ELEVEN
In the wake of the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo, Italy's home front was no less demoralized than the armies at the front. Although Luigi Cadorna preferred to ignore domestic politics entirely, by the summer the situation had deteriorated so badly that even the High Command took notice. The bloodshed and deprivation of war, combined with Italy's perennial class warfare, had produced a volatile and discontented country. Germany's resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, although principally aimed at Great Britain, hurt the other Allies, too. Italy, which imported so many raw materials and foodstuffs, was vulnerable to commerce raiding, and suffered accordingly. By the summer, coal imports had dropped to half their prewar level, and soon even bread was becoming scarce. This serious decline in basic standards of living inevitably resulted in protests, and eventually riots. Northern Italian cities were shaken by major disturbances, often led by women. In the worst case, rioting broke out in Turin and soon got out of control; to restore order, the army brought in heavy weapons, including machine guns, artillery, and armored cars. By the time order returned to Turin, forty-one protesters lay dead, and hundreds more were injured.
Although some citizens profited greatly from the war-the "sharks" so detested by the majority of Italians-most were impoverished by the seemingly interminable war on the Isonzo. Even industrial workers, who gained substantially (they were exempt from the draft, and had seen their real wages rise 27 percent since 1913), were tired of war-induced shortages. For the peasants, who made up the bulk of Italy's population, and whose husbands and sons formed the mass of Cadorna's ill-used infantry, the war was a disaster. In the face of spi raling wartime inflation, their meager wages evaporated. It was especially bad for the families of soldiers, to whom the war brought hardship, tragedy, and hunger. It was therefore no wonder that by July 1917 even the moderate Socialist deputy Claudio Treves proclaimed, "Out of the trenches before next winter." It would prove a memorable phrase. Even the Vatican spoke out publicly against the war. Pope Benedict XV, worried at the fate of his "beloved Italy" under the rigors of total war, called on August 1 for all belligerents to lay down their arms in favor of a "just and lasting peace." Benedict XV wanted not victory but an end to what he termed the "useless struggle" destroying Europe.
Although he was a devout Catholic, Cadorna managed to ignore even this papal plea for peace. He would listen to none of it. I Instead of discontent on the home front, he saw subversion and treason. He demanded that the government put an end to the disturbances before they got out of hand and endangered the war effort. Cadorna blamed the politicians, of course, and called for Rome to change "an internal policy that was ruinous for the army's discipline and morale." He wanted the government to apply the same ruthlessness at home that he had used with shirkers and defeatists on the Isonzo. But the government, led by the ancient and moderate Paolo Boselli, would do nothing of the kind.
Still, Cadorna was sure he could remedy the army's problems.'- After the Tenth Battle, morale difficulties by no means disappeared. Many thousands of soldiers, aware of their chances of survival and angry at the civilians who sat out the war in comfort, simply wanted out. The number of troubling incidents was substantially on the rise. In July the Catanzaro Brigade, which had spilled much blood on the Isonzo, mutinied. Cadorna blamed the mutiny on socialists, defeatists, and a lack of discipline, and ordered it crushed brutally; the decimated brigade was soon returned to the line.3 Seeing that, thousands of fanti opted for desertion instead of rebellion. The army's desertion rate, just 650 soldiers per month in 1915, rose to 5,500 by midsummer 1917. There was little Cadorna thought to do except enforce ever harsher and more unbending discipline. Terror had kept the army in the field for more than two years, and Cadorna saw no reason to moderate his routine punishments.
In an attempt to shore up army morale and deliver a badly needed victory, Cadorna undertook a local offensive on the Tyrolean front just following the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo. On June 9 the 6th Army attacked Austrian positions around Mt. Ortigara, on the Asiago plateau, the rugged, mountainous border between Austria and Italy. The battle pitted the elites of both armies against each other: the crack Austrian III "Iron" Corps versus several divisions of highly trained Alpini. The two-week battle was vicious, fought on a front of little more than a mile, but ultimately inconclusive. Mt. Ortigara changed hands several times, but in the end both armies were pretty much where they had started on June 9. The cost, however, was frightful, even by Great War standards. The Austrian III Corps took 10,000 casualties, but the Italians suffered far more, at least 23,000. The all-Alpini 52nd Division was completely destroyed, losing almost 16,000 men on the mile-wide battlefield. The pointless offensive sacrificed thousands of Italy's best-trained troops; among thefanti, Ortigara became known as "the calvary of the green flames." Needless to say, the offensive hardly helped army morale.
That said, there were a few positive developments in the Italian Army during the summer of 1917. The most important of these involved the raising of special assault troops to lead attacks. In the spring, the High Command at Udine received word of special Austrian assault detachments. Following her German ally's lead, Austria's army experimented with Stunntruppen, elite companies of selected veteran soldiers. These young and fit volunteers were given more heavy weapons (machine guns, light mortars), improved tactical training, and better rations and pay. Their mission was to lead the way in attacks; their advanced tactics, heavy firepower, and superior training would enable them to overcome stiff resistance. They quickly became the corps d'elite of the Habsburg Army. Initial combat experience with these crack units in mid-1917 was very positive, and the program was expanded. By the end of 1917, every Austrian division was scheduled to have its own battalion of Stunntruppen.
Cadorna and his staff were impressed by what they heard about these Austrian assault units. Highly motivated, well trained units of brave volunteers seemed just what the increasingly demoralized Italian Army needed to lead it in battle. As the Austrian experience indicated, such elite companies were worth far more to an offensive than their small numbers suggested. They offered at least a partial solution to the army's morale problems. Therefore in July, Cadorna authorized the raising of a first, experimental unit, the 1st Assault Battalion (I reparto d'assalto). It was placed under Luigi Capello's 2nd Army, and selected its men from among the many young, ardent volunteers who came forward to serve in the new unit.
The reparto d'assalto was no larger than a conventional infantry battalion, but was much more powerful: it had twice the number of heavy machine guns, and six times the number of light machine guns, as a line unit; and it had many more light mortars, as well as a pair of light infantry guns to provide portable direct fire support. Each of the battalion's three assault companies was armed with eight machine guns and hundreds of grenades. The battalion commander, Major Giuseppe Alberto Bassi, trained his men to be recklessly, even fanatically, brave. The soldiers, soon known universally as the "daring ones" (arditi) exuded an aura of courage and violence. Bassi devised a distinct uniform for his elite troops, including special Alpine trousers and a black shirt, tie, and fez. The young soldiers all carried fighting knives (pugnali), too, a symbol of their willingness to fight hand to hand. Italy had its newest crack corps, the "black flames," to assist in its struggle against Austria. The arditi would not have long to wait to prove their reckless daring.
Cadorna decided to attempt another Isonzo offensive in mid-August. Despite the terrible losses suffered in May, the army continued to grow. The factories turned out weapons and munitions in record numbers, and the early call-up of the conscript class of 1898 gave the army the fresh blood it needed to bring its depleted regiments up to strength. These nineteen year-old ragazzi de '98 would see an early baptism of fire on the Bainsizza. During the summer Cadorna added six new infantry divisions, as well as dozens of heavy batteries and ample ammunition reserves, to his still-growing legions. The count was confident that the Austrians could not withstand another all-out blow. To crack Boroevic's defenses once and for all, in early August, Cadorna sent fifty-one divisions and 5,200 artillery pieces-three-quarters of the entire Italian Armyto the banks of the Isonzo.
There were alliance pressures on Cadorna, too. The spring and summer did not go well for the Allies. In mid-April, France attempted an enormous offensive against German forces along the Aisne River. The new chief of staff, Robert Nivelle, amassed 1,200,000 soldiers for this effort, which he promised repeatedly and publicly would be a war-winner. Yet the Chemin des Dames offensive enjoyed little success, and instead quickly stalled, ending in the stalemate and slaughter that had become commonplace on the Western front and the Isonzo. Nivelle's hollow assurances of victory lowered morale to unprecedented depths. French infantrymen, disgusted at the heavy casualties and ill treatment, revolted. The mutinies spread throughout the army; only rapid intervention by General Philippe Petain, the hero of Verdun, restored discipline and saved the army from complete dissolution.
The Russian front looked even worse for the Allies. The February revolution overthrew the Tsar and led to a provisional government under Alexander Kerensky. This new regime assured its worried Allies that it would continue the war faithfully. But the provisional government proved too weak and divided to keep the army at the front. Desertion and mutinies became commonplace as tired and hungry soldiers threw down their weapons in disgust. Russia attempted one last offensive in East Galicia in July. It was directed by Alexei Brusilov, who had nearly destroyed the Austrian Army the previous summer. The July push initially went well, forcing local Austrian withdrawals, but Russia was now too strained and divided to sustain a major offensive. Rapid German intervention kept Brusilov's armies at bay in East Galicia, and by August the Russians were in headlong retreat. Soon the Russian Army began to dissolve, leading the Bolsheviks under Lenin to attempt a coup. This first Bolshevik revolt failed, but within four months Lenin and his cohorts would succeed, taking Russia out of the war.
The only optimistic development for the Allies was the entry of the United States into the war on the Allied side on April 6. America's enormous economic might and virtually limitless manpower reserves guaranteed ultimate Allied victory, yet in the short term America's entry meant little. Certainly it would take many months for America to raise, equip, and dispatch an expeditionary force to tight in Europe, and it would be at least a year before an independent American army could take the field in France. Therefore the Allies were still on their own for many months to come. Hence the pressure on Cadorna to act was considerable. Exhausted Russia pleaded with him to launch an offensive on the Isonzo to distract the Austrians from Galicia. France, too, was hoping for a major Italian push to keep the pressure on the Central Powers. By August, Cadorna was ready to go on the offensive again.
The plan of attack, slated to begin on August 18, was simple. Its main goal was the seizure of the Bainsizza plateau, the last obstacle to a breakthrough north and east of Gorizia. Cadorna allowed his two army commanders, Capello and the Duke of Aosta, considerable latitude in their planning: He gave them no written orders, instead leaving the tactical and operational details up to them. The main role in the Eleventh Battle would be played by Capello's 2nd Army. He considered his most important mission to be the capture of the strategically indispensable Tolmein bridgehead, with its railhead. The secondary mission was overrunning the whole Bainsizza plateau and taking Mt. Santo and Mt. San Gabriele. To achieve this, Capello's heavily reinforced 2nd Army possessed six corps with twenty-six divisions, backed up by 2,070 guns (half of them heavy calibers, some of them in British and French batteries loaned to Italy for the offensive) and almost a thousand mortars. This awesome force included numerous crack battalions of Bersaglieri and Alpini (and the reparto d'assalto), and enough ammunition to guarantee a major breakthrough.
The Duke of Aosta's 3rd Army was assigned a secondary mission, as in the Tenth Battle. It was to support Capello's forces by drawing Austrian divisions away from the Bainsizza; naturally, it was to gain any ground on the Carso it could. The duke's Terza Annata was reinforced to include twenty divisions and 1,350 guns and 756 mortars, divided among six corps. This was not enough to reach Trieste, but it was surely sufficient to exhaust the half-dozen Austrian divisions on the Carso. Cadorna also had six more divisions in a special reserve, to be committed wherever he decided. In August 1917 the Italian Army suffered from grave morale and discipline problems, but by any standards the Eleventh Battle promised to be a hard tight. The army at Cadorna's disposal- 530,000 infantrymen (1,246,000 soldiers in all) on a thirty-mile front-was almost twice the size of the whole Italian Army in 1915, and nearly four times bigger than Cadorna's forces in the First Battle. The coming epic battle would be one of the mightiest offensives undertaken by any army during the Great War.
It was precisely this numerical imbalance that so worried Svetozar Boroevic and his staff at Adelsberg. The Isonzo Army had reached a strength of twenty divisions (fifteen in the line and five held in reserve) supported by 1,526 guns and howitzers. Including all available units and weapons, the Austrians on the Isonzo were outnumbered almost three-to-one in infantry and four-to-one in weight of shell. Worse, most Austrian divisions were somewhat short of men, and few had adequate ammunition reserves. After the Tenth Battle, three of Boroevic's most exhausted divisions (including the 7th and 16th, destroyed on the southern Carso) were sent to the Russian front, their places taken by three new arrivals from the East. Yet these reinforcing divisions were not in first-rate fighting trim, and none of them had any experience fighting the Italians; the coming battle would be their initiation to Cadorna's merciless methods. Boroevic also knew that he could expect no help from the High Command. Russia's Galician offensive in July had drained Austria's limited reserve pool, so there was nothing more to send to the Isonzo. Bosco would have to hold off the Italians with the forces he had, a daunting task.
By mid-August the Isonzo Army was sure a major Italian offensive was coming soon. Boroevic's intelligence staff, in fact, predicted an Italian push in late July, but it failed to arrive, giving the Austrians three more weeks to prepare. Despite Italian efforts at concealment and deception, it was obvious that the 2nd and 3rd Armies were gearing up for an attack. Austrian observers noted greater troop and rail traffic all along the front, as well as increased Italian overflights by reconnaissance aircraft. Austrian suspicions were confirmed by the confessions of numerous Italian deserters. Starting in early August, dozens of scaredfanti crossed the lines daily, in a desperate attempt to avoid the imminent bloodletting. These groups of deserters, sometimes whole units reaching the Austrian trenches, were sent to the rear, to safety with the order "each Maut- hausen"4 Examining deserters' accounts and other intelligence, Isonzo Army headquarters correctly anticipated an Italian attack on August 18.
There were other indicators, too. As the start of the offensive approached, Italian air raids grew larger and more daring. There were too few Austrian pursuit aircraft on the Isonzo to defeat the Italian air offensive. On several occasions Italian bombers attacked Austrian headquarters and supply sites, particularly on the Bainsizza plateau, sometimes with devastating results. On August 11 Italian aircraft struck an ammunition dump at Grapa, southeast of Tolmein. The raid destroyed the base, the main Austrian munitions site on the upper Isonzo, causing a huge explosion. The same day, a few miles to the south on the central Bainsizza, Italian aircraft bombed and strafed XXIV Corps headquarters, forcing General von Lukas and his staff to flee from Cepovan to Lokve. Austria attempted to retaliate. Emperor Karl, who regularly meddled in military affairs, this time permitted a large-scale air raid on Italian bases at Venice; he usually forbade any bombing that might endanger civilians.5 Thirty-eight Austrian bombers took off from bases in the Isonzo valley on August 14, with Emperor Karl's blessing, headed for Venice. Yet fate intervened as the squadrons were beaten and knocked off course by severe winds and unexpected rainstorms. Only eleven aircraft reached Venice, and two of them were shot down. The raid caused no appreciable damage to any Italian bases. In all, for Austria it seemed a bad omen for the impending battle.
The artillery preparation began early on August 18, four hours before sunrise. From Mrzli vrh to the Adriatic, 5,000 Italian guns, howitzers, and mortars cascaded tire on Austrian positions. The noise was deafening, the feeling awesome, as the earth shook all along the Isonzo. Both Cadorna and Boroevic clearly heard the explosions at their headquarters, a safe distance from the front lines. Thirty miles of Austrian entrenchments, carefully reconstructed since early June, were torn into ruin as heavy shells ripped through all but the deepest dugouts and positions. Communications and supplies were cut off by the barrage, so it was impossible for Boroevic's divisional and corps commanders to gain a coherent picture of what was happening to their units. As the tempo of the bombardment increased with first light, the plight of the Austrian infantry grew grimmer still. Pounded by hundreds of shells a minute, parched by the August sun, the doomed Frontkarnpfer could only hide in their trenches and wait for it to end, for the real battle to begin.
The lead Italian infantry did not leave their positions until late in the evening, after the shells had done their deadly work. The first wave was the 2nd Army's XXIV Corps, whose mission was crossing the Isonzo and unlocking the northern Bainsizza's defenses. Its commander was the veteran Lieutenant General Enrico Caviglia, an energetic and decisive leader. Its two divisions in the front line, the 47th and 60th, were tough, battle-hardened formations that knew the Isonzo and the Austrians well. Both divisions were backed up generously with artillery-an average of seventy guns per division, plus many more heavy guns and howitzers farther back-as well as engineers for crossing and bridging the fast-moving river. The XXIV Corps knew the sector well, with its steep river banks and numerous Austrian entrenchments on the hills overlooking the east side. But Caviglia had studied the northern Bainsizza rigorously, helped by the revelations of a Czech junior officer who defected to the Italians in early August. Caviglia and his staff knew how the Austrians were arrayed, where their defenses were, and how to defeat them. The diligent corps commander, an exceptional officer by Italian standards, ensured that his assault troops were well trained and prepared for battle. By the early hours of August 19, the XXIV Corps was ready.
The northern Bainsizza's defenders were no match for Caviglia's elite corps. The Isonzo's east bank and the steep hills behind it were the responsibility of Major General Karl Haas's 21st Rifle Division, a recent arrival on the Italian front. The 21st Division had had a bad war. This mostly Czech formation, recruited in western Bohemia, mobilized in July 1914 and was sent to the Serbian front. Through no fault of its own, the poorly trained division was mauled by experienced Serb regiments at the Battle of Valjevo in mid-August 1914. The defeat was a humiliation for Austria, causing a general retreat from Serb soil, and it gave the Allies the first victory of the Great War. Ever after, the 21st Division fought with this black mark on its reputation. The division kept fighting on the Serbian front for the rest of 1914-suffering 120 percent casualties by Christmas-and was then transferred to the East. Like many Austrian formations, the 21st absorbed terrible losses in the frozen Carpathians in early 1915, and again in Galicia in the summer of 1916. Because the Czechs had little desire to fight the Russians, morale sometimes plummeted to dangerously low levels, and desertion was an all too common problem. The battle-scarred Czech division was sent to the Isonzo during the summer of 1917 because Boroevic was desperate for troops, no matter their quality. The 21st, about a quarter under strength, was placed on the rugged northern end of the Bainsizza plateau, heretofore a quiet sector due to its steep riverbanks and lack of good roads. The Italian offensive of August 19 therefore came as a rude shock to the tired soldiers of the 21st Division.
Caviglia's two assault divisions crossed the fog-enshrouded Isonzo in assault boats between Loga and Descla, a front of three miles. On the southern flank, just above the Plava bridgehead, the 60th Division made slow progress against the Czech defenders, taking heavy casualties during the river crossing. The 47th Division achieved greater success upstream, quickly overrunning the Austrian defenses near the river's edge, particularly at the town of Canale. The 47th Division, with its two full brigades of Bersaglieri, secured the east bank by dawn. The "red flames" lived up to their hard-won reputation for audacity, attacking with their trademark elan and capturing several major Austrian positions and their defenders. By midmorning, the 47th's engineers had built six bridges across the Isonzo, and the victorious Bersaglieri were heading uphill into the heart of the Bainsizza plateau.
Major General Haas had little idea what was happening to his division. His telephone lines had been cut by Italian shelling, but he knew something ominous was developing, so he decided to act without any reliable intelligence. He sent his only reserve, the 28th Rifle Regiment, to the Isonzo, in the desperate hope of restoring the front line. The all-Czech 28th Rifles fought hard through the day in a doomed effort to keep the XXIV Corps at bay, but by the evening of August 19 the cause was lost. The 21st Division sustained such heavy losses so early that it stood no chance of re-forming and fighting again on the Bainsizza. Isolated companies of the 28th Rifles resisted through the night, until the early morning of August 20. In the end they were surrounded on all sides by Bersaglieri, and then annihilated. After just twenty-four hours, the 21st Rifle Division was no more, and the northern edge of the Bainsizza plateau was in Italian hands.
Yet Capello's offensive was not successful everywhere. Divisions to the north and south of Caviglia's victorious XXIV Corps encountered stiff Austrian resistance. Immediately upstream from the 47th Division, the 22nd Division had managed to secure the Isonzo's east bank, but only at a great cost. The sector was defended by just two undermanned and overstretched Hungarian militia battalions, but the river crossing proved trying. The first wave included troops of the 1st Assault Battalion. Major Bassi's intrepid reparto d'assalto went into battle for the first time and garnered a reputation for valor and efficiency. The arditi crossed the Isonzo successfully, capturing several Austrian trenches and 500 prisoners, but the rest of the 22nd Division had a hard fight. By midday on August 19, it was across the river securely, after taking heavy losses, but its march inland proved arduous.
Farther upstream, Capello's divisions fared worse. The 2nd Army's first objective was the Tolmein bridgehead, but the strong Austrian defenses there showed themselves to be as resilient as ever. The attacking Italian army corps, the XXVII, had been raised only in late July under Lieutenant General Vanzo, and had enjoyed little time to organize and prepare itself for battle. It had plenty of men and artillery, including 326 guns and 131 mortars, but it fought clumsily, and Vanzo showed himself to be an indecisive leader. The 19th Division assaulted the tiny Tolmein bridgehead, but won no ground. The division was stalled by accurate machine gun and artillery tire, suffering grave casualties while winning no noticeable gains.
The story was the same on the lower Bainsizza, where Pietro Badoglio's II Corps attempted to break out of the recently conquered Plava bridgehead and seize the summit of Mt. Santo. Just east of Hill 383, the 3rd Division tried to advance. This division, which fought impressively in May, went forward with its Udine Brigade on the left and the Florence Brigade on the right, exactly as at the outset of the Tenth Battle. This time the Italian attack ended in disaster. Determined Austrian militia companies of the 106th Division cut down repeated waves of fanti, and Badoglio's drive met with complete failure. The 3rd Division incurred crippling casualties; the neighboring Girgenti Brigade lost 2,000 soldiers on August 19 alone. It was a black day for the II Corps, a sad contrast with its celebrated success in May. Similarly, the 8th Division charged up the slopes of Mt. Santo at dawn in a determined and costly assault on the ruins at the peak, yet its Avellino and Forli brigades failed to reach the summit. East of Gorizia, Capello's divisions met equally stiff resistance. The weight of the VI Corps failed utterly to make any impression on the Austrians at the summit of Mt. San Gabriele, and the VIII Corps likewise stalled before Erwin Zeidler's tenacious 58th Division. Despite valiant efforts and a decisive numerical superiority, except on the northern Bainsizza, Capello's army made little progress on August 19.
On the morning of August 19, the Duke of Aosta's four army corps joined the battle. A dozen reinforced Italian divisions assaulted the Carso's defenses, supported generously by heavy artillery, including several efficient British batteries. Most of the 3rd Army's attacks were blunted by the strong Austrian defenses, but on the central Carso the Austrian line was soon in danger. The central sector, immediately west of the village of Selo, was defended by Major General Stanislaus von Puchalski's 12th Division, another recent arrival on the Isonzo. Up to mid-1917 this mostly Polish division had spent the entire war fighting the Russians. In general the West Galician 12th had performed competently, save for an embarrassing collapse during Alexei Brusilov's breakthrough in July 1916. The 12th Division never fully recovered from this defeat, and it arrived on the Italian front a year later short of trained officers and men. On the morning of August 19, the West Galicians were hit by two strong divisions of the XXIII Corps, and the 12th soon began to lose ground. It bravely tried to hold the front line, but the effort was hopeless; by midday the shellshocked division had retreated to its second defensive position. An afternoon counterattack to restore the line collapsed bloodily, wiped out by torrents of Italian artillery and machine gun fire. By evening the scattered remnants of the 12th Division had retreated to the third defensive position. Selo was lost. Austrian troops on the southern Carso were harassed by intense shelling by long-range heavy batteries. The bombardment caused considerable damage, including the destruction of the main coastal rail line, which ran from Trieste to the front. The barrage was assisted by British and Italian ships that fired through the day at numerous Austrian coastal targets, including Trieste. Austrian coast artillery returned fire but was unable to silence the Allied guns, either at sea or on land.
Boroevic was alarmed by the Italian success on the northern reaches of the Bainsizza plateau, but as August 19 came to a close, he was relatively optimistic. Except for the retreat of the 12th Division before Selo, his forces on the Carso had held their ground and inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers, as had his divisions northeast of Gorizia. Even the unenviable fate of the 21st Division did not seem particularly dramatic or decisive. Boroevic had little information about the poor condition of the 21st, and was unaware how critical the situation on the northern Bainsizza had become. He sent some of his precious and scarce reserves to the Bainsizza to reestablish the first line of defense, but not with great alarm.
Only on the morning of August 20 did Boroevic realize how serious the crisis had become. The battle's second day began with more Italian shelling, concentrated heavily on the northern Bainsizza. The hammer blows of hundreds of Italian guns and mortars finished off what little was left of the 21st Rifle Division. The crushing Italian barrage also prevented reserves from reaching the Czech riflemen, so the shaky Austrian front line collapsed on the upper plateau. Only a thin line of scattered and diverse battalions was left on the northern half of the Bainsizza, barely enough to hold on to the ramshackle second defensive line and certainly too little to overturn any Italian gains. Yet, for the moment these troops were enough to stop any Italian breakthrough. Capello, who was often so reckless in his expenditure of human life, at this moment chose to be cautious. Like Cadorna, the commander of the 2nd Army was sud denly overcome by caution, and decided to wait and consolidate his forces before launching an all-out drive on the Bainsizza. On August 20, when there was little to stop them, Capello's divisions advanced slowly and cautiously. Caviglia's XXIV Corps, which easily could have marched into the very center of the plateau, instead spent the day mopping up Austrian resistance and securing its flanks.
Capello's other corps achieved even less on August 20. At the strategic Tolmein bridgehead, XXVII Corps units again failed to advance, and the II Corps gained precious little ground on the central Bainsizza. Badoglio's divisions could not advance past Vodice's summit, and made no headway on Mt. Santo. Although all these failed efforts cost many Italian lives, August 20 was a lost day for Capello, and for Italy. The 2nd Army squandered one of the greatest opportunities of the whole Isonzo fighting, indeed of the entire war. Capello's fatal caution-a decision that Cadorna supported-deprived his army of a rapid and decisive victory, and gave the Austrians badly needed time to shore up their creaking defenses.
The Duke of Aosta threw away several opportunities on the Carso, too. August 20 was another day of harsh fighting on the Carso, begun with both Italian assaults and Austrian counterstrokes. The 3rd Army's renewal of its offensive won little ground, but it destroyed all of Boroevic's attempts to regain lost positions. A dawn counterattack by the tattered 12th Division ended catastrophically, disrupted and then annihilated by a simultaneous Italian attack. The last elements of Puchalski's 12th Division retreated in chaos, causing units of the neighboring 48th Division to withdraw, too. A counterattack by the 35th Division on the southern Carso was likewise cut short, crushed by heavy Italian coastal artillery and naval gunfire (including shelling by two Royal Navy monitors). Yet the 3rd Army took no advantage of the potentially decisive Austrian setbacks. The Duke of Aosta, though not as fatally cautious as Capello, still failed to convert these Austrian reverses into Italian gains. Nowhere did 3rd Army units charge into the growing gaps in the creaking Austrian lines; the Italians still had not learned the art of the counterattack, a well honed-and frequently decisive-Austrian tactic. Timidity, not audacity, again prevailed, with disastrous consequences for Italy and her army battling on the Isonzo.
Indeed, the Italian forces on the Isonzo were clearly in difficult circumstances. By the evening of August 20, Boroevic's beleaguered divisions had captured 5,600 Italian prisoners. These captives, taken from forty different brigades, were a shocking indication of the fragility of Italian morale: it was unknown for an attacking army to lose so many prisoners so early in an offensive. Even so, Boroevic was in no position to take advantage of his enemy's weakness. On the evening of August 20, his own predicament appeared precarious enough. He was already out of reserves, and he could not expect that Capello's cautiousness would last much longer. Boroevic and his staff knew that another major Italian drive was imminent, and there was nothing to stop it but raw courage.
Fortunately for Boroevic and for Austria, the Isonzo Army still displayed courage in abundance. Even against hopeless odds, platoons, companies, and even whole battalions fought to the last man, denying the Italians an easy victory. The dogged Austrian resistance continued undulled on August 21, when the 3rd Army attempted to break through on the Carso at several points. The main Italian drive was aimed at several hills on the southern plateau, the last natural obstacles between the 3rd Army and Trieste. The greatest of these was Mt. Hermada, "the unconquerable beast," a 1,060-foot-high rise overlooking the Adriatic, dominating the whole southern edge of the Carso and crisscrossed with Austrian entrenchments. So far, the 3rd Army had enjoyed no success here, but on August 21 the duke's divisions pushed hard up against the rocky, barren slopes of Hermada. Throughout the day, two Italian corps mixed it up with troops from three Habsburg divisions in vicious fighting; the battle raged between the first and third Austrian defensive positions, with neither army gaining a decisive advantage. The last remnants of the 12th Division were wiped out in this fight around Flondar, so the West Galicians' place in the line was taken by the Czech 9th Division after nightfall.
By then the Austrian main line of resistance had been restored, thanks to the efforts of the Transylvanian 35th Division. Its 63rd Regiment, a three-quarters Romanian unit, bore the brunt of the battle and helped turn the tide in the Austrians' favor.6 The 63rd had been punished badly by the Italians for three days, losing several positions around Hill 146 and taking notable casualties. Its companies were weak and scattered, many of them out of contact with regimental headquarters.
The 17th Company was one of these. It had been struck very hard for several days, virtually without rest, by Italian infantry and artillery. The company had lost two kavernen on Hill 146, where many of its soldiers were trapped. Worse, it was surrounded on three sides byfanti, completely out of contact with regimental headquarters, and down to just thirty men, less than a platoon. But the 17th Company was not ready to give up. Its young commander, First Lieutenant Friedrich Franck, was unwilling to surrender and remained determined to rescue his trapped soldiers.
Fritz Franek, though only twenty-six years old, was a very experienced officer and company commander. The son of a Viennese baker, Franek graduated from infantry cadet school in 1910 and joined the 63rd Regiment in 1913 as a junior lieutenant. He had fought with his regiment since the beginning of the war, and was gravely wounded in the first weeks of the 1914 Galician campaign, receiving a near-fatal bullet wound to the neck and mouth during the battle for Lemberg. After several months' convalescence, Franek returned to the 63rd, leading his company through the Carpathians, and was again wounded, taking a bullet to the head. Yet Franek miraculously survived, indeed recovered, and was back on the Russian front by the fall of 1915. He was laid low by typhus early in 1916, requiring another extended hospital stay. The battle-scarred lieutenant had garnered a reputation for heroism, demonstrated by the several decorations he had already received, and resumed command of his company, the 17th, in June 1916. Franek accompanied it to the Isonzo a year later, and the Eleventh Battle was his baptism of fire against the Italians. It began badly enough, with his company and his regiment overrun by Italian assaults, but Franek kept a cool head and saved his trapped men, as.well as the entire Flondar position, by acting on his own initiative and leading his depleted company against the entrenched Italians. The odds seemed hopeless, but the surprise attack caught the fanti off balance, and the panic-stricken Italians soon began to retreat before the thirty bayonet-wielding Romanians and their Viennese lieutenant. The daring counterstroke freed the 17th Company, and by the afternoon, after hard fighting with grenades and bayonets, Franek had retaken the two lost kavernen and liberated his trapped soldiers. By the time the Italians regrouped and reacted, the 63rd Regiment had restored its defenses on Hill 146. Flondar, the gateway to Hermada, was again securely in Austrian hands.?
Franek was not the only Austrian soldier to win the coveted Knight's Cross on the Carso that fateful day. Three miles to the north, in the VII Corps sector, the veteran 17th Division was barely holding on in the face of repeated Italian attacks. The Austrian defenses depended, as usual, on the control of several hills. The most important of these in the 17th Division's sector was Hill 378, near Fajti hrib. There, tired troops of the Hungarian 46th and 39th Regiments, which had lost so many men on the Carso for more than two years, fought to preserve the line. The peak of 378 was in the hands of the 4th Battalion of the 39th Regiment, led by Major Konstantin Popovici. The forty-five-year-old major, a Romanian from south Hungary like many of the men under him, had been a soldier most of his life. Popovici had served the Habsburgs for nearly thirty years, but his career had been rather ordinary; certainly there was nothing in his service record to suggest any greatness. Yet, on August 21 Konstantin Popovici led his beleaguered battalion with remarkable courage and tenacity. All day, Italian regiments of the XXV Corps assaulted Hill 378, the center point of the Italian offensive, and each time they were repulsed with heavy losses. Popovici ensured that his men stayed in their positions, even under the fiercest shelling, and he was always visible. Each failed Italian attack was met with a sudden Austrian counterstroke led by Popovici. By the end of the terrible day, the Italians were exhausted, and the shell-scarred Hill 378, draped with Italian corpses, still belonged to a much depleted and very weary battalion of the 39th Regiment. Popovici's leadership prevented a 3rd Army breakthrough on the upper Carso, a feat that entitled the major to wear the Order of Maria Theresia. Twice on the Carso on August 21, Boroevic's outnumbered troops yet again demonstrated the decisive impact of outstanding leadership and courage on even the most technology-dominated battlefields.
Capello's army was more successful north of Gorizia, showing that the Italians, too, could fight bravely and victoriously. On the morning of August 21, the Forli Brigade assaulted the Doi saddle, a 1,500-foot-high rocky bridge between Vodice and Mt. Santo. The defenders, a battalion each of Croats and Slovenes, fought hard, but were badly shaken by sustained Italian shelling and aerial bombardment. In the afternoon, after savage hand-to-hand fighting, the Austrians abandoned the Doi saddle, and the Italians controlled the land bridge between Vodice and Mt. Santo. The latter peak remained in Austrian hands, but the loss of the saddle severely undermined the Habsburg defenses. It was now only a matter of time before Capello's troops marshaled sufficient strength to overrun Mt. Santo and push past Vodice.
Capello ordered another major push on the upper Bainsizza for August 21. It promised to be the all-out drive he failed to execute twenty-four hours before. Caviglia's XXIV Corps, brought up to strength with two fresh brigades, would attack, assisted by Badoglio's II Corps, both backed up by considerable heavy artillery. After a thunderous early morning bombardment, the offensive got off to a slow start due to poor infantry-artillery cooperation. However, once coordination was restored by midmorning, the Italians advanced rapidly. The northern Bainsizza's defenders, mainly isolated companies of Austrian militia, as well as some scattered survivors of the 21st Rifle Division, soon gave way. Against so many Italian men and guns, there was no hope. The new Austrian defensive line was an extended mountain ridge a little more than a mile behind the Isonzo. The 2,200-foot-high forested ridge offered excellent natural defenses, but General Lukas's XXIV Corps had too few troops to hold it. Capello's reinforced divisions were now firmly across the Isonzo, and there was little to stop them. By midafternoon most of the Austrians had been forced from the ridge, blasted off by Italian guns and pushed aside by onrushing battalions of farm. As night approached, the northwest Bainsizza plateau belonged to the Italians, and the gap in the Austrian lines was nearly a mile wide.
Ironically, General Lukas was not overly concerned. He remained calm, unaware of how grave the crisis now was, and fully confident that the line could be restored. Boroevic had sent him a fresh reserve division from the Carso front, the 73rd, an experienced mountain formation. But, because of a shortage of trucks, the 73rd would not reach Lukas's front lines until the early hours of August 23. The mountain troops were marching to the plateau on tired feet, up the Bainsizza's narrow mountain paths. The journey took more than twenty-four hours. By then it would be too late to save the Bainsizza.
Capello also was rushing reserves to the northern Bainsizza. He knew that at last he had torn a gaping hole in the Austrian defenses, a success that demanded fresh troops to reinforce victory. Capello ordered his reserve, the XIV Corps, two divisions strong, into the gap. The two fresh divisions would exploit the 2nd Army's success and drive into the heart of the Bainsizza plateau. Significantly, Italy's automotive industry had supplied Capello with hundreds of Fiat trucks, enough to move the XIV Corps into the line far quicker than Austrian reserves could arrive to stop it. Hence, by the morning of August 22, the XIV Corps had taken its place in the fighting line, just north of Caviglia's XXIV Corps, and was ready to march on Cepovan, on the eastern edge of the Bainsizza plateau.
August 22, the decisive day of the Eleventh Battle, started with a very potent Italian bombardment of the Bainsizza plateau. The withering barrage sapped the strength of the hopelessly outnumbered Austrian defenders. When Capello's infantry advanced, after the artillery had completed its deadly work, it met only scattered resistance. Several surrounded Austrian battalions fought back with undulled determination, but most units either retreated or surrendered. Indeed, in many places the Italians encountered only trenches filled with hundreds of Austrian dead and wounded. The defenders of the central plateau, the 106th Militia Division, were exhausted from four days of hard fighting, and were unable to hold their wrecked positions. By the afternoon, Capello's forward detachments had overrun the entire Austrian front line, had captured thousands of prisoners, and were moving far inland, into the very center of the densely forested plateau.
By the evening of August 22, Boroevic knew he was facing his greatest crisis of the war, the first genuine Italian breakthrough on the Isonzo front. After twenty-six months of trying, Cadorna's forces had finally ripped a gaping hole in the Isonzo Army's main defenses. Even compared to the capture of Gorizia, the imminent loss of the Bainsizza was of far greater significance; the former, although a serious political defeat, in no way undermined Austria's strategic position, whereas the latter threatened to unravel Boroevic's entire front. Bosco had spent the fateful day pondering his choices. There seemed to be little to do but abandon the Bainsizza plateau and reestablish a defensible line about five miles to the east. Certainly Boroevic had too few troops available to attempt a major counterattack, the only way to retake the Bainsizza. Therefore a general retreat by the XXIV Corps seemed a regrettable but unavoidable reality. Boroevic informed Emperor Karl of this on the morning of August 22. By coincidence, the monarch was visiting the Isonzo front that day, and stopped at Boroevic's headquarters. In a two-hour confidential meeting, Boroevic informed the emperor that the strategic situation was deteriorating, and that a withdrawal was imminent. Karl then went to the front to see for himself. His party arrived on the Ternova plateau, just east of Mt. San Gabriele, at midday. From a safe distance, Karl observed the bloody battle raging around San Gabriele; in the afternoon, disturbed by what he had witnessed, the emperor returned to Ljubljana. In a second coincidence, the same battle was observed by King Vittorio Emanuele. The king, who liked to visit the front regularly to take pictures, observed the Ternova fighting from the west bank of the Isonzo, almost directly opposite Emperor Karl. For the last time in European history, opposing monarchs watched as their armies battled before them. Surely Vittorio Emanuele, whose regiments were advancing, had more reason to enjoy observing the battle than his Habsburg counterpart did.
By nightfall, as further indications of the debacle on the Bainsizza reached Adelsberg, Boroevic had no choice but to order a withdrawal from the plateau; to do otherwise would needlessly sacrifice what remained of Lukas's XXIV Corps and endanger the whole Isonzo front. Only by retreating to secure positions east of the Bainsizza could the Isonzo Army expect to stand firm. Caviglia's forward elements had taken the town of Bate on the central plateau, two miles east of the Isonzo, and it was evident that all attempts to resist Capello's onslaught had failed. One Austrian survivor recounted, "The human wall that had withstood ten battles has burst." Therefore, at 9 P.M. Boroevic met with his two senior staff officers, Lieutenant General Aurel Le Beau and Major General Anton Pitreich, and officially decided to abandon the Bainsizza plateau. The order did not reach field units until 9 A.M. on August 23, and the retreat was not scheduled to begin until late that evening, but the fateful decision had been made. Boroevic pleaded with the High Command for fresh divisions to hold the new line running along the Cepovan valley, but he could not expect reserves for several more days. Indeed, Paul von Hindenburg responded quickly to Arthur Arz von Straussenburg's plea to release troops from the Eastern front, permitting the Austrians to transfer four and a half divisions from East Galicia, but none of them would arrive in time to fight in the Eleventh Battle. The weak and tired Isonzo Army would have to stand and fight with what it had.
The night was quiet, but dawn on August 23 was met with a hail of artillery barrages, both Italian and Austrian. Capello's gunners shelled their usual targets, and their Habsburg counterparts took aim at Italian troop concentrations and artillery positions to protect the impending retreat. The Austrian bombardment came as a surprise, and was unexpectedly heavy. For once, Boroevic's artillery took a notable toll of Italian guns, as counterbattery fire struck Italian batteries around the Bainsizza, a revenge for all the shelling the defenders had endured. Italian and Allied heavy batteries awoke to deadly accurate Austrian salvos, a most unwelcome and unusual greeting to the day. One British battery, a recent arrival on the Isonzo, was hit by a large-caliber shell that killed a sergeant and two gunners. The sergeant was blown into pieces; one rested on top of the officers' mess, and another landed in a gun pit 450 feet away.8
While the Austrian artillery was hard at work, headquarters staffs prepared to execute the retreat, which promised to be a complex and trying operation. The nocturnal withdrawal appeared so risky that several corps and divisional commanders protested, claiming that Boroevic's plan of retreat was too ambitious. Indeed, even Boroevic himself had second thoughts. Capello's troops were sluggishly inactive during August 23; the exhausted Italian divisions used the day to rest and regroup. Boroevic therefore pondered whether the high point of the battle had already passed, and considered canceling the retreat. Cooler heads prevailed, though, and the great retreat began shortly after dark. Boroevic then received word that he had been promoted to army group commander: on the orders of the High Command, the very large Isonzo Army was divided into two separate armies, with Boroevic as the overall commander of Army Group Isonzo.9 It was poor compensation for the loss of the Bainsizza.
The retreat was performed cleverly, with troops left behind to cover the withdrawal and to deceive the Italians. Asa result, the complex operation proceeded smoothly, and the following morning Capello's regiments were astonished to discover that the XXIV Corps had retreated to the other side of the plateau. Austrian troops also abandoned the southernmost mountains on the plateau, including Vodice and Mt. Santo. With the Bainsizza now in Italian hands, there was no longer any reason to hold on to these famed peaks, once the very symbol of Austrian resistance. So on the morning of August 24, as the hot late summer sun rose over the Isonzo valley, Austrian infantry cautiously relinquished their battle-scarred entrenchments on Vodice and Mt. Santo.
Capello ordered his troops to immediately take the abandoned summits, particularly Mt. Santo, which the 2nd Army had been attempting to wrest from the Austrians since June 1915. The 8th Division hastily sent reinforcements to the mountaintop. The regiment closest to the peak and its ruined monastery, with forward trenches just forty yards from the summit, was called forward by its colonel, who leaped to his feet and led hisfanti to the highest point of the mountain, 2,250 feet above the Isonzo and Gorizia. The ecstatic colonel then shouted, "My soldiers, let us cry aloud in the face of the enemy. Long live Italy! Long live the king! Long live the infantry!" His fanri cheered in riotous approval, and word spread down the mountain, through the ranks of the 2nd Army-"Our tricolor is waving from the summit of Monte Santo!" The news was greeted everywhere with an enthusiasm not witnessed since the fall of Gorizia a year before. No one seemed to notice or care that the capture of Mt. Santo was really an anticlimax. News of the great event soon reached Cadorna, and then Rome, where Parliament was informed, for the second and final time, that Mt. Santo was now Italian soil. After so long, after so many unanticipated disappointments and costly failures, victory on the Isonzo now seemed to be within Italy's grasp.
Yet, Capello and Cadorna again failed to exploit their obvious success on the Bainsizza. Rather than send victorious divisions inland with all possible speed, they let them advance slowly, cautiously toward the new Austrian defensive positions. This ponderous pursuit gave Boroevic's exhausted and depleted units ample time to reestablish their main line of defense. The XXIV Corps was soon dug in on a fourteen-mile front, from Loga to Mt. San Gabriele.10 The entrenchments were shallow and unimpressive, but the weary survivors of the Bainsizza fight were just glad to be alive, and particularly relieved that they were now beyond the range of Capello's heavy guns. The fourteen-mile Austrian line was defended by only fifty-two battalions, many of them at less than half strengthfar too few troops to hold the line against a major Italian assault. But that offensive never came.
Instead, Cadorna decided that he would wrest Mt. San Gabriele from the Austrians; the cautious count felt that an all-out drive for victory on the central Isonzo would inflict terrible losses on his armies and push their already fragile morale past the breaking point. Therefore San Gabriele was the Italian Army's new objective. In a perverse way, it was the fight for Monte Santo all over again. Capturing "Holy Mountain" had in fact decided nothing; the battle just shifted to Mt. San Gabriele, the second of the Tre Sant, less than two miles southeast of the ruined monastery. The steep-sloped San Gabriele was not one mountain but two: the summit, 646 (2,130 ft), and a lower peak, 526 or Veliki hrib (1,730 ft), immediately to the west. The Austrians held both peaks and were especially well entrenched at the summit. San Gabriele was the last significant mountain overlooking Gorizia that still belonged to the Isonzo Army. It promised to be a fierce struggle, with Cadorna as determined to take it as Boroevic was to keep it out of Italian hands. Capello, however, was so confident of a quick victory that he brought a mounted cavalry division and three bicycle battalions to the front to exploit his imminently anticipated breakthrough on San Gabriele. The horsemen and bicyclists still had long to wait.
The first major Italian assault on San Gabriele came on August 24. The Palermo Brigade was sent up the west face of the mountain all day, but met with no success. It was not for want of bravery: the fanti of the 67th and 68th Regiments charged the positions of the 9th Jagers twelve times in twelve hours, each assault being repulsed with heavy casualties. Again the Schwarzlose machine gun, the backbone of the Austrian defense, won the battle. The daylong effort was a bitter taste of the enormous struggle for San Gabriele that was to come.
The Austrian troops charged with holding on to the mountain were some of the best soldiers available in the Habsburg realm. The 18th Brigade included the Alpine German 9th Jager Battalion, recruited in north Styria, and the three-battalion-strong 87th Regiment, a Slovene outfit from south Styria. Both were crack veteran units with an excellent fighting record against the Italians, their "hereditary enemy." The German and Slovene Frontkarnpfer were prepared to defend San Gabriele-which they called "The Inferno"-to the last man. The brigade's commander, Colonel Vladimir Laxa, was likewise a seasoned campaigner. The forty-seven-year-old Croatian officer had extensive experience in both staff and line positions, and was an exemplary officer in all respects. His mission was the most important on the whole Isonzo front as the Eleventh Battle entered its second phase. The loss of San Gabriele would force a withdrawal off the Ternova plateau, and probably a general retreat eastward, away from the Isonzo.
Capello's 11th Division fought hard the next day, August 25, and achieved some minor gains on San Gabriele's west face, winning a few trench lines on the lower peak. Still, the mountain remained securely in Austrian hands. Capello launched a major coordinated effort on August 26, a three-pronged attack on Laxa's positions, generously backed up by hundreds of guns and mortars. The 11th Division again charged up San Gabriele's west and south faces, and the 8th Division attacked from the north, from Mt. Santo. These conquerors of the "Holy Mountain" assaulted San Gabriele via the Doi saddle, the 1,500-foot-high land bridge running parallel to the Isonzo, which extended from Vodice to Mt. San Gabriele. The saddle was the easiest avenue of approach for the Italians, and it was stoutly defended by troops of the 87th Regiment. The Italian advance was eventually cut short with notable losses, but nevertheless it seized some Austrian positions. The bitter fighting raged into the late evening, a merciless brawl among the quarter-mile-high rocks, illuminated only by shell explosions and the moonlight.
Thefanti battling and dying around San Gabriele on the night of August 26 received an unexpected morale boost when a military band situated at the summit of Mt. Santo began playing martial and patriotic tunes. The music was clearly audible, and it brought cheers from thousands of Italian troops in the area. The mystified Austrians tried to stop the battle's musical accompaniment by shelling the ruins at the peak of Mt. Santo, but they could not silence the Italian concert.
The oddly placed band was directed by none other than Arturo Toscanini, the world-famous conductor. The fifty-year-old Toscanini was an ardent patriot and irredentist, a passionate believer in Italy's cause. He had been raised on romantic nationalist and martial tales told by his father, who had fought with Garibaldi in the wars for unification and against the Austrians in both 1859 and 1866. From the war's beginning, the renowned musician had been a vocal champion of the war effort. He traveled to the Isonzo in August 1917, ostensibly to visit his nineteen-year-old son Walter, a junior artillery officer serving with the 2nd Army. While near the front, he persuaded General Capello to permit him to form a band to play for the soldiers. Capello liked the idea, and soon Toscanini was leading his handpicked band in open-air concerts for the troops of the 2nd Army. On one occasion, Walter Toscanini heard the band playing and was sure his father was conducting it, but could not believe it. Upon hearing that Mt. Santo had at last been taken, the patriotic Toscanini demanded the right to take his band to the summit and play for the victorious soldiers of the 8th Division. On the afternoon of August 26, the conductor and his musicians, carrying their instruments, struggled up the 2,250-foot-high mountain while the 8th Division tried to fight its way to San Gabriele across the Doi saddle. By the evening Toscanini's band was in place at the summit, beside the ruins of Mt. Santo's monastery, in the open, protected only by a rock. As the (anti of the 8th Division fought less than a mile to the southeast, Toscanini's band played patriotic tunes loudly and clearly. After each piece the conductor shouted "Viva 1'Italia!" The troops loved it and responded with euphoric shouts of approval, so the band kept playing long into the night. Austrian artillery tried to silence Toscanini's band, and the summit was struck by numerous shells. Austrian snipers across the valley took aim, too. Yet Toscanini refused to take cover, and although the bass drum was ripped by shrapnel, no musicians were injured. His dramatic concert was widely hailed in the army and throughout Italy, and Capello personally awarded Toscanini the Silver Medal for Bravery for his conducting in the field.
Unfortunately for Capello, enthusiasm was not enough, and the Italian assaults on San Gabriele continued without success. On August 27, the mountain was shelled relentlessly through the morning, as the firepower of nearly a thousand guns and mortars blasted Laxa's entrenched troops; Cadorna in fact considered the artillery preparation on San Gabriele to be the greatest of the entire war. Yet the noon-hour infantry attack that followed the barrage faltered in the face of accurate and sustained Austrian machine gun and rifle fire. Successive waves offanti were cut down by the staccato fire while trying to make their way up the steep and rocky slopes, now blasted completely barren by all the shelling. Word quickly spread among Capello's troops that Gabriele was "worse than Santo" Although the Italian bombardments invariably exacted a high price among Laxa's Styrian defenders, in every case just enough troops remained alive to man the machine guns and light mortars that formed the basis of the Austrian defense.
A further Italian effort on August 28 met a similar fate, despite the tons of high explosives dropped on the mountain to clear the way for the infantry. The next morning, Capello added several brigades to the assault force, regiments of fresh and well rested infantry. But these units similarly failed to advance more than a few hundred feet up the mountain. By the evening of August 29, when Cadorna called a temporary halt to the offensive after four days of heavy fighting, the 2nd Army had succeeded in capturing a single Austrian trench line on 526, the lower peak. Otherwise, Laxa's defenses remained intact.
By the end of August, even smaller Italian attacks on the eastern edge of the Bainsizza plateau were meeting with scant success. Austrian tenacity had returned after initial setbacks on the Bainsizza, and many units continued to resist fiercely, even against daunting odds. In the countless skirmishes that smoldered all along the Isonzo in the waning days of the Eleventh Battle, it was the willingness of junior soldiers to fight on that weighed decisively in Austria's favor. On the morning of August 27, an Italian assault on Hill 830 on the Bainsizza threatened to break through the still-shaky Austrian defenses. The only unit available to plug the gap, a company of the 4th Bosnian Jager Battalion, did what Austrian units were supposed to do-it counterattacked. Although the odds looked hopeless, the veteran 4th Bosnian Jagers were no ordinary unit. The battalion had arrived on the Isonzo front only the day before, and the 4th Company was soon hit hard by constant Italian shelling, losing many soldiers, including its commander. Yet a young corporal took the initiative and wrested Hill 830 from the Italians.
Corporal Rustan Kapetanovic, though only twenty-one years old, had been at the front for nearly two years and had twice won the Silver Medal for Bravery; the native of northwestern Bosnia had in fact been recently appointed a probationary officer cadet in recognition of his prowess. When Corporal Kapetanovic saw his company commander fall wounded on the hillside, he immediately took charge of not just his own platoon but the entire company, leading its Bosniaken in a headlong rush into the advancing Italians, right through an artillery and mortar barrage. Confronted with an unexpected counterattack, the fanti retreated, abandoning their gains. Although many Bosnian soldiers had fallen in the counterattack, it was a resounding success, illustrating yet again how decisive a role individual initiative still had to play on the machinedominated battlefield.I I
The Austrian victory on San Gabriele and elsewhere was the triumph of men over machines. Again Boroevic's infantry had withstood incredible hardships; veteran Frontkanipfer had refused to give in, even when shelled ceaselessly by nearly a thousand heavy guns and mortars. High morale and fighting spirit were far more reliable in the defense than in the attack, and the Austrian soldiers' martial qualities and hatred of the Italians decided the struggle for San Gabriele. As Field Marshal Archduke Eugen, commander of the Southwestern front, observed of the 18th Brigade, "The heroic spirit of such troops is the surest guarantee of victory." Although Laxa's brigade was massively outnumbered, short of food, water, and ammunition, and unable to rest, it emerged triumphant, at a cost of three-quarters of its men. Colonel Laxa was instrumental in his troops' success: he unfailingly stayed with his men and was frequently in the front lines, issuing orders.'' As the Italians had learned so many times before on the Isonzo, it was supremely difficult to evict determined Austrian infantry from well constructed mountain positions. Nowhere did Cadorna's armies learn this lesson more painfully than on the slopes of Mt. San Gabriele in late August 1917.
Indeed, Boroevic was so buoyed by his army's success at San Gabriele that he ordered a large-scale counterattack on the southern Carso. He remained concerned that the Duke of Aosta's right flank was dangerously close to Mt. Hermada, the last natural obstacle before Trieste. Therefore the XXIII Corps attacked Italian positions west of Hermada on the morning of September 4. The infantry assault was preceded by a craftily prepared and executed predawn artillery barrage: a brief, heavy bombardment, then a ten-minute pause to deceive the Italians, followed by a devastating half-hour "annihilation barrage." When the riflemen of the 28th and 35th Divisions went over the top at 5:30 A.M., they encountered little resistance; in most places the shell-shocked fanti, stunned by the surprise attack, proved only too willing to surrender. Within an hour, the XXIII Corps had retaken virtually all the positions it had lost in the Eleventh Battle and had captured 6,700 Italian officers and men, most of a division. It was a humiliating defeat for the 3rd Army, a startling indication of how fragile Italian morale had become.
That said, on the same morning Capello's infantry demonstrated their tenacity and courage on the slopes of San Gabriele. The Italians launched their own surprise attack at dawn on September 4, the beginning of a clear and bright day, as several fresh brigades fought their way to the summit of San Gabriele, now known to allfanti as it monte del inorte, "the mountain of death." This renewed offensive brought unexpected results. The Italian assault, spearheaded by Major Bassi's celebrated reparto d'assalto, quickly overran several Austrian trench lines. San Gabriele's defenders were no longer Laxa's elite mountaineers, but a brigade of the 106th Militia Division. The 106th, destroyed on the Bainsizza earlier in the Eleventh Battle, had been taken out of the line and given drafts of recruits to bring its broken regiments up to fighting strength. Two of its militia regiments, the 6th and 31st, relieved Laxa's tired battalions on San Gabriele. However, these two regiments were at less than half strength-they mustered only 2,500 rifles between them-and were unacquainted with the mountain; indeed, they arrived at San Gabriele only hours before Capello's offensive restarted.
The inexperienced and outnumbered polyglot regiments of German, Czech, and Polish militiamen soon collapsed when attacked by vigorously led Italian infantry. Bassi's hand-picked arditi, fresh from their triumph on the Bainsizza, led the way, seizing 546, the lower peak, and then charging toward the summit. By late morning, Capello's infantry had taken 646, too, and captured more than a thousand Austrian defenders. San Gabriele now belonged to the 2nd Army.
The only nearby Austrian reserve, the Czech 25th Militia Regiment, was hastily dispatched to the summit, where it executed a sudden counterattack. The Austrian drive unexpectedly retook the summit, 646, by noon, but was unable to push the Italians down the mountain. A bitter stalemate resulted, with the Austrians entrenched around the summit and the Italians dug in immediately to the west. The 106th Division's last fresh troops, the Polish 32nd Militia Regiment, were fed into the vicious fight around the summit on the morning of September 5, and Capello committed all the fresh regiments he had to the battle. Each side was supported by fearsome amounts of heavy artillery, which paralyzed movement near the peak. The cost was frightful as the forces dug in around the summit were bled white by the carnage. Neither army was strong enough to push the other back, but both armies had enough firepower to inflict grievous casualties. On September 5, Boroevic reported to the High Command that due to heavy losses, Mt. San Gabriele probably could not be held much longer.
Nevertheless, Boroevic never gave the order to retreat from the peak, and his regiments continued to fight hard against Capello's entrenched infantry. The battle raged through September 6 and 7 as each army tried to keep constant pressure on the other. The fighting was always at close quarters, and in many areas the Austrians and Italians were no more than thirty feet apart, well within grenade-throwing range. The opposing entrenchments were so close together that one night an Austrian soldier accidentally brought his battalion's mail delivery to the neighboring Italian positions. As casualties mounted, both armies-especially Capello's 2nd-sent an endless stream of reinforcements up San Gabriele. "The Butcher" was determined to take the mountain, so he sent regiment after regiment of fresh troops into the cauldron. Few of the fanti sent up the mountain would ever return. Regardless, the vicious combat resolved nothing, and both armies remained unshakably entrenched around the summit of it monte del morte, which had more than lived up to its evil name.
Frustrated by his infantry's lack of progress, Capello ordered his mighty artillery to blast the summit of San Gabriele away. Through September 8, 9, and 10, the 2nd Army's guns fired nonstop at Mt. San Gabriele, reducing most of the Austrian positions to shambles. In three days, 45,000 Italian shells struck the summit, killing and wounding hundreds of soldiers. In the process, the peak of "the Inferno" was reduced by some thirty feet. Still, the battered Frontkampfer would not budge. On the morning of September 11, the Foggia and Girgenti Brigades charged the Austrian trenches surrounding the summit and encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance. After halting this Italian attack, the defending 106th Militia Division was finally replaced on San Gabriele; a week of battle had reduced it to only a thousand infantrymen, and its trenches were taken over by the 14th Infantry Regiment, first-rate fighters from Upper Austria.
That night two reinforced companies of the elite 14th Regiment, efficiently backed up by a whole brigade of Honved artillery, assaulted the Italian trenches on the exposed northwest slope of San Gabriele, facing Mt. Santo. The blow took the exhausted Italians by surprise, and by dawn the 14th had captured more than 600 prisoners and retaken nearly the whole mountaintop, pushing the fanti far from the summit. All the Italian gains of the past week had been overturned. Capello responded with an attack of his own, but it was too late. The Foggia and Girgenti Brigades advanced up the slopes, now littered with uncounted rotting corpses, but made scant progress. One last try on September 13 similarly failed to win back the lost positions, and Mt. San Gabriele remained securely occupied by the 14th Regiment. Capello's troops were worn out; between September 4 and 14, his lead division, the 11th, alone lost 10,000fanti. Both armies were far too exhausted to keep fighting, and to everyone's relief the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo was officially declared ended.
Boroevic and Cadorna each proclaimed the Eleventh Battle a victory. It had been the largest and bloodiest Isonzo battle to date, and both armies were eager to portray their performance in a favorable light. The Austrians pointed not to the loss of the Bainsizza, but to their epic stand on Monte San Gabriele. After suffering an admitted defeat on the plateau, the Isonzo Army redeemed itself by winning a strategic victory at San Gabriele. The new Austrian defenses on the Isonzo front had proven strong, and the Italians were hardly closer to Trieste than before the Eleventh Battle. For their part, the Italians naturally celebrated the capture of the Bainsizza, an advance of six miles on an eleven-mile front. By Great War standards, this was indeed a noteworthy gain, precisely the kind of victory that had eluded Italy for more than two years.
Still, Cadorna and his tired armies were nowhere near accomplishing their goals of evicting the Austrians from the Isonzo valley and conquering Trieste. After twenty-seven months and eleven battles of the Isonzo, the 3rd Army had advanced less than seven miles on the Carso-only one-third of the way to Trieste. Cadorna's frightful strategy of attrition was winning, in a sense, but at such a slow pace and at such a high cost that ultimate victory seemed impossibly remote. Worse, Cadorna and Capello had again squandered a strategic and decisive victory by exercising caution at the precise moment when audacity was called for. The Italian generals' fatal operational timidity deprived Italy of a war-winning opportunity on the Isonzo, and not for the first time.
And the shocking cost of the Eleventh Battle far outstripped whatever had been gained by either side. In less than four weeks, the armies on the Isonzo together lost 300,000 soldiers. Italy conceded a loss of 166,000 grigioverdi between August 18 and September 13, including 40,000 dead, 108,000 wounded and 18,000 missing. The cost of Cadorna's "victory" was 25 percent greater than Nivelle's disaster on the Aisne in April, and this was according to official Italian figures! No less, by the end of the Eleventh Battle the morale of the much abused fantaccino had clearly descended to new depths. Even so, Austria had no cause to rejoice. Boroevic's losses came to 110,000, among them roughly 15,000 dead, 45,000 maimed, 30,000 missing, and 20,000 seriously ill. Most alarmingly, nearly 30,000 of the Isonzo Army's soldiers-three whole divisions-were in Italian captivity, a disturbing sign that Austria's morale, too, was dangerously low. Hardly less disturbing were the equipment losses the Austrians suffered, including more than a third of the Isonzo Army's artillery, either destroyed or captured by the Italians. Boroevic's multinational army had again withstood an enormous Italian blow, indeed one of the mightiest offensives of the Great War.13 However, the staying power of the Austrian Army was clearly in doubt. The Eleventh Battle had nearly defeated Boroevic's forces, and another full-fledged Italian blow would surely shatter them entirely. As autumn approached, the decisive question, then, was when Cadorna would again unleash a major offensive on the Isonzo. Without doubt, the Twelfth Battle promised to decide the fate of the entire Isonzo campaign.