Nobody in the late 19th century expected a war with other European powers 'soon' (apart from the occasional war fever), but it was seen as a wholly realistic occurence, to make full preparation against. And after the Triple Alliance, so war with France, on either side.
It's true that the generals broadcast that the traisn would roll as soon as the snow had melted from the Balkans every damn year - and provide them with work, handily enough. Did anyone else pay much attention, especially prior to the turn of the century?
Look at the Bulgarian crisis. The Russians have no idea how they're actually going to get Bulgaria, the Germans won't fight in a hundred years, Britain's navy is a joke, and the three of them collectively decide that it's all too much bother for a place like Bulgaria. The prizes for the capitalist and the statesman were outside Europe in those decades.
Bismarck juggled alliances rapidly to balance his assets against each threat. He was too clever to break treaties, but he was clever enough to sign treaties which he had no intention of obliging. I will have to re-read what Taylor says about the Triple Alliance, but it was a calculated manouvre from Berlin.
Bismarck never took Italy any more seriously than her (then small) physical power made him. And why would the junker's junker bother himself about the darling of liberals? One moment, he told his correspondants that Italy was not a great power - but when he needed threats to justify his plans, he raised the dread prospect of a Russo-Italian alliance. He used Italy as a balancing factor in his equations, safe in the knowledge that the Italians could do little about it.
Not necessarily in Rome's eyes. Or the Italian government may make the expectation that Britain is going to stay neutral.
The point is that
even with Britain neutral, the French and Russians can give the Germans a hard run of it. The Germans certainly thought so, of WW1 wouldn't have happened.
The German-Italian one was quite important, too, yet it did not stop Italian belligerance.
It was smaller, which is another factor to add to the ledger along with Austria's Ancestral Enemy status, the much lesser risk involved in a fight with Austria, and the more attractive prospects of a world arranged by the Entente.
They were but a minor element in the coalition of interests that supported the pro-war lobby. ITTL the same shipping interests may instead aim to cut down French competition in the Med.
Not really. The point was that Austria's seaborne trade went through either the Danube or Trieste and to a lesser extent Fiume. If the Italians annexed those cities, they gained control of the bottleneck to that whole system and were in a position to make Austria's considerable shipping interests uncompetative. The soap and steel of Brno would now have to be carried away in Italian ships.
Are the Italians in a position to make the French Mediterranean ports uncompetative if they win? Except for Nice, no, and Nice was not a hugely important commercial port. The whole south of France had less of an important hinterland to begin with, too.
If the shipping firms could benefit from either policy equally, why do you think they agitated for war with Austria? Garibaldian patriotism? Much as that motivated plenty of people, it was certainly helped by cold hard cash.
In the case of neutrality, it loses a major chance to affirm its status as a great power. That was the true main motivation for Italian WWI belligerance, to affirm its status as a great power by cutting down one of its traditional rivals, Austria or France. Everything else, including the irredenta, were smokescreens.
There's a strong case to made for that outlook, but arbitrary tracts of land - in this case the rocky Adriatic shore and the rockier Alps - often become inextricable from national grandeur. If Italy was going to assert her prestige, she would do it fighting her arch-rival. This was also the more sensible choice from a military and political standpoint - especially when you consider Cadorna's supreme over-confidence about his ability to march on Vienna.
Yup, that Franz Joseph had terrible judgement in picking his generals (not a surprise if you look at the militayr record of Austria past 1848). Conrad was an albatross around Austria's neck, an old fool whose strategic incompetence was only matched by his taste for advocating unprovoked pre-emptive wars against real or assumed enemies of Austria, one day Serbia, the other day Italy, the day after that Serbia again.
Quite - and do you think this made it any easier for the two countries to be reconciled? It's as reasonable to suppose that Austria would suddenly quit Bosnia because the Germans are determined to court Serbia.
True, but ultimately irrelevant from the PoV of Italian elite at the time, see my point above.
What was it Hamlet said?
...I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?...
Again, a legend builds up around certain unremarkable portions of our earth on behalf of which thousands of young men are condemned to death. The Italian troops heading to the front chalked 'Trento' onto their carriages. You can't just switch the gears on something like that, anymore than Hitler could decide in 1939 that he'd rather have North Schleswig than Danzig.
I need to remind you that this be a war that the country has been preparing to fight for three decades.
And given how prepared they turned out to be for the realities of Alpine warfare with Austria, what good exactly does that do them?
'Preparation' is another one of these magic words like 'diplomatic resources'. One cannot prepare one's way out of naval inferiority or over a range of gigantic mountains.
Which one ? An amphibious landing ? It would have been the French Gallipoli, even assuming that with a two-front war, and no BEF, the French Army has the men to waste in such a foolish errand.
And what was the situation of the Italiahn defences at the time? Guns on every inch of coast, well-hardened? Good troops ready to rush to the coast? Erskine Childers pointed out in
The Riddle of the Sands that a German army in lighters could have landed at their leisure around the Wash, and that book triggered a national panic that led to among other things the reform of the army, the creation of the TA, and the establishment of Rosyth. And still the Germans bombarded East Anglia quite easily enough, IIRC. Had Italy created a comprehensive national system that made every inch of a largely straight coastline as defensible as Suvla Bay?
The Dardanelles have been perhaps the most strategic waterway in the world since the Persians came to chastise Athens and Sparta, and as a bonus they're absurdly defensible: rocky hills on a tiny spit of land. Recall, also, that the Ottomans had young boys passing grenades up, and used wooden catapults to supplement their ordinance. It was a national effort to defend the City.
As to numbers, this is all assuming that the French have taken equivelant casualties facing a much smaller portion of the German armies. Not to mention that they aren't going to go to Gallipoli.
What Britain can do within the bounds of neutrality is not going to harm Germany's chances to win in any meaningful way. So the RN shadows the HSF while it sails from Kiel to La Spezia. Big deal.
It's an implicit threat of war in the event of misbehavior. If the Germans didn't give a flying damn about British threats, they would have invaded Belgium, no?
ROTFL. 1914 isn't 1849 and the Italian Army isn't the ragtag militias of the Roman Republic. Italy has been preparing for this kind of war since 1882, amphibious landings were much more troublesome in WWI than in WWII and even in the 1940s. quite troublesome to pull it off in Italy, by armies much more powerful than the French one. Little doubt that it would be the French Gallipoli.
And have you ever stood in an Italian fortification on the beaches of the Latium? They last. I have seen plenty of our bunkers in the Forth. WHat were the Italian plans in the event of a landing? Which troops - mobilised from the length of the country - would rush to the defense?
I'm not saying the French would win, I'm saying the threat is real and adds another to Italy's long list of reasons of reasons not to make war with France.
What is "this kind of war", in any case? And where were those preparations in the valley of the Isonzo?
It was justified by strategic reasons, since it allowed Italy to reach the watershed.
I'll file it with Poland's urgent need for frontage on the sea and France's absolutely necessary riverine border.
Probably true for Trieste whose ownership had meaningful economic consequences for Austria. But Trento or Gorizia ? Magyars, Czechs, Poles, and Croats didn't give a damn about them. It didn't need to give up all of the irredenta to win Italy over.
Need I remind you that the Hungarian exiles proposed a rising during the Venetian War, and that the Austrian constitution was a more-or-less direct result of defeat in Italy?
The Croats, of course, gave plenty a damn about Italian irredentism - although in a very different fashion to, say, the Romanians.