End of the Second Battle of the Isonzo

The British chronology of the war and the Austro-Hungarian official history end the Second Battle of the Isonzo on 10 August 1915. The Italians count it as shorter, from 18 July to 3 August, when the supreme command of General Luigi Cadorna ordered the offensive on the middle and lower Isonzo to be halted. The order did not, however, mean immediate quiet. The commander of the Italian Third Army, the Duke of Aosta, ordered a continued advance, only “slowly and methodically”. According to the Austrians, fighting on the Karst plateau therefore smouldered for another week, although it no longer changed the position of either side.

The last clashes on the Karst

The great attacks on Monte San Michele and the Sei Busi hill ended in the last days of July, and an attempt on 2 and 3 August to cut off an Austrian salient between Hills 197 and 118 gained the Italians nothing, although the defenders lost about 1,500 men in those two days. After that only single battalions fought for single trenches. According to the history of the Sassari Brigade, made up almost entirely of Sardinians, on 4 August one of its battalions took with the bayonet an elaborate Austrian trench in the Bosco Cappuccio wood, on the slopes of the Karst near San Martino del Carso. Austrian counter-attacks on 7 and 9 August did not take the gain back from the Italians. For the fighting in these woods the brigade was cited in a bulletin of the Italian supreme command. Shelling also continued throughout. The Austrian official history observes that from then on the Italian artillery on the Isonzo never again fell silent.

The defenders’ balance sheet

General Svetozar Boroević had held the front, but his Fifth Army had been bled white. According to the Austrian official history, from 15 July to 15 August it lost 46,640 men: 7,721 killed, 26,629 wounded and 12,290 missing, among whom were also prisoners and fallen whose bodies could not be recovered. In addition there were about 6,400 sick. Battalions came back from the “hell of Doberdò”, as the plateau beyond the village of Doberdò was called, as handfuls of men. The Italians gave their losses up to 3 August as 41,866 men, and Austrian historians estimated that by mid-August they equalled the defenders’ losses.

The command of the Fifth Army used the lull in the fighting to put its forces in order. Four regiments of Tyrolean Kaiserjäger were combined into the 8th Infantry Division, which Boroević kept as his reserve. He also positioned his reserves so that they could quickly support both the Gorizia bridgehead and San Michele, because airmen reported Italian trains moving towards Monfalcone. As early as 10 August work began on a new supply line. A standard-gauge railway was laid from the station at Dutovlje across the whole Komen plateau to Kostanjevica, on which petrol-electric railcars with trailers ran. The first section was opened on 5 September, the whole line on 25 September. For the next two years it was the main route by which the defenders of the Karst were supplied.

Before the next assault

The most difficult problem remained unsolved. On the Karst the defenders sheltered behind walls of piled stones, which under heavy artillery fire shattered into lethal splinters. The front’s chief of staff, General Alfred Krauss, had already demanded at the end of July that proper trenches be blasted into the rock. After long consultations, which, as the Austrian official history admits, were not without friction, between the army command in Ljubljana and the front command in Maribor, work began on strengthening the first line, above all on the Karst. Cadorna, meanwhile, needed time to bring his divisions up to strength and to accumulate ammunition and new heavy artillery. Until the end of the summer the Italians made no further great attack on the middle and lower Isonzo. The Third Battle of the Isonzo began on 18 October 1915.