DESCRIPTION

Italian Infantry (1915) WWI 4 figures Plastic Model Kit 

ICM 35687

1:35 Scale

Manufacturer: ICM

Material: Plastic

Condition: New in original packaging

Historical reference

The Italian front or Alpine front (Italian: Fronte alpino, "Alpine front"; in German: Gebirgskrieg, "Mountain war") involved a series of battles at the border between Austria-Hungary and Italy, fought between 1915 and 1918 in the course of World War I. Following secret promises made by the Allies in the 1915 Treaty of London, Italy entered the war 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 in France, but at high altitudes and with very 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. The Allied victory at Vittorio Veneto in November 1918, the disintegration of Austria-Hungary and the Italian capture of Trento, Bolzano and Trieste ended the military operations. Italy also refers to the Great War as the "Fourth War of Independence", which completed the last stage of Italian unification.

Finally on November 3, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian high command asked for an armistice in the name of an Empire which (de facto and de jure) no longer existed during the negotiations.

During the Italo-Turkish War in Libya (1911–1912), the Italian military suffered equipment and munition shortages not yet repaired before Italian entry into the Great War. At the opening of the campaign, Austro-Hungarian troops occupied and fortified high ground of the Julian Alps and Karst Plateau, but the Italians initially outnumbered their opponents three-to-one.

With love from Ukraine