World War I - Monte Paterno

Good morning, good afternoon or good evening!  I hope that you are very well reading this blog and doing your planning.  November presses on with World War I and World War II documentaries.  Soon it will be December and it will be fun and frivolous documentaries and year in review blogs.  Then it will be January 2025!  I cannot believe that I have been blogging about documentaries since 2020.  I hope that this website continues to be a good source for teachers when it comes to selecting documentaries.  Today is a documentary about World War I.  The run time for this documentary is 45:07.  It is part of the Great Underground War series and it is called Monte Paterno.  I had reviewed an episode of the series before and I did not like it, so maybe this episode will be better.

World War I was fought in the Alps.  In 1915, some of the most desperate struggles took place in the Alps.  A maze of tunnels and caverns were dug in the Dolomite range by both the Italians and the Austrians.  Mountain soldiers would fight, climb and die over the peaks of the Dolomites.  Heroes would be made among these peaks.  The Dolomites were on the front lines in the struggle between the Italians and Austrians.

Italy signed a secret treaty with London and when World War I began they raced to capture the Dolomites.  Hard on their tails was the Austrians.  Tunnels were carved into the rock.  Well-positioned artillery could easily control the Dolomites.  Two archeologists explore the tunnels that were carved into these mountains.  These two archeologists will find climbing the mountains a challenge.  This is one area of the war you never really heard about in school.

The mountains were the border lands between Austria and Italy.  Italy had fought against Austria before and had taken the side of the French, British, and Russians to regain their lost territory.  The Italians pushed very hard to take their lost territories back.  The summits in the Dolomites were the sight of back-and-forth fighting between the Italians and Austrians.

There was a man who would rise to the occasion, he was a mountain guide.  His name was Sepp Innerkolfer and he was from a family of farmers.  However, he would eventually become a mountaineer and would get his license to guide people through the mountains.  He was a pioneer of tourism in the area.  He would fight hard against the enemy's encroachment on these mountains.  Sadly the enemy was his Italian neighbors.  These mountain guides were as tough as the mountains they guided people through.  I tried to look into the man further to get the spelling of the name, however I could not find it.  Eventually, I found it when his great-grandson was interviewed.  Other Tyrolian mountaineers would participate in the war.

The mountaineers would have the necessary skills that would survive the terrain.  Emperor Franz Joseph would mobilize the Australian Mountaineers from Italian intrusion.  They were excellent marksmen and could navigate the terrain.  Other soldiers would be deployed and the mountaineers would help train these new soldiers.  The elderly and women trained men to be lookouts in the valley.

However, there were challenges along the way.  Mountaineers who knew the area well were told not to put patrols on certain mountains.  Even though they told the generals that those locations were good for defending.  Only after the enemy invaded these high peaks did the generals realize that these peaks were a good defense point.  To learn more about the war in the Dolomites, continue to watch the rest of this episode.

This should have been divided into chapters for easier viewing.  The discussion on Sepp Innerkolfer seemed to have run long.  The narrator could have done a quick introduction and then moved on to the war.  It was a reminder of how bad the first episode I reviewed was.  I had to rewind it several times.  There was too much introductory filler.  It took forever to get to the tunnel exploration.  So this episode was not better than the first one I reviewed.  I would not recommend this documentary for a history classroom nor would I recommend it for research purposes.