The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (25 page)

Cadorna appealed for Russia to attack at once rather than on 15 June, as planned. When Joffre demurred, the King appealed directly to the Tsar. On 1 June, Cadorna learned that the Russians would move on 4 June. This would not stop the Punishment Expedition in its tracks, but it should slow it. In the event, General Brusilov’s offensive succeeded better than the Italians could have hoped. Like Brusati’s men in the Trentino, the Habsburg forces in Galicia were caught too far forward. After two days, the Russians had driven back the Austrians by 75 kilometres, along a 20-kilometre front. After a week, they had taken 200,000 prisoners and 700 guns.

This relief came at the last possible moment, for on 3 June, the Sardinian Grenadiers were driven off the southernmost peak of the Asiago plateau. It was to be the Austrians’ last big achievement of the campaign. By the 8th, the Italians were surging back up the flank of Mount Cengio. That night, the Austrians tried to beat them back. Ferruccio Fabbrovich, a 19-year-old volunteer, described the clash:

Suddenly the alarm sounds, the enemy is out of his trench and coming to attack. Only one voice spoke up: be brave and always go forward! Our loopholes are already open, we were all ready for the counter-attack. The order suddenly comes to fire at will; dear father, if you could only have heard the racket; thousands and thousands of rifles – the whole Pistoia Brigade was there – spewing fire at the barbarous enemy hordes. But the Austrians kept coming; they were only 40 metres away. We kept waiting, because it was impossible to give the Savoy because of the distance, and the mountainside was very steep and rocky. My heart was bursting with emotion, I trembled all over. Ah, father, what terrible minutes those were. Finally the order came: ‘Savoy!’ At the fateful cry 6,000 Italians leaped out of their burrows like a single man and flung themselves at the Austrians, massacring them and shoving them back into their trenches. I found myself well and safe in the darkness, I don’t know how or when: I was stunned. Oh what joy it was, what indescribable joy you feel when you go into the attack with a bayonet …

The tide had turned. On 9 and 13 June, Conrad returned two extra divisions that had recently arrived from the Eastern Front. By now the outcome of the offensive was clear. On 16 June, he stopped the Punishment Expedition.

By this point, Cadorna had survived a government bid to unseat him. On 30 May, following the loss of Arsiero and Asiago, Salandra sought the King’s backing to oust the Supreme Commander. The King indicated that, if Salandra had full cabinet support, he would not stand in the way. Then Salandra met Cadorna himself, at Vicenza. He told the old general that he would not hear of strategic retreats. If the army pulled back behind the River Piave, the government would fall and subversive revolutionary elements would seize their chance. Cadorna, imposingly calm and self-possessed, said that a retreat was now unlikely, but he was duty-bound to prepare for all contingencies.

Back in Rome, Salandra was uncertain. If he forced Cadorna’s removal at the height of the crisis, who would take his place? And with what prospects of saving the day? While he vacillated, the military balance shifted in Italy’s favour. The press backed the generalissimo, extolling his dynamism and brilliance. When parliament opened on 6 June, deputies blamed Salandra for the crisis so narrowly averted. The Prime Minister hit back, accusing Cadorna of failing to prepare his defences. Most deputies backed the army, and Salandra lost a vote of confidence. ‘Hanged in his own noose,’ was Cadorna’s pithy comment.

On 25 June, the Austrians withdrew to well-prepared defences. Arsiero and Asiago were ransacked, burned and abandoned, their streets strewn with rubble, faeces and dead horses. Cadorna dissolved the Fifth Army, its task fulfilled. But the Italian counter-attacks were hasty, uncoordinated, and very costly; only a third to a quarter of the territory lost since 15 May was regained. Among the losses was Cesare Battisti, captured on a mountain, recognised as the famous traitor, and publicly hanged in Trent. Propaganda photographs of his last moments, and of Austrians grinning around the martyr’s corpse, caused outrage in Italy and beyond. It was Battisti’s last service to the cause.

The Austrians held firm on the northern portion of the Asiago plateau, well inside the 1866 border, mocking Cadorna’s promise at the start of the year that the enemy would never set foot on the fatherland’s sacred soil. The plateau would be a battleground for the rest of the war, stretching the Austrian forces even more thinly. The Italians had taken around 147,000 casualties, some 50,000 more than the Austrians. The Trentino salient still hung over the army like the sword of Damocles. Cadorna, fixated on the Isonzo, did not contemplate an all-out attack to remove this threat. On the contrary, he seemed to take a perverse pride in his vulnerability. When General Robertson, Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, wondered how the Italians could persevere despite such gaping insecurity, Cadorna felt gratified as if by praise. He even let it be known that he wanted to disprove Napoleon’s claim that Austria could only be attacked on the Isonzo if the Trentino was already controlled. For would he not thereby prove that he was greater than Bonaparte?

Cadorna’s acclamation as a hero during June says less about him than about the low level of national confidence and the power of the press. As a deputy later protested in secret session, ‘Why was Cadorna allowed to celebrate this grievous episode of the war and boast about it as something glorious?’ It was a rhetorical question, for who was to stop him? The new government had little credit with the public. The Supreme Command’s publicity machine promoted the generalissimo’s greatness. The oversights and blunders that preceded the attack and let it drive so deep, and then let the enemy keep so much territory, went unexamined. On the contrary, the
unpredictability
of the attack became axiomatic.
3
The propaganda worked because people were desperate for good news. In this sense, Cadorna was the beneficiary of an appetite for success that his own failures had created. Morale in the country and the army swung down, then up. What General Capello called ‘an obscure feeling of mortification because of an insult endured’ was rapidly overlaid by euphoria at the narrow escape. If the breakthrough was regrettable, the resistance was unexpectedly successful.

For Conrad, on the other hand, slender gains were no success at all when measured against his original ambition and the disaster in Russia. By 4 June, Conrad knew his original planned strength was inadequate, and the emergency created by Brusilov prevented him from transferring more troops from the Eastern Front. Yet the Russian crisis did not force him to go below that strength and, anyway, the Punishment Expedition had stalled several days earlier. He underestimated the manpower necessary for such a broad offensive; underrated Cadorna’s energy and resolve; discounted the impact of Russian support; and failed to use Boroević’s army for large-scale diversionary action on the Isonzo. Above all, he stuck to traditional tactics in mountain warfare, dragging artillery up cliffs with block and tackle. During the planning, he had clashed with General Alfred Krauss, the able chief of staff at Austria’s South- West Front Command, who boldly advocated rapid penetration of the valleys without simultaneous progress on the high ground. If Conrad had accepted this advice, the Austrians could have made faster advances in the crucial first phase. These misjudgements were dictated by personality. The Punishment Expedition was shaped by his Italophobia and ‘wretched rivalry’ with Falkenhayn. By beating the Italians, the Austrians would finally claim equal partnership with Germany.

Falkenhayn’s decision to withhold German support was not personally motivated in this way, though it was perhaps coloured by a hope that, if given enough rope, his vexatious ally would hang himself. Indeed, Conrad’s prestige never recovered in Vienna and Budapest, where he was seen as responsible for triggering Brusilov’s campaign, which in turn led to Romania’s decision to join the Allies in August. By September, when the imperial forces were formally subordinated to German command, Conrad’s failure in Trentino had already exacted a heavy price on the Isonzo.

Source Notes
FOURTEEN
The Return Blow

1
‘
I have already reported that
’: Rocca, 119.

2
‘
His Excellency the Supreme Commander of the Army
’: This incident was alleged by a parliamentary deputy in December 1917. Camera dei Deputati – Segretariato generale, 128.

3
Brusati learned from the newspapers
: Rocca, 136.

4
Ferruccio Fabbrovich, a 19-year-old volunteer
: Todero [2005].

5
When General Robertson
: Gatti [1921], 167. 

6
prove that he was greater than Bonaparte?
: De Simone, citing an unnamed staff officer.

7
‘Why was Cadorna allowed to celebrate
’: Camera dei Deputati – Segretariato generale, 128.

8
‘
wretched rivalry’ with Falkenhayn
: Weber.

1 
The Russians launched the Battle of Lake Naroch on 18 March 1916, in response to Joffre’s appeal for diversionary help.

2 
On 25 May, Brusati learned from the newspapers that the cabinet had decided to dismiss him from the army. By omitting to say that he had been removed from the Trentino before Conrad’s offensive, the bulletin implied that he and not Cadorna was most responsible for the army’s lack of readiness. Poisonous rumours now enveloped the disgraced man: he had an Austrian wife (she was American); his son had volunteered for the Austrian army (he was a decorated Italian soldier). When the authorities in Milan could not guarantee his safety against whipped-up public outrage, Brusati went into hiding. He was rehabilitated in 1918, after Cadorna’s removal.

3 
This nonsense was parroted by well-meaning foreign visitors such as H. G. Wells, who assured English readers later in the year that, ‘There was only one good point about the Austrian thrust. No one could have foretold it.’  

FIFTEEN

Victory’s Peak

Once the great victory is gained, the next question is
not about rest, not about taking breath, not about
considering, not about reorganising, etc. etc., but
only of pursuit of fresh blows.

C
ARL VON
C
LAUSEWITZ

The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo

By mid-June, Cadorna’s mind was back on the Isonzo. His original ambitions had taken such a bruising that he set more modest goals for the next offensive. He told the Duke of Aosta that it would take place as soon as possible, aiming for ‘firm possession of the threshold of Gorizia’. He wanted to set the Italians up for a future attack on the city and on Mount San Michele, and to make it impossible for the Austrians to break out of Gorizia. For the first time, he would concentrate his firepower ‘in a very narrow space’, the short tract of front between Podgora hill and Gorizia. He also accepted the Duke’s suggestion to extend the attack down to Mount San Michele in the south. Although it was separated from Gorizia by the valley of the Vipacco, five or six kilometres wide, San Michele was in tactical terms the southern rampart of the Gorizia enclave. Cadorna rightly supposed that the Austrians would not expect a major operation on the Isonzo so soon after the close call in Trentino. Given his previous disdain for the element of surprise, this was another sign that something had been learned.

After the restructuring around Gorizia, the offensive came under the Third Army. The Duke of Aosta made sure the three divisions attacking San Michele had substantial artillery support (though no heavy guns) and the lion’s share of reserves, which were never abundant on the Isonzo. This had serious consequences when the attack took an unexpected turn. The task of getting a foothold on the left bank of the Isonzo, on the skirt of land between the river and the city, fell to VI Corps under General Capello. Capello’s orders reiterated Cadorna’s aim of capturing ‘a small bridgehead’ that could be defended by a few men with machine guns.

Capello, bulking larger than life, cultivated renown as a plain-speaking warrior, learned in the arts of war, implacable in attack. He predicted that they would take the bridgehead in four hours and Gorizia in four days. ‘Let us not deceive ourselves,’ cautioned Cadorna, five times burnt. In this case, Capello’s bullish confidence had a foundation: the Italians’ excellent preparatory work on Mount Sabotino, a 600-metre hill that fills Gorizia’s northern horizon like a scalene triangle. The western side descends steeply but evenly; on the other side of a narrow summit crest, the eastern side falls almost sheer to the Isonzo. Since winter, units of the 4th Division had excavated an intricate grid of trenches, tunnels and caverns in the limestone, often by night, sapping up the western flank of the mountain until the front lines were close enough for the infantry to attack with realistic hope of success. The 4th Division had one of the better commanders, General Luca Montuori, assisted by Colonel Pietro Badoglio, a veteran of Ethiopia and Libya with the knack of inspiring trust in senior commanders. When Sabotino came under the responsibility of VI Corps, Capello became involved.

The divisions that had been transferred to the Trentino were brought back to the Isonzo, along with most of the First Army’s artillery, without detection. By early August, over 200,000 men were ready to move against San Michele and Gorizia. The heavy guns were placed in front of Gorizia, shells had never been available in such quantities, and the number of mortars quadrupled over the past year.

    The bombardment began early on 6 August, pounding the Austrian lines all the way from Tolmein to the sea, before drawing in to San Michele and Gorizia. Cadorna’s gunners had never been so effective. The Austrian lines were shrouded in smoke, their command centres disabled, many observation posts destroyed, and communications wrecked. Boroević telegraphed the Army High Command for urgent reserves and heavy artillery. He had underestimated the enemy build-up, partly because it was well concealed (with Cadorna making highly visible visits to Trentino). The Austrians had assumed that the new government in Rome would want more time before launching its first offensive. What was more, the trickle of deserters that preceded previous offensives had not materialised. But the high command was desperately stretched on the Eastern Front and had nothing to spare for the Isonzo. Boroević would have to manage with what he had, some 102,000 fighting men along the middle and lower Isonzo. Only 18,000 of these were deployed around Gorizia, in a semicircle from Sabotino to the Vipacco valley. The troops and guns that had been lent to the Punishment Expedition were slow to return. Making matters worse, Boroević had sent his own reserves – a scanty six battalions – south to protect the direct approach to Trieste. Retrieving them would take several days. As for artillery, the inferiority was frightful: he was outgunned on the Isonzo by at least 3:1, and in some places around Gorizia by 12:1.

The Carso and the Gorizia sector

Recognising that previous progress had been made in the first days or even hours, Cadorna curtailed the preparatory bombardment. At 16:00 on the 6th, Capello’s first wave of infantry scrambled out of the upper trenches on Mount Sabotino with large white disks tied to their backs. Thanks to this simple device, the battery commanders co-ordinated their fire with an assault for the first time. The Dalmatian troops defending the mountain were hopelessly outnumbered when Badoglio’s men stormed the summit, taking it in 38 minutes flat. ‘They look like Roman legions!’ enthused the King, watching from a hilltop in the rear. When the last defending platoons in the warren of tunnels refused to surrender, the Italians poured petrol into the tunnels and set them ablaze.

It was the best news since the capture of Mount Krn more than a year before. D’Annunzio, the self-styled poet of slaughter, caught the joyful mood in a couplet:

Swift as the wing that stoops in a streak,
The first shout rang out from victory’s peak. 

Further south, across the river, more glory lay in store. Although San Michele had seen no major offensives since the Fourth Battle, the Italian XI Corps had not been idle. As on Sabotino, the ‘methodical advance’ was conducted diligently until no-man’s land was only 50 or even 10 metres wide. When rock-drills arrived at the end of March, proper shelters and tunnels were excavated. Secure emplacements were made for the new trench mortars. Salients were protected with extra wire.

Even without major operations, the attrition on San Michele had been costly. Hundreds of men were lost in the limited actions of the Fifth Battle, and hundreds more during Austrian diversions in May. The following month, the Austrians used a new weapon to loosen the Italians’ grip. On 29 June, a mixture of chlorine gas and phosgene was released above the Italian line. After a stormy night, the wind died away just before dawn and the Austrians had considered aborting the operation. Then a south-easterly breeze picked up, and the 3,000 cylinders were opened. Dirty white clouds rolled towards the mystified Italians, withering the leaves and grass, then smothering the lookouts and the front line. The men keeled over, gasping, glassy-eyed, foaming at the mouth, and died clutching their stomachs. Primitive gas-masks – cotton-wool pads impregnated with alkaline solution, and separate goggles – had been distributed not long before, but many soldiers thought the precaution was needless; their masks were soon lost or damaged. In the second line, men looked around in panic for their gas- masks, not knowing these were ineffective against phosgene. Some 2,000 men of the Brescia and Ferrara Brigades died, and a further 5,000 were injured. Yet, like the Germans at Ypres in April 1915 when lethal gas was first used, the Austrians were too fearful of their weapon to seize the opportunity that it had created. (Fearful with reason: they lost 40 dead and 212 wounded to the gas.) They had bought a little time without improving their strategic position. By the end of the day, Italian counter-attacks had regained the ground lost in the morning.

Survivors and relief units were shocked by the sight of dead men at their post, caught unawares and so quickly that they had not even tried to escape. Corporal Valentino Righetti (19th Infantry, Brescia Brigade) was among those sent up the hill late on the 29th, wondering why his unit was returning to the front line only a day after leaving it. Reaching his trench after dark, he was perplexed to find it full of soldiers. The silence was complete; they must all be asleep. They were still sleeping at first light, so he shook the man next to him. ‘Dead! They were all dead! Eyes rolling, foam on their mouths.’ The brass stars on their uniforms and the metal of their rifles were discoloured green. Outrage was compounded when studded maces were found in the trenches. These had been used to finish off the gassed victims. The maces were exhibited in schools around Italy to prove the contrast between Habsburg barbarism and Italy’s just struggle – what the Supreme Command called the ‘sublime goodness’ of the war.
1

* 

The assault on San Michele began at 15:30 on 6 August. Though suffering heavy losses, the Catanzaro, Brescia and Ferrara Brigades took the summit while the Pisa and Regina Brigades pushed to the edge of San Martino hamlet. The counter-attacks that night, by Hungarian units, were beaten back. Boroević’s reserves were needed to limit the breach at Sabotino; there was nothing left for San Michele.

The whole sector fell the following day. The dreary whaleback hill was firmly Italian at last. Soldiers wandered around the silent summit, dazed at finally being able to set foot among the corpses, cartridge- boxes, spent cartridges, blackened boots, bits of rifles and empty knap sacks. One officer’s chief memory was of disgust at the sight of maggots, more than he had ever seen before, apparently sprouting out of the ground, ‘white and soft, wriggling towards the motionless bodies, penetrating them, feeding, reappearing in the empty sockets and half- closed mouths’. The conquest of San Michele had cost at least 110,000 Italian casualties over 14 months, including 19,000 dead, on a sector only eight kilometres long.

With Sabotino lost, the 15-kilometre line around Gorizia began to crumble. Most of Podgora hill – insuperable for so long – was overrun on the 6th. Counter-attacks during the night could not roll back the Italian gains. The Austrian artillery had run out of shells, and other sectors on the Isonzo were so sparsely manned that they could only spare half a dozen battalions, nothing like enough to wrest back control of Sabotino. Boroević was startled by the speed of the Italian advance; his reserves could not reach Gorizia before 10 or 11 August – too late to save the city. Nevertheless, he would not hear of a withdrawal, so more counter-attacks were launched, in vain. By sunset on the 7th, the ground between Sabotino and Podgora had fallen. A single Croatian regiment stood between Cadorna and complete control of the Isonzo’s right bank. Shortly after midnight, Zeidler told BoroeviČ that the situation was untenable and ordered his men to fall back across the river. Only 5,000 reached the second line behind the city, where the triple peaks of Monte Santo, San Gabriele and San Marco form a barrier even more imposing than Sabotino and Podgora.

Two hours after Zeidler issued his fateful order, Capello reminded his divisional commanders that their task was still to establish ‘little bridgeheads wherever possible’ on the Isonzo. A commander who reported rumours that Gorizia stood empty, and recommended a vigorous thrust over the river, was told to investigate further. Naturally the commander shrank from sticking his neck out, and troops continued to cross the river in dribs and drabs. As often, the senior commanders’ lack of nerve was exposed by a plucky junior officer. Early on the 8th, as the last pockets of resistance on Podgora were being mopped up, a few platoons of the 28th Infantry (Pavia Brigade) gathered on the right bank of the Isonzo, opposite the city. The first Italians to get this far, they had discovered a tunnel under the flank of Podgora and made their way through it, towards the river. Machine-gun fire was incoming from a trench across the river, some 20 metres from the water’s edge. As the only intact bridge was under heavy Austrian fire, a young officer, Lieutenant Aurelio Baruzzi, got permission to wade across the Isonzo, carrying an Italian flag.