Italy in the Era of Total War

For many years English-language coverage of Italy’s experience of the First and Second World Wars was scarcely superabundant. On the first of these conflicts, for example, until little more than a decade ago the historiography was limited to little more than Cyril Falls’ dated 1965 battle study, Caporetto, and Mark Thompson’s much more detailed but still narrowly military The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1914–1917 (2008). Over the course of the past 10 years, however, two remarkable British historians, John Gooch – a tutor of this reviewer during the latter’s undergraduate career to whom this essay is respectfully dedicated – and Vanda Wilcox, have set the record straight by publishing no fewer than five monographs that cover the whole gamut of war and society in both liberal and fascist Italy. The intention of this review article is to discuss all of them at once so as to highlight, or so it is hoped, the common themes that bind them together. Let us begin with The Italian Army in the First World War. In this work, Gooch offers a concise narrative history of the bloody battles that raged along Italy’s north-eastern frontiers from 1915 to 1917, and in this respect alone it is a useful place to start, not least because it soon becomes clear that the oft-published photographs of Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops manning lonely outposts on lofty Alpine summits are deeply unrepresentative, the vast majority of the fighting taking place on terrain that, if still rugged, was both at an infinitely lower altitude and far more accessible. That said, the Review Article