End of the Second Battle of the Piave

On 24 June 1918 the whole right bank of the Piave was once again in Italian hands. Nine days earlier the Austro-Hungarian army had crossed the river from the Montello hill to the sea, but had been unable to advance further. On the night of 22/23 June most of its troops withdrew to the left bank, and the last rearguards near the river mouth crossed on the night of 23/24 June. The British chronology of the war and Italian studies close the battle on 24 June, while some sources, including the Polish and German Wikipedia, close it on 22 or 23 June, counting to the withdrawal from the Montello.

The decision had been taken a few days earlier. From 17 June downpours in the mountains turned the Piave into a raging torrent, which, together with Italian and British airmen, swept away most of the Austrian bridges. The troops in the bridgeheads received too little ammunition and food. On 19 June Field Marshal Svetozar Boroević proposed a withdrawal to Emperor Karl I, but the latter hesitated for another day, because Field Marshal Conrad wanted to fight on. Only on the evening of 20 June did the Chief of the General Staff, Arthur Arz von Straußenburg, order the troops to withdraw across the river. On the night of 21/22 June the artillery, transport and wounded left. The following night the infantry with machine guns came down from the Montello so quietly that the first Italian patrols appeared on the bank only on the morning of 23 June. Further downstream, XXIII Corps, which held the bridgehead at San Donà, fell back in two stages. On the afternoon of 23 June the Italians, believing that it meant to hold the bridgehead, attacked its rearguards and inflicted heavy losses on them before they crossed the river during the night. Many soldiers drowned in the swollen Piave.

The Italians hardly interfered with the withdrawal. On 19 and 20 June the Eighth Army attacked the Montello in vain, and General Armando Diaz judged that his tired troops had no chance in a counter-offensive, while the enemy would have to withdraw anyway, so there was no reason to shed more blood. When on 23 June it turned out that the Austrians had gone, the Comando Supremo took this as the beginning of their collapse and ordered the armies in the mountains to exploit the opportunity. On the morning of 24 June, after a night bombardment, three corps of the Fourth Army attacked in the Monte Grappa massif, but the attack failed completely and the Italians returned to the defensive. After the Austrian withdrawal King Victor Emmanuel III visited the ruined Nervesa at the foot of the Montello. On the slopes of the hill, on 23 June, the wreckage of an aircraft and the body of Major Francesco Baracca, the best Italian fighter ace, who had been killed there on 19 June, were found.

The balance was disastrous for the monarchy. According to the Austrian official history, the armies on the Italian front lost about 118,000 killed, wounded and missing in the June fighting, and about 24,500 sick. The Italians and their allies lost, according to various estimates, about 85,000–90,000 men, a large proportion of them prisoners. For this price the Austrians gained nothing: on the Piave the front returned to the line of 15 June, and the army, exhausted and hungry, was no longer capable of any offensive. For the Italians, eight months after Caporetto, it was a victory that restored their faith in their own strength. In July the Emperor removed Conrad from his command, and in the monarchy people began to speak openly of defeat.