The Regi Carabinieri:

Counterintelligence in the Great War1

Alessandro Massignani
By royal decree, a new branch of the Piedmontese Army of
Savoy, the Royal Carabinieri, was established on 13 July
1814. It received the highest praise and was recognized
before any other organization to be wise and well distinguished.2 One hundred years later, the Carabinieri were
mobilized as the Kingdom of Italy entered the Great War,
mustering nine companies in three battalions, as well as two
cavalry squadrons that had retained its formation since its
establishment. The regiment was formed at Treviso between
22 and 28 May 1915, but was disbanded only a few months
later, on 15 November, to be incorporated into the major
units of the army were its members were to serve as military
police.3 The mobilization included 65 sections of Carabinieri,
a number that was in time increased to 168, with 257
independent platoons. All in all, 500 officers and 19,816
men, out of 31,300, served at the front. They were worthy of
the faith placed upon them, carrying out their orders with
distinction.
The duties of the Carabinieri had been set forth in the Kings
royal decree upon their establishment and was specified in
the General Regulations of the corps of 16 October 1822,
confirmed in December 1911. The Carabinieri were granted a
freedom of choice of method to suit the needs of the
particular objectives assigned them that resulted in the
development of a spirit of personal initiative that
distinguished it from the Italian military. The Carabinieri had
and have two upper echelons in the chain of command, in
the Interior Ministry and in the War Ministry. In time of war,

1I would like to thank my friends Jack Greene and Thomas NashMarshall for his help.
2The quote is from the royal act, known as the Regie Patenti.
3LEsercito italiano nella Grande Guerra, vol. 1: Le forze belligeranti
(Rome, Ufficio storico Stato Maggiore esercito, thereafter Ussme,
1976), 197.

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their duties were counterintelligence and security, i.e. the maintenance of order among
the troops, both on the front and on leave, as well as that of the defense of the nation.
This included the maintenance of headquarters security, the control of communication
lines to and from the front, protection of soldiers and their convoys in railway stations
and, most importantly, the maintenance of order in battle. This daunting task, in addition
to their functions in criminal policing, explains the need for a large numbers of men,
particularly as the war drew out and changed in character.
In addition to the increased attention the Carabinieri had to direct at the military, civil
order was considered vital to the successful pursuit of the nations war aims. This implied
novel necessities of coordination, it called for the supply of the necessary means, and it
called for visions. Counterintelligence required tools and the establishment of detention
facilities for prisoners. Large parts of civil management had to be reassigned to new
offices. In fact, the need for a tighter and more efficient organization clearly seemed
overwhelming. The great difficulty, obviously, was not only in finding men capable of
managing the new tasks at hand, but also to find men for the work at all. During times of
peace, the army shouldered a large part of maintaining public order, chores that now
were left in good part to the police officers.
It is of greatest importance to bear in mind that the Great War was an event that took
place in a time of rapid and fundamental changes. The wisdom of their fathers was
deeply entrenched in the minds of leaders of the day and, with the question of survival
before them, was in urgent need of modification. The battle losses were unexpectedly
high and increasing, posing a formidable demand to developed means to counter this
trend. It was soon recognized that battle losses among the highly specialized Carabinieri
were unsupportable. They were valiant fighters: two battalions of mobilized Carabinieri
were deployed on the Gorizia front, for example, and carried out an unsuccessful attack
on Point 240 of the Podgora Hill on 19 July 1915. As so often in that period, success had
been nearly impossible from the very beginning. While the performance of the men was
exemplary, a newly developed barbed wire defense presented an insurmountable barrier,
and artillery support by light field pieces of low caliber turned out to be ineffective. As a
result, combat units composed of Carabinieri were disbanded on 15 November 1915, and
the men were reassigned to major combat units to serve at different stations and with
different duties. This took place during a period when the soldiers conditions in the
trenches were declining quickly and when sickness often claimed more victims then
enemy fire: of the regiments 28 officers and 1,300 men, seven officers and 206 were
killed or wounded, but trench gastro-enteritis sent 585 soldiers to a field hospital over a
period of one week alone.

By that time, the moral spirit of the Carabinieri had

brought them recognition from far and wide. Nine Silver, 33
Bronze, and 13 Crosses of Valor on the field of battle were
awarded to Carabinieri by the Duke of Aosta, 4 commander of
the 3rd Army. Such honors, however, could not prevent the
destruction of the so called lost generation of 1914 on the
battlefields of Europe, and the Italian front was not
exception.
The Carabinieri fought in very few battles, but the cavalry
squadrons were the first to enter Gorizia in August 1916, the
battalion attached to the supreme command was first to land
in Trieste in 1918. But clearly, their expertise was needed in
other areas than as infantryman. The Carabinieri shared this
experience and fate with, for example, the Guardia di
Finanza, whose mobilized battalions would be disbanded in
1916 and the men reassigned to their old duties of border
and financial security. The platoons were attached to every
infantry and cavalry division to carry out their complex tasks.
As the war developed into a trench war, they became
responsible for the surveillance of the front line, for secure
accesses from and to the communication trenches, field
hospitals, roads, paths, etc. They had to make sure that the
military and the civilian population observed military decrees
(e.g., the evacuation of the war zones during the offensive in
the Trentino area in the Spring of 1916 and that of
Caporetto), to control the occupied zones, and to prevent
and repress espionage. These were obvious tasks for a
military police, and it would be well, at this point, to bear in
mind that the Royal Italian Army was no longer the small,
compact Piedmontese army which would not waver even in
severe tests, such as the two battles at Custoza.
The expansion of the armed forces (almost six million men
were mobilized during the course of the war) brought with it
new law enforcement problems. 5 The number of military
crimes committed was remarkably higher than that in the
armies of Italys allies.6 This may at least in part be due to

4Entering the war, the Italian Army fielded four armies (1st, 2nd, 3rd,
and 4th) and one special army corps.
5Mario Isnenghi and Giorgio Rochat, La Grande Guerra 1914-1918,
(Florence, La Nuova Italia, 2000), 227.
6The crime-rate within enemy armies is difficult to judge. Austria

the fact that the Italian military judges were granted a wide
range of powers and discretion in the application of the
criminal code. The Italian military code traces back to that of
the first war of independence (1848) and was drawn up for a
small army. The more frequent and and more casual
occurrence of crimes in the Italian military is a problem that
still needs scholarly attention. That mistaken evaluation and
misunderstanding of the attitudes of the troops or to the
vastness of the spirit of undiscipline and protest 7 may a play
a role in this, points to the difficulty in such a study.
It is worth noting that out of a total of approximately 400,000
trials held before of the military courts (which also had
jurisdiction in the common zone of war declared by the
provinces and n the Adriatic coastal communes), 61,927
civilians were tried, leading to 37,839 convictions, a number
that seems to be in conformity with the known
characteristics of Italian military criminal code. These crimes
were usually connected to disregard of the rules instated in
the war zone, but over time, the consequences of the
occupation of the border zones to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire also became influential.
Behind the front, troop movement and prisoner transport
made an observation of the zones of operations necessary.
This burden was carried out by 69 railway officers, 206 noncommissioned officers and 2,676 Carabinieri. They had to
watch the military plants and depots, fields of transit, and
they had to take care of enemy prisoners as well liberated
Italian prisoners. Theses turned out to be responsibilities
that, as the workload increased, overtaxed the means of the
Carabinieri. Thus, frequent demands for additional staff to be
assigned especially to the internal services were made.
Civil Ppolice services in the civilian field also were severely
taxed. Local police organizations often were reduced to two
men by the end of December 1916, and some places were
has not as yet published a comprehensive studies on this matter;
the Germans had virtually no problems with crime in their armed
forces.
7Quoted from the classic study of Alberto Monticone, Il regime
penale nell esercito italiano, in Enzo Forcella and Alberto
Monticone, Plotone di esecuzione. I processi della prima guerra
mondiale, (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 436.

even left destitute. A report of the Prefect of Bologna to the

Ministry of the Interior reads:
The Carabinieri are almost disorganized, many of their
stations are closed, their numbers are reduced to a point
of insufficiency: most are reduced to two men, rendering
normal supervision as well as care for public services
impossible in the little towns scattered in the country. The
better NCOs have been sent to the front and replaced by
military recalled from the reserve who are not capable of
the work asked of them ..., the commissioned officers also
called to arms are lacking in the experience necessary to
their new station.8
The General Command of the Carabinieri tried to solve these
problems, drafting a memorandum issued at the end of
1915. It called for an increase of the Carabinieri forces by at
least 2,500 new men to administer 250 newly created
stations with no increase in the existing staff. It was also
regarded as necessary to provide for officer corps needs,
because the officers of the army branches engaged in
operations were granted much more credits. 9 The
correspondence with the War Ministry reveals numerous
demands for an increase in the number of the Carabinieri.
The infantry brigades were granted a military police section,
but economic concerns demanded a slow pace in the
increase until the King gave his endorsement in October of
1916 and 2,500 men were added to the Carabinieri. Finally,
two decrees dated 25 January and 2 December 1917 raised
their numbers to meet the war situation. An undated
memorandum (which probably was prepared between the
end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917) indicates a figure of
52,390 police officers, of which 31,005 were devoted to
regular services at the home front.

8Archivio ufficio Storico Stato maggiore esercito (Archive of the

Italian Army, thereafter Aussme), fondo F3, bundle 98, Copia di
rapporto della Prefettura di Bologna n. 228.7 in data 31 dicembre
1916 diretto al Ministero Interni Direz. Generale P.S. Italics are in
the original documents. I am indebted to the Chief of the Office,
Colonel Trippiccione, and to Major Filippo Cappellano for the kind
support.
9Aussme, F3, 98: Memoria. provvedimenti per l'Arma dei CC.RR,
dated 1 December 1915.

An important step in the development of the Carabinieri as a

branch of the armed forces in World War I was the decree of
the 5 October 1916 by which an NCO school was established,
the new legion of Messina was formed and those at
Catanzaro and Genua, who had been dissolved, were
rebuilt.10 14,300 Carabinieri served in the army, 200 in troop
depots, 2,900 in the coastal and railroads defense, 8,690
took care of various other duties. 11 The enormous expansion
of the army in the spring of 1917 (the 35 initial divisions of
the Italian Army were doubled by 1917) made the increase of
the Carabinieri by another 12,000 men necessary to take
care of the growing number of military crimes. The
increasingly bloody strain of the war also took its toll on the
willingness of soldiers to fight, and by 1917, more than
100,000 deserters (a number that is more dramatic than in
other countries) rambled about the country, adding to the
chores the Carabinieri had to master.

The struggle against espionage and sabotage

A large part of the documents concerning the activities of
the Carabinieri was destroyed during war, especially during
the withdrawal from Caporetto. The available sources make
clear, however, that the Carabinieris role in combating
espionage and sabotage had become vitally important. As in
every of the belligerent powers, Italy, as the war dragged on,
faced a problematic transmission of power from military to
civilian authorities. In Italy, this was particularly true in the
fields of counterintelligence and intelligence. These activities
were regarded with suspicion, considered fundamentally
dishonorable, and thought to be the affairs of disjointed
adventurers rather than a science and art that makes patient
collection and accurate analysis pivotal. Historians 12 and
officers that took part in the events, such as Eugenio De

10Scuola ufficiali Carabinieri, LArma dei Carabinieri dalla

fondazione ai nostri giorni (1987): 110-11. The school, based in
Florence, became operational only after the war.
11Aussme, F3, 98: undated Promemoria of the Comando
generale dell Arma dei Carabinieri.
12Ambrogio Viviani, Servizi Segreti italiani 1815-1985 (Rome,
Adnkronos, 1985), 168-69.

Rossi13 and Tullio Marchetti,14 have supplied important

publications to make an adequate description of the
developments possible.
The army intelligence service was established at the eve and
during the first few weeks of the war by a group of Alpini
officers, among them Tullio Marchetti, Ercole Smaniotto, the
future commander of the 3rd army service later to become
very active in the organization of missions behind enemy
lines , and Attilio Vigevano, the future commander in chief
of the service. In comparison with other leading European
powers, who had established measures to combat espionage
as early as the 1890s, Italy was at a disadvantage. It was not
before the beginning of World War I, that the Italian penal
code even addressed such issues. In comparison with their
Italian counterparts, the Austro-Hungarian services had
highly skilled and trained members who had been ruthless in
the local wars in the Balkan countries where ethnic tensions
had run high for centuries. They could easily pinpoint an
advantage and were superbly skillful in exploiting it. At the
beginning of the war, most of the Italian-speaking population
close to the Austro-Hungarian border was interned and the
few irredentisti at large, who would have been a natural pool
of information and agents for Italian intelligence, were
closely observed.15 The Austrians were skilled in their use of
sabotage, an accomplishment they used when forced to
retreat before the advancing Italian army, and they
established spy networks that, when overrun, efficiently
worked behind enemy lines.

13Eugenio de Rossi, Vita di un ufficiale italiano sino alla guerra

(Milan: Mondadori, 1927), and idem Ricordi di un agente segreto
(Milano: Alpes, 1929).
14Tullio Marchetti, Ventotto anni al servizio informazioni militari
(Trento: Museo del Risorgimento, 1960), 18. Tullio Marchetti should
not be confused with Odoardo Marchetti who was the Chief of the
Army Intelligence Service from September 1917 to September
1919 and was regarded as incompetent by Tullio. Odoardo
Marchetti wrote also the semi-official book Il Servizio informazioni
dellEsercito italiano nella Grande Guerra, (Rome: Tipografia
Regionale, 1937).
15Irredentisti were the Italian speaking citizens of the AustroHungarian monarchy who wanted to join the Italian kingdom.

The Italians, in contrast, had to deal with acts of guerrilla

warfare and sabotage conducted by the Slovenian
liberated population and often by members of the clergy in
areas seized during the first months of war. The Austrians
knew the business of unconventional war while the Italian
military, unprepared as they were for such situations, had
hardly any guidelines for responses and countermeasures
and easily lost their nerve and overreacted. Antonio Sema
has written about the war on the Isonzo River a few years
ago: Why it is surprising then that the Italians behaved as
others had in the multiethnic areas of the Isonzo? 16
Nonetheless, the justified criticism about Italien behavior in
those days still haunts the nation. During the onset of the
war, Italian counterintelligence clearly was in its infancy and
depended on the wisdom and good will of the few officers
involved. According to the chief of the intelligence office of
the Dual Monarchy (Evidenzbro), General Max Ronge, 250
people from Carinzia, 248 from Slovenia, and 75 from the
coastal areas were involved in sabotages behind the lines of
the Italian army.17
It was the Carabinieri who were charged with operating the
counterintelligence section of the secret services, reporting
espionage suspects, and performing operations the services
needed. The gathering of intelligence was at that moment of
lesser interests and was, in any case, more the result of
amateurish activity of about thirty Alpine officers stationed
near the border of Tirol than of a well-established
organization. Among others, Lieutenant, later Captain, of the
Carabinieri Giacinto Santucci, in service at Schio near
Vicenza, commanded a spy network on the plateau of
Folgaria and Lavarone where asomen Austrian alpine
fortresses wereas built. Counterintelligence at the beginning
of World War I was carried out by a single Carabinieri officer
who could rely on the assistance of only two investigators. As
late as May 1915, when Italy entered the war, this important
service had failed to adapt to the necessities of war.

16Antonio Sema, La Grande Guerra sul fronte dellIsonzo, vol.1,

(Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana, 1995), 28.
17Quoted by Giorgio Boatti, Le spie imperfette. I servizi segreti
italiani da Custoza a Beirut (Milan: Rizzoli, 1987), 189.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to have survived a

copy of the 1912 regulations for the counterintelligence
operations a document that is listed among the restricted
documents of the time18 that would have shed some light
on organizational structure and philosophy of the services.
We can, however, gain some insights from the mobilization
plans and from the 1918 regulations, when, after substantial
changes, the service had been greatly improved: At the
beginning of the war, every corps commander appointed a
Carabinieri officer responsible for counterintelligence in his
area. The Norme generali, issued in 1918, provided
guidelines for inquiries, counterintelligence, and propaganda
among the troops and civilians. 19 It assigned to the P
officers20 of the P sections whose main duty was to
conduct propaganda among the troops officers the duties
to gather directly, through agents, or by controlling the mail,
intelligence about the ideas and feelings prevailing among
the troops and the needs they mostly felt. This extended to
the civilian population as well. The P officers could wear
civilian clothes and make use of police agents in order to
perform their duties. The pattern for intelligence webs was
rather simple: creating a network of informers among
members of the middle class that were known for undoubted
patriotism. The P officers generally could operate inside
their armys territory and had to report both to the supreme
command P office and to the army headquarters.
During the war, it was the armys obligation to conduct
intelligence operations while the Carabineri were assigned to
carry out counterintelligence measures because they could

18Titled Provvedimenti per prevenire lo spionaggio militare in

tempo di pace (istruzione di polizia militare).
19Comando Supremo, Norme generali per i servizi dindagine, di
propaganda e di controspionaggio fra le truppe operanti e le
popolazioni e di propaganda sul nemico (Rome: Comando del
Corpo di Stato maggiore, 1918). This is a more restricted part of
the general regulations for the intelligence service of the Army.
20P does mean among other things, propaganda. P officers
were often famous writers such as Giuseppe Prezzolini. See Gian
Luigi Gatti, Dopo Caporetto. Gli ufficiali P nella Grande Guerra:
propaganda, assistenza, vigilanza (Gorizia: Editrice Goriziana,
2000).

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operated in the civilian field.21 Because of personnel

shortage, however, this chore also fell upon the third line
infantry which was employed in surveillance activities near
the front. In some instances this proved to create problems
and frictions with the civilian population, and the largely
untrained men had to be put under the control of the
Carabinieri. Targets of these activities were primarily clerks
and individuals that lived near the Vicenza province border
and still spoke old German dialects. 22
Although twelve intelligence services operated in Italy, the
King relied mostly on the Carabinieri for information. He
could thus circumvent the increasing tendency of the chief of
the general staff Luigi Cadorna to keep politicians and the
King in the blind on military operations and the state of the
army, despite the fact that the King was, at least nominally,
the commander in chief. That a certain confusion about the
purposes of the individual services existed, was partially the
result of the creation of the Uci (Ufficio centrale di investigazione Central Office of Investigation) in 1915. It was the
intelligence apparatus of the Ministry of the Interior and
served as a military police and counterintelligence agency
within the country not in the areas of military operation.
The intelligence office of the army, mobilized at Italy's
intervention in the war, was transferred to the supreme
command at Udine. Only the so-called Territorial office still
had a duplicate operating in Rome. At the supreme
command in Udine, the counterintelligence and military
police section was numbered third, and it took advantage of
the experience of two Carabinieri officers, among them
Lieutenant (later promoted Captain) Giulio Blais, whose
competence was praised by Marchetti: intelligent, clever
like vixen, investigator of excellence. Their direct
counterpart was the service that rather efficiently gathered
intelligence for the Habsburg Monarchy. It had, from its
creation in 1908 on, achieved important successes, such as
the procurement of the Italian plans for mobilization. 23

21Viviani, I servizi segreti italiani 1815-1985, scheme at p. 139.

22Aussme, B1, volume 3e, War Diary of the V Army Corps, and
volume 72d, War Diary of the Sbarramento Agno-Posina.
23Sema, La Grande Guerra sul fronte dellIsonzo, 24. The author of
this article paper received a copy of the Italian OB marked with

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Officially, the Italian intelligence services only operated

against the central powers after 1914. Offices were detached
to the headquarters of the several armies to gather
operational intelligence at the tactical level. Their findings
were essentially based on air photographs, interrogating of
prisoners of war, wiretapping, and radio monitoring. One
exception was the intelligence office of the 1st Army under
the command of Major Tullio Marchetti, who was a native of
the Italian speaking Tirolean region and had established his
own spy network beyond the border, staffed by irredentisti.
The Italian secret war during Wor1d War I does not offer
great moments of glory. A caveat, however, is in order here:
substantial obstacles exist for research on the history of the
military intelligence and particularly of counterintelligence
services in Italy. Hardly any serious scholarly research has be
conducted so far, partially because most documents relating
to the operations of the Austro-Hungarian Evidenzbro in
Italy were suppressed by its chief General Max Ronge. From
a professional point of view, this was certainly the correct
thing to do because it safeguarded many of the spies who
had served Austria-Hungary or Imperial Germany from
possible prosecution, and it left a valuable foundation for
possible future intelligence operations in the region.
However, not all agents and sources could be protected by
the Austrians. Some intelligence documents were discovered
at the office of the secret service of the Austro-Hungarian
navy at Zurich in the safe of the Lieutenant Commander
Rudolf Mayer24 and on that account it was possible to break
up part of the Austro-Hungarian network in Italy. Some
agents were taken to Innsbruck after the end of the war and
were executed by a firing squad. The operation was
conducted by the Italian navy, but the army tried to infiltrate
the navys activities during and after the operation and a
stamps by the Austrian military headquarters at Innsbruck from
Heinz von Lichem as a gift.
24Rudolf Mayer, sometimes also called the the man without face,
was born on 8 December 1861 in Brnn, retired from active service
on 1 May 1917 and died on 29 May 1927 a Brnn (Brno). He should
be buried there at the Jewish cemetery. I am indebted to Dr. Peter
Jung for his help at the KriegsarchivWien, where I had the
opportunity to consult Mayers reports.

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Carabiniere agent was present at the opening of the safe. 25 It

is unlikely that the army could have gathered information in
such operations by itself. The Carabinieri operated inside the
naval bases for security reasons since, in 1879, the Navy
begun to employ a small number of Carabinieri for
counterintelligence duties in the arsenals. Carabinieri
personnel was also be occasionally recruited for other
operations, but they did not share the responsibility for
sabotage conducted by the navy. Wherever possible,
however, members of the army collected intelligence for
their own service even when they were detached to other
services. At least some kind of cooperation existed between
different intelligence and security agencies in Italy in 1917,
including allied services and particularly the French armed
forces. The operation in Zurich, however, was a case of
competitive intelligence arousing the attention of the Swiss
authorities and leading to angry exchanges of letters
between Army Chief of Staff Cadorna and the Navys GrandAdmiral Paolo Thaon di Revel.
Italian intelligence operations in foreign countries were
rather primitive and achieved limited success, with the
exception of a mole that was planted in the army corps
headquarters in Innsbruck. Only after Italy entered the war,
intelligence structure was organized that went beyond the
military attach level in order to acquire information, most
notably the activities of Carabinieri Colonel (later General)
Giovanni Maria Garruccio.
The most important task of the Carabinieri was in
counterintelligence connected with the normal police work,
control of railway stations, the often dangerous search for
the large number of deserters, and the surveillance of aliens
from neutral countries. They were the ones most probable to
be engaged in possible networks of espionage in Italy.
According to various sources, this counterintelligence activity
seems to have achieved certain successes. In some of the
ports, the Carabinieri established centers of surveillance

25About this operation see Marco Gemignani Zurigo 1916: un

colpo risolutivo. Il Servizio Segreto della R. Marina in azione in
Bollettino dArchivio dellUfficio Storico della Marina Militare 3
(September 1989): 153-70; Anton Peth, Agenten fr den
Doppeladler: sterreich-Ungarns Geheimer Dienst im Weltkrieg
(Graz: Stocker, 1998), 97 and ff.

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composed of five to six men who looked for light signals at

night, suspected to be a common form of communication use
by spies. Important strategic points of passage were
garrisoned, such as on the Island of Campione in the Lake of
Lugano, where a small station of three police officers and a
non-commissioned officer was installed by Tullio Marchetti.
Espionage and sabotage within Italy was successful
because of the skilled work of Austro-Hungarian officers, 26
particularly the section headed by the Captain of the
Imperial-Royal Navy Rudolf Mayer and the Austro-Hungarian
military attach to Bern, Colonel William von Einem, whose
primary intelligence focus was on Milan. They explored
opportunities for support of opponents of the war, such as
Catholic groups and Socialists, in order to increase the
tensions that were known to exist within the country. The
twenty Socialists groups of Italians working in Switzerland
and their newspaper Lavvenire del lavoratore were a
primary target. Agents regularly carried propaganda leaflets
to Italy, and the Austrian clandestine operations had
expanded considerably by the winter of 1917/1918 and were
so successfully concealed that von Einem claimed some
officers of the Italian army had served, unaware of the
propaganda content of the material, as couriers to Italy. The
Socialists women section was also infiltrated by an agent
code-named Engineer Rasim. This operation involved
Angelica Balabanoff, who had strongly influenced the Italian
Socialist Party and whose claim to fame was that she was the
mistress of Benito Mussolini. Nevertheless, these activities
turned out to have disadvantages. During the second half of
1917, news arrived in Vienna, that a revolution in Italy might
be imminent. The many deserters from the Italian army after
the bloody offensives at the Isonzo River had dramatically
added to the number of those eager to overthrow the
monarchy, and it was liklely that they might constitute the
nucleus of a republican army that would have taken refuge
in the mountains. Von Einem had just given 10,000 Swiss
Francs to Balabanoff and another 25,000 Francs to two other
agents in order to increase the propaganda against the war

26Peter Schubert, Die Ttigkeit des k.u.k. Militrattachs in Bern

whrend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Osnabruck: Biblio, 1980).

14

in Italy when orders arrived from the Austrian High

Command prohibiting such activities.
At the same time, counterintelligence and repressive activity
aimed particularly at the Socialists whose influence had
been reduced after Caporetto was increasing in Italy. 27 Such
measures were successful and lead to the detection of
agents reporting high quality intelligence, such as Nero
and Florenz, or Balabanoff. How valuable the information
provided by these agents was is obvious when we look at the
Italian attacks launched by Cadorna against the AustroHungarian positions at the Isonzo River: Out of the eleven
offensives only one was not revealed, with exact date and
time of the attacks, to the Austro-Hungarian high command,
and only this, the sixths offensive, was successful and made
the conquest of Gorizia possible. At another instance, the
exact moment of the explosion of the mine in Mount Col di
Lana was revealed to the Austrian headquarters of the
southwest front, although they did not make good use of this
information. The Austrian service boasted after the war that
it had been responsible for important sabotage activities: the
explosions at the gun-powder factory of Cengio; the
destruction of a hangar at Ancona, where in April 1918 a
landing of 60 Austrians took place unknown to the territorial
defense; and the sinking of the battleships Benedetto Brin
and Leonardo da Vinci.28 To the public, these events were
presented as accidents, and the preliminary conclusions of
the investigating committees seemed to sustain this
evaluation. But soon it became obvious that the Austrian
services were responsible and that the counterintelligence of
the Italian navy had failed. 29 Other daring plans were

27Archivio Ufficio Storico dellArma dei Carabinieri (Archive of the

Carabinieri ArmRome, thereafter AUSAC), Ministero dellInterno,
Direzione generale di PS, of 14 January 1918, Disertori rimpatriati
dalla Svizzera: several defectors who were in Switzerland in
relationship with the intelligence services of the Central Empires
were sent to Italy supplied with money by those services. I would
like to thank Lieutenant Colonel Musso and Marshall Sansoni of the
Historical Office of the Carabinieri for allowing me to consult
documents regarding the Carabinieri in World War I.
28Walzel, Ufficio informazioni dellImpero austro-ungarico, (Milan:
Marangoni, 1936), 141.
29Commissione dinchiesta sul sinistro della Regia Nave Leonardo

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proposed but never materialized, such as the bomb that was

to be placed in the lavatories of the Italian Parliament
Concomitanza that was to explode during demonstrations
calling for peace, a scheme the Italian counterintelligence
did detect.30
While the establishment of a revolutionary republican army
fighting in the Alps was perceived as threat, the failure of the
revolution in Italy greatly disappointed the Austrians. Thus,
in January 1918, they resumed to finance the Socialists
activities supporting the revolution in Italy as a last resort to
safe the Dual Monarchy and to win the war. According to a
Carabinieri report written in the first days of 1918, 2,000
Swiss Francs monthly went to members of the Italian
socialist party to foster the revolution. The Socialist Party of
Italy held two positions, an official one of neither joining, nor
sabotaging the war effort, and an unofficial one by inner
groups that proposed active propaganda against the war
through the establishment of red legions. The Austrians
also financed a Milan-based group of anarchists with the
consent of the Socialist Partys leaders.
Influence on the morale surely had an impact on the
operational Italian army and explains why Cadorna urged the
Prime Minister to provide more provisions against
propaganda activities. Propaganda alone, however, could not
have achieved wide-ranging dissatisfaction of Italien soldiers,
but it fed on the inability of the Italian supreme command to
convince the soldiers that the war was just and that they
would get everything they would need to succeed.
Both sides employed saboteurs and informers behind
enemy lines, the Austro-Hungarians, however, were first. The
Adriatic coastal communities were declared war-zones and
placed under surveillance by the Carabinieri in addition to
the navy and the border police. Secret landings were not
uncommon and were aided by support on land. The
Carabineri were able to discover some of these attempts, for
example a large group of saboteurs near the Ancona naval
base. The saboteurs had already passed a Finance Guard
post, but a second sentry fired his gun before being knifed.
da Vinci. Relazione generale della presidenza, 218.
30Aussme, B1, 265c, SI reparto R, notiziario n. 123 (serie A) del 21
febbraio 1917.

16

When soldiers arrive on the scene, the Austro-Hungarians

tried to flee in a motor torpedo craft (MAS) they had wanted
to seize when its engine failed. 31 After the Zurich affair the
season of the saboteurs seemed to have ended;
counterintelligence became more effective, and, as a direct
outgrowth of the information gathered in Zurich the head of
the Ministry of the Colonies, Ferdinando Martini, could note in
his diary that on 7 April 1917, 40 individuals were arrested in
Rome and other cities.32.

Checking the route of Caporetto.

In September 1917, one month before the Caporetto

breakthrough, Carabinieri General Garruccio, who was

relieved from his post at the head of the Military Intelligence,
was appointed by the Italian prime minister to establish an
intelligence office which was to serve him directly. The prime
minister had been alerted by rumors of a possible coup
dtat by Cadorna and others. Garruccio used all means at
hand, and on 5 October 1917, the Service of the Carabinieri
was reorganized. The effectiveness of the newly organized
Carabinieri can be demonstrated by its organization of a line
to stop the tide of retreating soldiers after the battle of
Caporetto. Many units of the 2nd Army on 24 October 1917
broke ranks and retreated calmly towards the countryside,
often without their weapons, harboring the naive belief that
now the war would be over. Italian efforts to explain to their
soldiers the causes and aims of the war had been ineffective,
while the memory of the slaughter at the Isonzo front
lingered and had undermined the morale of a large part of
the troops. At the same time the 3rd Army withdrew in good

31Aussme, E2, 110, Legione territoriale dei Carabinieri di Ancona,

n. 335/9: Processo verbale di interrogatorio fatto ai 53 marinai
della Marina da guerra dellimpero austro-ungarico descritti
nellaccluso elenco, catturati nella notte dal 5 al 6 aprile 1918 in
Ancona. The Zugsfhrer (platoon leader) Giovanni Trampusch
declared under interrogation that we found ourselves before
Carabinieri who should have come running there after the shot
fired by the Guardia di Finanza. We did not offer resistance to the
Carabinieri but threw our weapons, ammunitions, and other
equipment into the sea and surrendered.
32Ferdinando Martini, Diario 1914-1918, edited by Gabriele De
Rosa, (Milan: Mondadori, 1966).

17

order, partly because it was not pursued by the troops of

General Boroevic as the 2nd Army was, but mostly because
the military police, the Carabinieri, were at hand, a role that
has been depicted in a number of books, 33 such as A
Farewell to the Arms by Ernest Hemingway, which contains a
vivid description of the military police work. 34 The work of
the police officers has been associated with firing squads,
but actually these were composed of regular soldiers. The
repressive action against the soldiers who deserted in
combat was often carried out by their own officers in
accordance with war regulations. The Carabinieri generally
acted professionally within their assigned duties; discipline
was rigorously upheld by the army and its supreme
command, i.e., Generals Luigi Cadorna until the end of the
retreat after, Caporetto, and Armando Vittorio Diaz from 9
November 1917.35 The Carabinieri understood that the
situation called for conservation of human resources rather
than for indiscriminate application of military justice. The
police officers chores thus were to gather and channel
stragglers in camps rather than to provide for punishment.
Naturally, many men escaped to remote regions of Italy, but
most of them were recovered.
The independent Carabinieri Legion, the two squadrons, and
the Carabinieri battalion serving under the supreme
command, reinforced by men from the Udinese division of
the Legion of Verona (the Carabinieri of the occupied zones
depended from that legion), very quickly formed three lines

33As an example, see Gianni Oliva, Storia dei Carabinieri.

Immagine e autorappresentazione dellArma (1815-1992) (Milan:
Leonardo, 1992), 164-70.
34Ernest Hemingways A Farewell to the Arms was published in
1929 but was not translated into Italian before 1946 because of
Fascists opposition because of the negative representation of
Caporetto. See also the comments of Brian Sullivan in Caporetto:
Causes, Recovery and Consequences, in George J. Andreopulos
and Harold E. Salesky, eds., The Aftermath of the Defeat (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 59-78, here p. 59.
35This came up also at the International Meeting on the Great
War, 28 September to 1 October 1995 at Trieste, and in
discussions organized by the Centro Studi e documentazione della
Grande Guerra of Asiago (Vicenza), 6 to 7 June 1997, on the Italian
soldiers in the Great War.

18

of control at the rivers Tagliamento, Livenza, and Piave. They

accompanied, regulated, and at times blocked the tide of
regular soldiers, and when necessary they fought forward
Austro-German patrols who had become overconfident in
their success. This largely neglected episode demonstrates
the essential service the Carabinieri provided at Caporetto
amidst the epochal disaster of withdrawal ordered by
Cadorna.
The command of the army knew that is was in serious
trouble and during the battle for the Piave Line, Colonel
Angelo Gatti, the historian of the supreme command, noted
that Diaz had great hopes in his soldiers but did not develop
his own command. It was the military police that had a more
accurate image of the armys morale and could chart its
development to recovery of confidence and a willingness to
end the war in victory. The Carabinieri reports on the troop
are a precious source for understanding the morale of the
troops at various points in time. They obviously were
obtained from agents that had infiltrated the troops. One
example may suffice to support this evaluation: it is a dearly
held myth in Italy that on the Piave the nation's moral spirit
held against an onslaught of advancing enemies, however,
this paints a picture that is much too simple. On the PiaveMount Grappa line the 2nd Army, which was defeated at
Caporetto, but this only was of minor significance because a
good part of the men had been taken prisoner or were
concentrated in camps behind the lines. Defending that line
were, the 3rd Army that withdrawn in order without enemy
pressure, and the 4th Army, having survived intense
operational phases, came from the Cadore high mountain
area were operations were curtailed by the severe climate of
high altitude. Both these armies had a good morale level.
From the reports of the Carabinieri it is clear that after the
victorious battle on the Piave River during the second half of
June 1918, when finally the end of an endless war appeared
likely, feelings of renewed confidence were spreading among
the troops; with it came a desire for victory. 36

36AUSAC, Legione territoriale dei Carabinieri reali di Torino, n.

18/119 of 30 July 1918: Raccolta di notizie sullo stato morale e
sullo spirito delle truppe al fronte.

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These reports often were compiled by the P sections of the

Carabinieri (as noted above, P stood for Propaganda),
because after Caporetto the supreme command finally
realized that it was necessary to support the morale of the
soldier by means of propaganda. The eight Carabinieri
soldiers of the P section of the 1st Army under the
command of Lieutenant Aldo Soncelli may serve as a good
example of these activities. They dressed either in civilian
clothing or in uniform and reported what they saw, they
felt, and they reported on the morale of the soldiers. They
also combated Austrian formations which took advantage of
the fatigue of the Italian soldiers and were looking for
opportunities at the front to exploit their war-weariness
trying to talk them into a separate peace, i.e., individual
and collective surrender.37 The normal pattern usually
involved one lookout-post (in fact an officer or trained
NCO) beginning to talk with his Italian counterpart trying to
establish a friendly climate of conversation and trust.
Soncelli and his eight Carabinieri pretended to bite and
visited the enemy trench. When the Austrians returned the
visit they were captured. On one occasion, for example,
interrogation of the prisoners revealed that in the little
Tirolean town of Brixen a Austrian school similar to the
Carabinieri school existed.38 Similar episodes are recounted
in memoirs written after the war, for example by Arditi
Captain Ettore Viola, who noted that on Mount Grappa he
encountered very clever and trained [Austrian] officers
who, disguised as simple sentries, started conversations with
our soldiers, leaving gifts and propaganda leaflets. 39 That
these activities were regarded as very dangerous to the
morale of the Italian army became obvious when General
Pietro Badoglio, after he became deputy chief of staff under
Diaz, ordered the execution of three Austro-Hungarians
captured while they were trying to persuade Italian soldiers
to defect.

Conclusion
37Marchetti, Ventotto anni, 301.
38Ibid., 303.
39Ettore Viola, Vita di guerra (Milan: Istituto editoriale nazionale,
1928).

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The total losses among the Carabinieri during World War I

amounts to 1,400 killed and 5,000 wounded. Of these, 22
died and 159 were wounded during shoot-outs with the
deserters.40 Operating in combination with forces of the
Ministry of the Interior, the military police arrested some
7,000 deserters and 2,000 other armed criminals. 41 This
experience is not unique to Italy: in Austria-Hungary, in
1917-1918, armed groups of deserters, called Grne Kader,
even had artillery pieces, and a group of bandits composed
of Austrian deserters and Italian former prisoners of war
thrived on the heights of Gemona, in Friuli.
Even before the war, the Carabinieri were regarded as the
most reliable intelligence service. Faced in 1915 with the
possibility that Italy might have to take part in the war, it
was necessary to evaluate the food resources of the country,
a critical factor in any kind of war. In February 1915, Premier
Minister Salandra ordered the prefects to conduct a
discreet inquiry into the quantity of wheat stores in Italy.
This was to be done by the Carabinieri to ensure that
information provided was accurate.42
The awards bestowed upon Carabinieri during the war
provides an ample indication of their contribution to the war
effort: a Medal of Gold to the Flag, four Medals of Gold, 304
Silver, 831 Bronze, 801 War Crosses, and 8,182 crosses to
the Merit of War. Their careful selection and training a
tradition since the Regie Patenti but above all their
integration in the army, made the Carabinieri an effective
and reliable force that, in contrast with the other police
forces, was trusted by the population. Even when compared
with similar agencies of the Ministry of the Interior, the
Comando Supremo, and the War Ministry, the Carabinieri can
be regarded as most serious and effective. 43 In the
implementation of their duties in the Great War, the

40AUSAC, 149.27, Comando generale dellArma dei Carabinieri,

Ufficio storico, Studio sintetico sul contributo dato dallArma alla
guerra 1915-1918, dated 1968.
41Annibale Paloscia, I segreti del Viminale (Rome: Newton
Compton, 1994), 47-48.
42Maria Concetta Dentoni, Annona e consenso in Italia 1914-1919
(Milan: Franco Angeli, 1995), 18.
43Viviani, Servizi segreti italiani 1815-1985, 151.

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Carabinieri appear to have been inspired by the old motto

Used to silently obey and to silently die. Cooperating with
other agencies, particularly the Army Servizio Informazioni,
the counterintelligence operations throughout the country,
with personnel detached to active espionage duty in the
armies military intelligence offices at the front, and serving
abroad, the Carabinieri were a limited but effective
intelligence service.