Background
Armando Diaz was born on December 5, 1861 in Naples, Italy in a family of distant Spanish heritage. He was the son of Lodovico, a navy officer, and Irene Cecconi.
Armando Diaz was born on December 5, 1861 in Naples, Italy in a family of distant Spanish heritage. He was the son of Lodovico, a navy officer, and Irene Cecconi.
After graduating from the Turin Military Academy in 1881, he served as an artillery officer until he entered the General Staff Academy in 1892. He graduated with distinction in 1894, and over the next seventeen years developed a reputation as one of the army's most promising young staff experts.
Armando was a promoted colonel in 1910, he led one of the first combat regiments to land in Libya during the Italian-Turkish War, from 1911 to 1912. He campaigned in Libya for nearly a year, was wounded at the battle of Zanzur in September 1912, and returned to the General Staff with the laurels of a successful field commander to speed him upward.
The outbreak of World War I put Diaz, recently advanced to major general's rank, alongside General Luigi Cadorna, the army's chief of staff, to reorganize the military system in the expectation Italy might enter the fighting. With Italy's declaration of war on Austria in May 1915, Diaz took charge of the operations section of the General Staff. In late 1915, Armando received command of a division. He distinguished himself in the successful attack on Gorizia in August 1916 and, in the summer of 1917, as a lieutenant general in command of the XXIII Corps, he led a successful advance on the lower Isonzo.
The calamity at Caporetto in October 1917 brought the downfall of Cadorna. As the Italian armies, some driven back over seventy miles rallied to stand on the Piave, Diaz took over as chief of staff. With King Victor Emmanuel III playing only a decorative role as generalissimo, Diaz like Cadorna before him was the real commander in chief on the Italian side.
As Cyril Falls has put it, although not a leader of genius, Diaz was "eleven years Cadorna's junior and livelier in every way." He also maintained cordial relations with key government leaders, notably his fellow southerner, Francesco Nitti, the powerful minister of the treasury. Cadorna had kept himself as far from politicians as he possibly could.
Diaz rallied his troops on the Piave Falls gives Cadorna the credit for leading the army to that line in reasonably good order and immediately found himself under heavy enemy attack. The arrival of three British and three French combat divisions helped bolster the defenses, but Diaz also had the advantage of facing a tired and numerically depleted enemy force, dependent on overstretched lines of supply. Moreover, the German troops who had been the spearhead for the success at Caporetto, General Ludendorff was now drawing off to prepare for the 1918 spring offensive in France.
By early 1918, the Piave line was secure, and Diaz began to test his reviving army in small-scale offensives. Civil and military relations rested on a more stable basis than during the Cadorna era: a new war council brought Diaz and Premier Vittorio Orlando together for regular meetings. The most basic difference between the Cadorna approach to the war and that of the younger general was the preference Diaz demonstrated for remaining on the defensive. On the Piave, he imitated France's General Petain and constructed a defense in depth. He resisted the departure of his Anglo-French allies for the western front in the spring of 1918 and fended off the calls, from April onward, that came from General Foch, the Allied commander in chief, for a large-scale Italian offensive. Diaz fully expected the war to last into 1919, and his preparation included a futile call in August 1918 for twenty-five American divisions to help man the line in Italy.
In June the Austro-Hungarian armies launched a last-gasp offensive against the Piave. It took Diaz more than a week to mop up the last enemy bridgeheads. Even then he continued to close his ears to Foch's calls for action. Nitti helped hold the government behind Diaz, but this grew harder by the week. In the fall, Allied armies were cutting forward everywhere: in France, in the Balkans, and in the Middle East. Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino pointed with alarm to the dangers to come if Italian armies stood quietly on their own soil facing a shaken enemy; Rome's allies would have no reason to reward such a performance when it came time for dividing the territorial spoils of war.
A reluctant Diaz attacked in late October, pushing northward toward Feltre to split the enemy's army groups from each other while his main assault went to the northeast against Vittorio Veneto. Diaz encountered some resistance for a week, but by October 29 the Italians found themselves pursuing a routed enemy. By the end of the war, Italy's resurgent armies had driven nearly sixty miles into the enemy rear.
Diaz received a title of nobility (Duke of Victory) in 1921 to reward him for his services. He also remained on the scene to play a part in the early Fascist era. Openly sympathetic to Mussolini as a senior army commander during the 1922 "march on Rome," Diaz was named the minister of war in the first Fascist cabinet. He served from 1922 to 1924, when he retired with the rank of field marshal.
Diaz was married to Sarah De Rosa-Mirabelli.