Battle of Caporetto
The Battle of Caporetto, also known as the Battle of Kobarid, Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, or Battle of Karfreit > by the Central Powers, took place from October 24 to November 9, 1917. The combat was fought in the vicinity of Kobarid (Slovenia) on the Austro-Italian border, where the Italian front was located during the First World War.
Background
The stalemate of the fighting on the Italo-Austrian front was symbolized by the failures of the Italian forces in the successive battles of the Isonzo, which had achieved small territorial gains for Italy, but obtained at the cost of serious losses of troops and material. In the last two battles on the front, the tenth and the eleventh, the Italians had suffered three hundred thousand casualties; as of May 1915, they had numbered 720,000. The forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were also exhausted in their defensive positions, being forced to simultaneously fight Russia on the eastern front and keep numerous units deployed in the Trentino region. to prevent new Italian offensives. Without French or British collaboration and before the arrival of the harsh Alpine winter, the Italian high command abandoned plans to undertake a new offensive until the spring of 1918.
For their part, the Austro-Hungarian commanders feared that, if they did not seize the initiative and maintain their almost purely defensive strategy, the weakness of their line would soon lead to its rupture. Once a new offensive in the Trentino was ruled out due to the arrival of winter, the command decided to attack the enemy in the Isonzo, although for this it needed help from Germany, since Austria-Hungary lacked the necessary troops to carry it out on its own.
In mid-1917 Austria-Hungary received military support from the German Empire in its fight against the Italians, aid expressed in the arrival of German divisions in the theater of operations in the Alps. By that date, the two sides of the conflict had developed "infiltration tactics" to destroy the enemy lines through the use of specially prepared shock forces (Sturmtruppen in German), destined to launch a first frontal assault of great violence and immediately infiltrate behind the enemy lines to sow chaos, after which the line infantry would advance to take advantage of the brief break in the enemy defense, using gases, intermittent cannonade and machine guns in this phase. The German General Oskar von Hutier had been a specialist in the planning and use of these tactics and was sent to the aid of his Austro-Hungarian colleagues to launch a definitive offensive on the Italian lines.
The combat used new forms of military theory elaborated by German strategists and applied for the first time against the Italians. These lucubrations envisioned concentrating small groups of soldiers who would break the enemy front line at a maximum distance of one or two kilometers (usually the offensives were developed in about thirty kilometers) and that they quickly penetrated the enemy rear, and already in those positions the troops that had not moved from the front threatened, considering that in the mountainous theater of combat (the Alps) it was unfeasible to deploy large masses of troops in a single attack. For this, the German tactic postulated not to attack along the line of the Isonzo river, located in the plain, but to take advantage of the Alpine heights to fall on the Italian lines.
Preparations
The Germans contributed seven divisions for the assault (117th, 200th Mountain, 5th, 12th, 26th [all three hunters] and two veteran divisions from the Riga operation), in addition to the Alpenkorps, all framed in Von Bulow's 14th Army. The objective of these troops was to advance in the Caporetto-Cividale direction. The Austro-Hungarians, for their part, participated with as many divisions under the command of Svetozar Boroević, who were to attack Gorizia.
Facing von Bulow's 14th Army was General Capello's 2nd Italian Army, made up of two hundred thousand soldiers. Half of the army was concentrated in the Caporetto area, two corps with five hundred cannons and seven hundred howitzers, compared to the two thousand five hundred artillery pieces (of which, 1,134 howitzers) of the enemy.
The attack was set for October 22, but bad weather caused it to be postponed until the 24th.
The Battle
At three o'clock in the morning on October 24, Otto von Below's units, concentrated in the surroundings of Tolmino, Caporetto and Plezzo along the Isonzo river, unleashed the onslaught against the enemy. The attack began with a great bombardment of phosgene, a new gas for which Italian masks provided no protection.
The main target of the German 14th Army was General Luigi Capello's Italian 2nd Army, which had delayed defensive measures ordered by Chief of General Staff Luigi Cadorna. In addition to the main offensive, which conducted the 14th Army, the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army, deployed on the Isonzo line, attacked to immobilize the enemy. The first objective was the old Austro-Italian border; if this was reached, the 14th was to cross the Tagliamento River and make it easier for the 2nd Army to cross it as well. al 3.er Italian army of Manuel Filiberto de Saboya.
First strike
After a temporary cessation of the bombardment, it was resumed a few hours later, with the help of howitzers. At eight o'clock two large mines exploded under the Italian positions on the Rosso and Mrzli mountains and immediately the Austro-German infantry assaulted the enemy line. The Imperials quickly seized the enemy line, without the Italians being able to stop the advance, which was verified in bad weather. In three hours of fighting, the Italians had lost two divisions and the Austro-Germans had broken the second and last enemy defensive line. Around 12:30 the first units crossed the Isonzo and at 13:15 they seized Caporetto.
The Germans applied honed tactics on the Western Front: a major bombardment with nearly two thousand artillery pieces—five hundred large-caliber artillery—operating from a salient on the front and using poison gas, followed by an infantry assault equipped with grenades and flamethrowers.
The German vanguard encircled enemy strongpoints, which eliminated the units that followed, and advanced through mist and rain, allowing for a swift advance.. The fog also allowed the Austro-Germans to advance through the valleys instead of entertaining themselves in dominating the heights, as was usual in mountain combat. In the valleys the Italian resistance, undermined by gas, was minimal and allowed the By midnight the attackers would have reached almost all the objectives set for the day and the vanguard would have penetrated twenty-seven kilometers into the enemy lines. The Italians had lost almost twenty-five thousand prisoners and almost one hundred guns.
The enemy advance made Cadorna consider withdrawing the units to the Tagliamento river, to recompose the line, after the loss of the last mountain positions in the Isonzo; he gave the order on 26 October. Unable to stop the Austro-Germans, he ended up first ordering a general withdrawal, first to Tagliamento and then to the Piave. On the 27th the Austro-Germans seized Cividale and continued advancing towards Udine, which they took the next day. The cavalry divisions of the Italian 2nd Army, which formed the rear, were seized by the enemy. The remnants of the Italian 2nd and 3rd Army reached the Tagliamento on 1 November. The latter had narrowly escaped being engulfed by enemy divisions and barely managed to cross the Tagliamento before them, not without losing some of their strength. However, two enemy units had managed to cross it before they the Italians could have organized along it. In the fighting along the river, the Italian 2nd Army lost one of its four remaining divisions. In the days that followed, the 14th Army German destroyed the other three; the 2nd Army was almost completely destroyed. On 4 November, the attackers broke through the Tagliamento defenses and advanced towards Valeriano and Pinzano. By then, after ten days of fighting, the Italians had lost 180,000 made soldiers. prisoners by the enemy, four hundred thousand by desertion, two thousand cannons; this represented a quarter of the total number of soldiers in the Army. As a consequence of the defeat at Tagliamento, on November 4 Cadorna ordered a withdrawal to Piave.
Although the northeast units were advancing quickly, the Isonzo units, which should have prevented the Italians from retreating, did not. Thanks to this, the 3rd.er Italian army was able to withdraw to the west.
Taking advantage of the gap
Indeed, on November 2, some German units had managed to cross the Tagliamento, as had a Bosnian unit, which succeeded the following day. The following week the fighting almost ceased: the two armies dedicated themselves to marching to the southwest to cross the Piave. The Italian reached the river on November 9 and established the new line of defense there. The next day the enemy vanguard arrived. The Italians, after crossing the river, had blown up all the bridges. On the 7th, Cadorna had been replaced by Armando Diaz, mainly to improve the morale of the troops, since he did not change the plans of his predecessor in charge.
The Austro-Hungarian advance was halted there; except for the 2nd Army, which had been destroyed in the fighting, most of the remaining units had managed to retreat behind the river and blow up the bridges. both those deployed on the mountain and the 3rd, which had withdrawn almost safely from the Isonzo, formed a new strong line along the river that checked the enemy offensive.
In the battle, the Italians had lost 300,000 prisoners, half their artillery —3,000 cannons—, in addition to 300,000 rifles, 73,000 beasts of burden, 2,500 automobiles, and a large quantity of food. Despite this, the losses were lower than expected, both due to errors by the Austro-German command that allowed the Italians to save some minor units of the 2nd Army and the Monte Grappa position, and due to the lack of fast units that would have able to cut off the Italian retreat.
Front stabilization
The Austro-Germans also began to have supply problems since they were more than one hundred and fifty kilometers from their railway lines and motorized and animal transport only allowed the supply of a small percentage of the necessary material. of the means to storm the Piave.
The belated attempt to advance from the Trentino in mid-November failed, both because of Italian resistance and the harshness of the winter. The Austro-Hungarians only managed to capture Asiago, but not the crucial Mount Grappa. The British and French sent In addition, eleven divisions —five the first and six the second—, which collaborated in holding the Piave line. The last Austro-Hungarian assaults in December, minor ones, did not change the situation.
Balance
Temporary victory of the Central Powers
The victory allowed the Austro-Germans to seize part of Veneto and reach a hundred kilometers from Venice. In addition, they obtained abundant weapons and material: 3,136 cannons, 1,732 mortars, 300,000 rifles, 73,000 horses and mules, 2,500 automobiles, not counting supplies and ammunition.
Shortly after the victory, the Germans withdrew their units from this front, which Ludendorff considered secondary; the triumph did not make him change his mind or comply with Austro-Hungarian requests that he keep them in Italy.
Casualties
The Italians suffered in the battle 10,000 dead, 30,000 wounded and 293,942 prisoners; it is also estimated that another four hundred thousand soldiers deserted.
Fighting from November 1917 to November -1918
During the winter and the following spring, the Austro-Hungarians tried unsuccessfully to cross the Piave and fought the so-called Battle of the Piave with the Italians. In the fall, the Italians took the initiative in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. On October 24, 1918, Allied units crossed the Piave while those deployed on the Macedonian front reached the Austro-Hungarian border on the Danube. This made the empire agree to sign the Armistice of Padua.
Political and diplomatic consequences
The victory of the Central Powers had major political repercussions for both sides. On the one hand, they put an end to the peace negotiations that Emperor Charles had carried out during the spring and summer and postponed the reform projects of the empire until the end of the conflict. The distribution of the captured material to the enemy originated, on the other side, tensions between the two victorious empires in the battle.
On the Allied side, the battle also had important consequences. The presidency of the Government passed to Vittorio Orlando and the military high command was revamped. The disaster allowed the new Government to remove Luigi Cadorna from the supreme command. The British and French sent divisions to Italy and submitted the country to joint military command.
The victory of the Central Powers also caused the United States to declare war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Battle
Austro-German offensive
The Austro-Hungarian troops led by General Otto von Below, reinforced with German troops under General Oskar von Hutier, launched their offensive on the morning of October 24, 1917 on the Italian positions near the Slovenian town of Kobarid (in Italian Caporetto), and promptly broke through the Italian front and dispersed the Italian forces defending the position.
The Italian high command had distributed gas masks but of poor quality, as well as little artillery ammunition, which meant that at the time of the attack the Italian defenders could not reorganize after the first impact. On the same day, the 24th, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians took advantage of the breach opened at Caporetto and rushed towards the plains to destroy the Italian forces stationed there, advancing 25 kilometers and invading Italian territory proper, for the first time since the beginning of the war.
To make matters worse, the Italian general Luigi Cadorna, head of the supreme command of the Second Italian Army installed in the area, prohibited any withdrawal and insisted that the officers maintain the resistance at all costs, even though from the 25th the Italian positions began to be encircled or destroyed by larger Austro-German troops. Cadorna ordered the forces under his command to launch counterattacks locally, although the Regio Esercito had practically no mobile reserves to support such counterattacks, let alone to free the units trapped in the massive Austro-German encirclement, with only a general withdrawal but organized could prevent a disaster. Despite this, Cadorna himself threatened to shoot the officers who allowed a withdrawal, which ended up demoralizing the Italian forces.
Disaster in the Italian lines
With the passing of the days the situation of the Italians worsened when the great speed of the Austro-German advance was noticed and the lack of mobile reserves to stop it, even more so since the Italian General Staff had not foreseen the use of infiltration tactics in the alpine heights, and the sending of reinforcements implied weakening other points of the front, until making it totally unstable. By October 28 the Italian lines had collapsed under the pressure and the Austro-Germans took the Italian city of Udine. That day, General Luigi Cadorna authorized the withdrawal towards the Tagliamento river, while his past threats, far from maintaining order, demoralized the surrounded Italian soldiers more, who began to surrender en masse to the Austro-Germans rather than sustain a fight as desperate as useless.
The Italian plan was to maintain a defense line based on said river, but the speed and violence of the Austro-German infiltration made it impossible to carry out such a project, even more so because the shortage of means of transport meant that almost all the Italian battalions had to withdraw and fight simultaneously, without being able to allocate a specific number of troops to the rear. Thus, when the Italians arrived at Tagliamento, their rear guards continued to be harassed by the Austro-Germans, so on October 30 General Cadorna authorized his troops to cross the river to avoid complete annihilation. Around November 2, the Italians finished crossing the Tagliamento, abandoning weapons, war material and numerous prisoners; precisely on that same date the Austro-Germans reached the north bank of the Tagliamento and established their bridgeheads.
Italian retreat
The units of the Regio Esercito that had survived the offensive were exhausted, disorganized and lacking most of their war equipment, so they could not maintain an organized line of defense. Given this, Cadorna was forced to order the withdrawal to continue to the southwest of the Tagliamento, followed by the soldiers by a mass of tens of thousands of Italian civilian refugees.
On November 6, the Italians withdrew towards the Livenza River, leaving even more territory in the hands of the Austro-Germans. On that same date, Cadorna was removed from command by direct order of Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and was replaced by General Armando Diaz, who managed to reorganize the retreating forces despite the Austro-German attacks and formed a new line of defense on the Piave River. on November 12, stopping the Austro-German offensive that had already overwhelmed their supply lines.
Consequences
The loot from the Austro-German offensive was substantial, and the defeat of the Italian army one of the worst of the entire Great War. More than 270,000 Italians were captured by the Austrians, and another 300,000 Italians who managed to flee the disaster had to be reorganized and re-equipped, abandoning almost all their military baggage. The Austro-German forces suffered heavy casualties as Italian resistance stiffened during the retreat, but in the end they managed to advance more than 100 kilometers and invade Italian territory itself in the direction of Venice. The Austro-Hungarians were finally stopped at the Piave River, where the Italians had established a new defensive line, which was held for the remainder of the war until the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. During this battle, the German battalion commanded by Theodor Sproesser and in which Erwin Rommel was Oberleutnant played an important role. In Rome, the government headed by Paolo Boselli fell on October 29 as a result of Caporetto's serious defeat and was replaced by a new cabinet headed by Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando, who would hold office until June 1919.
Concerned about the Italian situation, the Allies called a conference in Ravenna, where King Victor Emmanuel III assured them that the Italian army would hold its positions without any problem. And so it was: until the end of the war in 1918, the Italian front was stabilized on the line of the Piave river.
The bloody results of the Battle of Caporetto were vividly described by Ernest Hemingway in his novel A Farewell to Arms.
Among the Italian generals, led by Luigi Cadorna, was also the future Marshal of Italy Pietro Badoglio, who had an outstanding participation in World War II and who, like many other military commanders, abandoned their positions and went to the fugue in Caporetto.
The term «Caporetto», after this battle, took on a special meaning in Italy and designated a terrible defeat. Thus, the failed general strike of 1922 by the socialists, was baptized by Mussolini as "the Caporetto of Italian socialism." The historian Giorgio Rochat has considered the battle of Caporetto as "the crucial knot of the war conflict", while Patrizia Dogliani locates in this Italian defeat the beginning of the social climate that would give rise to fascism. For this researcher, the spread of false news regarding this war episode also meant "the most important experience of mass psychology and manipulation of information prior to fascism, the lesson of which was learned by fascism".
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