Italian Infantry Assault, WWI: the Whistle and the Wire (XX0095)

The whistle and the wire — how an assault actually began

The officer in the centre has a pistol in one hand and a whistle in his mouth. Everything in this scene follows from those two objects: the signal that starts the advance, and the fact that nothing else could be heard once it had started.

Command by whistle

Field telephone lines were cut by shellfire within minutes and runners took too long. In the last hundred metres before an assault the whistle was the only command system that worked: one blast to go, and after that the attack ran on whatever the men had been told beforehand. It is the reason pre-attack briefings mattered more than orders given during the fighting.

The wire in the foreground

Barbed wire, not the machine gun, was the central tactical problem of this war. The artillery preparation was supposed to cut it; on the karst of the Isonzo front the shells often threw the wire about without clearing a gap, and infantry that had been promised an open lane arrived to find the entanglement intact and themselves stationary in front of it. That is the moment most assaults were decided.

Rifle, bayonet and what a man carried

The Carcano Model 1891 with its fixed bayonet, the haversack and cartridge pouches, the grey-green wool: an infantryman crossed broken ground carrying twenty to thirty kilograms. Bayonets were fixed less because they were often used than because a rifle with a bayonet on it cannot be mistaken, at a distance, for a man who has stopped.

Why the frontal attack continued

The Isonzo front was narrow, mountainous and had no flank to turn: there was nowhere to manoeuvre to. Successive commands concluded that the position could only be taken by weight of men repeated often enough, and the offensives went on being ordered on that logic long after their cost had become evident.