Italians take Monfalcone

On 9 June 1915 troops of the Italian Third Army took Monfalcone, an Austrian industrial town on the Gulf of Trieste, not far from the mouth of the Isonzo. It was the last easy success of the Italians on this sector of the front since they crossed the frontier on 24 May. The Austrians did not defend the town. They withdrew to the hills rising just behind it, on the edge of the Karst plateau, from where their guns shelled the streets for the following months.

Monfalcone belonged to the Austrian County of Gorizia and Gradisca and was inhabited mainly by an Italian-speaking population. Since 1908 it had been home to the Cantiere Navale Triestino shipyard, which built steamers for Trieste shipowners, and to industrial works beside it. The railway line from Trieste to Italy ran through the town. For Cadorna, Monfalcone was the gateway to Trieste, less than 30 kilometres away along the coast.

Below the edge of the Karst

At the end of May units of the Duke of Aosta’s Third Army reached the lower Isonzo, but the railway bridge at Pieris had been destroyed and the other crossings were in enemy hands. At the beginning of June the VII Corps seized a bridgehead at Pieris on the left bank of the river. The Austrians hampered its further advance in an ingenious way. They breached the banks of the de Dottori canal, which carried water from the Isonzo at Sagrado to Monfalcone, and flooded the plain at the foot of the Karst. The strip of land between Vermegliano and Monfalcone turned into a bog, through which the infantry had to advance under fire from positions higher up.

On 7 June the Italian Supreme Command ordered the attack on the edge of the plateau to be speeded up. On 8 June the 13th and 14th Divisions of the VII Corps tried to widen the bridgehead towards Selz, Monfalcone and the Sei Busi hill, but were stopped. The same night the Pisa Brigade of the 21st Division crossed the Isonzo on a makeshift footbridge at Sagrado, but the next day an Austrian counter-attack pushed it back to the river.

9 June

On the morning of 9 June the 13th Division attacked again. The Granatieri di Sardegna Brigade went round the flooded fields from the east and took Hill 61 above the Selz quarries and the San Polo heights. The Messina Brigade passed Staranzano and entered Monfalcone from the south, heading for the Rocca hill with its medieval castle, which dominates the town. The two brigades met on the Rocca. Accounts differ as to the time: according to some studies this happened as early as eight in the morning, according to others at about midday. Local historians write that on the San Polo hills some of the grenadiers were killed by the fire of their own artillery. Further north the Acqui Brigade of the 14th Division tried to take the Sant’Elia hill in front of Redipuglia, but because of the flooded ground it had to withdraw in the evening.

Most of the inhabitants of Monfalcone had left or had been evacuated earlier by the Austrians. Many of them ended up in refugee camps in the interior of the monarchy, among others at Wagna in Styria. Those who stayed hung white sheets from their balconies as a sign that there were no soldiers in the house. The Austrians withdrew to the line of Hills 121 and 85 and Cosich and Debeli just behind the town, which for more than a year was to be their main position on this sector. The Supreme Command had forbidden becoming involved in fierce fighting with a stubbornly defending enemy, so in the afternoon the troops halted and dug in on the positions they had taken.

A town on the front line

The capture of Monfalcone, however, changed little. The Third Army now stood along the whole length of the lower Isonzo, but it had not taken the edge of the Karst. On 11 June Cadorna ordered the resistance to be broken by “an appropriate concentration of forces and means, especially technical ones”, and began to assemble artillery for a larger attack. It began on 23 June as the first of the battles of the Isonzo.

Monfalcone became a front-line town. The Austrian artillery shelled it regularly, destroying houses and the shipyard, and in July it brought down the bell tower from which the Italians observed the enemy’s positions. In August an Austrian armoured train came down from the Karst at night to the station and shelled the town at close range. The Austrians were pushed back from Monfalcone only in August 1916, after the Italians captured Gorizia, and at the end of October 1917, after the defeat at Caporetto, they returned to the town for a year.