Italian counter-offensive in the Trentino

On 16 June 1916 the Italian First Army began a counter-offensive against the Austro-Hungarian forces which since mid-May had been advancing from the Tyrol across the plateaux of Folgaria, Tonezza and Asiago. This date is given alike by the British chronology of the war, the memoirs of General Luigi Cadorna and the Austrian official history. The Italian war bulletin had announced the start of the attack as early as 11 June, the day after the government lost a vote in the Chamber, but at that time there were only local counter-attacks on the plateaux, for example at Pasubio (PL), where the Italian 44th Division attacked on 9–11 June.

Cadorna’s plan

Cadorna began to prepare a counter-stroke as soon as he became convinced that the Austrians would not descend to the plain. On 2 June he instructed General Guglielmo Pecori Giraldi’s First Army to seize the initiative. At its disposal was the new Fifth Army, assembled on the plain near Vicenza, which became a reservoir of fresh divisions. First the front on the Asiago plateau had to be consolidated, then both flanks of the Austro-Hungarian wedge were to be struck: from the north, across the ridges above the Valsugana valley towards the Portule pass, and from the west, from Pasubio towards Col Santo. An attack on the flanks was expected to bring quicker and fuller success than a frontal blow on a narrow sector, and at the same time to draw the enemy away from the Italian centre. The terrain hampered the preparations. As Cadorna wrote, some 450,000 litres of water a day had to be brought up to the plateau by lorry and on mule-back. The first attack, set for 12 June, was postponed by the army command to 16 June to complete the regrouping of the artillery.

The first day

On the morning of 16 June the Italian XX Corps, reinforced by a third division, attacked on the northern edge of the plateau, from the ridge of the old frontier to the Meletta massif. According to the Austrian official history, the Italians here broke through the thinly held line of the 2nd Mountain Brigade, stretched out in dense, rocky forest. They surrounded and destroyed a company on the heights of Castelloni di San Marco and captured four mountain guns, whose crews defended themselves with rifles to the end. The command of the Austro-Hungarian III Corps threw the 12th Infantry Brigade into a counter-attack, which over the following days recovered part of the lost ground. Cadorna judges this fighting differently: according to him, between 16 and 20 June the Italians took the Austrian positions from Monte Magari to Cima Isidoro on the northern rim of the plateau, though they did not reach their objective, the Cima di Portule–Monte Meata line.

At the same time, on the southern edge of the plateau, the Austrians were still trying to break through. On 16 June the infantry of the Austro-Hungarian 43rd Rifle Division took the summit of Monte Lemerle, but powerful Italian counter-attacks at once fell upon it. One of its regiments lost 700 men in a short time, and the fighting for the mountain went on for several more days. At the headquarters of Archduke Eugen’s Army Group in Bolzano further attacks were being planned. But at half past six in the evening an order arrived from the high command in Teschen: the Army Group was to give up two more divisions to the Eastern Front and go over to the defensive. After the defeats inflicted by the Brusilov offensive, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf could no longer conduct two great operations at once.

What came next

From 17 June the Austrians prepared to retreat to a shorter line chosen in advance. The Italian attacks, meanwhile, broke up into separate assaults by brigades and even battalions. On 21 June Cadorna, who had learned that the enemy was sending troops east, offered the First Army the last four divisions of the Fifth Army, with the proviso that they must not be squandered in an exhausting and fruitless attack. On the night of 24–25 June the Austrians slipped away unnoticed from Asiago and Arsiero, and the Italians, who followed them cautiously, came to a halt in front of the enemy’s new positions. The counter-offensive continued intermittently until July. According to estimates cited in Italian literature, it recovered between a quarter and a third of the lost ground at the cost of tens of thousands killed, wounded and missing.