![]() Also, the newly appointed Italian commander, Luigi Cadorna, was highly unpopular amongst his men. Īs with most contemporaneous militaries, the Italian army primarily used horses for transport, and these failed to move supplies fast enough in the tough terrain of the Alps. Despite a professional officer corp, Italian units were severely undertrained and deficient in morale. This was mostly due to the Austrian forces being based on higher ground, and so Italian offensives had to be conducted climbing. Italy opened the war with an offensive aimed at capturing the town of Gorizia on the Isonzo river, and capturing the highlands on the Kras plateau and in the western Julian March, which would enable them to secure a further advance towards Trieste, Fiume, Kranj and Ljubljana.Īt the beginning of the offensive, Italian forces outnumbered the Austrians by three-to-one, but failed to penetrate their strong defensive lines along the Julian Alps and the north-western highlands of the Goriška region. Not until May 4 did Salandra denounce the Triple Alliance in a private note to its signatories. The Treaty of London was concluded on April 26 binding Italy to fight within one month. Salandra began to think that victory for the Entente was in sight, and was so anxious not to arrive too late for a share in the profits that he instructed his envoy in London to drop some demands and reach agreement quickly. The final choice was aided by the arrival of news in March of Russian victories in the Carpathians. On February 16, 1915, despite concurrent negotiations with Austria, a courier was dispatched in great secrecy to London with the suggestion that Italy was open to a good offer from the Entente. ![]() ![]() Set up between the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, the Italian Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino and the French Foreign Minister Jules Cambon. Italy's entry was engineered in secret by the 1915 Treaty of London. On 23 May, Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary. In the early stages of the war, Allied diplomats courted Italy, attempting to secure Italian participation on the Allied side, culminating in the Treaty of London of 26 April 1915 in which Italy renounced her obligations to the Triple Alliance. The annexation of those Austrian territories (inhabited not only by Italians, but also by ethnic Germans and South Slavs) became the main Italian war goal, assuming a similar function as the issue of Alsace-Lorraine had for the French. By the 1910s, the expansionist ideas of this movement were taken up by a significant part of the Italian political elite. More importantly, a radical nationalist political movement, called Unredeemed Italy ( Italia irredenta), founded in the 1880s, started claiming the Italian-inhabited territories of Austria Hungary, especially in the Austrian Littoral and in the County of Tyrol. Italy had a longstanding rivalry with Austria-Hungary, dating back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, which granted several regions on the Italian peninsula to the Austrian Empire. While being a member of the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany, Italy did not declare war in August 1914, arguing that the Alliance was defensive in nature and therefore that Austria-Hungary's aggression did not obligate Italy to take part. 4.2 The decisive Battle of Vittorio Veneto (October–November 1918).4.1 Battle of the Piave River (June 1918). ![]() [[File:Flag of Bohemia.svg|22px Czechoslovak legions |caption=From left to right: Ortles, autumn 1917 Fort Verena, June 1915 Mount Paterno, 1915 Carso, 1917 Toblach, 1915. For other Italian campaigns, see Italian Campaign. ![]()
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