Battle of Mount Ortigara

The Battle of Mount Ortigara was the largest Italian offensive in the mountains of Trentino in 1917. On 10 June the Sixth Army of General Ettore Mambretti attacked the northern part of the Asiago plateau to recover the peaks lost a year earlier during Conrad’s May offensive. The Italians had a threefold superiority in numbers and the densest concentration of artillery they had yet assembled on the Italian Front. Along almost the whole line, however, the attack collapsed on the very first day. Only on the northern wing did battalions of Alpini, the Italian mountain troops, break onto the Ortigara ridge, and on 19 June they took its highest summit. They could go no further. On the night of 24–25 June a few battalions of Austro-Hungarian mountain riflemen, preceded by assault detachments, retook the summit in less than an hour. In under three weeks the Italians lost more than 20,000 men, most of them on a sector barely two kilometres wide, and in Italy the name Ortigara became a symbol of the futile sacrifice of the Alpini.

Name and dates

The Italians call it the battle of Monte Ortigara (battaglia del monte Ortigara) or simply the battle of Ortigara, although the fighting extended along the whole northern edge of the plateau, from the Valsugana valley to the Assa valley. The Italian command prepared it under the code name “Defensive Hypothesis No. 1” (Difensiva ipotesi uno), to conceal from the enemy that an attack was intended. The Austrians spoke of the battle on the Ortigara (Ortigaraschlacht).

The Austrian official history, Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, dates the battle to 9–29 June 1917, Italian studies to 10–29 June, while English-language accounts often end it on 25 June, when the Austrians retook the summit. We adopt the dates 10 to 29 June: on 10 June the first assault began, and on the night of 29–30 June the Austrians took from the Italians the last scrap of ground they had won, knoll 2003 in the Porta Maora pass, and captured the remnants of the Alpini battalion “Cuneo” that held it.

Background

After Conrad’s offensive of May 1916 and the failed Italian counter-offensive, the front on the Asiago plateau ran from Monte Ortigara through Monte Zebio and Monte Rasta to the Assa valley. The Austro-Hungarians held a favourable bridgehead here, from which they could at any moment threaten the Venetian plain and thus the rear of the Italian armies in Cadore, Carnia and on the Isonzo. General Luigi Cadorna wanted to push them off the northern edge of the plateau and recover the Cima Portule ridge (in German, Kempel). A similar attack had already been prepared in the autumn of 1916, but it was called off because of snow. On 27 February 1917 Cadorna approved the plan of the commander of the newly formed Sixth Army, General Mambretti. At the Petrograd conference, moreover, Italy had committed itself to its allies to spring offensives in Trentino and on the Karst.

The attack was to cover 14 kilometres of front at altitudes of 1,700 to 2,100 metres, on stony, karst and almost waterless ground. Thousands of men were set to building roads and water pipelines. The main blow was to be struck by XX Corps of General Luca Montuori, and within it by the 52nd Division of General Angelo Como Dagna Sabina, composed mainly of Alpini battalions, which was to take Ortigara and Monte Campigoletti. In the south XXII Corps was to attack Monte Zebio. According to the Italian monograph on the battle, the Sixth Army had 154 battalions of infantry, Alpini and Bersaglieri, close to 300,000 men in all, 1,072 guns and 569 trench mortars, that is one barrel for every nine metres of front. Among them were two French railway batteries of 320 mm calibre.

Facing them stood III Corps of General Joseph Krautwald, part of the Eleventh Army of General Viktor von Scheuchenstuel, which belonged to the army group commanded since March 1917 by Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf. Ortigara lay in the sector of the 6th Infantry Division of General Artur Mecenseffy. According to Italian calculations, some 48 battalions and 400 guns stood against the Sixth Army. The Austrians saw through the enemy’s intentions. From April they had observed the build-up of Italian positions, and in May they estimated Italian strength on the plateau at about 107 battalions. The high command at Baden nevertheless refused Conrad reinforcements, because it believed that the war against Italy would be decided on the Isonzo. The offensive was planned for the second half of June, but Cadorna brought it forward to relieve the Third Army, which on 4 June had been struck by the Austro-Hungarian counter-attack that ended the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo.

The first assault (8–15 June)

The attack began with a disaster. On the afternoon of 8 June officers of two battalions of the Catania Brigade came to the position below Monte Zebio to inspect the place where, after a large Italian mine had been fired, they were to break into the Austrian lines. The mine went off prematurely, according to the Austrian official history after a lightning strike. Between 120 and 180 Italians were killed or buried, among them more than 20 officers, and the Austrians occupied the crater.

Because of a downpour Mambretti postponed the attack by a day. At 5.15 a.m. on 10 June the Italian artillery opened fire along the whole front. The weather did not improve: rain and fog hampered aiming, in many places the wire remained intact, and in the south shells fell on the trenches of the Sassari Brigade, which was preparing to storm Monte Zebio. At 3 p.m. the infantry went forward. At Monte Rasta, Monte Zebio and Monte Forno the Italians broke into the trenches here and there, but everywhere they were thrown back. Only in the north did the fog allow the Alpini to cross unseen the deep Agnellizza valley, later called the “valley of death”, and close up to the Austrian positions. The “Bassano” battalion took the Agnella pass and knoll 2003, and the “Monte Baldo”, “Val Ellero” and “Monte Clapier” battalions took the northern peak of Ortigara, knoll 2101 (2071, Lepozze, to the Austrians). The main summit, knoll 2105, remained in enemy hands, as did Monte Campigoletti, where the 7th Field Jäger Battalion repulsed every assault. The 52nd Division alone lost more than 2,500 men that day.

The Austrian official history admits that for a day or two the gap in their line was dangerous. Mambretti and Montuori, however, did not exploit their success. On the evening of 10 June they ordered the captured positions to be held and the attack continued, and early on 11 June they halted the general attack, permitting only local actions. The Alpini once more stormed the Caldiera pass without success. At two o’clock in the morning of 15 June three and a half Austro-Hungarian battalions counter-attacked knoll 2101 just as the Italians had relieved the Alpini there with infantry. The Austrians broke into the trenches but were driven out in hand-to-hand fighting. They lost about 600 men, the Italians, by Italian calculations, roughly half that number.

The capture of the summit (18–19 June)

The Italian command decided to repeat the attack along the whole front, lengthening the artillery preparation to 25 hours. The fire began at 8 a.m. on 18 June, and on the morning of 19 June the infantry went in. In the south everything ended as on 10 June: at Monte Zebio, Monte Rasta and Monte Forno the Italian divisions lost several thousand men and gained nothing. On Ortigara it was different. The 52nd Division, reinforced to 29 battalions including a Bersaglieri regiment, attacked the summit simultaneously from the north, the east and the south-east. According to the Austrian official history, on the northern wing of the 6th Division 35 Italian battalions attacked nine Austro-Hungarian ones. The defenders’ positions, hewn in the rock and pounded for ten days by 240 and 400 mm mortars, had turned into rubble. At about 6 a.m. the Alpini broke the resistance of the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger on the eastern slope and surrounded a battalion of the 14th Infantry Regiment fighting on the northern edge of the mountain. Within three quarters of an hour the main summit of Ortigara was in Italian hands, and the Italians reported taking nearly a thousand prisoners.

Once again the success remained local. Machine-gun fire from Monte Campigoletti and the slopes of Cima Dieci stopped the advance west of the summit. Como Dagna Sabina wanted to attack Campigoletti, but on the evening of 19 June the XX Corps command ordered a switch to the defensive. Mambretti reported to Cadorna that he saw no possibility of a victorious advance on the plateau, and ordered only that the captured positions be consolidated. On a ridge barely two kilometres wide the Italians crowded together more than a dozen battalions, and kept another ten in reserve. According to the Austrians, this concentration of troops on cramped, exposed ground proved their undoing.

The Austro-Hungarian counter-attack (25–29 June)

Conrad considered the loss of Ortigara a threat to the whole front in Trentino. “The Lepozze position must be retaken, otherwise the whole front cannot be held,” he told General Ludwig Goiginger, commander of the 73rd Division, newly arrived from Croatia, who on 22 June was put in charge of the counter-attack. It was prepared by Colonel Adolf Sloninka, commander of a brigade of Kaiserschützen, the Tyrolean territorial riflemen. Few troops were assigned to the attack, but they were carefully chosen: a battalion of the 1st Regiment and two and a half companies of the 2nd Kaiserschützen Regiment, a battalion of the 57th Infantry Regiment and 23 assault patrols from the Eleventh Army’s assault battalion, similar to the German Stoßtruppen. They were supported by about 90 guns. From 22 June the Austrian artillery several times a day plastered the summit with short bursts of fire, to wear the Italians down and conceal the moment of the attack.

At 2.30 a.m. on 25 June a short, violent bombardment fell on the summit of Ortigara. The assault groups cut the wire with explosive charges, and when the fire lifted onto the Agnellizza valley, where gas shells cut off the Italians’ line of retreat, the Austrians burst into the trenches with grenades and flamethrowers. On the summit the Alpini battalion “Bassano” defended itself, on knoll 2101 three battalions of the 9th Bersaglieri Regiment. Cut off by the barrage, hundreds of soldiers laid down their arms. At 3.10, after forty minutes, a white flare over knoll 2105 told Goiginger that the summit had been retaken.

The Italian command learned of this only several hours later. Instead of withdrawing the troops, on the evening of 25 June it ordered a counter-attack. Hastily assembled Alpini battalions stormed the summit that evening and early on 26 June, but were repulsed. The Italian artillery heavily shelled the lost positions and inflicted more casualties on the Austrians than the assault itself had. The “Cuneo” battalion managed to occupy knoll 2003 above the Agnella pass and was ordered to hold it while the rest of the troops withdrew to their starting positions. On 26 June Cadorna learned of the loss of Ortigara, and on 28 June he halted the planned attacks at Pasubio and ordered the First and Sixth Armies to go over to the defensive. On the night of 29–30 June a company of the Austrian 14th Infantry Regiment surprised the last defenders of knoll 2003 and took them prisoner. From 25 June the Austrians took in all some 70 officers and 2,000 men, 12 guns and 62 machine guns.

Casualties

Casualty figures vary with the source and with whether the whole front or Ortigara alone is counted. According to the Italian official account, cited in monographs on the battle, the Italians lost 25,199 men: 2,865 killed, 16,734 wounded and 5,600 missing, most of them taken prisoner. Of these, 12,633 fell on the Alpini battalions of the 52nd Division. An internal report of the Sixth Army staff for the period 10–30 June gave a lower figure, about 17,000, of whom more than 13,000 on Ortigara itself. The Austrian official history speaks of more than 23,000 men and stresses that the Italian losses equalled those of an entire battle of the Isonzo, although two thirds of them were suffered on a strip two kilometres wide. According to the same source, the Austro-Hungarian III Corps lost 251 officers and 8,577 men. This burden was borne mainly by the ten battalions fighting on Ortigara and Lepozze.

Significance

Ortigara was one of the most painful defeats of the Italian army before the disaster at Caporetto in the autumn of 1917. Enormous superiority in men and firepower achieved nothing, the front on the Asiago plateau remained almost as it had been before the battle, and the Italians lost the flower of their mountain troops. Cadorna blamed Mambretti and on 20 July removed him from command of the Sixth Army. According to the diary of General Angelo Gatti, head of the historical office of the high command, the soldiers regarded Mambretti as a bringer of bad luck. Cadorna himself, in his memoirs, named as the causes of the defeat the bad weather and, above all, the collapse of morale in part of the army under the influence of “subversive propaganda”. He exempted from this judgement the Alpini, who had suffered the heaviest losses. Italian critics, from Gatti to later historians, pointed rather to the dispersal of the artillery over too wide a front, leaks to the press, the rigid clinging to every captured position and the crowding of too many soldiers onto it.

The Austrians regarded the battle as a model defensive victory. Their official history stressed that for the first time small, specially trained assault detachments had so quickly defeated an enemy many times stronger. Goiginger and the staff of his 73rd Division were soon transferred to the Isonzo.

In Italy Ortigara became the “Calvary of the Alpini”. In September 1920 veterans met on the summit and erected a broken column there with the inscription “Per non dimenticare” (“Lest we forget”). This gathering is regarded as the first national rally of the Alpini. The memory of the battle also survived in the soldiers’ song “Ta-pum”, and every July a ceremony in honour of the fallen of both sides is held on nearby Cima Lozze.