FIFTEEN
In November 1918, in the immediate aftermath of such a long-awaited victory, Italy was gripped with nationwide euphoria. After so long, the Austrians had been defeated, the hated Habsburgs deposed, and the unredeemed provinces joined to the Italian motherland. The army was hailed in all quarters, and the Comando Supremo showered generals and many lowlier soldiers with decorations to celebrate the army's triumph.' A dozen entire brigades were collectively awarded the inedaglia d'oro for their outstanding heroism throughout the struggle, among them the Tuscany, Aosta, and Sassari Brigades, which had spilled so much blood on the Carso. The fanti, Gabriele D'Annunzio's "holy infantry," finally received the grateful thanks of the nation for their awesome sacrifices on the Isonzo and numerous other battlefields.
But the cost of victory was appalling, and the enormity of the price Italy had paid to liberate Italia irredenta was only slowly being fully realized. In material terms alone, the cost of the war was daunting. The Treasury calculated the final cost of the war with Austria at 148 billion lire, equivalent to twice the Italian government's total expenditures from unification in 1861 to the eve of war in 1913. The war was financed in large part with foreign loans, leaving the victorious nation with a notable debt and lingering inflation as well. They ensured that prosperity would be slow to return. The baleful economic consequences of the Great War would remain with Italy for years to come.
Far worse, though, was the human cost of Italy's Pyrrhic victory. In fortyone months of fighting, the armed forces called twenty-seven conscript classes to the colors. Some five and a half million men donned a uniform during the struggle with Austria; two-fifths of them became casualties-killed, wounded, captured, or seriously ill. It took the army a full generation to make an accurate accounting of its losses. The final numbers revealed that Italy sacrificed 689,000 of her sons to redeem the Littoral and the South Tyrol. Another million Italians were seriously wounded, half of them permanently disabled. The overwhelming majority of Italy's casualties fell on the Isonzo, far and away the greatest and bloodiest campaign of the Italo-Austrian war.2
The Duke of Aosta's 3rd Army, the "undefeated" Terza Armata that fought so long on the rocky Carso, counted a total loss of 1,269,061 soldiers: 140,462 killed, 680,595 wounded, and 448,004 missing (most of them dead)-the vast majority of them fallen on the Isonzo.3 Italy's mountain infantry and artillery, the famed Alpini who did so much of the fighting on the upper Isonzo, alone had 166,881 casualties, more than half of them killed. In all, Italy lost no less than 1,100,000 soldiers on the Isonzo from June 1915 to October 1917, at least 95 percent of them in Luigi Cadorna's eleven futile offensives, twenty-eight months of failed attacks that brought the Italian Army only a third of the way to Trieste. Even by the terrible standards of the Great War, it had been an awe-inspiring and needless sacrifice. Nothing like it had been seen in the history of warfare.
Unsurprisingly, the enormous and unprecedented Italian casualties on the Isonzo demanded adequate compensation. The conquest of the Littoral and the South Tyrol no longer seemed enough to offset such a shedding of Italian blood. Rome soon demanded more. Crudely put, Italy wanted a better return on her frightful investment in Italian lives on the Isonzo's banks. Vittorio Orlando's government pressed the Allies for greater territorial concessions. The lands promised to Italy in the Treaty of London-the Littoral, the South Tyrol, and northern Dalmatia-were not enough. Rome now wanted Fiume, too, an Adriatic port southeast of Trieste. The majority of Fiume's residents were indeed ethnic Italians, but the city had always been part of Hungary and had no connection at all to Italy. More important, giving Fiume-and Dalmatia, for that matter-to Italy would be a mortal offense against the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia. When the British and French promised Dalmatia to Italy in 1915, it had been an Austrian province, but now it was part of Yugoslavia, one of the victorious Allied powers. In British and French eyes, Yugoslavia, a Habsburg successor state, was just as entitled to the Adriatic coastline as Italy; indeed, more so, because Dalmatia was almost wholly South Slav, with hardly any Italians living there. Why, reasoned London and Paris, should the Yugoslavs be deprived of South Slav territory just to satisfy Italian greed'?
The Italians were furious. After all, had they not entered the Great War to save Italian lands from the South Slavs? Worse, Italy's generals remembered well the pivotal role played by Austria's South Slav regiments in the defense on the Isonzo. Now they were being asked to surrender their claim on Dalmatiapromised to them in 1915--to satisfy the desires of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, many of whom had recently been fighting the Italians with vigor. When the Versailles peace conference convened on January 19, 1919, the Italian delegation was determined to wrest Dalmatia and Fiume, too, from the Yugoslavs. Only then would the peace settlement be just in Italian eyes. Indeed, Prime Minister Orlando arrived in France with only one object: collecting on his nation's debts, the blood debts incurred on the Isonzo. Italy had entered the war on the grounds of sacro egoismo-sacred egotism-and now Orlando came unashamedly to collect. He faced a tough diplomatic fight. Italy's allies, who had supported her and bankrolled much of the war with Austria, were uninterested in further Italian land claims. The land that was firmly in Italy's grasp, the Littoral and the South Tyrol, had large numbers of South Slavs and Germans; why cede even more territory, all of it almost purely Slav, to Rome? President Woodrow Wilson's notions of national self-determination, which guided the Versailles conference intermittently, certainly recommended against any further land grants to Italy, particularly at the expense of Yugoslavia. Italy was only a second-rate Allied power, far below Britain, France, and America in might and prestige, and her attempted grab of Dalmatia and Fiume was doomed to fail. It was therefore with resignation that the Orlando government accepted the Versailles settlement. In June 1920, the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon, which divided up Austria and Hungary, respectively, gave Italy the Littoral and the South Tyrol, as expected, but ceded Dalmatia and Fiume to Yugoslavia.
The response in Italy was fast and furious. The peace treaties were vehemently denounced. Millions of Italians, especially those on the Right, believed that Italy had been robbed of land she deserved and had bought with Italian blood. They demanded a revision of the postwar settlement in Italy's favor. Actually, dissatisfaction with the war's outcome had emerged almost immediately after the guns fell silent; the treaties were merely the final insult. As early as November 24, 1918, while the troops had only begun to demobilize, D'Annunzio wrote an article in Corriere della Sera, Italy's most prestigious newspaper, about the end of the war. In it he rued that Italy would not get what she deserved, and coined a memorable phrase: he called it a "mutilated victory."
D'Annunzio spoke for many Italians who felt that Italy had won the war but somehow lost the peace. The dashing fifty-five-year-old poet and war hero was disappointed by the war's end and lacked a sense of purpose. He seized on the revisionist cause with all his energy; and his usual weakness for self-dramatization and theatrics came to the fore. D'Annunzio, who had done so much to turn popular opinion toward intervention in 1915, now demanded annexation of South Slav lands: "Dalmatia belongs to Italy by divine right as well as human law, by the Grace of God who has designed the earth in such a way that every race can recognize its destiny therein carved out.... It was ours and shall be ours again."
D'Annunzio soon had followers. Many of them were disgruntled veterans, unable to find their place in society now that peace had returned. Many, too, were angered by crippling postwar inflation and unemployment; the Italy they came home to was not the idyllic place they had been promised by the government. Arditi veterans were notably prominent among the revisionists. As many as 50,000 soldiers served in special assault units during the war, and many of them could not adjust to civilian life. War had brutalized them. They felt that Italy no longer appreciated their heroism and patriotism, and that the government had sold out them and their fallen comrades by accepting the Versailles settlement.
D'Annunzio was not the only political figure courting the arditi. Mussolini, too, was looking to recruit disenchanted veterans for his cause. Mussolini also was appalled by the treaties, and he was determined to do something about it. He had argued for war in 1915 not only to defeat Austria and liberate Italia irredenta, but also to radicalize the nation, to bring a revolution. But postwar Italy looked much as it did before. The elites that ruled Italy in 1915, the staid, liberal bourgeoisie, were still in charge; worse, Italy was now threatened by the Left. After Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, all Europe was fearful that the Red contagion would spread. Mussolini was perhaps the greatest worrier of them all; he believed that if he did not act, the revolutionary Left, his mortal Socialist enemies, would seize power.
With this political message, Mussolini started down his road to power. On March 23, 1919, he founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan. These nascent groups of ultranationalists were named for the ancient fasces, symbol of the Roman Republic, and soon gave a name to Mussolini's rising movement and ideology-Fascism. Their first chairman, significantly, was a former arditi captain. Out-of-work arditi filled the ranks of the movement; their violence, elitism, black shirts, and fighting knives appealed to Mussolini and gave his movement a well defined image. Mussolini continually emphasized that veterans like himself and his followers, the men who had fought the endless battles of the Isonzo, were the rightful leaders of Italy: "We, we alone have the right to the succession, because we, we were the men who forced the country into the war and into the victory." His essential message was interconnected and threefold: revise the treaties, revolutionize the country, and defeat the Left. This heady brew of nationalism and radicalism included pretty much the same themes Mussolini had advocated in 1915, only now they were made much more virulent by the cost of the war and the "mutilated victory."
Yet Mussolini was soon upstaged by D'Annunzio. Frustrated by the government's acceptance of the treaties and eager to act, on September 12, 1919, the writer led a motley band of a thousand armed ultranationalists into Fiume. D'Annunzio and his followers marched into the city under the "banner of Randaccio," the flag that had adorned the corpse of Major Giovanni Randaccio, the poet's friend mortally wounded on the Carso during the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo. The legion raised the banner and the Italian tricolor and claimed the city for Italy, a flagrant violation of the peace settlement. D'Annunzio established himself as local ruler, leading an odd life that mixed idealism with debauchery. Nevertheless, D'Annunzio's daring act electrified the ultranationalists. Soon thousands of volunteers flocked to Fiume to join the cause.
In fact, D'Annunzio's action was illegal, and the government in Rome should have evicted the warrior-poet and his strange legion from the city. But not only did the government fail to move against the Fiuman adventurers, but the occupiers actually received considerable military assistance from the army. The senior general in the region was Pietro Badoglio, commander of the 8th Army, garrisoning the northeast and the Littoral. Like many senior officers, Badoglio was sympathetic to the revisionists and lent covert aid to D'Annunzio's forces at Fiume. The government demanded a blockade of the rebel city, but its execution was halfhearted and it failed to damage D' Annunzio's cause. For a time the warrior-poet threatened to fatally destabilize the government in Rome, but the adventure came to an abrupt end after more than a year.
In November 1920, following lengthy negotiations, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti's government reached an agreement with Yugoslavia: Belgrade got Dalmatia and Fiume was declared a free city, belonging to neither Italy nor Yugoslavia. The government, anxious to settle the issue, now wasted no time getting rid of D'Annunzio and his adventurers. D'Annunzio pledged resistance to the death, promising Fiume would be "the city of total sacrifice." Obsessed with his memories of the Isonzo, he exhorted his legionaries to defend Fiume to the last man: "This is the August of the torrid battles, of the desperate victories. There is Sabotino with its long gray back reshaped by explosions.... There is the Oslavia gully choked up by stagnant smoke. Here is Podgora, reddish like a blood clot. Here is San Michele ... that saw thirty-two assaults, watered with more blood than that drunk by all the votive altars in the course of the centuries. Where has that blood gone?" Yet D'Annunzio's lurid, religious-sounding battle cry was hollow. When an Italian battleship appeared in Fiume's harbor and fired a single shell, wounding the bard slightly, D'Annunzio hastily fled. He moved into retirement, and the revisionist torch passed to Mussolini.4
Mussolini had been busy building his political base. His core of support remained the veterans, but he managed to gain the admiration of many Italians from diverse groups. Many Italians of the Right and Center feared the Bolshevik threat, and a great many wanted an end to postwar inflation and unemployment, which Mussolini promised. No less, millions of Italians of all political stripes detested the treaties and demanded that Italy gain her rightful territory. The Fascists also gained support in the army; this was indispensable because the military was the only force strong enough to block Mussolini's rise. Badoglio, appointed chief of the General Staff to replace Armando Diaz in 1920, was pro-Fascist, as was the Duke of Aosta, the army's most esteemed general. Countless more junior officers responded favorably to Mussolini's nationalist cries for revision and reform.
The Fascists did not rely on campaigning and persuasion alone, however, to gain recruits and deter their political enemies. From the beginning there was a boisterously thuggish element of the movement. Many former soldiers had developed a taste for violence in the trenches and saw no reason not to use similar tactics against real or imagined opponents of Fascism. Mussolini's party militia, the "Black Shirts," adopted the black uniforms and violent outlook of the arditi. Ex-arditi gave Fascism a disciplined street-fighting army and a justifiably bad image. Fascist violence was particularly brutal against ethnic minorities, especially South Slavs. In the recently annexed Littoral, Italy pursued anti-Slav policies even before the Fascists rose to power. Slovenes and Croats, the "Slav barbarians" denounced by D'Annunzio, were persecuted by Rome. Their language and culture were all but outlawed; even the most anti-Austrian Slavs in the Littoral soon missed the Habsburgs. To make matters worse, Fascist toughs routinely beat up Slovenes with impunity. Many of the Slovenes in Trieste were members of the Socialist Party, and they were frequent victims of Fascist thuggery. Mussolini's Black Shirts liked to abuse Socialists anyway, so finding a victim who was both a Socialist and a Slav was, no doubt, doubly rewarding.
Liberal Italy proved feeble in its attempts to thwart Mussolini's rise to power. By 1922, the Fascist movement had gained significant momentum; to many Italians it was the only force strong enough to resist the radical Left and gain Italy's rightful territorial inheritance. In October, Mussolini planned a March on Rome. It was more a propaganda exercise than an actual grab for power. Mussolini in fact had only 20,000 Black Shirts coming to Rome to support him (and riding trains, not marching, as it turned out), surely not enough to pose a threat to the army. Decisive action by the military and the king would have easily crushed the March on Rome, but Vittorio Emanuele was unwilling to risk a civil war. Earlier in October, Diaz and Badoglio informed the king that the military was sympathetic to the Fascists, and could not be used against Mussolini and his supporters. Vittorio Emanuele was also afraid that his pro-Fascist cousin the Duke of Aosta, whom he "cordially hated," would depose him with Black Shirt support and assume the throne himself. Therefore the king caved in when confronted with Mussolini's demands for power. No violence marred this bloodless coup. Vittorio Ernanuele requested that Mussolini form a government immediately. The Fascist leader, now 11 Duce of all Italy, arrived in Rome on October 31, 1922, the new prime minister at age thirty-nine.
From the beginning, the Fascist regime was deeply imbued with the spirit of the trenches. Mussolini himself was a veteran of the war on the Isonzo, and the upper ranks of the Fascist movement were filled with former grigioverdi. The Great War had been the most formative experience of Mussolini's life, as it had been for millions of other Italians. He would build a new, stronger Italy, a country reborn in war. Italy's new ruling class, Mussolini promised, would be una trincerocrazia-a trenchocracy. Significantly, Mussolini's first official act as prime minister was to pay homage to Italy's unknown soldier of the Great War.
11 Duce's dealings with the army were complex. He was always careful not to alienate the army, the only potential rival and threat to the Fascists. He appointed Armando Diaz war minister and made him a marshal of Italy, the new highest rank. Diaz had an excellent reputation as the savior of the army and the nation after Caporetto, and Mussolini was careful to court his favor. But Diaz was a dying man. He had contracted chronic bronchitis on the Carso and suffered from pulmonary emphysema. Diaz died in Rome in February 1928, aged sixty-six.
His predecessor at the Comando Supremo, Luigi Cadorna, outlived Diaz by only ten months. Cadorna's career was ended and his reputation stained by the Caporetto disaster, but he achieved an almost phoenixlike resurgence under Fascism. After the war, Cadorna busied himself writing books, including his self-serving war memoirs and a biography of his father, the occupier of Rome in 1870. He played no political role. Yet, in November 1924, Mussolini promoted the retired count to marshal of Italy, simultaneously with Diaz. Mussolini was sympathetically inclined toward the Piedmontese general, and saw his promotion as a token to the army; his raising of both Cadorna and Diaz to marshal permitted Mussolini to appease both major factions in the officer corps. Cadorna then was back in official favor, a position he maintained up to his death at seventy-eight, in Pallanza, his birthplace. To the end of his life Cadorna remained wholly unrepentant for his deeply flawed generalship on the Isonzo.
The fate of Luigi Capello was less happy, and somewhat less deserved. Like his superior, Capello's reputation was ruined by the collapse of the 2nd Army on the upper Isonzo. Capello, too, tried to justify his failures after the war in print, but met with little success. Mussolini detested Capello, not because he was "the Butcher" of the Isonzo front but because the general was a staunch Freemason. 11 Duce both hated and feared the Masons, whom he believed were part of an international conspiracy to weaken Italy. Capello's Masonic affiliations denied him any role in Mussolini's Italy, and ultimately doomed him. The general was arrested in November 1925 on trumped-up charges of plotting a coup against the government. He endured a special trial in 1927, Mussolini's method of humiliating Capello and eliminating him from political life. It decayed into a political circus that Mussolini exploited for cynical purposes, and it ended with a thirty-year sentence for the old soldier. Capello was too feeble to serve his time in a regular prison and spent much of his sentence in more pleasant penitentiaries. He was released on compassionate grounds in 1936 and died, forgotten, in Rome five years later, at the age of eighty-two.
The Duke of Aosta maintained smoother relations with the Fascist regime. An early admirer and supporter of Mussolini and his movement, the duke enjoyed privileged status under Italy's new order. He spent much of his time in retirement near the Isonzo battlefields, at Miramare Castle, built for the Habsburg Archduke Maxmilian. For six years the duke enjoyed lengthy stays at the beautiful castle, overlooking the Adriatic just west of Trieste. When he died in 1931, aged sixty-two, the Duke of Aosta was buried on the Carso, at Redipuglia, among the fallenfanti of his beloved Terza Arniata.
One general from the Isonzo front who benefited greatly from Fascist rule was Pietro Badoglio. As already mentioned, he was appointed chief of the General Staff in 1920, only forty-nine years old. Badoglio was ennobled, named the Marquess of Sabotino to commemorate his great deeds of August 1916. He proved as loyal a servant of Mussolini as he had been of the king. During the 1920s and 1930s he played an instrumental role in Mussolini's ambitious military expansion and preparation for war. He commanded Italy's bloody pacification campaign in Libya, as well as the much larger and more brutal invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Badoglio became intimately associated with the Fascist regime and its military. No Italian general played a greater role in readying Mussolini's armies for the Second World War.
When Badoglio was regional commander of the northeast and the Littoral during 1919-1920, his troops began the herculean task of constructing monuments to the dead of the Isonzo. First, though, Italy had to find and identify the remains of hundreds of thousands of fanti still listed as missing in action on the Isonzo front. Many thousands of Italian soldiers had no known grave; countless others had been buried hastily in hundreds of small, temporary cemeteries scattered throughout the Isonzo valley. For twenty years after the war's end, the Italian Army painstakingly searched for bodies and relocated them in larger, central cemeteries. The majority of Italy's dead on the Isonzo were never identified. The years of static fighting blew thousands of corpses to pieces, and decomposition did the rest. Italy built three massive ossuaries-one at Caporetto on the upper Isonzo, another at Oslavia before Gorizia, and the largest at Redipuglia on the western Carso-where the dead were collected. The ossuaries were enormous, moving, churchlike edifices, national shrines built both to remember the dead and to glorify the sacrifice on the Isonzo. Mussolini conducted several propaganda visits to the Isonzo, his old battleground, and in 1938 personally dedicated the ossuary at Caporetto, near where the Austrians had crossed the Isonzo in late October 1917.
The Fascist regime regularly cited the Isonzo battles as an example of Italian valor and willingness to sacrifice for the nation; needless to say, the government never tolerated criticism of the army or its generals for the prosecution of the war against Austria. Mussolini wanted to reap glory, not criticism, from the catastrophe on the Isonzo. Italy permitted the Austrians few monuments along the Isonzo, and were especially careful not to let the Slovenes use war memorials as nationalist symbols. As a result, the Italians refused to permit the Slovenes to rebuild Sveta Gora, the monastery at the peak of Mt. Santo destroyed by Italian shelling during the war's first month. Instead, the Italian Army erected its own war monument in its place, incurring the undying resentment of the Slovenes.
For many years, the building of ossuaries and war memorials was the only construction taking place on the Isonzo. The entire valley had been wrecked by the twenty-eight months of fighting. Gorizia was mostly in ruins, many smaller towns like Flitsch and Tolmein were equally damaged, and dozens of rural villages had been obliterated. The Fascist regime was perennially short of funds and reconstruction came slowly. Gorizia was rebuilt between 1934 and 1937, almost a generation after the war. The first government reconstruction project was Gorizia's cathedral, dating to 1570 and reassembled beginning in 1927; the city's early fourteenth-century castle was rebuilt by the mid-1930s. Trieste was more fortunate, because the fighting front never got near the city. After the war her buildings were intact, but her economy lay in ruins nevertheless. The collapse of Austria was a disaster for Trieste and her citizens. The Adriatic city was a well integrated part of Austria's economy, her greatest port and a major rail center. Austria's demise reduced Trieste to second-rate economic status. The Great War dissolved Central Europe's economic system no less than its political stability. As part of Italy, Trieste now had to compete with Venice, her ancient trading rival, without the benefit of Austria's protective tariff and favored trade status. Trieste's economy quickly fell into a decline from which it never recovered; no longer was it a leading Adriatic port, much less the eighth busiest port in the world, as it had been in 1914.
Austria's collapse therefore left the residents of the Littoral notably poorer. The chaos and damage inflicted by the Isonzo fighting had been bad enough, and postwar economic instability only worsened matters. Even many Italians living in Trieste and Gorizia were soon disgruntled; the oppressed Slovenes and Croats living under Italian rule did not even have a lingering sense of wartime triumph to comfort them. Italo Svevo, Trieste's most eminent writer, died in September 1928. He lived to witness the annexation of his home city to Italy, a goal he had waited decades to see realized. But he had also lived to see Italy bring not prosperity and liberty to Trieste, but impoverishment and Fascism. Political redemption by Rome, it turned out, was no panacea.
Most of the rest of the world soon forgot about the Isonzo fighting and its painful aftermath. The battles on the Italian front had been well covered by English-language newspapers during the war, but after 1918 Americans and Britons quickly lost interest in the Isonzo. Interest in the English-speaking world was rekindled for a time with the 1929 publication of a celebrated novel by Ernest Hemingway, the American ambulance driver wounded on the Piave. A Farewell to Arms was set on the Isonzo, and much of the story takes place in Gorizia during 1917; the novel also includes graphic descriptions of the Italian retreat after Caporetto. Yet, despite appearances, it was not an autobiographical book: Hemingway reached Italy a half-year after Caporetto, and never laid eyes on the Isonzo and its beautiful valley before he wrote his novel. All the same, the book became an international best-seller, winning Hemingway considerable royalties and universal acclaim. Still, interest in the Isonzo waned. By the 1930s, there were more pressing matters on the world stage, and another war began to loom large in European fears. Except in the countries whose sons died on the Isonzo, the dozen great battles fought there quickly became a mere footnote to history.
The Austrians naturally maintained their interest in the Isonzo. The Habsburg Empire's losses there, although less than Italy's, were nevertheless frightful, amounting to probably 650,000 dead, wounded, and missing. The Austrian Army counted some five million soldiers lost to death, wounds, illness, and capture during the war, the worst loss rate of any major belligerent; Austria's casualties on the Isonzo front were, in fact, far lower than those incurred against the Russians. Even so, the Isonzo occupied a special place in Austrian memory. The soldiers remembered the terrible Isonzo for the merciless and futile slaughter that raged there from June 1915 to October 1917. No less, though, Austria's soldiers and many civilians remembered the Isonzo front with pride: Habsburg arms acquitted themselves superbly there, and the fighting included the Caporetto breakthrough, the greatest triumph in Austria's long history of battles. In 1918 the war, the dynasty, and the army all came to an end because of the Italian front, and the Isonzo therefore stayed fresh in the memory of numerous former Habsburg subjects.
Many senior Habsburg generals were stranded by the empire's sudden collapse in October 1918. Soldiers who had spent their entire lives serving the multinational monarchy watched their world dissolve virtually overnight, and many soon found themselves literally men without a country. Foremost among them was Svetozar Boroevic. The battle-worn field marshal was startled by the speed and thoroughness of the Habsburg demise. His efforts to save the dynasty had failed through no fault of his own. Worse, both as an Austrian general and a Croatian patriot, he was horrified by Italy's final victory and annexation of the Littoral. Soon after the Austrian Army dissolved, Boroevic contacted the new Yugoslav government and offered his services; he wanted to lead Croatian, Serbian, and Slovene soldiers in defense of the Littoral and Dalmatia, to protect South Slav lands from the Italian invader. The Serb-led Yugoslav government and army balked at the suggestion; soon they even denied Boroevic, a Serb, the right to set foot in his Croatian homeland. Belgrade feared Boroevic. The Yugoslav regime knew he was hailed as a war hero by many South Slavs, and was revered in Croatia. The Serbian dynasty and army wanted no rivals in their new Yugoslav state.
Turned away from his homeland (the Yugoslav government even confiscated all his personal possessions in Croatia), Boroevic decided to stay in now-independent Austria. He and his wife settled close to Klagenfurt, near the Italian and Slovene frontiers and the Isonzo. Rampant inflation ate away the field marshal's modest pension, and the old soldier and his wife found themselves penniless; they lived simply off the kindness of loyal fellow officers, settling in a rented two-room cottage. Yet "the Lion of the Isonzo" did not long outlive the dynasty and army he had spent his life serving. The sixty-three year-old Boroevic suffered a stroke while swimming and died on May 23, 1920, five years to the day that Italy declared war against Austria.5
The Republic of Austria, the German Alpine rump of the defunct empire, was an unstable creation from the start. A small country of just seven million, it was burdened with Vienna, a capital of two million, overlarge for such a tiny Alpine republic. Worse, its economy had been badly damaged by the war, and its politics proved dangerously volatile. Red Vienna was pitted against more the conservative Alpine provinces, resulting in political deadlock and eventually violence.' Most Austrians had desired union-Anschluss-with Germany in 1918, but the victorious Allies had strictly forbidden it. Successive governments in Vienna tried hard to bring stability and prosperity, but it was a hopeless task.
Austria's politics were frequently marred by violence. Both the clerical Right and the socialist Left maintained large and well armed party militias, filled with disgruntled veterans, which fought openly in the streets. One of the most powerful of the paramilitary forces was the Heiniwe/ir (Home Guard), the armed wing of the Right. The commander of its Vienna detachment was the retired Major Emil Fey, the hero of Zagora in 1915. Active in ex-officers' circles, the Viennese Fey soon rose to prominence in Austrian politics. He benefitted greatly from the dominance of the Right in Austria by the 1930's. The leader of the anti-Socialist bloc was Engelbert Dolfuss, like Fey an ex-Habsburg officer and decorated veteran of the Italian front, who was determined to preserve an independent and conservative Austria. The Dolfuss regime was certainly rightist, but much more traditionalist than Fascist, although, ironically, it courted the favor of Mussolini's regime. Rome's support was needed to stave off aggression on both sides-the ultra-Right and ultra-Left. Radical Socialists were naturally regarded as enemies of the Dolfuss state, yet the threat from the far Right was even greater. From Hitler's assumption of Germany's chancellorship in late January 1933, Austria was in mortal danger. To the National Socialists, an independent Austrian state was a fiction; Austria-Hitler's homeland-was regarded as an inseparable element of the greater German nation.
Both German and Austrian Nazis began to destabilize Austria with propaganda and violence. At this point, Dolfuss should have rallied all anti-Nazi forces, including the Socialists, in defense of the state, but in fact he did just the opposite. In February 1934, in response to a Socialist coup attempt, the Dolfuss regime, with the backing of Fey, the Vice-Chancellor, reacted vigorously. The Socialist putsch was drowned in blood as the army brought artillery into Vienna to blast away apartment buildings occupied by left-wing militants. Habsburg Army veterans fought each other bitterly in the streets of Vienna. The threat from the far Left was crushed, but so was any willingness among the moderate Socialists to defend the Dolfuss state against Nazi aggression. Hitler wasted no time. In July 1934, Austrian Nazis, trained in Germany and acting on Berlin's orders, gunned down Chancellor Dolfuss in his office. Significantly, ViceChancellor Fey did nothing to stop the assassination.?
With Dolfuss out of the way, the Germans prepared to occupy Austria. Tiny Austria's army was too weak to defend the Alpine republic, and it was by no means clear that many Austrians wished to fight Germans, their wartime allies and racial kin. What prevented a Nazi invasion in July 1934 was Mussolini; unwilling to see Austria-Italy's northern frontier-occupied by Germany, ll Duce moved several divisions to the Brenner Pass. Mussolini was still wary of the Nazis, and he was outraged by Dolfuss's cold-blooded murder; the dead chancellor's wife and children had been visiting Mussolini at the time of the assassination. Hitler got the message and backed down for the moment.
In the long run, though, an independent Austria was doomed. The new chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg (another ex-Habsburg officer and veteran of the Italian front), wanted to maintain Austria's independence, but his cabinet was soon infiltrated by homegrown Nazis who ardently desired Anschluss. Emil Fey was reduced to a mere minister without portfolio. Some former Habsburg officers played an active role campaigning for union with Hitler's Germany. Still, few officers of the old army became National Socialists. The Habsburg Army's multinational ethos and outmoded values were the antithesis of all that the Nazis, with their virulent racialism and anarchic violence, stood for. However, some retired officers were so dismayed by the collapse of the empire that they gravitated toward radical Right circles. Foremost among them was Alfred Krauss, architect of the Caporetto miracle.8 After the war, Krauss regularly and loudly voiced his view that Austria's defeat was the result of treason and betrayal by the army's Slav soldiers-a uniquely Austrian "stab in the back" legend. As early as 1920, he agitated for Anschluss, and his campaigning grew more determined after the rise of Hitler. Krauss, like most German nationalists in Austria, saw the little Alpine republic as hopelessly weak, and looked forward to salvation through absorption into Greater Germany.
Krauss was one of the most vocal champions of Anschluss, and he was greatly pleased when it arrived in March 1938. Almost four years after the Dolfuss murder and the first Nazi attempt to take Austria by force, Hitler succeeded. The difference was that by 1938, Mussolini was no longer willing to challenge Berlin on the issue of Austrian independence. Rome now saw the Na zis as allies, and without Italian help, Austria was doomed. The outnumbered Austrian Army, acting on the government's orders, offered no resistance to the German invasion. It was a bloodless coup. Hitler returned to Linz and Vienna, the two cities where he spent his youth, in triumph.
The seventy-six-year-old Krauss was a dying man, but he lived long enough to be made a general in Hitler's army and sit for a formal portrait in his new, bemedaled German uniform. When he died in September 1938, just six months after the Anschluss, he was heralded in Austria's Nazi-run press as "a courageous champion of National Socialism." His highly publicized state funeral, "the German People say good-bye to General Krauss," ended with the old Habsburg soldier's casket, draped with the swastika, borne by senior Nazi Party and SS men.
Many other ex-Habsburg soldiers met a less pleasant end after the Anschluss. Emil Fey, unpopular with the Nazis because of his failure to back the Germans in 1934, was gotten rid of. Four days after the German invasion, the bodies of Fey and his wife and children were found in their Vienna home, riddled with bullets. The official verdict, released by the Nazi authorities, was suicide. Death awaited other ex-Habsburg officers, too. The Germans quickly absorbed Austria's military into the Wehnnacht. Numerous career officers were dismissed, including those believed to be hostile to National Socialism, and especially all Jews. Austria's Jewish officers, many of them decorated veterans of the Great War, were immediately discharged from the service. A worse fate still awaited them.
One of those dismissed just after the Anschluss was Gustav Sonnewend, the Jewish hero of the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo. Sonnewend enthusiastically opted for Austria in 1918, married an Austrian wife, and began a successful career in the army of the Austrian Republic. He rose to command a battalion, and was a full colonel when the Germans invaded. He was forcibly retired, despite his many decorations and years of service. Sonnewend and his wife settled in Vienna and watched the Second World War begin, a conflict far more terrible than the slaughter Sonnewend witnessed on the Isonzo. He also saw thousands of Jewish veterans of the Habsburg Army rounded up and sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. Colonel Sonnewend, protected by his Order of Maria Theresia, was safe for the moment.
Ex-Habsburg soldiers of all backgrounds fared better in neighboring Hungary. The first two years after the Great War were terrible for Hungary. The Allies erased Hungary's ancient borders and deprived defeated Budapest of two-thirds of her territory, leaving millions of Magyars trapped in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Worse, the end of the fighting brought no peace to Hungary. The liberal government of Mihaly Karoly, which came to power at the war's end, was well intentioned but naive and inept; instead of saving Hungary, it exposed it to Allied invasion. It was soon succeeded by a short-lived but brutal Communist regime under Bela Kun, a former Honved lieutenant. The abortive Communist dictatorship was crushed by the Allies, but not before it wrecked the already ailing economy and left an enduring hatred of Communism among most Hungarians.
The new anti-Communist government was led by Rear Admiral Nicholas Horthy von Nagybanya, who pulled down the Imperial-and-Royal Navy's colors at Pola at the war's end. Under Horthy, who stayed in power until late 1944 as regent, Hungary again became a nominal kingdom; as many observed ironically, Hungary, a land lacking both king and coastline, was ruled for a generation by a regent who was an admiral. There were several attempts at a Habsburg restoration in Budapest, but all failed. Archduke Joseph von Habsburg, the Carso's defender and a vocal Magyar patriot, tried to restore the monarchy, but was undermined by Herbert Hoover, head of America's Commission of Relief; Hoover threatened to deprive starving Hungary of food if a Habsburg returned to power in Budapest. Archduke Joseph then contented himself to live in Horthy-dominated Hungary.
More serious were two attempts in 1921 by dethroned Emperor Karl to reassume his kingship in Hungary. Karl found himself unwanted in Austria, or anywhere else in his former empire, after the war. He tried to claim his throne in Budapest on two occasions, but was met with hostility from the Horthy regime. Although numerous Hungarians, and particularly army officers, were favorably disposed to Karl, many could not forgive his incompetence at the war's end. Horthy wisely felt that Karl was unable to run Hungary but perfectly able to destabilize it. He therefore opposed his ex-sovereign with force. A near civil war resulted, with Hungary's military dividing into pro-Habsburg and pro-Horthy camps, but the dethroned emperor was ultimately persuaded to back down. He died in exile in Madeira a year later, a broken man at the age of thirty-five.
Karl's former soldiers fared well in Horthy's Hungary. Postwar Hungary's army kept the uniforms, medals, and traditions of the old army, as well as many of its officers. Habsburg veterans of the Great War crowded the higher ranks of Horthy's military through the Second World War. Geza Heim, who as a young lieutenant had saved the Carso, according to Archduke Joseph, was ennobled with the title "von San Martino del Carso" after his name. He remained in Horthy's army, dying at his post as a major general and brigade commander in Budapest in 1942.
Habsburg veterans of the Isonzo were less welcome in other successor states. Czechoslovakia, although comparatively fair in its dealings with its large German and Magyar minorities, remained implacably hostile to ex-Habsburg soldiers. Even Czechs who served the Austrians were treated with suspicion; the new state's military was dominated by those who took up arms against Vienna in the last year of the war. Ethnic Germans who fought for Austria were shunned by the Czechoslovak military. A few German career soldiers entered the new army, but were treated poorly. Theodor Wanke, the hero of the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo, was a German-Bohemian who pledged loyalty to the new Czechoslovak state and accepted a commission in its army. Yet prejudice prevented this highly decorated and efficient soldier from being promoted above captain in the Czech-dominated forces. Wanke resigned in disgust.
Romania, too, was suspicious of soldiers who had served the Habsburgs. Few Germans and Magyars received commissions in the Romanian Army, and even ethnic Romanians who fought for Vienna were viewed skeptically; the army, like the state, was led by Austrophobes who battled against the Habsburgs during the war. Even Konstantin Popovici, the Romanian officer who won the Order of Maria Theresia during the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo, was promoted to colonel, but no higher, in Romania's army. Peter Ro6sz, who won the Knight's Cross for his exploits in the Ninth Battle, was a Magyar who chose retirement over service in Bucharest's military. Yugoslavia was even less inclined to promote its subjects who bore arms for Austria. The emergent Yugoslav state was run as simply an enlarged Serbia; its army had no room for the impressive martial traditions of the Croats, who had fought bravely under Habsburg colors for centuries. The Yugoslav military by and large refused to promote Croats, Slovenes-even Serbs-who once wore Habsburg uniforms. As a result, Belgrade's forces remained in the hands of Serbs from Serbia, and few veterans of the Isonzo could be found in their ranks.
The only Habsburg successor state that courted ex-Habsburg soldiers was Poland. Renascent Poland, led by the former Austrian subject Jozef Pilsudski, viewed the defunct empire sympathetically, and many veterans of the Isonzo made successful careers in the Polish military. Indeed, ex-Austrian officers built the new Polish Army and led it to victory in the war with Soviet Russia in 1919-1920. In a typical case, Stanislaus Wieronski, who received the Order of Maria Theresia for his heroism during the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo, entered the Polish Army in 1918, reaching the rank of major general and divisional commander before his retirement in 1935. In fact, thousands of ex-Austrian soldiers in Polish uniform fought against their former Habsburg comrades when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, beginning the Second World War.
Violence and suffering returned to the Isonzo because of Mussolini's bellicose policies. 11 Duce believed that only fighting would bring Rome glory and win Italy her rightful place in Europe and the world. With Pietro Badoglio's help he built a large and imposing military, at least on paper. He sent the army into battle in Ethiopia in 1935-1936, and soon after in Spain, on the Nationalist side in the bitter civil war. Italian forces acquitted themselves respectably, though not as well as Mussolini wanted, in both conflicts; divisions of the MVSN, the "Black Shirts" of the Fascist Party militia, wore the uniforms of the legendary arditi, but displayed little of their enthusiasm. Mussolini decided to enter the Second World War on the side of his German ally in May 1940, during the Nazi invasion of France; he expected easy territorial gains. But Marshal Badoglio cautioned 11 Duce against intervention. The old soldier explained that the army was simply not ready for a major war: despite years of Fascist preparations, the military was poorly trained and equipped. It certainly could not expect to take on a major power on equal terms. Yet Mussolini did not want to listen to words of warning-he had begun to believe his own bellicose propaganda-and Italy entered the Second World War anyway. Badoglio fell from official favor.
The result was a debacle. The Italian Army performed badly in France, and even worse in Greece, where the outnumbered but spirited Greek Army repulsed all Italian invasion attempts. The army was, if anything, less ready for a major war in 1940 than it had been in 1915, and the fanti generally displayed little of the determination that their fathers had shown so often on the Isonzo. Mussolini had failed to make the Italians the conquering martial race of his dreams. Further evidence came from Russia, where Mussolini disastrously sent an ill-fated army to fight alongside the Germans. Worst of all was North Africa, where small numbers of British troops managed to shatter Italy's best divisions. By 1942, the Fascist war effort was entering its terminal phase.
The one notable Italian success came in Yugoslavia. A combined GermanItalian invasion quickly crushed the ramshackle South Slav state in April 1941, and Italy formally took possession of Dalmatia, the land she had been deprived of by Versailles. Italy also annexed half of Slovenia and enjoyed de facto sovereignty over Montenegro, as well as half of Croatia and Bosnia. But Italy's triumph was destined to be short-lived. No sooner had the army occupied Italy's new territories than their Slav inhabitants arose in revolt. Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs alike took up arms against the hated Italians. Nowhere was local resistance more bitter than in the Littoral. Slovenes living on the Isonzo, disgusted by a generation of Italian repression, formed local guerrilla units in the Julian Alps to fight the Fascist occupiers. The Slovene partisans established base areas on the upper Isonzo, particularly in the rugged Tolmein-Karfreit area, and by 1942 the northern Littoral was Italian territory in name only. Italian Army units that entered the upper Isonzo valley were subject to vicious attack by bands of Slovene irregulars hiding in the steep, dark mountains overlooking the river.
By mid-1943, Italy was all but defeated by the Allies. By the summer, the Italians and Germans had been evicted from North Africa, and British, American, and Canadian troops were landing in Sicily. Mussolini's policies, particularly his alliance with Germany, had led to disaster. The army leadership, including Marshal Badoglio, wanted to get Italy out of the war before it was too late. On July 15, Mussolini agreed to a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council, the first since 1939. The session, which took place July 24, resulted in the Fascist Party hierarchy agreeing to depose Mussolini. After twenty-one years in power, Il Duce was unceremoniously dumped by the party he had founded. He was soon imprisoned on a mountaintop in southern Italy by Badoglio, who was named head of a new provisional government to negotiate Italy's way out of the war. Badoglio wanted to avoid German occupation, but it was a hopeless task. On September 8, 1943, German troops brutally occupied Italy, their recent ally. Four days later, SS commandos under Major Otto Skorzeny rescued the imprisoned Duce in a daring glider raid on his mountaintop jail. Mussolini, a nearly broken man, was taken to see Hitler and given a Fascist fiefdom, the Italian Social Republic, in German-occupied northern Italy. Still, Italy's Fascist experiment, born on the Isonzo, was essentially over. The Allies occupied the southern part of Italy, and Mussolini's statelet was a mere puppet of the Germans.
The Germans had good reason to be dissatisfied with Mussolini and the Fascists. After all, on several inconvenient occasions the Germans were forced to devote significant numbers of troops to save Italy's ailing armies, much as Berlin had done for Vienna during the Great War. The largest German bailout of Italian arms came in North Africa, where in 1941 a whole German tank army was dispatched to save Mussolini's legions from total defeat at the hands of the British. Hitler's expeditionary force, the famed Afrikakorps, was led by Erwin Rommel, the outstanding hero of the Caporetto victory. In a strange twist of fate, Rommel found himself with thousands of Italians, his former enemies, under him in the Western Desert. Rommel inflicted embarrassing defeats on the overconfident British, nearly taking the Suez Canal. The British admired their talented and wily foe, whom they dubbed the "Desert Fox" Rommel was likewise lionized at home, where Hitler made him a field marshal. Even the Axis reverse at El Alamein in October-November 1942, followed by a retreat across North Africa, failed to tarnish Rommel's great martial reputation.
Rommel was then made commander of an army group in France. His outnumbered and outgunned forces were defeated by the Allied invasion of June 1944, but Rommel did not live long enough to be blamed for the disaster. He was critically injured by a British air attack on his staff car on July 17, 1944. His career was over, a verdict confirmed by a nearly successful attempt on Hitler's life three days later. The failed bomb plot, engineered by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, led to a purge of all Wehrmacht officers suspected of a role in the assassination scheme. Rommel's name came up, not as an actual conspirator but as a leading general whom the coup plotters trusted and considered to be an ideal representative for Germany in negotiations with the Allies after Hitler's death. That was sufficient evidence to seal Rommel's fate. The celebrated field marshal was forced to commit suicide. Hitler did not want a public trial for the great soldier, and announced that he died of wounds received in the British air attack. The Nazis thus kept Rommel's esteemed image clean.
Other heroes of the Isonzo likewise met an unenviable fate serving in Hitler's armies. Thousands of ex-Habsburg officers fought for the Nazis on all fronts. One of them was Fritz Franek, who as a lieutenant won the Order of Maria Theresia on the Carso during the Eleventh Battle. He stayed in the Austrian Army after the war's end and became a respected military historian, receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and writing parts of the Austrian official history of the Great War. He returned to active service after the Anschluss. Franek led a battalion of mountain troops during the invasion of Poland, where he fought against former comrades in arms and took part in the battle for Lemberg, where he had fought a quarter-century before in Habsburg uniform. Franek, promoted to colonel, then commanded a regiment in France in 1940 and in Russia a year later. He led his regiment courageously on the Leningrad front. He was gravely wounded by two shots to the head, the third time he had been shot by Russians during his career, and was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, Germany's highest decoration, for his valor. Franek was therefore one of the most decorated Austrian soldiers in both world wars. He recovered and was promoted to general in October 1942. He commanded a division in the field until mid-1944, when he was captured by the Red Army and sent to Siberia.
Erwin Zeidler, the hero of Gorizia, died peacefully a few months later. Zeidler retired from Austrian service in 1918, but was named a general (retired) of the Wehrmacht in 1940, in honor of his outstanding command of the 58th Division on the Gorizian front from 1915 to 1917. He settled in the quiet Carinthian town of Villach, little more than a dozen miles from the Isonzo's source high in the Julian Alps. He died there in January 1945, nearly eighty, as the Third Reich headed rapidly to defeat, just months before Allied armies occupied Carinthia.
Sadly, many Jewish soldiers who once served the Habsburgs, on the Isonzo and elsewhere, met a cruel end at the hands of the Nazis. Although the Nazis initially exempted Austrian war veterans, especially those who were decorated for bravery, from persecution, in time many Jewish war heroes were exterminated as part of Hitler's "Final Solution." Some of them were killed at Mauthausen, a concentration camp just outside Linz, the only death camp on Austrian soil. During the Great War, Mauthausen had been a prisoner of war camp where Italian captives were sent to wait out the fighting; to thousands of farm, Mauthausen meant life, a refuge from the ceaseless slaughter on the Isonzo. Yet during the next war, the name Mauthausen meant death, genocide. There, hundreds of thousands of Jews, Slavs, and other "subhumans" were mercilessly exterminated by SS Death's Head units. Luckily, Gustav Sonnewend was not among them. As both a convert to Roman Catholicism and a Knight of the Order of Maria Theresia, Sonnewend managed to avoid the hangman. When the war ended, he was one of the very few Viennese Jews to survive the slaughter, the greatest of all pogroms.
The Nazis practiced their evil methods along the Isonzo, too. When Italy left the war in mid-1943, Berlin annexed Austria's lost territories, the South Tyrol and the Littoral. Long-forgotten Habsburg civil servants, German, Italian, and Slovene, returned to power as the Isonzo valley was again called Kustenland. Germany's annexation of Italia irredenta proved short-lived but vicious. The persecution of Trieste's large and well established Jewish population was the worst legacy of Nazi rule. Mussolini had enacted anti-Semitic laws in July 1938, an attempt to court Hitler's favor, but they were mild compared to Nazi repression; under Fascism, Italy's Jews were hounded out of the army and bureaucracy and suffered countless indignities, but none were killed. Indeed, the Italian Army protected thousands of Jews from German persecution, not just in Italy but in occupied Yugoslavia and France as well. Even so, the Jews of the Littoral were doomed once the Nazis took control in mid-1943.
German executioners, aided by Italian collaborationists, rounded up Trieste's Jews. Soon Trieste had its own concentration camp, San Sabba, where, by the war's end, as many as 5,000 Jews, Partisans, and other "undesirables" had been murdered. Trieste ended the war as a battleground, with many of its sons and daughters dead. In a typical case, of the Triestine novelist Italo Svevo's three grandsons, two died in Russia serving in Mussolini's army, and a third was killed in the fighting for Trieste at the war's end; worse, Svevo's Jewish niece and nephew were exterminated by the Germans at San Sabha. The Second World War proved even more costly for Trieste and the Littoral than the Great War had been.
With the Third Reich's complete collapse in the spring of 1945, Yugoslav Partisans occupied much of the Isonzo valley. The irregular army, made up of all of Yugoslavia's diverse peoples, was led by Tito, the former Honved corporal. He took up arms in 1941 to evict the German invader from South Slav lands, and in the latter half of the war began to enjoy success. The Partisans received considerable British military assistance, and by 1944 the tide had begun to turn against the outnumbered Germans. Tito's ranks were swelled with volunteers from all over Yugoslavia. A few Habsburg veterans, like Tito, fought with the Partisans. Yet some ex-Austrian soldiers initially sided with collaborationist regimes in occupied Yugoslavia. The Ustasa dictatorship in Croatia actively recruited former Habsburg officers. The "Independent State of Croatia" was, in fact, a German puppet regime, led by the virulent racist Ante Pavelic. The Ustasa actually enjoyed little support in Croatia (and Bosnia-Hercegovina, which it annexed as part of "Greater Croatia"), and even that diminished once the Pavelic regime began exterminating hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and other unwanted citizens. The commander of the Croatian Army at the time was Vladimir Laxa, the hero of Monte San Gabriele. He was named a general in the spring of 1941, when the Croatian puppet state was established. The respected Laxa quickly rose to become chief of staff of the army. Yet he was ap palled by the Ustasa regime's brutal treatment of its minorities, and spoke out against Pavelic. This ensured his dismissal, and Laxa was pensioned in June 1942. He sat out the rest of the war while Tito's Partisans gained strength, and despite his opposition to the excesses of the Pavelic regime, the old soldier was executed by the victorious Communists at the war's end, aged seventy-five.
Slovene irregulars expanded their hold on the Isonzo valley throughout 1944, so that by the war's end, local Partisans were well positioned to seize Gorizia and Trieste. Slovene patriots, who had suffered so long under Italian rule, demanded the complete annexation of the Littoral, as did Tito, a South Slav nationalist and Italophobe as well as a Communist. The Allies, however, were ambivalent about the Isonzo issue; they did not want to reward the Italians, their recent enemies, but neither did they want Trieste in the hands of Tito and his Communist army. The result was a race between the British and the Partisans, ostensibly allies, with the 2nd New Zealand Division crossing the Isonzo and reaching Gorizia at the war's end. On the first day of May 1945, the Slovene 9th Partisan Corps descended from the surrounding hills of the Carso and occupied Trieste, the real prize.
The Slovene Partisans occupied Trieste for forty days. The victorious Communist troops executed many Fascists and other prominent Italians; they were taking their revenge for all the oppression the Slovenes had endured under Mussolini. Yugoslav occupation of Trieste was short-lived, mercifully for the city's Italian majority. The Allies, worried that Trieste would become Tito'sand therefore Stalin's-Adriatic port, demanded that the Partisans withdraw. Soon the city and its environs were garrisoned by American and British troops, there to ensure that the Yugoslavs stayed behind their side of the demarcation line. There were occasional firefights between Trieste's Allied Military Government and the Yugoslavs, recent allies, but the last Allied troops left the city on October 26, 1954, when sovereignty was formally returned to Italy. After Tito and Stalin split irrevocably in 1948, Yugoslavia drifted back into a pro-Western orientation, and Tito's regime was viewed favorably by the British and the Americans.
The 1954 settlement established the Isonzo valley's current borders. Slovenia (then a Yugoslav republic) received the whole upper valley and the eastern third of Gorizia, as well as a slice of the northern Istrian Peninsula (Croatia received the rest, and Fiume-Rijeka to the Croats-too). Italy was given Trieste, its suburbs, much of the Carso, and most of Gorizia. The international frontier ran through many former battlefields. Trieste was relieved to rejoin Italy. The new Italy was a wholly different country than the old Fascist state. After Mussolini's demise, ending in his execution by Italian Partisans at the war's end, the monarchy tried to reestablish its authority, but with scant success. Vittorio Emanuele III, who had reigned since 1900 and led Italy through two world wars and two decades of Fascism, died in 1947. His son, Umberto II, assumed the throne, but only briefly; the ancient House of Savoy had tainted itself through its relationship with Fascism, as indicated in a 1946 referendum, which defeated the monarchist cause. Umberto soon headed for exile in Portugal. The new Italian Republic was led by Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi, a former Austrian subject from the Trentino and a onetime parliamentarian in the Viennese Reichsrat. He led Italy toward postwar prosperity and membership in NATO, and restored Italy's international reputation, so badly tarnished by the Fascist experiment. Trieste slowly rebuilt and recovered some of its long-lost stability and prosperity under de Gasperi in the 1950s.
Tito, too, was busy reconstructing his country, ravaged by war and occupation. The Isonzo valley was painstakingly rebuilt during the 1950s. The Slovene part of Gorizia, a divided city, was renamed "New Gorizia"-Nova Gorica to its inhabitants. The new city included Gorizia's monastery, railroad station, and eastern suburbs. These were gradually restored, and Tito, always conscious of his image, constructed large, unsightly apartment blocks in Nova Gorica; from the air they spelled TITO. Less drab and dull was the Yugoslav reconstruction of the monastery atop Monte Santo (Sveta Gora to the Slovenes). The pilgrimage site, blown apart in 1915 by Italian guns, was rebuilt by Titoist Yugoslavia beginning in 1949. First the Yugoslavs destroyed the Italian war memorial placed at the summit after the Great War. The beautiful late medieval church was reassembled, again a monument to Slovene national pride; the Communist regime, though officially atheist, was always aware of the political value of national symbols. By the 1960s, the Slovene part of the Isonzo valley was again peaceful and stable, and in places quite pleasant to look at.
By then the veterans of the war on the Isonzo were old men. Few of the officers and generals who led both armies in battle were still alive. The last surviving senior Italian commander was Pietro Badoglio, the Marquess of Sabotino. He died in late 1956, aged eighty-five. His pivotal role in both world wars left a controversial legacy of courage and opportunism. Marshal Badoglio was soon followed by the last living Austrian generals, his former adversaries. Otto von Berndt, the decorated Bohemian divisional commander, died in Vienna in 1957, aged ninety-two. Berndt, a convinced German nationalist, supported the Nazis and was forced to leave his native land when the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the country's Germans were forcibly expelled. He spent his last days in Vienna, the onetime imperial capital. Also living out his final years in Vienna was Archduke Joseph von Habsburg, the commander of VII Corps in the epic battles for the Carso. The rise of the Communists in Hungary9 after the Second World War forced the elderly archduke to flee to Austria, leaving his beloved Hungary forever. The former general and hero of the Isonzo died in Vienna in the summer of 1962, less than a month before his ninetieth birthday.
By then, Austria was a wholly unrecognizable place. Occupied by the Russians, Americans, British, and French at the war's end, Vienna negotiated its independence in 1955, in exchange for neutrality in the Cold War. The State Treaty reestablished an independent Austria free of foreign occupation, setting the stage for the Alpine republic's postwar stability and prosperity, a marked contrast with the sad history of Austria after the Great War. The State Treaty was negotiated by Chancellor Julius Raab, a Habsburg sapper lieutenant in the Great War decorated for valor on the Carso in 1916; Austria's president in 1955 was Theodor Korner, a respected ex-Habsburg colonel, confidant of Field Marshal Boroevic, and the last chief of staff of the Isonzo Army. Vienna, destroyed by Allied air raids and bitter street fighting, was slowly and tenderly rebuilt. One of the veterans of the Isonzo who lived to see Vienna's rise from the ashes of defeat in 1945 was Gustav Sonnewend. He miraculously survived Nazi persecution and spent his last years in Vienna, dying in 1960 at age seventyfive, the next to last Knight of the Order of Maria Theresia for service on the Isonzo.10
From the 1960s through the 1980s, while the last veterans of the war on the Isonzo died natural deaths, unlike so many of their fallen comrades, the Isonzo valley remained pleasingly quiet. The valley was the most demilitarized East-West border during the Cold War, and traveling from Gorizia and Nova Gorica was easy. In fact, many Italians from Gorizia and Trieste regularly drove across the frontier to fill their cars with cheaper Slovene gas. Old animosities were forgotten; six months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Italian mayor of Gorizia and the Slovene mayor of Nova Gorica jointly called for their twin cities to realize their vocation as "a laboratory for the common European house." By the early 1990s, however, as Europe's postwar equilibrium dissolved, the Isonzo valley was again tense with military activity. After Tito's death in 1980, his Yugoslav state entered a terminal decline. The national antagonisms submerged forcibly by Communism again came to the fore, with added fervor from being pent up so long. Slovenia, the most prosperous and western of Belgrade's six republics, saw no future in an ailing, Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. Slovenes remembered that their long history tied them to Austria and Central Europe, not to Serbia and the Balkans. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia's democratically elected government formally seceded from Yugoslavia, the first act of open rebellion against the dying Titoist state. The result was war.
Belgrade was determined to prevent Slovene secession and to seize all border crossing points, sources of desperately needed hard currency for the Yugoslav government. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav People's Army, the successor to Tito's Partisans, sent its tanks into Slovenia, into the Isonzo valley. It had been fully two generations since the last war, and more than three since the great bloodletting on the Isonzo's rocky banks. The Yugoslav invasion came as a rude shock, but the Slovenes were ready. Local home guards were called out; they were equipped with few heavy weapons, but as in 1915 they were fighting for their own soil, and resisted the foreign invader with vigor. Yugoslav aircraft dropped bombs on Flitsch and Tolmein (now Bovec and Tolmin), upper valley towns that had seen so much suffering during the Great War. Yet the ragtag Slovene militia triumphed. Their courage won the day, turning back the halfhearted Yugoslav attack. After a few days, Belgrade's offensive fizzled out; the Slovenes would be a tough opponent, and the army was unwilling to waste its resources on a peripheral target. Instead, Belgrade sent its armies against Croatia, and then Bosnia, beginning the bloodiest European war in a half-century.
Perhaps the decisive battle in Slovenia in late June 1991 was the tight for Nova Gorica. The Yugoslav military sent an armored column to Nova Gorica to seize the border crossing point in the heart of the old city. Tanks rolled into the city, which had seen so much fighting during the Great War; the Slovene home guard was waiting. The poorly armed militiamen fought back hard, destroying several tanks, killing the Yugoslav commander, and capturing several tank crews. One of the prisoners taken, a Serbian tank driver, was asked by his captors why he had come to assault the peaceful city on the Isonzo. The confused soldier responded that his unit commander had told the troops that the city was under Italian attack.