Italians take Gorizia

On 9 August 1916 Italian troops entered Gorizia, a city on the Isonzo for which they had fought five bloody and fruitless battles since June 1915. The Austro-Hungarian defenders had abandoned it during the night, withdrawing to the hills east of the city. Gorizia was the first large city of Austria-Hungary to be taken by the Italians. In Italy the news of its capture caused a genuine outburst of joy.

Fall of the bridgehead

The road to the city had opened three days earlier. On 6 August the Italians took Monte Sabotino and the summits of Monte San Michele, the two pillars of the Austro-Hungarian defence of Gorizia, and during the following day they stormed the remains of the bridgehead on the western bank of the Isonzo. It was defended by the remnants of the 58th Division of General Erwin Zeidler, who had run out of reserves and artillery ammunition. At 1.30 a.m. on 8 August Zeidler ordered the bridgehead to be abandoned. According to the Austrian official history, little more than 5,000 soldiers crossed to the eastern bank out of the roughly 18,000 who had defended the bridgehead two days earlier. Sappers blew up the bridges, but the road bridge at Lucinico was only partly damaged and could still be crossed.

The commander of the Fifth Army, General Svetozar Boroević, ordered the eastern bank of the river to be held at all costs, also for political reasons: he did not want to give the Italians a city that meant a great deal to them. In August, however, the Isonzo south of Gorizia was shallow and fordable, and the exhausted soldiers held the bank with only a thin chain of posts. Before noon on 8 August a patrol of a few men of the 28th Infantry Regiment of the Pavia Brigade, under the nineteen-year-old Second Lieutenant Aurelio Baruzzi, crossed the river at Lucinico, reached the railway station in Gorizia and hoisted the Italian flag on it. Baruzzi received the Gold Medal of Military Valour for this. Following him, further units of the 12th Division crossed the river and formed a small bridgehead on the eastern bank, and in the afternoon the Italians were also crossing further south, at Sant’Andrea.

The Austrian withdrawal

On the evening of 8 August it became clear that the exhausted defenders would not hold the bank for more than a few hours. Boroević agreed to the withdrawal of the 58th Division to the second position, prepared a few kilometres east of the city, from Monte San Gabriele across the hills above Gorizia to the valley of the Vipava. At 11 p.m. the order to retreat came. During the night of 8–9 August the units left the city in good order, and the last to leave the western bank was the battalion that had defended the railway bridge at Solkan. The sappers then blew up the bridge’s great stone arch, the pride of Austrian engineering. According to the Austrian official history, in the last days about 3,000 civilians and nearly 100 wagons of food and fodder were taken out of Gorizia under fire. That same evening Boroević also decided to abandon Monte San Michele and the Doberdò plateau, whose defence had become pointless after the fall of the bridgehead.

The Italians march in

On the morning of 9 August there were no longer any Austro-Hungarian soldiers in Gorizia. The Italians did not notice this at once. All day they crossed the river on pontoon bridges and footbridges, expecting fierce resistance. Already during the night of 8–9 August two battalions of cyclist Bersaglieri and a hastily assembled cavalry detachment had crossed the river to pursue the retreating enemy, but only a few kilometres beyond the Isonzo they ran into Austrian outposts. According to Italian sources, the first formed unit to occupy the suburbs was the 11th Infantry Regiment of the Casale Brigade, at about half past two in the afternoon. A cavalry brigade then rode into the city centre, and the Taranto and Avellino brigades passed through Gorizia to its eastern suburbs, where they were stopped by fire from the new Austrian line. Before the war Gorizia had about 30,000 inhabitants. According to Italian accounts only about 3,000 civilians remained.

On 10 August the commander of the Third Army, the Duke of Aosta, Emanuele Filiberto, made a ceremonial entry into the city and appointed an Italian commissioner of Gorizia. On the same day King Victor Emmanuel III, in a proclamation to the soldiers, thanked them that thanks to them the joyful fatherland was receiving Gorizia into its bosom. The press and public opinion celebrated the first great Italian victory of the war, which seemed to wash away the spring humiliation in the Tyrol. Ferdinando Martini, a deputy and until recently Minister of the Colonies, noted in his diary on 10 August that all Italy was celebrating, but warned that no one should regard the capture of Gorizia as an almost final success after which peace was near.

Victory without a breakthrough

Martini was right. Gorizia lies in a basin surrounded by hills, and as long as the Austrians held them, the city remained under their fire. Cadorna later wrote that the victory at Gorizia was above all a moral one and of little military value until the Italians took the hills dominating the city from the east. In his view they would have fallen on 9 August if the commanders had attacked them as quickly as he had ordered. The Austrian official history also considered that the Italians missed their chance then, because the defenders, exhausted by three days of fighting, had only a few battalions of reserves behind them. When the Italians attacked the new line the next day, the Austrians had already had time to settle into it, and reinforcements were beginning to arrive from the Tyrol and from the Eastern Front.