The Italian front had been active throughout 1916. For the Austrians, as we have seen, Italy was always the preferred adversary. In May, much against the advice of his German allies, who saw no strategic advantage in doing so, Conrad launched a major offensive through the mountains of the Trentino. After an initial success it had slowed to a halt.
Admittedly Conrad could claim a major victory—the Italians lost about 286,000 men, 45,000 of them prisoners of war— but its main strategic consequence had been to reduce the resources available to the Austrians when Brusilov attacked the following month. Meanwhile the main Italian armies under General Luigi Cadorna had been assaulting the strong Austrian defences forty miles further east on the Isonzo river.
They continued to do so until November in a prolonged battle of attrition on the stony plateau of the Carso, north of Trieste, which was renewed the following spring. By August 1917 Cadorna had lost over 200,000 men on this bloodiest of battlefields, and both the Italian and the Austrian armies had reached breaking point. But Ludendorff, having disposed of the Russians, could now spare resources to help his ally, and sent seven divisions to reinforce the Austrians on the Isonzo.
Using all the artillery and infantry techniques they had now perfected on the Eastern Front, the Germans smashed through the Italian defences at Caporetto on 25 October, taking 30,000 prisoners. The entire Italian front collapsed, and only re-formed two weeks later seventy miles to the rear along the Piave, with the loss of 275,000 prisoners, 2,500 guns, and vast quantities of stores. In addition, about half a million Italian deserters had melted into the landscape.
For Lloyd George the Italian collapse was providential. Haig was summarily ordered to send five divisions from the Western Front, which effectively closed down his own offensive and, together with six French divisions, restored stability in the Italian theatre. More important, Lloyd George used the opportunity of an Allied conference at Rapallo on 5 November to collaborate with the new French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (a man after his own heart, one who had even less time for generals) in setting up an Allied Supreme War Council, consisting of the Allied political leaders with their military advisers, to lay down military policy, to allot forces to the various theatres, and, most important, to organize and allocate military supplies.
Both Haig and Pétain intensely resented this usurpation of their authority, but their power had been broken. Haig’s independence was still further enfeebled by the replacement of his senior staff officers, and by the removal of his greatest ally in Whitehall, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir William Robertson, in favour of Lloyd George’s own protégé, General Sir Henry Wilson. In both France and Britain civilian control of strategy was now complete.
Within a month of the creation of the Supreme War Council, Lloyd George received even better news. On 11 December a British army entered Jerusalem.
The Battle of the Somme
