Fall of Gorizia and Udine

On 28 October 1917, four days after the breakthrough at Caporetto, the Italian army lost two towns that were symbols of its war. Shortly after midnight Austro-Hungarian soldiers entered Gorizia, taken by the Italians with enormous effort in August 1916, and before noon German infantry marched into Udine, where the Italian headquarters had been located since the first weeks of the war. The whole Italian front from the Carnic Alps to the Adriatic was in retreat, and the roads to the bridges over the Tagliamento were filled with columns of troops, trains and refugees.

Gorizia

General Luigi Cadorna issued the order to retreat behind the Tagliamento at 2.30 a.m. on 27 October, when German and Austro-Hungarian troops had come out of the mountains into the rear of the Italian Second Army. It also applied to the Duke of Aosta’s Third Army, which still stood intact on the Karst plateau and at Gorizia. On the evening of 27 October the Italian VIII Corps began to leave the town and withdraw behind the Isonzo. General Erwin Zeidler’s Austro-Hungarian 58th Division, which had defended Gorizia for two years and since August 1916 had held positions on the hills east of it, at once set off after them. According to the Austrian official history the Croatian 96th Infantry Regiment entered the town after fighting shortly after midnight and planted the imperial flag on the ruined castle.

On 28 October Zeidler’s soldiers cleared Gorizia in street fighting, and then, going round it to the north, took the Podgora hill on the west bank of the Isonzo, over which so much blood had been shed in the earlier battles of the Isonzo. The fighting lasted until dawn the next day and brought the division more than 2,000 prisoners. In the south the Italian Third Army had crossed the Isonzo before 10.30 a.m., and in the morning Hungarian Honvéd troops occupied the railway station at Monfalcone. The prize for which the Italians had paid tens of thousands of dead and wounded in the Sixth Battle of the Isonzo and in the battles that followed was lost in a single night.

Udine

Since 1915 Udine had been the seat of the Italian Supreme Command and the place from which Cadorna directed the war. On the afternoon of 27 October the general left with his operations department for Treviso, and the rest of the headquarters for Padua. On the night of 27/28 October, in a downpour and thunderstorm, two divisions of General Albrecht von Berrer’s German group marched almost without a break towards the town. At dawn the advanced guard of the 200th Division forded the swollen river Torre, broke through the front of the Italian VII Corps and, after beating off a cavalry charge, reached the northern edge of Udine at about 10 a.m. According to the Austrian official history most of the inhabitants had already fled, and Italian soldiers and local riff-raff were looting the abandoned houses and shops. The leading German battalion entered the town and found itself in a difficult position amid a crowd of Italian soldiers, some of them already prisoners, while units of the Italian XXVII Corps tried to drive it out from the south and east. Only when further German units arrived was the town taken, and in the evening the Württemberg 26th Division also reached it.

The victory cost the Germans a commander. General Berrer, who had driven ahead of his own troops by car in the morning, was killed by the bullets of Italian soldiers near Udine. Command of his group passed to the commander of the 26th Division, General Eberhard von Hofacker. The day before the Germans had taken burning Cividale.

The retreat

The breakthrough at Udine split the Italian Second Army in two. Its left wing was falling back north-west towards the bridges at Cornino and Pinzano, while the three corps of the right wing still stood east of the town, covering the retreat of the Third Army. The road from Udine to the bridges at Codroipo was almost without cover, and along it moved trains, batteries and countless carts of refugees with their belongings. During the night a jam formed on the road which, according to the Austrian official history, was about 20 kilometres long. The Tagliamento, swollen by the rains, swept away or damaged several field bridges. That day Cadorna’s war bulletin was also published, in which he accused units of the Second Army of having “retreated in cowardly fashion without fighting or ignominiously surrendered to the enemy”. The government softened its opening in the version for the Italian press, but the version for abroad went out to the world unchanged.

The defeat found Italy without a government. On 25 October Paolo Boselli’s cabinet had lost a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies, and a new government was still being formed. At the headquarters in Baden and Maribor, by contrast, the mood was excellent. Emperor Charles I toured the commands on the Isonzo on 28 and 29 October, and the staffs began to think about a pursuit beyond the Tagliamento. Over the following days the Central Powers’ troops pursued the Italians across the Friulian plain, taking tens of thousands of prisoners, and at the beginning of November the Italian army began to fall back further, to the Piave.