WI Italy keeps fighting WW1

Italy was on the winning side of World War One, the Entente, and yet they didn't get everything they were promised out of the Treaty of Versailles, and it was called a 'mutilated victory' in Italy. While Italy did annex a number of provinces, what if they had countinued the war to annex all that they have been promised, including Dalmatia?
 
They didn't because their army was in a state of disintegration of 1918 and because of communist agitation. Italy was unstable at the time and no continuation of the war was going to happen. If you want anything like that you should have Mussolini remain neutral in WW2 and while Britain is losing, snatch those territories in small war against Yugoslavia.
 
They didn't because their army was in a state of disintegration of 1918 and because of communist agitation. Italy was unstable at the time and no continuation of the war was going to happen. If you want anything like that you should have Mussolini remain neutral in WW2 and while Britain is losing, snatch those territories in small war against Yugoslavia.

Agreed Italy likr Japan is expantionist at this point but is unable to maintain such long logistics and offensives and as such their expansion is slow, they need to prey on when other powers are weak; perhaps the US joining earlier Sapping CP strength on the Italian front - but even thats a longshot
 
Italy was on the winning side of World War One, the Entente, and yet they didn't get everything they were promised out of the Treaty of Versailles, and it was called a 'mutilated victory' in Italy. While Italy did annex a number of provinces, what if they had countinued the war to annex all that they have been promised, including Dalmatia?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but WW1 ended ufficially 4 november 1918, while the actual division of the former austro-hungarian empire happened during the Versailles peace conference in 1919.
The territories promised by the allies to the italian goverment in the treaty of London and not handed to Italy were used to create the new state of Jugoslavia, following the principle of people self-determination. To get Dalmatia Italy should have declared war to Jugoslavia and to her protectors, the entente... kind of suicidial choice...
In truth the whole "mutilated victory" was blow out her true borders by political propaganda during the early twenties. Italy did get the italian speaking territories (and some more, notwithstanding Wilson and co.).

If you want a larger Italy after the war you should posit a far more successful italian offensive during the war shattering the austrian army or keep out the USA from the war. Neither are really probable, without some serious POD.

Anyway, Italy, in effect, did continue war for a bit. When Fiume was handed the status of free city, Gabriele d'Annunzio led a band of war veterans to conquer it. After about a year of rule, Fiume was "liberated" by italian troops, ending so a rather complicated diplomatical conundrum. Fiume proper was later added to italian kingdom, while her outskirts become part of Jugoslavia.
 
Italy was on the winning side of World War One, the Entente, and yet they didn't get everything they were promised out of the Treaty of Versailles, and it was called a 'mutilated victory' in Italy. While Italy did annex a number of provinces, what if they had countinued the war to annex all that they have been promised, including Dalmatia?

As others have pointed out, Italy was bound by its membership of the Entente to take part in the Paris conference and accept its ruling, by which the London Treaty was torn up by Wilson (and of course the Entente had intended it to be flexible all along). A war againt Yugoslavia will be quixotic and questionably succesful, since Italy is in such dmoestic turmoil.

"Mutilated Victory" was not really a product of Italy actually being betrayed as the Italians realising that the war hadn't been worth it. They'd entered agressively because of their furious irredentism... and thed's secured most of that irredentism's targets, which turned out to be a stretch of mountains with as many germans as Italians, a rocky peninsula with more Slavs than Italians, and Zadar. Their cumulative population was about equal to Italy war casualties. The truth was that nothing could justify the sacrifices Italy had made, as she had made them for reasons blown out of all proportion.
 

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"The truth was that nothing could justify the sacrifices Italy had made, as she had made them for reasons blown out of all proportion."

You could say the same thing about every participant in World War One. No-one got anything out of the war equal to what they had suffered.

Would France and Britain have gone to war in 1919 or 1920 with Italy over a strip of land in the Adriatic? Not a chance.

If the Italians had defied France and Britain and occupied and annexed Dalmatia I’d expect them to have various border incidences with the new Yugoslav Kingdom during the ‘20s or ‘30s.

It would have just been another minor border readjustment. There were a string of them in Eastern and Central Europe after WW1.

 
If the Italians had defied France and Britain and occupied and annexed Dalmatia I’d expect them to have various border incidences with the new Yugoslav Kingdom during the ‘20s or ‘30s.

It would have just been another minor border readjustment. There were a string of them in Eastern and Central Europe after WW1.

I tend to agree here. Also, as Serbia's expansion was huge anyways, Italy occupying a few ports during this phase might not bother other that much.

I am not sure if Serbia/Yugoslavia had the military means in late 1918 to stop the Italians.Maybe their navy could even simply enter the ports (Spalato, Zadar...others?) and spew out a few troops which take up defensive positions in the mountains a few miles inwards.
 
Would France and Britain have gone to war in 1919 or 1920 with Italy over a strip of land in the Adriatic? Not a chance.

If the Italians had defied France and Britain and occupied and annexed Dalmatia I’d expect them to have various border incidences with the new Yugoslav Kingdom during the ‘20s or ‘30s.

It's really not a matter of military power. Italy could have seized those territories in 1920, for example, pretty easily. But it would happen in open defiance of Versailles treaty.

France, Britain and USA could do a lot of damage to Italy without using soldiers or navy. Sanctions anyone?
The post war economy in Italy was a sorry mess (not to mention the political instabilty) and she could not afford to anger her major creditors.
Fiume worked because was largely a private adventure, that italian troops helped to stop.
 
As already stated, the political situation is too fragmented. You'd need either to butterfly or co-opt the Red movement or have some external trigger. Note that in 1918 you already have a "Versailles Yugoslavia" being built over the very ground Italy wants.

Maybe if the burgeoning Yugoslav state sends troops to "liberate" Fiume from D'Annunzio you could have casus beli enough for a war with Yugo, which at this point will be a hodge-podge of Serbian and former A-H Slovene and Croat troops and generals who may not trust one another versus a war-weary and politically fragmented Italian army in territory far from good for combat. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
 
How set were the borders before the Conferences started in January 1919? After all, the Treaty of London in 1915 offered Dalmatia to Italy. If Italy moves quickly enough, it might at least try to create results.

So - how about a swift action with a small number of troops still in November 1918? Yugoslavia is only being started to be built at that point. Its proclamation as SHS-state on Dec 1st, 1918 is also some kind of pre-emptive action.
 
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I tend to agree here. Also, as Serbia's expansion was huge anyways, Italy occupying a few ports during this phase might not bother other that much.

That's just the thing. Serbia outlined a "Greater Sebian" programme in her declaration of war with Austria, claiming she would liberate Serbs and listing all the places they were to be found, but saying nothing of Croats and Slovenes (quite understandably, since the racist "Srba na Vrba!" chant originated in 1914 as a translation of "Alle Serben muss sterben!": Croatia and Slovenia were generally pretty pro-Hapsburg). King Peter as pretty suspicious of the whole idea of "Yugoslavia", and nobody had seriously raised it in 1915 when London was negotiated.

The London treaty outlined both "Greater Serbia" and Italy's Venetian claims, overlap being fairly minimal. This left Croatia with pretty much nuthin', and the Croats and Slovenes were scared out of their wits at the prospect of the Entente winning and rallied again to the Hapsburgs.

Yugoslavia was formed for a variety of reasons (Wilson's support, for instance, and the distorting effect the exile of the government had had on Serbian intellectual and political life), but it was principally because the South Slavic elites of Austria-Hungary (and you could meaningfully talk about "South Slav" elites there, because the Croats and Slovenes often co-operated toward common goals and in this case the local Serbs were also in agreement), having seen that Austria was going under, turned to Entente-backed Serbia for protection from Italy. The fact that nobody had ever really considered the logistics of uniting two territorially mixed and bitterly sectarian populations in one state for essentially tactical reasons led to the somewhat frantic state of interwar Yugoslav politics; and during that period the only thing that could really unite Serbs and Croats was the Italians making noises.

You could say the intellectual origin of the Ustasha was as Croats who for whatever reason (because they held Catholicism and sectarianism above Yugoslavism, or just because Yugoslavia was what they grew up in as young radicals) would rather Italian sponsorship than sharing a state with the Serbs on any terms.

So the point is that it isn't a matter of what the Belgrade government wants, it's a matter of what the local inhabitants who control the old Hapsburg institutions want.

As already stated, the political situation is too fragmented. You'd need either to butterfly or co-opt the Red movement or have some external trigger. Note that in 1918 you already have a "Versailles Yugoslavia" being built over the very ground Italy wants.

Maybe if the burgeoning Yugoslav state sends troops to "liberate" Fiume from D'Annunzio you could have casus beli enough for a war with Yugo, which at this point will be a hodge-podge of Serbian and former A-H Slovene and Croat troops and generals who may not trust one another versus a war-weary and politically fragmented Italian army in territory far from good for combat. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Indeed. The "State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs" was pretty much a continuation of the Austro-Hungarian state in those areas that was grafted onto Serbia, led by the South Slav parliamentary caucuses. Vienna even formally handed them the navy, to make sure the Entente combatants didn't get it.
 
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How set were the borders before the Conferences started in January 1919? After all, the Treaty of London in 1915 offered Dalmatia to Italy. If Italy moves quickly enough, it might at least try to create results.

So - how about a swift action with a small number of troops still in November 1918? Yugoslavia is only being started to be built at that point. Its proclamation as SHS-state on Dec 1st, 1918 is also some kind of pre-emptive action.

In November, there was the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, which was a hastily organised national council in the Croatian kingdom and the Cisleithenian areas assembled out of Austro-Hungarian fragments. The Italians were already occupying bits of Istria west of Fiume, IIRC (I'll look for a book I have), while the Serbs in Hungary and Syrmia set up their own local councils and militias and declared union with Serbia in the course of November: the boundary between Hungary, Romania, and Serbia was entirely undefined. Monetenegro also united with Serbia in November.
 
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