Italy went to war, in 1915 (that is, a year later) with just 875,000 men and only 180 artillery pieces. Britain, which relied on professionals (Volunteer divisions of Kitchener’s New Army would first see service only in the summer of 1915 conscription wasn’t introduced in Britain until January, 1916) entered the war with nearly a million of them. Let’s establish a baseline here: Austria-Hungary entered the war in 1914 with a mobilized army across all fronts of perhaps 3,000,000 men, with 1,800 artillery pieces. At the strategic level, Italy’s position entering the war was fairly stark: the Italians were by some distance the weakest of the major powers. But Cadorna’s failures run through all three levels of military analysis.
Battle of the isonzo meme how to#
Often the failure of generals in WWI goes to their ability to grasp a strategic or operational objective but then fail to plan on how to get it. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter ( for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings. But in any event, this is a good illustration of Cadorna’s personality: bitter, arrogant and callous, but with a cruel authoritarian streak and a profound conviction that all of his mistakes were someone else’s fault.īut first, before we assault this particular issue eleven times, if you like what you are reading here, please share it if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon.
As we’ll see, that complete authority is not going to come with complete responsibility for outcomes. For his part, Cadorna seems to have spent about as much time fighting a political battle in Rome as he did fighting the actual war on the Isonzo Cadorna insisted at the outset that he would only accept the job if he was given unfettered, complete authority. The son of Count Raffaele Cadorna (who had led the army which captured Rome, completing the unification of Italy), Cadorna’s political connections, particularly to the king Victor Emmanuel III, made him functionally impossible to remove from command after he was made chief of staff in 1914. Luigi Cadorna didn’t, to my knowledge, perpetrate any genocides, though as we’ll see, he was cruel and unreasonable. As I’ve noted before, the worst decision in the First World War was having a First World War, though the responsibility for that is diffused across multiple different leading figures. We are also here not investigating to see which WWI leader made the single worst decision. He then sold his services to the Soviets, before betraying them to side with the Basmachi movement, which didn’t go particularly well either. 1914 – Jan 1915) but who also then blamed his defeat (falsely) on the Armenians and subsequently instigated and played a key role in the Armenian genocide. That latter prize probably goes to İsmail Enver Pasha, Ottoman Minister of War from 1914 to 1918, a vain, arrogant strutting sort of man who not only utterly botched the only battle in which he commanded directly ( Sarikamish, Dec.
Now I should be clear here what I mean by ‘worst general.’ What I am assessing here is the fellow who was worst at generaling, rather than the worst human being who happened to be a general.
Via Wikipedia, Marshal of Italy Luigi Cadorna. While I argued that the tactical problem of trench warfare probably wasn’t solvable by any general, that doesn’t mean that some generals didn’t perform better than others under the difficult conditions imposed by the stalemate. Now, as I noted at the time, there is some stiff competition for that position. I said that Cadorna was my pick for the worst general of World War I. I thought I ought to substantiate the nearly endless shade towards Luigi Cadorna, Italian Army Chief of Staff from 1914-1917 (though I realize after writing this that what I actually ought to have done is just told the same bad joke about Cadorna 11 times in a row and let that stand as the explanation). This week we’re going to break from our normal fare and take a bit of a lark.
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