Military history, done differently

336 pages, full colour throughout

140,000 words

149 photos

27 maps

Plus...

QR codes in each chapter linking to free additional content — more photos, more maps, videos, animated battle maps, and 27 downloadable battlefield walks.

Part history, part travelogue, part battlefield guide, Thunder in The Mountains takes a fresh look at WW1 on the Italian Front in a meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated new book. For so long neglected by British historians, the Italian Front was WW1 fought at the limits of human endurance, from the malarial marshes of the Adriatic to ice-clad peaks of the Ortler Alps. A common misconception is that the Italian Front was an irrelevant side-show, but Thunder in The Mountains shows that it played an essential part in the Allied victory, at a cost of one million lives.

Tom Isitt has spent the last six years exploring the Italian Front of WW1 on foot, by bicycle, and even on horseback, giving him a unique insight into the extraordinary battles that took place amongst the peaks and valleys of the Alpine front.

He walked in the footsteps of his Grandfather, who served with the British 48th Division in Italy, and tells the story of WW1 fought in very different circumstances to the wet plains of the Western Front, or the icy steppes of the Eastern Front. Here military advances were often measured in vertical metres, attack tunnels were dug through solid ice at 11,000 ft above sea level, the tops of mountains were blown off with huge mines, and thousands of soldiers perished in avalanches.