NINETEEN
‘It’s a silly front,’ she said. ‘But it’s very beautiful.
Are you going to have an offensive?’
HEMINGWAY
The Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Battles of the Isonzo
Despite his victory at Gorizia in August 1916, Cadorna was still at loggerheads with Rome. After Salandra lost the vote of confidence in parliament in June, a new government was formed under the 78-year-old Paolo Boselli. With ministers drawn from across the political spectrum, Boselli’s was in effect a ‘national unity government’ under weak leadership.
One of the new ministers without portfolio was Leonida Bissolati, a former socialist. After the death of Cesare Battisti in July, he was the most prominent ‘democratic interventionist’. He had argued passionately for Italy to join Britain and France, volunteered for the Alpini at the ripe age of 58, won two silver medals for valour and been wounded. Later in the year, he would became the first senior Allied politician to call for the destruction of Austria-Hungary. Boselli gave him special responsibility for relations with the military and sent him on a fact-finding mission to the front. At their first meeting, the Supreme Commander ‘intuited’ that Bissolati held him partly responsible for the near disaster in Trentino. ‘He began to see me as the worst of enemies,’ Bissolati reported. After the triumphant Sixth Battle, Cadorna wrote imperiously to Boselli that unauthorised visits by ministers to the front must stop. The Prime Minister agreed at once, but a week later he blundered by mentioning to journalists that Bissolati gave the Duke of Aosta much of the credit for taking Gorizia. The incandescent commander banned Bissolati outright from the war zone.
The next upset came at the end of August, and involved Colonel Douhet, chief of staff in the Carnia Corps, mentioned in earlier chapters. Even before the war, he was a prophet of air warfare, urging Italy to set up a military air force, seek command of the air, and practise high-altitude bombing long before these ideas had currency. Under Mussolini, Douhet would develop his thinking on terror bombing and total war. For now, he was an appalled observer of Cadorna’s tactical traditionalism and ineffectiveness. The low-intensity conflict on the Carnian front gave him time to keep a diary, copiously analysing the Supreme Command’s faults. He also corresponded with ministers and deputies – anyone in a position of influence who would listen. One of these was Bissolati; visiting Rome in July, Douhet handed the new minister a blistering assessment of Cadorna’s performance: his thinking was 45 years out of date; the ‘absurd concept’ of the frontal attack had wiped out the country’s ‘best soldiers, those who really knew their profession’; the insistence on holding every bit of conquered ground, regardless of losses, was unjustifiable; the soldiers were treated as so much ‘raw material’. In sum, Cadorna had no strategic vision, had lost the army’s trust, and the government was duty-bound to act accordingly.
It was all true, and very provocative. But Douhet, who had the intransigence as well as the foresight of a prophet, would not be discreet. At the end of August, an anonymous memorandum written for Sonnino and Bissolati – arguing that the capture of Gorizia had not improved Italy’s strategic situation by a jot – found its way by mishap to the Supreme Command. The mixture of expertise and contempt left no doubt that Douhet was the author; he was arrested for spreading false information, breaching confidentiality, and denigrating the Supreme Command. A court martial jailed him for a year.
Bissolati was also the real target in Cadorna’s third feud at this time. Jealous of the credit that the press and public opinion gave to Capello after the capture of Gorizia, Cadorna became convinced that certain ministers were intriguing to replace him with the other man. So he banished Capello to a remote command on the Asiago plateau.
In mid-September 1916, with Capello cooling his heels far from the limelight, Douhet under arrest and Bissolati’s independence buckling if not yet broken, Cadorna launched the Seventh Battle of the Isonzo. The Italians now had corpses behind as well as before them. A fetor of death hung over the land captured in August, and westerly breezes made life even more repulsive in the front lines. Cadorna had always known that winning Gorizia would not change the strategic balance on the Isonzo. ‘There are other fortified lines right behind the city’, he wrote to his daughter late in 1915. ‘This war can only be ended through the exhaustion of men and resources … It’s frightful, but that’s how it is.’ The King knew it, too. Observing the Fourth Battle from a hilltop in the rear, he had remarked: ‘Who knows what people in Italy will think when we do take Gorizia! Militarily, Gorizia means nothing in itself.’
Following the Sixth Battle, fresh recruits and munitions had poured across the Isonzo. While the Second Army consolidated around Gorizia, the Third Army geared up for another offensive on the Carso, to strike down towards Trieste across the Vallone. Cadorna wanted to catch the Austrians before they had recovered from their first real defeat and fortified their new positions. He also wanted to capitalise on their distraction by Romania’s entry into the war on the Allied side at the end of August.
Boroević was better placed than Cadorna knew. Alarmed by the loss of Gorizia, the Austrian high command granted reinforcements and better equipment. Steel helmets, mortars and gas-masks were rushed to the Isonzo. The high command also stood firm against German requests to release units from the Isonzo for the campaign against Romania. By early September, the Austrians had 152 battalions on the Isonzo, as well as 168 medium and heavy artillery pieces and 606 field guns. As for strengthening the new lines on the Carso, Boroević had 40,000 men at his disposal for construction work, including 20,000 Russian prisoners of war. Working around the clock, they dug trenches, laid wire, built roads and gun emplacements in the rear. By early September, he had four defensive lines – two more than the Italians realised.
Italy’s hopes of a Romanian dividend burst in the first week of September, along with the storm clouds over the Carso, marking summer’s end. Both sides’ trenches were awash with mud and filth. Cadorna had to postpone the attack, but started the preparatory bombardment anyway. He had 430 medium and heavy guns, 600 mortars, and 130 battalions on the Carso, facing 62 enemy battalions with a hundred guns. For several days his gunners fired blind into the fog, doing little damage. On 13 September, the skies cleared; that afternoon, with the sun at their backs, the Italians sighted their targets. With the help of aerial observers, the heavy batteries reduced much of the Austrian front line to rubble, blowing broad holes in the wire, shattering their communications. Cadorna took heart; he believed the Austrians were packed into their front-line bunkers. In fact they had left only a token force in the front lines, so their losses were relatively slight; their men were nearby, and ready. So were their skilfully disguised batteries.
The infantry attacked at 13:30. The Duke of Aosta had amassed 100,000 men on a front of eight kilometres, an unprecedented density. Emerging through smoke and dust in compact blocks, they presented ideal targets, like the British on the Somme a few weeks earlier. With no shells to spare, and not knowing the Italian batteries’ new locations, the Austrian gunners had waited for this moment. Now they opened up, inflicting terrible losses. The Italians kept coming, wave after wave, across open ground in close-order formation, shoulder to shoulder, against field guns and machine guns. To one Austrian artillery officer, ‘it looked like an attempt at mass suicide’. Those who reached the deserted Austrian line met flame-throwers, tear gas, and machine-gun and rifle fire emanating from hollows and outcrops on the crumpled Carso. When dusk fell, their only significant gain was a hilltop, wrested from the Polish infantry of the 16th Division. Bad weather returned, rain scouring the battlefield.
Over the following days, repeated attacks brought few durable gains. The Austrian VII Corps, ably led by Archduke Josef von Habsburg and well positioned on the eastern rim of the Vallone, bested the weary regiments probing uphill. A few scraps of ground were taken here and there. For the most part, where the Italians broke through, inexorable counter-attacks drove them back before they could dig in and bring up reserves. An isolated attack on Mount Rombon, at the northern end of the front, met with no greater success.
Austrian casualties kept pace, and by the time Cadorna suspended the attack late on the 17th, Boroević’s army was in tatters. As Italian production increased, the artillery gap had widened. The quality of Austrian rations was slipping. The draft was despatching middle-aged intakes to the front after little training. Ominously, combat performance was starting to fracture along ethnic lines. On the Eastern Front, desertion rates were always high among the Bosnian Serbs, Russophile by culture and Eastern Orthodox faith; this pattern began to repeat itself on the Isonzo. The Czechs, on the other hand, fought tenaciously on the Isonzo, by contrast with their showing against the Russians. Most dependable of all were the Slovenes, Croatians and Bosnian Muslims, who usually wore their fez and tassel even when steel helmets were available. The ferocity of Bosnian regiments was legendary, and other Habsburg units sometimes donned fezzes before counterattacking, to put the wind up the Italians. Croatian units that performed poorly in Galicia were formidable on the Isonzo. As for the Slovenes, whose alleged pacifism would be a stock joke in Tito’s Yugoslavia, they excelled against the Italians wherever they were sent.
When the guns fell silent, the Supreme Command was already planning the next offensive. Aware of what was pending, Boroević begged for extra forces. The empire was still heavily engaged on the Eastern Front, and now committed against Romania as well. Even when Conrad released two more divisions, the Austrians were outnumbered almost three to one on the Carso. At least Boroević’s units were among the best: hardened Hungarian, Czech and Transylvanian infantry, and a German–Slovene alpine regiment. Smashed trenches and bunkers were rebuilt, wire re-laid, communications repaired.
A senior staff officer arrived from Vienna to inspect the defences. He proposed a new fortified line to run the length of the Carso, three kilometres behind the current front line, from the Vipacco valley to the Hermada massif, a labyrinth of ridges sloping steeply to the Adriatic – the last natural bastion before Trieste. Grottoes in the limestone would be enlarged and linked. Hamlets on the new line would be razed. This was a project for the future; there was no time to get these works under way before the next attack.
On the Italian side, fresh men and munitions were hurried to the front. Commencing on 30 September with a bombardment that lasted more than a week, counting interruptions for bad weather, the Eighth Battle replayed the Seventh, except that Cadorna involved the Second Army more actively, attacking from the north while the Duke of Aosta’s men pushed eastwards. The epicentre would be 800 metres wide, around the village of Nova Vas, where 10,000 men were massed. On 9 October, the shelling intensified into so-called ‘annihilation fire’, marking the climax before the infantry attacked. Even with more than a thousand guns, it was less than half the weight of equivalent bombardments on the Western Front.
The Austrians contained the first assault on the central Carso. In the north, however, the Second Army made dramatic gains, driving back the Austrians a couple of kilometres. The next day, 11 October, Cadorna widened the front to 18 kilometres, diluting the Austrian fire. The Italians had a very good day, capturing several villages beyond the Vallone. If the Czech riflemen had not mounted a spectacular charge on Hill 144, at the southern edge of the Carso, the road would have lain open to Hermada, which was not ready to withstand a major offensive. Fog settled overnight, slowing the next Italian assault and favouring the counter-attacks. The Austrians clawed back some of the lost ground. The danger of a breakthrough was averted. Again, the price was appalling; by the day’s end, the Eighth Battle had cost 24,000 Habsburg casualties. More than 40 guns were captured or destroyed. The best Habsburg chronicler of the Isonzo front reckoned that with 12 fresh divisions, the Italians would have broken through. But Cadorna did not have anything like those reserves to bolster his exhausted forces. He may also have been deceived by disinformation from Habsburg prisoners about the imminent arrival of extra Austrian divisions and even some German forces. Late on 12 October, he amazed his enemies by answering their prayers: the Italians stood down.
Again, the halt was intended as a pause for regrouping. The Duke of Aosta thought ten days would suffice. New artillery and trench mortars rolled to the front from the factories of northern Italy. The Germans let Conrad transfer another division from the Eastern Front, and fresh regiments of Bosnian, Hungarian and Tyrolese infantry were scraped together. The Russian prisoners and middle-aged militiamen set to work on the new defensive line down to Hermada.
The foul weather continued, and neither side had constructed effective shelters on the Carso. Men huddled in flooded trenches under icy gales. The sky began to clear in the last week of October, and the artillery opened up from Gorizia to the sea. With 1,350 guns, the Italians had three times the firepower of the Austrians. Deserters told the Austrians that the infantry would attack on the first fine day. This was 1 November. Annihilation fire demolished the Austrian front-line positions. At 11:30, the infantry attacked. With almost 200,000 men, Cadorna said he could crack the Carso and open the road to Trieste before winter. And indeed, on the northern Carso, the Third Army proved irresistible. Such was the Italian preponderance that the Duke of Aosta could afford to pack a single division (12,000 men) into 400 metres of front.
The Austrians were forced back, giving the Italians a salient five kilometres wide and three deep. The hill of Fajti, bulwark of Habsburg defence on the northern Carso, had fallen. The flood was stemmed on one flank by the Habsburg 43rd Division, clinging to its positions between Gorizia and the Vipacco valley, and on the other by a tough Czech regiment. But for how long? Was this the breakthrough? When the counter-attack came, eight Austrian battalions tore forward from their second line wielding any weapons to hand: rifles, grenades, teargas bombs, iron-tipped clubs. With both sides’ gunners trying to stop fresh units from reaching the line, their forces clashed on the pitted moonscape of the Carso amid shellbursts and hissing fragments of limestone. Cadorna had kept back 22 regiments for this, the second day, and they determined its outcome. Despite regaining a few positions, the Austrians had to fall behind their second line, accepting the Italian salient as accomplished fact. By 3 November, even this line looked untenable. As John Schindler finely recounts, the focal point was Hill 464, a few hundred metres east of Fajti. Boroević sent his last reserve battalion into the fray. This was the 4th Battalion of the 61st Infantry, a rich ethnic mix from the Banat region, today divided among Romania, Hungary and Serbia. Although they were outnumbered by six to one, their rampaging counter-attack triggered one of those failures of nerve that overtook Cadorna’s men. This turned the tide, and the arrival of an extra division from Galicia a few hours later clinched Cadorna’s decision to halt the Ninth Battle. The Italians had lost 39,000 men, some 6,000 more than the enemy, and he refused to throw his last reserves into the battle. The Austrians were astounded; did he not know how close he was to breaking through?
Cadorna recognised that the ratio of losses and gains in the autumn campaigns was horrific, which explains why the account in his memoir is unreliable even by the general standard of that book. But it does not follow that he was battering blindly at a door that showed no sign of yielding, learning nothing from experience.
He revised his battle plan before the Ninth Battle. While he still paid lip-service to the aim of reaching Trieste before winter, his goal was more modest: an improvement in Italy’s position on the Carso, reaching an imaginary line between the hills of Trstelj and Hermada – at least 15 kilometres north of Trieste – without incurring huge casualties. By providing the army, the government and the nation with limited but secure territorial gains, without colossal bloodletting, he would build on the capture of Gorizia, disarm his critics and end the year on a positive note, well placed for spring 1917. He formalised this thinking in a circular to his divisional generals on 17 October. After achieving ‘total destruction’ of the enemy front line, the infantry would attack across the Carso. The offensive would halt at the ‘critical point’ before the enemy had time to regroup.
It was hard to do these things singly, let alone in a tightly timed sequence amid the chaos of battle. Even with their trench mortars, the Italians could not be sure of breaching barbed wire. A tactic of holding back the infantry until this had been achieved, in order to launch a simultaneous assault, was sure to fail. And how to identify that ‘critical point’? Cadorna’s new realism rested on some highly unrealistic foundations.
Making matters worse, the Austrians had adapted their tactics to turn static defence into dynamic counter-attack. Instead of trying to hold their front line against the shelling and frontal attack, they waited in their second line, then rushed forward to clash with the enemy around the almost deserted front line. The element of surprise and enhanced morale made this method effective enough to be worth using, though the depth and improved accuracy of Italian fire ensured that initial casualties stayed high.
Cadorna had finally done what his critics wanted: he had concentrated his forces on a narrow front, and employed his batteries more effectively. Yet, in other respects, these offensives repeated the errors of 1915. The outcome confirmed that defensive superiority could be overturned only by a combination of patient preparatory sapping, artillery fire that was both colossal and precisely accurate, and the timely deployment of reserves. Worst of all, Cadorna had discovered a knack for abandoning offensives when Boroević had committed his last reserves. The steely exterior concealed a vacillating spirit.
Nevertheless, these battles brought the Italians within sight of the goal of attritional warfare: exhausting the enemy to the point of collapse. The Austrians had no hope of replenishing their losses. Since August, at least 130,000 had been killed, wounded or captured on the Isonzo. Many divisions were shadows of themselves; almost all had been completely reconstructed half a dozen times.
Yet Cadorna’s advantages were less solid than they appeared to the enemy. His recruits were poorly trained, incoming officers likewise, and the army’s material superiority did not nullify the defenders’ advantage.1 As for his actual gains on the Carso, they amounted to several villages and a couple of kilometres of limestone, won at a cost of 80,000 casualties. The Italians were nowhere near the Trstelj– Hermada line. This was far from a limited success at reasonable cost. By blaming these results on the infantry’s lack of fighting spirit, among other factors, he twisted a consequence of his tactics into a cause of their failure. His claim that all three battles were halted as soon as the casualties became disproportionate to the results was equally cynical, for the impact of these campaigns on morale was clear at the time. Douhet put his finger on the problem when he said that none of Cadorna’s offensives gave the troops ‘the feeling that they had really won’. As Italy was fighting an aggressive war, success had to be measured by a different scale than resistance or endurance. The men knew this very well, and mocked the shortfall between ambition and performance with a little rhyme that they chanted when their officers were out of earshot:
See Cadorna rampage, hear him roar!
He’s killed all the mice on the kitchen floor.
If the Italians were not driving ahead, they were, by definition, failing. The finest trench-memoir was written by a lieutenant who fought on the Carso in the winter of 1916. ‘It is not dying that is the demoralising thing, the thing that grinds you down’, he recalled. ‘It is dying so uselessly, for nothing. This is not dying for the fatherland; it is dying for the stupidity of specific orders and the cowardice of specific commanding officers.’ The mood of incipient despair grew during the last months of 1916, and found expression. On 1 November, as the Ninth Battle got underway, the Duke of Aosta had six men summarily executed for mutiny. Cadorna seized on this grim incident to issue a directive that commanders were duty-bound to decimate mutinous units. While he had no authority to revise the military penal code, nobody was prepared to challenge him.
Source Notes
NINETEEN Not Dying for the Fatherland
1 ‘He began to see me as the worst of enemies’: Melograni, 197.
2 a week later he blundered: Rocca, 176.
3 a blistering assessment of Cadorna’s performance: Rocca, 179.
4‘it looked like an attempt at mass suicide’: Weber, 242.
5 their only significant gain was a hilltop: Schindler, 176.
6 other Habsburg units sometimes donned fezzes: From an unpublished memoir by Aleksandar Grlić.
7 with 12 fresh divisions, the Italians: Weber, 250.
8 disinformation from Habsburg prisoners: Sema, vol. II, 33.
9 a circular to his divisional generals on 17 October: Rocca, 171–2.
10 blaming these results on the infantry’s lack of fighting spirit: Cadorna [1921], 318.
11 equally cynical: Cadorna [1921], 328.
12 ‘the feeling that they had really won’: Sema, vol. II, 28.
13 a little rhyme that they chanted: Rocca, 238.
14 ‘It is not dying that is the demoralising thing’: Salsa, 63.
15 the Duke of Aosta had six men: Melograni, 218–19.
16 Capello boasted that his artillery: Sema, vol. II, 97.
1 For example, use of the creeping barrage – allowing infantry to advance behind a curtain of artillery fire – was standard practice on the Western Front by the end of 1916. By March 1917, it was still unknown on the Italian front, due to the relative inaccuracy of Italian guns and poor co-ordination between infantry and artillery. The mountainous landscape posed insuperable problems to communications at the front. Capello boasted that his artillery, around Gorizia, had mastered the creeping barrage, but it was not true.