Start of the Ninth Battle of the Isonzo

On 31 October 1916 at 8 a.m. the Italian artillery and trench mortars opened full fire on the Austro-Hungarian positions on the Karst plateau and on the hills east of Gorizia. So began the Ninth Battle of the Isonzo, the third offensive on the Karst in seven weeks by General Luigi Cadorna. Italian aircraft bombed Sežana, Dutovlje and Miramare Castle near Trieste. In the afternoon the Italian infantry tried in many places to approach the trenches, but was everywhere repulsed. The Austrians reported a major attack that day, but Italian sources place it on 1 November. The bombardment continued throughout the night.

The attack had been due to begin a week earlier. On 16 October, a few days after the end of the Eighth Battle, Cadorna ordered the Second and Third Armies to be ready to attack from 24 October, the day of the start to be decided by the Duke of Aosta, Emanuele Filiberto, commander of the Third Army, depending on the weather. The objective had not changed: to break through the northern part of the Karst towards the heights of Fajti hrib and Trstelj, and then towards the Hermada, the last great obstacle before Trieste. On 24 October, however, the weather broke. Several times in the last ten days of October the Italian artillery began its preparation, but each time rain and fog interrupted it. On 30 October the sky cleared.

The Austrians knew what awaited them and waited for it anxiously. Their positions on the northern part of the Karst, pushed back beyond the Vallone valley in the Eighth Battle, were only a line of stone walls and chevaux-de-frise on the slopes of the Veliki Hribach and Pečinka heights, in full view of the Italian positions. The soldiers were kept on constant alert in downpours from which the makeshift shelters gave no protection, and by the Vertojbica stream water flooded the trenches. From 24 to 28 October the Fifth Army lost almost 500 killed and more than 2,300 wounded. General Svetozar Boroević had reported as early as 16 October that his army was in crisis, having lost about 100,000 men in battle since mid-August. Reinforcements, the 14th Infantry Division from Galicia, were still on their way to the Isonzo.

According to the Austrian official history, the Duke of Aosta had 177 battalions and 24 squadrons of dismounted cavalry, and on the narrow, eight-and-a-half-kilometre sector of the main attack he deployed eight divisions. All the guns and mortars that the fronts in the Tyrol and Carinthia could spare were brought to the Third Army. Prisoners consistently testified that this time there would be no bombardment lasting many days, and that the infantry would go in after a short barrage. And so it happened: before noon on 1 November the Italian infantry attacked along the whole front and in the first assault broke through the Austrian defences on the Karst.