Disaster over the Alps: The Austro-Hungarian army on the Italian Front, 1915-1918

In May 1915, Italy abandoned the neutrality that it had uneasily maintained for the first ten months of the Great War. For the Italian kingdom, which had been created barely two generations earlier, war with Austria-Hungary offered the enticing prospect of sweeping territorial gains on its northern border. It aimed to win control of a frontier zone that contained not only significant Italian-speaking populations but also people of German, Slovene, and Croat ethnicity. Italy had designs on an area stretching from the alpine Trentino-South Tyrol region eastwards to Trieste and down the Adriatic coastline into Dalmatia. The opening of the Italian Front was an unwanted additional burden for t