The Italian front or Alpine front (, "Alpine front"; in , "Mountain war") involved a series of battles at the border between Austria-Hungary and Italy, fought between 1915 and 1918 in the course of World War I. Following secret promises made by the Allies in the 1915 Treaty of London, Italy entered the war aiming to annex the Austrian Littoral, northern Dalmatia, and the territories of present-day Trentino and South Tyrol. Although Italy had hoped to gain the territories with a surprise offensive, the front soon bogged down into trench warfare, similar to that on the Western Front in France, but at high altitudes and with very cold winters. Fighting along the front displaced much of the local population, and several thousand civilians died from malnutrition and illness in Italian and Austro-Hungarian refugee-camps. The Allied victory at Vittorio Veneto, the disintegration of the Habsburg empire, and the Italian capture of Trento and Trieste ended the military operations in November 1918. The armistice of Villa Giusti entered into force on 4 November 1918, while Austria-Hungary (de facto and de jure) no longer existed as a unified entity. Italy also refers to the Great War as the Fourth Italian War of Independence, which completed the last stage of Italian unification.