out it's now the summer there are these amazing accounts from officers in mark thompson's book there's no escaping the heat tongues swallowing and he also quotes an italian officer called virgilio bonamori who kept a diary in the first month of the war bonamori says you know he describes being in one of these limestone trenches we talked about the trenches on the western front last time the italian trenches are awful they are far worse than anything on the western front because they can't dig down deep enough really for them to be effective they can't dig down you can't bury the bodies yeah so the bodies are just hanging around the stench was unbearable says bonamore we're squatting among our own and enemy corpses basically this can't get very deep so when the austrians fire at you lots of you end up dying blokes are being ripped open by shells and whatnot and he gives us a description of a single day on the upper socha river on the 14th of august gives you a sense of what it's like so the italians started with an artillery bombardment at three o'clock in the morning and they set off uphill before they even really started uphill most of them are absolutely exhausted and some of them while they're walking fell asleep while they were walking which seems a bit much the sun finally comes up and they discover that they're on this hillside they're totally exposed no cover they're exposed to the austrian guns the austrians fire at them and kind of rake them with shrapnel but that goes on till midday and then midday their officer says okay charge now they start charging the people who've got the wire cutters are all shot down before they even get to the barbed wire so the rest of the men then are underneath the barbed wire and the austrian machine guns are just firing at them bonamore the dead are in piles on top of each other nearly all the senior officers have fallen and basically they end up huddling for hours together kind of underneath the austrian barbed wire they can't get through it they can't go back they're kind of stuck they all run out of ammo and their captain says i think we should just make a breakthrough we should try to sneak away and so they start to sneak away the first four men who try to sneak away are all shot straight away actually let's not sneak away this is a really bad idea so they basically just stay there under the austrian wire until darkness comes and then when darkness comes when the austrians have kind of gone to bed or whatever they manage to stumble down the hill and bonamore says in his diary what a massacre how many young lives wasted it's raining non-stop and we lie in the bottom of a ravine to spend the night in the dark and we're amid the water and the cold and the amazing detail about all this about this these battles that always sticks in my mind it's very unusual in the story of the first world war there are loads of stories about the austrians saying to the italians go back we won't shoot at you you know don't kill yourselves for nothing so here's an example an austrian captain shouting to his machine gunners he says to them what do you want to do do you want to kill them all let them be and then he says to the italians stop go back we won't shoot anymore do you want everyone to die loads of accounts of austrians saying italians go back we don't want to massacre you your brave men don't get yourselves killed like this and there's even a story from later in the year the austrians actually stopped firing during a battle and they said to the italians go on yeah enough get your dead and go back down and as the italians were collecting all their dead the austrians came out from behind their machine guns to help them to bring them stretchers and cigarettes and the italians gave them some of their feathers from their plumed hats as nice souvenirs they're still wearing plumed hats after all they're still wearing their plumed hats i mean what are they thinking so that was the second battle the second battle was a massive bloodbath the italians lost 42 000 men the austrians actually lost more 50 000 so here is the question it's been agitating callum our producer yeah how come the austrians actually lost more because they're outnumbered and because the italians they finally do get their act together they're able to overrun some austrian positions but they aren't able to do enough of that to swing the tide of the battle but i mean let's not pretend that the austrians aren't going the austrians are being killed too in large numbers you know the austrians they're not exactly one of europe's great military machines we saw how badly they performed against the russians they are struggling but somehow they're clinging on is the answer right so they are they are they are the massive underdogs here even though they're at the top of the hill but this slightly recalibrates um the the strategy then because it does suggest that that albeit bloodly it is working and if the austrians are as outnumbered as they seem to be one day it will work one day it would work i mean you can kind of see codona's mentality general codona's spin doctor joins us now on the rest of history yeah but it doesn't work though i mean that i would say it doesn't work well we'll see we'll all this are losing fewer men than the austrians does put a slightly different perspective on it but they're not always losing fewer men so back in rome salandra the prime minister is becoming very frustrated he needs a victory to show the italian public but he also needs a victory to appease the allies so in october general codona agrees to launch a third battle of the isonzo and it starts with a huge bombardment in october the 18th not enough as always to break the defenses or destroy their barbed wire the italians advance to driving rain two weeks it's really really muddy they don't really get anywhere and that's that and at the end of that third battle the italians lost maybe 67 000 men killed and wounded but in this case only 40 000 austrians so the tide of war is turning well now you would think at this point codona would surely change tactics but no he's got he looks at the calendar he says well that's probably time for for a fourth battle before the end of the year and he's convinced the austrians must be running out of men now and he's not entirely wrong because in some places the italians outnumber the austrians three to one so he launches a fourth battle at this point it's now very cold lots of the italians have got frostbite their feet are so swollen with frostbite they can't put their boots on their hands are all purple and misshapen with the cold lots of italians by now started to shoot to get out of the war so given the choice you would rather be fighting at the battle of loose than in this battle yeah i think so i think so um because here's the test when allied observers went to the italian lines they said oh my god i didn't think anything could be worse than what we're experiencing but this is absolutely awful so in that fourth battle by the way the italians lost 49 000 men the austrians 30 000 so again the italians lost 40 000 men and the italians lost more and the conditions in the italian trenches over the winter were absolutely appalling they have these shallow trenches their uniforms are in rags a lot of them don't even have guns their boots fall apart they've all got typhoid and cholera and actually the thing that i was about to say amuses me it both appalls and amuses me british visitors who went to the italian camps they couldn't get over the toilet conditions that they they had no respect for italian hygiene one british visitor said the italian camp was literally a field of filth i had never seen such a disgusting sight and i wondered what kind of epidemic was being bred amidst the excreta and soiled paper i mean it sounds like a kind of baidika discussing italian toilet arrangements 1897 or something they're always very sniffy about that or a columnist in the daily telegraph whose children have just been to glastonbury yeah i was appalled by that yeah when he went to see they were getting on anyway so the year ends with the war in total deadlock at an absolutely horrendous cost so the italians have now lost killed and wounded 400 000 men and this is a war that they chose right they could have stayed out but they've thrown away the lives of all these people and mark thompson gives a example of a single brigade who were called unimprovably the palenta brigade because they wore yellow colors and the palenta brigade began the war with 130 officers and 6 000 soldiers and by the end of 1915 having been reinforced several times they have lost 154 officers and 4 276 men killed wounded and missing so almost the entire you know the entire pre-war contingent and so by the end of the year the italians have actually lost more than the austrians do you think yes they have and to just to look ahead in the next two years they fight another eight battles on the asonzo and basically the 12th of them the italians just crack completely and the austrians end up winning it and this is that place called coborid very uh pretty town actually caporetto hemingway was there uh towards the end of the war this is what he's when he writes about the italian front he's writing about caporetto and the italian second army was completely destroyed and the austrians and the germans who have now piled in to help the austrians they pushed them back and they struck a hundred miles into italy and then the austrians themselves then fell apart the italians rallied at the river piave and then they beat the austrians at vittoria veneto in november of 1918 and this was the point at which the austro-hungarian empire was falling apart and then the war ends and at that point the italians have lost 689 000 people killed in battle as well as probably about 600 000 civilians and another million italians seriously wounded so it goes well yeah exactly developed to their advantage and it's this tremendous national trauma and the thing is for what because at the peace conferences they are given trieste they're given istria they're given the trentino and south tyrol but they're not given a lot of the other stuff they wanted they don't get a bit of turkey they don't get loads of greek islands they don't get dalmatia they don't get an empire in the adriatic and even though on paper they are among the winners of the first world war lots of italians feel we've actually you know we did all that for nothing you know for we didn't get what we wanted and so this will feed into feelings of resentment that will help to incubate fascism completely so one of the people who feels cheated is one of the worst men in history gabriella denuncio and he has all the through the war he's been reveling in the war i mean he was nicknamed the poet of slaughter and he loved that nickname and when the war ends because they don't get the istrian port of rieca or fiume as the italians called it he seizes it himself with a paramilitary group and he names himself the duce and that of course is an inspiration for another man we've mentioned the man who really does tap the bitterness after italy's war a man who had fought on the asonzo who rose to become a corporal who was badly wounded but survived to tell the tale and that man was benito mussolini a man who was badly wounded but survived to tell the tale and that man was benito mussolini okay dominic well next week we will be leaving the killing fields of the asonzo and heading out onto the high seas for the story of the lusitania in a way a sequel not just to this series but to the series we did on titanic because it involves more death on the high seas and then after that we will be going to brussels for a spy story or was edith cavell a spy we will be exploring that um rest is history club members of course can hear both those episodes and the remaining two episodes which will be on gallipoli so to join them and get the full range of benefits the only way to do that is to go to the rest is history.com and sign up there so thank you dominic thank you everyone for listening we will be back soon bye ciao ulcerative colitis and crohn's disease symptoms don't pause for the moments that matter that's why understanding your treatment options matters discover what's possible with 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