FOURTEEN
The defensive in war cannot be a state of endurance
… a defensive, without an offensive return blow,
cannot be conceived.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
Austria’s passivity on the Isonzo did not suit the fiery Conrad, chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, who longed to take the battle to the traitors. After Serbia was overrun in mid-November, the Habsburgs were fighting on only two fronts and Conrad believed he had an opening. He cherished two bold ideas for an offensive. One was an attack across the upper Isonzo, between Tolmein and Flitsch. The other was an operation out of the Tyrol towards the sea. As 1915 drew to its end, this second idea became an obsession. If the Austrians surged across the mountains onto the plains of the Veneto, their impetus and the enemy’s disarray would make them unstoppable. Reaching the sea near Venice, they would cut Cadorna’s supply lines. Even if the Italian reserves improvised defences in front of Padua and Venice, they would not be able to counter-attack effectively. Unless Britain and France sped to the rescue – an unlikely prospect, he thought, given their focus on the Western Front – Rome would have to sue for peace.
Conrad calculated that he needed 16 full-strength divisions – more than 160,000 men – to give him a 2:1 advantage over the Italians in the Trentino. As the Austrians’ total strength on the Isonzo front was 147 battalions, each with no more than 1,000 men, they would need Germany’s help. Conrad sat down with his German counterpart, Erich von Falkenhayn, on 10 December. While he accepted that the French were the principal enemy, he argued that a decisive success was much more likely in the Italian theatre. If they struck early the following year, before Cadorna built up his strength and materiel, Italy could be eliminated altogether. At the least, the front would be shortened dramatically, freeing 200,000 Austrian troops for deployment elsewhere. Germany was not formally at war with Italy, but if Falkenhayn saw his way to releasing nine Austrian divisions from the Eastern Front, around 100,000 men, he would greatly improve the odds of dealing Italy a terminal blow.
Conrad had the impression that Falkenhayn was not opposed, so he felt let down when Germany said no. Falkenhayn’s logic was, however, impeccable. First, Conrad underestimated the strength needed for a successful attack: realistically, he should have 25 divisions, not 16, and finding 25 divisions was out of the question. Second, the Germans would only support the operation if it could knock Italy out of the war; simply pushing the front line back, even to Lake Garda and Padua, would bring no advantage. But Italy was utterly beholden to France and especially Britain, which would not allow her to capitulate. Therefore the operation did not justify the diversion of German forces from the Western Front.
Privately, Falkenhayn thought the Austrians were blinkered by a fixation on their ‘own private enemy’, and missing the wider picture. Conrad confirmed this insight by taking the rebuff as a personal slight, and the relationship between the two, always difficult, now broke down. Liaison between their staffs virtually ceased. Mirroring more sharply Cadorna’s attitude to the French and British, Conrad resented Germany’s deprecation of the Italian front. Again like Cadorna, resentment bolstered his stubborn self-righteousness. In late January, encouraged by Austria’s conquest of tiny Montenegro, he decided to go it alone against the Italians.
What Falkenhayn had chosen not to mention was that every last German division was needed for a colossal new operation on the Western Front. When Conrad learned about the Verdun offensive, only a few days before it was unleashed on 21 February, he decided to keep the Germans in the dark about his own plan for Trentino. His army’s recent stronger showing on the Eastern Front seemed to confirm that significant front-line forces could safely be withdrawn without German substitutes. He informed Archduke Eugen, the commander on the empire’s South-Western Front, that Italy would be attacked between the Adige and Sugana valleys. The initial bombardment would last only a few hours before the infantry were unleashed. Cadorna’s army would have seen nothing like it.
Boroević was instructed to send four of his best divisions and many of his heavy batteries. By mid-March, there were only 100 Habsburg battalions on the Isonzo; medium or heavy guns were down to 467 from 693. With five divisions and much artillery subtracted from Galicia (against Falkenhayn’s express request) and other forces transferred from Serbia, Conrad scraped together 15 divisions: nearly 200 infantry battalions with more than a thousand artillery pieces, including 60 heavy batteries. With nearly 160,000 fighting men, he should still have a powerful advantage in manpower and a 3:1 superiority in medium and heavy guns. Mild temperatures in February led Conrad to propose a mid-April date for the attack. Given that his forces would have to capture peaks and ridges over 2,000 metres high, this was rash. The likelihood that the terrain would be passable by 10 April was always slim. Conrad lost his wager on the weather. Snow began to fall heavily on 1 March, and kept falling. By early April, the invasion routes were under more than two metres of snow, forcing Conrad to postpone the operation.
The Italians registered the enemy build-up in the Trentino without grasping its import or realising the implications for the Isonzo campaign. It was a classic case of a headquarters possessing intelligence without the ability to interpret it.
The sector commander who would face Conrad’s onslaught was General Roberto Brusati. By mid-February he sensed that the Austrians were stirring; he asked Cadorna for reinforcements, and was told curtly that he had enough for any need that might arise. A month later, on 22 March, the very day that Conrad’s strike force was assembled and ready to move, Brusati reported that a substantial attack could be expected within a few days, striking down from Trento towards Vicenza and the Veneto plains. There would be flanking support along the Sugana valley. ‘I have already reported that, in the event of a serious enemy attack, this Army absolutely lacks any reserves.’
As Brusati’s tone suggests, his relationship with the Supreme Command had a history. For he had chafed under Cadorna’s refusal to pursue offensives in his sector, between the Dolomites and Lake Garda. Dismayed by Cadorna’s failure to realise in May 1915 that the Austrians had withdrawn to a defensive line behind the state border, Brusati had tried to compensate ever since by attacking towards Trento, despite Cadorna’s order of 24 February to prepare the First Army’s main defence on the stronger rearward lines. He had pushed his forces forward over the summer and autumn and now they were strung along advance positions, without reserves or reliable communications. These positions had not been tested in action and were extremely vulnerable. His defensive lines, too, were in poor shape. Yet Cadorna, usually the scourge of free-thinking officers, neither disciplined Brusati nor compelled him to ensure that his defences were in order. Probably he was relieved that a bit of progress was being made.
Cadorna received Brusati’s report with scepticism, if not incredulity. Distracted by the aftermath of the Fifth Battle, he saw no need to revise his judgement that the Austrians were fighting a purely defensive war. Why, anyway, would they suddenly go on the offensive when the Russians were attacking in the east?1 His composure was not disturbed by the detailed testimony of Habsburg deserters, one of whom – an ethnic Italian – even produced documents about the build-up. While consenting to reinforce the First Army with five extra divisions, Cadorna rebuked Brusati for lacking the ‘imperious calm’ which reigned at the Supreme Command. The enemy movements were, he maintained, a bluff to divert attention from an imminent offensive on the Isonzo.
Brusati made matters worse by committing the extra divisions to his untenable front line rather than his fragile defences. He went to Udine in person, but again failed to persuade Cadorna that the situation in Trentino was unusual. Then a Czech officer deserted with precise information about the impending attack. By mid-April, accurate estimates of the Austrian build-up (though not of the artillery) were appearing in the Italian and French press. Still unmoved, Cadorna added a further reason for scepticism: why would the Austrians attack on this front when the Russians were about to launch a major new offensive? What he did not know was that the Russians had just decided, on 24 April, to postpone their next offensive until June. Cadorna only learned of this decision on 14 May, the day before Conrad’s Trentino offensive began. Bad communications between the Allies reinforced Cadorna’s obstinacy.
Around this time, reportedly, an officer in the Alpini presented himself at the Supreme Command in Udine, with important information about the situation in Trentino. After a long wait, a captain on Cadorna’s staff emerged: ‘His Excellency the Supreme Commander of the Army has no need of advice from Lieutenant Battisti.’ The officer thus dismissed was Cesare Battisti, the legendary patriot from Trento, who knew every tree and rock in the threatened sector.
Cadorna was not truly so pig-headed as his communications with Brusati and his rudeness to Battisti suggested. Writing to Joffre on 26 April, he warned that an Austrian attack on the rear areas was probably imminent. He coolly asked for French artillery and other help – this, during the Battle of Verdun, perhaps the bloodiest confrontation of the entire war. Three days later, as if to show that he took the omens seriously, Cadorna visited the Trentino front. It was his first inspection since September, and he refused even to meet Brusati, a decision that only makes sense if – as Cadorna’s biographer suggests – he was setting the other man up as a scapegoat. Back in Udine, he brushed off Brusati’s strained assurances that he had always respected orders. On the contrary, both the lines and the batteries in Trentino were dangerously exposed, in violation of his directive that any offensive actions by the First Army must strengthen its defences. Brusati hit back: the First Army’s offensives had conformed to orders, and Cadorna had repeatedly expressed approval. To no avail. The critic of Roman intrigue was himself a merciless political operator. On 8 May 1916, he wrote to the King that Brusati should be replaced. Even though the general’s brother Ugo was aide to Victor Emanuel, Cadorna had his way. Brusati was replaced with an elderly general whom he, Cadorna, brought out of retirement and who repaid the kindness with total obedience.2Ugo Brusati asked why his brother had been sacked so soon after Cadorna’s assurance that he did not believe in an Austrian offensive. The Supreme Commander replied that he had not changed his mind on that point; General Brusati had to go, not because he had neglected the defences but because he had shown ‘too little serenity’.
At dawn the next day (15 May), Conrad’s guns began to roar. An Austrian journalist gave the offensive a name that stuck: the Straf- expedition, or ‘punishment expedition’. Punishment was an important concept in the propaganda of the Central Powers. Austria had started the war in order to punish Serbia. A phrase coined by a nationalist poet, ‘Gott strafe England!’, meaning ‘May God punish England!’, entered the language as a cap-badge slogan, a military salute, a drinking toast. The Italian traitors’ chastisement was under way.
In early May, the Germans had asked their Austrian allies to call off the offensive. The delay due to bad weather had, they said, removed the vital element of surprise. For once, the Germans overrated the Supreme Command; Cadorna’s cussedness meant that an element of surprise was, against all odds, retained. The Austrians quickly overran the Italian lines on a 20-kilometre front, west of the Asiago plateau, involving the conquest of deep valleys and jagged summits. The Italians fought bravely but in vain; their gunners, withdrawing the batteries prematurely, left the infantry in the lurch.
Rising at last to Conrad’s challenge, Cadorna transferred all available units from the Isonzo. Within a fortnight he had formed a new army of 180,000 men in the Trentino. The Fifth Army would guard the valley mouths, where they opened onto the plains of the Veneto. Several new divisions were mustered from new conscript classes. Additionally, he recalled two divisions that Sonnino had sent to Albania – a snub to the foreign minister. By mid-June, more than 300,000 men were deployed on the Trentino sector.
The shock of the attack – the brilliance at the heart of Conrad’s scheme – was attested by Giani Stuparich, now a lieutenant in the Sardinian Grenadiers. Transferred to the Trentino in the first wave of reinforcements, he had the usual reaction of infantry when they moved from the lower Isonzo to the mountains. ‘How far we are from the convulsed and menacing Carso!’ The very sky seems ‘carefree’. Can the Austrians really be attacking? His disbelief vanished when a wounded infantryman told him that his unit was wiped out. ‘They’re up there.’ Stuparich squints at a tiny peak, swirling with cloud. ‘Up there? That’s insane!’ But it was true. The infantry struggled uphill against a current of old men, women and children on mules, pushing their belongings on carts, with cows and pigs trailing behind.
On 20 May, Conrad extended the operation eastwards to the Sugana valley. In this second phase, the Austrians swept onto the Asiago plateau. Their forces were still storming ahead, but their chances of reaching the sea shrank with every extra lateral kilometre. Their supply lines were weak, munitions were running low, and the men were exhausted. The Italians fell back to their third defensive line, but could not hold it. Cadorna formed a new corps to defend Asiago. On 27 May, the Austrians captured the town of Arsiero, only a few kilometres from the plains. No defensive line had been prepared, despite the town’s strategic importance. The next day, Asiago fell. Cadorna shocked the government by warning that, unless the enemy pressure relented, he would order a full-scale withdrawal behind the River Piave, less than 30 kilometres from Venice. The only good news at the end of May was the Austrians’ failure to break out of Vallarsa onto the lowlands.
Cadorna appealed for Russia to attack at once rather than on 15 June, as planned. When Joffre demurred, the King appealed directly to the Tsar. On 1 June, Cadorna learned that the Russians would move on 4 June. This would not stop the Punishment Expedition in its tracks, but it should slow it. In the event, General Brusilov’s offensive succeeded better than the Italians could have hoped. Like Brusati’s men in the Trentino, the Habsburg forces in Galicia were caught too far forward. After two days, the Russians had driven back the Austrians by 75 kilometres, along a 20-kilometre front. After a week, they had taken 200,000 prisoners and 700 guns.
This relief came at the last possible moment, for on 3 June, the Sardinian Grenadiers were driven off the southernmost peak of the Asiago plateau. It was to be the Austrians’ last big achievement of the campaign. By the 8th, the Italians were surging back up the flank of Mount Cengio. That night, the Austrians tried to beat them back. Ferruccio Fabbrovich, a 19-year-old volunteer, described the clash:
Suddenly the alarm sounds, the enemy is out of his trench and coming to attack. Only one voice spoke up: be brave and always go forward! Our loopholes are already open, we were all ready for the counter-attack. The order suddenly comes to fire at will; dear father, if you could only have heard the racket; thousands and thousands of rifles – the whole Pistoia Brigade was there – spewing fire at the barbarous enemy hordes. But the Austrians kept coming; they were only 40 metres away. We kept waiting, because it was impossible to give the Savoy because of the distance, and the mountainside was very steep and rocky. My heart was bursting with emotion, I trembled all over. Ah, father, what terrible minutes those were. Finally the order came: ‘Savoy!’ At the fateful cry 6,000 Italians leaped out of their burrows like a single man and flung themselves at the Austrians, massacring them and shoving them back into their trenches. I found myself well and safe in the darkness, I don’t know how or when: I was stunned. Oh what joy it was, what indescribable joy you feel when you go into the attack with a bayonet …
The tide had turned. On 9 and 13 June, Conrad returned two extra divisions that had recently arrived from the Eastern Front. By now the outcome of the offensive was clear. On 16 June, he stopped the Punishment Expedition.
By this point, Cadorna had survived a government bid to unseat him. On 30 May, following the loss of Arsiero and Asiago, Salandra sought the King’s backing to oust the Supreme Commander. The King indicated that, if Salandra had full cabinet support, he would not stand in the way. Then Salandra met Cadorna himself, at Vicenza. He told the old general that he would not hear of strategic retreats. If the army pulled back behind the River Piave, the government would fall and subversive revolutionary elements would seize their chance. Cadorna, imposingly calm and self-possessed, said that a retreat was now unlikely, but he was duty-bound to prepare for all contingencies.
Back in Rome, Salandra was uncertain. If he forced Cadorna’s removal at the height of the crisis, who would take his place? And with what prospects of saving the day? While he vacillated, the military balance shifted in Italy’s favour. The press backed the generalissimo, extolling his dynamism and brilliance. When parliament opened on 6 June, deputies blamed Salandra for the crisis so narrowly averted. The Prime Minister hit back, accusing Cadorna of failing to prepare his defences. Most deputies backed the army, and Salandra lost a vote of confidence. ‘Hanged in his own noose,’ was Cadorna’s pithy comment.
On 25 June, the Austrians withdrew to well-prepared defences. Arsiero and Asiago were ransacked, burned and abandoned, their streets strewn with rubble, faeces and dead horses. Cadorna dissolved the Fifth Army, its task fulfilled. But the Italian counter-attacks were hasty, uncoordinated, and very costly; only a third to a quarter of the territory lost since 15 May was regained. Among the losses was Cesare Battisti, captured on a mountain, recognised as the famous traitor, and publicly hanged in Trent. Propaganda photographs of his last moments, and of Austrians grinning around the martyr’s corpse, caused outrage in Italy and beyond. It was Battisti’s last service to the cause.
The Austrians held firm on the northern portion of the Asiago plateau, well inside the 1866 border, mocking Cadorna’s promise at the start of the year that the enemy would never set foot on the fatherland’s sacred soil. The plateau would be a battleground for the rest of the war, stretching the Austrian forces even more thinly. The Italians had taken around 147,000 casualties, some 50,000 more than the Austrians. The Trentino salient still hung over the army like the sword of Damocles. Cadorna, fixated on the Isonzo, did not contemplate an all-out attack to remove this threat. On the contrary, he seemed to take a perverse pride in his vulnerability. When General Robertson, Chief of the British Imperial General Staff, wondered how the Italians could persevere despite such gaping insecurity, Cadorna felt gratified as if by praise. He even let it be known that he wanted to disprove Napoleon’s claim that Austria could only be attacked on the Isonzo if the Trentino was already controlled. For would he not thereby prove that he was greater than Bonaparte?
Cadorna’s acclamation as a hero during June says less about him than about the low level of national confidence and the power of the press. As a deputy later protested in secret session, ‘Why was Cadorna allowed to celebrate this grievous episode of the war and boast about it as something glorious?’ It was a rhetorical question, for who was to stop him? The new government had little credit with the public. The Supreme Command’s publicity machine promoted the generalissimo’s greatness. The oversights and blunders that preceded the attack and let it drive so deep, and then let the enemy keep so much territory, went unexamined. On the contrary, the unpredictability of the attack became axiomatic.3 The propaganda worked because people were desperate for good news. In this sense, Cadorna was the beneficiary of an appetite for success that his own failures had created. Morale in the country and the army swung down, then up. What General Capello called ‘an obscure feeling of mortification because of an insult endured’ was rapidly overlaid by euphoria at the narrow escape. If the breakthrough was regrettable, the resistance was unexpectedly successful.
For Conrad, on the other hand, slender gains were no success at all when measured against his original ambition and the disaster in Russia. By 4 June, Conrad knew his original planned strength was inadequate, and the emergency created by Brusilov prevented him from transferring more troops from the Eastern Front. Yet the Russian crisis did not force him to go below that strength and, anyway, the Punishment Expedition had stalled several days earlier. He underestimated the manpower necessary for such a broad offensive; underrated Cadorna’s energy and resolve; discounted the impact of Russian support; and failed to use Boroević’s army for large-scale diversionary action on the Isonzo. Above all, he stuck to traditional tactics in mountain warfare, dragging artillery up cliffs with block and tackle. During the planning, he had clashed with General Alfred Krauss, the able chief of staff at Austria’s South- West Front Command, who boldly advocated rapid penetration of the valleys without simultaneous progress on the high ground. If Conrad had accepted this advice, the Austrians could have made faster advances in the crucial first phase. These misjudgements were dictated by personality. The Punishment Expedition was shaped by his Italophobia and ‘wretched rivalry’ with Falkenhayn. By beating the Italians, the Austrians would finally claim equal partnership with Germany.
Falkenhayn’s decision to withhold German support was not personally motivated in this way, though it was perhaps coloured by a hope that, if given enough rope, his vexatious ally would hang himself. Indeed, Conrad’s prestige never recovered in Vienna and Budapest, where he was seen as responsible for triggering Brusilov’s campaign, which in turn led to Romania’s decision to join the Allies in August. By September, when the imperial forces were formally subordinated to German command, Conrad’s failure in Trentino had already exacted a heavy price on the Isonzo.
Source Notes
FOURTEEN The Return Blow
1 ‘I have already reported that’: Rocca, 119.
2 ‘His Excellency the Supreme Commander of the Army’: This incident was alleged by a parliamentary deputy in December 1917. Camera dei Deputati – Segretariato generale, 128.
3 Brusati learned from the newspapers: Rocca, 136.
4 Ferruccio Fabbrovich, a 19-year-old volunteer: Todero [2005].
5 When General Robertson: Gatti [1921], 167.
6 prove that he was greater than Bonaparte?: De Simone, citing an unnamed staff officer.
7 ‘Why was Cadorna allowed to celebrate’: Camera dei Deputati – Segretariato generale, 128.
8 ‘wretched rivalry’ with Falkenhayn: Weber.
1 The Russians launched the Battle of Lake Naroch on 18 March 1916, in response to Joffre’s appeal for diversionary help.
2 On 25 May, Brusati learned from the newspapers that the cabinet had decided to dismiss him from the army. By omitting to say that he had been removed from the Trentino before Conrad’s offensive, the bulletin implied that he and not Cadorna was most responsible for the army’s lack of readiness. Poisonous rumours now enveloped the disgraced man: he had an Austrian wife (she was American); his son had volunteered for the Austrian army (he was a decorated Italian soldier). When the authorities in Milan could not guarantee his safety against whipped-up public outrage, Brusati went into hiding. He was rehabilitated in 1918, after Cadorna’s removal.
3 This nonsense was parroted by well-meaning foreign visitors such as H. G. Wells, who assured English readers later in the year that, ‘There was only one good point about the Austrian thrust. No one could have foretold it.’