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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
A desperate country to fight in.
Brigadier-General Charles Delmé-Radcliffe, 25 October 1915Before the war Italy had been ‘the least of the Great Powers’. That had been a diplomatic truth but now the opening phase of her war showed that it was also a military truth. Indeed, if Austria–Hungary had not been engaged in driving the Russian army back deep into Poland and had turned her full attentions on her former ally instead, Italy might well not have lived to fight another day. In the first seven months of the war Cadorna fought four battles of the Isonzo (seven more would follow in the years to come) all to no avail. In the face of huge physical obstacles and a well-entrenched enemy strategy failed, commanders failed, and the rank and file of the army began to show the first signs of the very reactions Cadorna feared – disillusion and disobedience. His response was to begin what became an ever more forceful tightening of the disciplinary screw. Behind the firing lines supply, while it did not entirely fail, barely sufficed to keep the armies going. Slowly, and with difficulty, Italy began to build its own version of a war economy.
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