Lecture NIDO May 4, 2006 By Dr. Gaetano V. Cavallaro 

He talked on Political, Social, Military and Diplomatic Events in Italy during 
the beginning of the last century. 

Gaetano V. Cavallaro M.D. was born in Poughkeepsie of immigrant Sicilian 
parents. He attended local schools as well as Fordham University where he 
obtained a degree in pharmacy. He had completed the course work for a Master's 
Degree in Biology at Fordham but then left to study medicine in Bologna, Italy 
the oldest university in the world. While there he studied the battlefields on 
the Italian Front. 

With a fifty year interest in the First World War he studied German in the 
evening at Columbia University for two years which along with his four years of 
high school French has assisted him greatly in reading war reports. He completed 
his medical training in Internal Medicine and Gastroenterology at the Albany 
Medical Center and the Lahey Clinic in Boston. 

After forty years of practice he decided to do more research on the war 
realizing that there was nothing in English on the war on the Italian Front. He 
has just completed a 2000 page three volume study of warfare on the Austro-
Italian Front which includes political, diplomatic military and social events 
during the war. Most of the information has been obtained directly from archival 
sources so that many archives in Europe have asked for copies of the books. 

There are 280 photographs, with fifty graphically illustrated maps and a fifty 
page bibliography in four different languages. Included are a large section on 
aviation as well as naval encounters. Especially noteworthy are accounts from 
both sides of the trench obtained from different archives in London, Rome, 
Berlin, Vienna and Paris. 

At the present time he is taking intensive German lessons twice weekly with a 
private tutor. He has lectured extensively on the First World War to university 
audiences in Boston, Delaware, Providence, Kansas City Mo.as well as overseas in 
London and Rome with other lectures scheduled next year in Germany, Britain, 
Italy and Australia. 

His books THE BEGINNING OF FUTILITY, FUTILITY ENDING IN DISASTER AND DISASTER 
WITH FINAL VICTORY are scheduled to be in book stores in a few months.