Page - 402 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

402 The Third Front presence and intermittent dominance in the Adriatic and to all appearances also in the Mediterranean. By 1918, 56 German submarines were sailing under Austrian colours.951 However, even the original Imperial and Royal submarines were successful. On 18 July 1915, the U 4 sank the Italian cruiser Garibaldi, and on 28 July, the U 5 sank the Italian submarine Nereide. There were also losses, though. The U 12, under the command of Ship-of-the-Line Lieutenant Egon Lerch, who had torpedoed the Jean Bart, was sunk by an Italian mine and the French succeeded in sinking the U 3 near Brindisi. Three submarines built in Bremen had to compensate for the losses.952 And Austria-Hunga- ry’s own construction programme was stepped up. Here, Hungary successfully requested that more Hungarian boatyards be used for the fleet construction programme. In the interim, the land war had also intensified. Falkenhayn was correct in his pre- diction that the Italians would only proceed slowly in the main direction of attack in the land war, and Conrad was forced to admit that while his pessimistic view had made it possible to scratch together any last remnants that could still be offered, his prognosis had been far too gloomy. In contrast to the ‘Russian terror’, as Cramon, the German liaison officer at the Army High Command had described it, there had been no ‘Italian terror’.953 However, there was no avoiding the fact that the army that was now to face Italy was not the same as it had been in 1914. All four ‘Kaiserjäger’ Imperial Tyrolean rifle regiments, the Carinthian ‘Khevenhüller’ (IR 7), the Salzburg ‘Rainer’ (IR 59) and other Alpine regiments, had been deployed in Galicia and suffered heavy losses. The troops were no longer what they had been. Even the replacement soldiers had become used to the war, knew about the effects of the weapons and learned to use all technical auxiliary equipment. However, numerically, they were far inferior and they lacked ar- tillery, particularly heavy guns. For this reason, it would soon become evident how far the Italians would be able to exploit the weaknesses of the Imperial and Royal troops to their advantage. The Italians procrastinated heavily in their attack on the Tyrolean mountain front. In the individual departments, the front soon became bogged down as a positional war  – and this at heights of around 2,000 to 3,000 metres and more. A style of warfare that was at least to some degree systematic could only be observed at all in the area around the barrier forts, on the plateau of Folgaria, where the Italian infantry attacked after a week of preparatory fire. In some sections, the Italians were able to gain a small amount of territory and occupy the villages that had been evacuated by the Austrians, since they had withdrawn to positions that could be better defended. However, then the Italian troops came to a standstill in all sections, and along the entire mountain war front a war began for the peaks, the ‘war of the mountain guides’ that would continue until 1916, and in some cases, until 1918, in which the aim was to gain height over the other side and with audacious Alpine methods, with tremendous losses, and yet limited operations, to shoot out or blow up enemy positions from the mountain.