FIGHTING IN THE ALPS—ITALIAN SUCCESSES

Leaving the situation on the Isonzo where it rested at the close of July, 1915, in a condition virtually of stalemate, we return to the still more picturesque struggle in the Alps. While the Italian Third Army in massed assault was making its unsuccessful fight for possession of Gorizia with Trieste as its ultimate objective, warfare was in progress in a hundred places in the Julian, Carnic, Dolomite, Trentino and Tyrolean mountains. Although along this part of the frontier the Italians inflicted no vital harm upon the enemy during the first two months of the war, they were successful in a multitude of minor enterprises, each of which furnishes its stirring tale of hand-to-hand fighting, individual heroism and novel expedients in a country singularly adapted to some of the methods of primeval warfare. Being on the defensive, the Austrians frequently made use of the primitive ambush of mountain tribes. Loose, heavy bowlders were lashed to the edge of a precipice and masked with pine branches. Then when the enemy passed along the mountain path beneath, the wires holding the rocks in place were cut, releasing a deadly avalanche upon the advancing foe.

Any description of the fighting on this Alpine front becomes by necessity a catalogue of apparently isolated operations, for the nature of the ground negatived any great battle in force such as that along the Isonzo River. In the Julian Alps the Italian mountaineers gained a lucky success early in June. General Rohr, the Austrian commander, had set two companies to guard a rampart of rock between Tolmino and Monte Nero. The position was so strong that a few hundred men with Maxims and quick-firers could have held it against an army corps. Its strength, in fact, was so apparent that the Austrians took their duties too lightly. Leaving only a few sentries on watch, both companies enjoyed plenty of sleep at night. But one night the Italian Alpinists climbed silently over the mountain, killed the enemy's sentries with knives before they could make an outcry and coming upon the two companies from the rear captured them with scarcely a struggle.

The peak of Monte Nero, a stump-shaped mountain 7,370 feet high at the headwaters of the Isonzo, proved important to the Italians, for it gave them a fire-control station from which 12-inch shells were dropped into the forts of Tolmino and the southern forts of Tarvis. North of Monte Nero, where the boundary turns to the west, is the important pass of Predil, the gateway to Tarvis, guarded on the southeast by the fortress of Flitsch and on the west by Malborghetto. These two positions were the strongest points in a great ring of fortified heights protecting the pass and the highway and railroad running through an angle of the Julian Alps into the heart of Austria. The forts of Malborghetto projected into Italian territory and its chief works, Fort Hensel, a great white oblong of armored concrete, was visible miles away in the Italian mountains. Against this system of fortifications the Italians brought their heaviest howitzers and demonstrated, as satisfactorily as the Germans had shown months earlier at Liege, that the strongest forts were no match for modern artillery. Fort Hensel and the other permanent forts were shattered and the ground around them was pitted with great craters from explosions of the 12-inch shells.

The final ruin of Fort Hensel was accomplished by a shell which penetrated through the thickest of its steel and concrete layers and exploded in its ammunition magazine. This bombardment of Malborghetto necessitated firing mortar shells at a high angle completely over mountains which hid the target from the Italian gunners. The work of destruction was slow owing to the fact that mists often curtained the mountain tops and forced the gunners to cease operations, because to fire while the observers were unable to watch every shot and telephone the results would have been only a waste of ammunition.

But the Austrians already knew that their forts were no match for 12-inch howitzers, once these great guns could get into position, and they had prepared another method of defense which they put into use as soon as the forts were destroyed. Batteries of Skodas, hidden in a stretch of pasture land below the summit of the mountain, were brought up and placed in pits concealed by tufts of grass and brush from reconnoitering airmen, while at a safe distance dummy guns were displayed to draw the Italians' fire. Thus one of the greatest artillery duels of the whole front continued day after day, neither side being able to see the enemy and relying for information upon observers posted on mountain tops and in aeroplanes. These 12-inch guns were not intended for such work. They had been laboriously hauled to their lofty emplacements five and six thousand feet above sea level to destroy 6-inch batteries, as these 6-inch guns had been brought up to overpower the lighter 3-inch mountain guns, some of which the Italians worked from peaks as high as 10,000 feet. When both sides got these monster howitzers into position the natural sequence was a deadlock. The most the infantry could do was to drive the enemy's troops from summits valuable as observation points in the service of the heavy artillery.

Thus the official reports issued by the Austrian and Italian staff headquarters reiterated the names of peaks hitherto unknown to the traveler and tourist mountaineer, peaks which became of immense importance now, not so much on account of their height as because they commanded the best views of the surrounding territory. One of these was Freikofel. The Alpini captured it early in the war with scarcely a struggle and then for weeks the Austrians sacrificed regiments and even brigades in vain attempts to recover it.

The loss of Freikofel by the Austrians was followed, on June 24, 1915, by the loss of Cresta Verde, and then in the first week of July the Italians captured the important observation peak of Zellenkofel. This mountain was held by the Austrians with a force of only forty men, but in view of its extraordinary position this squad was considered sufficient. The slopes below them were swept by a battery of their mountain guns, in telephonic communication with the more distant howitzer battery upon which it could call for assistance if necessity arose, and a large infantry reserve was stationed in the wooded valley below. But one night twenty-nine Alpini crept up the almost sheer precipice a thousand feet high that separated them from the Austrian defenders. They carried ropes and a machine gun and just as the moon rose they attained the summit, set up their Maxim and opened fire. Every man in the observation station was shot down.

Then followed a desperate fight with the Austrian mountain battery on the reverse slope. But thanks to their machine gun the Italians were able to break up the enemy's charge and as day broke they captured the Austrians' guns and drove the men who served them down the mountain. When the Austrian reserves arrived the Italians had intrenched themselves on the southern slope and were able to make use of the captured guns. The attacks of the reserves were repulsed and the Italians held the mountain.[Back to Contents]