Page 82 - Atti 2014 - La neutralità 1914-1915. la situazione diplomatica socio-politica economica e militare italiana

82 la neutralità 1914 - 1915. la situazione diplomatica socio-politica economica e militare italiana

There can be no doubt that in the situation of summer of 1914 three active
corps had constituted a considerable fighting force. But in the end, victory and
defeat in this first year of the war had not been the result of numbers alone. The
armies on all fronts had rather been confronted with a profound technological
shock, one that should lead to the development of industrialized static warfare and
should thereby transform European warfare. 20
On the strategic level, things look different because Italian forces on the Upper
Rhine would mean that Italy had entered the war on their partners’ side. And this,
in turn, would have enabled the Dual Monarchy to concentrate her forces against
Serbia and Russia. There is some reason to believe that this indirect effect would
have had considerable impact for the war against Russia in 1915/16.
Historical irony can be seen on the military-diplomatic level for it was in
1913/14 that, for the first time since the founding days of the Triple Alliance,
German planners actually expected an Italian contribution in the West and in the
Mediterranean. This expectation could therefore serve as an indicator for a poten-
tially changing character of the alliance. Neither the planning for Italian forces in
Germany nor the tripartite naval convention was targeted at the operational level
alone, but especially Moltke was also motivated to achieve an improvement of
the political relationship through a closer military integration of Italy and Austria-
Hungary.
Is it therefore possible to observe a substantial change of the Triple Alliance
towards a truly strategic alliance? Hardly so. The reason therefore is that the bin-
ding character of all planning was only based on the good personal relations of
the military decision-makers who were in charge then. In Germany, the Chief of
the General Staff saw no reason to involve the government in the negotiations and
ask for diplomatic flanking. In Italy, the situation was exactly reverse: Here, the
General Staff intensified the plans but had to find that the politicians had not much
interest in this development in the situation of August 1914. In both cases, the re-
lation between politics and the military had been inadequately developed to meet
the demands of the European war to come. Therefore, the historical sideshow of
the Italo-German military cooperation points to a much bigger problem in both
countries at the outbreak of World War One.

20 This technological shock has been described recently by Frédéric Guelton, “Technology and
Armaments,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War. 3 vols., vol. 2. Ed. by Jay Winter
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. 240-265.