French retake Monte Tomba

On the afternoon of 30 December 1917 General Dillemann’s French 47th Division, made up of battalions of alpine light infantry (chasseurs alpins), attacked the Monte Tomba ridge in the eastern part of the Grappa massif, above the Piave. After a five-hour artillery bombardment the chasseurs broke into the positions of the Austro-Hungarian 50th Division and took the ridge. According to the British official history (Edmonds) they took 1,564 prisoners, and the Austrians left more than 500 dead on the battlefield. The French lost only 249 killed and wounded. It was the first attack by French troops on the Italian front.

Monte Tomba, a ridge above the Piave gorge near Pederobba, was one of the pillars of the Italian defence in the First Battle of the Piave. On 22 November the German Alpenkorps took its crest, but the Italians held on to its southern slopes. At the beginning of December the French XXXI Corps, with the 47th, 64th and 65th Divisions, part of the forces of General Marie Émile Fayolle, took over from the Italians the sector on the slopes of Monte Tomba and further along the Piave, next to the British on the Montello hill. On 17 December the Alpenkorps on the ridge was replaced by the Austro-Hungarian 50th Division, which still belonged to the German Fourteenth Army of General Otto von Below. When the fighting on the Grappa and the Asiago plateau had died down, the French decided to take the ridge back from the enemy.

According to the Austrian official history (Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg), on 27 and 28 December strong French reconnaissance detachments tried to climb onto the ridge but were repulsed. On 29 December the French artillery shelled the positions of the 50th Division all day, and on 30 December the fire became a hurricane bombardment. At about 4 p.m. (Edmonds gives 4.05 p.m.) the French infantry, supported by an air squadron, went into the attack in a deeply echeloned formation and after see-saw fighting broke through the defenders’ line. Until late in the evening Below received no reliable news from the 50th Division. He ordered the situation to be restored by a counter-attack if it was only a local enemy penetration, but to give it up if the greater part of the position had been lost. The next day it turned out that the division had been shattered. According to Austrian figures it lost 500 killed, 1,000 wounded and 1,600 missing. Below did not commit the German units that had already been made ready, and on 31 December ordered the Monte Tomba ridge abandoned and a new line of defence set up closer to the Piave valley, near Quero. The French did not advance further.

The success was widely acclaimed. The French presented the attack as a model of modern assault and claimed that the enemy in Italy was much weaker than the one they had fought in France. The Italian General Caracciolo later replied that the 47th Division owed its victory above all to an enormous mass of artillery, about 450 guns. The commander of the British forces in Italy, General Herbert Plumer, wrote in mid-January 1918 that the recapture of Monte Tomba had heartened the Italian commanders, because it showed how a well-prepared attack could succeed at relatively low cost. At the beginning of 1918 the 47th Division, many of whose men had been killed less than three weeks earlier in the Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne railway disaster, marched in a victory parade.