Page 309 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

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Information Office dealt with it. This latter also observed German military propaganda
and printed some of the first leaflets dropped in 1915 over the enemy. Then there was
also the Office of Situation and War Operations. However, much of what was done was
due, more than to the High Command, to the lower units: above all to Armies and to
Army corps, wherein specific offices (propaganda offices, information offices, operating
troops information offices or ITO) were created. This structure was to be officialised in
1917, year characterized by a growing war death rate, by an increasing weariness of the
troops and by mounting worries of the Commands both with regard to the future of the
war and to the resistance of the soldiers. These worries were strongly increased by the
appeal of the Italian Socialist leader Filippo Turati not to spend one more winter in the
trenches, by the stigmatization of the war defined by the Catholic Pope Benedetto XV
an “useless slaughter”, and by the riots exploding on the countryside and even in an
important industrial city like Turin.
In this context, the military defeat of Caporetto, with its military causes and con-
sequences, was considered in Italy and, what is more, by its allies, also as a “military
strike”, which actually occurred only in the form of a certain “slowness” of the defeated
soldiers in taking up arms again. As a matter of fact Caporetto was due mainly to the new
German tactics of “infiltration” and to the insufficient preparations of the High Command
in case of loss. In any case, Caporetto gave an extraordinary and new urgency to any
propaganda activity: for creating or strengthening the Italian consensus and for weaken-
ing the Austrian one, even appealing to its composite imperial and multiethnic nature.

Civilians were immediately aware of this.
The Government had just created two ministries without portfolio, one for propa-
ganda, entrusted to the liberal-national Senator Scialoja, who then dealt only with the
propaganda abroad, and one for the civil assistance, entrusted to the Republican in-
terventionist Ubaldo Comandini. Since July 1917 he was responsible for the internal
propaganda, and, since February 1918, for a “General Commissionership for Civil As-
sistance and Internal Propaganda”. Since 1917, state deficiencies had been made up for,
above all, by private actions promoted by the liberal civil society which, in that summer,
had united into “Federate Works of National Assistance and Propaganda” directed by
Comandini. It was a single, private body formed by 80 provincial secretariats and 4500
commissionerships. After Caporetto the State had to strive with might and main. With
regard to the propaganda for the enemy, after Caporetto it was strengthened the “Wilso-
nian” tendency to fight Austria-Hungary also by rousing its nationalities and, therefore,
to weaken its army by exploiting its composite structure. In this sense the democratic
interventionists scored a goal in their internal fight against nationalist interventionists
when the government supported the convocation of the “Congress of Oppressed Nation-
alities” held at Rome in April 1918.
The military were slower.
They felt the need of an internal propaganda for its own soldiers nearly immediately
after Caporetto. It was showed through the multiplication of “trench journals” and “sol-
diers’ homes”, while the admission of the convenience of a propaganda for the enemy