Luigi Cadorna
Luigi Cadorna commanded the Italian army for two and a half years, fought eleven battles on the same river, and was removed after the twelfth. Born in 1850, the son of the general who had taken Rome for Italy in 1870, he was appointed chief of staff in July 1914, weeks before the war began, and took Italy into it in May 1915 on the Allied side. The front he chose was the worst available. The Isonzo river runs through mountains on Italy's north-eastern frontier, and the Austrians held the heights; attacking there meant advancing uphill against prepared positions on rock, where shells produced stone splinters that multiplied the casualties. He attacked twelve times. The first eleven battles of the Isonzo, from June 1915 to September 1917, cost around a million Italian casualties and moved the line a few miles. His method was frontal assault and severe discipline. He dismissed 217 generals, ordered decimation — the shooting of men chosen by lot from units judged to have failed — and Italy executed more of its own soldiers than any other belligerent, some 750 formally and more without trial. He suppressed reports of low morale rather than acting on them. At Caporetto in October 1917 a combined German and Austrian attack using infiltration tactics and gas broke the line in hours, and the army fell back seventy miles to the Piave with 300,000 taken prisoner. His first communiqué blamed the troops for cowardice. He was dismissed within days. Italy recovered under Armando Diaz and won at Vittorio Veneto a year later. Cadorna was promoted to field marshal by Mussolini in 1924.
- Lived: 1850 CE – 1928 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: chief_of_staff, military_leader
