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 the already overstretched Habsburg empire. In the spring of 1915, Germany was reluctantly preparing to provide Austria-Hungary with military aid on the Eastern Front, where it was struggling against Serbia and Russia. But the Germans refused to intervene against Italy until the autumn of 1917. As a result, Austria-Hungary found itself fighting alone in the theatre for more than two years, along a physically challenging front almost 400 miles long. It was a war in which the empire’s forces initially had the advantage, but which ended in their comprehensive defeat.
Strength in defence
Much of the fighting took place in the mountainous South Tyrol, where peaks range from 6,000 to 12,000 feet in height. The campaign was commonly known as the ‘White War’ – because in summer, the steep limestone slopes turned a blinding white, while in winter they were covered in snow. Although the Italians had local numerical superiority, the forbidding Alpine topography restricted them to small-scale operations. Field guns had to be hauled by rope up almost vertical cliff faces. The Austro-Hungarians held the higher ground, where they strengthened the natural defences with barbed wire and improvised trenches and tunnels cut into the rock face. They also had an advantage in terms of heavy artillery, though not when it came to small and medium guns.
