Battle of the Three Mountains

On 28 January 1918 at 6.30 a.m., after an artillery preparation, Italian troops went over to the attack on the eastern edge of the Asiago plateau. Their objective was three heights east of Gallio: Monte Valbella, Col del Rosso and Col d’Echele, which the Austrians had taken before Christmas in the last attack of the autumn campaign. The fighting lasted until 31 January and ended with the recovery of the whole lost line. The Italians call it the Battle of the Three Mountains (battaglia dei Tre Monti). It was the first successful attack by the Italian army since the defeat at Caporetto. A few weeks earlier, on 30 December, the French had retaken Monte Tomba, but this time the success was the Italians’ own.

The fighting

After the end of the First Battle of the Piave, the command of General Armando Diaz decided to improve its positions on the front before the spring. According to the British official history (Edmonds), the Italians carried out three such attacks in January. The first, on the lower Piave near its mouth, was successful. The second, on 14 January, on Monte Asolone in the Grappa massif, took the summit and about 400 prisoners, but after two days Austrian counter-attacks drove the Italians back to their starting positions. The third, on the Asiago plateau, was the largest. The Bersaglieri and assault troops (Arditi) struck first, followed by the infantry, above all the Sassari Brigade, made up of soldiers from Sardinia, together with the Liguria Brigade and Alpini battalions. They were supported by British heavy artillery batteries and aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps.

The fighting was fierce. Col del Rosso was taken, lost in an Austrian counter-attack and retaken. Col d’Echele was occupied by the Alpini. Monte Valbella changed hands several times, and according to Italian accounts the Italians finally held it on 29 January at about 1 p.m. Edmonds gives a slightly different chronology: the attack began as early as 27 January, on 28 January the Austrians retook the western heights, and on 29 January the Italians captured them again and from then on held the whole objective. The last fighting was still going on on 31 January, when Captain Eugenio Niccolai of the Sassari Brigade was killed leading his battalion into an attack. The commander of its 151st Infantry Regiment, Colonel Giovanni Aprosio, was also killed in the battle, struck by an artillery shell.

Losses and significance

According to Edmonds, the Italians lost 5,240 men in three days of fighting and took about 2,600 prisoners. Italian accounts state that the losses included 579 killed, about 3,300 wounded and more than 1,300 missing, and put the Austro-Hungarian losses at about 2,150 killed, wounded and missing plus about 2,600 prisoners. The Austrian official history does not give the full losses of the four divisions that defended the heights. It lists only the losses of one of them, 1,547 men, and claims that the Austrians took 810 prisoners.

The success was small in terms of ground, but important for the morale of an army that three months earlier had gone through Caporetto. It showed that the Italian soldier could attack again. For the recapture of Col del Rosso and Col d’Echele both regiments of the Sassari Brigade, the 151st and the 152nd, received a second gold Medal of Military Valour, something that happened to no other regiment in this war. 28 January is still the brigade’s feast day, and until 1993 it was also the feast day of the region of Sardinia. After the battle, calm settled on the front from the sea to the river Astico and lasted until the spring. In June 1918 fierce fighting again raged over the same heights, when Austria-Hungary launched its last great offensive in the Battle of the Piave.