Italian performance in the First World War has been generally disparaged or ignored compared to that of the armies on the Western Front, and troop morale in particular has been seen as a major weakness of the Italian army. In this first book-length study of Italian morale in any language, Vanda Wilcox reassesses Italian policy and performance from the perspective both of the army as an institution and of the ordinary soldiers who found themselves fighting a brutally hard war. Wilcox analyses and contextualises Italy's notoriously hard military discipline along with leadership, training methods and logistics before considering the reactions of the troops and tracing the interactions between institutions and individuals. Restoring historical agency to soldiers often considered passive and indifferent, Wilcox illustrates how and why Italians complied, endured or resisted the army's demands through balancing their civilian and military identities.

A study of how the Italian army managed morale and troops responded to its policies during the First World War.

In May 1915, Italy declared war on the Habsburg Empire. Nearly 750,000 Italian troops were killed in savage, hopeless fighting on the stony hills north of Trieste and in the snows of the Dolomites. To maintain discipline, General Luigi Cadorna restored the Roman practice of decimation, executing random members of units that retreated or rebelled. With elegance and pathos, historian Mark Thompson relates the saga of the Italian front, the nationalist frenzy and political intrigues that preceded the conflict, and the towering personalities of the statesmen, generals, and writers drawn into the heart of the chaos. A work of epic scale, The White War does full justice to the brutal and heart-wrenching war that inspired Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

In Italy in the Era of the Great War, Vanda Wilcox brings together nineteen Italian and international scholars to analyse the political, military, social and cultural history of Italy in the country’s decade of conflict from 1911 to 1922. Starting with the invasion of Libya in 1911 and concluding with the rise of post-war social and political unrest, the volume traces domestic and foreign policy, the economics of the war effort, the history of military innovation, and social changes including the war’s impact on religion and women, along with major cultural and artistic developments of the period. Each chapter provides a concise and effective overview of the field as it currently stands as well as introducing readers to the latest research. Contributors are Giulia Albanese, Claudia Baldoli, Allison Scardino Belzer, Francesco Caccamo, Filippo Cappellano, Selena Daly, Fabio Degli Esposti, Spencer Di Scala, Douglas J. Forsyth, Irene Guerrini, Oliver Janz, Irene Lottini, Stefano Marcuzzi, Valerie McGuire, Marco Pluviano, Paul O’Brien, Carlo Stiaccini, Andrea Ungari, and Bruce Vandervort. See inside the book.

A major new account of the role and performance of the Italian army in the First World War. Setting military events in a broad context, Gooch explores pre-war Italian military culture, and reveals how an army with a reputation for failure fought a challenging war in appalling conditions - and won.

From the mud of the Somme to the raid on Zeebrugge, the Royal Marines fought in almost every element of the Great War on the Western Front. Today they are known world-wide as an elite commando fighting force, but that has only been their role since 1940, a fraction of their period in existence. Until 1923 they existed as two corps - the Royal Marine Light Infantry and the Royal Marine Artillery - and both served with distinction along the western front in the great war. This book examines and explains the engagements in which they were involved, the equipment used and the organisation and training undertaken in hitherto unseen detail, drawing on a wide variety of sources to give an accurate picture of their contribution to the war in France and Belgium.