The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (45 page)

Pivko stands pale and rigid, as if turned to stone. He and 300 of his Bosnians are taken prisoner. As if to justify his decision, Zincone makes a slighting remark about the guides. Finzi is in a trance of despair; the Italians’ indifference is inexplicable. As he returns to sector HQ, he sees the Italian artillery open fire on bersaglieri in Carzano, who are cut off and surrendering to the Austrians. It is the final horror. The Italians lose 360 dead – fighting to get back to their lines – and more than 900 prisoners. Cadorna orders an inquiry. Etna and Zincone are relieved of their command, without explanation. Finzi ensures that Pivko’s talents are put to good use in the Italian army.

Long after the war, Cadorna told Finzi that nothing had angered him more during the entire war than the fiasco at Carzano. Yet the dysfunctional system or ‘culture’ at the Supreme Command was largely responsible. In his jealousy and obsession with unified command, Cadorna made himself the lynchpin of all significant decisions. Bencivenga was Saint Peter, authorised to reject supplicants. When Finzi eventually gained access, Cadorna approved a minimal version of the proposal. He dismissed Finzi’s well-founded worries about the commanding officer and unit assigned to the operation. There was no alternative address for these concerns. Another reason for the fiasco is that the Italian military never believed in the Pivko–Finzi plan, not because of distraction by the Eleventh Battle, rather because the concept did not conform to the Supreme Command’s notion of offensive operations. Senior commanders understood that an attack might rely heavily on intelligence, subterfuge and infiltration; in practice, they did not trust such methods or know how to plan them.

Ultimately, Finzi’s plan was distrusted for political reasons. Italy was fighting heart and soul to enlarge its national territory at the expense of non-Italian peoples – Germans in south Tyrol, Slavs around the Adriatic. Those peoples were twofold enemies: now as soldiers dressed in the Habsburg pike-grey uniform, and in future as more or less resentful victims of Italian force majeure. Viewed through a nationalist lens, this was a zero-sum struggle. Foreign Secretary Sonnino saw no merit in finessing the contradiction between Italian and Yugoslav aims. Translated into practice, this meant there was little point in threading the labyrinth of Habsburg nationality politics. Why bother, if it made no difference to your actions and aims?

Even before the war, according to a well-placed observer, Sonnino’s views of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were ‘antiquated’; he had had ‘little notion of the strength of the national movements among the subject Habsburg races’. For he ‘shared, to a degree surprising in a man so cultivated’, the nationalist illusion that the eastern shore of the Adriatic ‘was mainly Italian in spirit and in racial character’. Enlightened nationalists from Mazzini to Slataper tried to understand the aspirations of Habsburg Slavs. This was the tradition behind democratic interventionism, an important strand of opinion in the first year of war. Under Sonnino, ‘an obstinate, unimaginative man, ensconced in the clauses of his London Treaty as in a besieged bastion’, ignorance of Italy’s eastern neighbours became a patriotic virtue.

Sonnino despised propaganda and wanted nothing to do with it. This goes far to explain why Italian propaganda towards the South Slavs until the end of 1917 was, in one historian’s phrase, ‘violently anti- Yugoslav’. Leaflets were dropped over enemy lines with undoctored translations from Italian nationalist newspapers. For the Italians mistook the motives behind the Slovenes’ and Croats’ ferocity on the Isonzo, wrongly assuming they were infinitely devoted to the empire, even more so than the German Austrians. In fact, the defence on the Isonzo depended increasingly on Slavic nationalism, a force which corroded the empire. This dialectical irony was lost on Italy’s opinion- makers, who, instead of driving a wedge between the South Slavs and the empire, confirmed that Italian motives were as wicked as Habsburg propaganda had painted them.

The army had no excuse for neglecting nationality politics: as early as October 1915, Czech and Moravian prisoners had thanked their captors for liberating them from ‘the Germans’. An officer who fought on the Carso in October 1916 described the hundreds of enemies who lurched out of the smoke and dust of the Italian bombardment, ‘mad with terror, throwing their guns away, holding their hands up, shouting that they were Serbs or Romanians, taking [Italian] tricolour ribbons out of their pockets, sticking them in their berets and buttonholes, all while the artillery made such a racket that I cannot tell you, the wounded screaming and blood everywhere’. Such scenes should have triggered a reassessment of the situation in the empire, investigating the impact of Vienna’s policy towards the non-German peoples, whose loyalty was repaid with steadily worsening conditions. The closure of parliament in Vienna and the provincial assemblies had denied the nationalities a legitimate voice, and tough censorship affected them disproportionately. Emperor Karl’s efforts to restore constitutional government did not restore the trust of the non-German nationalities, which were ripe for Allied propaganda, but Italy’s leaders were not interested. When H. G. Wells visited Italy in summer 1916, he found ‘thoughtful men talking everywhere of the Yugoslav riddle’. Everywhere, it seems, except the cabinet and the Supreme Command, which were in denial.

The Yugoslavs, by contrast, had not stood still. A number of Croat and Slovene politicians fled abroad in 1914 and organised the Yugoslav Committee. This group lobbied the Allies to support the cause of Yugoslav unification, merging the Habsburg lands where Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks lived, with the independeant kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. The same cause was argued passionately by the government of Serbia, which found itself exiled on the island of Corfu after Austria and Bulgaria conquered the Serbian kingdom in autumn 1915. The Yugoslav Committee and the Serbian government agreed that the Slavs living between the Alps and Greece should be united in a sovereign state. Their views on the nature of this state were, however, antithetical. The exiled Serbs could not accept the Committee’s vision of national unity on a federal basis with full equality for Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

Events in 1917 increased the pressure on both groups to compromise. Representing the Slovenes and Croats, as well as the large community of Habsburg Serbs from Croatia, who were directly threatened by Italian expansion, the Yugoslav Committee needed the promise of protection by the Serbian army. The Serbian government, facing the loss of its imperial Russian mentor, was driven to acknowledge the equal rights of non-Serb peoples. At the same time, Emperor Karl’s peace feelers to the Allies threatened to revive an option that alarmed both the Committee and the Serbs: namely, self-government for the Habsburg Yugoslavs inside the empire.

Against this background, in mid-July 1917, the Serbian prime minister and the leader of the Yugoslav Committee agreed a blueprint for a postwar Yugoslav state, to be called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, under the Serbian monarchy and comprising ‘all territory compactly inhabited by our people’. This pact between monarchist Serbs seeking to expand their kingdom to the Alps and the Adriatic coast, and on the other side republican Croats and Slovenes seeking a federal route to national independence, would not ensure harmony after the war, but it showed a united front to the world, out flanking the pro- Austrian Yugoslavs with their schemes for self-government within the empire, and – of course – dealing a blow to Italian nationalists. Sonnino was bitterly disappointed; he had hoped that tensions between Habsburg Yugoslavs and the Serbian govern ment would deepen under pressure.

Touring the Allied capitals a fortnight later to drum up support, Sonnino called on Asquith, who as British prime minister in 1915 had helped bring Italy into the war. Territorial outcomes were, more than ever, preying on the foreign minister’s mind. He stressed the ‘great difference’ between ‘what Italy
needs’
, meaning the unredeemed lands and ‘such territories on the E. of the Adriatic as will make her secure’, and on the other hand ‘what she would
like
to have (in Asia Minor etc.).’ He added that he was ‘all for a deal with the Yugoslavs’. This flexibility was specious. For if Sonnino counted ‘the harbours, bays and islands’ on the eastern Adriatic coast as must-haves for Italy, what could he offer the Yugoslavs in exchange? There was no basis here for a deal. Events made Sonnino’s fundamentalism about the Treaty of London look increasingly out of touch. By October, the timorous Boselli was ready to replace him with someone more adaptable. Before he could follow through, Italy was overwhelmed by its worst disaster since unification.

Source Notes
TWENTY-FOUR
The Traitor of Carzano

1
‘
We are ready to help you
’: Pettorelli Lalatta. My account of the Finzi–Pivko episode is drawn from this book by Finzi, who changed his name to Pettorelli Lalatta after the war.

2
‘
I regret that somebody wished to cast
’: Pettorelli Lalatta, 118.

3
‘
antiquated
’: Wickham Steed, vol. II, 59.

4
‘
an obstinate, unimaginative man
’: Sforza [1966], 127.

5
Sonnino despised propaganda
: Sforza [1944].

6
‘
violently anti-Yugoslav
’: Tosi, 96–8.

7
wrongly assuming they were infinitely devoted
: Sema, vol. 2, 75.

8
‘
mad with terror
’: Cicchino & Olivo, 150.

9
Sonnino called on Asquith
: Asquith.

TWENTY-FIVE

Caporetto: The Flashing Sword of Vengeance

The onrush of a conquering force is like the
bursting of pent-up waters into a chasm a
thousand fathoms deep

S
UN
T
ZU

The Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo

October brought weeks of rain to the upper Isonzo valley, turning to sleet on the heights. Italian observers on both sides of the valley glimpsed the river through ragged gaps in the fog. One morning, they saw Habsburg soldiers move steadily up the valley, two abreast on the narrow road, towards the little town of Caporetto. No cause for alarm; they had to be prisoners marching to the rear. Otherwise …

For the Italians, the Twelfth Battle began as something unthinkable. By the time they realised what was happening, they were powerless to stop it. Cadorna liked to say that he led the greatest army in Italy since the Caesars. The last week of October 1917 turned this epic boast inside out; no single defeat in battle had placed Italy in such peril since Hannibal destroyed the Roman legions at Cannae, more than two thousand years before.

The unthinkable had a name: infiltration. On the other side of Europe, while Capello’s Second Army died in droves behind Gorizia, the German Eighth Army rewrote the tactical playbook. It happened on 1 September 1917, around the city of Riga, where the River Dvina flows into the Baltic Sea. Aiming to paralyse the Russian lines rather than demolish them, the preliminary bombardment was abrupt – no ranging shots – and deep, preventing the movement of reserves. Protected by a creeping barrage, the assault troops crossed the river upstream and took the Russians by surprise, punching through their lines from several angles, attacking the weak points without trying to overwhelm all positions at once. The Germans’ mobility and devolved command let them exploit this method to the full.

Their success did not emerge from a vacuum. Since early 1916, if not before, the warring commanders had searched for tactical norms that could, in Hew Strachan’s phrase, ‘re-establish the links between fire and movement which trench warfare had sundered’. Falkenhayn’s initial bid for breakthrough at Verdun sent stormtroopers ahead in groups after massive bombardments that had destroyed French communications. The Russians discovered other elements of infiltration with Brusilov’s brilliant offensive of May 1916. The British tested different attack formations, turning infantry lines into ‘blobs’ or, later, diamonds. Although there was no magic key, infiltration tactics emerged as a solution to attritional deadlock against defences that were ‘crumbling or incomplete’. This was the situation in the Riga salient, where the Russians were preparing to withdraw as the battle began, and the garrison in the city escaped. And it was certainly the situation on Cadorna’s upper Isonzo.

A week before the Riga operation, Emperor Karl wrote to the Kaiser ‘in faithful friendship’. The Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo ‘has led me to believe we should fare worse in a twelfth’. Austria wished to take the offensive, and would be grateful if Germany could replace Austrian divisions in the east and lend him artillery, ‘especially heavy batteries’. He did not ask for direct German participation; indeed he excluded it, for fear of cooling the Austrian troops’ rage against ‘the ancestral foe’. The Kaiser replied curtly and referred the request to Ludendorff. The German general staff had already assessed that the Austrians would be broken by the next Italian offensive, which they expected before the end of the year. If Austria-Hungary collapsed, as it probably would, Germany would be alone: an outcome that had to be prevented. Meanwhile the Austrian high command – ignoring the Emperor’s scruple – had separately suggested a combined offensive.

Ludendorff decided he could spare six to eight divisions until the winter. He dusted off Conrad’s idea for an offensive across the upper Isonzo between Tolmein and Flitsch. Hindenburg, the chief of the general staff, sent one of his most able officers to reconnoitre the ground. An expert in mountain warfare, Lieutenant General Krafft von Dellmensingen had served in the Dolomites in 1915 and seen the emergence of fast-moving assault tactics against Romania. He now prepared a plan to drive the Italian Second Army some 40 kilometres back from the Isonzo to the Tagliamento and perhaps beyond, depending on the breakthrough and its collateral impact on the lower Isonzo. It was not intended as a fatal blow; the Germans believed the Italians were so dependent on British and French coal, ore and grain that nothing short of total occupation – which was out of the question – could make them sue for peace. Success would be measured by Italy’s inability to attack again before the following spring or summer.

The first target was a wedge of mountainous territory, five kilometres wide between Flitsch and Saga (now Žaga) in the north, then 25 kilo metres long, from this line to the Austrian bridgehead at Tolmein. The little town of Caporetto lies midway between Saga and Tolmein, near a gap in the Isonzo valley’s western wall of mountains. This breach, leading to the lowlands of Friuli, gave Caporetto a strategic importance quite out of proportion to its size. This had been recognised a century earlier by Napoleon, when he warned his commander in Friuli that if the Austrians broke through here, the next defensible line was the River Piave. South of Caporetto, the valley is a kilometre wide; northwards, the river snakes through a gorge of cliffs and steep hillsides, then broadens again at Saga, where the river angles sharply eastwards. At Flitsch, the valley splays open like a bowl, flanked on the north by Mount Rombon.

Since Austrian military intelligence had cracked the Italian codes earlier in the year, the Central Powers were well informed about enemy dispositions in this labyrinth of ridges rising 2,000 metres, where communications were ‘as bad as could be imagined’. Krafft thought the Italian defences were so shallow that losing this wedge of ground could crack open the front from Gorizia to the Carnian Alps. Eight to 10 divisions at Tolmein and three more at Flitsch should suffice. As at Riga, the artillery would deliver a very violent bombardment, then support the assault by laying down box barrages to isolate enemy units.

Hindenburg created a combined Austro-German force for the purpose, the Fourteenth Army, led by a German general, Otto von Below, with Krafft as his chief of staff. Seven German divisions, all of high quality, would join the three Austrian divisions already on the ground plus an additional two from the Eastern Front, backed by a reserve of five divisions: a total of 17 divisions, supported by 1,076 guns, 174 mortars and 31 engineering companies. It was an Austrian general who proposed applying the new tactics. Alfred Krauss, appointed to command a corps at the northern end of the sector, argued that the attack should proceed along the valley floors, avoiding the high ridges in order to isolate and encircle them. He had made a similar proposal to Conrad in 1916, in vain. This time, his advice was taken. For Cadorna, obsessed with attacking high ground and retaining it at all costs, this proposition would have made no sense. Yet it was appropriate to the terrain north of Tolmein, where the mountain ranges loosely interlock, with the Isonzo threading between them.

The attack was scheduled for mid-October, leaving only five or six weeks to prepare. The roads from the assembly areas beyond the Alps were few and poor, especially from the north; two passes linked Flitsch to the Austrian hinterland, but the roads were narrow. Fortunately the Austrians had a railhead near Tolmein. Some 2,400 convoys brought 140,000 men, a million and a half artillery shells, three million fuses, two million flares, nearly 800 tonnes of explosive, 230,000 steel helmets, 100,000 pairs of boots, 60,000 horses. Then October brought its downpours. The sodden roads sagged under the ceaseless traffic of boots, wheels and hooves. By veiling the massive concentration, however, the bad weather served the Central Powers well. The Germans went to great lengths to keep their presence secret. Transports arrived by night, some units wore Austrian uniforms, others were taken openly to Trentino then secretly moved eastwards. Fake orders were communicated by radio. The Austrian lines on the Carso, 40 kilometres away, were ostentatiously weakened to deter the Italians from transferring men northwards. The German air force, brought in for the first time, photographed the Italian lines and prevented Italian planes from overflying the Austrian lines. The gunners bracketed their targets over a six-day period, to avoid alerting the enemy.

If the Italian observers noticed nothing unusual, this was partly because they expected the front to remain quiet until spring 1918. Austrian deserters talked about an attack in the offing, but their warnings were ignored. By the 24th, the Central Powers had a huge advantage in artillery, trench mortars, machine guns and poison gas on the upper Isonzo, and roughly a 3:2 superiority in men. The Germans crouched like tigers, ready to spring. As for the Austrians, far from being demoralised by sharing their front, they were inspired by the scale of German involvement. Without knowing the whole plan, the troops realised something big was up. The possibility of moving beyond the hated mountains stirred their hearts.

On 18 September, Cadorna put the forces on the Isonzo front on a defensive footing. Without ensuring that his order was implemented, he let himself be absorbed by other matters. He was incensed to discover that Colonel Bencivenga, his chef de cabinet until the end of August (and who was so unhelpful over the Carzano initiative), had criticised his command in high places in Rome. This mattered because Cadorna’s Socialist and Liberal critics were finally making common cause, preparing to challenge his command when parliament opened in mid-October.

He was also vexed by an article in an Austrian newspaper. Cadorna filed every press clipping about himself, with references underlined in crayon. Several months earlier, a Swiss journalist had written that the Austrian lines on the Isonzo were impregnable. After the Tenth Battle, Cadorna sent his card to the journalist with a sarcastic inscription: ‘With spirited compliments on such penetrating prophecies about the strength of the Austrian lines, and hopes that you will never desist from similar insights.’ The insecurity betrayed by this gesture swallowed more urgent priorities. Now he did it again. A provincial newspaper in the Tyrol had commented that Cadorna wasted the first month after Italy’s intervention in May 1915. This criticism was too painfully true to pass; Colonel Gatti had to prepare a rebuttal explaining to readers in Innsbruck that Cadorna had not wasted even a day. (Would his revered Napoleon have written to an English provincial newspaper to explain why he decided not to invade Britain?)

Then he went on holiday with his wife near Venice. The rain was so heavy that he returned early, on 19 October, ‘in excellent spirits: calm, rested, tranquil’. By this point, the Supreme Command had been aware for at least three weeks that an attack was imminent on the upper Isonzo. The presence of Germans was rumoured. Even so, Cadorna’s staff did not take the threat seriously. The Austrians had never launched a big offensive across the Isonzo; why would they do so now, with winter at the door?

As late as 20 October, Cadorna did not expect an Austrian offensive before 1918. On the 21st, two Romanian deserters told the Italians the place and time of the attack. They, too, were ignored. Next day, Cadorna escorted the King to the top of Mount Stol, one of the ridges above Caporetto that link the Isonzo valley to Friuli. They agreed there was no reason to expect anything exceptional. On the 23rd, he predicted there would be no major attack, and said the Austrians would be mad to launch operations out of the Flitsch basin. Even on the morning of the 24th, when the enemy bombardment was under way, Cadorna advised his artillery commanders to spare their munitions, in view of the attack on the Carso that would inevitably follow. Rarely has a commander been exposed so completely as the prisoner of his preconceptions. What Clausewitz called ‘the flashing sword of vengeance’ was poised above his head, and he was unaware. He had little idea what was going on in the minds of his own soldiers; imagining the enemy’s intentions was far beyond him.

At 02:00 on 24 October, the German and Austrian batteries opened up along the 30-kilometre front. The weight and accuracy of fire were unprecedented, smashing the Italian gun lines, observation posts and communications, ‘as if the mountains themselves were collapsing’. According to Krafft von Dellmensingen, even the German veterans of Verdun and the Somme had seen nothing like it. Rather than softening up the enemy, the purpose was to atomise the defence. It succeeded with terrible effect, helped by fog and freezing rain, and more significantly by Italian negligence. For the lines on the upper Isonzo were in a sorry state.

After 18 September, the Duke of Aosta put Cadorna’s order into effect on the Carso, placing the Third Army on the defensive. The lines after the Eleventh Battle were incomplete in many places and lacked depth in most. Batteries had to be moved to less vulnerable locations. Communications along and between the lines were poor, especially at the juncture of command areas; they had to be improved. These humdrum tasks also awaited the Second Army, by far the biggest Italian force, deployed between Gorizia and Mount Rombon. Yet its commander, General Capello, was reluctant; he convened his corps commanders and paid lip-service to ‘the defensive concept’ while urging them to hold ‘the spirit of the counter-offensive’ ever-present in their minds. Capello enjoyed a mystical turn of phrase, and what he meant here was not clear. Probably Krafft von Dellmensingen was right when he wrote in his memoirs that Capello had no idea what was meant by a modern defensive battle. He followed up with an order that his commanders must convince the enemy of ‘our offensive intentions’. Again, Capello wanted to go his own way, and again Cadorna shrank from confronting him.