That fact they were killed during the war by the Italians is the point. The carcano was an accurate rifle.
The nutjob in the Cuckoo's Nest amply demonstrated just how accurate the Carcano can be in practiced hands. Going 2-for-3 is a great batting average in any man's league. But one cannot claim exact numbers of deaths-by-Carcano unless one has documentation. Or wounded-by-Carcano, for that matter. But having said that, see below (in 'Austrian-Hungarian Losses') how difficult it was to obtain accurate information on military casualties of war.
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The Carcano on the battlefield:
World War1 (Italian-Front Equipment)
http://www.worldwar1.com/itafront/equip_w.htmMANNLICHER-CARCANO MODEL 1891 OF 6.5 MM. CALIBER RIFLE : The standard Italian rifle of the Great War was adopted in 1891. It was fed with a 6-round clip. The clip was a Mannlicher design and the breech block assembly was designed by an Italian gunsmith named Carcano. While it is looked down upon by some devotees of the "finer" rifles, it was a rugged weapon that didn't foul up easily and withstood hard treatment. Its smaller cartridges [6.5mm vs. 7.6mm] meant a soldier could carry more rounds and its clip held 6 rounds vs. 5 per clip for almost all rifles of the other belligerents. It's length [140 cm, 160 cm with the bayonet] which can be noted in the photo at the top of this article was designed for an obsolete method of warfare, allowing an infantryman to fend off the lance or saber of a mounted cavalryman. Since it proved to be clumsy in the tight confines of the trenches, a carbine version called the 'moschetto' adapted from the carbine version used by the cavalry was also given to special troops, carabinieri [MP's], officers, NCOs and Arditi [shock troops]. Both carbines fired the same cartridge the rifle did, indeed they were just shortened versions of the rifle. Both had a turned down bolt handle rather than a straight one. The cavalry version had a built in folding bayonet while the infantry adaptation had a detachable one and a longer wood stock.
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Austrian-Hungarian Losses in The Great War
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_austria-Military Losses
[includes civilians]
During the war, two independent institutions registered military losses: the first was the “List of Losses” (Verlustliste), compiled by the Department X/VL (Verlustlistengruppe – Group of the List of Losses) of the Ministry of War (Kriegsministerium), which in August 1917 was transferred to the Office of War Statistics (Kriegsstatistisches Büro) attached to the War Archives(Kriegsarchiv). Independently, the Austro-Hungarian High Command (k.u.k.Armeeoberkommando, or AOK) also recorded losses. Both institutions counted differently and came to different figures: in its last report on losses up to September 1918, the AOK registered 499,203 deaths whereas the Kriegsstatistische Büro noted 363,144 deaths at the front and 324,590 deaths in hospitals, altogether 627,534 deaths for the same time. In both cases, the total dead were calculated to include an unknown number of dead who were classified as missing. At the end of the war about 1 million people were missing.
After the war, three people were active in calculating war losses. The first was Winkler. During the war he had been a member of the Scientific Committee of War Economy (Wissenschaftliches Komitee für Kriegswirtschaft, or WKKW) which was part of the Kriegsministerium. After the war, he worked in the Ministry of Military Affairs (Staatsamt für Heerwesen), but joined the Office of Statistics (Bundesamt für Statistik) in 1921. His publication on war dead in 1919 was based on works of the WKKW undertaken in 1917/18.[3] The WKKW did not try to fix an exact number of deaths. Instead, it estimated the number of deaths at 1.2 million by the end of 1917. A sample of 120,000 deaths from eight different time periods was classified by home regions (sub-categorized by nationality) as well as age and then grossed up to 1.2 million. This work was marked by a German-national view and, in particular, the classification of the fallen soldiers into national groups is tendentious in its derivation and in its conclusion. For Winkler, however, these results could be used to scale the heroism of the different nations of the monarchy: the higher the losses per capita, the “tougher” the nation. Winkler failed to take into account many factors influencing the intensity of losses and his conclusions are highly flawed. For example, according to Winkler, Bosnia had the fewest losses per capita. Yet, during the first years of war Bosnia faced the worst supply situation of the monarchy and its recruiting results were much below average. This was also a time of high losses as shown in table 2. If there are fewer Bosnian soldiers in times of high losses and Bosnia had the least losses per capita, this figure says nothing about the heroism of Bosnian soldiers.
In addition to Winkler, Gaston Bodart (1867-1940), a Viennese statistician and military historian, dealt with war casualties even before the First World War.[4] During the war he worked at the Kriegsstatistische Büro. Afterwards, he tried to calculate as closely as possible the real number of casualties from each year and on each front. In around 1921 he finished his manuscript on Austro-Hungarian war losses, though it was never published. According to Bodart, 1,046,893 soldiers were dead, while 332,950 were still missing. Bodart counted half of these as dead, thus arriving at the number of 1,213,368, rounded to 1.2 million. This figure did not include prisoner of war deaths.
Edmund Glaise-Horstenau (1882-1946), a regular officer throughout First World War and an active Nazi between 1938 and 1945, headed a staff to publicize an official Austrian history of the First World War, which appeared in 1930-1938 in seven volumes.[5] This work includes tables of losses. The “losses at the front” differs slightly from the results of the lists of the AOK and Bodart (539,633 instead of 499,203 fixed by the AOK, and of 521,146 given by Bodart). Including rear areas, “Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg” gives a total of 1,016,200 dead, whereas Bodart counted 1,046,893. But only Bodart took into account the estimated number of deaths of those still missing in 1921.
The number of deceased prisoners of war (POWs) can be estimated roughly at 450,000: 385,000 died in Russian captivity; 35,000 in Italian POW camps; 30,000 in Serbia, especially during the great retreat of the Serbian army in autumn 1915; and 3,000 died in Romania. With exception of Italy, the data was very crude, especially that of Russia which only ranged until the beginning of November 1917.[6]
[Note: Editing in progress. Y'all come back, now... y'hear?]
