TWELVE
As soon as the Eleventh Battle ended, Luigi Cadorna was eager to unleash another offensive against Svetozar Boroevic's weakened army. However, several significant factors could not be overlooked. In the first place, Cadorna felt that another push would have to come soon, in the next month: he believed that the imminent arrival of the harsh Alpine winter would prevent any offensive after mid-October. Therefore his armies would have to advance again in less than a month, and that looked unlikely on several grounds.
Second, he estimated that seizing Hermada and Mt. San Gabriele, the last significant natural obstacles in front of his armies, would cost not less than 150,000 casualties and two million heavy artillery shells. Even to Cadorna these were steep figures. So soon after the bloodletting on the Bainsizza, Cadorna knew he could not put his fanti to such a severe test; their morale was dangerously close to the breaking point already. Since May, the Italian Army had lost 720,000 soldiers, including those incapacitated by illness, and even Italy's ample manpower reserves no longer seemed limitless. The more than 300,000 battle casualties from the Tenth and Eleventh Battles still had not been fully made good. One more major offensive on the Isonzo in 1917 promised to cost more than Italy could afford in men, in materiel, and in spirit.
Cadoma might have been able to achieve victory with help from the Allies, but he knew that he could expect little assistance from Britain and France. Haig's divisions were bogged down in a costly and ultimately inconclusive fight in Flanders, the ill-starred Passchendaele offensive, and France's weary poilus, still embittered by Nivelle's springtime debacle, were in no condition to attempt another major offensive on their own soil, much lesson the Isonzo. The Allies might have offered Cadorna more heavy artillery to use on the Isonzo, but even that seemed unlikely in mid-September.
On September 11, as the Eleventh Battle drew to a close, Cadorna received two important British officials at his Udine headquarters: Lord Derby, minister of war, and Major General Frederick Maurice, director of military operations. They came to the Isonzo front to survey the possibilities for major British involvement there. Lloyd George was ever eager to divert Britain's armies from the futile slaughter of the Western front, but he had little confidence in Cadorna's abilities. This sentiment was reinforced by the Udine visit. Derby and Maurice returned to London unimpressed, feeling that Cadorna could promise few results, whether or not he received substantial numbers of British men and guns; they recommended only the bare minimum of British assistance to Italy, and Lloyd George's scheme of a major Allied front on the Isonzo died, stillborn. The British made vague promises of dispatching 160 heavy guns to Cadorna, leaving the Piedmontese count disappointed and angry. He was now even more convinced that another offensive against the Austrians in 1917 would be a mistake.
Therefore, on September 18 he ordered Luigi Capello's 2nd Army and the Duke of Aosta's 3rd to suspend all offensive planning and prepare for the defense. With winter approaching, the Italian Army began digging in and readying to wait out the long, cold months ahead, holding on to its hard-won positions on the Isonzo, just as it had for the past two war winters. From Cadorna to the lowliestfantaccino on the Carso or the Bainsizza, none of the million Italian soldiers on the Isonzo front expected to fight a major battle again until the spring of 1918.
Austrian officers soon had ample evidence that the Italians were digging in and hunkering down for the winter. This ought to have been precisely the relieving news that Boroevic had been waiting to hear. In a sense it was-at last, he knew his tired army had a reprieve until the spring-but in other ways it worried him all the more. The Isonzo Army was now so weary and depleted that perhaps a winter to rest would not prove sufficient; another Italian offensive in 1918, maybe with considerable Allied-perhaps even American-help, would shatter his army all the same. Boroevic's tried-and-true tactic of keeping the front line strong and retaking all lost ground at any price had worked for two years. But the Eleventh Battle demonstrated that it no longer was the key to success; instead, it guaranteed only further attrition, an equation that the much stronger Italians in the end would certainly win. Indeed, a senior Austrian general remarked after the loss of the Bainsizza, "20,000 unwounded prisoners were the sign that no soldiers could be abused endlessly in such a fashion." More than ever, Boroevic wished that for once he had enough troops and guns to launch an offensive of his own, a major push to drive the Italians away from the Isonzo and restore Austria's strategic position.
Fortunately for Boroevic and his soldiers, Austria's most senior generals had begun to think the same thing. Franz Conrad's South Tyrolean offensive in the spring of 1916 came close to achieving strategic results, but was cut short by a lack of men and munitions and the Russian attack in East Galicia. Since then, the Austrian High Command had been convinced that another major offensive against Italy could win the decisive victory which Conrad came so close to claiming in May 1916. .The endless attrition on the Isonzo was, in the end, a losing proposition for the Habsburg Empire, as Arthur Arz and his staff at Teschen feared. More ominously, the Eleventh Battle's heavy losses-particularly in prisoners-were but a foretaste of what the Austrians could expect from the next Italian offensive, in the spring of 1918. Arz knew that the time had come to act, to launch a major attack against Italy before it was too late.
In strategic terms, anotherTrentino offensive appeared unpromising, principally because the winter arrived early in the steep Tyrolean Alps. Taking climate into consideration-as both the Austrians and the Italians always did-a Habsburg effort on the Isonzo was a better option. The Austrian problem, as it always had been, was a lack of men, guns, and munitions. Even with Russia collapsing, the Austrians alone could not muster sufficient strength to deliver a knockout blow to Cadorna's armies. Any Austrian offensive would inevitably require German assistance, in the form of soldiers or heavy artillery, and probably both.
Initial Austrian inquiries about German help had been refused out of hand. Arz first mentioned the subject to Hindenburg in late July 1917, even before the debacle on the Bainsizza, but met with no success; the Germans preferred to concentrate their efforts against ailing Russia. The Germans, including Emperor Wilhelm II, typically remained uninterested in Austria's war with Italy; for them it remained a sideshow of the war, of little strategic concern.
The unexpected loss of the Bainsizza made the Germans reconsider. In Berlin, Italy's first major success in a year raised concerns about a general Austrian collapse. By September, the Germans were willing to compromise, particularly when Emperor Karl personally requested help from Wilhelm, his fellow monarch. The Austrian plan, developed in conjunction with the German General Staff, called for a major attack on the uppermost Isonzo, north of the Tolmein bridgehead. Although the high Alpine terrain made movement difficult, the Austrians correctly surmised that Italian defenses there, at the leftmost flank of Capello's 2nd Army, were relatively weak. No less important, an Austrian offensive on the upper Isonzo would be the last thing Cadorna and his staff expected. The Germans agreed, and soon a German army (the 14th, under General Otto von Below) was en route to the Isonzo, under the greatest secrecy; it included seven German divisions1 with 460 guns and 216 mortars, a powerful force of veteran formations. On September 17, the Austrian High Command informed Boroevic that it intended to launch an offensive on the Isonzo in late October. It would be the first Austrian offensive on the Isonzo, after eleven major Italian efforts. The Twelfth Battle promised to deliver the decisive blow against Italy that Boroevic and his generals had always longed for.
With winter coming soon, the Austrians and Germans had no time to waste, and the planning and preparation for the offensive began immediately, assuming a frenetic pace. The breakthrough force for the offensive was the German 14th Army, under the Prussian Otto von Below, whose chief of staff was Germany's foremost Alpine warfare expert, the Bavarian Lieutenant General Krafft von Dellmensingen. The 14th Army included two German and two Austrian corps, with a total of five Habsburg and seven German divisions, all of them crack fighting forces with ample combat experience. Although von Below's army was nominally German, its spearhead force was the Austrian I Corps, whose mission was breaking through the Italian lines between Rombon and Krn, the roughest terrain on the whole Isonzo front; von Below's three other corps were to break through around the To] mein bridgehead. The commander of the I Corps was General Alfred Krauss, perhaps the finest tactician in the whole Habsburg Army, and an exemplary choice to lead the Austrians in their greatest offensive of the war.
The fifty-five-year-old Krauss, the son of an Austrian army officer, had devoted his life to serving the Habsburgs, and enjoyed an exemplary career in the emperor's service. An infantryman by training, Krauss spent much of his career on the elite General Staff, including time as an instructor of tactics at the Theresian Military Academy; later he was commander of the prestigious War School, which trained General Staff officers. He was a stern and dedicated officer who demanded excellence from his subordinates. In addition, Krauss was an unusually scholarly general who had studied modern tactics in detail; two of his written works dealt with Austria's 1866 war with Prussia and the RussoTurkish war of 1877-1878. Krauss served as a divisional commander in Serbia and Galicia in the first year of the Great War, then went to the Italian front in mid-1915, as chief of staff to Archduke Eugen, commander of the Southwestern front. Krauss took over the I Corps in May 1917. His knowledge of modern tactics and the Italian front was unsurpassed in the Austrian Army.
The force at Krauss's disposal for the coming offensive was outstanding in all respects. Besides the crack Prussian Jager Division, his I Corps included two Austrian divisions of Alpine mountain fighters from Styria, Tyrol, and Salzburg, the 22nd Rifle Division, and the 3rd "Edelweiss" Infantry Division. There was also the 55th Division, including two regiments of Bosnian troops. The 55th Division had the most important mission of all: piercing the Italian defenses between Javorcek and Krn and crossing the Isonzo at the main bridgehead, the town of Karfreit (Caporetto to its Italian defenders). The 55th Divi sion's commander was Major General Felix, Prince zu Schwarzenberg, an experienced field commander and scion of one of Austria's oldest noble families. The Schwarzenbergs had served the Habsburgs in the army and the civil service for centuries, frequently with considerable distinction. The family was one of the great ancient Bohemian magnate clans, neither German nor Czech but distinctly bohmisch in the old, anational sense (Prince Felix spoke both German and Czech). The fifty-year-old prince had enjoyed a successful career in the emperor's service, including many years with the Bohemian 14th Dragoons, a decidedly aristocratic regiment. Yet Major General Schwarzenberg was not the average wealthy cavalry officer; he had attended the War School and had served with distinction with staffs and other units. His war record was equally good, including command of a brigade, and then a division against the Italians. He was a brave officer and an astute tactician well versed in Alpine warfare.
Schwarzenberg was also popular with his troops, including the 7th Infantry Regiment and the 2nd and 4th Bosnian Regiments. The 7th was a centuries-old unit of tough Carinthian mountain soldiers, known to the Italians as the "brown devils." The Bosnian regiments, although raised only in the late nineteenth century, had, if anything, an even more distinguished fighting record against the Italians. Both of the 55th Division's Bosnian regiments boasted considerable combat experience on the Isonzo (the 4th were the famed defenders of Rombon), and the legendary 2nd Regiment was the most decorated Habsburg unit of the whole war, its soldiers winning forty-two Gold Medals for Bravery.'- In addition, the Carinthians and Bosnians were born mountain fighters imbued with a deep hatred of the Italians, ideal troops to lead Austria's Isonzo offensive. The 55th Division was also provided with two high mountain companies, elite units of handpicked veterans who knew the Julian Alps intimately. Just as important, Schwarzenberg's division included the 55th Assault Battalion (Sturm-bataillon), whose young Bosnian and Carinthian volunteers, generously equipped with machine guns, mortars, and flamethrowers, would lead the attack.3 The overstrength 55th Division counted 138 guns and howitzers, as well as a full battalion of sappers, to break through the Italians' mountain defenses. Major General Schwarzenberg commanded one of the finest and best equipped Austrian divisions of the entire war, indeed one of the most powerful divisions in any army during the Great War.
Krauss ensured that his assault divisions were well equipped and provisioned for the coming offensive, and had adequate transportation to advance deep into Italian-held terrain without running out of supplies. The Austrian Army was the world's foremost practitioner of Alpine warfare, as it had been since the mid-nineteenth century,4 and its preparations for the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo were especially thorough, thanks in large part to Krauss's efforts. In fact, Krauss later recounted that the arduous buildup to the great offensive constituted "for us the hardest and bitterest time of the entire operation." His first task was se curing enough firepower for his corps to break through, and that meant getting as many guns and shells as possible; Krauss, who understood the tactical realities of static fighting and the vital role of artillery better than anyone, stated bluntly, "The extent of blood that our infantry would have to shed to achieve victory depended in direct proportion on the amount of artillery." Simply put, the more guns and munitions he had, the fewer Frontkampfer Krauss would have to sacrifice to achieve a breakthrough. Therefore Krauss demanded 500 guns to execute a successful assault. In the end, his I Corps was allocated 433 artillery pieces, including 328 field and mountain guns, eighty-five medium and heavy guns, and twenty superheavy guns, as well as forty-eight heavy mortars, a generous portion of the nearly 2,000 additional guns and howitzers brought to the Isonzo for the offensive. It was an unprecedented amount of firepower for a single Austrian corps.
Just as important for the success of the offensive was the stocking of generous shell reserves, particularly for the heavy guns. By scouring depots on the quiet Transylvanian and Russian fronts, as well as hinterland arsenals, the forces on the Isonzo were supplied with considerable ammunition stocks. For the initial push, the divisions of the I Corps were each granted a thousand rounds per field and mountain gun, 500 per medium gun, 800 per heavy howitzer, and 200 for each superheavy piece, more than enough to achieve a breakthrough.
The most laborious task confronting the I Corps before the offensive was the positioning and placement of its artillery in Alpine terrain. This proved especially difficult because the nearest railhead was twenty miles behind the front line; the only available routes were poor roads through the Julian Alps, some of them 6,000 feet high. To assist the 55th Division's artillery, the High Command gave it particularly lavish logistical assistance, because its mission was so vital. To supplement its normal complement of transport units, Schwarzenberg's division received two additional pack animal detachments of 150 animals each, and three motor transport companies, each with seventy trucks.-' In addition, the division's artillery was assigned 1,200 construction troops to help with the movement of guns and munitions to the battle area. Even so, the placement of the division's heavy and superheavy batteries proved an arduous task. To avoid Italian observation, weapons of 150mm and greater were moved only at night, over high mountains, in some cases to within a quarter-mile of Italian forward positions. Yet no artillery movement was ever detected by the opposing Italian IV Corps, despite nightly shelling by Italian illumination mortars.
For this offensive, the Austrians took extensive security precautions. As the attack's scheduled start day of October 22 approached (it was delayed to October 24 by bad weather), infantry units were moved to the front slowly and carefully, at the rate of one or two battalions per division every night; march discipline was excellent, and the Italians detected very little. More modern methods were also used to ensure that the offensive would be a surprise. The Austrian signal troops performed invaluable service in the weeks leading up to the battle, both constantly monitoring Italian transmissions and enforcing strict communications security on Austrian formations on the Isonzo. Signal units also disguised the Habsburg buildup on the upper Isonzo through the sending of false and deceptive messages. Thus the signalers gained an accurate assessment of Italian dispositions through signal intercepts while keeping the 14th Army's massive troop movements hidden from hearing as well as sight.
The Austrian air service likewise played a key role in the planning for the great offensive. The small, often ill-equipped Austrian air forces had had a hard war; much like the army as a whole, the airmen found themselves fighting on too many fronts to regularly marshal sufficient strength against any one enemy. The maximum effort for the Twelfth Battle was a rare exception. Still, by late 1917 the Habsburg air service was efficient and manned by veteran personnel, who performed sterling service both before and during the offensive. The I Corps was generously provided with four air companies,6 augmented by a German squadron, some sixty aircraft in all. The air units undertook vital missions: artillery observation, radio interception, general reconnaissance, and the protection of Austrian airspace; the last was a particularly high priority mission, because Italian overflights had to be prevented both to protect the corps from air attack and to preserve the element of surprise.
The air companies' artillery reconnaissance was all-important. It gave Krauss's gunners the information they needed about where Italian guns were located. All the Austrian guns and shells would be useless without confirmed targets to destroy, and by the eve of the offensive, the I Corps artillery knew the precise location of hundreds of Italian guns, thanks to the aviators' hard work. Krauss's fire plan, the first act of the offensive, called for the barrage to begin at 2 A.M., with gas shelling directed against Italian artillery positions; the 55th Division was assigned its own chemical company for this mission, equipped with a new, highly lethal combination of chlorine and phosgene. The use of poisonous gas in mountainous terrain was invariably precarious because of the unpredictability of wind patterns and abnormal temperature variance. Nevertheless, gas shelling was considered necessary to paralyze Italian batteries and forward defenses. By 4:30 A.M., the gas barrage would be finished, followed by a conventional bombardment of Italian trenches at 6:30, then mortar barrages from 7 A.M. These would continue until 9 A.M., when Austrian infantry would advance, led by the storm troopers. The artillery would fire a rolling barrage, keeping pace with the infantry advance, to protect the Austrian foot soldiers. Once Krauss's I Corps reached Karfreit on the Isonzo, and the 14th Army's other corps breached the Italian lines west of Tolmein, the rest of the Austrian troops on the Isonzo-Army Group Boroevic, twenty divisions strong-would attack and retake the Bainsizza, Gorizia, and the western Carso from the retreating Italians, if all went according to plan.
Fortunately for the Austrians, their chances of success were greatly improved by Italian incompetence. If the preparations for the Twelfth Battle brought out the best in Austria's army and officer corps, they surely showed Italy's forces in the worst light. On the eve of the great Austrian attack, Italy's armies on the Isonzo were riddled with slackness, overconfidence, and sheer laziness, not to mention sagging fighting spirit. In the aftermath of the Eleventh Battle, and expecting a quiet winter, Cadorna's forces dug in from Rombon to the Adriatic were weary and wholly unready for the unexpected blow Austria was about to deliver.
That said, Cadorna's armies still looked very impressive on paper. Opposite the Austro-German forces massing east of the Isonzo, Cadorna possessed some thirty-four infantry divisions at the front, plus another seven infantry and four cavalry divisions in nearby reserve. In fact, the Italians had more men on the Isonzo than the Austrians and Germans did: 570 infantry battalions versus 383. The Duke of Aosta's nine-division-strong 3rd Army, dug in on the Carso, occupied defensible positions, and was prepared to meet any Austrian attack.
Capello's 2nd Army, however, which would have to absorb the main Austro-German blow, was another case altogether. In the first place, Capello's army was unmanageably large. It was huge, with twenty-five divisions in nine corps, covering a front of thirty miles, from the Vipacco River at the Carso's edge north to Mt. Rombon. In size and scope the 2nd Army was nearly three times bigger than a normal field army. The defensive tasks of such a large and unwieldy force spread out on such a long front would have taxed the most meticulous commander. To make matters worse, the impetuous Capello was uninterested in defense, and took little care to ensure that his army was well positioned and provisioned for the great defensive battle to come. Indeed, the 2nd Army's defenses were thoroughly inadequate, particularly on the upper Isonzo, where the Austrians and Germans were set to attack. Its entrenchments were relatively strong in the Rombon and Km sectors (where the 55th Division would attack), but decidedly weak at Tolmein and especially on the newly occupied Bainsizza. There the Italian forces were poorly dug in; only at the old front line-at the Isonzo's edge-were the 2nd Army's entrenchments strong enough to guarantee a vigorous defense.
Despite Cadorna's decision in the third week of September to switch to the defensive for the winter, Capello had done very little to prepare his divisions to fight a defensive battle. After so many months of attacking, the Italians had scant experience with defensive tactics, and Capello's formations on the upper Isonzo were woefully unready to protect their sectors against a determined Austrian assault. Italian defensive techniques were primitive and vulnerable to attack. In particular, Capello concentrated the overwhelming majority of his units in the front line, a thin belt of mountain entrenchments running from Rombon to Krn, down Mrzli ridge, across the Bainsizza past Mt. Santo to the edge of Mt. San Gabriele. Although these high altitude positions were well situated and protected by machine guns, there was little behind them; 231 of Capello's 353 infantry battalions were in the front line. There was no defense in depth, and there were few operational reserves. The large artillery arm was ill prepared to protect the infantry in a defensive battle; it was also placed well forward, and therefore vulnerable both to Austrian artillery fire and to infantry attacks. Thus the 2nd Army was arrayed to defend its long and exposed front line, and nothing else. There were practically no reserves on hand to stage counterattacks to restore the front line. If the Austrians managed to achieve a major breakthrough, cracking the thin crust of Italian defenses, Capello's army would be doomed.
Cadorna became aware of the poor state of Capello's defenses. Alarmed by the weakness of the 2nd Army, especially on the upper Isonzo, on October 10 Cadorna ordered his subordinate to reduce his forces on the Bainsizza and move his heavy artillery back west of the Isonzo. It was a sensible defensive measure that might have helped the 2nd Army considerably in the battle to come. Yet, in a manner all too typical of the Byzantine world of Italian military bureaucracy, Cadorna's directive was never carried out. Capello disliked Cadorna,7 and often followed only the orders he liked or happened to agree with, believing that his own defensive ideas were correct. So Capello simply disregarded a direct order from the Coniando Supremo, and the 2nd Army stayed where it was. Capello's disobedience would soon bring awesome strategic consequences.
In fairness to Capello, Cadorna had already done a great deal to wreck the Italian Army from within. His ideas about how to wage war and keep an army's offensive spirit high had done seemingly irreparable damage to the forces in the field. By October 1917, the fanti were exhausted and plainly sick of the war; many simply wanted the senseless fighting to end. Ordinary soldiers were fully aware of how few gains eleven offensives on the Isonzo had won for Italy, and how demoralized the home front had become. Cadorna had inevitably failed to protect his armies from domestic political "contamination." Decimations and executions, liberally applied, might keep an army in the field through terror, but they signally failed to maintain fighting spirit. Just as devastating for the army, Cadorna had relentlessly continued his policy of "torpedoing" commanders who disappointed him. By October 1917, he had dismissed hundreds of senior officers for a "lack of offensive spirit": 217 generals, 255 colonels, and 355 battalion commanders, in all.8 Coupled with heavy casualties among field officers, this meant that most Italian infantry units were now led by woefully inexperienced-and sometimes obviously incompetent-commanders. Willingness to sacrifice their men's lives, rather than tactical proficiency, was Cadorna's main test of an officer's ability. Needless to add, such shortsighted policies only served to lower the already poor state of the Italian infantry's morale and fighting prowess.
The army's evident tactical and morale problems were made immeasurably worse by the Coniando Supremo's shocking inability to predict the AustroGerman offensive. It amounted to an intelligence failure of epic proportions. Although Cadorna had been obsessed with a fear of a major Austrian offensive ever since the war began on the Isonzo-a concern much compounded by Conrad's South Tyrolean offensive in the spring of 1916--by the autumn of 1917 he was absolutely convinced that the Austrians could not launch an offensive so late in the year. Cadorna was serenely confident that a late autumn offensive was impossible, particularly in the snow-covered Julian Alps. In fact, he was so sure that his armies were safe from attack that on October 4 he left Udine for a two-week holiday away from the front. He planned to spend the winter writing his memoirs, recording his outstanding contribution to the Great War, a task that occupied his mind much more than any fears of an Austrian offensive.
Despite Austria's best efforts at deception, there was still ample evidence available to the Italians that an offensive was coming, but Cadorna and his staff simply refused to believe it. By mid-October, Italian military intelligence had collected impressive and convincing information that Austrian and German forces were massing on the upper Isonzo. Signals intelligence, diplomatic espionage, aerial observation, and Austrian deserters' accounts all pointed to only one possible conclusion: the first Habsburg offensive on the Isonzo was imminent. Even so, Cadorna remained obstinately incredulous. On October 19, an Italian intelligence report noted accurately that several German divisions had passed through Ljubljana, headed for the Isonzo, in the past two weeks, and that since mid-September a thousand Austrian guns had arrived to reinforce Boroevic's army group. Yet on the very same day, two senior colonels on Cadorna's staff assured him that there were no signs of any impending Austro-German offensive. Cadorna accepted this news unquestioningly; after all, he had always said that no large-scale offensive was possible on the Isonzo after late September, least of all in the high Julian Alps. On October 23, only hours before the Austrian and German guns were scheduled to open fire, Italian signal units overheard an Austrian telephone message which indicated that the artillery was prepared to commence its barrage at 2 A.M. on October 24. Still, the Italians dismissed this, and did nothing to react or prepare. In truth, it no longer mattered. It was already too late.
At exactly two hours past midnight on October 24, Austrian and German artillery opened fire on the upper Isonzo. From the northern Bainsizza to Rombon, Italian artillery batteries were struck by thousands of gas shells. Many Italian soldiers, awakened by the barrage, found their French gas masks useless against the new chemical agents, and died or were burned terribly within minutes. In the dark mountain valleys, thousands of Italian soldiers drowned in the dense, lingering clouds of chlorine and phosgene. The 14th Army's artillery, 1,700 guns strong, kept up its lethal work until dawn. Then the infantry readied to go into battle. As the sun rose, soldiers of the I Corps were read a message from General Krauss, in the troops' many languages, that epitomized the Austrian determination for victory: "Soldiers of the I Corps! For the second time in this war we are going on the attack against Italy! For you this phrase counts: No calm and no rest until the Italians are crushed. Forward with God!" With this message the 55th Division entered the fight.
It was hard going at first. Much of Krauss's sector was hit by an unexpected snowstorm and heavy fog that lasted for hours. The weather was particularly bad in the Vrata-Vrsic area, where the 55th Division was set to advance. In addition, Schwarzenberg's opponents, the Italian 43rd Division, included good troops-three line regiments, a regiment of Bersaglieri, and another regiment's worth of Alpini. As a result, the Bosnians and Carinthians, hampered by difficult weather, made comparatively little progress on October 24. While the rest of the 14th Army advanced pretty much according to schedule, capturing 30,000fanti in the first twenty-four hours, Schwarzenberg's division and the neighboring 22nd Rifle Division to the north advanced slowly. Even the Bosnians had difficulty advancing up 6,000-foot-high peaks through waisthigh snowdrifts. Yet the 4th Bosnian Regiment fought effectively, repulsing an Italian night counterattack, and capturing a battalion of the 43rd Division. The only one of Schwarzenberg's battalions to secure all of its assigned objectives for October 24 was the 4th of the 7th Regiment, led by Captain Eduard Barger. The 900-man Carinthian unit advanced daringly through the Mrzli line, but even Barger admitted that victory at that point in the offensive was mostly a matter of chance: "If at this moment ... even one Italian machine gun had opened up on our attack, we all would have been killed." But the "brown devils" were lucky, and they took all their objectives, losing only twenty dead and eighty wounded on the offensive's first day.
Undaunted, Krauss ordered the 55th Division to attack even more energetically toward Karfreit on the morning of October 25. The snowfall had ceased and the heavy fog had lifted, so Schwarzenberg's soldiers now advanced easily. The 43rd Division, crippled by the Austrian guns, had exhausted itself in futile counterattacks, and was now incapable of sustained resistance. The 7th Regiment, led by Strunuruppen, tore a large gap in the Italian line, and the Italian defense began to crumble. By midmorning, both of the 55th's brigades had descended from Mrzli ridge toward the Isonzo valley, and Karfreit, captured by the Italians in the first weeks of the war, was again in Austrian hands by noon. The 43rd Division had evaporated, and the IV Corps's reserve, the 34th Division, which should have launched a counterattack against Krauss's advancing regiments, had been badly bruised in the recent fight for San Gabriele and wanted only to surrender. Schwarzenberg's forward units secured Karfreit's stone bridge over the Isonzo, the most important objective. Although the cold, fast-flowing Isonzo was only three feet deep at Karfreit, Austrian artillery and supply units required a sturdy bridge to cross the river. By midday on October 25 they had it. Soon Schwarzenberg entered Karfreit (Caporetto to the Italians), the river town that would give the great offensive its name.
The triumphant 55th Division continued its advance through the afternoon, encountering no appreciable Italian resistance. Indeed, like its sister formations in the I Corps, the 55th Division found itself inundated with Italian prisoners. Once the IV Corps's first line of defense gave way, morale collapsed and the will to resist disappeared. Manyfanti surrendered enthusiastically to the Austrians. A platoon of the 22nd Division, fighting on the northern flank of Schwarzenberg's troops, captured a whole entrenched Italian company on October 25 without a shot being fired. Some 140 Italians came out of their mountaintop trenches crying, "Evviva I'Austria, la guerra e finita"9 One Italian officer was so relieved to be out of the war that he kissed the hand of the Austrian platoon commander. The jubilant Italians were sent to the rear with the words they wanted to hear, "Nach Mauthausen. " For them the long and terrible war was over.
Such incidents became increasingly common as the 2nd Army melted away before the advancing Austrian and German divisions. Nowhere on the upper Isonzo was Italian resistance prolonged or successful. Italian generals were caught completely unaware by the Austro-German blow north of Tolmein. Even after hearing early reports of the offensive, on October 24 Cadorna pronounced his "perfect serenity and complete confidence" Capello was not even at the front. On the eve of the offensive, seriously ill, he left the Isonzo for rest in Turin; his place was taken by General Montuori, commander of the II Corps, who inherited the unfolding disaster. Not that it made any difference. The 2nd Army's precarious defenses shattered quickly and never recovered. Chaos reigned as the 14th Army broke through in both the Rombon-Krn and Tolmein areas. Even the 2nd Army's powerful artillery proved no help; on October 24, battery commanders all along the upper Isonzo waited in vain for orders to open tire that never came, and were simply overwhelmed. On October 26, Cadorna at last realized that something had gone dreadfully wrong. The 2nd Army had folded, especially on the upper Isonzo. From Rombon through the Bainsizza, Italian resistance had evaporated, exposing the rest of the Italian Army to lethal encirclement. The Comando Supremo had lost all contact with several divisions north of the Bainsizza. No one knew where General Villani, commander of the 19th Division, was; his division, holding the strategic Tolmein bridgehead, had disappeared. In fact, Villani was dead, a suicide. So on October 27, with Austrian and German divisions racing toward his headquarters in Udine, Cadorna reluctantly ordered a general retreat from the Isonzo, before his entire army was lost.
While the Italians were paralyzed by inaction and confusion, the Austrians and Germans continued their advance at an awe-inspiring pace. One of the most successful drives into the Italian rear was executed by the Wurttemberg Mountain Battalion, an elite unit of veteran Alpine troops. Its objective was Mt. Matajur, a 4,500-foot-high peak four miles southwest of Karfreit. This snowy peak straddled the Austrian-Italian frontier and was the last significant mountain before reaching the Friulian plain. General von Below, commander of the 14th Army, was so eager to capture Matajur that he promised the Pour le Merite, the coveted "Blue Max," Prussia's highest decoration, to the officer whose unit seized it.
The young officer who led the German advance to Matajur was twenty-sixyear-old Erwin Rommel, a first lieutenant soon to be promoted to captain. A career infantry officer, Rommel served with distinction in the French campaign of 1914, then helped raise the Wurttemberg Mountain Battalion in September 1915. He fought with this crack new unit in the Vosges, then in Transylvania, winning a reputation for daring and cunning on the field of battle. He came to the Isonzo with the German Alpenkorps to take part in the great offensive; he had been wounded by a Romanian bullet only ten weeks before, but was eager to be part of the coming fight. He was particularly eager to win the Blue Max.
His command was the Rommel Detachment, with three mountain rifle companies and a machine gun company in support, a full battalion in strength. (Major Sprosser's Wurttemberg Mountain Battalion was nearly the size of a regiment, with eleven companies.) Rommel's detachment began October 24 by breaking through Villani's ill-fated 19th Division due west of Tolmein, just after 8 A.M. By noon, Rommel and his men were in the Italian rear, and there were no forces before them, so they continued their advance toward Matajur. They marched up 3,500-foot-high Kolovrat ridge, just south of the Isonzo, the quickest route to Matajur, but encountered little Italian resistance; the 2nd Army had already begun to collapse. The marching was arduous for Rommel's heavily laden mountain troopers, each man carrying enough ammunition and supplies to last several days, eighty pounds of equipment in all. Rommel's men hardly rested that night, instead continuing their steady march across Kolovrat. By October 25, the Rommel Detachment had captured 1,500 Italian prisoners. The next objective was the village of Luico, three miles east of Matajur. Rommel took it by leading a surprise charge straight into the village. The stunned Italian garrison surrendered en masse: a hundredfanti and fifty vehicles were added to Rommel's haul. Just beyond Luico, Rommel and his men pounced on the surprised 4th Bersaglieri Regiment. The Italians fought back initially, but surrendered once they were surrounded; 2,000 more troops-the whole regimententered German captivity.
Major Sprosser, receiving word that Rommel had reached Luico, ordered the enterprising lieutenant to halt and wait for reinforcements. Rommel would hear none of it, and instead led one of his companies toward Matajur, in violation of Sprosser's direct order. On the way to Matajur, Rommel and his forward detachment, a hundred men with six machine guns, captured the whole Salerno Brigade. One of its regiments, 1,500 strong, simply ran out of its positions, shouting "Long live Germany!"; the second regiment resisted briefly, but then gave up, too, adding 1,200 morefanti to Rommel's burgeoning column of captives. Rommel, anxious to keep going, sent the prisoners to the rear and continued to advance. By the morning of October 26, he and his company were at the foot of Matajur. The advance to the summit was arduous, ending with a mad 400-yard dash over rocky ground to Matajur's peak. At 11:40 A.M., Rommel fired signal flares from Matajur's almost mile-high summit to indicate that he had taken it.
The last of the Julian Alps was in German hands, and the 2nd Army was doomed. In fifty-two hours of almost nonstop advancing, Rommel had captured 9,000 Italian soldiers, at a cost of less than twenty casualties of his own. He justly received his Pour le Merite (as did Major Sprosser, who forgave Rommel for his insubordination), thus bringing to prominence one of the greatest and most legendary soldiers of the twentieth century.10
Although Rommel's feat was the most dramatic, in many places on the upper Isonzo small units of Austrian and German troops managed to capture entire companies, battalions, even regiments of weary Italian soldiers without a fight. The 2nd Army's will to resist had disappeared when confronted with the first Austrian offensive on the Isonzo. That said, in places Italian infantry resisted fiercely, even against hopeless odds, inflicting heavy losses among advancing Austro-German forces. The fight for Rombon was especially vicious and costly. The Edelweiss Division succeeded in pushing the Italians off the mountain on October 25, but only after nearly two days of bruising close combat. Some of Krauss's best regiments, including the 2nd Imperial Tyrolean Rifles (Kaiserschutzen)I I took heavy losses in the battle for Rombon, an exception to the generally light casualties suffered by the I Corps during the breakthrough phase of the Twelfth Battle. One of the Austrian casualties was First Lieutenant Franz Janowitz, a twenty-five-year-old officer of the 2nd Kaiserschutzen, who led his company in the October 24 attack on Rombon.
Janowitz, the son of a prosperous Bohemian Jewish family, had studied philosophy at Leipzig and Vienna, and was serving as an officer cadet when the war began. He fought with his regiment on the Russian front through 1916, when he was transferred to the Italian front. He often wrote poetry between battles, a favorite pastime; indeed, Max Brod had published fourteen of Janowitz's poems in his Arcadia yearbook in 1913. Janowitz's works grew increasingly dark and brooding as the war dragged on, and by October 1917 he had collected a folio of fifty-one poems, many dealing with the war, that he hoped to publish. One of the best was "Be, Earth, True!" ("Sei, Erde, Wahr!"), composed in Galicia during the summer of 1916. It focused on what Janowitz had witnessed:
Janowitz, leading his men into battle, was struck by an Italian bullet on Rombon. He survived the difficult stretcher ride down the 7,290-foot-high mountain, but died in a field hospital on November 4. Franz Janowitz lived long enough to know that the offensive had succeeded, that the Italians had been thoroughly thrashed, but he did not live long enough to see his war poems in print. That came only two years later, when the noted Viennese journalist Karl Kraus, a friend of Janowitz's brother Otto, persuaded a publisher to put out the dead soldier's poems. The collection, On the Earth (Auf der Erde), which appeared in 1919, was praised but never reprinted.
By the morning of October 28, the Italian Army was in headlong retreat away from the Isonzo. With the collapse of the 2nd Army's left flank, its right flank east and northeast of Gorizia, as well as the Duke of Aosta's 3rd Army, were forced to withdraw across Friulia. It was bitter news, especially for the 3rd Army-"the undefeated"-which had managed to repulse all Austrian attacks on the Carso. Objectives that had been bought at such cost in Italian bloodGorizia, Plava, Mt. Santo, Mt. San Michele, Sabotino, Podgora, Oslavia-were relinquished without a fight. The 8th Division, the recent captors of the summit of Mt. Santo, left the ruined monastery, aware that they had not been defeated, merely outflanked by the collapse of the 2nd Army on the upper Isonzo. Officers and men wept openly as the army abandoned Gorizia and the Carso, now crowded with hundreds of thousands of Italian graves. The retreating Italian soldiers could do nothing except promise to return again in victory.
On the heels of the Italian retreat, the 1st and 2nd Isonzo Armies reoccupied all the terrain they had lost since June 1915 and the First Battle of the Isonzo. Some 60,000 Italian prisoners were already in Austrian captivity. On October 28, the black-yellow standard of the Habsburgs was again raised over Gorizia, and Boroevic's troops crossed the Isonzo and were soon marching past the shell-scarred battlefields of Podgora and Oslavia, headed across the Italian frontier into Friulia.
The Italian retreat was a shambles. Although the 3rd Army, led energetically by the Duke of Aosta, withdrew in good order, showing admirable march discipline, the 2nd Army hardly existed anymore. Even those divisions which escaped the Austro-German breakthrough soon fell apart. Without leadership, the defeated army was reduced to a rabble; thousands of fanti just wanted to surrender, and countless others chose to desert. Everywhere the 2nd Army abandoned its equipment-guns, munitions, vehicles, and all.''- The great ritorno a casa had begun. The masses of Italian troops heading westward through Friulia were more a mob than any kind of fighting force. Cadorna might have gone to considerable lengths to save the situation by exercising inspiring leadership in the hour of crisis, but that had never been his style of command. Instead, he spent the early days of the great retreat blaming others-the soldiers, the politicians, the press, the socialists, everyone but himself-for the debacle. He told Antonio Gatti, his adjutant, "What could I do? The army was swarming with worms." Cadorna's official communique of October 28, in which he wasted no time pronouncing the defeat "perhaps the greatest catastrophe in history," explicitly blamed the soldiers for the retreat: "The failure to resist on the part of units of the 2nd Army, which cravenly withdrew without fighting or ignominiously surrendered to the enemy, has allowed the Austro-German forces to break through our left flank on the Julian front" Of course, nowhere did Cadorna hint at any command failures, or why the once intrepid Italian infantry had broken so easily; he did, however, repeatedly blame his favorite nemesis, "the internal enemy," for the battlefield reverse. The tactless communique was watered down by the government when it reached Rome, but it was published abroad in its original form. By then the political damage was done. Cadorna's military career was probably finished on the morning of October 24, when the 2nd Army started to fall apart, but his dishonest pronouncement four days later confirmed his demise.
While Cadorna was busy composing his communique, the Austrian and German armies advanced deeper into Italy. By October 29, the 14th Army and the 1st and 2nd Isonzo Armies stood firmly on Italian territory; the next day Udine, Cadorna's hastily abandoned headquarters, fell without much of a fight.13 Nowhere east of the Tagliamento River could retreating Italian divisions offer prolonged resistance, and Austro-German forces soon occupied all of Friulia. The next major Austrian goal was crossing the Tagliamento, thirty miles west of the Isonzo. By seizing a bridgehead across the river, the Austrians would cut off what remained of the 2nd and 3rd Armies. It was imperative that Habsburg forces reach the Tagliamento before Italians could blow all the bridges. The 55th Division spent October 28 marching toward the town of Cornino, which possessed the only surviving bridge across the Tagliamento. Although Italian resistance was neither stiff nor prolonged, the marching pace of nearly thirty miles daily was exceptionally arduous. The advancing Bosnians and Carinthians regularly outpaced their supporting artillery and logistical columns, causing ammunition and other supply problems. Regardless, Schwarzenberg's lead companies reached the Tagliamento late on October 29, found the bridge at Cornino intact, and readied themselves for a contested crossing.
At Cornino the river was the better part of a mile wide and apparently unfordable. There was also a large island in the Tagliamento at Cornino, Colle Clapat, which was connected by two wide bridges to each bank. The unit Schwarzenberg chose for the assault was the 4th Battalion of the 4th Bosniaken. Schwarzenberg wanted to lead the cross-river attack personally, but was dissuaded by his cooler-headed staff. Although the Bosnians were exhausted from the long march across Friulia, the veteran battalion responded enthusiastically to the chance to decide the campaign's outcome; the breaching of the Tagliamento line would force a general Italian retreat to the Piave River, more than thirty miles farther west. For this reason, the defenders of Colle Clapat, two companies of the 33rd Regiment supported by sixteen machine guns, were equally determined to hold their ground.
The battalion commander, Captain Emil Redl, volunteered to lead the assault. The forty-year-old Redl, a native of Gorizia, had spent his career as a line infantry officer in Croatian and Bosnian units; he had fought with the 4th Bosnian Regiment through the war, commanding first a company, and then a battalion. He led his battalion's 15th Company forward at 4 A.M. on October 31, under the cover of darkness and rain and heavy machine gun fire. Tenacious Italian resistance prevented a predawn victory as the Bosnians stalled on the sandy shore of Colle Clapat. But by midmorning, when the 16th Company entered the fray, the fanti began to lose ground. The flat, marshy island offered little natural cover, and losses were heavy on both sides. An Italian counterattack by reserve elements of the 33rd Regiment was repulsed, including a probe across the bridge by armored cars, which the Bosniaken destroyed at close quarters with machine gun fire and hand grenades. Redl's troops also found a small ford on the Italians' Clank and rushed fresh infantry into the battle, turning the tide. By the end of October 31, Redl's tired companies had secured Colle Clapat, in the process capturing most of the 33rd Regiment-more than 1,500 fanti, thirty-one machine guns, and six artillery pieces.14 Although the Bosnians had suffered heavy casualties in two companies, a further advance to the west bank of the Tagliamento was halted only by the blowing of the second bridge by retreating Italian engineers.
The following two days, both sides prepared for the inevitable Austrian crossing attempt. The remnants of the 33rd Regiment were reinforced and ordered to hold their ground on the Tagliamento's west bank at any cost. The Italians were entrenched in and around the town of Cornino, which overlooked the Tagliamento and was surrounded by steep hills that offered excellent fields of fire for the defender. Schwarzenberg was still confident that his division could cross the river, and he sent Captain Redl a company each of sappers and construction engineers to help the Bosnians reach the west bank. The threebattalion-strong 2nd Bosnian Regiment was also moved forward to exploit Redl's success in the coming assault. The 55th, having lost only 1,655 casualties since October 24 (only 157 of them killed in action, many of them on Colle Clapat), was in excellent fighting trim.
At 6 A.M. on November 2, supported by machine gun and artillery fire, the 55th Division engineers began to construct a temporary bridge over the collapsed span. They were soon followed by two Sturm platoons and the 13th and 14th Companies of Redl's battalion. Through sheer courage and determination, by noon the lead companies forced their way across the unstable bridge against withering Italian fire, taking heavy casualties in the process. In the afternoon the rest of Redi's battalion crossed, followed in the evening by a fresh battalion of the 2nd Bosniaken. During the night the Bosnians advanced through the town of Cornino, capturing one house at a time, scaling the steep hills above the village. The 33rd Regiment, overrun by the fearsome Bosnians, began to surrender as Austrian reinforcements entered the fray, surrounding Cornino and taking nearby hills. By the early dawn hours of November 3, the Cornino bridgehead firmly belonged to the 55th Division, a whole regiment of 2,500 fanti had been captured, and the Austrians had secured a nearly mile-deep hold on the Tagliamento's west bank. The rest of Schwarzenberg's victorious division soon followed to exploit the Bosnians' hard-fought victory.
The success of Captain Redl and his Bosniaken proved to be the decisive action of the entire offensive. As Emperor Karl said to Redl when presenting him the Order of Maria Theresia, "You gave our offensive fresh momentum." Unable to hold the Tagliamento line, the Italians began a disorderly strategic retreat toward the Piave. By now, Austrian and German forces had captured a quarter of a million Italian soldiers, as well as 2,300 artillery pieces-essentially the whole 2nd Army. Another 40,000 Italian soldiers were out of action, killed or wounded since October 24. Many more Italian units were rounded up before they reached the Piave; on November 6, the 22nd Rifle Division captured the entire Italian XII Corps, two divisions strong. Countless Italian units, scattered and confused by the retreat, surrendered without a fight. Feeble attempts to maintain national and personal dignity in the face of catastrophe were commonplace. In one instance, an officer cadet of the 7th Regiment, leading an eight-man patrol nearly twenty miles west of Cornino, accepted the surrender of a fully armed battalion of 500 Italians. The fanti were cheered by the end of their war, exclaiming "Mama mia" while being led into captivity. The major commanding the battalion, however, did not want to be captured by a mere officer cadet and eight men, so some haggling was required to save face. In the end, though, the battalion was disarmed and marched eastward, nach Mauthausen, like hundreds of other Italian units captured whole in the days after the initial Austrian breakthrough at Karfreit.15
By now the extent of the Italian disaster was evident to the army, to the government, and to the Italian people. Vittorio Emanuele, horrified by the collapse of his beloved army, wrote in his diary, in English, "What caused it all?" He contemplated abdication for a time, but instead resolved to lead his people in resistance to the foreign invader. One of Vittorio Emanuele's first acts in the aftermath of defeat was the dismissal of Cadorna, the architect of catastrophe. Capello was almost immediately sacked, but Cadorna apparently expected his career to survive Caporetto. The first indication of Cadorna's irrevocable withdrawal into unreality was the Rapallo conference. On November 5, the political and military leaders of Italy, Britain, and France met in emergency session to discuss the recent Italian defeat on the Isonzo, and to coordinate an Allied grand strategy to counter the Austro-German victory. Cadorna did not bother to attend, sending his second in command, General Porro, in his place. At Rapallo, Porro claimed that thirty-five German divisions had participated in the offensive-five times the actual number-and, as expected, blamed the soldiers and the politicians for the defeat, as Cadorna no doubt wished. At Peschiera on November 8, at a meeting of British, French, and Italian generals to discuss the details of Allied planning, Vittorio Emanuele, in excellent English, explained his country's predicament; he formally requested help from the Allies, and explicitly blamed Cadorna and the generals for the debacle. Cadorna was outraged. At first he refused to resign, believing himself to be above even the king. He pointedly criticized "the notorious ingratitude of the House of Savoy" He had finally gone too far.
Vittorio Emanuele dismissed Cadorna as head of the Comando Supremo, although he did not force him to retire altogether. Cadorna, the director of Italy's war effort from the outset, was out of office, and a replacement was needed quickly to reassure both the army and the public, particularly in such an hour of crisis. The cabinet, and the Allies, wanted the Duke of Aosta to become the new chief of the General Staff. The duke, after all, was Italy's most accomplished general-he had saved the 3rd Army from defeat only two weeks before-and he was popular with the troops. Yet Vittorio Emanuele balked at the idea. Always jealous of his glamorous and dashing forty-eight-year-old cousin (when the unassuming Vittorio Emanuele became king in 1900, he nearly convinced his father to permit him to renounce the throne in favor of the duke), Vittorio Emanuele, never very self-confident, now feared that appointing the Duke of Aosta as Italy's senior general would give him a platform to make the king even less popular. Therefore Vittorio Emanuele suggested a compromise candidate.
The man who took Cadorna's place at the Comando Supremo on November 8 was Armando Diaz, a fifty-five-year-old general with an impeccable service record. He was cut from very different cloth than Cadorna, or indeed than most of the Italian officer corps. In the first place he was a southerner, a Neapolitan, from a family of Spanish origins. Diaz was an artillery officer by training, but spent most of his career on staffs-he stayed a total of sixteen years in Rome. But Diaz nevertheless possessed ample knowledge of fighting. He commanded an infantry regiment before the Great War, including time in battle in Libya; he was very popular with his fanti because he believed in light discipline and was genuinely concerned for the welfare of his troops. Diaz returned from Libya in 1912 with battle wounds, decorations for valor, and a reputation for humanity and common sense as well as courage. Needless to say, compassion and sensibility were not valued qualities in Cadorna's army, but Diaz nevertheless rose quickly during the Great War. He commanded an infantry division on the Carso for ten months, beginning in mid-1916; again he demonstrated a concern for his troops' welfare and longevity. He was also tactically astute: Diaz managed to conquer more ground, at a lower cost in lives, than other generals on the Carso. He assumed command of the XXIII Corps in April 1917, leading it to victories in the Tenth and Eleventh Battles; indeed, his XXIII Corps captured Selo in August, the only success for the 3rd Army in the last Italian offensive on the Isonzo.
Diaz's appointment as capo dello stato maggiore heralded a new era for the Italian army. Unlike Cadorna in virtually every way, Diaz personally understood what the fantaccino had endured on the Isonzo. He knew why the 2nd Army had collapsed so quickly and so totally. Diaz assumed his new post with a threefold mission before him: to resist the Austrian invasion, to restore and rebuild the army, and to win the war at the lowest possible cost in Italian lives. Beginning on November 8, Diaz devoted himself completely to attaining these goals. He was helped considerably by the new assistant chief of staff, Pietro Badoglio. Only eighteen months before, Badoglio had been a young and obscure regimental commander; in November 1917, after a meteoric rise, he was the second in command of the Italian Army. Although Badoglio had, in fact, been partly responsible for the Caporetto disaster-his poorly arrayed XXVII Corps had fallen apart almost immediately when struck by Austro-German assault divisions-Vittorio Emanuele did not know this, and felt the enterprising Badoglio could help rebuild the army. This he did effectively, thus redeeming himself for his failure on the upper Isonzo. Badoglio's specialty was rewriting Italian tactical doctrine, particularly defensive doctrine, a glaring Italian shortcoming. He would guarantee that Caporetto could not happen again.
Before the army could be rebuilt, though, the Austrians had to be stopped. By the second week of November, the Italians had decided to make their stand on the Piave. This mile-wide river, which began in the highest of the Carnic Alps, on the Austrian frontier, flowed past the Dolomites, then meandered through the coastal plain, reaching the Adriatic less than twenty miles northeast of Venice. The Piave was the last natural obstacle before the heart of Venetia and Venice itself. Either the Austrians would be stopped at the Piave, or northeastern Italy would be lost. Diaz hastily dispatched all available reserves to the Piave; it did not amount to much, but by mid-November, most of the Piave line was defended by the 3rd Army. The Duke of Aosta's Terza Arrnata was anxious to inflict a punishing defeat on the Austrians, revenge for the loss of the Carso and the Isonzo. The 1st Army, still in good order, defended the Asiago plateau, and the understrength 4th Army was wedged between them, in the center of the Italian line.
The Austrians tried to breach the Piave line before winter arrived, but it was a logistically impossible task. The Austrian armies had suffered trifling casualties during the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo compared to the magnitude of their victory, but maintaining a continuous advance was asking too much of the overextended supply services. The fighting troops were still willing to keep going, but their vital stores of ammunition and materiel could not keep pace. By midNovember, the 1st and 2nd Isonzo Armies had reached the Piave in strength, and the 14th Army was at edge of the eastern Asiago plateau. Army Group Boroevie had advanced sixty miles or more since late October 24, an amazing gain by the standards of the Great War. Still, the march into Venetia taxed the Austrian logistical system to its limits; it took weeks for supply columns to reach the Piave in adequate numbers. By then the Italians were firmly established on the river's west bank.
On November 16 the Austrian 29th Division attempted to establish a bridgehead across the Piave, but the effort failed with heavy losses. The Italians resisted tenaciously, meeting the Austrian river crossing with a determined counterattack. The few Austrian survivors swam back to the east bank and safety. The story was the same on the Asiago plateau. There, Austrian divisions-it was by now almost entirely a Habsburg affair, the Germans having headed for home-tried to break through the plateau's rugged mountain defenses. A hodgepodge of Italian units of the 4th Army, undefeated in battle, fought back furiously, and the Austrians advanced only slowly and painfully. Even Krauss's I Corps managed to gain little ground against the Italians there. The 55th Division, fresh from its victories at Karfreit and Cornino, met unexpectedly strong resistance when it tried to clear the highlands south of the city of Feltre, on the Piave. The division fought a vicious battle for Mt. Tomatico, a 5,200-foot-high snowy peak defended by a regiment of Alpini, a fight that exhausted even Schwarzenberg's crack division. The veteran 7th Regiment soon called Tomatico "our mountain of death"; the summit fell after several days of costly failed attempts, and then the 55th Division received a well-earned rest from action.
By any standards the Twelfth Battle and its aftermath represented an unprecedented catastrophe for Italian arms. By November 20, Italy had lost some 800,000 soldiers. Perhaps 50,000 were dead and wounded, not less than 300,000 were in Austrian captivity, and the remainder-as many as 400,000- had deserted in the chaos and confusion. By the end of November, Diaz had disbanded much of the lost army: forty-six regiments of infantry, four of Bersaglieri, fifteen Alpini battalions, and numerous support units. Italy's equipment losses were equally terrible: 3,150 guns, 1,732 mortars, 3,000 machine guns, and 300,000 rifles. In less than a month, the Italian Army shrank from sixty-five divisions to just thirty-three. In stark contrast, Austrian and German battle losses amounted to only 30,000 soldiers. It was an epic defeat. The magnitude of the disaster that befell the Italian Army on the Isonzo in late October 1917 surpassed even the Austrian catastrophe of mid-1916 in Galicia.
Yet Italy was still in the war, though if just barely. The conscript class of 1899 was called to the colors ahead of schedule in mid-November to replace the army's unparalleled losses, and Diaz rushed 300,000 ill-trained replacements and weary convalescents to the front in December to save the remnants of the Italian Army. In addition, help came quickly from the worried Allies: five British and six French divisions, well equipped and veterans of considerable fighting, were shipped immediately from the Western front to the Piave and the Asiago plateau to stave off collapse. Most important, perhaps, was the dramatic change that the Caporetto disaster brought to Italy. Austrian armies now occupied much of northeastern Italy, and total defeat seemed dangerously close. The Caporetto debacle nearly destroyed Italy's armies, and it completely altered Italian feeling about the war. In a few short weeks, the Great War was transformed in Italian eyes from an offensive struggle on the Isonzo to liberate Italia irredenta into a defensive fight on the Piave for national survival. Antiwar sentiment evaporated overnight as the Austrians stood at Venice's door; even those Socialists who had long criticized Cadorna's "imperialist war" now sounded militantly patriotic. In the words of newly appointed Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando, who formed a government of national unity after Caporetto, "The people must know that when the nation is in danger, we are all united." Thus the terrible defeat at Caporetto gave Italy the common purpose and unity of spirit that Cadorna's eleven calamitous offensives on the Isonzo had failed to produce.
The Austrians naturally did not notice this yet. The whole Habsburg Empire was still in the grips of a euphoria that transcended national lines. At last the hated Italians, Austria's faithless former allies, had been punished for their betrayal. The "Caporetto miracle"-das Wunder von Karfreit-was hailed as the greatest victory and most successful offensive of the Great War, at least in Western Europe, and indeed it was. The Austrian Army, after stoically enduring twenty-eight months of Italian attacks on the Isonzo, finally struck back. Boroevic and his armies had brought the war to Italian soil. The army of the Habsburgs had never fought better. It had shown itself to be tactically skilled and imbued with excellent fighting spirit. Soldiers of all nationalities, including some that had failed to fight effectively on other fronts, battled bravely and vic toriously on the Isonzo, and marched across Friulia and Venetia. Although Germany had lent her Habsburg ally considerable help with men and equipment, the Caporetto victory was unquestionably an Austrian triumph.
As 1917 drew to a close, the Central Powers appeared tantalizingly close to complete victory. For Austria, after more than three years of bruising total war, a victorious end was finally in sight. Serbia, the Habsburgs' original foe, had been crushed long ago, and Romania had more recently been knocked out of the war. Even Russia, Austria's deadliest opponent, was effectively out of the war, torn asunder by an emerging bloody civil war and Bolshevik revolution. Of Austria's enemies, only Italy remained, and she had been almost fatally weakened by the Caporetto offensive. The war that had begun and raged so long on the Isonzo had moved deep into northern Italy. As the Austrian Army ended 1917, its triumphal year, it could look forward to continuing a one-front, popular war against a nearly defeated foe.