SEVEN
As the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo ebbed away slowly and painfully, the senior Allied generals met near Paris to determine a combined strategy for the coming year. The Chantilly conference was an attempt to craft a joint war effort to defeat the apparently insurmountable defenses of Germany and Austria; only by waging war together, France, Britain, Russia, and Italy finally realized, could they hope to win the war. Luigi Cadorna was too busy with the Fourth Battle to attend, so he sent his trusted subordinate General Porro, subchief of the General Staff, to represent him at the conference, which was to begin December 6. At Chantilly, a glorious Renaissance chateau, Porro enjoyed the sumptuous surroundings with his Allied counterparts. While their soldiers died and struggled to stay warm on a dozen battlefields across Europe, the generals were wined and dined in the best Parisian fashion; Chantilly, a relic of the ancien regime, boasted an English garden, an impressive Temple of Venus, and an Isle of Love where the generals could stroll and ponder strategy. The results of the conference were predictable enough. The French, British, Russian, and Italian representatives pledged to launch massive, coordinated offensives starting in the spring; the planned Allied blows would knock the Central Powers out of France, and possibly out of the war. Porro, speaking on behalf of his anxious superior, argued in favor of simultaneous offensives as soon after the March thaw as possible. Why these attacks would be more successful than those launched in 1915 was not explained.
As 1916 began, and Italian soldiers endured their first winter in the frozen Alps, Cadorna continued to believe that his methods, which had so unmistak ably failed four times, would nevertheless prevail in the spring. He steadfastly resisted all attempts to reign in his unlimited powers. In January, Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, alarmed by Italy's terrible losses and negligible gains, requested that Cadorna establish a Council of War, where Italy's other generals and senior politicians might be able to suggest alternative strategies. Cadorna tactlessly rebuffed Salandra's suggestion, arguing that he need answer only to the king, never to mere politicians; of course, Vittorio Emanuele dared not question Cadorna. The count thereby remained a law unto himself, the most supreme of all supreme Allied generals, the sole and unchallenged architect of Italy's war effort.
By early 1916 Cadorna's view of the war encompassed all of his well known beliefs about fighting, modified only slightly by four costly defeats. The half-year of bloodletting on the Isonzo had finally convinced him that the Julian front had become inalterably static, at least for the moment. All the unheeded warnings from his attaches and intelligence officers a year earlier about the Western front now seemed sadly prophetic; trench warfare had emerged on the banks of the Isonzo with a vengeance, a development that even Cadorna could not fail to notice. The rapid battle of maneuver Cadorna and the Italian Army had hoped for had disappeared irrevocably. Italy was now committed to fighting a long, siegelike war of attrition against Austria. The strong entrenchments, barbed wire, machine guns, and ample artillery that covered the Isonzo valley removed all possibility of maneuver. Instead, the war had become a bloody wearing-down process to exhaust the enemy. Only after Austria was worn down much more could Cadorna hope for any kind of decisive breakthrough on the Isonzo. He accepted this reality without reservation, even though it committed him to an almost endless war of attrition, one that would bleed Italy far worse than anything seen in 1915. The chief of staff knew that Austria, slowly collapsing from the pressures of a three-front war, would give in before Italy, and that was enough. The effect of this fighting on Italy's fighting men, who would have to bear the deadly cost of attrition, did not concern him.
Cadorna still saw no need for a coherent set of rules on how to defeat the Austrians on the battlefield. Despite all the tactical changes of the past year, he continued to put faith in numbers of men and guns. He doggedly believed that bravery and weight of shell would eventually vanquish Svetozar Boroevic's army. The need for a systematic fighting doctrine-how to plan artillery barrages, how to target the artillery most effectively, how to coordinate the infantry and artillery, how the infantry should advance, for instance-eluded Cadorna; instead, he argued, "It is enough that at the right moment the decisions are taken quickly." Although huge superiorities in men, guns, and shells had availed him little in the first four battles, he nevertheless believed that he needed ever more infantry and artillery to succeed; exactly how they were to be used most effectively did not concern him.
Cadorna pressed the War Ministry, industry, and the government for more men and munitions, and his wishes were fulfilled without argument. The ongoing expansion of the army continued unabated. Cadorna demanded 270,000 more soldiers and hundreds more guns by the spring, to bring his total strength up to 1,340,000 troops in the field, supported by 2,344 guns. The conscript class of 1896 was called early to the colors, as were several more classes of reservists, to bring Cadorna's armies up to strength. The army's service and supply branches were combed out to supply the front with more riflemen. General Alfred Dallolio ensured that Italy's factories worked overtime to provide Cadorna with the thousands of guns and mortars and millions of shells he needed to break through on the Isonzo. In the first half of 1916, Cadorna received a new army headquarters, five new army corps, eight freshly raised infantry divisions, and dozens more heavy and superheavy artillery batteries. In addition, the army's four cavalry divisions were dismounted to provide more infantry. Cadorna could not justly complain that Italy failed to respond to his incessant requests for more men and materiel. Like all generals, however, he inevitably rued that he never had enough soldiers and shells, but in Cadorna's case these criticisms were unrealistic and largely unwarranted. Italy's army had expanded enormously, and her disorganized prewar industries had responded surprisingly well to the needs of the war economy. Italy did not lack men and guns, but ideas of how to use them effectively.
The soldiers who invariably bore the brunt of Cadorna's unrealistic demands were of course the infantry. As in all armies during the First World War, the Italian infantry had declined considerably as an overall percentage of the army's strength; as the war became increasingly an industrial struggle, the supporting and service branches-the artillery and engineers, backed up by the construction, transport, maintenance, signal, and medical corps-took an ever greater slice of the available men. Yet it was the infantry who still did the real fighting, the dirty work in the trenches, and it was always the infantry that suffered almost all the casualties. Despite the impressive technological changes that had irrevocably altered the face of war by early 1916, the war's outcome still depended on the ordinary, unexalted fmuaccino.
Italy's tired and abused fanti holding the Isonzo line enjoyed the rest afforded by the onset of winter. For the first time since the war's beginning, there was no prospect of another immediate offensive. The foot soldiers had time to improve their positions and enjoy a break in the fighting. However, the Italian trenches were nowhere near as well constructed and comfortable as the impressive Austrian entrenchments across the river. Cadorna had shown little concern for the condition of his troops' trenches. He did not expect to be on the Isonzo for long, so Italian trenches were primitive and unsanitary compared to the more permanent positions built by Boroevic's engineers. Italian frontline trenches were shallow and uncomfortable, affording little protection against Austrian shells or the weather. As the Alpine winter arrived and thousands of fanti had to sleep outside through snowstorms without overhead cover, it was evident that the army had to make major improvements to the trenches running all along the Isonzo. Although building materials were in short supply, the engineers, assisted by the infantry, began to construct deeper and more comfortable trenches where the foot soldiers could live underground year-round. The ideal trench system included well ventilated shelters underground, safe from shells, where the infantry could live and sleep undisturbed. It would take many months to complete the project, and thousands of Italian foot soldiers would have to endure the winter virtually without shelter, but at least it was a step in the right direction. The Italian Army was going to be on the Isonzo for a long time, and the troops therefore had to have permanent entrenchments.
Cadorna's infantrymen were pleased to be getting better living quarters, but they still had numerous other grievances. Although the winter on the Isonzo was fierce, especially in the high Julian Alps, the army supplied few of its soldiers with adequate winter protective clothing; only the Alpini were issued proper winter gear, including mountain boots and thick snowsuits; the rest of the infantry had to make do with normal uniforms, often supplemented with scarves and pelts sent by concerned relatives at home. Soldiers from the South, unaccustomed to harsh winters, in particular suffered badly. The army's medical service remained desperately short of doctors, medicines of all types, bandages, and of course clean hospitals, inspiring little confidence among the fighting men. Rations were usually poor and inadequate; the supply corps was no better at providing the army with fresh meat and vegetables than with medical supplies. Frontline soldiers frequently lacked even cooking appliances to prepare warm rations, a serious problem during the cold winter months; morale inevitably suffered when infantrymen did not get hot food for days on end. As Napoleon once observed, "An army marches on its stomach," and Cadorna's was no exception.
The greatest numbers of complaints, however, centered on the army's shockingly low pay. The Italian private soldier was the worst paid in Europe. The prewar pay rate, only a few centi a day, had not been raised, and there was no extra allowance for soldiers at the front. To all soldiers this was an outrage; for married men it represented a severe economic crisis. The army's meager wage was barely enough to support a single soldier, and it was pathetically inadequate to feed and clothe a family. The hundreds of thousands of soldiers with wives and children worried not just about surviving the war, but also about how their families were surviving at home. Home leave was rare, and soldiers who visited home before returning to the front-usually wounded men on convalescence-came home to genuine hardship. The families of fighting men regularly did not have enough to eat, and the government was slow to do anything to remedy this desperate situation. The soldiers' resentment was exacerbated by their hatred of all those who managed to avoid the draft. Men still safe at home-inevitably denounced as shirkers by frontline veterans-incurred the wrath of all those in uniform. Particularly detested were the legions of industrial workers who supported the war economy. Workers who built guns, shells, and other vital materiel were both exempt from conscription and very highly paid; they enjoyed the security of the home front and the inflated wages of war workers while abysmally paid fanti died by the thousands on the Isonzo. The workers' role in the war effort was indispensable, but the fundamental inequality of the situation galled the soldiers no end.
Italy's infantrymen therefore had little to comfort them. Yet they did not rebel or desert en masse. Their morale, though by no means high, was nevertheless adequate to keep them in their trenches, waiting for the winter to end and the fighting to resume. What kept the grigioverdil in the line was not just Cadorna's willingness to shoot deserters and cowards, but also a deep loyalty to their comrades. Soldiers who shared the extreme hardships of combat invariably developed intense bonds with each other and to their unit; the terrible sufferings of the infantry bred deep affection in its ranks. Their suffering was shared, and before long, combat soldiers felt much more in common with fellow fanti than with anyone else, including their families. Units in the rear, safe from the fighting, frequently had serious morale problems, but infantry regiments, brought together by common dangers and hardships, only rarely suffered from severe crises of morale. Mussolini, who returned to the 1 1th Bersaglieri in the snows of Vrsic and Javorcek during February's bitter winter, observed accurately, "The morale of men in the front line is not that of men in the rear" The educated journalist felt a strong bond with the soldiers in his unit, most of them uneducated peasants.'- His regiment included men from all over Italy; they shared no common region, dialect, or class to unite them, but they were all Bersaglieri, and they were all Italians. Even the insurmountable distance between officers and enlisted men narrowed at the front. The fanti frequently got along well with their junior officers, often just out of cadet school, the platoon and company commanders who shared the dangers of combat; it was the staff and more senior officers, safely behind the lines, whom they detested.
The solidarity of fighting men was equally visible on the Austrian side of the Isonzo. In Boroevie's army, too, infantrymen developed an intense loyalty to each other and to their units. In Austria's army, this powerful bond was often buttressed by regional or ethnic ties; the Austrian practice of recruiting regiments from a single province or region meant that its soldiers were united by a common language or dialect and a shared local identity. German, South Slav, and Magyar regiments regularly boasted a noticeable ethnic pride. They all hated the Italians, but the sense of frontline unity on rare occasions even managed to transcend the war. At Christmas, a few units on both sides the Isonzo arranged brief unofficial truces, in flagrant violation of both armies' regulations. Soldiers of the two overwhelmingly Catholic armies stopped shooting at each other for a few hours; in some places they met in no-man's-land to exchange mementos and Christmas greetings.
The morale of the 5th Army was doubtless higher than that of Cadorna's forces. This can be largely attributed to Austria's better care of its soldiers. The Austrian administration was far superior to the Italian, and the Habsburg Army supplied its fighting men with amenities that were lavish compared to those enjoyed by their adversaries. Austrian trenches were permanent and reasonably comfortable, including sleeping areas and other amenities. The rations enjoyed by Boroevic's army were acceptable, if not first-rate, and the soldiers' pay was adequate. Most important, Boroevic's staff had arranged a system of regular rotation of units in the front lines. Battalions were frequently taken out of the line and moved to permanent rest areas behind the front, where tired soldiers could sleep in real beds, eat fresh meat and bread and drink real coffee, receive rations of beer and tobacco, and enjoy concerts by army bands and other entertainment. Such three-day rest periods proved a vital restorer of morale in infantry units, particularly during the harsh winter months.
When in the line, infantry battalions of both armies were always busy, even during the quiet periods between battles. Very little happened during the day. Movement during daylight hours was too dangerous; the Italians feared the deadly accurate cecchini, and the Austrians dreaded surprise Italian artillery barrages. Therefore soldiers slept during the day and did their work at night. Every evening on the Isonzo front, the armies dispatched patrols into noman's-land to survey the enemy's positions, and sometimes to raid a troublesome machine gun nest. Under the cover of darkness, the sappers improved entrenchments and laid barbed wire, while stretcher bearers stealthily collected the wounded and dead lying between the two sides. Service and supply units were just as busy laying telephone wires, repairing damaged equipment, and bringing fresh rations and ammunition to the forward trenches. Soldiers on both sides soon adjusted to the backward world of working only at night, which proved especially easy during the winter months, when the hours of darkness were extended.
Yet the winter's complications far outweighed its benefits. The cold weather made life unpleasant for sentries and all others who ventured out of their dugouts. Heavy snows and ice storms made the movement of supplies difficult, especially in the high Julian Alps. More ominously, the winter brought avalanches to the upper Isonzo. Throughout the winter, Austrian and Italian infantry garrisoning the Mrzli chain and the Flitsch basin were far more afraid of the "white death" than they were of each other. Both sides did their best to prevent avalanches and to protect their entrenchments, but it was alarmingly easy to cause a mountain of snow to tumble down a slope. Enormous avalanches were caused by explosions of shells and other munitions, or missteps by mountain patrols, and sometimes had no apparent reason. The two armies used avalanche alarms to warn of impending disaster and raised ski detachments to rescue buried soldiers, but losses to avalanches were steep. During the winter of 1915-1916, Austria's Carinthian sector (which included the Vrsic, Javorcek, and Rombon areas of the Isonzo front) alone lost 600 soldiers killed by avalanches. In one catastrophic incident, on March 8, 1916, an avalanche in the mountains behind Vrsic buried six Austrian watchposts and more than a hundred Russian prisoners of war who were working on a road through the mountain pass. Although the pass had avalanche buttresses, the snow completely submerged the road, cutting off traffic to the Vrsic sector for several days.3
Despite the serious risks posed by the weather, both armies continued military operations, albeit on a much reduced scale. Even on the precarious upper Isonzo, Austrians and Italians dueled sporadically for mountains and ridges. The fighting centered on strategic Mt. Rombon. The 44th Rifle Division, garrisoning the Flitsch basin, feared that Italian positions around Mt. Cukla endangered Austrian troops down in the valley east of Flitsch. Cukla, the 5,860-foot peak southwest of Rombon's summit, was held by a well entrenched Alpini battalion, supported by a mountain battery that often rained fire on Austrian positions in the valley below. In early February the 44th sent troops of the Carinthian 1st Mountain Rite Regiment to retake the positions lost to the Italians in August. The lightning attack began just after midnight on February 12. Two companies of the 1st Mountain Rifles, tough German troops trained and equipped for Alpine warfare, silently advanced a quarter-mile in snowshoes, over man-high snows, down the slope toward Cukla, where they surprised the sleeping defenders. The Alpini attempted to mount a defense, but they were soon overrun, and the survivors escaped down the mountain; by 3 A.M. Cukla was in Austrian hands. At a cost of just five dead and thirty wounded, the two companies of Carinthians had captured the Italian fortress along with eighty-three Alpini and four machine guns.
Outraged by the loss of Cukla, the commander of the 36th Division (the renamed Bersaglieri Division) sent three fresh Alpini battalions back up Rombon to retake the lost position. For the next week the Pieve di Teco, Exilles, and Bassano Battalions, seasoned veterans of earlier upper Isonzo battles, launched repeated assaults on Cukla. The withering fire of the three battalions and their supporting artillery batteries blasted the Austrian-held trenches. Losses mounted steadily in the two defending Carinthian companies, but the Italians failed to dislodge them, despite heroic efforts. Appallingly bad weather and accurate rifle fire kept the Alpini at bay until February 20, when the attacks were called off. The weeklong fight cost the Italians more than 400 casualties, versus only a hundred for the Austrians. The 36th Division decided to wait until the weather improved before trying again to retake Cukla.
Austrian attempts to regain lost ground during the winter were not limited to the upper Isonzo. Boroevic and his staff were particularly worried about the Italian penetration before Gorizia in the last stages of the Fourth Battle; Italian forces on the heights of Oslavia were only a half-mile from the Isonzo. Major General Erwin Zeidler, acting on Boroevic's orders, sent units of his 58th Division to retake their former trenches around Hill 188 and the wrecked village of Oslavia. Capello's headquarters did not expect any Austrian counterattacks so soon into the new year, so the heights of Oslavia were garrisoned relatively lightly. On the evening of January 14, under a moonless sky, seven companies of Dalmatians left their positions and charged through the darkness toward the Italian-held trenches. The surprise assault rapidly overran both Hill 188 and Oslavia. Within less than an hour, both positions again belonged to the 58th Division. The startled Italians had not fought very hard; a thousand defenders, including thirty-four officers, were taken prisoner.
Capello, furious at the loss of such hard-won positions, immediately dispatched all available reserves to push the Dalmatians back to their own lines. Troops of the 11th and 27th Divisions moved up and prepared to retake the ruined village and the neighboring hill. They struck on the morning of January 15. Zeidler, fearful of heavy casualties from Italian shelling, withdrew most of the attacking companies, leaving only a few platoons to hold the recaptured positions. The Italian attackers thus found Hill 188 and Oslavia weakly defended. The defenders had several machine guns, however, which took a heavy toll of the advancing fanti. The outnumbered Dalmatians were forced to relinquish Hill 188 late on January 15; Oslavia, a day after. The status quo of three days before had been reestablished. This small and indecisive engagement cost the 58th Division 600 dead and wounded, and Italian losses were far higher; officially Capello admitted to 1,500 casualties in the 27th Division and almost 800 in the 11th.
On January 19, under pressure from Boroevic, Zeidler decided to try to take and hold the heights of Oslavia one last time. He planned a rapid daytime infantry assault with modest artillery support. He gave his troops several days to rest and prepare for the attack. The 58th Division's guns opened up on the afternoon of January 24, shelling Italian trenches around 188 and Oslavia. After the two-hour long barrage lifted, the three assault battalions climbed out of their trenches and headed for the Italian lines. At 5 P.M., as the sun went down, the Austrian infantry fixed bayonets and marched through thick fog toward Oslavia and 188. The assault was led by platoons of sappers, armed with flamethrowers and explosive charges, newly introduced weapons to destroy sturdy Italian positions. The Italian 27th Division fought back, especially around the sunken road that ran between the hill and the village. The ferocious battle for the road lasted half an hour, inflicting heavy losses on both sides and ending in an Italian retreat. In the darkness the 27th Division began to withdraw in the face of deter mined Austrian pressure. Zeidler's sappers cleared the way, blowing up and incinerating several Italian machine guns nests and dugouts. Two companies of the Magyar 69th Regiment charged up the cloud-shrouded slopes of Hill 188, overrunning the positions at the summit. Soon after, Dalmatians of the 37th Rifles retook the church at Oslavia. By 7 P.M., the 58th Division had regained the heights of Oslavia and seized all the positions it had lost to the VI Corps. It also took 1,200 Italian prisoners from five different regiments, among them forty-five officers. Many of the prisoners appeared to have been driven temporarily insane by the shelling, explosions, and flamethrowers. They were led eastward across the Isonzo, under close guard. The morale and fighting spirit of Capello's much-abused VI Corps had been shown to be surprisingly fragile. That evening Capello tried to recapture his lost positions, but to no avail. A strong ten-battalion counterattack was bloodily repulsed by Zeidler's machine gunners, and a disappointed Capello had to abandon any hope of retaking Hill 188 and Oslavia for the moment. The day's fighting cost Austria 334 more dead and wounded, and the VI Corps conceded a loss of 2,320 soldiers, many of them captured. The Gorizia bridgehead again quieted down for several more weeks. Both sides needed a rest to recover from the seesaw mid-January battle, which succeeded only in reestablishing the Austrian hold on the inconsequential heights of Oslavia; it decided nothing of any tactical, much less strategic, significance.
Cadorna was planning an attack that he hoped would have strategic consequences. Now committed to a clear policy of attrition, he naturally lowered his expectations; he would be content to make minor gains on the battlefield while inflicting heavy losses on the Austrians. Even so, a decisive breakthrough on the Isonzo remained his ultimate goal. The inevitable Fifth Battle began several weeks ahead of schedule, before the spring thaw. It was the product of Italy's relationship with the Allies, the result of German strategic thinking. Throughout 1915, the chief of the Imperial German General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, pursued an Eastern strategy. Confronted with trench deadlock in the West, he concentrated Germany's offensive forces against Russia while his armies stood on the defensive in France and Flanders. To a considerable degree Falkenhayn's strategy worked: German armies decisively defeated the tsar's forces in Galicia and nearly knocked Russia out of the war. However, by late 1915 it was evident that the Russian colossus, though grievously injured, was not yet dead, and that the Allied threat in the West had increased markedly. Falkenhayn therefore opted for a Western strategy for the new year; he believed that inflicting a major defeat on France was Germany's only way of securing ultimate victory.
The mighty German military machine, though clearly the war's preeminent fighting force, was nevertheless not powerful enough to wage a war-winning offensive against France while still committed to holding the line in the East; there simply were not enough men and guns to go around. Falkenhayn thus opted for a limited offensive in France; its goal was not winning on the battlefield, but wearing the French military down to the point of utter exhaustion. Falkenhayn accepted the same deadly logic of attrition that Cadorna heartily embraced. He selected the Verdun sector in eastern France for the offensive. The Verdun region, heretofore a quiet part of the Western front, was of considerable psychological and political significance to France; Falkenhayn was sure that Joseph Joffre would not part with Verdun, an ancient fortress city, without a hard fight. The Germans planned to launch a limited offensive against Verdun and let the French die in droves trying to take back their lost ground. Falkenhayn's plan was simply to bleed France white.
He put his scheme into practice on February 21, 1916, with an enormous twelve-hour bombardment by 1,400 guns. When the barrage lifted after firing two million shells, the German 5th Army advanced through snowstorms on the fortresses surrounding the city. The Germans made impressive progress at first, but the offensive soon bogged down; as Falkenhayn predicted, the poilus were fighting doggedly for every foot of French soil. By the tenth day of the offensive, Falkenhayn had begun to entertain doubts about his plan, which he feared might be spiraling out of control. It no longer looked like a limited, controlled offensive. French losses were steep, but so were Germany's, and there seemed to be no end in sight. In one of the most important decisions of the Great War, Falkenhayn cast his second thoughts aside and resolved to continue his scheme through to its conclusion. By the time the fight for Verdun ended nearly ten months later, it had claimed almost a million dead and wounded, cost Falkenhayn his position as Germany's senior general, and helped turn the tide of the war.
For the moment, however, Joffre was merely concerned that Verdun not fall to the Germans. France had already lost so much territory to Germany that she would not willingly surrender any more of it; Verdun thus attained an importance to France and her army that far outweighed its military significance. The battle gave France an epic struggle around which the nation rallied. It also became a terrible fight for tiny pieces of ground, with progress measured in feet, not miles-much like the war on the Carso. The French Army indeed was being bled white at Verdun, as Falkenhayn expected, and Joffre appealed to France's allies to take the pressure off by launching immediate offensives against Germany and her Austrian ally. Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, for months had been planning Britain's first great offensive for midsummer, and responded that his volunteer divisions could not possibly be ready before then. The Russians were only slightly more accommodating. They answered truthfully that the Tsar's armies were in no condition to launch a major offensive to help the French, but they promised some kind of attack against German positions on the northern end of the Eastern front. Cadoma proved more responsive. He had been planning an offensive on the Isonzo for the spring anyway, and Joffre requested only that Italy move its timetable forward by a few weeks. Cadorna did not value his allies very highly, but he realized that a French defeat at Verdun would have catastrophic consequences for his own war plans, so he agreed to launch the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo ahead of schedule.4
Cadorna's objectives for the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo reflected consistent themes. The 2nd Army was ordered to attack Austrian positions at the Tolmein bridgehead, and the 3rd Army (which now included Capello's VI Corps) received orders to assault the Gorizia sector and the western edge of the Carso, with a particular emphasis on the San Michele sector. This was not to be a war-winning blow, even in Cadorna's mind; it was instead supposed to weaken Austria further while rendering assistance to the beleaguered French. The chief of staff planned the offensive to start at the beginning of the second week of March. The winter weather would be a serious impediment to movement, particularly on the upper Isonzo, but Cadorna expected his forces to advance modestly. He assembled an impressive force to strike the 5th Army's positions. By the eve of the offensive, Italian forces on the Isonzo totaled twenty-nine divisions: seven reinforced divisions with Pietro Frugoni's 2nd Army, eleven with the Duke of Aosta's 3rd Army, and eleven more in special reserve in eastern Friulia. In all, Cadorna's armies possessed 350 infantry battalions and nearly 1,400 guns. His orders remained typically vague and imprecise-he told Frugoni and the Duke of Aosta that they should aim their forces at any objective they liked, so long as they contributed "directly or indirectly" to taking Gorizia and Tolmein-but his numerical superiority guaranteed that the offensive would make a considerable impression on the Austrians.
By early March, the Austrian forces holding the Isonzo line were weaker than they had been for nearly a year. The needs of other fronts meant that the relatively quiet Isonzo front had lost several veteran formations during the winter; tour crack Alpine divisions5 departed in February and early March. On the eve of the Fifth Battle, Boroevic's army was down to just ten divisions with about a hundred battalions, half of them second-line militia units. In less than a month, the 5th Army had relinquished a third of its 147 rifle battalions, and artillery strength had fallen from 693 guns to 467. Boroevic's shell reserve was similarly cut back, and his army had received few of the new, more modem weapons being produced by Austrian arsenals. As long as Cadorna remained on the defensive, the Isonzo was a low priority for the Austrian High Command.'
Still, the outnumbered Austrians continued to enjoy the advantages of terrain that strongly favored the defender and excellent entrenchments, two benefits which Boroevic's troops had used to such decisive effect since the beginning of the Isonzo battles. In addition, the Austrians knew an Italian offensive was coming. Austrian intelligence noted heavier rail traffic through Venice and Friulia from early March, and the days before the attack were filled with all the usual troop movements that indicated an imminent Italian blow. The 5th Army used the first days of March to improve its defenses and deploy its reduced divisions to best effect. Starting on March 8, Italian divisions all along the front sent out reinforced patrols to test the Austrian defenses, another sure sign of an impending offensive. When Cadorna's preparatory barrage began on March 11, the Austrians were ready.
The combined artillery of the 2nd and 3rd Armies, more than 900 field guns reinforced by 300 medium and 85 heavy pieces, pounded Austrian defenses all along the Isonzo, from Rombon to the Adriatic. The powerful bombardment lasted almost forty-eight hours and destroyed many entrenchments, but its fire was often indiscriminate. Italian batteries seemed to be aimed at general target areas rather than specific targets. The barrage was therefore considerably less destructive than it might have been. Cadorna's infantry attacks began on the morning of March 13 with actions all along the front and major assaults by the VI Corps at Podgora and the XI Corps around San Michele. The (anti found it tough going. In the first place, the late winter weather was everywhere against them. On the upper Isonzo, deep snows made advancing up mountainsides difficult, in some places impossible. On the lower Isonzo, dense fog reduced visibility almost to zero on the Carso and in front of Gorizia. In such conditions coordinated attacks were impossible, and the offensive soon stalled completely.
The 2nd Army's offensive hardly even happened. Efforts by the IV and VIII Corps to take their objectives in the Flitsch basin and on Mrzli ridge barely got off the ground and gained nothing. Similarly, the VI Corps' attempts to advance on Podgora hill proved abortive. In the thick fog, only one battalion from the three attacking divisions got anywhere near the Austrian lines, and it was quickly turned back. The 3rd Army did little better on the Carso. In the San Michele sector, the XI Corps made concerted efforts to take the mountain and the neighboring village of San Martino, but the fog and efficient Austrian defenses prevented any possibility of success. At San Martino the 21st Division launched an attack by a full brigade, but it was repulsed with heavy losses by the 46th Regiment of the 17th Division, Magyar veterans who knew the terrain intimately. Farther downstream, the XIII and VIII Corps, five divisions altogether, likewise advanced not at all. The two corps managed to mount no determined attacks in the blinding fog; none of the assaults exceeded regimental strength, and all were turned back easily by the southern Carso's Czech and German defenders.
The 2nd and 3rd Armies executed even more halfhearted attacks the next day. The Austrians held all their ground until March 16, when Cadorna officially abandoned the Fifth Battle. It was obvious that the offensive was getting absolutely nowhere. It was a poor showing compared even to the dismal records of the 1915 fighting. For once Cadorna was not reluctant to call a halt to his of fensive. He had demonstrated his loyalty to his French ally by attacking the Austrians on the Isonzo; the alliance demanded an effort, not an all-out drive for victory.? Cadorna did what duty required, and no more. The five-day Fifth Battle claimed only about 2,000 Italian casualties and an equal number for the Austrians, most of them caused by the preparatory bombardment. Compared to the epic struggles on the Isonzo in the summer and autumn of 1915, the Fifth Battle hardly seemed a battle at all; indeed, the Austrian official account dismissed it as "an attempt by the enemy to pretend there had been a serious battle." Cadorna's brief offensive perhaps appeased the panicked French High Command, but it surely failed to help the beleaguered French forces at Verdun. A five-day minor attack against Austrian positions on the Isonzo could not possibly cause Falkenhayn to reduce his pressure at Verdun. The Fifth Battle, although a near non-event in the history of the Isonzo fighting, nevertheless had one lasting impact on Cadorna's military thinking. It further hardened his belief that what he needed above all else to achieve a breakthrough was more largecaliber guns and shells; as he recalled after the battle, "The Italian Army could not advance victoriously on the Carso or anywhere else until it had been able to increase its resources in heavy artillery." He therefore decided to wait until he had many more big guns to attempt another major offensive on the Isonzo.
Yet the Fifth Battle did not end as tidily or completely as Cadorna's orders demanded, or as official histories portray. Sporadic fighting dragged on for several weeks after the brief battle formally ended. Most of these minor actions were small-scale Austrian attempts to gain minor pieces of ground to improve their defensive position. Combat flared up again on the upper Isonzo despite the deep snows and bitter cold. On the evening of March 17, the 6th Bosnian Jager Battalion stormed forward positions of the Italian 7th Division in a surprise attack at the Tolmein bridgehead. The lightning assault overran Italian trenches just west of the Church of Holy Mary, bagging 558 prisoners and strengthening the Austrian hold on the hill. On the same evening, in the Flitsch sector the 44th Rifle Division launched a surprise attack on Italian positions on Mt. Rombon. Alpine veterans of the 1st Mountain Rifles left their staging area at Cukla after dark and advanced down the mountain through the deep snow. They quickly overwhelmed the surprised defenders, seizing the Italian positions and inflicting 559 casualties (224 of them taken prisoner) to just eleven of their own.
This astonishing local victory outraged the commander of the 24th Division, who now controlled the Italian side of the Rombon sector. He was determined to retake Cukla, which he believed would put an end to Austrian raids on his positions. He decided, however, to wait for the weather to improve before launching his assault. While the Italians waited for spring to arrive, the defense of Rombon passed from the Carinthian 1st Mountain Rifles to the 4th Bosnian Regiment, a unit of equally skilled and courageous mountain fighters. When the Italian attack came on May 10, Cukla was garrisoned by just three compa- vies of Bosnians. The 24th Division's efficient mountain batteries poured fire on the Austrian entrenchments while four battalions of Alpini prepared to advance up the mountain. After several hours of shelling, the Italian infantry went over the top, the Saluzzo Battalion first, led by its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Luigi Piglione. The charging Alpini braved withering Austrian rifle fire that felled many of their comrades, but soldiers of the Saluzzo and Bassano Battalions pressed on and eventually reached Cukla. Vicious hand-to-hand combat ensued between Alpini and Bosniaken, the cream of their armies, with heavy losses on both sides. Soon the Bosnians were surrounded and could not escape. Following several hours of costly melees, the Italian tricolor again flew over Cukla after three months of Austrian occupation. Losses on both sides were considerable. The three companies of Bosnians were nearly wiped out, losing 250 men, half of them captured; the Alpini suffered 534 casualties, including the brave Lieutenant Colonel Piglione, killed at the head of his victorious battalion. He was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Bravery, the coveted inedaglia d'oro, for his feat, which rivaled the capture of Krn, almost a year before, in the annals of Italy's mountain troops.
Farther downstream, fighting also flared up occasionally as the winter gradually turned into spring. In the days after the end of the Fifth Battle, Boroevic tried to exploit Italian weakness by attempting to grab some minor positions before Gorizia and on the Carso. Between March 19 and 21, Austrian regiments conducted small and indecisive raids on the western edge of the Doberdo plateau. The 58th Division's effort on Podgora proved more successful. In a well planned raid, the 37th Rifle Regiment left its trenches on the heels of a two-and-a-half-hour barrage, headed for positions held by the 11th Division on Podgora hill. The surprise assault pushed the Italians out of their dugouts with heavy losses. At a cost of 259 casualties, the Dalmatians inflicted 1,269 losses on the 11th Division, half of them prisoners. The failure of the Italians to resist for long, coupled with the large number of prisoners taken, indicated again that the morale of Capello's VI Corps was low.
Not all Austrian efforts ended in success. On March 26 the 5th Army's air units attempted the first major Austrian bombing raid on the Isonzo front. The Austrian air service was well trained but suffered from a persistent lack of aircraft and spare parts, a further indication of Austria's weak war economy. Large air operations therefore were very much the exception, rather than standard practice. The mass raid, to be conducted by seventy-eight army and navy aircraft, was designed to hinder Cadorna's supply effort by bombing the rail bridges over the Piave River, sixty miles behind the front. It was led by Major Junovicz, commander of all Austrian air units on the Isonzo. The raid began favorably enough, encountering little resistance from Italian air units and antiaircraft batteries; the bomb run appeared to be a complete success, registering several hits on the rail bridges. However, troubles began on the flight home. Italian fighter squadrons pounced on the returning bombers, shooting down four aircraft and damaging several more. Worse yet, heavy fog had moved in over the Isonzo, and the pilots had great difficulty finding their bases; in the confusion, several more aircraft crashed. In all, the Austrians lost eighteen aircraft and several of their most experienced pilots were killed, including Major Junovicz. Most disturbingly, the raid failed to inflict notable damage on the Piave bridges. The Italians repaired the bomb damage within hours, and the rail bridges were soon operating again at full capacity. Such heavy losses for such modest gains ensured that it would be many months before Boroevic would again permit his air squadrons to launch another major raid on Cadorna's rear areas.
More minor engagements followed in late March. On March 28 and 29, the Duke of Aosta's 3rd Army tried to reclaim several positions on the Carso and in front of Gorizia. All attacks failed. The 3rd Army resumed its raiding in the San Michele sector in late April. The armies waged a bitter nocturnal war in no-man's-land, a struggle between sapper detachments and small infantry patrols. Every night the Italians and Austrians sent raiding and mining parties toward the each other's trenches. The nighttime mining grew particularly serious around San Martino. VII Corps sappers placed several large mines under Italian positions, to be detonated before a large raid. The mines usually killed many Italians and blew a significant hole in the XI Corps' entrenchments just west of San Martino. During the night of April 24, 17th Division sappers detonated two large mines, destroying a wide section of the Italian trenches immediately west of the village. In the confusion that followed, the 22nd Division unexpectedly threw an entire regiment into the gap blasted by the mines. The Magyar 46th Regiment, holding the San Martino sector, was completely surprised by this Italian move; worse, it had no reserves on hand to stop it. Several companies of fanti charged into the wide gap in the lines and overran the thinly held trenches just a hundred paces to the east. The Italians were only minutes away from capturing the village of San Martino and possibly reaching the Austrians' second defensive line. The breakthrough that ten months of offensives had failed to achieve was now within the reach of the XI Corps.
There was only one company of Austrian infantry anywhere near the Italian penetration, the 6th of the 46th Regiment. The company, held in immediate reserve, was commanded by First Lieutenant Geza Heim, a twenty-five-year-old Magyar. A professional soldier, he had fought on the Serbian front in 1914, and on the Isonzo since the late summer of 1915, becoming an experienced troop leader who knew the Carso well. Receiving orders from VII Corps headquarters to stop the Italian penetration, Heim led his company through the darkness until his soldiers were just a hundred feet from the advancing Italians. He then ordered his infantrymen to fix bayonets and charge the columns of fanti. The Magyar company, with Heim in the lead, collided with the Italians full force. Heim's riflemen, many with foko-the much feared Hungarian fighting knife-in hand and at the ready, attacked the startled Italians ferociously. The regiment had not expected an Austrian counterattack so soon; after a brief firefight and brawl, its forward companies became disorganized and withdrew into the darkness rather than face the foko-wielding Magyars. Soon the whole regiment was in headlong retreat back to its own lines. Within less than an hour the Italian attack evaporated. The 22nd Division's promising effort had turned into a rout. The briefly mortal threat to the San Michele sector had been destroyed by Heim and his lone company. The young officer's rapid action had saved at least the San Martino sector. His corps commander, Archduke Joseph, claimed that Heim in fact saved nothing less than the entire Doberdo position. For his audacity and courage, Lieutenant Heim was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Maria Theresia, a rare honor for so junior an officer.
The skirmishing on the Carso in the early spring, though of great importance to the soldiers involved, nevertheless attracted little attention at the Austrian High Command, far away in the Silesian city of Teschen. Austria's senior generals had for several weeks been focused on the Italian front, but not on the Isonzo. Indeed, since the beginning of 1916 Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf had been able to think of little else but his plans for the Italian front. Conrad, a lifelong Italophobe, had wanted to strike a fatal blow against Italy since becoming chief of the General Staff in 1906. He naturally had had no opportunity before Rome entered the war in May 1915. Since the Italian declaration of war, however, Conrad had pleaded with his German ally to permit him to transfer enough divisions from the East to knock Italy out of the war. Italy's betrayal of its Austrian ally made Conrad and his senior generals even more determined to strike against it. Conrad, often immoderate but always a shrewd strategist, was convinced that an offensive launched from the South Tyrol would quickly bring Italy to its knees. He knew the Tyrolean frontier intimately, having spent many years commanding units in the Tyrol, and believed that the problems posed by the difficult high Alpine terrain were more than offset by the strategic opportunities a Trentino offensive offered to the Central Powers. Conrad argued forcefully that a well planned thrust from the South Tyrol would cut off Cadorna's supply lines to the Isonzo, thus crippling the Italian war effort, and quite possibly knock Italy out of the war entirely. He called his plan the Strafexpedition- the "punishment expedition"; it would be an act of revenge against a faithless ally. Conrad's scheme was an excellent example of an indirect strategy, something rarely seen on any front during the First World War, in which blunter methods typically prevailed.
Conrad's strategic concept was very sound, but Falkenhayn remained unconvinced. The Prussian general, unquestionably the senior partner in the Vienna-Berlin alliance, felt that the Italian front was a sideshow of the war. He thus proved unfailingly unreceptive to Conrad's repeated arguments in favor of a Tyrolean offensive. Any major diversion of Austrian effort to the Italian front appeared foolish to German eyes; besides, by early 1916 Falkenhayn was too busy with the Verdun campaign to waste time and troops on Conrad's pet project. He therefore refused to offer any German divisions to Conrad for his offensive; he even denied Conrad a few divisions to take the place of the units Conrad would have to withdraw from the East for his Tyrolean effort. The Austrians would have to go it alone.
Conrad was disappointed by his ally's dismissal of his grandiose scheme, but he preferred the risk of launching the offensive without German help to abandoning what he passionately believed was a war-winning plan. He knew that Austria could not sustain the human and material cost of the Isonzo fighting indefinitely, so a potentially decisive rapid blow at Cadorna's rear offered attractive strategic possibilities. Austrian preparations for the South Tyrol offensive swung into action in the late winter. Boroevic was informed on March 3, before the Fifth Battle, that a major offensive against Italy was planned for mid-April, and that it would require the 5th Army to transfer four of its best divisions to the Tyrol. Boroevic reluctantly surrendered four of his toughest mountain divisions to Archduke Eugen's assembling army group in the South Tyrol; Conrad also demanded many of Boroevic's heavy artillery batteries and numerous supporting troops, a total of 70,000 men. Many more arrived around Trient from the Eastern front. Conrad stripped his Galician defenses of five first-rate divisions and many valuable artillery units. The new army group also received the lion's share of Austria's limited shell reserves for the offensive. Conrad spared no effort for his long-awaited blow against Italy.
By April 10, Archduke Eugen's army group was ready. The Austrian strike force was impressive in both quantity and quality. The two armies, the newly raised 1 1 th and the veteran 3rd, moved from the now dormant Serbian front, totaled fifteen divisions with almost 200 infantry battalions, supported by more than 1,000 guns, including sixty heavy batteries. The force included the cream of the Habsburg Army, tough divisions of veteran mountain troops. The core of Archduke Eugen's assault force was the III Corps, the Iron Corps of German-Slovene Alpine troops, and the XX Corps, the Thronfolgerkorps (Heir Apparent's Corps), two divisions of elite Tyrolean and Upper Austrian regiments, commanded by the heir to the throne, twenty-nine-year-old Archduke Karl. Conrad placed his offensive in the hands of his very best troops. The treacherous high Alpine terrain posed limitations on movement and promised difficulties with keeping the advancing troops supplied. In mid-April the South Tyrolean mountains were still snow-covered and dangerously icy, but Conrad believed that breaking through the Italian lines would not overly tax his elite mountain divisions. The attack was amply supported by artillery and included the latest tactical innovations; much of the battle plan was devised by the respected tactician General Alfred Krauss, chief of staff of Archduke Eugen's army group. The offensive's objective was the city of Padua, forty-five miles behind the front lines. It was only twenty miles from the Adriatic coast, and was the easternmost railhead for Cadoma's armies on the Isonzo, the supply source for the Isonzo offensives. There were high Alpine chains and an entire Italian army between Conrad's troops and Padua, but the Austrians were confident of victory.
The Italian 1st Army defended the Tyrolean frontier. It was more than seven divisions strong and included many Alpini battalions, in addition to 800 guns. Its very mountainous sector offered daunting natural defenses, as well as extensive entrenchments and fortifications. The 1st Army's commander, Lieutenant General Brusati, oversaw the construction of five defensive lines near the Austrian frontier during the months after the war began. Like Cadorna, he was always fearful of an Austrian offensive, and had organized his forces to defend every foot of their sector. Brusati was in many ways a typical incompetent Italian general-he took no interest in his men, knew little about tactics, and obeyed only the orders from the Cornando Supremo that he liked-but it cannot be denied that his army occupied solid defenses.
The grigioverdi of the 1st Army received an unexpected reprieve when Conrad was forced to delay his grand offensive. The weather in the South Tyrol deteriorated in mid-April; winter returned with a vengeance, bringing deep snows that made an immediate attack impossible. Conrad therefore decided to launch his blow a month later than planned, on May 15. During the four weeks that Archduke Eugen's two armies waited for the weather to improve, Italian intelligence could not fail to detect Austrian preparations for an offensive. Indeed, the Comando Supremo had noted heavy rail movement to the Tyrol weeks earlier, but Cadorna refused to believe that the Austrians would dare to launch an offensive from there. He was confident that the 1st Army's defenses were strong enough to repulse any Austrian attack anyway; furthermore, Cadorna feared that the Austrian troop movements were just a feint to distract him from the Austrians' real plan, an offensive on the Isonzo, his worst nightmare. Even so, he was sufficiently disturbed by the plethora of reports about an Austrian buildup around Trient to leave Udine and visit the 1st Army in early May. He was dismayed to find that Brusati had systematically disobeyed repeated orders from the High Command about the proper manning of entrenchments. Of the five Italian defensive lines, only the first two were occupied, and those were poorly organized. The 1st Army was strong, but its defensive scheme had serious defects. Cadorna dismissed Brusati on the spot and ordered the 1st Army's staff officers to improve the defenses immediately. To shore up the defenses further, Cadorna dispatched two divisions from his special reserve to the Tyrolean frontier. He felt that would be sufficient; besides, he could not believe that Conrad would strike from the Trentino.
The beginning of the offensive on May 15 therefore came as an unwelcome shock to Cadorna and his staff. Playing to Cadorna's obsession with the Isonzo, the Tyrolean effort was preceded on May 14 by a minor Austrian thrust on the Carso, enough to distract the Italians. The next morning a thousand Austrian guns opened up on a twenty-mile front in the South Tyrol. Archduke Eugen's two armies then advanced, making impressive gains in several sectors. The 1st Army's undermanned and disorganized defenses offered only sporadic resistance to the Austrian mountain troopers. By the end of the first day, the Austrians had advanced in some places as deep as five miles into Italian territory, an amazing feat by Great War standards. Despite the difficulty of moving quickly in the high Alps, the experienced Austrian infantry maintained its steady forward march for the next several days. Although many Italian units resisted fiercely, few managed to hold their ground in the face of determined and well planned Austrian assaults.
Cadorna reacted to the crisis by shifting considerable forces from the Isonzo; he soon realized that the Tyrolean offensive was no feint but a serious, perhaps mortal, threat to his armies. He reacted surprisingly well to the looming disaster; Cadorna sometimes displayed better qualities of leadership in times of profound crisis.8 (He later remembered, with typical modesty, "I was never so calm as at that moment.") He began to move an entire army from the Isonzo to the Asiago plateau in front of Padua, transferring the equivalent of eight infantry divisions, numerous battalions of Alpini and Bersaglieri, and dozens of artillery batteries from the Carso and Gorizia sectors to new defensive positions a hundred miles west. By the end of May he had shored up the Asiago sector with a half-million soldiers from the Isonzo and all over Italy. Cadorna's reinforcements, traveling along interior lines, enjoyed a notable logistical advantage over the Austrians. The arriving units were assembled in a new army, the 5th, whose mission was halting the Austrian drive. Most important, Cadorna appealed to his allies for immediate help.
Cadorna's impressive troop movements at first had little impact on the Austrian advance. Until the end of May the 3rd and 11th Armies continued to move slowly but steadily into Italian territory. By the month's end they had seized the town of Asiago, on the rugged plateau of the same name. The Austrians had advanced fifteen miles-only a third of the way to Padua, but a very impressive achievement nevertheless. However, supply problems mounted as the advancing divisions outpaced their slow-moving logistical columns; moving tons of munitions over the almost roadless high Alps proved frustratingly difficult and impossible to remedy quickly. The Austrian advance therefore slowed its pace to wait for its all-important supplies to catch up. The 5th Army took advantage of the slowdown to build strong defenses on the Asiago plateau, where the next round of fighting would take place.
Far more significant for Italy, though, was the Russian offensive in East Galicia, which began on June 4. Cadorna's plea for help was answered generously by the Russians. The Tsarist High Command was unable to promise a major effort, but it did order General Alexei Brusilov, the commander of the Southwestern front, to launch a limited offensive against Austrian positions in East Galicia. On paper, the Russian attack was doomed from the start: Brusilov's fifty-six divisions barely outnumbered the forty-five Austrian divisions across the lines, and his artillery was hampered by serious shell shortages. Most important, the Austrian defenses in East Galicia, improved throughout the winter and spring, appeared impregnable; indeed, Conrad was willing to strip his forces in the East for his Tyrolean gamble precisely because the Galician defenses seemed so strong. Brusilov responded to his orders to attack the Austrians with novel tactics. Knowing that he had only a bare numerical superiority over the defenders, and that his shell reserve was too limited to allow a sustained preparatory bombardment, Brusilov and his talented staff devised a previously untried solution. The Southwestern front would concentrate its offensive in force in several places, rather than spreading its forces all along the front. Furthermore, because the artillery barrage would have to be brief, it would be very intense and directed at specific vital Austrian targets. In addition, Brusilov innovatively ordered that all his assault divisions be trained realistically for the offensive, including live-fire exercises with mock-ups of the Austrian entrenchments they would attack. He thereby totally contradicted the prevailing tactical wisdom of 1916, which emphasized mass attacks on long fronts, supported by weeklong bombardments. As evidenced on the Western front and the Isonzo, spread-out mass attacks inevitably failed with heavy losses, and extended barrages only served to wreak general destruction and make the ground impassable for the attacker. Brusilov's new tactics avoided such frequently encountered pitfalls.
When the Russian artillery opened fire on the morning of June 4, it blasted carefully selected Austrian troop positions, ammunition dumps, artillery batteries, and headquarters behind the front. The serenely confident Austrians, like Cadorna a month before, had witnessed numerous signs of an impending Russian attack, but they had refused to take them seriously. Stunned by the intense and deadly accurate barrage, the Austrian infantry was unable to resist the determined waves of Russian infantry. Several Austrian divisions simply collapsed in the face of Brusilov's lightning blow; veteran regiments holding solid positions surrendered en masse to the advancing Russians. In several sectors the Austrian defenses just crumbled, and a mass withdrawal soon followed. Leadership was lacking, and the retreat evolved into a rout; soon it was a catastrophe. In the first week, Brusilov's advancing armies captured 200,000 Austrian soldiers, an unprecedented feat, and nowhere in East Galicia could Conrad's forces hold their ground. The Russians' limited offensive turned into one of the greatest advances of the war. By the end of June, the Austrians had again lost all of East Galicia to the Russian steamroller, and there was no end in sight for Brusilov's advance. Urgent German assistance was required to halt the Rus sians. By the time Brusilov's offensive ran out of steam in midsummer, the Austrians had lost half of Galicia and at least 600,000 soldiers, most of them captured. It was the worst defeat in the long history of Habsburg arms, a psychological blow of immense proportions. It changed the balance of power in the East, reducing Austria to a mere German satellite in the war against Russia. Most of all, it dealt the Austrian Army a blow from which it never fully recovered.
For Conrad, it also meant the end of his Tyrolean offensive. His strategic gamble was one of the first victims of Brusilov's victory in East Galicia. Confronted with an unexpected disaster in the East, the Austrian High Command immediately had to transfer several divisions from the Italian front to tight the Russians, thus crippling Archduke Eugen's advance. The offensive ended after advancing fifteen miles; it had been an impressive gain, particularly considering the difficult terrain, but nothing like the war-winning blow that Conrad had hoped to deliver. The South Tyrolean offensive was officially suspended on June 16, several days after it had ground to a virtual halt from a lack of supplies. The enormous effort had gained a bridgehead to nowhere. Still, Cadorna was determined not to let the Austrians keep their useless bridgehead. On the same day that Archduke Eugen regretfully ordered his forces to stop their advance, Cadorna sent his newly raised 5th Army on the offensive. The battlefield was the Seven Communes, a plateau occupied by German-speaking farmers since the Middle Ages, a curious Teutonic island in a Latin sea. Cadorna's attack was a two-pronged advance intended to encircle the Austrians on the plateau; however, the defenders cleverly retreated far enough to avoid being cut off. The Italian push soon devolved into a bitter wrestling match forthe frontier hills. Italian tactics were primitive, as on the Isonzo, and the attackers had difficulty retaking lost ground. Casualties mounted. By the time Cadorna called off the 5th Army's three-week drive, it had recaptured half of the territory lost in late May. The cost of the seven weeks of fighting on the Tyrolean border was steep for both sides. The Austrians counted 89,000 casualties, including 26,000 soldiers captured; Cadorna's forces lost 147,000 men-a rare case when the defender's losses were nearly twice those of the attacker. Italian casualties included the alarming loss of 56,000 men and 294 guns in Austrian captivity, a sign that after only a year of fighting, Italian morale had become brittle.
Nevertheless. Italy had turned back Conrad's intended death blow. Of course, Italy's salvation was mostly attributable to the Russians' stunning victory in the East, which cut short the Tyrolean offensive in midstride, but Cadorna and his generals naturally pretended otherwise. Conrad's offensive failed to achieve any strategic gains, but it did succeed in making Italy's political rulers take the war far more seriously than before. The specter of Austrian armies descending on northern Italy frightened the politicians into action. On June 10, Prime Minister Salandra, the man who brought Italy into the war, resigned from office. He and his cabinet were replaced by a government of na tional unity headed by Paolo Boselli, at seventy-eight the oldest deputy in Parliament. The new prime minister had no visibly outstanding qualities, but he was a badly needed symbol of national cohesion. The cabinet was reshuffled, but Sonnino remained foreign minister, although the home front was now controlled by a new interior minister, Vittorio Orlando. Cadorna, of course, remained chief of staff-no politician yet dared challenge the iron-willed Piedmontese count. So Cadorna's monopoly of military power remained undiminished, and he was still answerable to no one. The only thing Cadorna learned from Italy's close escape on the Asiago plateau was that he should launch another great offensive on the Isonzo as soon as possible. He was eager to inflict the decisive defeat on Boroevic that had eluded him for more than a year. Six months had elapsed since the last major Italian attempt to break the Austrian hold on the Isonzo, and Cadorna believed the time had come to try again.