Despite the victory that was achieved in the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, Luigi Cadorna and his conduct of military operations continued to receive very strong criticism. Colleagues and politicians criticized his tactics that were considered inadequate, obsolete and often unreasonable and that failed to achieve satisfactory results compared to the very large number of soldiers who had fallen on the battlefields.
One of his leading critics was, for example, Colonel Giulio Douhet, an officer in the Corps in the Carnia Army. During the war he succeeded in keeping a diary and in having several exchanges of correspondence. In a letter that he sent to the new Minister for Relations with the Army, Leonida Bissolati, he expressed all his "concern regarding the absurd concept of launching a frontal attack that had swept away the country's best soldiers […], the insistence on keeping every single piece of land that had been won, regardless of losses, was unjustified; soldiers were being treated as if they were merely raw material." (in Gianni Rocca, Cadorna: il generalissimo di Caporetto, Mondadori, Milan, 2004, page 179).
At the end of August a report by Douhet that was meant for Bissolati and for the Minister for Foreign Affairs Sonnino was intercepted by the Supreme Command. Accused of spreading reserved and false news, he was immediately condemned to a year of military imprisonment.
A second episode involved also General Luigi Capello of the Second Army, one of the military commanders most known to public opinion. Cadorna was convinced that his colleague was plotting with some ministers for his substitution. It so happened that, probably due more to jealousy than to any proven motives, the Chief of Staff decided to transfer Capello to the Asiago plateau, removing his bothersome presence from the main front.
In the meantime, on the international front Italy decided to send a division (with a total of 44,000 men) to Greece to support, at the request of the allies, the war in the Balkans. The 35th division under the command of General Carlo Petitti di Roreto fought against the Bulgarian army, an ally of the Central Empires. Besides this intervention outside Italian frontiers, there was also the official entry into the war against Germany (28th August). Up to this moment in fact Italy had delivered its declaration of war to Emperor Franz Josef but not to Kaiser Wilhelm II. This was, however, merely a formality: the Germans had supported for a long time the Habsburg Empire by sending arms and some Alpine battalions to regions in the Dolomites that were away from the frontlines.
