Page 308 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

308 XXXIX Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

its distance from the people, with many Italians fighting a war whose aims they probably
did not even know well. However, although with huge costs, some of which would have
soon overwhelmed the liberal political system and would have started a dictatorship,
Italy resisted and the nationalization of masses advanced.
This preliminary information seems necessary, in front of a non Italian public, to
understand the history of Italian propaganda for the enemy between 1915 and 1918.
Generally speaking, Italian studies concerning war propaganda are actually quite a few,
and only the recent establishment of a political-mediatical regime seems to promise a
more rosy future, if not to Italy, at least to the Italian historical studies about propaganda.
Among other, the story of Italian war propaganda for the enemy it is a small but remark-
able and revealing one, which is still not well known even in historical studies led in
Italy or about Italy.

War propaganda promoted in Italy both by civilians and military during the First
World War has been only recently studied. Recalled but not studied during Fascism,
with the exception of some volumes of memoirs by some of his makers, in the first
decades of the Republic silence fell on it. Its role in creating a “consensus” during and
after the Great War was not to be admitted. First in the decade after 1968 some more
critical historians demonstrated that the so-called consensus to the war had also been
fabricated, and had not been spontaneous (when and where existing at all). With respect
to that, military historians replied by stressing the relevance of the army deeds. In fact,
just like the propaganda for Italian soldiers, the propaganda for the enemy was late but
represented in the last year of war a propaganda battle of remarkable dimensions. Even
Ph. Taylor and A. Pizarroso Quintero hint at it in their general works. Later on, a British
historian, Mark Cornwall, reconstructed this great propaganda battle by emphasizing its
dimensions and studying it after the Austrian sources (strangely, not the Italian ones).
His work is definitely fundamental, although now and then he seems to emphasize the
object of his studies without always understanding Italian local dynamics. His specific
merit is having retraced for the first time the nearly complete Italian production (namely,
the series of nearly 500 leaflets dropped over the enemy in 1918). His merit is also a
limit, as it happens to any historian who studies propaganda just according to its prod-
ucts without taking into account its production process.

As already stated, until Caporetto and then until 1918, Italian propaganda for Italian
soldiers and for the enemy was scarce.
On June 19, 1915, less than a month after its entrance into the war, the High Com-
mand spread a circular to subordinate commands warning them of the danger of Aus-
trian propaganda for Italian soldiers: Wien used “illicit” practises to convince Italian
soldiers to desert. Repression against Italian soldiers who had been found in possession
of Austrian leaflets was rather slowly supplemented by the autonomous production of
an Italian counter-propaganda, both for its own soldiers and for the enemy. It could be
stated that many and none among the offices of High Command dealt with propaganda.
A (smaller) Press Office was organized within the Office of the Secretary, but also the