Fighting on the Col di Lana

The fighting on the Col di Lana was the bloodiest episode of the war in the Dolomites. This unremarkable grassy mountain, rising to almost 2,500 metres above the Cordevole valley, barred the Italians’ way from Cadore into the Austrian Tyrol, to Val Badia and on to the Puster valley, along which ran the railway supplying the defence of the Tyrol. From July 1915 Italian infantry and Alpini stormed its steep slopes again and again, while a few hundred defenders beat them off from small trenches on the summit. In November the Italians held the top for a few hours, but were thrown off it. The soldiers named the mountain “Col di Sangue”, the Mountain of Blood. In the winter Italian sappers under Lieutenant Gelasio Caetani drove a tunnel through the rock beneath the Austrian position. On the night of 17–18 April 1916 the explosion of more than five tonnes of explosive tore the summit apart, and the Italians quickly occupied it. They got no further, however: neighbouring Monte Sief remained in Austrian hands.

Name and dates

The Polish name comes from the Italian name of the mountain, Col di Lana (in Ladin, Col de Lana). Its highest point is called Cima Lana, and different surveys give its height as 2,452 or 2,462 metres. On the slopes of the mountain lay the village of Pieve, the seat of the municipality of Livinallongo, in German Buchenstein, in the Ladin valley of Fodom, which until 1918 belonged to the Austrian Tyrol. The Italians also called the Col di Lana “Col di Sangue”. The Austro-Hungarian official history, Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, describes the fighting for the mountain as part of the three Italian offensives in the Dolomites in 1915 and in a chapter on the blowing-up of the Col di Lana in 1916.

We adopt the dates 8 July 1915 to 18 April 1916. According to some studies the first clashes at the foot of the mountain took place as early as June, but according to the regimental histories of the Italian Calabria Brigade its 59th Regiment began the attack on the summit on 8 July. The summit was taken after the mine was fired shortly before midnight on 17 April and in the first hours of 18 April, which the 59th Regiment later celebrated as its regimental day. The fighting for the ridge linking the Col di Lana with Monte Sief went on until 24 April.

Background

When Italy crossed the border in May 1915, General Luigi Cadorna sent his main forces to the Isonzo and placed the Fourth Army of General Luigi Nava in the Dolomites. It was to break through into the Puster valley and cut the railway linking the Tyrol with the rest of the monarchy. The Austrians did not try to defend the border itself. They fell back to prepared positions on the peaks and passes, and their scanty forces, largely detachments of Tyrolean territorial riflemen and volunteer Standschützen units, were supported by the German Alpine Corps, which arrived at the end of May. According to some studies it was its soldiers who defended the Col di Lana in the first months of the war, before Austro-Hungarian troops replaced them. The defence of the Tyrol was commanded by General Viktor Dankl.

The Col di Lana and Monte Sief formed a forward bastion of the Austrian line above the Cordevole valley. Whoever held them commanded the Livinallongo valley and the road descending into it from Cadore over the Falzarego pass. The Italians had numerical superiority, but they had to attack uphill, across open grassy slopes on which the defenders had sited machine guns. At the Col di Lana the small-unit mountain methods used in other parts of the Dolomites were not applied: the Italian 18th Division, made up of the Calabria and Alpi brigades, made frontal infantry attacks here in waves.

The first assaults (July – September 1915)

On 5 July 1915 the Calabria Brigade began driving the Austrians out of the upper Cordevole valley, and on 8 July its 59th Regiment advanced on the summit of the Col di Lana. The attack did not succeed, and on 28 July both regiments of the brigade attacked again, likewise without result. For the rest of the summer the fighting was for individual rocks and trenches on the slopes. The Austrian official history notes that Nava carried out Cadorna’s orders reluctantly. When at the beginning of September the high command reminded him that his army was to break into the Puster valley before winter, he replied that this was impossible. In the second Italian offensive in the Dolomites, from 16 to 28 September, IX Corps concentrated on the mountains above the Travenanzes valley, and at the Col di Lana merely moved closer to the Austrian position. In the autumn Nava was replaced at the head of the Fourth Army by General Mario Nicolis di Robilant.

The Mountain of Blood (October – December 1915)

In October Cadorna ordered the Fourth Army to attack in the Dolomites so that the enemy could not transfer troops to the Isonzo, where another great offensive was being prepared. In the third offensive in the Dolomites, from 18 to 31 October, the Col di Lana became the main objective of the Italian 18th Division and the left wing of the 17th Division. On 22 and 25 October the Italians took two small but important rock positions, and on 29 October they broke into a trench, wrecked by fire, about a kilometre south-east of the summit. It was defended by soldiers of the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger regiments and German machine-gunners. When all their officers had fallen and losses had reached 60 per cent, the Italians took the trench. According to the Italian official history, the IX Corps assault group, about 12,500 strong, lost 6,400 men between 18 and 31 October. The Austrians, who had fewer than 4,300 rifles in the area, lost about 1,800 men.

On 7 November one of the battalions of the 18th Division took the summit of the Col di Lana in a surprise attack. The regimental history of the Calabria Brigade credits this to the III Battalion of the 60th Infantry Regiment. Some accounts link the success to the unit of Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe “Peppino” Garibaldi, grandson of the hero of Italian unification, who a year earlier had commanded the volunteers in the Argonne, and who was promoted to colonel for the Col di Lana. The Italians could not hold the summit, however. Accurate Austrian artillery fire prevented them from digging in, and in the evening or during the night of 7–8 November a battalion of Tyrolean territorial riflemen threw them off the top. The Italians went on attacking until 11 November, and after a pause forced by a snowstorm again on 20 and 21 November, going over the top from tunnels dug in the snow. The Italian military historian Amedeo Tosti wrote that the Alpi and Calabria brigades paid a further bloody tribute on the “Calvary of Cadore” and had to be content with digging in just below the summit. The Calabria Brigade alone lost 3,092 men at the Col di Lana in 1915. Another assault by three columns of infantry, prepared from 11 December, broke down a few days later in the fire of a battalion of territorial riflemen and the Austrian artillery.

The mine under the summit (winter 1915–1916)

Since the mountain could not be taken by assault, the Italians decided to blow up its summit. The idea came to them while hewing shelters and galleries in the rock. The plan was drawn up by Lieutenant of Engineers Gelasio Caetani of the family of the Dukes of Sermoneta, a mining engineer by training who had worked in mines in the United States before the war. For most of the winter the sappers drove a gallery with hand drills and chisels beneath the Austrian positions on the summit. The work was done as quietly as possible, but already in January 1916 the Austrians began to suspect something and set up a listening service. When the sounds of drilling fell silent they relaxed, believing that the Italians were only building shelters. In mid-March their fears returned, and according to some accounts an artillery observer on the Pordoi pass noticed signs of mining. The defenders began to drive their own countermine galleries.

From February the summit was held by the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Tyrolean Kaiserjäger Regiment (PL). On 5 April, or 6 April according to other sources, the Kaiserjäger hastily fired a charge of 110 kilograms of explosive in their most advanced gallery to destroy the Italian works. The countermine, however, went off too far away and only slightly damaged the two Italian galleries. The Italians stopped work for a while, then completed it. On 12 April the gallery was ready. Between 5 and 5.5 tonnes of blasting gelatine, according to different sources, were placed in two mine chambers. An attack by a whole brigade was planned around the mine: after the explosion nine companies were to take the summit and immediately strike at Monte Sief.

The blowing-up of the summit (17–18 April 1916)

From 15 April 84 light and 25 heavy guns shelled the Col di Lana. Telephone lines were cut, and the trenches and the steps leading to the summit turned into rubble. On the night of 16–17 April the 6th Company of the 2nd Tyrolean Kaiserjäger Regiment under Lieutenant Anton von Tschurtschenthaler relieved the 5th Company on the summit. On the evening of 17 April a wounded soldier brought down a report from the garrison commander: the position was “totally shot to pieces”, staying in the shelter was becoming impossible, and the situation was “terrible”. The regimental chaplain, the Benedictine Anselm Blumenschein, set out for the summit to give the men heart, but was killed by a shell on the way.

At 11.35 p.m. Italian time on 17 April, just before midnight, Caetani fired the mine. The explosion tore the top apart and hurled huge blocks of rock into the air, leaving a double crater 35 metres long, 25 metres wide and 12 metres deep. The trench parapets collapsed over a length of 25 metres, burying the defenders. Immediately afterwards the Italian artillery shifted its fire onto designated targets, and the I Battalion of the 59th Infantry Regiment went for the summit. The Italians quickly occupied the main summit, and the north-eastern knoll after sharp fighting. According to the Austrian official history there were about 280 defenders on the summit. Of these 170 were taken prisoner, and the rest were killed or buried. More than a hundred bodies remained under the rubble for ever. The Italians also captured four machine guns, two trench mortars and a mountain gun.

The companies that were to outflank the summit by the south-western slope, however, were turned back by the Kaiserjäger, and at dawn on 18 April the attack had not got beyond the captured top. The ridge leading towards Monte Sief was held by a handful of Kaiserjäger under a non-commissioned officer. On the night of 18–19 April two companies of Kaiserjäger counter-attacked, but ran into fresh Italian battalions. General Ludwig Goiginger, commander of the defence of this sector of the Tyrol, concluded that without strong artillery retaking the summit would mean the destruction of the remnants of his troops, and ordered a switch to the defensive. From the night of 20–21 April the Italians, with a third regiment of the 18th Division, stormed the ridge and Monte Sief, but the soldiers of the Landsturm, the Kaiserjäger and the Standschützen from the Enneberg valley, although they lost two forward posts on the slope, held the ridge and the saddle below Monte Sief. On 24 April, Easter Monday, the Italians halted the attack.

Casualties

The total losses of both sides in the fighting for the Col di Lana cannot be established precisely. Italian studies often state that the fighting for the mountain cost more than 8,000 dead, usually without explaining which side and what period the figure refers to. It is known that the Calabria Brigade lost 3,092 men here in 1915, and the IX Corps assault group 6,400 men in the second half of October 1915. According to some studies avalanches alone killed 278 Italian soldiers in 1915–1916. In October 1915 the Austrians lost about 1,800 men on the sector from Arabba to the Tofana. After the mine explosion more than a hundred men were killed and 170 taken prisoner. In the fighting for Monte Sief from 18 to 24 April 1916 the Italians lost, according to the Austrian official history, about 2,000 men.

Significance

The capture of the Col di Lana was one of the greatest Italian successes in the Dolomites and a major propaganda event. Strategically, however, it changed little. The Austrians held Monte Sief and the saddle behind it, so the way to Val Badia and the Puster valley remained closed. The Col di Lana mine did, on the other hand, become the most famous episode of the mine warfare in the Alps, which the Austrians had begun on 1 January 1916 on the Lagazuoi. By March 1918 the two sides had fired 34 mines on the Tyrolean front, five of them on the Col di Lana and Monte Sief. The last of these, an Austrian one, cut through the ridge of Monte Sief in October 1917. After the defeat at Caporetto in the autumn of 1917 the Italians had to withdraw from the whole area.

Caetani received high decorations for the Col di Lana, and after the war he was Italian ambassador to the United States. The story of the mountain became one of the legends of the war in the Alps. It was told in 1931 in the film “Berge in Flammen” (“Mountains on Fire”) by Luis Trenker, and today a chapel in memory of the fallen of both sides stands on the summit.