THIRTEEN
The future of the Habsburg Empire and its army seemed brighter at the beginning of 1918 than at any point since the outbreak of war. Austria, which started the Great War poorly prepared to fight compared to its adversaries, had survived three and a half years of total war. Costly battles of attrition had worn down the Austrian Army, but the often strategically indecisive campaigns in Galicia and on the Isonzo had in a sense begun to pay off: of Austria's enemies, only Italy remained, and the Italian Army, recently shattered at Caporetto, appeared unlikely to stage a recovery soon.
As the war's last year began, the Austrian Army deployed forty-four divisions against the Italians, including all its elite formations. The Italian front was far and away the main Habsburg front; the Russian and Balkan theaters were now mere sideshows in comparison. Austria's remaining thirty-seven divisions, most of them understrength, were deployed in dormant theaters, more as occupation forces than as combat divisions.
Offsetting such encouraging developments, however, were many grave problems. None was more serious than Austria's increasing lack of soldiers. Ironically, casualty rates had been falling since the beginning of the war: 1917 had been, in fact, the best year yet, but Austria still lost 1,481,000 soldiers during the year, counting those hospitalized for illness. Even though the army's overall loss rate was in decline, the total number of Austrian casualties by 1918 was enormous. Of the 8,420,000 men called to the colors by the end of 1917, a staggering 4,010,000 had been lost to the army permanently, including 780,000 dead, a half-million invalided due to wounds, and over 1.6 million taken pris oner. The unavoidable reality confronting Austria was that the empire was rapidly running out of men. By 1918, Austria had already called more than 70 percent of its available men to the colors.
To make matters worse, the number of soldiers in the front lines had declined precipitously. The Etappe, the rear areas so detested by combat troops, including training and replacement depots, convalescent units, and ever growing support echelons, had expanded enormously since 1914 to meet the unprecedented manpower and materiel needs of total war. Thus, of 4,912,000 Habsburg soldiers of all kinds in uniform at the beginning of January 1918,' 1,661,000- one-third-were garrisoned in home districts, safe from the combat zone. However, even among the 3,251,000 Austrian soldiers constituting the field army, less than a million were actually combat soldiers.
By the last year of the war, repeated comb-outs of rear area units and industry could produce only limited numbers of men for the war machine; nearly all the fit and able men had long before been dispatched to the front. Even the use of volunteer "female assistant helpers" for service and administrative duties, of whom there were some 90,000 in early 1918, did comparatively little to ameliorate the shortage of Austrian fighting men. The army was especially lacking in infantrymen. The infantry, only 38.7 percent of the army's overall strength, accounted for roughly 95 percent of its casualties. The pool of available infantry replacements had begun to dry up. By January 1918, Austria could dispatch only 100,000 replacements to the field army monthly, versus a quarter-million in earlier years; infantry replacement battalions totaled on average only 500 soldiers, compared to a thousand or more previously. Worse, most of the replacements were convalescents returning to the front, not fresh men. As a result, most infantry regiments were well below strength, filled with weary older men and half-trained teenagers.
No less alarming for the Austrian war effort was the empire's sharp decline in industrial and agricultural output. The poor condition of the transportation system and the increasing shortages of raw materials, coupled with the loss of many industrial workers to the army, steadily took their toll on the war economy. The production of weaponry and munitions, which peaked in the first half of 1917, declined dramatically in the first half of 1918. For instance, Habsburg arsenals provided the army with 2,285 artillery pieces in the first six months of 1917, but only 1,296 in the first six months of the following year. The output of other vital war materiel exhibited a similar pattern of marked decline: artillery shell production fell by almost half (750,000 as opposed to 1,476,000 shells per month), and rifle manufacture dropped by nearly 80 percent (617,000 rifles in the first half of 1917, compared to but 130,000 in the first half of 1918). Even uniforms and accoutrements were increasingly in short supply.
Food, too, was a growing problem for the army, thanks to the Allied blockade and the conscripting of so many peasants. By 1918, the soldier's daily ra tion had fallen to ten ounces of flour for combat troops and seven for rear area troops, and meat was virtually nonexistent. Fodder was also scarce, and horses often went hungry, too. The army's pool of horses, so vital for all operations, was likewise shrinking: 459,000 by mid-1918, compared to nearly a million in 1916.
The army's paltry rations worsened the already grave impact of disease. The number of troops withdrawn from the front due to illness, always high, rose dramatically: in the last year of the war, a million Austrian soldiers were incapacitated by sickness. Cholera and malaria, prevalent in Italy and the Balkans, were particularly lethal, the latter being especially feared for its ability to cripple whole formations in a very short period of time. In one instance, the 47th Infantry Division, garrisoned in distant Albania, lost 10,000 men almost at oncevirtually its entire strength-to malaria; a quarter of them died. The food crisis during the winter of 1917-1918 was severe for Austria, notably in Vienna, Lower Austria, and Bohemia. In late January the High Command ordered two dozen infantry battalions from the Balkan front into the Hungarian countryside-the empire's breadbasket-to assist with food requisitioning, a duty that eventually would absorb whole divisions of already scarce combat troops.
Materially, life on the empire's home front was hardly better than in the combat zone, and in some respects appreciably worse. By early 1918, workers' rations had fallen to five ounces of bread per day. Civilians were dissatisfied with war-induced increases in inflation and taxation; at root, the population was simply growing tired of the war, as in all belligerent countries. In the third week of the new year, civilian frustrations exploded in a series of strikes across the monarchy. The strikes were basically antiwar in character, although some were overtly Bolshevik or nationalist, or both. The dynasty and army were frightened by the strikes, which seemed to threaten internal collapse. Emperor Karl appealed to his army for assistance, and rapid action brought seven divisions of loyal troops from the front to put down the strikes in German Austria and Bohemia; a military government seemed a genuine possibility. Fortunately for the tired empire, the strikes were short-lived and nearly bloodless, and the army was not called upon to take power. Nevertheless, this need for combat troops to maintain order on the home front was merely the beginning of a mission that would absorb increasing numbers of frontline units as the war headed to its conclusion.
The military, of course, was far from immune to civilian ideas and pressures, so it was perhaps inevitable that the strikes would spread to the armed forces. Indeed, the threat of mass nationalist and socialist uprisings in the ranks, although failing to materialize during the first four years of the war, remained a major concern for many Austrian generals. The first incident was a mutiny at Cattaro, a major naval base on the southern coast of Dalmatia, on February 1, 1918. Some 4,000 sailors, many of them Italians and Croats (the navy, recruiting heavily from Istria and Dalmatia, was disproportionately Italian, Croatian, and Slovene), revolted over their poor rations and living conditions. The mutiny was quickly and easily put down by loyal army and navy units, and the mutineers returned to their posts without further incident. The brief Cattaro revolt in fact had little to do with nationalist agitation, the generals' greatest fear; rather, it was a sailors' mutiny similar to those in the German and Russian navies of the period, inspired by stern shipboard discipline and abysmal living conditions. Even so, the incident frightened the High Command, which worried it was the precursor to wider nationalist mutinies in the armed forces. Although Cattaro was a social, not ethnic, protest-and a mild one, at that-it ushered in rear area unrest which would plague the Austrian Army later in 1918.
Fortunately for Austria, frontline army units of all nationalities were still relatively immune to the increasing unrest in the rear areas. Divisions in the field, and particularly those in Italy, still exhibited high morale and combat effectiveness. As spring arrived, however, the Austrian Army's vulnerable rear experienced its first major disturbances of the war. The problem centered on the Heimkehrer, Habsburg prisoners of war who were repatriated from Russia following the signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March; as part of the new Bolshevik regime's concessions, Austria's many prisoners in Russia were returned home. At first, this filled the High Command with optimism; at last it would have the replacements it so badly needed. And the numbers of returnees was staggering: 517,000 by the summer, nearly 700,000 before the war's end. Yet many of the Heimkehrer were in poor health due to the abysmal living conditions in Russian prisoner of war camps. As many as a quarter of all Austrian prisoners in Russia died from disease and starvation, and many of the survivors were sick and tired upon their return to Austria. Worse, both the Imperial Russian authorities and their Bolshevik successors had proselytized among their Habsburg captives; the former propagandized among "Entente" prisoners (Serbs, Romanians, and Italians), as well as "brother Slavs"; the latter added a Communist element to the indoctrination. Although few Austrian prisoners returned home convinced radicals of any kind-most were merely happy to be alive-there was a dedicated cadre among the Heimkehrer determined to agitate upon their return to Austria.2
Upon repatriation, the army dispatched physically fit Heimkehrer to depots for retraining, to be followed by reassignment to field units. Army authorities promised the returnees both leave and back pay before sending them to the front. Yet, in a muddle only too typical of the strained Habsburg bureaucracy, many returnees were sent back to their regiments with neither back pay nor leave. Mutiny was the inevitable result. Revolts broke out at rear area depots across the empire in May and June. They involved troops of all nationalities, although Czech, Slovak, and Serb troops were especially active. In most cases, the mutineers quickly returned to their posts when confronted by military authorities, but in a few cases blood was shed when loyal troops put down the mutinies with deadly force.
None of the mutinies was explicitly nationalist in origin. Although claims of ethnic discrimination and persecution were included in the lists of mutineers' complaints, dissatisfaction with material conditions featured far more prominently. Most mutineers just wanted the back pay and leave they had been promised; they revolted against the army's slack and insensitive bureaucracy, not against the Habsburg Empire itself. Significantly, none of the mutinies involved combat units at the front. The High Command was quick to place blame on poor administration and the declining quality of officer leadership; its official report on the mutinies observed, "The blame falls in the first place on the officers" After years of heavy losses among field officers, the abilities of the army's leadership cadres had declined demonstrably. Yet there was little the army could do, except reinforce the concept of discipline.
January's civilian strikes, combined with the late spring's military uprisings, led to the establishment of permanent military security battalions. The High Command raised these special units-the equivalent of seven divisions by the summer-to aid civil authorities in the event of further unrest, military or civilian. The support battalions were taken from hard-pressed line regiments, with German, Magyar, Croatian, and particularly Bosnian soldiers being favored by the High Command for their political reliability. These units proved exceptionally successful at countering any threats to internal order in the empire, even up to the last days of the war. However, internal security was one more mission that the ailing Austrian war machine was ill-equipped to perform. Simply put, there were just not enough battalions and soldiers in the Austrian Army to fulfill all the missions it was given. Throughout 1918, the High Command and the War Ministry argued over unit deployments, the former emphasizing the needs of the front, the latter being more concerned with the threat of revolt and revolution at home.
To make matters worse, the army was additionally called upon to help the Hungarian government requisition foodstuffs to feed the hungry cities. Indeed, by spring, famine seemed a possibility in the empire. In March, Budapest requested 50,000 additional troops to help bring the crops in; soon after, the High Command ordered three whole Honved divisions and a number of smaller units into the Hungarian hinterland, putting large sections of rural Hungary under military occupation. This further drain on the army's emaciated manpower reserves only worsened conditions at the front. Equally significantly, the huge military requisitioning effort served to alienate many peasants, who heretofore had been mostly loyal subjects of the empire, as well as the backbone of its infantry.
In the spring of 1918, confronted by material and psychological crises on the home front, the Austrian Army sought above all to maintain the fighting spirit of the army in the field. The High Command was sufficiently unsettled by dis turbances in the hinterland, and concerned enough about the effect of Allied propaganda, to begin a campaign of explicit political indoctrination of the troops. The prestige of the dynasty and its army and the support of the church, traditional sources of Habsburg strength, were found wanting when confronted with the demoralized Heiinkehrer, so in late March the army established the Enemy Propaganda Defense Organization to combat Bolshevik and nationalist subversion. Its program of "patriotic instruction" borrowed heavily from Erich Ludendorff's propaganda methods in Germany, and was developed with the assistance of loyal politicians and academics, with the aim of stimulating greater loyalty to the dynasty and the army. It used lectures, journals, pamphlets, placards, and even films to carry home the message that the war was nearly won, and that peace would bring an era of prosperity and liberty to the peoples of the Habsburg Empire. Though this considerable propaganda exercise may have ameliorated the army's condition somewhat, it remains doubtful whether its long-term effects were very great. Austria's dwindling supply of men, machines, and food, the essential military problem, could not be overcome by words. Indeed, many generals were pessimistic about the campaign's utility. Colonel-General Wenzel von Wurm, commander of the Isonzo Army, commented, "The beautiful words of the patriotic lessons could not convince anyone, for an empty stomach and revolutionary ideas supersede stronger arguments."
By the war's last spring, increasing numbers of Austrian soldiers, dissatisfied with the declining conditions of wartime service, were deserting. Many returning prisoners of war, as well as a fair number of other soldiers, chose to leave the army rather than stage revolts inside it. There were likely 100,000 deserters by the late summer of 1918, 35,000 in Galicia alone. Some of them formed bands of armed thugs and thieves, known as the "green cadres"; these groups were particularly strong in the mountainous forests of Croatia and Bosnia, and some of them were politically motivated. The largest bands even had machine guns and artillery. The army proved incapable of eliminating the "green cadres" because there were too few troops available in the hinterland to do more than harass armed deserters. In some areas, bands of deserters were a serious threat to Habsburg authority: when Karl visited Sofia and Constantinople in May, special security precautions had to be taken as the emperor's train moved across the Balkan countryside.
On the whole, though, despite numerous and growing problems, the fighting condition of the Austrian Army in the first half of 1918 was certainly adequate for defensive purposes. The tranquillity that prevailed on all fronts gave field units a chance to rest and absorb what few replacements were available. The Piave line remained strong, and soldiers of all nationalities were determined not to give any ground to the Italians. The army in the field was still largely untouched by the political turmoil that gripped the rear areas and the home front. The army in fact spent the first six months of 1918 undergoing a tactical reorga nization. This entailed a rationalization of divisional structure, with each of the army's sixty-five divisions to have one artillery and two infantry brigades, as well as numerous support units. This organization, and the tactical understanding that accompanied it, reflected the maturity of the Austrian Army as a fighting force; it included all the hard-won lessons of total war, especially the need for heavy firepower, close infantry-artillery cooperation, solid aviation, engineering, signal, and logistical support, and coherent tactical doctrine at all levels. In the last months of the Great War, the Austrian Army emerged as a first-rate fighting force, well adapted to the static, firepower-heavy combat that prevailed on most fronts. Unfortunately, many of these vital lessons were learned too late, and by mid-1918 Austria was materially far too weak to equip a first-rate army. Most of the weapons required by the new organization never came from the factories. The Austrian Army would have to fight its last battles with the tired and worn-out men and equipment it had on hand.
The condition of the Italian Army in mid-1918 provided a significant and unanticipated contrast to Austria's precipitous military decline. The Caporetto catastrophe had finally forced Italy to fight the war with all its strength and determination. Rather than bringing Italy to its knees, the disastrous performance of its fighting forces in the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo instead gave rise to a desire in all quarters to repel the Habsburg invader and win the war. Diaz and Badoglio were fortunate enough to take command when the entire nation wanted, even demanded, resistance and victory. They wasted no time remaking the army. From the tattered remains of the divisions destroyed on the Isonzo, they would raise a wholly new army, one that could defend the Piave line and eventually evict the Austrians from Italian soil. They perceived two major defects that had caused the debacle on the upper Isonzo in late October: outmoded tactics and poor morale. Armando Diaz and Pietro Badoglio spent the first half of 1918 rebuilding the army both in body and in spirit, to enable it to win the war.
The army's tactical deficiencies were numerous and widespread; they were, in fact, the major cause of the debacle between Flitsch and Tolmein. From mid-1915 to late 1917, the army had learned very little, despite years of terrible fighting. Luigi Cadorna was no tactical visionary, so his forces remained wedded to simple, outmoded fighting methods that rarely won victories but always produced high casualty rates. Diaz and Badoglio would no longer tolerate either. Badoglio, whose embarrassing role in the autumn's defeat was forgotten,was particularly concerned with remolding the army's tactical doctrine, which he knew would be necessary to defeat the Austrians in the battles to come. No longer could the army rely on inaccurate extended barrages or costly mass infantry charges in the attack; just as significant, the use of a strong, single defensive line had been found badly wanting, and was in need of revision. To hold the Piave line, Badoglio mandated new defensive techniques that emphasized mutually supporting strong points instead of a continuous line, defenses in depth rather than a single trench system. The Italians also learned to use counterattacks to bolster the defense, a technique that the Austrians had used so successfully on the Isonzo. Infantry tactics were modified, centered around firepowernotably machine guns and mortars-rather than manpower, particularly the human wave attacks that had failed so dismally on the Isonzo. Perhaps most important, Badoglio helped develop a new artillery doctrine to make the gunners more flexible and responsive to the infantry's needs, as well as more accurate and deadly in their shooting. Above all, Badoglio standardized the army's tactical doctrine and ensured that all officers were acquainted with it; no longer would commanders be permitted to fight as they pleased, as Cadoma had been content to do. By mid-1918, the Italian Army had advanced remarkably in its fighting methods, having at last learned the painful battlefield realities of the Great War. It was not yet the tactical equal of its Austrian adversary, but it bore little resemblance to the forces that had been defeated so thoroughly in the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo.
No less significantly for Italy and her army, Diaz and Badoglio spent a great deal of effort rebuilding the morale and fighting spirit of the much abusedfanti. They knew that the horrible battles of attrition on the Isonzo could never be repeated, and that the fantaccino, the backbone of the army, expected reasonable conditions of service and a decent chance of success before the Italian Army could again go on the offensive. Given good leadership, sound doctrine, and fair treatment, the Italian soldier could be relied upon to fight bravely and effectively. The army's new leaders at last gave Italy's fighting men the decent wages, food, and benefits that Cadoma had denied them. The Comando Supremo increased the soldiers' pay, improved their rations, and granted more leave. It also gave each soldier a free life insurance policy, and promised generous postwar benefits from the new Ministry of Pensions and Army Welfare. In a similar vein, the government imposed a special tax on workers exempted from war service, and improved the sad lot of the peasants. The peasantry especially bore the brunt of the war-providing the army with half its infantry, as well as 61 percent of war orphans-and in Rome the politicians finally took steps to lessen the peasants' poverty and suffering. They were promised land reform after the war, and the National Veterans Organization, with a capital base of 300 million lire, bought smallholdings to distribute to peasant soldiers upon their return from the front. No longer would the families of fighting men have to go hungry. After three years of war, the Italian soldier at last had the material comforts that had been provided to the soldiers of other belligerent armies long before.
Diaz and Badoglio also worked hard to improve the army's flagging morale. The Caporetto defeat proved a painful shock, and clearly fighting spirit had to be restored. The Comando Supremo did this through a program of intense indoctrination. The army's new information service bombarded the troops with messages about why they were fighting. These messages, conveyed through speeches, leaflets, and an armywide newspaper (Italy's first), portrayed the Austrians as barbarian invaders, Teutonic hordes assaulting northern Italy. Reconquering the lost territories of eastern Venetia and Friulia, as well as Italia irredenta, was the new national crusade. Although perhaps half of the fanti were illiterate, and therefore unable to read the propaganda material printed for them, all Diaz's soldiers understood that the Habsburgs, Italy's old nemesis, had to be expelled from Italian soil.
Devotion to victory likewise now extended to the home front. In the aftermath of Caporetto and the occupation of the Northeast by the advancing Austrians, Italy's once vocal antiwar protests fell silent. Only the most radical socialists and pacifists still spoke out against the war, and they soon wound up in jail. Vittorio Orlando, formerly a strong defender of civil liberties, refused to tolerate antiwar protest-in his eyes, defeatism-in Italy's hour of crisis. For the overwhelming majority of Italians, whatever their political allegiance, the war was now a just struggle in defense of the homeland. Patriotism flourished even in the most unlikely quarters. As the moderate Socialist leader Filippo Turati was careful to point out, socialism was not "a doctrine of cowardice." A genuine spirit of national resistance spread throughout Italy in early 1918, transcending the recently insurmountable barriers of class, caste, and region.
Strikes, too, disappeared, and industrial productivity rose dramatically. Increasing the output of war materiel was vital to make good the army's massive equipment losses of October and November. Italy's war economy, bolstered by improved labor relations and a streamlined bureaucracy, performed superbly in the first half of 1918. The army lost 3,500 guns as a result of the Twelfth Battle, half its artillery park, but arsenals quickly provided thousands of replacements. By mid-April the army had 5,900 guns, and 6,300 by the onset of summer. Production of all types of weaponry rose appreciably: by 1918 the army received 1,200 new machine guns per month, compared to just twenty-five in 1915. The output of ammunition, just as vital to the war effort, similarly increased: shell production reached 88,400 a day in the last months of the war, nine times the number available at the war's beginning. The army soon put these shells to good use: during the ten months of war in 1918, Italian guns fired more munitions than they had from May 1915 to the Caporetto retreat. Still, the Italian war economy remained weak in some areas-during the winter of 1917-1918 Italy received wheat stocks from British Army depots in France to ward off hunger-but, with Allied help, it managed to reequip the army after Caporetto, an impressive accomplishment.
Diaz and Badoglio used the freshly made guns and equipment to raise what was, in effect, a second army for Italy. The necessary manpower came from several sources. Convalescents and soldiers on leave were dispatched to the front, as was the teenaged conscript class of 1899. In addition, the army made determined efforts to round up the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who deserted in the aftermath of Caporetto. Many were eventually caught, and those deemed reliable were sent back into the line; the unreliable ones were imprisoned, and 60,000 others went to France, where they served in labor units. With this diverse collection of men, the Comando Supremo raised 25 infantry divisions by late February 1918 (the equivalent of more than 120 infantry regiments), more than 30 artillery regiments and two dozen sapper battalions, as well as hundreds of supporting units. Dozens of new support regiments and battalions, including heavy artillery and engineers, likewise were added to the order of battle. Just four months after the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo began, Italy had already made good most of its enormous losses of men and equipment.
Some of the most important increases in troop strength in early 1918 came with the expansion of the army's special assault units. The first battalion of arditi had distinguished itself during the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo, and the second unit fought equally well in raids later in September 1917; both battalions fought bravely, if hopelessly, during the Twelfth Battle. Impressed by the arditi's accomplishments, the Cornando Supremo ordered nineteen more battalions raised as soon as possible, for a total of twenty-one, one per army corps. There was no shortage of volunteers. Thousands of ardent young men came forward, many of them sons of the middle classes, anxious to take revenge on the hated Austrians. They were notable for their recklessness and violence, as well as their cultivated aura of danger and courage. Well armed and trained to attack and conquer at any price, the young volunteers, clad in black shirts and fezzes, had a standard arrogant response to all outsiders, me nefrego-I don't give a damn. They even replaced the army's traditional chant, "Hip, hip, hurrah!" with their own self-absorbed cry: "A chi Vonore? A noi!"4
With their obvious valor and apparent idealism, the arditi became national heroes. Their ferocious enthusiasm was widely admired, even adulated. Indeed, the brave and dedicated "black flames" seemed to many to be just the kind of soldiers Italy needed to win the war. They quickly became the darlings of the nationalists and the Right. One of their loudest champions was Benito Mussolini, who extolled their "sublime heroism." After recovering from his near-fatal wounds received on the Carso, Mussolini was demobilized from the army, unfit for further duty. He returned to journalism, to Il Popolo d'/talia; from there he ceaselessly urged the government and the army to prosecute the war ruthlessly until complete victory was won. To Mussolini, Caporetto only confirmed how deeply sick liberal Italy was, and the arditi with their cult of violence offered the badly needed cure. He hailed them in print, claiming, "We should pin our faith to those men who make war with conviction and passion." A more sanguine staff officer on the Comando Supremo sounded a quiet cautionary note, wondering what peacetime role there would be for the arditi, for "these people who no longer know the value of human life." In early 1918 most Italians were, however, more cheered than worried by the rise of the arditi; in fact, the army planned to raise even more assault battalions in the second half of the year.
The arditi and other Italian infantry saw action in the first half of 1918, even though Diaz was determined to maintain the strategic defense for the foreseeable future. A stand on the Piave did not mean a totally passive role, however, and through the winter and spring the army undertook a series of local counterattacks against Austrian positions on the Asiago plateau. They were intended both to retake some important hill positions and to keep the army's fighting edge sharp. The Italians enjoyed some notable and well publicized small victories in these battles; at the least, they proved that the fantaccino was still capable of fighting bravely. One of the best known of these engagements occurred at Sasso Rosso, snow-covered peaks on the eastern Asiago plateau. On January 28, the Monte Baldo Alpini Battalion launched an attack on the Austrians entrenched there to recapture the nearest hill, Col d'Echele. The attack largely failed, but was noted for the courageous fighting of the Alpini against hopeless odds. The most celebrated event happened on the east slope of Col d'Echele, where the battalion's arditi platoon tried vainly to advance. The suicidal charge into Austrian fire was led by a seventeen-year-old Jewish volunteer, Roberto Sarfatti (who was, incidentally, the only son of Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti). He was quickly cut down by Austrian machine gun fire, but his heroic deed was hailed throughout Italy as an example to follow. Sarfatti became the youngest Italian soldier to receive the Gold Medal for Bravery. His socially prominent mother, clad in black, accepted his inedaglia d'oro.
The Italian Army was content to remain on the defensive overall. Diaz and Badoglio knew their newly raised army was too inexperienced and too lacking in self-confidence to take on the Austrians on anything like equal terms. They would not attempt a major offensive until they were absolutely sure of victory, and that promised to be several months. Diaz might have agreed to an offensive had more help from his Allies been available; there were, to be sure, a halfdozen French and British divisions in Italy, along with many support units, but nowhere near enough to break the Austrian defenses on the Piave. The exhausted Allies were now pinning their hopes of victory on the Americans anyway. By the spring of 1918, there were half a million American troops in Europe, preparing to turn the tide of the war, but virtually none of them had reached Italy. General John J. Pershing was adamant that the main American effort would be in France, and almost the entire American Army was concentrated there.
There were, of course, some American troops in Italy by early 1918, but few of them were destined to fight against the Austrians. There were only a few scattered air and support units, and they were in Italy mostly to show solidarity with the Italian cause.5 Certainly they would not be much help in breaching the Piave line. There were several well publicized American ambulance units serv ing at the front. They counted among their ranks the nineteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway, who left his job at the Kansas City Star in April to join the Allied war effort. He soon found himself working as a frontline ambulance driver with the American Red Cross in the Dolomite foothills, opposite the Austrian 10th Army. Hemingway was eager to enter combat, and as it turned out, he would not have long to wait. But a handful of ambulance drivers and some pilots on speaking tours was not the American help Diaz had hoped for. As the war's last year continued, he became increasingly disenchanted with the Allies-the whole American field army was gathered in France. He pleaded for more help, notably in the form of American divisions to tight on the Piave, but all his requests were rebuffed. Diaz used this as an excuse to refuse to assist the French and British in their hour of greatest need, which soon arrived.
After Caporetto, the British and French had learned to be understanding about Italy's military weakness; certainly neither London nor Paris wanted to provoke another Caporetto-style debacle. Yet, this Allied sympathy evaporated as soon as a serious German threat arose on the Western front. In late March, the Germans undertook a massive attack on British positions in the Somme area. It was the greatest German offensive since 1914, intended to win the war before the Americans could arrive in sufficient strength to alter the balance irrevocably in the Allies' favor. The "Peace Offensive," launched in three stages and backed by the very best German assault divisions, made alarming gains; by April, the British 5th Army had been thoroughly wrecked and Ludendorff's armies had advanced forty miles. The Germans seemed perilously near a breakthrough to Paris, and the Allies were plunged into a crisis worse than any since the Battle of the Marne in September 1914.
At Rapallo in early November 1917, in the aftermath of Caporetto, the Allies had agreed to a Supreme War Council and a unified strategy, so Italy was bound to help her British and French allies in their time of peril. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied generalissimo, soon began requesting all available help from Italy to stem the German tide. By May, as successive German drives pounded the French as well as the British, Foch pleaded with Diaz to undertake an offensive-any offensive-against the Central Powers. Diaz refused. Meeting the Allies' demands would involve a major offensive on the Piave, an all-out drive to win the war, and the Comando Supremo was unwilling to undertake that until it was supremely confident of victory. His carefully rebuilt army was not yet ready. Diaz and Badoglio told the Allies that an Italian offensive would be too risky; it could mean, they cautioned, "another Caporetto," so the Western front would have to hold without any help from Italy.
Regrettably for Austria and her army, the Habsburgs were not as good at rebuffing the demands of their indignant allies. The immense strains of four years of total war had made Austria wholly dependent on the German Empire for her survival. The attack on Serbia in August 1914, the spark that ignited the Great War, had been started by Vienna as a last-ditch attempt to maintain the Habsburg Empire's status as an independent great power, so it was a supreme and bitter irony that by the war's end Austria had become so militarily, economically, and politically reliant on Berlin, more a German satellite than an ally.6 In the middle of the war, German intervention had saved Austria in the East and in the Balkans, and by 1918 Austria was inalterably tied to Germany, for good or it I.
But somehow Emperor Karl managed not to see things that way. Karl was a well intentioned monarch whose deepest desire was peace, and with it the saving of his multinational empire, but he was hopelessly naive. He had, in fact, been conducting secret peace negotiations behind Berlin's back. His envoy was Prince Sixtus of Parma, his brother-in-law and an officer in the Belgian Army. Karl surmised that the Germans were losing the war and that Berlin's demise would drag the Habsburg Empire down with it. He therefore wanted a separate peace, the only way he saw to avoid the collapse of his family's centuries-old empire. He arranged for his brother-in-law to contact the Allies, and Karl's peace feelers were met with a mixture of interest and skepticism; exactly how he planned to take Austria out of the war was far from clear. It all ended when Karl's secret mission was discovered by the Germans. Germany's military and diplomatic leaders, and Emperor Wilhelm II, were outraged by their ally's disloyalty.
Karl wasted no time repenting for his sins. Visiting the German High Command on May 13, he concluded a series of agreements with Germany that tied his empire to Berlin more closely than ever before. Austria was now theoretically joined with Germany in all matters of military, political, and economic cooperation: Karl had essentially signed away the sovereignty of his realm, submitting to the authority of a German-directed Mitteleuropa.
To make matters worse, in an attempt to assuage his guilt and reassure Germany of Austria's sincerity, Karl committed his tired army to a major offensive against the Italians as soon as possible. By May, Ludendorff's "Peace Offensive" had begun to stall with heavy losses, and with the seemingly limitless numbers of Americans reaching France, Germany's strategic situation began to appear bleak. The Germans were thus elated to accept Karl's offer of an offensive to take Allied pressure off them in France. But for Austria it was hardly less than a suicidal gesture. The Habsburg armies in Italy were strong enough to hold their defenses in the Piave and Asiago areas for some time, but a major offensive was far beyond Austria's military means. It could not win the war, yet it promised to wreck Austria's weary field forces.
The prospect of an offensive horrified many senior Habsburg generals. Significantly, the highest ranking opponent was Svetozar Boroevic, recently promoted field marshal and commander of one of the two Austrian army groups in Italy. Boroevic believed that the war would be lost before the end of the year, even without the offensive, and that the army must conserve its waning strength for the coming domestic tumult. He was willing to agree to a limited offensive, albeit with great reluctance, but was adamantly opposed to a general twopronged push on both the Piave and the Asiago fronts. But this strategic concept, based on Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf's prewar planning, was precisely what Karl's concessions to Berlin promised. Boroevic, ever loyal to the emperor, in the end had no real choice but to go along with the operation that he knew would destroy the last remaining Habsburg army in the field.
The plan of attack, set to begin June 15, committed virtually the entire frontline strength of the Austrian Army to the offensive, a total of fifty-three divisions plus an additional ten in reserve. Conrad's army group on the Asiago plateau contained some twenty-eight divisions, and Boroevic's army group on the Piave boasted eighteen more. Despite the impressive numbers, the combat readiness of the Habsburg forces left a great deal to be desired. The paper strength of the field army was 2,800,000, but there were actually only 946,000 troops at the front. Furthermore, several of the divisions recently sent to the Piave front from the Eastern and Balkan theaters had no experience fighting the Italians, and were of questionable value in the coming offensive.? The deteriorating condition of the war economy meant that the troops were short of virtually everything. Many divisions were mere shells, with only a third or half of their prescribed numbers of riflemen. The supply of replacements had dwindled to near nonexistence. In early June, on the eve of the offensive, the 29th Infantry Division on the Piave, a typical infantry formation preparing to attack, received a replacement battalion: in the past such a unit would have been a thousand strong, but even on paper it came to just 302 soldiers; there were actually only 166 troops on strength, once those on leave were counted. A third of Austrian artillery batteries had no draft horses, and there was no fuel for tractors; ammunition, too, was increasingly scarce. Shortages of spare parts crippled or damaged worn-out equipment. The soldiers themselves were badly malnourished. The daily combat ration was now so meager-infantrymen were fortunate to receive seven ounces of meat per week and mostly subsisted on small portions of corn bread and occasional boiled vegetables-that the average body weight of an Austrian frontline soldier had fallen to just 120 pounds. Clothing and accoutrements were in equally short supply, and such "luxuries" as underwear and decent boots were but a memory in most combat units.
Even so, the majority of Austrian infantrymen were still willing to fight against the detested Italians. Tactical planning for the offensive developed quickly. The brunt of the battle would be borne by Colonel-General von Wurm's Isonzo Army; its four corps with fourteen divisions, backed up by 1,770 guns, had the mission of penetrating the defenses of the Italian 3rd Army, dug in on the lower Piave before Venice, from Papadopoli island to the Adriatic. Only nine Italian divisions stood between the Isonzo Army, and Venice and the northern Italian heartland. To break through, Wurm's army would rely upon careful artillery preparation. In its last offensive, the Austrian Army enjoyed a sophisticated artillery fire plan, beginning with mortar barrages at 3 A.M. on the day of the attack, followed by a general barrage of gas shells to prevent Italian shelling. The Isonzo Army intended to launch the assault elements of its four corps across the Piave at 7:30 A.M., with mountain batteries attached to forward battalions for direct support. Divisional artillery would commence rolling barrages after the initial penetration was achieved, jumping forward 200 yards every four minutes to provide advancing infantry units with constant supporting tire. The detailed artillery fire plan, based on all the tactical lessons of the past four years of fighting, was made possible by the effective use of army aviation. The hard-pressed Austrian air arm performed sterling service in the weeks leading up to the offensive, providing detailed reconnaissance about Italian dispositions, particularly about Italian artillery batteries, and protecting the movement of Austrian troops and supplies to forward staging areas.
Infantry divisions spent the first two weeks of June gradually moving their combat and supply echelons toward the banks of the Piave, a few companies at a time, always under the cover of darkness. To maintain surprise, construction units devised complex camouflage schemes to hide the burgeoning supply depots just behind the Piave front. By mid-June, the army was ready to attack. The months of comparative quiet on the Italian front meant that Austria's combat divisions, although short of rations, clothing, weapons, and munitions, nevertheless were well rested and self-confident. Habsburg soldiers of all nationalities, although tired of the war, wanted to inflict a final defeat on Italy, their last remaining enemy. Such a victory would bring an end to the war. General August von Cramon, chief Prussian liaison officer to the Habsburg Army, observed, "The troops' offensive spirit, confirmed to me on all sides, was the best. Officers and men burned, as in the first months of the war, to compete against the Eyeties." It cannot be doubted, though, that some of the troops' offensive ardor was inspired by hopes of plundering the more generously provisioned Italian trenches.
The offensive began, as scheduled, on the morning of June 15. After an impressive artillery bombardment, the Isonzo Army's infantry assaulted the Piave line, crossing the river with the optimistic battle cry "To Milan!" 8 But Italian defenses proved stronger than anticipated, and few Austrian divisions made notable progress on June 15. The flat Venetian plain offered the Italians comparatively few natural defenses, but the fmui fought back surprisingly hard. All of Wurm's nine divisions in the first wave reached the Piave's west bank on June 15, but only two of them penetrated more than a mile into Italian-held territory. The next day the Isonzo Army's divisions continued to advance, but only slowly and with heavy losses. The story repeated itself on the more mountainous Asiago front, where Conrad's army group encountered firm Italian resistance. Austrian casualties mounted as entrenched Italian units fought with unanticipated vigor; their many machine gun nests, in particular, well dug in and positioned, took a heavy toll of Austrian troops and proved difficult to overcome. The Duke of Aosta's "undefeated" 3rd Army, rebuilt and retrained since the Caporetto retreat, held the Piave line, resisting the attacks of the Isonzoarmee with determination and skill.
On June 17, the Isonzo Army poured reinforcements into the small bridgeheads it held on the Piave's west bank, but made scant progress. Fresh Italian reserve divisions began to arrive on the Piave, further stalling the Austrian drive. By the evening, despite heroic efforts, the veteran Isonzo Army's best divisions had advanced little more than two miles westward, and the rest remained stuck just beyond the river's edge. Wurm watched the likelihood of a major breakthrough dwindle during the day, and therefore committed his last remaining fresh divisions to the fight that evening, a final attempt to tear a significant gap in the Italian defenses and expand his small bridgeheads. June 18 saw more attempts by the Isonzo Army, particularly its VII and XXIII Corps, to breach the Italian defenses, but the day's advances totaled only a few hundred yards. During the night, fresh Austrian battalions crossed the Piave, and were sent into battle by midday on June 20. Again the 3rd Army fought back with surprising grit, and the Austrian drive stalled with heavy casualties. To make matters worse for the Austrians, the 3rd Army's artillery was active, inflicting losses on forward units; the Isonzo Army's gunners, running out of ammunition, failed to respond.
On the Asiago front, the 11th Army continued to meet equally dogged Italian resistance. There, too, Austrian assault divisions attacked with bravery and tactical skill, but the natural strengths of the defense, bolstered by machine guns and artillery-many of them manned by first-rate British and French troops-carried the day. Army Group Conrad found it impossible to gain ground on the rough, mountainous Asiago plateau. It was not for lack of effort; everywhere Austria's tired Frontkampfer, anxious to win a decisive victory, battled hard. Even when the offensive stalled and the chances of a breakthrough dimmed, officers and men kept trying, always at a heavy cost. One such determined soldier was a young artillery lieutenant of the 5th Division, fighting on the upper Piave. He was Ludwig Wittgenstein, son of a wealthy GermanAustrian industrialist. In a few short years he would achieve international fame for his innovative and controversial philosophical concepts, but at the moment he was wholly absorbed in soldiering. Wittgenstein had been an avid supporter of the Austrian cause from the war's beginning, donating considerable sums of his inherited fortune to buy weapons for the army. After receiving a reserve commission in the artillery, he had tried for two years to get into battle, but had spent many boring months in the East, supervising the repair of damaged guns. Now at last he had his chance to see some action. He served as a forward observer with the frontline infantry, marching with them into battle, calling down artillery fire by field telephone to support their advance into Italian territory. It was demanding and dangerous work, but Wittgenstein relished it. Although the offensive soon bogged down, Wittgenstein performed his duty successfully and bravely, following the infantry into battle against British troops several times during mid-June. Miraculously he returned unscathed from every mission. His efforts alone could not bring victory, of course, but they did win him the Silver Medal for Bravery.
Austrian soldiers of all nationalities similarly fought courageously, even as any chance of victory disappeared slowly but inexorably. By the morning of June 21, the Isonzo Army command realized plainly that the offensive had stalled without achieving more than limited tactical gains, and that the threat of a general Italian counteroffensive was very real, indeed increasing. Already the Italians had committed reserve divisions to battle, frequently led by arditi battalions, pushing the Austrians back toward the river. After losing so many men and guns during the abortive offensive, the army's power to resist a determined Italian assault appeared dangerously weak. Ammunition shortages continued to worsen, leaving the infantry without much artillery support in the face of continuous Italian barrages. Machine gun ammunition reserves, too, were dwindling. Even rifle ammunition was growing scarce, with regiments in the field reporting a reserve of only 110 bullets per rifleman. Worst of all, Austrian formations were depressingly vulnerable to Allied air attack; by now the Italians, British, and French had concentrated their reserve squadrons on the Piave, pushing the depleted Austrian air service from the skies. Despite heroic efforts to protect the troops on the ground, Austria's pilots, short of everything, were unable to blunt the increasing Allied air attacks on the Piave. Allied pilots strafed and bombed Austrian troops at will. The cost of air attacks on frontline units was bad enough, particularly with respect to morale; the toll on rear echelon units was devastating, as supply depots and columns were attacked incessantly during daylight hours. Eighty percent of Austrian bridging across the Piave was destroyed by Allied air and artillery bombardment.
After six days of the offensive, Austrian positions were growing more precarious by the hour. Fearing a debacle, especially with the threat of tanks looming, General Wurm at Isonzo Army command ordered a general withdrawal to the east bank of the Piave late on June 21. Units in the field received the order in the evening, but the retreat did not begin at once; the Italians could not be permitted to turn the Austrian withdrawal into a strategic rout. No less, the retreat of an entire army was a prodigious logistical undertaking, requiring twentyfour hours of arduous engineering preparations. Thus Austrian divisions on the Piave's west bank continued to resist Italian probes during the night of June 21-22 and the following day, as construction units readied the few remaining bridges and ferries for the retreat. Austrian units in the front line began to withdraw after dark on June 22, always leaving a covering force behind to deceive the Italians. The Isonzo Army's cumbersome service and logistical units crossed first, followed by the artillery, with the infantry bringing up the rear. By dawn on June 23, the last units of the tired and defeated Isonzo Army had reached the Piave's east bank. Austria's last offensive was over.
The ill-fated gamble on the Piave at least ended on a positive note, showing the army's ability to execute a strategic retreat under fire, one of the most difficult military tasks. But there could be no doubt the Habsburgs' final offensive had been a catastrophe. The army suffered grievous losses of men and equipment that it could not hope to make good. As Boroevic and others had feared, the "starvation offensive" had achieved nothing but the wrecking of the last Austrian army in the field. The depleted divisions of the Isonzo Army, short of men and guns even before June 15, were now incapable of any offensive action; even their defensive potential now seemed questionable. The six-day battle cost Austria 118,000 dead, wounded, and missing soldiers1°-nearly 60,000 in the Isonzo Army alone. The defeat cost the army even more than the bloody Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo, and that terrible struggle had at least ended in a draw. The army had nothing to show for its sacrifice on the Piave. Morale among the shell-shocked survivors plummeted as the last hope of victory ebbed away. All the Austrian troops holding the Piave line could do was wait for the inevitable Italian offensive. No one knew when the Italians would launch a major offensive, a decisive push to win the war, but there could be no doubt that it would come.
The Austrian Army had failed in its last offensive. The defeat was not for want of effort; soldiers of all nationalities had fought doggedly but futilely on the Piave and on the Asiago plateau. The sacrifices of the infantry in particular were enormous among all ranks; four colonels, leading their brigades and regiments from the front, were among the dead. Yet it was not enough. The Prussian General von Cramon offered a brief epitaph for the Piave offensive: "In truth this army deserved a better fate." The painful reality was that by mid-1918, weary Austria could not support a major offensive against even one enemy. The war economy was a shambles, and the army was too short of men. Bravery could not compensate for the massive shortfalls of weapons, ammunition, and equipment of all types. As the Italians had learned so bitterly on the Isonzo so many times, courage alone could not deliver victory. Emperor Karl had hastened his empire's impending demise with his foolish offensive. Now all he and his army could do was wait for the Allies' next move.
For Italy, the stand on the Piave was an epic triumph, proof of a military and national renaissance. Seven months after the Caporetto disaster, the Italian Army had held its ground and won a major defensive victory, saving the northern Italian heartland from Austrian invasion. Thefantaccino had shown that, properly armed and led, he could fight potently indeed. The arditi fought especially well, demonstrating their trademark tenacity and recklessness in turning back Austrian assaults.I I Badoglio's rebuilding efforts had proven successful, for the new army resisted the Austrian drive with both determination and skill. The artillery in particular, long an Italian weak point, had proven decisive in crippling the Austrian advance. General Roberto Segre, architect of the artillery's defensive fire plan on the Piave, was hailed as a national hero.12 There had been significant French and British help, to be sure, but the defense of the Piave had unquestionably been an Italian victory. Italian casualties were hardly less than the Austrian, but Italy could still afford such losses. June's victory greatly restored the morale of the fighting forces, very low since Caporetto, and gave the fanri the self-confidence they needed to go on the offensive again. Diaz was still cautious, though, and it would be several months before he would be willing to risk a major offensive. In the meantime, the Italian forces on the Piave rested and waited for battle, regularly shelling the Austrian defenders on the opposite bank, a foretaste of the great bombardment to come.13