Page - 778 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

778 The Pyrrhic Victory : The Breakthrough Battle of Flitsch-Tolmein to him when the Chief of the Imperial Military Chancellery told him that the Italians would certainly conclude from this that Austria-Hungary was already preparing for a major new offensive. However, the Italians were not fooled for very long. Between 10 May and 4 June, they waged the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo, with the aim of conquering Trieste. However, they only succeeded in occupying a mountain ridge to the east of the Isonzo River. What must have appeared to the Austro-Hungarian troops as a defensive success was for the Entente a reason to direct increasingly harsh criticism towards the Italian war leadership. According to a weekly summary for the British War Cabinet, ‘The Austrians suffer more from a lack of food and drink than from the Italian fire’.1816 The supply of auxiliary weapons in the form of around thirty batteries of heavy French artil- lery were to be withdrawn and brought back to France in light of the Italian ‘inactivity’. The Italians would have to fend for themselves. The Comando Supremo reacted to the lack of success from the thirty months of fighting with increasing harshness. Since the soldiers were no longer willing to allow themselves to be sent unconditionally into the fire, martial law was applied in excess. Insubordination was treated as a war crime. Soldiers were increasingly shot for coward- ice. But even such relatively minor misdemeanours such as smoking a pipe during an inspection were punished by death. There was hardly any leave, and almost no rest. The Commander of the Italian 2nd Army, General Luigi Capello, justified this by saying that the soldiers must be kept continuously at work, since they were too southern in temperament in order to do anything of their own free will.1817 As soon as formations were replenished and the necessary fighting equipment became available again, the next offensive was begun. The Italians had become used to attacking. However, the Austro-Hungarian troops were extremely experienced and tough defenders. In June 1917, the Italian 6th Army attacked northwards towards the plateaus. The Battle of Mount Ortigara began, a struggle with enormous losses for the sake of a bleak mountain ridge in the Austrian-Italian border area. At the Isonzo, Italian losses during the Tenth Battle totalled almost 170,000 men, of which 36,000 were killed. During the Battle of Mount Ortigara, 23,000 men were killed and wounded. The Austro-Hungar- ian losses were significantly lower than those of the Italians, but what did that signify ? At the Isonzo and in the Dolomites, the strategy of ‘bleeding dry’ was no less consist- ently applied as had been the case at Verdun. Even so, the British General Staff was of the opinion that it was above all the fault of the Italian conduct of the war that the page had not already been turned long ago. Instead of carrying out an artillery barrage lasting three or four days and nights, the Italians stopped after just a few hours. They made insufficient use of the situation, it was claimed, and  – this was incomprehensible to the Allies  – they were unable to succeed against the half-starved Imperial and Royal troops. At the same time, before the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo, over 500,000 people