At 2am on 24 October 1917, Austro-German forces unleashed a devastating artillery attack against Italian troops defending land they’d captured in a long series of brutal and costly offensives. It was the opening salvo in a battle that would lead to one of the greatest military catastrophes of World War I.
After two and a half years of a vicious war fought in a dramatic, often frozen landscape thousands of feet up in the clouds, the Italian defences were well built. Earthworks and underground bunkers had been dynamited and drilled into the region’s mountainous terrain, while an elaborate trench system stretched across the valley floors below. Although these had proven resilient in the face of previous artillery attacks, they did little to protect the Italian troops from the horror that now rained down upon them. Approximately 10 per cent of the shells fired that morning contained phosgene gas. Although the use of chemical weapons was commonplace on the Western Front, poison gas had never been used before in the so-called White War that raged in the Alps. The Italian high command had completely underestimated the power of this new terror weapon and its troops were ill-equipped to deal with it. The results were devastating.
At 8am, the Austro-German infantry assault began. As it advanced in a pincer movement to seize the river crossing at Caporetto, it encountered little resistance from what had been a numerically superior force. The gas attack had been so effective that hundreds of Italian troops now lay dead in their defences without havingbattlefield and heading west. What unfolded next would have disastrous consequences for Italy, creating social and political upheaval for years to come. And, although Italy’s troops would be accused of cowardice, responsibility for the disaster was largely due to the shortcomings of one man.
