Background
Alfredo Dallolio was born in Bologna on June 21, 1853.
Alfredo Dallolio was born in Bologna on June 21, 1853.
He entered the Military Academy at Turin and was commissioned in the artillery.
Fom 1903 until 1910 Dallolio was the commanding officer for the Italian army's artillery units in Venice; his interest was drawn to the problems of fortifying Italy's eastern border regions. Promoted general, he commanded the artillery and engineering section at the Italian ministry of war. During the 1911/1912 conflict with Turkey, he supervised the flow of war matériel to the troops in Libya.
Italy's declaration of neutrality at the start of August 1914 increased the need for a Dallolio. The army's stockpiles of supplies had shrunk during the Libyan War, and the cabinet under Antonio Salandra showed no enthusiasm for massive military expenditures before the outbreak of World War I. Nonetheless, Italy was likely to be drawn into the conflict, whose cost and dimensions were becoming evident on battlefields from Flanders to Poland. Dallolio was the obvious choice to hitch the nation's economy to the needs of its soldiers. On July 9, 1915, in what Whittam has called "one of the most crucial decisions of the war" for Italy, Dallolio was named undersecretary of state for munitions. By then, the early bloodletting on the Isonzo under General Luigi Cadorna had demonstrated Italy's woeful lack of the tools of war: artillery, machine guns, hand grenades, and even modem rifles were in short supply.
Dallolio set out to close the gap between what the arms factories could produce in mid-1915 and what the army needed; just as David Lloyd George and Albert Thomas were attempting to meet the same problem in Britain and France. Skilled workers were shielded from conscription; some already in uniform were permitted to return to their civilian occupations. The most powerful weapon at hand was Dallolio's authority to designate industrial enterprises as essential to the war effort; these "auxiliaries" then fell under direct military control. Dallolio, who was elevated to minister of munitions in June 1917, took command of 2,000 plants in this fashion.
The ultimate test of Dallolio's work came after the Austro-German breakthrough at Caporetto (October 1917). The Italian industrial system, aided, of course, by shipments from Rome's allies, was able to reequip the battered armies for the victorious 1918 campaign. The closing year of the war saw a new candidate for control over war industry take the stage. Minister of the Treasury Francesco Nitti took the entire Italian economy as his proper sphere of influence. A clash with the minister of munitions was inevitable, and in May 1918, Dallolio was forced from office.
The old general's reputation as an industrial wizard endured, however, into the Fascist era. In 1935 Dallolio was named commissioner general for war production. But Dallolio was appalled at the chaotic state of Italy's economic preparation for a new European war and the government's apparent inability to remedy this situation. In August 1939, he resigned; confirmation of his fears concerning his country's lack of preparation for a modern war was quick in coming. He endured World War II and died in Rome on September 20,1952, at the age of ninety-nine.