ELEVEN
It is a military axiom not to advance uphill
against the enemy.
SUN TZU
The Third and Fourth Battles of the Isonzo
Cadorna was in no hurry to start a third offensive. Aware that his resources lagged behind the nation’s ambitions, he needed more heavy artillery and munitions if his breakthrough strategy was to succeed. He scraped together medium and heavy guns from far and near, including some naval batteries, and pushed the government to boost domestic production. The economy had to be put on a war footing, but the government still regretted its dream of a short campaign and feared the public’s reaction when it awoke from the same dream. Cadorna’s case was not helped when the Minister of War, Zupelli, criticised his use of resources, particularly the dispersal of men and artillery.
Cadorna estimated that Italy’s arms manufacturers would need the best part of a year to produce the quantity of heavy artillery that he wanted. He had no doubts about the ultimate outcome, and urged the government to prepare for a long haul to victory. But governments are shy of long hauls when the stakes are so high, and Cadorna’s relationship with Salandra began to sour. He had to put up with a string of high- profile visitors from Rome, warning that the nation needed a resounding victory by the end of the year. If they could not have Trieste, what about Gorizia, the only other city in the ‘unredeemed lands’ around the Adriatic? Other pressure came from the Allies. In October, when Britain and France wanted Italy to relieve the strain on Serbia and the Western Front, the onus on Cadorna to attack became irresistible.
In the meantime, the Supreme Command assessed its failures to date. As thousands of dead were collected in raw new cemeteries along the valley bottoms, where the villages stood empty and the crops rotted, senior officers drafted memoranda on tactics. These discussions centred on the reasons why Italy’s offensives had failed. The theory of attack was clear; the preliminary bombardment had to be heavy enough to wreck the enemy’s forward positions, but not so long that reinforcements could be brought up to the attack zone. The ‘methodical advance’, introduced over the summer, was meant to deter the Austrians from building up their strength at strategic points.1 Diversionary assaults were timed to prevent the enemy transferring forces to block the main thrust. When the infantry attacked, artillery fire should be lengthened to strike the enemy rear, to block counter-attacks from the second defensive line. The attacking infantry line should be spaced out, with the soldiers a metre apart, except where they poured through the breaches in the barbed wire that had been made the night before by the wire-cutting teams, and widened by the artillery. These teams comprised four or five men with a pair of cutters, some sacks, half a dozen hand- grenades, and gelignite tubes.
In practice, matters had gone very differently. The Italians could not knock out the enemy batteries if they did not know their location; aerial reconnaissance was not yet developed, and even the observers perched at the top of church towers could not see over the brow of the Carso. Co-ordination between the attacking infantry and the supporting batteries was often poor, as was the communication between observers and gunners. The fire was not accurate enough to pinpoint the enemy reserves as they moved up to counter-attack. Rigid fire tables prevented the gunners from reacting flexibly to evolving situations. Shells were in short supply and many guns had been damaged by over use. At the end of August, the Supreme Command set a daily ceiling on use of artillery. This helped to preserve the guns, at the cost of sparing the enemy. New approach roads were constructed, so heavy artillery could be brought closer to the front. Artillery fire was reduced when the infantry attacked, rather than switched off abruptly.
No reliable way had been found to breach barbed-wire entangle ments. Heavy artillery could do it, but could rarely be spared for this task. Even when the gelignite tubes exploded (the fuses easily became damp and refused to ignite), the gaps were so narrow that they formed deadly bottlenecks when the Italians tried to crowd through – a gift to enemy machine gunners. Unless enough cylinders were used, the explosions failed to break the wire. Even then, the Austrians usually had time to patch over the gaps before dawn. In desperation, weird alternative devices were tried out. A large rectangular shield was fitted with an axle and two wheels that the soldiers pushed in front of them, up to the wire. A wheel was equipped with spiked blades and launched at the enemy lines by catapult. While the blades sliced through the first strands of wire, the wheel got snarled up in the wire. An explosive charge in the wheel hub would then detonate, blasting a wide hole. It worked as well as would be expected. Wire-cutting teams were given portable shields of iron for carrying up to the wire, where they presented a splendidly static target.
Even local successes had exposed crippling defects. When the Italians did manage to break into an enemy trench, after heroic efforts, they seemed at a loss. Their resolve disintegrated at the first burst of gunfire, flurry of grenades, or bayonet charge. The Austrians found they could stampede the Italians back to their own lines quite easily. Cadorna was oblivious to such omens about training and morale. On 9 October, he suspended all leave except for convalescence, a crushing blow to soldiers who had been in the line since June.
The reserves were another problem. Before the Italians could bring theirs into an occupied line, the enemy’s had moved up from the second and third lines. The Supreme Command realised that the first wave of attacking infantry had to be supported by second and third waves – and even fourth and fifth waves, entering the fray before the Austrians mounted their inevitable counter-attack. This could not be done unless more reserves were brought up before an attack, especially difficult when communication trenches were lacking in many places. Cadorna’s answer was to establish ‘men-reservoirs’ as close to the front line as possible, like a human munitions dump. Unfortunately this created another problem: how to protect the reserves against well-targeted Austrian artillery?
Then there were the problems of defence. The Italians still lacked rock-drills and explosives to deepen the trenches, so – like the Austrians – they piled up stones into parapets, and piled sandbags on the stones.2 The Austrians could aim almost at will; as a rule, their observers high up on the hills had sight of the front lines and the rear. And Italian losses were increased by sheer carelessness, born of inexperience and also ideology. Many officers disdained to organise their defences properly because they thought the Austrians did not deserve the compliment. Only tragic experience would expunge this prejudice.
In short, the Austrians were masters of the front. By day, their lines were generally quiet, though sharpshooters were quick to fire on Italians who forgot to stay under their parapets. Their artillery was well back, out of Italian view. By night, they kept up intermittent fire while their searchlights played over the Italian lines, interrupting the drilling, digging and provisioning. By October, most sectors on the lower Isonzo front had three main lines, zigzagging in textbook style and linked by communication lines. These defences were deep enough to absorb local break throughs, like an airbag in a car crash. During Italian bombard ments, the first line was almost empty except for observers. The forward troops waited in deep dug-outs behind the trenches, often six or eight metres deep, swarming with vermin. As soon as the fire lengthened towards the communication lines, the infantry clambered up the ladders and poured out of these dug-outs, quickly joined by units from the second line. They usually reached the front in time to repulse the Italians. Inured to hardship and ferocious discipline, they were skilled and savage at hand-to-hand fighting – the essence of counter-attack – with bayonets, spiked clubs, daggers and knuckledusters.
It was difficult to anchor barbed wire in the Carso rock, a job that could only be attempted at night. Luckily it was even more difficult for the Italians to cut through wire, anchored or not. At the same time, the Austrians were making geology work for them. The second and third defensive lines made good use of grottoes and caverns. When these were not accessible through fissures, holes could be drilled or blasted through the limestone. Lined with planks, creosoted against damp, these shelters accommodated hundreds of soldiers. Although the heaviest shells could not smash through more than a metre and a half of solid stone, prolonged shelling made the cavern walls tremble, inducing panic and claustrophobia – a fear of never seeing sunlight again. But it was better than being blown up.
Bulgaria came off the fence in September – and joined the Central Powers. From mid-October, assailed by Austria from the north and west and Bulgaria from the south-east, Serbia was fighting for its life. Meanwhile the Allied offensives in France were at a bloody standstill. The Allies called on Italy to take some of the heat.
Cadorna believed he had enough artillery and shells for another attack. Trieste had mocked his efforts so far; it was inconceivable that an impressive breakthrough would be achieved in that direction by the end of the year. Gorizia was another matter. It was worth very little strategically, but it lay only one or two kilometres beyond the Italian lines. If he could outflank the city by taking Plava and Tolmein to the north and Mount San Michele to the south, the fanatical resistance of Zeidler’s Dalmatian and Hungarian forces in the bridgehead could, Cadorna supposed, soon be reduced. Gorizia and its 15,000 citizens would drop into his hand.
Under General Frugoni, the Second Army prepared to attack Tolmein and Plava, as well as the hills of Podgora and Sabotino. Meanwhile the Duke of Aosta’s Third Army would attack Mount San Michele once again and try to drive forward elsewhere on the Carso plateau. Austrian intelligence, helped by talkative Italian deserters, was well informed about these plans.
The offensive started on 18 October, a chilly autumn day, with more than 1,300 Italian guns shelling along a 50-kilometre front, from Krn to the sea. The bombardment was more intense than anything the Austrians had seen on this front.3 Yet, as before, the brunt of it was fired by 75-millimetre artillery, too light to harm trenches or wire. When the Italians moved out of their trenches on the 21st, they expected large gains. The Austrians, however, were more than ready. Enough machine guns always survived to check the Italians – even when they advanced in armour of steel plates, as they did in some places. Very little was achieved on the northern Isonzo. The Italians had briefly recaptured the ‘Big Trench’ on Mrzli at the end of September, only to lose it to the usual ferocious counter-attack. They hauled artillery onto Krn to pound the summit of Mrzli and its rear lines from the north while the infantry drove up from the south and west. Assisted in this way, the Salerno Brigade took the Big Trench on 21 October. Success was clinched with bayonets. Losses on both sides were very high. Hundreds of mud- plastered prisoners, including Bosnians with their sky-blue fezzes, were led down to the valley. The front lines were so close that working parties, collecting the dead or bringing up supplies, sometimes found themselves on the wrong side. At dawn on the 24th, the Italians made their first real grab for the elusive summit of Mrzli. They were driven back once, then twice. These failures were mitigated by advances elsewhere on the mountain, pushing the Austrians back towards the summit on either side of the Big Trench. But there was no breakthrough.
3 The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, strolling in Agram (now Zagreb) on 20 October, nearly 200 kilometres away, imagined he could feel the ground vibrating under his feet. ‘Subterranean rumblings’, he noted in his diary. ‘Guns on the Isonzo.’ Next day, he reported rumours circulating in the cafés ‘that the guns on the Isonzo are audible. The Isonzo has its magnetic field and we all walk around inside its spell.’
The Italians were nowhere near taking Tolmein. Hill 383, looming over Plava, remained impregnable. As for Gorizia, there were 30 assaults on Sabotino and Podgora, often in driving rain. The corps commander on this sector was General Luigi Capello, promoted from divisional commander on the Carso, where his ruthlessness justified the nickname he had earned in Libya: ‘the butcher’. This reputation commended him to Cadorna, who otherwise disliked Capello as too political and, especially, too active as a Freemason. Their on-off partnership defined much of the Italian war for the next two years.
On the Carso, control of San Michele switched from one side to another amid savage fighting over three days. The Italians repeatedly overran the Austrian front line, but could not withstand the counter-attack. Again and again, they charged at positions that turned out not to have been seriously damaged. Their assaults were stopped short by intact wire. The Austrians had made good use of the quiet months since the Second Battle. By the time the Italians had taken the first line of enemy trenches, the enemy reserves had reached the second line, which was in better condition than the first line and well able to block any further advance while the Austrians prepared their counter-attack.
Between San Michele and Monfalcone, the Carso escarpment rises and falls without any clear summits. The name given to this limestone wilderness is Monte Sei Busi, which translates as Six Holes Mountain. (To someone walking over the surface, the name could as well be Sixty or Six Hundred Holes.) The Siena Brigade’s task in the Third Battle was to take the Austrians’ long, well-fortified front line on Sei Busi. On 23 October, the trench was taken after three days of bloody assaults, with all three battalions engaged. The rejoicing was short-lived; that night, the Italians were driven back to their jump-off position. As usual, they had no time to prepare their defence. The next morning, the Austrians called for an hour’s ceasefire to tend the wounded and collect the dead. Soon afterwards the Siena Brigade was replaced with a regiment of Bersaglieri and the Sassari Brigade. Together, these fresh forces retook the trench early in November, and kept it. Yet another massive effort had yielded a ‘success’ which was scarcely visible on the map.
Bad weather lasted throughout the battle, intensifying at the end of the month. By early November, the trenches were quagmires of filth, the roads almost impassable. The first snowfalls forced the fighting to stop.
The last days of the battle, 3 and 4 November, were extremely violent. Brigade diaries reported fears that some units might crack and desert en masse. The attacks on San Michele were weakening under the internal pressures of exhaustion and hopelessness. The Italians had sustained 67,000 losses along the front. On San Michele, the Catanzaro Brigade alone lost almost 2,800 men and 70 officers between 17 and 26 October, nearly half of each category. The Caltanisetta Brigade, deployed alongside the Catanzaro, took even heavier casualties, losing two-thirds of its men and 63 per cent of its officers between 22 October and 3 November. South of Monfalcone, the 16th Division carried out a frontal attack on Hill 121, the nearest point to Trieste that Cadorna’s army had yet reached. This one failed attack cost 4,000 Italian casualties. The battle’s only gains were trivial: some ground along the river, south of Plava, and two hills to the west of Podgora, bringing the Italians a hundred metres closer to Gorizia.
The extra artillery and tinkering with infantry tactics had made little difference. One reason was the rigorous centralisation of command and control. Given the poor communications on the battlefield, this made bad decisions inevitable. An episode involving the Lazio Brigade, recovered by the historian Giorgio Longo, illustrates this with tragic clarity.
The brigade was stationed on the northern slope of San Michele. It is the steepest face of the hill, rising 270 metres from the Isonzo within 900 horizontal metres. The 132nd Infantry Regiment (Lazio Brigade, 29th Division, Third Army) was stationed between regiments of the Perugia and Verona Brigades. It faced formidable Austrian defences, guarded by multiple rows of barbed wire and machine-gun nests, backed by batteries to the east. Flanking movements along the river were barred by a redoubt with outlying trenches that the Italians judged to be impregnable. On 21 October, the 132nd Infantry was ordered to take a ridge on the northern slope. Known as Hill 124, this ridge was ringed with barbed wire that had suffered only a few narrow breaches. Efforts to widen the breaches with wire-cutters and gelignite tubes had mostly failed. Inevitably, the attackers suffered heavy losses; over ten days of continuous assaults, the 132nd lost 26 officers and 707 men. The survivors sheltered in muddy holes; their soggy uniforms could not be dried.
On the evening of the 31st, the regiment was ordered to renew its attack the following morning. The commanding officer, Colonel Viola, decided to resist. He reported to the brigade commander, General Schenardi, that attacking in these conditions was impossible: the rain had made the steep slopes too slippery; the paths disappeared under sliding mud; the triple rows of wire were intact; enemy fire turned the assaults into pointless butchery.
Schenardi knew Viola as a courageous CO who would not refuse an order without good reason. Throughout the following day, he urged him to proceed with the attack. The other man bought time by sending out wire-cutting patrols. That evening, Schenardi put the best face possible on the colonel’s refusal in a report to his divisional commander, General Marazzi. Wire had blocked the 132nd Infantry’s progress, and subsequent wire-cutting patrols had been killed by enfilade fire from above. They would send night patrols to try again, but if these failed to widen the breaches, the next day’s attack could only succeed if the Verona Brigade, adjacent to the Lazio, gave timely support. He ended by assuring the general that every effort was being made and every hardship endured to achieve success.
At divisional headquarters in Sdraussina, two kilometres away, Marazzi warned that the men’s ‘extreme energy’ might be undermined by weakness in the officers. Any commander suspected of shortcomings should be replaced. Behind their defences, the enemy were few and disheartened. ‘Strike a vigorous blow with every means, and victory shall be ours.’ Marazzi was under pressure from the corps commander, General Morrone, who had been stung by a phone call from the Duke of Aosta himself, in his headquarters at Cervignano some 16 kilometres away, regretting that the previous day’s action had brought ‘no appreciable result’. On the morning of 2 November, Marazzi informed the irate Morrone that ‘the most energetic orders’ had been given ‘to drive the troops forward with the utmost vigour’. Every man would do his duty to the last, at whatever cost.
General Schenardi ordered the attack to take place at 13:00 hours. Colonel Viola protested that the breaches in the wire were still too narrow, due partly to damp fuses in the gelignite tubes. Without support from the Verona Brigade, the 132nd would be massacred again. Once again, zero hour passed without an attack. When Schenardi asked about the Verona Brigade, General Marazzi snapped back: attack at once, never mind the Verona Brigade! A quarter of an hour later, he followed this order with another: if Colonel Viola hesitates for an instant, relieve him of his command.
Viola duly gave orders to advance. As usual, he led from the front. The platoons poured uphill in waves, only to break against the wire, still ‘nearly intact’ according to the brigade diary. Reinforcements arrived, but the enemy fire was overwhelming. Around 19:00, the regiment fell back. The following day, Viola prepared to lead his men back up the hill, but torrential rain forced a postponement. The same happened on the 4th. The 29th Division was exempted from the next rotations, so the men of the 132nd stayed at their sodden posts. By 10 November, the regiment was stunned by exhaustion, in terrible condition. That evening the steady downpour became a cloudburst, flooding the trenches and turning the paths into foaming streams. Two days later the 132nd was granted a week’s leave. Colonel Viola died on 22 November, leading his men in yet another attack against Hill 124.
The Third Battle was suspended on the evening of 4 November, but Cadorna was unreasonably convinced that Boroević’s army teetered on the edge of collapse. Knowing that 24 fresh battalions were due to arrive within a week or two, he felt sure Gorizia could still be taken. After a week’s pause, the Fourth Battle was launched with a short bombardment. The infantry did their best to charge up the open slopes of Mrzli, Podgora, Sabotino and San Michele, swept by machine-gun fire. The rain pelted down, the temperature sank, and then – on 16 November – heavy snow fell. There would not be a proper thaw until spring 1917, when corpses were revealed after a year and a half.
Thanks to the wire and machine guns, Austrian units that had lost half their men held back Italian advances with three times their own strength. A bit of ground was taken here and there, after huge losses, but nothing decisive. Capello, an intuitive soldier, knew it was impossible to succeed in such conditions, with the men exhausted. He sent a graphic report to General Frugoni, commanding the Second Army. As the rations were cold by the time they reached the men, and short as well, the mud-soaked infantry could not ‘restore their strength with hot, abundant rations’. Some units went more than two days without food. They were not so much men as ‘walking shapes of mud. It is not the will to advance that’s lacking … what they lack is the physical strength.’ Even the reserves had spent days in water and mud, hence were not capable of reinvigorating the first-line troops. Malingering and self-mutilation were serious problems. Malingerers imitated symptoms that doctors found hard to verify. With so many infantrymen presenting tidy wounds to their hands or feet, officers learned to look for telltale scorchmarks. Self-mutilation could be punished with summary execution or jail, but the trend was only reversed much later, when the Supreme Command sent all suspects straight to the front line.
Amid the routine slaughter, 18 November marked a turning point: the Italians shelled Gorizia for three hours. This was the start of ‘total war’ on the Isonzo. Until now, both sides had mostly refrained from targeting civilians – though Austrian ships and planes had shelled several Adriatic cities in May 1915. Astutely, the Italians had milked the fact that they had less to gain from targeting civilians. In July, Cadorna offered to support a joint commitment against targeting ‘open cities’. The Austrians were not interested: they wanted to exploit their superiority in the air.
Gorizia was known as the Austrian Nice, the city of roses or violets. Blessed by a mild climate in winter, with hills behind and the turquoise Isonzo in front, it flourished under the Habsburgs. Long avenues were lined with handsome villas. The public gardens were exceptionally pretty, the medieval castle on the hill was picturesque. The hospitals and convalescent homes were patronised by wealthy Viennese and Bavarians, who formed a German crust on top of the mixed Italian and Slovene population. After May 1915, fighting quickly reached the city’s edge. The first wave of refugees brought some 40,000 people through the city, local Italians as well as Slovenes, carrying or dragging whatever they could save from the invaders; many would spend years in internment camps. Although the prewar population of 31,000 soon halved, as citizens fled to safer regions, numbers were kept up by several tens of thousands of Habsburg troops quartered in the city, turning it into a virtual third line. Curtains of reeds were hung across the streets to block enemy snipers’ sight-lines; otherwise life continued almost normally. Officers and their wives strolled in the gardens, sat in the cafés, and kept local businesses afloat. Authority passed from the mayor to General Zeidler, legendary commander of the 58th Division, who chose not to evacuate the city, perhaps because the attack was a gift to Habsburg propaganda.
Why did Cadorna abandon the moral high ground now, when he knew that Gorizia could not be taken during this battle? His memoirs offer no clue. Perhaps he decided that civilised restraint had become a luxury, or the spectacle of the city’s near-normality so close to the front line harmed his own men’s morale. Joffre, who visited the front, may have advised that he could not afford to spare the city. Whatever the reason, Cadorna privately admitted that Gorizia was more a political than a strategic objective, and the shelling brought no advantage to offset the propaganda loss.
The Supreme Command ordered a last offensive on Mount Mrzli and around Tolmein for 23 November. Senior officers were unconvinced. Many of the men could no longer fit their boots onto their swollen feet, and frostbite was a danger. The mud, too, undermined morale: when their uniforms dried out, they were stiff as boards. The sight of Sicilian peasants shivering in a trench, hands purple and swollen, unequipped for climatic extremes that were as inconceivable to them as the war itself, could sow doubt in any observer’s mind about continuing the assaults in sub-zero temperatures. But Cadorna was not an observer; he was in Udine, nearly 40 kilometres from Mount Mrzli, surrounded by deferential staff officers.
Even so, on 26 November, the Italians pushed the Austrians back to within 20 metres of the summit. Taking advantage of a rising mist, the counter-attacking Austrians quickly drove the Italians back to the Big Trench. A separate push to take the southernmost end of the ridge, directly above Tolmein, was also repulsed. Inching up the mountain, the Italians eventually found themselves only eight metres below the Austrian front line. Pelted with grenades, rocks, barrels, even tins filled with faeces, they could get no further. It was rumoured that a corps commander shouted at his staff, ‘Don’t you see I need more dead men, lots more, if we’re to show the top brass that the action against Mrzli cannot succeed?’ By the end of 1915, the losses of two brigades that had served on Mrzli from the start – the Modena and Salerno – exceeded 9,000 men.
Operations petered out in the first week of December, when heavy snowfalls obliterated trenches and wire. The Fourth Battle had added 49,000 Italian casualties to the 67,000 from the Third. Austrian losses were 42,000 and 25,000 respectively. Summarising the reasons for failure, the Italian official history of the war blamed the barbed wire, which was ‘practically impossible’ to destroy. Many months would pass before the Italians found a remotely effective solution.
Source Notes
ELEVEN Walking Shapes of Mud
1 ‘Where are the trenches?’: Salsa, 49.
2 ‘restore their strength with hot, abundant rations’: Rocca, 102–3
3 ‘Don’t you see I need more dead men’: Balbi & Viazzi, 245.
4 49,000 Italian casualties to the 67,000: Isnenghi & Rochat, 167.
5 ‘practically impossible’ to destroy: Alliney, 78.
1 The ‘methodical advance’ engaged front-line units in raids and other small-scale actions along the front. The purpose was to keep the Austrians in ‘continual tension’, denying them the advantages that accrued from the Italians’ predictable cycles of preparation and attack. However, as these smaller actions were largely fruitless and costly, they also sapped the Italians.
2 ‘Where are the trenches?’ asked a junior officer, arriving on San Michele in November 1915. ‘Trenches, trenches …’ came the wondering reply. ‘There aren’t any. We’ve got holes.’