The relationship between military offensive and domestic protest that characterized the month of July in Russia found a parallel in Italy in the following month. On 17 August Cadorna launched an assault on the Carso that had been planned since May, and which has become known as the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo. The objective was the plateau of Ternova to be reached via the Bainsizza plateau. If successful, the Carso would fall as would the entire Julia front. But this east-south trajectory is not what transpired. On 2 June Capello, hero of the Battle of Gorizia and now commander of the 2nd Army, presented an updated draft which contained some apparently innocuous ‘secondary’ manoeuvres further north from Aiba and Doblar. These were approved by Cadorna. However, these objectives had an anything but subordinate ring to them. The offensive had moved so far north that it now included actions against the Mrzli and Monte Rosso; the latter formed part of Monte Nero. And since the Duke of Aosta had also received approval to extend the 3rd Army’s task from one of support to a full-scale offensive ranging from the Stol- Trstely to the Hermada, virtually the whole of the Isonzo front from north to south was now included in the attack.
The 2nd Army opened artillery fire from Tolmino to Mount San Gabriele at 16.0 on 17 August and the 3rd Army began on the Carso the following day. At dawn on 19 August Italian troops went over the top. It was Capello’s northern initiative which collapsed first. Also futile were the offensives against Mount Santo and those effected on the Carso. Some success was achieved with the XXIV army corps on Bainsizza under the command of General Enrico Caviglia. This penetration, which benefited from the element of surprise, continued on 20 August. But it very quickly met with lack of water and reserves. Even so, on 21 August the advance proceeded and Auzza and the Vrh basin fell into Italian hands, as did the Kuk (not the one captured in the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo) later on that same day. Having taken stock of the situation, Cadorna ordered activity to be suspended on the Carso and for materials and men to be transferred to the Bainsizza. The Jelenik fell to Italian troops who were now moving towards the Chiapovano valley. Fieldmarshal Svetozar Boroevic von Bojna, commander of Austro-Hungarian forces on the Isonzo, wanted to retreat to a new line from the Lom di Tolmino to Mount San Gabriele via the eastern margin of the Chiapavano valley and the northern margin of Ternova. Yet things were not as bad as they at first sight appeared to be. By 23 August the Italian push had waned due to lack of food and water and to the inability of Italian troops to move artillery forward on tortuous terrain. Aosta’s inactivity on the Carso also meant that Boroevic could now safely transfer his reserves to the Bainsizza. His men began to withdraw in an orderly manner beginning 24 August. Italian troops then moved into the 10 km gap left by the retreat. One of the enemy strongholds left vacant during the retreat was Mount Santo which the Italians duly occupied. On 26 August Cadorna decided that since the 2nd Army’s attack had waned, attention should be focused on the Carso. That same day Italian troops in the forward positions noted stiffening resistance from the Lom to Mount San Gabriele. By 29 August the Austro-Hungarians knew that a rout had been avoided and that the Bainsizza plateau, despite Italian penetration, remained an important point of connection between the high and low Isonzo.
The Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo was the most bloody of the entire Italian campaign. Approximately 19,000 men died, while the majority of the over 35,000 MIAs were also counted as dead. Just over 89,000 men were injured, of whom about 10 per cent later died of their wounds. The Austro-Hungarians lost 85,000 men in battle and 28,000 through illness. Figures for Italian illnesses are not known. Penetration on the Bainsizza and the occupation of Mount Santo made no strategic difference. The bridgehead at Tolmino and the bulwarks of Mount San Gabriele and Mount Hermada were still well and truly in Austro-Hungarian hands. Despite further operations in September the Italian offensive was over and victory had not been achieved (Pieropan, 1968: Chs 42 and 43; Rocca, 1985: 239-44; Isnenghi and Rochat, 2000: 202-5; Schindler, 2001: Ch. 11).
Mussolini looked to Cadorna’s latest offensive even more than he had to Brusilov’s in order to restore national cohesion and a sense of direction to the war. He suggested that ‘the Italians no longer look towards the Vatican from where there came a false word, but towards the Carso, solemn and tragic, from where, with the thunder of thousands and thousands of guns, the certainty of our victory reaches us’ (OO, IX: 128-9). But the Papal note was nothing compared to the wave of popular hostility to the war that engulfed Turin at the time. Starting off as a women’s protest against the shortage of bread on 22 August the agitation quickly spread to other sectors of the Turin working class. Paolo Spriano has shown that Turin workers, male and female, were under the enormous influence of events in Russia. This was confirmed during the visit of a Russian reformist delegation which aimed to promote the continuance of the war. On arriving in Turin on 5 August the visitors were greeted with the unexpected cry of ‘Long live Lenin!’ On returning to the city on 13 August, following their tour of other major centres, the delegation was met with a 40,000 strong crowd which shouted: ‘Long live the Russian Revolution. Long live Lenin!’ (Spriano, 1960: 225-8). Thus long before the bread crisis Turin workers were geared up for a fight against the war. Demands for bread merely provided a catalyst for a much deeper anti-war and revolutionary sentiment. Indeed, when bread was promised to protesters on 22 August it was rejected and the protest gathered pace into a full-scale anti-war general strike with street mobilizations, barricades and consequent State repression (Spriano, 1960: Chs 9 and 10 and esp. p. 236). By the time all was calm again on 26 August, around 50 protesters were dead and another 200 injured. About 1,000 were under investigation while 300 or so were sent to the front. Around ten law-enforcement agents were also killed (Spriano, 1960: 255-6).
Faced with the starkest challenge to national cohesion of the war so far, Mussolini grasped at the broken reed of Cadorna’s offensive: ‘It is sad, infinitely sad, that in Italy, while the army, the salt of the nation, fights and wins, in the back lines the parasites attempt to render vain the sacrifice of blood.’ Against the unmentioned insurrection Mussolini counterposed the capture of Mount Santo. Like the press in general, he falsely presented the occupation of that mountain as the outcome of an Italian assault: his point was that ‘faced with this superb proof [of Italian genius], defeatists are in a state of desperation. The victory of Italy is their ignominious end. They promised to celebrate their saturnalia on the corpse of the Nation. The Austrian defeat is their defeat. They try to impede it. It is complicity with the enemy’ (OO, IX: 138-40). On 28 August Mussolini returned in more detail to the causes of the Turin protest, though he focused on the bread shortage rather than on the anti-war sentiment which really lay behind the protest. He observed that there was no shortage of grain in Italy and that the lack of bread was down to bureaucratic inefficiency (OO, IX: 143-5). This was true, at least to a point. Bread and flour distribution was often carried out using 1911 census figures. Uncoordinated organization allowed misunderstandings between civilian and military authorities and emergency situations were created where they need not have occurred (Procacci, Gv., 1990/91: 163; Dentoni, 1995: 31-51). At any rate, Mussolini claimed that inevitable deficiencies should not be allowed to assume ‘the aura of gestures of complicity with the sabotaging manoeuvres of the internal enemies of Italy’ (OO, IX: 143-5). He had therefore drawn a picture of Italy in August that differed from that of Russia in July. In substance, he was claiming that a successful offensive had redeemed an internal upheaval. But that he was less convinced of this than he would have his readers believe is witnessed by his response to the resulting pressure of both the offensive and the Turin insurrection on national cohesion and soldier morale. On 30 August he stated that the millions of lire confiscated from German subjects should still go to the soldiers’ families, but with one important addition: ‘Land to the peasants!’ (OO, IX: 149-51).