Armando diaz, after the defeat of Caporetto the previous year, had replaced the supreme command Luigi Cadorna (son of that Raffaele who on 20 September 1870 had led the "capture of Rome" from the breach of Porta Pia). With the Bulletin of November 4, 1918 (which we report here in its entirety), the general gave the announcement of victory in the Great War, rightly defined by Pope Benedict XV "the needless slaughter”. At the end of the conflict, our country had paid a cost of suffering and pain represented by 5.750.000 soldiers mobilized, of which 4,2 million were combatants at the front.
I killed in combat (with strategies and tactics that did not hesitate to send thousands of men to slaughter for the sole purpose of conquering a few meters of land, which perhaps would have been lost the next day, with similar enemy losses during the counter-offensive) they were 571 thousand. As many as 57 died in captivity; the wounded were more than a million, of which about half remained disabled. The prisoners were 600 thousand. Then there were the victims of repression: 870 complaints to the military courts with many sentences of life imprisonment and capital punishment, when decimation was not carried out on the spot. There were 470 complaints for dodging and 101 convictions for desertion. Between 1918 and 1920, the Spanish flu caused 500 deaths (but the figure is uncertain by default).
After the war, his cost economic turned out to be scary: well 157 billion. The public debt rose, in 1919, to 69 billion and 200 million (in 1914 it was equal to 15 billion and 705 million). The circulation of paper money went from 2 billion to 12 billion. To this debacle of the public finances were added the debts contracted with Great Britain and the USA. (Data are taken from Storia d'Italia by Massimo L. Salvadori – Einaudi). The war, with the changes it had brought about on a geopolitical, economic and social level (the Russian Revolution had broken out on 7 November 1917) became a sort of Pandora's box from which the demons that led to the Second World War in 1939 sprang, as if the decades that separated it from the Great War were only an armistice.
THE FULL TEXT OF THE VICTORY BULLETIN
Supreme Command, 4 November 1918, 12 noon:
The war against Austria-Hungary which, under the high leadership of His Majesty the King, Duce Suprema, the Italian Army, inferior in number and means, began on 24 May 1915 and with unshakable faith and tenacious value it led uninterrupted and asprissima for 41 months is won. The gigantic battle waged on the 24th of last October and in which fifty-one Italian, three British, two French, one Czechoslovakian and one American regiment took part, against seventy-three Austro-Hungarian divisions, is over. The lightning-fast and daring advance of the XXIX Army Corps on Trento, barring the retreat routes for the enemy armies in Trentino, overwhelmed in the West by the troops of the VII Army and in the East by those of the I, VI and IV, brought about the collapse yesterday total of the opponent's front. From the Brenta to the Torre, the irresistible dash of the XII, VIII, X armies and the cavalry divisions drove the fleeing enemy further and further back. In the plain, HRH the Duke of Aosta advances rapidly at the head of his unconquered III army, yearning to return to the positions he had already victoriously conquered, which he had never lost. The Austro-Hungarian Army is annihilated: it suffered very serious losses in the fierce resistance of the first days and in the pursuit it lost very large quantities of material of all sorts and almost entirely its warehouses and deposits. He has so far left in our hands about three hundred thousand prisoners with entire staffs and no less than five thousand guns. The remnants of what was one of the mightiest armies in the world climb in disarray and hopelessness up the valleys, which they had descended with proud assurance. Armando diaz
