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Remembered Today:

Italian front


swizz

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Sorry to have let you wait that long... yes is Paolo Caccia Dominoni di Sillavengo. You might find some hurdes in translating his book as it is written in a somewhat "researched" style, although pleasant to read for a native italian...

Go to the second part of the book if you want to read about the flamethrowers, the first part deals with his experience as pontooneer.

He speaks about heavy and light flamethrowers in fixed installations.

I seem to recall that Dominioni's books about the second world war were translated, but I'm not sure.

Regards

Luigi;

Is his name structured in the Spanish fashion; i.e., "Dominoni" was his father's name, "Sillavengo" his mother's family name? To catalog the book, should I use Dominoni" as his "real" name?

My first dictionary was terrible; someone took a larger dictionary and arbitrarily cut out words, explainations, etc. to shorten it (to say 800 pages); still it was published for at least 30 years and by Oxford. Got a better one now. My wife has fairly good Italian. But it is coming along well, much faster than when I taught myself to read and then write German.

Yes, I have only started on the flame thrower (FW) material, but the Italians seemed to mostly use the

FW in fixed positions, almost like MGs emplaced in the trenches. Also the FW troops seemed to stay in the trenches for some time. The Germans usually came to the assault place, attacked, and pulled out to barracks, using their own trucks to move. The German high command had a written order that FW were not to be used as a defensive weapon, except for exceptional circumstances; FW were a great attack weapon, used properly; usually a really bad defensive weapon.

Yes, at least one of his WW II books has been translated into English. It is common, this book is quite rare. I have to send it back soon, so I will photo-copy it.

I think that this book will be very useful to me. The Italian flame warfare effort was rather large; but from what I have read so far, they were not using them in the most effective fashion, in my opinion. As far as that goes, the British really were the leader in using the FW incorrectly, and finally dropped their use in warfare entirely, while continuing to demonstrate them to distinguished visitors to France, like the Royal Family. When the Royal Navy decided to use the weapon in their attack on Zeebrugge, they had to "reinvent the wheel", so to speak, and manufacture rather crude devices.

Bob Lembke

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Luigi;

Is his name structured in the Spanish fashion; i.e., "Dominoni" was his father's name, "Sillavengo" his mother's family name? To catalog the book, should I use Dominoni" as his "real" name?

No, it means Dominoni FROM, or OF, Sillavengo, they were a noble family, Count of Sillavengo.

My first dictionary was terrible; someone took a larger dictionary and arbitrarily cut out words, explainations, etc. to shorten it (to say 800 pages); still it was published for at least 30 years and by Oxford. Got a better one now. My wife has fairly good Italian. But it is coming along well, much faster than when I taught myself to read and then write German.

Yes, I have only started on the flame thrower (FW) material, but the Italians seemed to mostly use the

FW in fixed positions, almost like MGs emplaced in the trenches. Also the FW troops seemed to stay in the trenches for some time. The Germans usually came to the assault place, attacked, and pulled out to barracks, using their own trucks to move. The German high command had a written order that FW were not to be used as a defensive weapon, except for exceptional circumstances; FW were a great attack weapon, used properly; usually a really bad defensive weapon.

Indeed it seems from the reading of Dominoni's book. Actually my grandfather was a seargeant in WWI and was trained as assault-Flamethrower-specialist... too bad he passed away beginning of the 80ies when I was too young and still not much interested in technicalities. I remember him saing that a light flamethrower squad was of three men, the carrier of the weapon, a soldier for cover and a "machanician" with a blanket (woollen if IIRC) to "extinguish" the carrier in case of self ignition or the device being hit and such... they trained for long time and he often complained by letter to a friend of him (the brother of my later Grandma) that they couldn't wait to see the front line. The friend, a savvy young man, told him to stay quiet and not be too eager to see the trenches... The friend of my grandfather was a young and valiant leutenent, I read the letter he sent home, what they had to endure is incredible and it is increible to see such maturedness in such young people, but he wasn't crazy: he died on the Col Bricon in fall 1916 from the splinters of a bomb.

Regards

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Luigi;

Very, very interesting. Pardon me if I sound preachy (like Il Papo), but I think that you have a responsibility to preserve this very interesting and I think rare oral history of the Italian flame thrower (FW) effort in WW I. My focus in my research is on the German FW effort in WW I, but I also study the efforts of other countries, and I had thought that it would be hard to find out much about the Italian effort, but now we have both Dominoni's book and the oral history and perhaps even some letters from your family.

Allow me (I always love talking about myself or my family) to recount how I handled my family's oral history. My father told me many stories about the WW I period, family and military stories, probably mostly in the 1950's, when I was a young teenager( ca. 12-16 years old). I can hardly remember being told the stories, but they were very vivid in my mind. Then I found a collection of about 50 letters of the era, mostly letters of my father's and grandfather's from the front. It seems that my father went about after the war and collected letters from the people that he sent letters to during the war, even people not in the family, and put them in a folder and marked in big letters on the folder what the contents was.

I was very interested, but before I did anything with the letters, or started studying the war from books, etc., I carefully wrote down what I remembered from the stories and went over it to get the stories down on paper as accurately as I could, before the letters or any other source could "color" the stories. I have, in about six years, not changed one word of the 40 pages of single-spaced notes that I had put down. At first I was suspicious of the stories, especially as my father helped keep alive several "hoaxes", or stories that were deliberately incorrect and humorous and designed to make the person who believed them look like a fool. One of these hoaxes was kept alive for about 50 years.

However, as I study WW I, read family letters and documents, and build a library of reference materials (for example, I have about 15-20 Ranglisten and about 110 German official histories of the war from the Reichsarchiv), I have found that one after another story was true. Recently a British expert who lives in Germany and has remarkable resources, like collections of decades (tens of years) of German military newspapers from the 19th Century (e.g., 1885), the actual papers, has found solid evidence that some stories that sounded impossible or at least impossible to verify were true; for example, finding mentions of my grand-father in several military newspapers from about 1886 when he was still a sergeant! Some stories are impossible to verify, but now I can accept them with some confidence, although if I ever use them in a book I will clearly mention the nature of the source.

Additionally, we have a good family photo album that went back to the 1890's, with some military content, and at least three times I went through it (seperately) with my father, my mother, and a relative of my mother's, all now dead, and used a tape recorder to record their recollections of what the scenes were, who the people were, etc. Also, shortly before my father died, I tried to get him to tell some of the stories into a tape recorder, but he had a bit of trouble breathing, and unfortunately did not feel good enough to do it (no, he was not actually on his death bed, I am not that big a meat-head), as he had smoked 60 years, and his breathing was impared a bit, even after stopping a couple of years before.

Your potential material is, IMHO, quite important, and I hope that you can get it down on paper, and see if you can secure copies of any family letters on this era.

Even your brief explaination of the structure of the Italian flame team is very instructive. The Germans did no particular steps to protect the flame troops, things like, blankets, flame masks, protective clothing, although some ignorant people actually drew pictures of German troops equipped in that way. But the Germans, who started their design efforts in 1901, done by professional engineers, had many safety features built into the devices and inherent in the types of fuel that they used. Cases of German flame throwers exploding, even when hit by enemy fire, were very rare. The single most important safety feature was the use of inert nitrogen as the propellant, while the Allies often used compressed air and even, insanely, compressed oxygen, which could and did lead to the devices blowing up, possibly even achieving ignition within the device, probably within the hose, before the fuel emitted from the nozzle to be ignited. From Dominoni's account the Italians used compressed air (was he an architect or an engineer?), hence the need for "blanket-man". The German-used nitrogen was inert and could not support self-ignition (and also threw the unburned fuel further before it burned up) and could even extinguish a fire, not make it 10 times worse.

Please record your excellent information. Please drive carefully until you do so.

Bob Lembke

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Hi, we have a little booklet going around in our family with all the letters this friend of my grandfather wrote... well not all because at a certain point his sister, i.e. my grandma, burned a big lot of them, I don't really know why. Fact is, that we know much more about the feat of him (is it correct that he should be my father in law, being the brother of my grandmother?) than about my grandfather.

I'll try to gather some info from my father... Paolo Caccia Dominoni da Sillavengo was a civil engineer and, after WWI he worked mainly abroad, in the colonies and in Egypt, where he designed the seat of the Italian Embassy. After WWII he spent several years in recovering the fallen of each side of the El-Alamein Battle, and working in cleaning the many minefields still present there. The Italian Military Cemetery there was designed by him.

Regards

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Hi, I would like to make a comment here, being a Slovenian I'am quite familiar with the course of this front, what astonishes me is that you use primarily Italian names for the front (even call it Italian Front), while the main course was going at the river Soča (Isonzo), that was before the war inside the Austrian-Hungarian empire, not in Italy. The only part of the fighting on this front that actually happened in Italy was after the Miracle at Kobarid. The people living there were and are Slovenian. And most of the front is in modern day Slovenia, so you might want to learn slovenian names of the places and look for slovenian literature on this topic (quit a lot of it is translated in English). And yes there is an excellent museum in Kobarid about the war and you can take a tour of the front, taking a look at the cavers, supply routes,...

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Yes and if you are going to walk those battlefields you better be in shape! Some of the prettiest country in Europe, lots to see. A terrific little book with great pictures The Front On Soca ISBN 961 231 288 5.

There is a real nice Hotel with a very good restaurant in Kobarid ( Caporetto).

Of course much of the front was not in AH, Piave, Asiago Plateau, all gorgeous country.

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Yes, you're right about a part of the front being in Italy, I generalised wich is usualy not a good thing. I also mixed up the whole front and the Soča part of it. But still, I think it's unfair for it to be called Italian front, since a lot of the fighting went on the territory that was and is ethnicly slovenian (we use the term Soča front for it). I went through some of the english literature about it (I have a paper on Western and Soča front) that's why I even got to this forum. And it's mostly using Italian names, I think that at least slovenian names should be used with italian on the territories where slovenian population lives/d. This ofcourse dosen't apply for example for Asiago Plateau as you pointed out.

Just a qucik note here, although slovenian soldiers were fighting for AH army, they thought when fighting on Soča front that they are defending their (slovenian) territory from Italy, wich in the end didn't do them any good, since Italy got a lot of this territory becouse of the London treaty.

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Dober Dan, Koktach!;

Dober. Znam.

Nas svedinje,

Bob Lembke

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Very good :D I'd like to see you pronounce that :P. (It's nasvidenje, together and I comes before the E), might be useful someday :)

Ow btw I hope my comments aren't offending any italians that might be on this forum (luigi), it's just my view on the history and present.

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Drag Koktash;

I really don't speak Slovene. A long time ago I lived and worked in Ljubljana, with some other Americans, and we made the decision to mostly learn Serbo-croatian, as it is both easier and is spoken by about 10 times as many people; additionally, at least at that time the vast majority of Slovenes also spoke Serbo-croatian. Our Slovene friends were disappointed, but I am sure that they knew it was a pragmatic decision. But of course I learned a bit of Slovene, greetings, etc., to dress up my use of the related Serbo-croatian. I have been in "ex-Jugoslavija" about 18 times.

We recently had a thread here on the Soca Front, where I sang the praises of spending time in Slovenija, visiting more of the wonderful Triglav National Park, which covers much of western Slovenija, the museum in Kobarid, etc.

I have to admit that I probably drove through Kobarid eight times before I realized that it was Caparetto, which I just assumed was further west in Italy. Kobarid is, guessing, perhaps five miles east of Italy, on the other side of the Isonzo River. I think that the great bulk of the battlefields, fortifications, etc. from the fighting are in Slovenija. And the new Kobarid museum is focused on the war and is really exceptional and has won awards. I always was interested in the fighting there, before I began seriously studying WW I, as I assumed that my father had fought there, as he told me a first-person story of the fighting there, although he did not specifically say he was there. Then I learned some of his unit was indeed sent there, but (from his Militaer=Pass) an arm wound of his from Verdun and 1916 had become re-infected and he was back in hospital in France; the story must have come from a buddy.

For five summers I climbed in Switzerland and the French Alps with a Slovene friend and mountain guide, Anton (Tony) Sazanov. (His name is Russian, not Slovene, as I am sure that Koktash has noticed, as his father was a Russian POW from WW I that wisely never went home after the war. I met him briefly when he was 95.) The first time we went to Switzerland I hardly knew him, we began driving across Italy on the way to Zermatt, but he insisted that we detour and visit an Italian war cemetary, where he told me with great feeling how the Slovenes were forced to fight against each other by their two occupiers, the Austro-Hungarians and the Italians. The cemetary was quite impressive, sort of a natural amphitheater , with slabs of stone carved with repeated "Presente", or "Present!", for the war dead reporting that they were present. Quite a moving experience. I imagine that Tony must know a lot about the front, as he spent much of his life in the mountains, and I might be able to hook someone up with him as a guide for the area. (He was one of the first people {actually the 32nd} to climb the North Wall (Nord Wand) of the Matterhorn, probably Jugoslavija's most famous climber for 20 years, director of an alpine rescue service, multi-lingual, and a great guy. He must be in his 70's, but powerful and vigorous; I saw him recently.)

I have not been there much in a long while, but for about 15 years I considered Slovenija my second home, and visited every year or two. A combined Slovene/Caparetto Front visit should be a wonderful and inexpensive trip; I offer lots of free advice to anyone interested.

Bob Lembke

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Koktash;

I did my few words of Slovene from memory; I have the parrot-like ability of pronouncing languages in which I only really know a few dozen words (like Russian, Mandrin Chinese, Arabic, etc.) quite well, which repeatedly gets me in trouble, as I am the kind of fool that starts conversations in languages in which I know very little. I mis-spelled nasvidenje as I feel that I pronounce it well, having said it several thousands of times, and wrote it phonetically, not bothering to hit one of my half-dozen Slovene-English dictionaries, while I probably have never written it before. As you know, the related expression in Serbo-croatian (Dobar Dan), which I do write, is written in two words, as is the same expression in Czech Dobry Dan and Russian Dobro Dein. To my perception nasvidenje is pronounced with a rather distinct pause in speech after the nas, so I wrote it that way.

(Yes, I know, I am a pompous fool.)

Bob Lembke

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Hehe, no problem. Yes I do see why you would rahter learn serbo-croatian (althogh "serbo-croatian" doesn't exist anymore, it was an artificial language in ex-yugoslavia, although they are very very similar they are still to different languages). Hmm, you have a quite interesting history in slovenia I see :D.

Ow and my name is Anej, koktach is my nickname I use everywhere on the internet.

Damn, I'm late for uni once again. :D

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Guys;

Well, I have so far translated about 25 pages of Caccia's diary, and now am in a very interesting part. (He is at the moment advancing down a trench with his men with an Austrian MG firing right over his head, walking on a "carpet" of dead fellow Italian soldiers. I believe that he is about to be wounded, and a couple of his fellow section leaders are about to get killed. A sergeant who had been wounded three times before has just had his arm shattered.) I am finally "getting a handle" on the Italian verbs, which is making this easier.

I have never attempted to read Italian, or study it, with one exception; Three years ago I had an evening in the Austrian state library in Vienna (my wife was next door in an art museum), and I came across a curious book written by an Italian naval captain attempting to prove, partially on the basis of 500 year old ballistic data, that the 42 cm (16.5 inch) howitzers that my grand-father used in Belgium and in Russia did not exist, could not exist; that a workable cannon that large was not physically able to work. Quite a learned book, 500 or 600 years of ballistic history, but basically quite a lot of nonsense, but fascinating. Realizing that I might never again have an opportunity to handle this book, I pitched in, and I was able to skim the book well enough to get a sense of it, and extract some interesting bits and pieces. My wife has fairly good Italian, but I try not to bother her. She only studied it four months, but has very good French and Latin, and also an astonishing head for languages. (She is the person her library goes to when they have to deal with a bit of an African language, or a Central American aboriginal language {e.g., Mayan}, or a dialect of the latter {e.g., Pokoman} She recently had to buy 85 books in the former, and one in the latter, in a single day. She recently found spelling errors in some transliterated Arabic, Hebrew, and Hindi, and she has no background in those languages at all.)

But the diary is quite an interesting book. Caccia seems to have been quite an interesting and productive fellow. Luigi, thanks for your guidance here.

Bob Lembke

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  • 1 year later...
It strikes me that threads like this one on the lesser considered battlefronts (ie NOT the Western Front) often turn up a useful "bibliography". I wonder if pals might like to consider building bibliographies for these "lesser" dcoumented battlefronts as an aid to those enquiring upon these areas.

Any Thoughts?

I had in mind:

Mesopotamia

Salonika

Egypt & Palestine

Gallipoli

Italy

East & South West Africa

Advance apologies if this has already been pointed out in another thread. There is currently a structured hierarchical listing on the Birmingham University First World War Studies site (see below). That said, the Italian 'cupboard' is disitinctly bare. I suspect that this is because they are awaiting submissions. However it does seem that the wheel has already been invented. Many other sections are comprehensively populated, but could only be enhanced by contributions from this polyglot forum.

http://www.firstworldwar.bham.ac.uk/biblio...Italy/index.htm

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  • 1 month later...

There's a book coming out called "White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1918" by Mark Thompson. It is listed on Amazon and I believe it will be released in September '08.

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  • 1 year later...
There's a book coming out called "White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1918" by Mark Thompson. It is listed on Amazon and I believe it will be released in September '08.

I am presently reading it. I wanted to know about how the history of the Great War in Italy is told by a third party. I must say it is a really good book! Unlike G.Irwing Root's "Battles in the Alps" this one goes deep in the whole story, including political, cultural, social and economical sides. It's bibliography is rich and it includes many recent Italian, Austrian and German sources.

It's too early for detailed review (i'm now at page 133 of 405) but I will post it on Amazon as soon I have finished reading. It will take some time... If it the rest of the book it is at the same level, it will receive my enthusiastic appreciation.

My review of Battles in the Alps is already on Amazon and is not as poisitive.

Regards

Franz

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