Jesse continues a history lesson on Italy in World War 1

that nobody knows about. Very few people do. The Italian Front. It's known as the Italian Front of World War One. Give you a thirty second recap of what you missed yesterday. In case you're just now joining US. Germany and Austria Hungary. I'm just going to refer to them as Austria from now on because I get annoyed having to say that whole name. Germany and Austria. They're at war with Britain,

with France, with Russia. Italy's not Sherwood side they're gonna land on, but they decide they really want those Alps on the northern part of Italy, the Alps Austria currently has. They declare for the Allies and they go after the Alps. The Austrians are desperately fighting on two fronts already, so they don't have the men or the resources to properly defend this area. And they do the only thing they

could do. They retreat up into the mountains and they say to the Italians, okay, come get us out of the mountains. And these are mountains nine thousand feet thirteen thousand feet. I'll tell you this what kind of conditions we're discussing. I actually, in all my research digging into this, I found a hut that is still there. It is on a mountaintop at thirteen thousand feet. It's covered in snow. The hut is fairly preserved. It was the Austrians. You can't go in it because inside of it so much

moisture has seeped in. Inside of it is a gigantic block of ice. They would put men up there, we'll call it a dozen men. They would leave you up there for three weeks at a time. The climbers who were investigating this hut, when I looked at it they had to repel, looked to be about fifty feet down the cliff where they located. What the men were forced to use as a latrine for three weeks. When's the last time you had to go pee in the middle of the night. Didn't enjoy it? Did you get out

from underneath those warm covers and walk to the bathroom? Yeah, imagine that, little midnight John. We are discussing some of the most extremes stuff. So Austria is desperate. Okay, now we're picking up the story. You're caught up for the most part. You missed a lot of background. You can have to go download yesterday's podcast. iHeart Spotify iTunes. Austria is desperate. They cannot afford to lose on this front. So they have other more important fronts, but they can't

afford to lose this one. What do you do? They start grabbing everybody they can and sending them down to the mountains. Austria is so desperate they're going to shooting clubs and scarfing them up. And that's just as crazy as it sounds. I'm talking the local club of forty year old dudes. They meet on the weekend to go shoot guns. Maybe they go pheasant hunting. The Austrian government comes in and says, hey, here's a uniform. We need you to come fight. Austria's doing everything they can to

slow the Italians down, things like blowing the bridges. And let's discuss this because whenever you look at the Italian campaign, what you'll see. And believe me, if you looked into this last night at all, you already know what I'm talking about. If you didn't, I'm gonna give it away. You'll see. They keep fighting what are known as Battles of the Asonzo, the Battle of the Assanzo, the battle. I can't even figure out how many battles there were.

One person said there were ten, another said there were seven. That's because the battles tend to blend together. If there's a battle one day and then not another battle three days later, is that the same battle? Is that? Okay, so you get it. But they kept fighting these battles of the Issanzo. The Asonzo's a river. Not only is it a river, it's a freezing river. You ever been to the mountains. Everybody listened to me in Denver right

now in Montana, everybody knows what I'm talking about. But that beautiful river, you see, it's freezing all the time. We used to have in Bozeman, Montana. We would go float the river, and because we were irresponsible and we only had one car, we would drop ourselves off and float down the river and then we'd go hitchhike our way back up to the car. I know, it's amazing, yes, Chris, we would float a freezing river. It's frigid. You didn't look. I remember the first time I floated a river when

I wasn't in Montana. Me and some Marine Corps buddies of mine, we were down in Phoenix. We had a long weekend and so we wanted to do a bunch of irresponsible things, as marines tend to do when they're off. And there is something known as the Salt River down there. We went floating the Salt River and it was so foreign to me because everybody was in the water. Everyone's kind of hanging out, hanging on to the side of

your inner tube. You didn't hang on to the side of your or two when you floated the Madison, not for very long because the water was freezing cold. Well, these are the conditions we're dealing with when Austria blows the bridges. How do you even get across a river like this? Fight these battles when you're being shot at from machine gun nests. How do you cross a frigid river where your body will shut down if you spend too much time inside of it. We did a river

crossing like this once. What wasn't a crossing, It was just basic torture to teach us how to deal with it. We did mountain warfare training in the Marine Corps one time, and look, I know they did it just because they thought it would be funny, but they made us There was this. It wasn't even a river. It was a very big, very deep stream, as in up to my neck deep. It was quite a stream. They had us lock arms with each other and we had to go walk out into the middle of it, up to our

chest and just stand there. You know, the time of this water it was thirty seven degrees. They had to stand there, and I don't remember the time. I don't want to give you a time, but I would say five minutes maybe maybe maybe not even that. By the time we got back to the shore, everybody kind of had to just lay down when you got out of the water, because you didn't lose feeling in your fingers. You couldn't feel your body anymore. Have you ever lost

feeling in your body because it's so cold. Well, that's the kind of these are the kind of battles we're talking about here. Now, let's talk about who's doing the charging on the Italian side. We already talked yesterday about how poorly equipped and poorly trained and poorly led the Italian army was. They were having a difficult time beating up Ethiopia. They just couldn't African countries couldn't hold off

the Italians. Now against the Austrians, who I realized, they're not the Germans, right, the Germans were the peak of this war. They weren't the Germans but a very modern thing. The Italian army was completely lost. Their officers were completely lost at how to even train for something like this. They were still training as if it was the year eighteen hundred instead of the year nineteen fifteen. What they believed, what they're Italian, what the Italian leadership believed. They believed

that toughness was all the men actually needed. So, look, toughness is great, you want toughness in your troops. But they thought they were properly training the troops when they would throw packs on them and march them for twenty miles. Now, there may be times when you have to throw on a pack in march for twenty miles, but you know what it doesn't do for you. It doesn't teach you how to survive a machine gun nest. When you're charging it. You can be the toughest thing in the world. That

doesn't mean anything when you're charging machine gun nests. The Italian Army lost twenty thousand people the first month, and I brought up these battles of the asanzo. Let me just give away the game a little bit here. This whole affair is so unbelievably heartbreaking because as I was trying to figure out where all this was taking place and get my bearings on where was where and who was where, I came across this amazing map and it had the Austrians, and it had the Italians, and it

had this battle and that battle on it. And on this map they had a little key on the on the bottom of the map like maps too, right, so this marking shows you this is where I rode it is and this map shows you where this is in On this map, I saw right away because of the key, I saw where the lines were at the beginning of

this whole affair. Okay, so you're looking at where the battle lines were, but I looked down at the key and I saw where the lines were at the end of it all, and that I couldn't seem to locate on the map where were the lions at the end. You know why I couldn't find them because they didn't move a million men plus for nothing. We'll continue in a moment. Hang on, It is the Jesse Kelly Show on a wonderful, wonderful Tuesday, talking about World War One,

which is improving my mood immensely. We'll get back to more politics next hour. We're discussing now kind of the beginning of this whole Austria Italian dust up in World War One. In case you're just now joining us. Now, for the purpose of our next little talk here, I need you to picture mountains. But what I'm about to say it may it may be like something you know, or it may sound different to you. I'm going to

describe a mountain range. And the reason I had to qualify it that way is if you grew up in the mountains or you're aware of the mountains, this is going to be the most obvious thing in the world to you. If you didn't, maybe you're just from the South or the East, or maybe you're listening in Honolulu right now. I need to explain something, right, mountains. When you picture a mountain, before you become familiar with mountains, you generally picture Mount Fuji, Japan. You ever seen a

picture of mounta Fuji, Japan. I've actually been there. I said an illegal fire there once, but that's another story. But you picture when you're not familiar with mountains, you picture one big mountain popping up. It's gotta watch your picture, right, Chris can see Chris is a sudden. That's exactly why I wanted to have this talk because it's important. Chris doesn't spend any time in the mountains, but mountain ranges are an entirely different affair, and so I'm going to

explain it like this. I'm sorry for dumbing this down for everyone aware of the mountains, but it's gonna be important for you to understand it in this way. So picture a piece of paper, just a white piece of paper, you with me. To the untrained eye, a mountain would be a Hershey's kiss that you drop in the middle of it. Okay, So you have all this flat ground and then rip, there's your mountain. You with me, all right, Now here's what it actually is. One you need to

picture that. You have twenty different sizes of hershey kisses, Okay, summer little minis. Some are taller, some are fatter, some are skinnier. But they're all different sizes. They're all shaped like a Hershey's cancer. Okay, but they're all different sizes. Now drop them all onto that piece of paper, and some of them connect. Maybe a tiny one connects with a medium one. Maybe a huge one connects with a medium one. Maybe a tiny one connects with it. Maybe

three are connected together, maybe there's four. But there's peaks everywhere. And this is so critical to understand what's taking place in this battle, because what this is, it is a year's long struggle for the high ground in the most extreme way possible. Austria they retreated up into the peaks because they believed correctly, you control the peaks, you control the valleys. If you control the peaks, you control everything.

You set up your artillery pieces up there, you set up your sharpshooters up there, you dig in, it'll be very, very difficult, as we will find out to get you out of there. That's one. Two you are able to observe everything, and three you can fire at anything that is within range. You have to have the mountain peaks. Only it's not one peak. There are peaks everywhere. It's a mountain range. They are stretched out, they are connected. There's a valley by this one, a little ravine up

this one. This one has a sheer rock cliff. The other one has more of a gradual slope. They're not some uniform, one off thing. It is a mountain range. It is a mess, a complete mess. Okay, Now the idea was, as I said, you take the high ground, you keep the high ground. So you have to get up to not just the peak, you have to get up to the tallest peak. Let's go back to our Hershey's kisses. What if I take a mountain and this happened many times, through blood, sweat and tears, I fight

my way up to the top of a mountain. I managed to dislodge the Austrian troops from the top of the mountain, and now my men hold the mountain. Nice, We got it, guys, Except is that is that the tallest mountain in the area. That's a really important question because if it's not the tallest mountain in the area, guess what the tallest mountain in the area is about to start doing to you. As you sit on the mountain that is not the tallest mountain in the area.

You see, Yes, you fought hard, you lost a lot of lives, you took the peak. But that mountain right there, three miles away, they're looking down on you. And right about now their artillery is going to start firing down on you, and you will be leaving that mountain you just took. Kind of brings it into perspective the kind of nightmare we're dealing with here and the kind of strategy you have to come up with. If you're an overall commander, you have to figure out how to get

your men alive up into the mountains. You have to figure out which mountain you need to assault first, you have to figure out the direction you're going to attempt to assault that mountain from. And oh, I've failed to mention this. It's very, very, very difficult for modern countries to supply their troops on good terrain. Now, go to a brand new country like Italy, not at all modern at the time, and put their troops up into the cliffs and Austria, the same thing applies to them. How

are you gonna feed them? How are you getting the artillery pieces up the mountain? Oh, it gets so much worse, so much worse. We will continue in a moment. Maybe all this talk about climbing mountains has your knees aching. I have great news, you have something. Neither of these armies had access to relief factor. I bet they would have killed to have some relief factor. Can you imagine the daily aches and pains that came with this kind of in existence. Gosh, it makes my elbow hurt just

thinking about that kind of cold. That's why relief factor is there to take away your daily pain, the daily pain that holds you back from going for a run, from playing pickleball, that bothers your knee when you're sitting at a desk, your hand, when you're pounding nails. Relief factor is one hundred percent on free. Try it. Three weeks of it is nineteen ninety five. Just try it. If you don't feel better after three weeks, don't take

it anymore. It's a supplement. One hundred percent drug free supplement. It's miraculous. Call one eight hundred the number four relief or go to Relief Factor dot com. We'll be back. It is the Jesse Kelly Show on a Tuesday. Member you can email the show Jesse at Jesse Kellyshow dot com. Jesse at Jesse Kellyshow dot com. Back to our story about the Italian campaign in what is known as the White War in the Alps of Northern Italy, Austria hungry

versus Italy. So let's discuss the logistical situation, because it is something amazing, to be honest with you, the Austrians and the Italians, they had to figure out how to get the men up to the cliff, and they had to figure out how to feed the men, how to clothe the men, how to get the men the bombs,

the bullets to everything. Look, we used to uh, we used to go on, well, we called them humps, but I guess you'd know them as forced marches all the time in the Marine Corps, and we would hump all of our gear near your body armor and things like that. And there were times even in training where they would give us, if not ammunition, they would give us the weight of ammunition. So for instance, I was a mortarman

and three forty one mortarman. All right. Now, let's say we're about to do ten miles a ten mile hump out into the field. All right, so I'm probably loading on sixty seventy pounds of gear. Remember I have myself, but that doesn't count. But I have have a flak jacket, bulletproof vest. You would know it as that's heavy. I

have some webbing. You've seen webbing people were that they put magazines and canteens, And I'm trying to put this in language you would understand that goes over my flack jacket. Just that, let's pause right there. Just that alone, flak jacket, webbing, that's probably fifteen twenty pounds at least bare minimum. Then I have my pack. Of course, we're going to go out to the field where I have to loot, shoot

and do whatever, probably gonna stay out there. I have all kinds of gear I have to keep inside of my pack. My food food alone. I have my food. I have to have something to sleep. I have to be able to sleep somewhere. What if the weather gets cold, means I have to have a sleeping bag of some kind. Okay, so you got it. My pack has all kinds of weight in it. How But then we also have your weapon that's eight pounds roughly. Okay, that's an eight pound weapon.

How But you're in mortars, congratulations, is a thirty pound base plate. Carry this, Attach that to your pack. Now carry that. Okay, So already you're doing the math in your head. Now, I'm a mortarman. When I get to where we're going, let's call it combat. But when I get to where we're going, I need to have mortar rounds to shoot. Otherwise, what's the point of even having the mortars up there? I need rounds. And guess what,

I don't need one or two. I'm gonna need probably several rounds just to get on target, just to adjust my guns to get on target. We're gonna need you to throw a couple rounds in a piece everybody. In fact, they may even make the entire company put a mortar round or two in their pack. Let's go ahead and add another twenty pounds to everybody's pack and that mortar shoot we're about to go do even with everybody in the company loading out a couple rounds for me, I

got twenty minutes worth. Thirty minutes worth. Now that was just me as a mortarman part of an infantry company in the Marine Corps. Now what does that look like when I have to get the men, equipment and food. I need five thousand feet up that cliff, and I need everything that goes with it because we're fighting a war up there. Oh oh, and I forgot this little tidbit.

The weather. I know you probably already figured this out, but the cold in these Alps one, it was, of course unreasonably cold at that time, but no matter what, twenty thirty below zero. This part of World War One combines the worst parts of Chosen Reservoir in Korea, which we've talked about, and the Western Front of World War One. It combines them both that level of cold, the frost bite. You know, men used to smear fat all over their skin,

otherwise they would get frostbite all over their skin. Men routinely had hands, fingers, feet, legs amputated because they would turn black. Men would just simply go up on the mountains and freeze. They had to mobilize the Italian civilian population. We're not even talking about the Austrians. The Italian civilian population. The women had to be mobilized as I guess you'd just call them a team of seamstresses. They had to

start sewing blankets and clothing together. So the men they sent up to the front came back with all their fingers and toes. The conditions were so unspeakably awful out there, they started investigating the bullet wounds. Italian troops would come back with you know why, they would be looking for what were known as scorch marks. You get a scorch mark when the weapon is fired really really close to you.

If you ever look at a slow motion picture of a gun, a slow motion picture, I guess all pictures are slow motion. A slow motion video of a gun being fired, you see those flames coming out the end can be hard to see if you're watching it live. Well, they'll come out the end right because there's an explosion in that barrel. If you shoot yourself, there will generally be scorch marks because you will be too close for yourself. They used to examine the wounds of the Italian troops

for scorch marks because these conditions were oh bad. The men were routinely killing themselves or shooting themselves in the arm, leg, or foot to get off of the frozen mountains. The Italians executed over four thousand men for cowardice during this time. And I'm not saying all those men were cowards. This is what happens when you take normal boys of any nationality, but in this case they were Italians eighteen nineteen twenty years old. You take them and you throw them up

top into a living hell. Now, the frostbite does many many things, the altitude does many many things. But all this meant you can't supply these guys. Regularly, men didn't have enough water. Oftentimes the men would get a leader of water for an entire day. Do you know how fast your body would use up a lead of water in these types of conditions. If you're just sitting around being fat all day, your body's going to use up

more water than that. These men are thousands of feet above sea level, oxygen deprived, and if you have to walk fifty yards, you are going to walk up elevation down elevation. This is not even taken into account the combat aspect of it. Your body is eating up calories and eating up water, and the men are starving in some cases they can't supply them at all, and then men will go two three days with no food. So what happened next was Look, I know this is a

lot ugly, and there's still more ugly to come. But what happened next is amazing. There are logistical things that man is able to overcome that just dumbfound me. And some of the things they did here are amazing. Let's talk about the logistics of it. Then we'll get back to politics, shall we. Before we get to that, let me talk to you about this little problem meets expensive, isn't it chicken, beef, fish? It's expensive, cost a lot. What if you could never ruin a cut of meat again? Ever,

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Jesse Kelly Show on a Wonderful Tuesday. Don't forget. You can email the show Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com. So the Austrians are having a harder time than the Italians actually at resupplying their men. The Austrians are in no great shape. It's just the Austrians have the benefit of having the mountaintops the Italians don't, and so they're working on it. And what happens is they keep dying

trying to get supplies up there. It's a humongous problem when you actually think about a mountain range and you think about the fact the Austrians are looking down. And when you think about the fact the Austrians and the Italians both employed sharpshooters with scopes and everything else, and they were there to kill everybody, and you can see everybody. So what do you have to do? Well, you can try, and they did this many times to resupply people at night.

Of course, then you can't be seen. But have you ever been on a mountain side, I've been on many. You were in a dangerous place. Peacetime. You are in a dangerous place, and if you step the wrong way, that can be it for you. It really can be. It doesn't even have to be a sheer rock cliff going down. If it's too steep and something gives way underneath your feet or you trip or something like that, you are going to fall very fast. Even though you're

on the ground. You're not free falling. You're gonna fall very very fast. You're gonna slam into things, and you are going to be broken, if not dead. You know what it's like to travel at night in the middle of the Alps. Hey, here's a fifty pound pack. It's got ammo. The guys up their need have a nice walk. It's midnight and You can't hardly pull out your flashlight, now, can you, because then the other side sees you and

shoots you in the head. What do you do? You have to figure out how to get your guys supplied. So there is something I'll give you something if you're if you're ever in the area, something I really, really really want to do. The Italians came up with something called the Road of fifty two tunnels. Okay, road of fifty two tunnels. I'm going to say it again, the Road of fifty two tunnels. This way, you don't email me asking me about it, you can go walk it to this day. It's a few miles I think it

took like ten months to build. The Italians started using train tracks. They would lay train tracks winding up the side of the mountain. They built the Road of fifty two tunnels, They built other roads. They flat out started tunneling. And that brings me to probably what's going to be the final part today. The tunnels, many of which are still there because they were carved into the granite of the mountain. Both sides figured out being exposed was death.

Even if the bullets didn't get you, if the bombs didn't get you. If the avalanches didn't get you, if the rock slides didn't get you, the temperatures alone probably would. You had to come up with ways where men could get into the mountain, into the countryside. And so they took caves that were already there and expanded them, and they took caves that were not there, and they brought in all these engineers. In fact, you go look up

pictures of them. I saw a bunch of them Italian engineers in the mountains that were brought in to tunnel. And that's what they were there for. And the Austrians did it too, And these tunnels took many different forms for many different purposes. Maybe you would have a tunnel that goes from underneath this peak to underneath the other peak where your guys hold it because you want to be able to supply them with food and water safely.

Maybe that's a reason. Maybe maybe it's not as much of a tunnel as it is a man made cave. You see all kinds of these where instead of it being this long tunnel, picture it twenty feet deep. They'll simply find a way to blast out or mine out a big a room. For lack of a better way to put it, a room with an open side into the side of a mountain where you will sleep for

two weeks until you're relieved. You don't leave the area because you're on the side of a mountain and you had to use ropes and climbing equipment to get into the area. When you when it is the daytime, you will spend your time at the opening observing. Maybe you have a field telephone, maybe you're one of the sharpshooters, and what you do is you sit there and you simply kill every Austrian and or Italian you can find.

A room carved into the side of the mountain. But they weren't all carved into the granite, you see, because we're dealing with essentially Antarctica with bombs. They made ice caves where men slept in the ice was such a solid block. They would tunnel through the ice and the men would move to and fro inside of the ice in the mountains and probably finish it up with this little tidbit here today. Not all the caves were completely sturdy, as you can imagine, can only do what you can do.

And so when the artillery started dropping, and it was always dropping, the man always had to make a choice. You can stay in the cave with the possibility the entrance will cave in and you will slowly starve to death in the dark, or the cave will flat out fall on you and you will lay there. Hopefully you die right away, because if you don't, you'll lay there, broken under the rocks and snow until you freeze to

death or starved to death. Or if that's too much of a fear, and it was too much of a fear, just depends on what your fears are. If that's too much, you're welcome to leave. And then you will find the air is full of razor sharp molten steel in the form of shrapnel flying everywhere to cut you in two oh and by the way, you're in the mountains and it's twenty below zero and you just lost a finger yesterday. We will wrap up this story tomorrow. We're going to

get back to the politics today. This has been a podcast from wor