Start of the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo

At 6.30 a.m. on 9 October 1916 the whole Austro-Hungarian front on the Karst plateau, from the Vipava valley to the sea, came under a hurricane of fire from Italian guns and trench mortars. In the afternoon strong detachments of Italian infantry tried at many points to approach the trenches, but the thinned garrisons repulsed them everywhere. The command of the Austro-Hungarian 5th Army at Postojna concluded that the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo had begun. That is how the Austrian official history dates its start, and the British chronology of the war follows it. Italian and English-language accounts count the battle only from 10 October, because the actual assault began that afternoon. General Luigi Cadorna wrote that on 9 October and the morning of the following day his artillery was still preparing the attack.

It was a continuation of the Seventh Battle, broken off on 17 September after the capture of only a few trenches. Cadorna at once ordered the next blow to be prepared and did not change its objectives: the Italian 3rd Army of the Duke of Aosta, Emanuele Filiberto, was to break through along the ridge on the northern edge of the Karst towards the heights of Fajti hrib and Trstelj, which opened the road to Trieste. This time the VIII Corps of the 2nd Army, east of Gorizia, was also to join the attack. According to the Austrian official history, the Italians prepared 221 battalions, and on the four-kilometre sector of the XI Corps’ main thrust they packed 66 battalions. General Svetozar Boroević had about a hundred battalions facing them and far fewer guns.

This time the Italians gave up surprise altogether. Their artillery had been registering since 30 September, from 3 October it fired ever more heavily, and by 5 October the artillery battle was in full swing. Day and night heavy shells and mortar bombs smashed the Austrian trenches, communication routes and villages far behind the front. After the September battle the positions on the Karst were in a deplorable state: between Nova Vas and the Vipava the soldiers lay behind sandbags and low stone walls, without dugouts or continuous wire. Colonel Brosch, sent to the front by the Austrian high command, wrote on 7 October that the defenders were “really covering the lines only with their own bodies”. In the first five days of October the defenders of the Karst lost 700 killed and 3,000 wounded, although the Italian infantry had not yet moved.

On 6 October rain and fog forced the Italians to postpone the assault, but on 7 October the fire returned with new force. Probing attacks on Hill 208 that day and on the ruins of Nova Vas on 8 October showed them that the defence was not yet broken. On 9 October, therefore, the artillery fired all day, and the infantry merely tested whether the enemy was still holding. Meanwhile the Austrians waited in vain for reinforcements. At the turn of September and October three mountain brigades had left the Isonzo for the fighting against the Romanians in Transylvania, and the 10th Infantry Division, which was to replace them, was only just arriving from the Tyrol. Only nine battalions remained in the army’s reserve.

On the afternoon of 10 October the Italian infantry launched a great assault along the whole front from the hills near Gorizia to the sea. In three days of fighting it took the ruins of Nova Vas and pushed the Austrians back by just under one and a half kilometres, but did not break the front.