White War

White War
	Part of Italian front (World War I)
	; Clockwise from above: Austrian barracks in East Tyrol; Alpine with mule painting by Achille Beltrame from 1916; Austrian infantrymen waiting for the ration in the sector of Dreisprachenspitze; difficult transport of an Italian artillery piece at high altitude
Date	May 24, 1915 – November 4, 1918
Location	Southern Rhaetian Alps, Dolomites
Result	Italian victory • Austrian defeat and subsequent end of World War I
Belligerents
Italy	Austria-Hungary; Germany
Commanders and leaders
Luigi Cadorna; Armando Diaz	Conrad von Hötzendorf; Arz von Straußenburg
Strength
Two armies for about 100–120,000 men	April 1915: about 32,400 Austro-Hungarians defending the Tyrol + 13 battalions of the German Alpenkorps arrived on May 26, 1915
Casualties and losses
	c. 150,000–180,000 overall deaths, only one third of which were caused by combat

The White War (Italian: Guerra Bianca, German: Gebirgskrieg, Hungarian: Fehér Háború) is the name given to the fighting in the high-altitude Alpine sector of the Italian front during the First World War, principally in the Dolomites, the Ortles-Cevedale Alps and the Adamello-Presanella Alps. More than two-thirds of this conflict zone lies at an altitude above 2,000m, rising to 3905m at Mount Ortler. In 1917 New York World correspondent E. Alexander Powell wrote: “On no front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the frozen Mazurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so arduous an existence as up here on the roof of the world.”