The Soča valley was the site of a major front in World War I, where millions of soldiers fought during more than two years from 1915 to 1917. It was a contest between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose troops included not only natives of modern-day Austria and Hungary, but also Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Bosnians, and Slovenes, all of whose future countries were wholly or partly within the boundaries of the Empire. The Austrian army even included Serbs who, though Serbia was on the other side, belonged to communities that had lived in and fought for the Empire for centuries. The general who commanded the Austrian forces in this campaign, Svetozar Boroevic von Bojna, was one of these.
Svetozar Boroevic von Bojna

The campaign took place in what is now Slovenian territory, but was then subject to Austria. The Italians, bribed into the war by Britain with the promise of big territorial gains at Austrian expense, attacked across a river that they called the Isonzo and the Austrians the Sontig. To Slovenes, it’s the Soča, and most of the river (which, like the Sava, rises near their iconic mountain, Triglav) is in their country now. Downstream, the Soča crosses the border, and the last fifth of it runs through Italian territory to the Adriatic Sea.

A major Italian objective was the city of Trieste, on the Adriatic. Its urban population was mostly Italian, and rescuing these “unredeemed” countrymen (irredenti) from Austrian rule had been a national ambition. Inland from Trieste was the “Ljubljana Gate,” a stretch of comparatively easy country that provided a way around the Alpine barrier toward central Europe.

Luigi Count Cadorna
Except for this area, most of the border between Italy and Austria-Hungary was forbiddingly mountainous and easy to defend. The low-lying coastal area around Trieste was much more suitable for military operations. The Soča was wholly in Austrian territory, but the Italian border ran parallel to it, only a short distance away, so any force invading from Italy would have to get across it. The Italian commander, General (and Count) Cadorna, reckoned that his best chance was an attack all along the river valley: his army might outflank the defenders of Trieste and gain a good deal more territory besides — and then, who knows? Perhaps a triumphant advance all the way to Vienna.

The Italians attacked along a 60-mile front with a force that greatly outnumbered its enemy. But geography gave the Austrian side a considerable advantage. The eastern bank of the river, opposite Italy, was lined with steep mountains, so the defenders were generally fighting downhill. Also, having been at war for a year, the Austrians had learned the defensive advantages of trenches and machine guns. And many of them were Alpine troops, trained as sharpshooters. The Italian offensive lost shocking numbers of men and gained comparatively little ground. This was to be the story of the next two years. Cadorna launched eleven major offensives between 1915 and 1917, buying insignificant advances at a huge cost in men.
Italian advances along the Soča, 1915–1917

The map at the right shows all the gains the Italians made during this time. The area in blue represents the Austrian territory that they simply rolled over on their way to the Soča, where they first came up against Austrian resistance. After that, ten further offensives brought them only as far as the rightmost dotted line. (This map gives only the German or Italian names of places. Sometimes this is just a matter of spelling and pronunciation (for example, Görz, Gorizia, Gorica), but sometimes the names are entirely different. On this map, “Plezzo” (German “Flitsch”) is Bovec, near the northern end of the Italian lines (but never captured from the Austrians), and elsewhere in what’s now Slovenia, “Ratmannsdorf” is Radovljica and “Adelsberg” is Postojna.

Cadorna never seems to have thought of concentrating his attack on what he considered his enemy’s weakest point, but always ordered all-out assaults along the whole front. He wasn’t good at adapting to conditions or learning from experience, and was seldom known to change his mind about anything. Cadorna had additional defects as a leader: he saw no reason why a general needed to observe his troops in the field, so he never visited the front, planning attacks and issuing orders from his headquarters well behind the lines in the Italian city of Udine.

Nor was the general burdened with excessive respect for the men he commanded. Most Italians, he said more than once, were deficient in discipline, and he sincerely believed that fear was the only reliable motivator in combat. Officers who failed to take the objectives he assigned them were relieved of command and sent home in disgrace — by the hundreds. Staff members who criticized his decisions were sometimes imprisoned for insubordination. The treatment of common soldiers was far worse: not only deserters, but any considered cowards or troublemakers were shot. Cadorna even revived the ancient Roman practice of decimation: “regiments that failed to achieve their objectives were taken out of the fighting, lined up in rows, and every tenth soldier was executed, to encourage his comrades to do better next time.” Such methods kept the army on the attack, but needless to say did little to inspire the troops. In spite of this, they often showed great bravery — but after eleven bloody offensives their morale and fighting spirit were unquestionably low.

Conditions on the mountainous front were harsh for both armies. In winter they froze, in summer they burned. Artillery shells hitting the mountainside sent splinters of limestone flying, and these could be as deadly as bullets or shrapnel, especially during the first year or so of fighting, when neither army had yet been issued metal helmets.

In late October of 1917, the Austrians, borrowing German reinforcements for the occasion, launched a major counteroffensive of their own, centered on the little riverside town of Kobarid (Caporetto to the Italians, Karfreit to the Austrians), in the northern part of the front. Five Austrian and seven German divisions, with massive artillery and other equipment, were smuggled into place behind the Austrian lines in that area without alerting the Italians. Cadorna believed that the prevailing weather in the mountains made large-scale maneuvers impossible after September. Although he received a few items of intelligence indicating that the other side was planning an offensive, the evidence wasn’t overwhelming, so he didn’t let it overcome his complacency.

Having spent two years attacking, the Italian army had no experience fighting on the defensive except against relatively small-scale counterattacks by the outnumbered Austrians. General Capello, commanding the northern sector of the front, was an avid attacker, but took little interest in defense. Besides, he disliked Cadorna (whose job he was politicking to get) and habitually ignored orders he disagreed with. So when, early in October, Cadorna directed him to put his forces in better defensive positions, he paid no attention.

Caporetto: the Austrian-German counteroffensive
The assault, when it came early on October 24, was devastating. An artillery barrage (beginning with poison gas shells, a weapon used by all sides in World War I) wiped out most of the Italians’ artillery at the beginning, and the attackers, instead of moving forward along the whole front at the same time, punched through the Italian lines at selected points, outflanking and getting behind those positions they didn’t attack directly. The Italians were confused, off balance, and increasingly panicky as their front collapsed. Many units surrendered en masse, often without firing a shot. There were some, in fact, who greeted the Austrians with cheers and seemed delighted to learn that they would be spending the rest of the war as POWs. Even if you don’t enlarge the map, the red arrows and the blue lines continually shifting back and down pretty much tell the story.

In a few days all that was left of the Italian army had been chased back into Italy. Unable to halt the enemy at the Tagliamento, the first big river in the path of retreat, they finally shuddered to a stop behind the mile-wide Piave, whose mouth was less than 20 miles from Venice, and here the Austrian advance ran out of steam.

Italy’s losses in this battle and retreat were enormous. John R. Schindler (on whose book, Isonzo, this account is based, and who is the author of anything you see above in quotation marks) estimates that, in round numbers, 50,000 may have been killed and wounded, 300,000 taken prisoner, and 400,000 gone missing, mostly through desertion. After the King removed Cadorna from command, his successor, General Diaz, reorganized the Italian army. From 65 divisions, it shrank to 33. The defeat was so thorough that the name of Caporetto entered the Italian language as a synonym for disaster — when everything goes wrong that possibly could go wrong, “it’s a regular Caporetto.” And “go to Caporetto!” is still a common curse. Our guide Sašo, who had once spent a season working at an Italian resort, told us he heard it uttered more than once.

It’s hard to find definite numbers for those killed on both sides in this brutal campaign. According to some Web estimates I found, Italy lost 651,000 men killed in the war; if you omit those who died in POW camps or of disease, the figure is 427,000. Except for a brief Austrian incursion across another part of the border in 1916, which lasted only a few weeks, the Soča campaign (including its aftermath in the last year of the war) was the only fighting they did. So the number of men killed in that campaign, from the first offensive in 1915 to the last battles with the collapsing Austrian army in 1918, must have been very close to 400,000, and the number of wounded correspondingly higher. The Austro-Hungarian forces are estimated to have lost about 200,000 killed in the fighting along the Soča, out of a total of 1.2 million in the whole war — which, of course, they fought on several fronts. These numbers are hard to compare exactly, but by any measure it’s an appalling butcher’s bill.