General Luigi (Conte di) Cadorna (1850-1928) came from an old piedemontese aristocratic military family in Pallanza. He graduated from the Military Academy in Turin and then served briefly at the Army headquarters in Rome. In 1892-1896 he commanded a battalion of the 62nd infantry Regiment as Colonel, then he was in charge of the 10th Bersaglieri Regiment. With his promotion to Lieutenant General, he took over command of the division and in 1910 he led the Army Corps in Genova. He completed his pre-war career as a commander of the 2nd Army. When Italy declared war, he held the post of Chief of Staff of the Italian Army (the chief commander was formally King Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy).
Cadorna contributed to the preparations of the army for war. But in the moments went the army entered battle, he lacked the necessary imagination, strategic invention, flexible thinking, and courage to break away from the army doctrines and dogmas at the crucial moment. This was reflected during the eleven Isonzo offensives, in which the weaknesses of Cadorna´s rigidly repetitive schematic solutions were compensated by unprecedented numbers of forces and resources. The insignificant results of these battles resulted in the disastrous defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto, after which Cadorno was recalled. He was replaced by Lieutenant General, later Marshal, and Italian Minister of War, Armando Diaz. At the end of the war he was sent to serve as the Italian representative of the Allied Military Council at Versailles. After the war, he published his memoirs explaining his point of view of the war events. He had a quiet old age and died in Bordighera at the age of 78.
Source:
JORDAN, D.: The Balkans, Italy and Africa 1914-1918, London 2008
FUČÍK, J.: Soča (Isonzo) 1917, Bojiště českých dějin, Prague-Litomyšl 1999.
