Earlier this month, Bret Devereaux took the time to give WW1 Italian general Luigi Cadorna the attention he richly deserved as the worst general of that war (which also included the strong Austrian contender Conrad von Hötzendorf), and certainly must be considered to be in the running as the worst general in military history:

Luigi Cadorna, Marshal of Italy, Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, 1914-1917.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

This week we’re going to break from our normal fare and take a bit of a lark. I thought I ought to substantiate the nearly endless shade towards Luigi Cadorna, Italian Army Chief of Staff from 1914-1917 (though I realize after writing this that what I actually ought to have done is just told the same bad joke about Cadorna 11 times in a row and let that stand as the explanation). I said that Cadorna was my pick for the worst general of World War I. Now, as I noted at the time, there is some stiff competition for that position. While I argued that the tactical problem of trench warfare probably wasn’t solvable by any general, that doesn’t mean that some generals didn’t perform better than others under the difficult conditions imposed by the stalemate.

Now I should be clear here what I mean by “worst general”. What I am assessing here is the fellow who was worst at generaling, rather than the worst human being who happened to be a general. That latter prize probably goes to İsmail Enver Pasha, Ottoman Minister of War from 1914 to 1918, a vain, arrogant strutting sort of man who not only utterly botched the only battle in which he commanded directly (Sarikamish, Dec. 1914 – Jan 1915) but who also then blamed his defeat (falsely) on the Armenians and subsequently instigated and played a key role in the Armenian genocide. He then sold his services to the Soviets, before betraying them to side with the Basmachi movement, which didn’t go particularly well either.

We are also here not investigating to see which WWI leader made the single worst decision. As I’ve noted before, the worst decision in the First World War was having a First World War, though the responsibility for that is diffused across multiple different leading figures.

Luigi Cadorna didn’t, to my knowledge, perpetrate any genocides, though as we’ll see, he was cruel and unreasonable. Nor did he bring Italy to war. The son of Count Raffaele Cadorna (who had led the army which captured Rome, completing the unification of Italy), Cadorna’s political connections, particularly to the king Victor Emmanuel III, made him functionally impossible to remove from command after he was made chief of staff in 1914. For his part, Cadorna seems to have spent about as much time fighting a political battle in Rome as he did fighting the actual war on the Isonzo; Cadorna insisted at the outset that he would only accept the job if he was given unfettered, complete authority. As we’ll see, that complete authority is not going to come with complete responsibility for outcomes. But in any event, this is a good illustration of Cadorna’s personality: bitter, arrogant and callous, but with a cruel authoritarian streak and a profound conviction that all of his mistakes were someone else’s fault.

[…] Cadorna has a small, fragile and relatively weak army to work with. Conscription would eventually put millions more Italians in the ranks (and slowly make the equipment situation less of a disaster), but of course everyone else was doing that too and even then it was clear from a simple exercise in demography that Italy’s manpower reserves were likely to be brittle. An equally simple exercise in economic statistics would suggest that while Italy’s army might be made minimally sufficient in equipment (the Italians eventually end up deploying well over a thousand artillery pieces on the Isonzo front, though the quality of their artillery never matched what was available on either side of the Western Front), it would never be excellent. Strategically then, Cadorna had the one army; it was small and weak and it was also effectively all Italy had. Moreover Italy, only recently unified (recall, Cadorna’s father had been directly involved!) was still politically fragile itself and might not take well for horrible casualties. So Cadorna’s army had to be husbanded carefully, spent only in great need and for great benefit.

Instead of doing literally any of that, Cadorna opted to pursue the highest operational tempo of any front of the war. I can’t stress this enough: between May 1915 and October 1917, the French launched (or supported) four offensives (Second Artois, Third Artois/Second Champagne/Loos, the Somme and the Nivelle Offensive; I’m not counting Second Arras as that was a Commonwealth operation in which the French had little part), plus being on the defensive at Verdun. Of course there were lots of minor operations too, but that’s five major operations on the Western Front, where the French were almost totally focused. In contrast, in that same time frame, Cadorna – who again, has the smallest, weakest major army – launches eleven (11)(eleven)(XI)(1011)(I𐤗‎)(ΙΑ)(eleven!?!) offensives on the Isonzo River.

[…]

Because Cadorna thought that discipline and morale were the key components of victory (and also because he seems to have just generally been a cruel, uncaring and authoritarian person) he attempted to enforce both in his army through coercion and cruelty. Cadorna executed around 750 men for cowardice (to my knowledge the highest rate in any army of the war), presided over a military justice regime that convicted something like 3.6% of his army of one disciplinary charge or the other. He dismissed an incredible total of 217 officers during his tenure, frequently because he felt they were not committed enough or aggressive enough and when his army began to fall apart at Caporetto, he ordered the summary execution of officers whose units retreated. It turns out that actually adopting a “the beatings will continue until morale improves” command style does not actually improve morale.