Italy's involvement in World War I is often neglected with the Western and Eastern Fronts being the focal points of remembrance, but for the Italians, their involvement in WWI caused significant loss and human suffering.
As in the Western Front, it became trench warfare with the Italian army repeatedly attacking Austria, making little or no progress and suffering heavy losses. However, unlike the Western Front, the main difference was the fact that the trenches had to be dug in the Alpine rocks and glaciers instead of in the mud and often up to 3,000 m of altitude.Nearly 750,000 Italian troops were killed in savage, hopeless fighting on the stony hills north of Trieste and in the snows of the Dolomites.
From May 1915 to October 1917 the armies of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian empire were locked into a series of twelve battles along the River Isonzo, a sixty-mile front from the Alps to the Adriatic. The campaign was fought in the most appalling terrain for combat, with horrendous casualties on both sides, often exceeding those of the more famous battles of the Great War. Yet this massive struggle is too often neglected in histories of the war which focus on the fighting on the Western and Eastern Fronts.
