Jesse continues a history lesson on Italy in World War 1

Then we're gonna make fun of Michelle Obama. We'll talk about the Head of the IRS resigning because of illegals, all that, parents naming their kids, weird things, emails, including hate mail, and so much more. So to come on The Jesse Kelly Show. But back to what we've been

discussing for somebody maybe just now joining us. You're joining us on part three of a little history thing I've been doing on the Italian Campaign, the Italian portion of World War One, the part nobody knows out, no one pays attention to it, and in my opinions, purely an opinion, I believe these are the worst battlefield conditions anyone ever fought. Here's your little recap. If, by the way, if you want a much more detailed recap. It's all podcasted. The

show is podcasted on iHeart, Spotify iTunes. You can download it and listen. It's hour two of Yesterday and Monday show. Go enjoy all right Part three to recap where we are. Italy is a fairly new country. They have a poorly equipped, poorly trained military at the outbreak of World War One. Austria Hungary is a very old country, an old empire, and they also are stretched pretty thin during World War One.

They're already fighting on other fronts. What they do have, though, is possession of the Alps that are in the northeast portion of Italy. Austria has those, they have the mountaintops, they have the Mountaintop Fortification. Italy wants those mountaintops. Italy believes those are they're a natural border for their country. They believe that should be an Italian possession, and they decide to look. There's no nice way to talk about

Italy's involvement in this war. It was really opportunistic. It was Britain and France were fighting Germany and Austria Hungary. Yes, Russia's in there too. Italy looked and thought this is a good opportunity if I jump in on the right side to get the territory I want. I understand it, but it looks a little opportunist Italy jumps in. So now you have poorly trained, poorly equipped Italian troops throwing themselves at not exactly Austria's crack troops by any means,

but Austria's troops who are mostly outnumbered. They're dug into the mountaintops, mountaintops that are oftentimes covered with snow. We talked extensively yesterday about the nightmarish logistical situation for both sides. How do you get the men up there? How do you get their equipment up there? Artillery pieces, ammunition, food, They have to come up with, cable pulley systems. I can show you a picture, you can go look it up. It's fascinating of a donkey, a mule, most likely a

mule being hoisted up into the mountains. And once you even get into the mountains, well there are other mountains. You're connecting this mountain peak to that mountain peak. How do you get men and supplies from this and that? They're building tunnels, carving caves, blasting caves, mining things into the side of the mountain, and that brings me to I'm just gonna try to wrap up this World War One story today with a couple of things that I think will bring home the horror of all this. You

know what an avalanche is? Have you ever wondered? Has it ever crossed your mind why an avalanche is fatal? And what I mean by that is how do you die? What is it about an avalanche that kills you? I am not an expert, of course, but I'm fairly well versed on avalanches because I grew up in Bozeman, Montana. We were always always in the mountains. We were hiking in the mountains, we were camping in the mountains, we were skiing in the mountains. I was in the Rocky

mountains all the time. And one thing you learn about is avalanches. You know, extreme skiers and snowboarders, these types who will you'll see You've seen movies or videos of them being dropped out of a helicopter on top of the Swiss Alps somewhere. You've seen this stuff, or at least you know what exists. Do you know they have something on them, most of them, they have something on them.

It's a locator beacon. It's for avalanches. It's in case they get avalanched in someone knows where they are how to find them. Do you know when an avalanche washes over you, you generally die one of three ways. If you are lucky, then I want to stress this. If you are lucky, the avalanche will wash you over a cliff and you will fall to your death. Those are the lucky people who die in an avalanche. And just

pause on this before I keep going. In one avalanche, I'm going to try to explain the scale of the avalanche problem during this hellscape of a war campaign. Avalanches killed more men than bullets in the Italian campaign. In one gigantic avalanche, ten thousand men were lost ten thousand. Now, you've read different versions of that. Some said it was four, some said it was one. The most consistent version I've

seen is nine to ten thousand men were loshed. Back to what we were discussing, you may be washed over the cliff, and if you're one of the people who's going to die in the avalanche, you're one of the lucky ones if you got washed over the cliff. Because a second way you can die during an avalanche is well, I know, you know it's snow, right, But it's snow that's falling, and it's picking up steam as it falls. It's picking up other snow, but it's also picking up rocks, trees.

Avalanches will clear trees out, it'll snap them like toothpicks off of there. Everything on the mountain side that is fallible, I know that's not probably a word. Everything that's not nailed down, and some things that are, they will come with the avalanche. So when the avalanche hits you, depending on the amount of force it hits you with, it may shatter your body like an artillery shell shatters your body.

And those guys, they aren't even the most unlucky ones, because the most unlucky ones, well, how you normally die when an avalanche gets you is you suffocate. You suffocate surrounded by snow, and you are so surrounded and packed in by snow that you no longer have a sense of gravity. Did you know that people who have survived survived avalanches will tell you you you don't know which way is up or down. Maybe you have thought to yourself, well, I would simply dig my way out of it. No,

you will not. You are packed in with snow. You can't really move in any way that will allow you to dig. And even if you could dig, you don't know which direction leads you out of the avalanche. You could very well be digging down in the wrong direction. If you are not located promptly and dug out, you will suffocate surrounded by snow packing you in. And this was not a one time thing. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Italians and Australians died by avalanche during the

Italian campaign. They would describe it as sounding like a rolling thunder, and you knew immediately what it was, and you would look up and see what was essentially a white tidal wave pouring down the mountain, and you can't escape it. Contrary to what you see in James Bond movies, you can't throw on some skis and outrun it. Most of the time, you have to try to hunker down, hide, be behind a rock and pray to God that the snow doesn't engulf you to such a degree that you

will suffocate inside of it. It was such a problem each side started to use avalanches as an offensive weapon. I'll tell you for a fact, in the Bridger mountains which are close to Bozeman, Montana. To this day, the trained professionals, they will take explosives up high into the mountains when the mountain is cleared out and they will explode. They will set off explosives on purpose to cause avalanches to clear out all that snow that may fall, so

what doesn't kill other people. It's a professional clearing of deep snow. They would fire artillery shells into hard snow packed areas above enemy troops and then sit back and watch as thousands, as entire companies, entire battalions have a tidal wave of snow wash over them and kill them. Are you starting to come around on my opinion that this is the worst battlefield conditions in history? Chris is

starting to come around yet on any of this. We'll continue this, maybe I'll even finish this in just a moment. Before I finish it, I'm going to talk to you about America. First, we love to say those words now, buy American. You love that, right, Hire Americans? I love it too, and I really love companies that were doing it before it got popular again. Pure talk didn't start high Americans after November when Trump won the election. They didn't look around and lick their finger and stick it

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you switch during the break. It's fast, it's easy. Dial pound two five zero and say Jesse Kelly. That'll save you an extra fifty percent off your first month pound two five zero, say Jesse Kelly. We'll be back. Jesse Kelly. Is the Jesse Kelly Show on a wonderful Wednesday, our final part three of World War One, our final little history thing this week, and then we will get back to the politics. Member, you can email the show Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com. All right, that was the avalanches.

Now let's talk about something else that was just so terrible. Because I mentioned the map yesterday I mentioned this part and it kind of gives away the endgame here, but it doesn't matter. You probably get it by now. Where I'm looking at this map, and the map had the lines,

the battle lines. These were the Austria battle lines. These were the Italy Italian battle lines, and it had dates on them, right, Hey, these were the battle lines in nineteen fifteen, and then these were the battle lines when it ended in nineteen seventeen. And you're looking at these things and they don't move, not really, they don't move

at all. They remain the Italians. They wanted to attack and get the Austrians off the mountaintops because the mountaintops controlled the asses, they controlled the valleys, they had better observation you want the high ground than one of the mountaintops. And the Italians didn't always fail in taking these peaks, I want to be clear about that. In fact, we'll talk about a couple quote success stories here, but what would oftentimes happen is they would get counterattacked once they

were successful. Now, let's just discuss in general counterattacking, because that's probably a term you've heard many times before when people talk about wars or battles or what is it is pretty obvious, and why is it effective? Is less obvious? Okay, so counterattacking. Let's say I'm on the defensive. It's World War One, so we'll make it about a trench. I'm in my trench. I'm in the first trench line. This

is what routinely happened to both sides. If you were able to get into the opposing guy's trench line and take it over, would the guys you didn't kill or capture you would run them out of the trench line. Okay, So I just charged the trench line or I forgot I'm on defense here. My trench line just got charged. They dropped an artillery brage on us, and they blew the barb wire, and they had it organized the right way, and now they're fighting and killing our way. We can't

hold this trench line anymore. What I do, as a smart commander is I tactically retreat. Remember, I know it doesn't play well in the movies, but tactical retreat is a critical part of battle. What I do is I gather my men because we can't defend that trench line anymore, and we in an organized fashion, we back away. We back into another trench line. At the same time, we're backing away. I have reinforcements in the rear. This is a common part of World War One. The reinforcements are

called up. Now, the assaulting guy who just jumped into my fence line, what's the state of his troops? What are his troops like after they took my trend trench line. They're shot to pieces. They're shot to pieces. They left dead and wounded everywhere. They're probably out of ammunition, They're dang sure out of energy. They are not even close to being at full strength. Yes, they're in my trench

line now, but they are shot. Well, I now get my reserves and my men that I left with, and I use the opportunity to counterattack, and I go right back at the trench they just took over. They don't have the strength and the men to keep me from taking it back, and they end up losing in the end and having to run back to their original lines because of the counter attack. Now, that's a World War

One version of a counterattack. But that's why counter attack itself is so successful, because attacking takes more energy, and you will lose more men while attacking. Then you will while you're defending. So even if your attack is successful, yes, you may hold the mountaintop in this case, but you started out with fifty men. There are now ten of you still left standing on the mountaintop. I retreated, and I have reserves, and I'm simply going to come take

it back. This happened all the time in the Italian campaign. You would you would make tunnels and supplies, and you'd make plans, and you'd bring up the artillery, and you'd get the units ready and make sure everyone has AMMO and you and you would know, on this day, we are going to finally do the final assault to this mountain, and you'd you'd wait until there was bad weather, when there was fog and you could move, and you would plan everything right. And then let's say it was successful.

Maybe maybe you blew the barbed wire in all the right places and your artillery barrage worked correctly and you managed to fight your way through machine gun nests and all this other death and misery going on. Oh and did I mention I brought this up day one? Roller bombs? Did you know that was a thing kind of cool and fascinating. They would take what essentially was cast iron, and they would fill it up with explosives and light the fuse and roll it down the mountain and it

would blow up on people. Beyond bombs, I already mentioned the avalanches, boulders a commonly used weapon. I will tell you, as somebody who spent a lot of time hiking and skiing in the mountains, looking up for rocks or boulders coming down your way is something you learn really, really, really fast. If my wife is hiking ahead of me, and so much as a rock the size of an apple, if it comes bouncing down my way, it'll break the skin, it catches a bad bounce, it'll shatter the teeth out

of my mouth. That's a rock the size of an apple. You know the damage you can do with the rock the size of a howling ball. They're rolling those down, but even when you do take a peek, even then you'll get counterattacked right off of it. So let's talk briefly about that as we wrap this up, and then we'll move on. Hang on is the Jesse Kelly Show Final Well, I should I shouldn't say? Final World War One segment of the Jesse Kelly Show, I Shouldn't say that it may It might be I might need one

more to finish this whole thing up. So let's just again talk briefly about the conditions on the mountaintop. You already know about the lack of food and water. We already talked about these things. But one thing, And I know it's a little dark. I understand there are kids listening, But it's something we forget about. Men have lived through this for us. What about the dead bodies. If you've ever been on a battlefield, you've seen them, and maybe

more importantly, you've smelled them. So it's something you never forget. What do you do when you're holding a mountaintop, a mountain, top of rock. Remember this is not top soil, not at these elevations. What do you do with your best friend who got killed yesterday? He caught a bullet between the eyes, he's dead. Well, you can't, you can't really just leave him there. One, it's very bad for morale. Military commanders have known this forever. Men they need to

see other men being buried for a couple different reasons. One, the body does some really ugly physical things after it dies. It gets bloated as the gas are in there. You turn colors. You don't want to see your best friend that way. Okay. It affects the morale of the men, and it's something in the human psyche. You. I want to see some sort of care taken with dead bodies, your dead comrades, because that tells you that should the worst happen. And all these men on both sides all

thought they were going to die. They said, this is the most fatalistic portion of the entire war. They all assumed they were all going to die. They want to see that there is a certain level of respect paid for their bodies after you're gone. Human beings want that. It's part of why we have different burial traditions depending on your culture, but everyone has a tradition. That's part of the reason why it helps. It helps ease the pain of death. Okay, now I'm on a mountaintop and

my buddy's dead. I can't take a six foot grave and put a lovely tombstone up for him. I don't even have the equipment to dig something like that up there. So what they had to do wherever they could was dig something as shallow as possible and then throw the bodies in there. Okay, so let's call it a one foot ditch. We'll call it two feet deep, a little

two foot area. We paid our respects, set a prayer over my buddy, dragged him into that little hole and threw rocks on him, and we left him because there's nothing else you can do. Now, Remember, I said, Abody, if this is a critical mountain top, many many, many, many many men have died up there already, so they're buried all over. Okay, Now they're going to be shooting artillery at me. Artillery was particularly nasty in this portion

of World War One. It was nasty all over World War One, but in this portion of the war it was actually worse than everywhere else because artillery didn't have any mud to sink into. Here. It landed on top of rocks all the time. Rocks themselves create shrapnel on top of the shrapnel from the artillery. The artillery wounds, the wounds in general in this field were ghastly. The stories were awful as I combed through all my research on this thing, just awful, awful, awful stories, similar to

what Ewojima was for the Pacific War Marines. They talked a lot about pelelu in Ewojima, in particular as having kind of the giest, gnarliest wounds, uglier than other parts because it's all rock, it's all coral, it's all shrapnel. It's one big shrapnel pit. Well that's what the rocks

were like. Well, what happens when you're dug in on that mountaintop and that artillery shell lands, and it happens to land on the little two foot ditch where you just buried your buddy this morning, Not only will rocks and shrapnel be raining down on you, so will your buddy's body parts. This is not something out of a horror movie. And I don't share this with you to be macabre. This is what real men, flesh and blood, people just like you, just like me. They have lived

in this existence. This is why the mutinies were so bad, why the Italian army executed thousands of troops. Troops would go on leave and never come back. At one point, the Italians, they were terrible about releasing this information to the public. They kept telling the public how they were

winning and how everything was going great. At one point they sent the men home on leave with warnings, Hey, don't be telling people how bad the conditions are here were the men all went home and they told all their relatives. You can't even imagine what it's like. That was the moment public sentiment for the war turned, because the stories finally got out that our young men, our young boys, are going into hell up there, and so

I just wanted to bring that home. In fact, I'm going to actually do something that I never ever do during these things. I'm going to read something for you in a moment before I read something for you. At one point in time, the Germans, who were not involved in this really for the most part, they left it up to Austria. The Germans they had some new storm

trooper tactics they were using. It involved things like making sure the artillery prevented the reserves from coming up, preventing counterattacks, and the infiltration tactics. And the Germans decided they had enough troops they wanted to come down and actually help the austri with a big offensive, and they did, and gas was of course used. And I brought this up that at one point in time, you want to talk about living in existence, that no human beings should ever live.

At one point in time, Austrian troops in Austrian unit they went up to the line to replace another unit that had been on the front line. They went into the trenches and found the other unit was not only dead, and they were terrible colors, and they obviously had died by gas, most of them. But it wasn't all of them, you see, because they found other things in the trench.

They found maces, clubs with spikes on them. Where the Austrians and Germans, after they gassed the Italian troops in their caves, in their trenches and their tunnels, they went in with gas masks on and ants and maces in their hands, and as they were laying there choking to death, they beat them to death with maces. Yeah. I tried to tell you this was as bad as it gets, Chris.

It's as bad as it gets. And remember the gas was designed to be heavier than air, So if you were in one of these caves that was essentially a pit, they would make sure the winds were right release the gas. You might be in your bunk, maybe finally getting warm, enjoying a meal. Completely unbeknownst to you, a monster known as gas is seeping through the entrance to your cave and you're about to die in terrible, terrible fashion. Now

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One segment of The Jesse Kelly Show. Remember you can email the show Jesse at Jesse kellyshow dot com. So on this final segment, I'm actually going to read something from a book I told you about. The White War is the name of the book. A lot of details and stuff like that, But if you're into that, it's there certainly a great resource, wonderful resource. But I just

thought maybe this little story would bring it home. Remember I told you about the mines and the tunnels they were all digging, and how the Italians would dig mines. They would dig a tunnel essentially underneath an Austrian position and then fill it up with explosives and blow them out of the position. This was done routinely, and the

Italians would dig counter mines trying to stop it. Sometimes in the mountains in the dark, they would run into each other and then have a good old fashioned knife and dagger fight in the dark. Now, what if what if you were holding one of these mountain peaks, and what if you knew the explosion was coming and couldn't stop it. Let me read you something. In the final stage of the digging, aromas from Austrian rations being prepared in the Castellanos seep through fissures in the limestone to

the Italians below. The Italians were below mining. Obviously, if the Austrians noticed these air currents, they might release poison gas above the fissures, slowing the tunneling or even stopping it. That's right, as you were tunneling, gas might come in. Apparently, the idea never occurred to the Austrians, who were absorbed by the challenge of keeping their sanity. The senior officer at the Castellado was Hans Schneberger, a nineteen year old

ensign in the Austrian whatever unit. In early June, he was ordered to lead his platoon up to the Castelletto. It's a peak. A reputation for agility around the mountains had already earned young Schneberger the nickname of the snow Flea. Yet his commanding officer explained that the main reasons for his assignment were his age and marital status because he was single. For it was clear that the enemy were prepared to detonate a spectacular mind. The rock was buzzing

and trembling under the Austrian boots. Another drill could be heard behind the surface of Tofuna across the saddle Visiting Visiting the Castellato one night, Schneeberger's sector commander, Captain von Roch, put him in the picture. In the long term, it was impossible to hold the Casteletto. For reasons of prestige, the divisional command refused to abandon a single foot of territory without a fight. The situation was hopeless. If you do not freeze or starve to death first, you will

be blown up. That's what his commander told him. There were two ways of averting this outcome. They could drive the Italians off Tofana completely, or foil their plan by discovering and destroying their tunnel. The first option was out of the question. The Italian counter offensive was too strong, so on and so forth. The second option was highly improbable, for the army was unable to provide a rock drill. The most they could hope for were a few flame

throwers and heavy machine guns. Schneberger resisted the impulse to share the bad news. The cavern walls were thin, and word quickly got around. The effect on the Austrians' nerves can be imagined young Schneeberger soldierly resolved, his soldierly resolved, sometimes wavered. Not so the thirty men under his command of the Alpine stock themselves. That was the Austrians. They lived up to the reputation of Highlanders for strength and dependability.

Their stoicism shamed and heartened the young ensign. When he asked what they thought of situation, they shrugged and carried on. As the days passed, Schneberger began to find the noise of the enemy drill, reassuring. It meant the Italians were not yet ready. As long as they're not ready, we survive. When the drills fell silent, everyone knew the countdown had started, but not when it would end. Schneberger asked who wanted

to be transferred off the rock. Nobody spoke, not even Ashenbrenner, with eight children at home, nor the Spinley, fifty two year old. He gives out his name. At midday on the tenth of July, the Italian guns across the valley below open fire on Castelltto. The intensity suggested that a detonation was imminent. At three point thirty am the next morning, Schneberger was in his cavern trying to sleep. A candle gutters on the table. Outside. The sky is pre dawn gray.

At once, the rock shakes, Everything goes black, and he's flung off his hammock coming too. He hears his head roaring, his brains when a burst out of his skull. The air is thick with sulfurous dust. Stones crash around him. Men grown, It has come at last. From across the valley, the king sees a tower of flame blaze up between Castellano and Tofano. A noise crashes around on the mountain walls. Schneberger staggers outside. The sky has vanished into boiling dust.

The saddle was unrecognizable. A crater has been blown in the middle a church or as deep as a church tower, fringed with rubble. Turning around, he sees the southern end of the summit crest has disappeared. Only ten of his

platoon survive. The rest of them were exploded, and they had to sit there day after day after day, freezing and starving on a mountaintop, listening to the Italian's plant explosives underneath their feet, knowing with full knowledge that one day the drills would stop, the explosives would be loaded, and an explosion would happen, and rocks and body parts would be blown off the top of the Swiss Alps. Some of these craters, in fact, really all of them can be seen to this day if you go look

up images of this area of battle. Chris asked, why have we never been taught this America wasn't really involved? And maybe the saddest part of all this is all this death, all this freezing loss of life, all this horrible misery was for nothing. The lines really never moved in the end, Austria's succumbed to the war and everything just kind of went away. All those lives well north of a million I think it was seven hundred and

fifty thousand Italians alone, all those lives tossed for nothing. Horrible, right, But I bet you're more interested in the White War now than you were before. This is a podcast from wor