Luigi Cadorna

Luigi Cadorna: The General Who Never Admitted a Thing

Eleven times between June 1915 and September 1917 he sent Italian infantry at the same river. The Isonzo gave up Gorizia and the Bainsizza plateau and took hundreds of thousands of men in exchange. When the line finally broke at Caporetto in October 1917, Luigi Cadorna's explanation was not that his dispositions had failed. It was that his soldiers were cowards. He was dismissed within a fortnight, and seven years later Mussolini's Italy made him a Marshal.

The Son of the Man Who Took Rome

He was born on 4 September 1850 in Verbania, then in the Kingdom of Sardinia, the son of General Raffaele Cadorna. Commissioned a second lieutenant of artillery in 1868, he took part in the occupation of Rome in 1870 — the campaign his father commanded. From 1892 he was a colonel commanding the 10th Bersaglieri Regiment, and he reached lieutenant general in 1898. Offered the post of Chief of Staff in 1908, he refused it: he objected to the degree of political control attached. The objection is the whole man in miniature.

He took the job on 27 July 1914, days before Europe collapsed, on terms closer to his own. According to the 1914-1918-Online encyclopedia, he held that "the civil authorities had to accommodate the army's every request without objection" and "did not tolerate interference of any sort in war operations."

An Army Sent North Underequipped

Italy entered the war in May 1915. Cadorna fielded thirty-six infantry divisions — some 875,000 men — and precisely 120 modern artillery pieces, the army's equipment having been drained by the Libyan campaign in Tripolitania and by Antonio Salandra's long neutrality. Into that shortfall he poured a doctrine he had written himself: he was the author of a manual on infantry tactics emphasising the offensive, and the Great War never shook his confidence in it. "Cadorna's faith in his tactics never wavered," the encyclopedia records, "despite the lack of progress or the alarmingly high casualties."

Eleven Battles on One River

The First Battle of the Isonzo, 23 June to 7 July 1915, cost 14,917 Italian casualties against 10,400 Austro-Hungarian. The Second, from 24 July to 3 August, cost roughly 42,000 Italians and more than 47,000 Austrians. The Third and Fourth, from late October into early December 1915, bought Oslavia and Mount Calvario. His high-water mark came at the Sixth Battle, 6-17 August 1916, when he took Gorizia — the most significant success of his command, arriving in the same year as the recapture of Asiago and briefly making him a national figure. The Tenth, 12-28 May 1917, secured the Kuk-Vodice area. At the Eleventh, in August 1917, six million artillery shells broke through onto the Bainsizza plateau and destroyed more than 38 percent of the Austrian guns.

Discipline as Doctrine

Cadorna ran the harshest disciplinary regime of any army in the war. He dismissed 217 officers. Six percent of Italian soldiers faced disciplinary charges and 61 percent of those were convicted. Roughly 750 men were executed — the highest number in any army in the First World War. At Caporetto he ordered the summary execution of officers whose units retreated.

Whether he revived decimation, the killing of one man in ten, remains disputed. One instance is documented: in May 1916, twelve soldiers of the 141st Catanzaro Infantry Brigade were shot after a mutiny, and Cadorna endorsed the action by telegram. John Keegan's reading is that Cadorna's "judicial savagery" consisted of "summary executions of individual stragglers, rather than the formalized winnowing of entire detachments" — a distinction that matters to historians and mattered very little to the stragglers.

Behind the executions lay something more corrosive. For Cadorna, in the encyclopedia's phrase, "soldiers' needs were absolutely secondary," and his command showed "a serious neglect of the soldiers' emotional and material needs" while "inevitable failures were promptly and severely punished." He kept no direct contact with the troops. He also insisted on absolute unity of command to the point that "no one was allowed to contradict his authority," which produced, in the end, "his total isolation."

Caporetto

On 24 October 1917 a combined Austro-Hungarian and German force attacked at Kobarid. Cadorna had been on leave for most of that month; the immediate subordinate holding the sector was seriously ill; the troops were drawn up far forward with little defence in depth, and warnings of the coming attack had produced only halfhearted orders and no monitoring of their execution. By 12 November the enemy stood on the Piave. Some 275,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner.

He blamed the men. British and French allies demanded his removal, and he was dismissed on 7 November 1917, replaced by Armando Diaz and shunted to the Allied Supreme War Council at Versailles. The official Caporetto Commission of 1919 was scathing, and included accusations that he had fled to Padua and abandoned the Second Army. He answered with a two-volume memoir, *La guerra alla fronte italiana*, defending everything.

Why Luigi Is Called a Genius

He mostly is not, and the honest place to begin is there. David Stevenson of the LSE writes that Cadorna "earned opprobrium as one of the most callous and incompetent of First World War commanders," and the standard portrait is of an unimaginative martinet who repeated a failed offensive eleven times and never conceded an error.

The case for him, made most seriously by the Italian historian Giorgio Rochat, is not about brilliance but about capacity. Rochat places him alongside Joffre and Haig and argues that trench warfare "had its own terrible logic" largely independent of Cadorna, and credits him with genuine effectiveness in military logistics and an unshakeable sense of mission. That is the real claim: administrative and organisational power. He took an army short of artillery, badly prepared, and moved it in mass across some of the worst terrain in Europe for two and a half years, sustaining offensives that did eventually take Gorizia and the Bainsizza. Some historians also attribute Caporetto less to his incompetence than to the arrival of superior German formations.

But this is competence, not cognitive originality, and even the competence has a hole in it that the sources name precisely: an inability to understand the needs of a mass army. The faculty a modern commander most needed — learning from evidence — is the one he demonstrably lacked. Eleven Isonzo battles are not eleven ideas. Scholarly opinion on him varies significantly and he remains genuinely contested, but the contest is over whether he was ordinary or disastrous, not over whether he was a genius. Nothing in the record supports that word.

Legacy

In 1924, two years after Mussolini took power, Cadorna was made Marshal of Italy, a rehabilitation owing more to the regime's appetite for martial symbols than to any revision of the 1919 findings. He died at Bordighera on 21 December 1928, aged 78. His son Raffaele Cadorna Jr. commanded Italian resistance forces in the Second World War, fighting the state that had restored his father's rank. In Italian memory Caporetto survives as a common noun for catastrophe, and the man who presided over it remains the most argued-over general the country has produced.

Achievements

• Knight Grand Cross of the Military Order of Savoy — 1916
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus
• Educated at Military School Teulié and Royal Academy of Turin
• Worked as politician, military officer and military commander