Offensive in Albania (1918)

The offensive in Albania in July 1918 was the largest land operation on the forgotten Albanian wing of the Salonika front. The Italian XVI Corps of General Giacinto Ferrero, which had sat for years in the entrenched camp around Vlorë, crossed the lower Vjosë on 7 July, while French troops of the Army of the Orient, standing to its east, attacked in the valley of the Devoll. The weak Austro-Hungarian XIX Corps, stretched out in a thin cordon, did not hold. Within a few days the Italians took the Malakastër range of hills, which had long threatened Vlorë, and the towns of Fier and Berat, and reached the River Seman. Then the advance lost its momentum. The lack of roads, the heat and malaria exhausted the victors, while the defeated were sent a new and energetic commander. In the second half of July the initiative began to pass to the Austrians.

Name and dates

The operation has no established name in Polish literature, so we use a descriptive one: “the offensive in Albania”. The British chronology of the war records under 6 July 1918 the start of the “Franco-Italian offensive in Albania”. The Austrian official history (Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg) speaks of a “summer campaign in Albania” lasting from 6 July to 26 August, and calls its first part, from 6 to 13 July, the Battle of Fier and Berat. The Italians usually write of the capture of the Malakastër, Fier and Berat.

This page describes the Allied attack from the first fighting on 6 July until it came to a halt around 22 July. According to the Austrian official history, the attack was actually planned for 7 July, and on 6 July only a preliminary Franco-Italian operation took place on the eastern wing. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) and Italian accounts, however, take 6 July as the start of the whole offensive. The end is fluid. On 19 July the Allied commander-in-chief at Salonika, General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, ordered the advance halted; on 20 and 21 July the Italians and French carried out one last attack on the Devoll; and from 21 July the Austrians went over to counter-attacks, which developed into a counter-offensive on 24 July. The later fighting, up to the Austrians’ recapture of Fier and Berat at the end of August, is mentioned only briefly.

Background

From the winter of 1916 Albania was divided. The north and centre of the country were held by Austria-Hungary, while the Italians held the south with Vlorë, which they had occupied as early as 1914, and in 1917 they proclaimed a protectorate over all of Albania. Further east, around Korçë, stood French troops, the left wing of the Allied armies in Macedonia. The front line ran through mountains and marshes, far from the main theatres of war, and for most of 1917 this sector was quiet.

In the spring of 1918 General Adolphe Guillaumat, then commander at Salonika, reached an understanding with Ferrero, and in May and June the French, with Italian cooperation, carried out two successful operations in the mountains between Lake Ohrid and the Devoll. They eliminated a dangerous Austrian salient and pushed the enemy back from the road from Korçë to the port of Santi Quaranta (Sarandë), by which the left wing of the front was supplied. This happened in parallel with the Greek victory at Skra di Legen. After these successes the command at Salonika wanted to go further. The commander of the French Army of the Orient, General Paul Henrys, planned, together with the Italians, to reach the River Shkumbin, a much shorter and more convenient line. Had this succeeded, the Bulgarian-German front in Macedonia would have lost the cover of its western flank before the great offensive being prepared by the new commander-in-chief.

The Italians, however, had their own aims. As the Austrian official history, based on Italian and French studies of the 1920s, puts it, Ferrero wanted above all to take the Malakastër, the range of hills north of the Vjosë from which the Austrians threatened the entrenched camp of Vlorë. A plan for this operation had been ready as early as 1917, but the government in Rome had then sent part of the corps to Epirus. On 24 June 1918 Ferrero informed the French that the Comando Supremo had given him a free hand. He agreed to cooperate with them in the east, but demanded that future gains, above all Elbasan, should fall to the Italian sphere of influence. Disputes dragged out the negotiations, and the attack, set for the end of June, was postponed to the first days of July. According to Villari, the Italian historian of the Macedonian campaign, the aim was in any case not to gain ground but to weaken the enemy, so that the Austro-Hungarian forces in Albania could not help the Bulgarians during the coming offensive in Macedonia.

The Allies had the advantage. According to Falls, XVI Corps, reinforced by a brigade from Italy, numbered about 53 battalions, a third of them territorial militia, and 300 guns. The French fielded the 57th Infantry Division from General de Lobit’s 3rd Group of Divisions, reinforced by colonial units: Moroccan spahis, Algerian and Indochinese tirailleurs, and Albanian volunteers. The Austro-Hungarian XIX Corps of General of Infantry Ludwig Können-Horák had, according to Falls, only about 24 battalions at the front and 14 in the rear, many of them weak battalions of the territorial reserve (Landsturm). The battalions were on average at half strength and held sectors 4 to 10 km wide. The Albanian volunteers, on whom the defence of the eastern sector had so far relied, had mostly deserted, and Können-Horák himself was seriously ill.

Course of the battle

First fighting (6–7 July)

On 6 July, on the eastern wing, four French columns attacked Austrian outposts on the Cafa Gjarperit pass and Mali Kercir mountain, while the Italian group of General Treboldi, made up of battalions of the Guardia di Finanza and Albanian units, struck in the area of the Tomorr massif. After a day of fierce fighting, in which the outposts changed hands several times, the defenders held their positions. On the night of 6/7 July the main forces of the Italian 38th Division moved into their starting positions on the lower Vjosë, and the Verona Brigade crossed to the bridgehead at Feras.

At dawn on 7 July, supported by the guns of the Vlorë entrenched camp, Italian warships and two British monitors, the Verona Brigade attacked the hills between Pojani and Levani and, after stubborn resistance, took them early in the morning. Italian cavalry dashed across the coastal plain, seized the airfield near Fier and burst into the town. The Austrians drove it out after a short street fight, but rumours that Fier, the bridges over the Seman and the brigade headquarters were in enemy hands caused panic. Neighbouring units, which had hardly fought themselves, began to fall back, cut off from the only line of retreat through Fier, and had to destroy 13 guns. The Savona Brigade and the 10th Bersaglieri Regiment crossed the Vjosë almost without a fight and took up position on the southern slopes of the Malakastër. Only on the road to Berat, where the Austrians had long expected the main blow, did the Tanaro Brigade meet strong resistance.

Capture of Fier and Berat (8–13 July)

On the evening of 7 July the XIX Corps command decided to pull back the whole front to shorten the line and shift troops to the threatened western wing. With the forces deployed in a cordon, the retreat quickly got out of control. Colonel Veith, who took part in the fighting, wrote that groups of 200–300 men, several kilometres apart and without communication, were falling back through the tangle of Albanian hills, and every soldier was losing faith that resistance was still possible. On 8 July, according to Italian accounts, the last Austrian positions on the Malakastër fell. On 9 July the Verona Brigade occupied Fier, and the Tanaro Brigade entered Berat without a fight. The British chronology of the war records the capture of Berat under 10 July. By the evening of 10 July the Austrians had withdrawn to a new line some ten to fifteen kilometres to the north, and the Italians had lost contact with them.

In the east the French advanced more slowly. On 8 July they seized the upper course of the Tomorrica and the Bofnia hills, but near Komjani they suffered such losses that General de Lobit halted the attack. When the Austrians began to withdraw, the French followed them and on 13 July, according to Villari, took the small town of Gramsh (PL) on the Devoll, an important enemy supply base. On 12 July the Tanaro Brigade attacked north of Berat and pushed the defenders back another few kilometres. Ferrero, however, did not exploit the easy route along the coast, which the Austrians feared most, and directed his main effort into the mountains, towards Elbasan.

According to Falls, the Allies pushed the front forward along some 60 miles (nearly 100 km) by an average of at least 10 miles (about 16 km). The Italians took more than 2,000 prisoners, 26 guns and six aircraft, the French about 700 prisoners.

Change of commander and the halt of the attack (14–22 July)

On 10 July Emperor Charles I appointed Colonel General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin, who in 1916 had commanded the Seventh Army in Bukovina, as commander of the forces in Albania. Pflanzer-Baltin sailed by torpedo boat to Kotor and on 13 July reached headquarters in Tirana. He summoned the divisional and brigade commanders by aircraft, and the news that the army would go forward again, according to Veith, spread along the front like lightning. He forbade stretching the troops out in a cordon and ordered a defence in depth, with strong reserves ready for an immediate counter-attack. Since the soldiers were exhausted and food was short, he decided to wait before launching a counter-offensive.

The Allies, meanwhile, were reaching the end of their strength. Supplies could not be brought up along the narrow mountain paths, and in the coastal marshes, where the soldiers had to sleep in the open, malaria raged. Villari states that in one cavalry regiment only 70 men were not on the sick list. The Italians and French argued over whether to go further north, onto the Mali Siloves range above the bend of the Devoll. Ferrero declared that he could not advance to the Shkumbin because his superiors had refused him reinforcements. On 19 July, on news that German-Bulgarian forces were being shifted westwards, Franchet d’Espèrey ordered the advance halted and suitable defensive positions taken up. An attack prepared earlier by Treboldi’s group and the French on both sides of the Devoll nevertheless went ahead on 20 July and by 21 July had taken several hills, including the key position on Mali Siloves. This was the Allies’ last success. From 21 July the Austrians counter-attacked, and on 24 July they went over to a counter-offensive on the Seman.

Losses

There are no precise figures for losses. The Austrian official history states that XIX Corps lost about 6,000 men in July, of whom only 1,500 were killed and wounded, the rest being prisoners and malaria cases. The Italian XVI Corps, according to the same source, lost a third of its combat strength, and the French too suffered considerable losses. Italian accounts stress that the fighting of 7–9 July itself cost them little, and that the heaviest losses were caused by disease: malaria and Spanish flu.

Significance

The offensive restored the prestige of the Italian army, badly damaged in Albania after the defeat at Caporetto, and pushed the Austrians back from Vlorë. Coming after Austria-Hungary’s recent defeat on the Piave, it was a further sign that the imperial and royal army was weakening. The gains, however, proved short-lived. Pflanzer-Baltin, having gathered reinforcements, struck at Kuçi on the Seman on 24 July and cut the only good road from Vlorë through Fier to Berat. At the end of July the Italians began to fall back, and after a pause in the fighting, on 22 August, the Austrians launched a general attack. Ferrero, according to Falls probably on the orders of the Comando Supremo, abandoned almost all his gains and withdrew to the hills north of the Vjosë. The Austrians retook Fier and Berat on 25 August (the chronology records Berat under 26 August). This was the last significant success of the Austro-Hungarian army in the field.

The affair caused unease among the Allies. The British feared for Vlorë, without which the barrage in the Strait of Otranto could not have been maintained, and the government in Rome replied coolly that the offensive had been carried out by Ferrero on his own initiative and further than the Comando Supremo had wanted. The Italians held on in the Malakastër until September. When the great offensive in Macedonia took Bulgaria out of the war, the Austrians had to leave Albania, and the Italians, after beginning their pursuit on 1 October, re-entered Berat on 3 October.