By 10 June, Cadorna recognised that matters were not going to plan. He told his family that the advance faced great difficulties and a trench war was looming – a prospect he detested. Salandra was under pressure from warmongers whose euphoria was beginning to curdle. A note of asperity crept into his communications with Cadorna, who warned that the campaign would take a long time, and advised Salandra to inform the public of the real situation. This advice was not taken.
Meanwhile, as the clashes died down in the second week of June, Cadorna’s army set about hacking trenches and gun emplacements in the limestone, carving mule-tracks in zigzags up the mountains, and draping the valley with telephone wires and cable ways suspended from triangular wooden stanchions that can still be found in the forests that now cover the lower hillsides. Pontoons over the Isonzo were strengthened, swept away by late spring rains, rebuilt. Barracks were built in the rear. Cadorna took over the archbishop’s palace in Udine which he named the ‘Supreme Command’ instead of the traditional ‘General Headquarters’. The commanders of the Second and Third Armies set up their headquarters closer to their sectors. By 21 June, Cadorna was ready to start the war in earnest. With over a million men on the plains of Veneto and Friuli – the greatest force ever assembled in Italy – he issued orders for a general advance towards Trieste and Gorizia. The first battle of the Isonzo was about to begin, but the Austro-Hungarian army was better prepared than anyone had thought possible in May.
Source Notes
FIVE The Solemn Hour Strikes
1 only two of the army’s 17 regular corps: Rocca, 65.
2 lack of ‘offensive spirit’: Cadorna [1950], 232–41.
3 guarded in mid-May by only two divisions: Sema, vol. I, 26.
4 ‘We are on the eve of an enemy invasion’: Flores, 35–6
5 An Austrian officer posted in the Dolomites: Lt. Anton Moerl, quoted by Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxix.
6 ‘We expected them to do just that’: Vianelli & Cenacchi, xxix.
7 So he attacked anyway, achieving no success: Flores, 38.
8 not admitted at the time, or under Fascism: Alberti.
9 Carlo Emilio Gadda, who fought on the Carso: Gadda [1963].
10 ‘Daddy, daddy, look at all the ladies’: Pavan, 367
11 Other units, he was told, were active on Mrzli: Details of operations on Mount Mrzli are from Alliney, 30
12 This man, Lieutenant Colonel Negrotto: Alliney, 30.
13 urged the men to defend their ‘Slavic soil’: Schindler; Sema, vol. I, 43
14 ‘It was like the end of the world’: Faldella, 14.
15 ‘hard Friulan faces’: Mario Puccini, 114.
16 He told his family: Cadorna [1967], 104
1 Known in English as Bangalore torpedoes, the gelignite tubes were iron pipes, around 1.5 metres in length, with gelignite packed in one end. The wire-cutting party would thrust the explosive end under the wire, then light the long fuse with a sulphur match before retreating. When they worked, these devices could blast a gap of 3–5 metres in the wire.
2 Cadorna’s original plan had foreseen offensives in this sector, but he changed his mind at the last minute, when he decided that offensive efforts should concentrate almost exclusively on the Isonzo.
3 The Bersaglieri (literally ‘sharpshooters’) were mobile light infantry, recognisable by the long black feathers in their wide-brimmed hats. Some units rode bicycles.
4 The first Alpini companies were formed in 1872 to protect Italy’s mountainous northern border. Unlike the infantry brigades (except those from Sardinia), their units were recruited regionally, from the northern parts of the kingdom.
5 For example, the Austrians counter-attacked by night from the start – something the Italians were not prepared for.
SIX
A Gift from Heaven
Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of
the enemy, will be fresh for the fight.
SUN TZU
The superiority of the defensive (rightly understood)
is very great, and much greater than may appear at first sight.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, On War (1832)
In the first days of May 1915, a battalion of the Austrian territorial militia detrained in a little town in the Puster valley, near the Italian border. One, two, three, four companies marched out of the station, complete with machine guns, horses, mules and muddy wagons, and formed a column. The officers stared at the road ahead. The men were not young or smart or well-equipped. The boys scampering around could not get a word out of them. The adults realised that the dreaded war with Italy must be very close. These men did not look up to much, yet they were better than nothing and surely others would follow, maybe with artillery.
The silent column marched westwards to the principal pass over the mountains into Italy. People lined the road to cheer, and the closer they drew to the border, the louder the cheers rang out. The soldiers halted at nightfall near the foot of the pass, without encamping. Under cover of darkness, they moved off again, quietly – not southwards to the border, but north. Early next day, four more companies climbed down from the train at Hermagor. ‘Look!’, people said, ‘we’re getting a whole army!’ The men fell in and marched off. At night they rested near the border before turning their backs on the border and disappearing northwards. Next day, the same happened again. The trainloads of arriving soldiers looked wearier and more unkempt as the days passed. Eventually some onlookers wondered if they were not the same men, marching more than 40 kilometres each day with full kit, then looping around to the next valley and arriving back in Hermagor each morning. A battalion of the damned, repeating their futile routine day after day, with no hope of release.
If they really were the same men, then the meaning of the deception was all too obvious. The empire had no more or better troops to spare. Italian spies were supposed to report a build-up on the border, so that Cadorna would expect to confront a great battle-hardened army. Whatever the truth about this particular story, it was true that Austria could ill afford a third front. In summer 1914 – spectacularly unpre pared for the war it was bent on fighting – Austria-Hungary had put 50 infantry divisions into the field against Russia’s 94 and Serbia’s 11 divisions. These divisions suffered early losses that almost beggar belief. The standing army’s peacetime strength had been around 450,000; this force took some 80 per cent casualties in the first few months. The winter operations against Russia led to 700,000 losses, reducing many infantry divisions to 3,000 or 5,000 rifles, instead of the standard strength of 12,000. The 1914 campaign against Serbia cost the lives of 600 officers and 22,000 men. In other words, the casualties between August 1914 and May 1915 equalled the size of the prewar army. The official history of the war would say that the old professional army ‘died in 1914’ and was replaced by something quite different, ‘a conscript and militia army’. The army that faced Italy in spring 1915 was a different force: ‘civilians in uniform’ for the most part, who were more easily moved by the nationalist currents washing through the empire.
Universal conscription had been introduced nearly fifty years before, but the army’s capacity to draft and train the annual intake was very limited. While the population increased by 40 per cent between 1870 and 1914, military strength grew by only 12 per cent. Lacking weapons and facilities, Austria-Hungary could mobilise fewer men than France, which had a smaller population. In the decades before 1914, military spending in the Habsburg empire had fallen behind that of the other great powers. When Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf became chief of the general staff in 1906, there was a new effort to modernise the armed forces and boost their share of the budget. But military spending, even at its zenith, represented only 21 per cent of the empire’s total budget. It was a quarter of Germany’s and Russia’s spending, less than half of France’s, and less even than Italy’s.
Still essentially pre-industrial, the empire produced less iron and steel than Belgium. While this lack of economic modernisation probably
acted as a political preservative, it did the military no good, entailing permanent shortages. In 1914, Austria had the weakest firepower of any major army. Artillery support averaged only 42 light pieces per division (even the Russians had 48). Even so, they outgunned the Italians in the summer of 1915. Crucially, they had three times as many machine guns. The empire’s lack of industrial capacity only became crippling in the war’s later stages. Road and rail communications were also pre-modern – though it happened that Austrian rail links to the Italian front were far better than Italy’s to Friuli (six railheads compared with two).
The army mirrored the ethnic diversity of the empire. In 1914, a quarter of the infantry were Austro-German; 18 per cent were Magyar- speakers (Hungarians); 13 per cent were Czechs. The rest (some 45 per cent) were Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Romanians, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Bosniaks (Muslims from Bosnia), Jews, and also – in the pro portion of one or two per cent – Italians. Elaborate procedures were in place to accommodate the multiethnic, polyglot intake. By 1914, the officer corps was still 72 per cent German-Austrian and the language of command remained German, but it comprised only 80 or 90 expressions. For the rest, regiments used whichever of nine other languages – most of them mutually unintelligible – that their men under stood. Fewer than half of the 330 regiments were more or less homogenous in ethnic and linguistic terms. Fully half of them used two languages routinely. Officers were expected to learn the language of the troops within three years of joining a regiment. (Reservists who replaced officers lost in the early campaigns were often unable to communicate with their men.)
The high command was gloomily aware that the military could not be immunised against the rise of nationalism. Early in 1914, Conrad – whose opinion of Italians and Serbs verged on racist – sent a memo to the Emperor, ranking the nationalities in terms of their likely loyalty to the army in a war. The only ‘completely reliable’ elements would be the German Austrians, Croats, Slovenes and Bosniaks. The Serbs and Czechs, by contrast, were ‘completely Russophile’. His forecast proved broadly accurate for the first two or three years of the war, until the bonds of loyalty frayed beyond repair for all nationalities. Many Serbs from Bosnia wanted Russia, not Austria, to win. There were summary executions of ‘unreliable’ Serb soldiers on the Eastern Front. All the Serbian-language newspapers in the Habsburg province of Vojvodina (now northern Serbia) were banned at the start of the war. As for the Czechs, when two infantry regiments surrendered to the Russians in the spring of 1915, they were officially disbanded. Over the course of the war, the Bohemian Germans, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims suffered the highest casualty rates – a rough but valid indicator.
Against this background, the high command was astonished when the mobilisation in 1914 proceeded without problems, indeed with fervour. No sooner had the failures against Russia and Serbia burned away the initial enthusiasm than the Italians gave Austrian morale a desperately needed lift. The Emperor’s message to his people, announcing Italy’s declaration of war, was crafted to stir deep emotions. Italy, he said, had committed a betrayal unique in history. After more than thirty years of alliance, the kingdom had ‘abandoned us in the hour of danger’ and unfurled its banners on the field of our enemies. But the ‘great memories of Novara, Custoza and Lissa, which formed the pride of my youth, and the spirit of Radetzky, Archduke Albrecht and Tegethoff’, the Habsburg commanders who had won those famous victories, guaranteed that ‘we will also successfully defend the borders of the monarchy in the south’. They had always beaten the Italians in the past, and they would now do so again.
Anti-Italian propaganda pushed at an open door. The German Austrians had a set of prejudices about the uncivilised, unreliable, cowardly Italians that could easily be mobilised.1 As early as August 1914, Conrad believed that the likely struggle with Italy would hinge on successful appeals to ‘the good German and Slav peoples’ of the empire, ‘still loyal to the Emperor, and determined to fight valiantly for hearth and home’. The Slavic peoples could be encouraged to share the feeling that the Italians were perfidious, sly in the Latin way. This stereotype was a priceless asset; the high command’s hope that Slavic soldiers would fight valiantly proved well-founded from the first clashes.2 A few weeks into the war, the Papal nuncio in Vienna reported that hatred for the Italians was widespread. There were even mutterings that the Church in Austria might split away from Rome. The Archbishop of Vienna agreed that anti-Italian passions posed a grave danger to Catholic unity. The Italians, by contrast, had no such universal ‘enemy image’ to manipulate. Hatred of the Austro-Hungarians was a middle- class emotion, and smart talk about Prussian militarism or the Habsburg prison-house of peoples was for intellectuals only.
General Ludendorff, Germany’s First Quartermaster General but in reality the senior strategist, contrasted the Habsburg troops’ lacklustre record on the Eastern Front with their ardour against the ‘hereditary enemy’. Field Marshal Hindenburg, too, would write that they fought the Russians with their head but attacked the Italians with their whole soul. Czech and Slovak troops who had failed against Russia ‘did excellent work against Italy’. Even greater excellence was shown by the Slovenes, Dalmatians (meaning Croats and Serbs from Croatia), and Bosnians, for these peoples – who entered the Yugoslav state together in 1918 – stood to lose most from Italian expansion in the Balkans. The high command played the ethnic card against Italy from the outset. Regiments from Slovenia were deployed to the Italian border in 1914. Dalmatian and Bosnian regiments were later sent where the fighting was fiercest. The front-line troops were supported by reservists from Trieste and Istria. The last Habsburg census before the war showed that some 7 million ‘Yugoslavs’ (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks) lived in the empire – around 14 per cent of the total population. In 1914, they formed 11.5 per cent of the armed forces, and 3.1 per cent of the officer corps. By 1917, these proportions rose to 17 per cent and 9 per cent respectively. On the Isonzo front, Yugoslavs were 42 per cent of the Habsburg forces.
With its population of Orthodox Serbs (44 per cent), Muslim Bosniaks (32 per cent) and Catholic Croats (22 per cent), Bosnia compacted the empire’s fractious diversity in a little space. The high command tried to ensure that the four Bosnian regiments all reflected the ethnic make-up of Bosnia as a whole. This was impossible to sustain when the purge of many Serbs early in the war reduced the strength of the Bosnian units by a third. Nevertheless, these regiments earned a reputation on the Italian front for supreme valour and toughness.
Conrad never trusted Italian neutrality. He placed the border units on alert in August 1914 and appointed General Franz Rohr to organise the defences so that Austria could resist the Italians ‘most resolutely’. With the Habsburg army fully stretched on other fronts, Rohr’s forces were a motley collection of training battalions, militia units, border guards and customs officers, armed with old rifles and no artillery to speak of. If they were attacked, they could be crushed in a few hours. (Falkenhayn wrote after the war that the Central Powers could ‘scarcely’ have held ‘another enemy at bay’ over the winter of 1914–15.) Rohr’s men would not be reinforced by regular units until early 1915, when they were also joined by Tyrolese Standschützen, volunteer riflemen with a proud local tradition. Around 20,000 of these ‘schoolboys and grandfathers’ were soon under arms. (The regular troops from the Tyrol were away in Galicia and Serbia.) Similar units were formed in Carinthia, Slovenia and Trieste.
Conrad realised that Austria could not win a third war. His strategic aim was twofold: to delay an Italian advance towards Vienna, and keep possession of the Tyrol. (He did not believe Trieste could be held.) His first idea was to draw the Italians over the mountains, cut them off, and smash them in the valleys of Carinthia and Slovenia. He reckoned that public opinion in Italy was so divided over the war that this would deal a terminal blow. But it would be very risky, and he needed 10 German divisions. When Falkenhayn refused to deplete German forces on the Western and Eastern Fronts, Conrad was compelled to adopt
a purely defensive strategy. His relationship with Falkenhayn, never good, deteriorated.
Conrad announced on 21 April 1915 that no ground should be ceded without a fight. The Austrians faced a much stronger enemy, and neither the quantity nor the quality of their supplies and equipment was likely to improve. On the contrary, it would be a miracle if these did not decline. So they took their stand not at the border but further back on the first high ground. They had learned from their campaign against Serbia, where small units of irregulars who knew the ground well and were supported by the people had defeated a much stronger but poorly informed force. They fortified the western edge of the Carso plateau and the hills around Gorizia, aiming to prevent the Italians penetrating the valleys that led to the interior. Working around the clock, they entrenched the plateau rim, laying landmines and triple rows of barbed wire. Bunkers were prepared for machine guns and artillery. The Italians apparently discovered little about these preparations. By mid-May, the defences around the Tyrol were complete, with wire entanglements 6–12 metres deep, trenches and emplacements excavated and sometimes armoured, magazines prepared, telephone lines laid, and sight-lines cleared of vegetation. Further east, the work in Carnia was delayed by late snowfalls.
The situation on the Isonzo was less satisfactory. Work in some northern sectors was almost complete but further south the defences were still patchy. The positions around Gorizia were mostly ready, though the barbed wire and minefields were not. The Carso and Monfalcone sectors – guarding the route to Trieste – were still sketchy; the Austrians had taken too long deciding where their front line should run. On the coast, they fixed their rear defences near Duino, a few kilometres east of Monfalcone, where their position overlooked open marshes and a deep fast river, the Timavo.3 By 26 May, Rohr could report that the line on the Isonzo was ‘almost completely closed’, with two rows of barbed wire, increasing to four rows at decisive points. The first line would be ready by the end of the month, though the second, he warned, could not be finished in the near future.
The White War Page 11