Italian front (World War I)

The Italian front (Italian: Fronte italiano; German: Südwestfront) was one of the main theatres of war of World War I. It involved a series of military engagements in Northern Italy between the Central Powers and the Entente powers from 1915 to 1918. Following secret promises made by the Allies in the 1915 Treaty of London, the Kingdom of Italy entered the war on the Allied side, aiming to annex the Austrian Littoral, northern Dalmatia and the territories of present-day Trentino and South Tyrol.

Although Italy had hoped to gain the territories with a surprise offensive, the front soon bogged down into trench warfare, similar to that on the Western Front, but at high altitudes and with extremely cold winters. Fighting along the front displaced much of the local population, and several thousand civilians died from malnutrition and illness in Italian and Austro-Hungarian refugee camps.

Before the Allied victory, the Austro-Hungarian state started to disintegrate on the last week of October. The Allied victory at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and the Italian capture of Trento and Trieste ended all military operations on the front by November 1918. On the 1st of November, the pacifist and pro-Allies Mihály Károlyi's new Hungarian government decided to recall all of the troops, who were conscripted from the territory of Kingdom of Hungary, which was a major blow for the Habsburg's armies. The armistice of Villa Giusti entered into force on 4 November 1918, when Austria-Hungary no longer existed as a unified entity. Some Italians subsequently referred to the conflict as the Fourth Italian War of Independence, as it completed the final stage of the unification of Italy.