Eleven Battles of the Isonzo

January 21, 2022 3:32 PM

Was Luigi Cadorna one of the worst generals of World War I, or was he the worst? Bret Deveraux makes the argument: Luigi Cadorna Was the Worst.

Also interesting: On Public Scholarship.

posted by russilwvong (19 comments total)

ACOUP: Visit the blog to learn why Saruman is like a STEM tech bro with a private army, stay for evaluations of forgotten WWI generals and the history of bread.

No one is writing about history or classics or any subject in the humanities ‘for the money’ because anyone who can write that well could make far more money writing something else. The deeper problem is that this attitude demands that anyone engaged in this kind of work must either live as a monk, already have a tenure-track teaching job, or be independently wealthy. We ought not shame public engagement efforts that aim to be self-funding, in whole or in part (though we should also be clear that relatively few such efforts will actually be self-funding).

This seems right, and I suspect is a relic of an age that had such a restricted applicant pool that people who did was considered either "not good enough" or "the wrong kind of person," both of which were valid reasons to ignore them.
posted by mark k at 3:46 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

But there are so many to choose from.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:53 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

ACOUP is a public treasure and I'm a little ashamed for not supporting it via Patreon.
posted by Slothrup at 4:13 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you would like more of this Tom Foolery in detail I can recommend In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign by Leon Wolff...
posted by jim in austin at 4:50 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

On Cadorna: My maternal great-grandfather, who would emigrate to the US after the war, served in the Italian army during WWI - and almost got himself shot for desertion several times, being saved by virtue of being an excellent cook.

That piece explains why he did that (and why being able to cook pulled his porcetta out of the fire.)

On public engagement: I'm not surprised that he pointed to OSP for his example of "this is what we can do with public engagement", given that they're one of the most prominent YouTube channels engaging in public discourse on the classics. In a lot of ways, they demonstrate the points he made about writing for public consumption. Then again, they do fall more towards the "amateur" side (while Blue is a trained classicist, he only has undergrad work under his belt, I believe, ) but I think that's as much benefit as much hinderance for them, and illustrates some of bigger issues with academia today.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:04 PM on January 21, 2022

Luigi Cadorna is the patron saint of the Lions Led By Donkeys, a weekly leftist podcast about military-related disasters run by a collection of Xennial/Millenial American veterans and other malcontents. Of all the war criminals, unfit leaders, and oddballs talked about in the nearly 200 episodes, Cadorna stands out as the worst. In their eyes, Cadorna wasn't just incompetent, he deliberately murdered the soldiers under his command.
posted by Enkidude at 6:09 PM on January 21, 2022 [5 favorites]

WWI was just such a horrible learning experience about warfare.

This General is an excellent example of such.
posted by Windopaene at 6:17 PM on January 21, 2022

WWI was just such a horrible learning experience about warfare.

Basically, the issue was that you had a sea change in how war was fought starting with the Crimean and American Civil Wars and continuing on to WWI. As a result, you had officers getting trained in tactics in just enough time to see those tactics become obsolete - and yet they would stick with them, resulting in soldiers getting fed into the meat grinder.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:02 PM on January 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

And then WWII changed everything again, and the lessons had to be relearned.

But WWI has always felt that the lessons learned weren't learned soon enough. When France fell in WWII, everyone kind of got the memo that things needed to change ASAP. Seems like during WWI, those lessons didn't get learned. Trench warfare wasn't great for offensive innovations.
posted by Windopaene at 7:43 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

WWI has always felt that the lessons learned weren't learned soon enough

I mean, seems like the first time your dudes were machine-gunned down by the other dudes when they barely got out of the trenches would be the last but no.
posted by kirkaracha at 7:57 PM on January 21, 2022 [2 favorites]

But WWI has always felt that the lessons learned weren't learned soon enough.

Deveroux has a good series explaining why this belief is wrong. Short version: the popular idea of trench warfare is wrong and fundamentally misunderstands why trenches were made and how they worked, generals had figured out how to deal with machine guns pretty quickly (answer: use artillery to shut them up), and it was artillery that was the unsolvable problem because it made it that any gains couldn't be held. And yet defense wasn't an option at the tactical or operational levels, because attackers tended to have the advantage, and a war of attrition was politically untenable.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:22 PM on January 21, 2022 [13 favorites]

Yep. They did it over and over and over. This time it will work!
posted by Windopaene at 8:23 PM on January 21, 2022

Yep. They did it over and over and over. This time it will work!

While that is applicable to Cardona, it's really not the case for the war as a whole. As per Deveroux:

Before that, it is worth recapping the core problem of the trench stalemate laid out last time. While the popular conception was that the main problem was machine-gun fire making trench assaults over open ground simply impossible, the actual dynamic was more complex. In particular, it was possible to create the conditions for a successful assault on enemy forward positions – often with a neutral or favorable casualty ratio – through the use of heavy artillery barrages. The trap this created, however, was that the barrages themselves tore up the terrain and infrastructure the army would need to bring up reinforcements to secure, expand and then exploit any initial success. Defenders responded to artillery with defense-in-depth, meaning that while a well-planned assault, preceded by a barrage, might overrun the forward positions, the main battle position was already placed further back and well-prepared to retake the lost ground in counter-attacks. It was simply impossible for the attacker to bring fresh troops (and move up his artillery) over the shattered, broken ground faster than the defender could do the same over intact railroad networks. The more artillery the attacker used to get the advantage in that first attack, the worse the ground his reserves had to move over became as a result of the shelling, but one couldn’t dispense with the barrage because without it, taking that first line was impossible and so the trap was sprung.

Furthermore, pure defense wasn't an option at either the tactical or operational levels - you needed to attack to take pressure off your defenses. At the strategic level - fighting a war of attrition - it could be done, except the political will was (unsurprisingly) not there.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:34 PM on January 21, 2022 [4 favorites]

TIL defense in depth the Information Security concept comes from defense in depth the military strategy.
posted by The genius who rejected Anno's budget proposal. at 8:55 PM on January 21, 2022

Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf was the worst, worse than Cadorna, because Hotzendorf was also terrible operationally and politically as well as strategically. He was, if you will, the Donald Rumsfeld (or John Bolton) of Austria-Hungary- the leading voice advocating pre-emptive war against Serbia, who saw Ferdinand's death as the opportunity to destroy Serbia once and for all.

And yet, for all his being the Feldmarschall in charge of the Austro-Hungarian military for the past 9 years before 1914, for all his relentless bragging about having elaborate and brilliant plans to defeat every one of Austria's plans, when the war actually came? It took him over a month to get his forces into position, only to get soundly drubbed by the Serbian army. It took Mackensen and the Germans to defeat them.

So Luigi Cadorna was a heartless and unimaginative brute who was unable to learn or accept responsibility. But he wasn't a fraud. Feldmarschall Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf was a fraud, and his fraudulent claims of military plans (which, I remind you, did not actually exist) deceived a nation into starting a war which destroyed the kingdoms of Europe and killed hundreds of millions of people. If there's a plain of punishment or karma, he deserves to be alongside Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Hong Xiuquan.

Actually, I'd say he's worse than those people. They believed in an ideology and backed that up with a fearsome work ethic- they were monsters subscribed to some notion of a greater good. Conrad von Hotzendorf bull-shitted for nine years, and then was found to be entirely fatuous at the moment of crisis, and he did not pay the price- the world did.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 9:29 PM on January 21, 2022 [8 favorites]

I blame Moltke.
posted by clavdivs at 12:04 AM on January 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

Deveraux makes an good case for Luigi Cadorno, and LeRoien Jaune makes a solid counter-argument for Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, but I have a hard time looking past Enver Pasha. Now, as is noted in the blogpost, he was an epically terrible human being, on a scale notable even for the first half of he 20th century. How terrible was he? His activities later inspired the invention of a new word, genocide.

But that infamy kinda eclipses how immensely bad he was at his job at leading the Turkish army.

Most other candidates for worst World War One general were, in some way, constrained by the political realities of the regimes they served, Enver Pasha, as one of the Three Pashas ruling the Ottoman Empire, he had full power over the war effort. And he was bad in every conceivable way.

He was using napoleonic tactics a hundred years to late, but unlike Napoleon, he chose the Russian winter as the time to launch his big offensive. Even before the first attack, 25 thousand Turkish soldiers froze to death.

It went downhill from there.
posted by Kattullus at 6:53 AM on January 22, 2022 [3 favorites]

(My previous post about Caporetto)
posted by doctornemo at 2:37 PM on January 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Good article. Makes a very plausible case for Cadorno being the worst WWI general.

Conrad von Hötzendorf - agreed, for the reasons of his prewar work and massive strategic screwups.

I'd like to add some Russian generals (the ones facing Europe), starting with Alexander Samsonov, who fatally screwed up the battle of Tannenberg early on, lost the chance to smack down Germany, and set the train going for the collapse of the tsarist empire (not one I support, but Samsonov's job was to expand it). Then moving on to the other generals who kept losing to the Germans and Austro-Hungarians - except Brusilov.
posted by doctornemo at 2:40 PM on January 23, 2022 [1 favorite]