Austrians retake Berat

At the end of August 1918 Austro-Hungarian troops regained Berat, the old town on the Osum river which the Italians had taken on 9 July. The British chronology of the war records this under 26 August, and some Italian studies also give that date. According to the Austrian official history (Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg), units of the 93rd Infantry Brigade marched through the town as early as the morning of 25 August, and on 26 August the Austrians moved on southwards after the retreating Italians. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) states that the Italian retreat ended on 26 August.

The fate of Berat was decided by manoeuvre, not by assault. In the counter-offensive begun on 22 August the attack north of the town stalled before strongly fortified positions. The commander of the 93rd Brigade, Generalmajor Lerch, therefore sent most of his forces across the Tomorr ridge and the Qafa Darz pass to the south-east, so as to take Berat from the rear. The Italian General Treboldi expected further attacks on Qafa Darz and had prepared his main defence there, so the blow of 24 August took him completely by surprise. The Italians fighting at Berat barely managed to cross the Osum before the enemy cut off their retreat. That same day, 24 August, the commander of the Italian XVI Corps, General Giacinto Ferrero, under enemy pressure and in view of heavy losses, decided to abandon Berat and Fier and pull the whole corps back to the line of the Mallakastra hills. Falls suspects that Ferrero was acting on the orders of the Comando Supremo. In Fier itself street fighting lasted from the afternoon of 24 August to the morning of 25 August, when the Italians withdrew from the town. The French, standing east of the Italians, had to bend back their left wing on the night of 24/25 August, and on 26 August they gave up the hills near Narta to the Austrians.

As early as 25 August Pflanzer-Baltin decided that the operation would end with the capture of Fier and Berat. He still allowed a pursuit to a line south of the two towns, but forbade any further advance. The soldiers, especially on the western wing, were surprised and disappointed, because a march all the way to the Vjosë, from where the Italians had set out in July, seemed obvious to them. The generals knew, however, that the troops were already beyond the reach of supplies, because the roads and food stocks in the battle zone had been destroyed. Even more dangerous was malaria. According to the Austrian official history, in July the troops in Albania lost 3,900 men in combat and 2,600 to sickness, and in August 2,000 and as many as 18,000 respectively. At the beginning of September no battalion had more than 150 riflemen. Pflanzer-Baltin himself called his roughly 10,000 riflemen “a ridiculously small force for the defence of Albania”, and holding a front 180 km long “a great bluff”.

The Italian retreat alarmed the Allies. According to Falls, the commander of the British forces in the Adriatic warned the Admiralty that Vlorë was threatened, without which the barrage in the Strait of Otranto could not be maintained. The government in Rome replied coolly that Ferrero had carried out the offensive on his own initiative and further than the Comando Supremo had wanted, and that the present line was in any case better than the one at the beginning of July. Just in case, however, the Italians moved another brigade to Vlorë and a division to Brindisi. The recapture of Fier and Berat is regarded as the last significant success of the Austro-Hungarian army in the field. It held them, however, for only about five weeks: after the collapse of the Bulgarian front in Macedonia in September the Austrians had to leave Albania.