Morale and the Italian Army during the First World War

Cambridge Military Histories

by Vanda Wilcox

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.

238 pages, Paperback

Published December 20, 2018

Reviews

[Ron Piovesan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting perspective for those interested in First World War history. Italy wasn’t quite formed psychologically when war broke out in 1914. One year later when Italy entered the war, it did so with a brutal military leadership and a class of peasant-soldiers who were disconnected from the causes (real or invented) for which Italy was supposedly fighting.