Events
Events in the
Great War
Great War
Events
Spring offensive
Named Strafexpedition by the Italians, the German translation of “punitive expedition”, this was a savage battle fought between the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies on the Vicenza plateaux from 15 May to 27 June 1916. In German, this battle is referred to as the Frühjahrsoffensive (spring offensive).
In fact, it was indeed a punitive expedition that the Austro-Hungarians launched along the vertex of the Trentino salient consisting of the Vicenza foothills between the course of the Adige to the west and the Brenta to the east. The Austro-Hungarian offensive was intended as a punishment for the Italian betrayal of the Triple Alliance.
Its organiser was General Franz Conrad, who wanted to break through to the heart of the Veneto plain and take the big Italian army deployed on the Cadore and Isonzo fronts from the rear to crush it and compel it to surrender.
About 230,545 men were lost during the battle between the two armies.
Fort Campolongo
after the Austro-Hungarian attack
Events
The battle of
the plateaux
The biggest high-altitude battle ever fought took place on the summit of Monte Ortigara, a 2,105 m peak at the eastern extremity of the Asiago Plateau. The Italians and the Austro-Hungarians attacked and bombarded each other continuously from 10 to 29 June 1917 to conquer the peak.
On 25 June, after two weeks of very hard fighting, the Habsburg soldiers repulsed the assaults of the Italian 6th Army, finally using flame launchers and gas.
The Battle of Ortigara thus became one of the most dramatic pages of the Great War: in 16 days the Italians lost more than 25,000 men and the Austro-Hungarians 9,000.
Events
Remembrance
During the war, cimiteri di guerra (war cemeteries; first burial) sprang up near the front line, the firing line, of the various battlefronts and near field hospitals; they were intended for soldiers who died during the fighting either of their wounds or of sickness. Available spaces in existing civilian cemeteries or neighbouring spaces were used to bury those who died in military hospitals in urban centres.
Cimiteri militari (military cemeteries; second burial) are places where bodies were transferred immediately after the war to places more suitable for visitors and nearer urban centres, also as a result of the forming of a central office for caring for and honouring the fallen in battle by decree of the War Ministry of 19 March 1920.
Events
The Unknown Soldier
After the First World War, the nations that had taken part in it wished to honour the sacrifices and heroism of their soldiers, identifying them all over the remains of an unknown soldier, a person who had died in war and had never been identified, and thus without a name or a grave at which he could be sorrowed for and remembered.
In October 1921 the Italian War Ministry appointed a commission to travel the battlefields and gather eleven unidentified bodies. One was chosen to represent them all, and the person to whom the duty fell of choosing the Unknown Soldier was Maria Bergamas of Trieste, whose son Antonio had deserted from the Austro-Hungarian ranks to enrol in the Italian army and had fallen during the fighting without it having been possible to identify his body.
The remains chosen were loaded on a special train at Aquileia and a long journey started that was destined to go down in history. The train travelled surrounded by the affection of the whole country to Rome, where the body was entombed under the Altar of the Fatherland on 4 November 1921.
“Abbiamo ricostruito edifici e recuperato trincee […] per non dimenticare che l’unità dell’Europa, da ripensare per rinforzare, è diventata un ideale, un’opportunità ed una realtà dopo sanguinose guerre fratricide.
Abbiamo lavorato per non dimenticare quelli che non sapevano né leggere né scrivere, e non avevano idea per chi e per che cosa dovevano morire; quelli che sapevano, ma non lo potevano dire, che la guerra non era voluta né da Dio né dal fato, ma dal volere irrazionale degli uomini; quelli che hanno maledetto la guerra, ed il momento in cui venivano impartiti loro illogici comandi destinati ad inutili stragi, fucili puntati davanti e fucili spianati dietro; quelli che non si sono mai perdonati di aver dovuto ucciso un alto uomo.
Ci siamo impegnati per non dimenticare le migliaia di ossa sbiancate sui nostri pascoli, scheletri ai quali non abbiamo mai potuto dare un nome, pur avendo ciascuno di loro avuto un immenso desiderio di vivere, di amare e di essere amati di poter esprimere l’irripetibile, ultimativa occasione di essersi affacciati su questo mondo. Abbiamo lavorato per non dimenticare una intera generazione sottratta ai posteri. […]
Ci siamo impegnati per ricordare a noi, e a che verrà dopo di noi che anche questo territorio, così verde e gioioso d’estate, così candido e silente d’inverno, ha visto la stupidità dell’uomo far arrossare di sangue le sue rocce e la sua erba in una orrenda carneficina, e che ancora oggi e sempre potrà accadere, come accade ancora, pure in questo momento altrove, che il sonno della ragione possa generare il mostro della aggressività organizzata, fino a che non saremo pienamente coscienti che la patri dell’uomo, pur nel rispetto di ciascuna cultura, è il mondo, e che solo una vera giustizia sociale potrà contribuire a renderlo più pacifico.”
