Young Rommel's First Triumph: Battle of Caporetto 1917 (Documentary)

HOOK In October 1917, German and Austro-Hungarian troops went over the  top into the rain and fog to attack the Italian trenches opposite them. They would go on to break  the trench deadlock on the Italian Front, and nearly destroy the Italian army in just two weeks.  The Battle of Caporetto was Austria-Hungary’s greatest victory of WW1 – and where a young  Erwin Rommel learned to fight like a Desert Fox.

In fall 1917, the Central Powers knew that time  was running out for the chance at victory in the First World War. The United States had joined  the Allies, and soon there would be no chance of success on the Western Front. The Germans  and Austro-Hungarian populations were hungry and exhausted, and the alliance between Berlin  and Vienna was tense, since Habsburg Emperor Karl flirted with a separate peace.

But there  was hope – Russia was seized by revolution, and the new Bolshevik powers wanted to end the  war in the east. The only external threat to Austria-Hungary now was Italy, whose army had been  weakened by 11 mostly fruitless attacks along the Isonzo river since 1915. If the Central Powers  could relieve the pressure on the Italian Front, Austria-Hungary could fight on and help Germany’s  planned last-ditch offensive in spring 1918.

The Austro-Hungarians were planning an  offensive against Italy, and they wanted to do it on their own - mostly. Kaiser Karl  I wrote Kaiser Wilhelm II, asking his ally to take over more of the line Russia to free up  Habsburg units, and to loan Vienna heavy guns: “You will certainly understand that I particularly  wish to conduct the offensive against Italy with only with my own troops. My entire army considers  the war against Italy ‘our war’.

Since childhood, every officer has inherited from his forefathers  the desire to fight against the hereditary enemy. ” (Rothenberg 206) But Berlin had other ideas. At this point in the war, the Germans didn’t fully  trust the Austrians, since Vienna openly wanted peace without annexations, which the German High  Command opposed.

German leadership considered the Austro-Hungarian army as too weak to attack on  its own, and even thought that the country would collapse if the alliance drifted further apart.  A joint victory under German command would nip Vienna’s doves in the bud and keep them in the  war. At the same time, the capture of Riga on the Eastern Front in September freed up German  troops for use elsewhere.

So the Germans created the 14th Army to send to the Italian Front, a  mixed formation of German and Habsburg troops under the command German General Otto von Below.  The new army included the Würtemberg Mountain Battalion and a young Lieutenant by the name of  Erwin Rommel. The 25-year-old Rommel was already experienced and decorated for his actions on  the Western and Romanian fronts , but he and many other Central Powers soldiers were about to  witness a battle unlike any they’d fought before.

The plan for Operation Waffentreue, or  Brotherhood-in-arms, was for the German and best Austro-Hungarian units to infiltrate  the Italian line on a 40km front near the key village of Kobarid – called Karfreit in  German and Caporetto in Italian. Then, they would seize the high ground, and race  along the valleys until they reached the Tagliamento River. An Austrian officer described  the plan as a fist punching through a barrier, then unclenching to spread its fingers – a  stormtrooper tactic the German had success with at Riga in September.

If things went well,  the German command would decide what to do after that. The idea was not necessarily to knock  Italy out of the war completely, but simply to cripple it. The Central Powers had about  350,000 men and 2500 guns ready for the attack, facing about 250,000 Italians and their 1300  guns.

Still, it wouldn’t be easy – logistics routes ran over narrow mountain roads, there  weren’t enough locomotives and railway cars for supplies, and their troops were already short  of food, cigarettes, and even salt. The weakened Austro-Hungarians had also narrowly avoided defeat  at the 11th Battle of the Isonzo in September. And those Italians were not ready.

Morale  had suffered due to repeated attacks with no breakthrough over the previous two years , and  the excessive discipline of overall commander General Luigi Cadorna. Italian positions were  vulnerable with their backs to the Isonzo river, and the High Command failed to ensure proper  defensive measures had been taken, partly b ecause Cadorna was distracted by political intrigues  in Rome . The British Cabinet was not impressed with its ally: “The Austrians are suffering more  from the lack of food and drink than from Italian fire.

” (Rauchensteiner 806) [British Cabinet] On the eve of battle, two Austro-Hungarian officers, one Romanian and one Czech, deserted  and alerted the Italians to the danger. German General Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen was livid: “With such a Völkerbrei [mix of peoples], which contains such oppositional and inferior elements,  one can no longer undertake something in common. These are the fruits of Kaiser Karl’s amnesty  of traitors!

We will send our Army Command a serious report of how things stand with  this ‘country. ’” (Rauchensteiner 818) Despite the defections,  which the Italians ignored, the Central Powers launched their offensive  in the early morning fog on October 24, 1917. German and Austro-Hungarian guns delivered  a short but intense 4-hour bombardment, including massive amounts of poison gas.

The  shelling and mix of different gases – called Buntschießen because of the different color  codes for the gases - caught the Italians by surprise : irritating gases forced the men to  remove their masks, then they inhaled deadlier chemicals. Central Powers infantrymen went over  the top, and quickly found weak spots in the Italian defenses to exploit. Among them was  Erwin Rommel, who noted the success of German and Austro-Hungarian counter-battery fire: “It was a dark and rainy night and in no time a thousand gun muzzles were flashing on  both sides of Tolmein.

In the enemy territory an uninterrupted bursting and banging thundered  and re-echoed from the mountains as powerfully as the severest thunderstorm[…] the Italian  searchlights tried vainly to pierce the rain [and] only a few hostile batteries  answered the German fire. ” (Hart 386) The Central Powers’ success was more complete than  even they had hoped. Their forces burst out of the Tolmein bridgehead and around Zaga, capturing or  bypassing the most important Italian positions.

Confusion reigned in Italian lines, as whole  units found themselves outflanked, surrounded, or suddenly overlooked by enemy forces they had  not expected. Tens of thousands surrendered. Italian Lieutenant Carlo Gadda’s unit was among  them, and he could barely stand the shame on the long walk to an Austrian prisoner camp: “Marching from midnight to 8 a.

m. : horror, extremely sleepy and exhausted…The end of  hope, annihilation of interior life. Extreme anguish for the Fatherland.

” (Thompson 310) Other Italian soldiers felt relief that the war might be ending, and that they might get out  of it alive. Units who could retreated pell-mell, and some officers even abandoned their men.  Positions that had been conquered at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Italian  lives were given up without a fight as rivers of disorganized men streamed westwards,  although some Italian troops did resist.

At first, Italian High Command had no idea  of the scale of the disaster. Cadorna only learned of the attack late in the morning, and  news arrived piecemeal . 2nd Army Commander Luigi Capello ordered his reserves  forward, but the confusion and panic prevented any effective command and control.

Meanwhile, Leutnant Rommel was leading his men to the capture of important high ground near the  Italian stronghold of Kolovrat . His unit bypassed enemy positions on the lower slopes, moved uphill,  then snuck up on the unsuspecting Italians below: “We went downhill through the bushes with our  machine guns and carbines at the ready and we soon saw the hostile position below us. […] From  above we looked down on the bottom of the trench.

The enemy had no cover against our fire. The  enemy did not suspect what threatened him. The assault squads made ready and we shouted down to  the hostile garrison and told them to surrender.

Frightened, the Italian soldiers stared up to  us at their rear. […] They knew they were lost and gave the sign of surrender. ” (Hart 387) Many Central Powers units achieved similar successes, and Italian resistance crumbled.

On  the afternoon of the first day, they blew some of the bridges over the Isonzo, but quick-moving  German and Austro-Hungarian troops captured others intact and soon capture Caporetto. Some  residents of the Austro-Hungarian town lined the streets and greeted the troops with shouts  of “Zivijo-Austria”, “Long Live Austria. ” By evening, Cadorna ordered the 2nd and 3rd Armies  to retreat to the Tagliamento, but it was too late.

The Italian 2nd Army was broken and in full,  uncontrolled retreat. Cadorna blamed his own men: “Due to the lack of resistance of some units  of the 2nd Army, who cowardly retreated without fighting, or ignominiously surrendered to the  enemy, the German - Austrian forces have been allowed to break through our left flank on the  Julian front. The valorous efforts of other troops were not able to stop the enemy from penetrating  our country's sacred soil.

” (Silvestri 458) So by the end of the first day  of the Battle of Caporetto, the Italian army was already facing disaster.  The question was, how bad would it get? The days and weeks that followed, the Central  Powers continued to slice through the Italians – Rommel even disobeys orders for a tactical retreat  to press on against another Italian position, which his unit captures.

Austro-Hungarian General  Svetozar Boroevic’s army joined in the advance, forcing the Italian 3rd Army to accelerate its  retreat to avoid being cut off. The Italian 2nd Army was a shadow if its former self, consisting  mostly of columns of men retreating as fast as they could, fleeing groups of deserters, or long  lines of prisoners marching to the east. Rommel’s small unit alone captured two entire regiments  of the Salerno Brigade whom they convinced to surrender .

Austrian officer Julius Kugy witnessed  the mass of prisoners moving back from the line: “The whole time, crowds of prisoners moved past  us towards Golobar. We saw wounded among them, and there were many tragic and heart-rending  images! Transports continued to pass, even throughout the night.

They were all hungry  and exhausted but since we ourselves had nothing to eat, we couldn’t help them. ” (Kugy 88) Back on the battlefield, by October 29, Austro-Hungarian troops were closing on the  Tagliamento river. The panicked Italians blew up the Eiffel bridge, trapping two entire divisions  on the eastern bank and condemning most of them to captivity.

Drconian orders allowed officers  to execute stragglers at will, scenes that Red Cross ambulance driver Ernest Hemingway would  later work into his novel “A Farewell to Arms. ” The Italia n rout continued across the river,  but former Austro-Hungarian overall commander Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf’s army made slow  progress in the north. Some German generals expected Conrad might be able to “Sedanize”  the Italians and cut them off from the rear, but these hopes went unrealized.

German  commanders decided to press on farther than originally planned, and the other Central Powers  armies continued their race across northern Italy, crossing the Livenza river on November 6. The advance and news of victory brought joy to a war-weary Austro-Hungarian public.  Newspapers wrote of the Wunder von Karfreit, the Miracle of Caporetto, and the government  launched a war bonds campaign with the enthusiastic support of the Catholic church: “In the last few days our glorious armies have begun a splendid offensive against the hereditary  enemy and have not only wrung from him the fruits of his 11 Isonzo battles, but have driven him  deep within his own country.

Obviously, Heaven is with us…God himself has put us in the right  mood for the 7th war bond. ” (Rauchensteiner 820) Kaiser Karl, Kaiser Wilhelm and Bulgaria’s  Tsar Ferdinand all visited the liberated and occupied areas as well. But their forces  were also suffering from exhaustion, hunger, and shortages of supplies.

As a result, once  they crossed the border into Italy they began looting and destroying the property of some  Italian civilians. Austrian officer Ludwig Hesshaimer witnessed the desperation: “Emaciated Austrian soldiers in torn, filth-soaked uniforms, without underclothes,  stared vacantly out of bloodshot eyes ahead. So they hurried and gasped forwards for days,  without rest, without sleep, without food – just forwards, forwards.

” (Rauchensteiner 824) [ The two Central Powers’ distrust also caused other problems. Boroevic held up some German  units under his command so his own forces could destroy the Italian 3rd Army, but they failed  to do so. There were also reports that Austrian intelligence officers put German units under  surveillance to make sure they wouldn’t mistreat the liberated Austro-Hungarian population.

On the Italian side, Cadorna’s initial hopes of a fighting retreat proved to be fantasy,  and he even briefly considered the idea of a separate peace , he also wrote to his son that  the men didn’t want to fight, and he had a clear conscience. Rome was not so calm in the face  of disaster and the possible loss of Venice. In parliament, socialists and anti-war liberals  brought down the government, and Cadorna opponent Vittorio Orlando became the new Prime Minister  .

Orlando’s government also asked Britain and France for help to stem the tide. London and Paris  were worried that Italy might drop out of the war, or collapse in revolution like Russia a few months  earlier. They quickly sent several divisions, and eventually deployed 200,000 men on the  Italian front.

But there were tensions: British General Douglas Haig said the Italians  were “a wretched people,” and a British General Staff report was less than generous: “Italy is an additional burden on us, and moreover, Italy is similarly  unreliable to France. ” (Rauchensteiner 823) One topic the three Allied did agree on was  that Cadorna had to go. General Armando Diaz took over command, and relaxed the needlessly  harsh discipline that had undermined morale.

So Italy was buckling under the pressure, but  the Central Powers’ advance was slowing down. The Italians managed to reposition their forces  and bring up reinforcements in time to make a stand along the Piave river in mid-November,  before the French and British units arrived in the line. Engineers blew the bridges,  and overstretched Austro-Hungarian forces could not push the Italians off the heights  around Monte Grappa to outflank the Italian line.

The Italian army, including many young  soldiers of the draft class of 1899, stood firm and the Battle was over. Austrian commanders  complained the Germans refused to help them, and the Germans complained the Austrians were  too slow. All the same, their forces had advanced about 150km in just 17 days, and removed any  Italian threat to the Austro-Hungarian heartland.

The Central Powers’ victory at Caporetto came at  a cost. The Italians lost about 40,000 killed and wounded, 290,000 prisoners, and between 250,000  and 400,000 deserters and stragglers. Germany and Austria-Hungary lost 50 to 70,000 killed and  wounded.

They also captured valuable supplies, like nearly 1 million greatcoats, 10 million  rations, coal, and 3000 guns. The battle caused a wave of refugees – up to 1 million, including  some 250,000 ethnic Italians who fled from recaptured Austro-Hungarian territory. There were  so many that Rome had to create support programs to resettle them across the kingdom, although  this did not prevent widespread suffering, and, sometimes, unfriendly attitudes on the  part of local Italians towards “enemy” citizens from Austro-Hungarian lands.

Nearly  all faced similar hardships to this woman: "I was brought here, to this town in Puglia […].  Here you cannot even find water to wash and I have to pay a high price for it, meeting this expense  from my small daily wage of two Liri. With the huge increase in the price of food, I have  to see to all my needs out of these two Liri; I cannot even go out from my shelter to look  for a decent job since I am ashamed to look so shabby and to be so badly dressed.

" (Ceschin 28) Ironically, Austria-Hungary’s greatest victory of the war proved to be a Pyrrhic one, as  it brought it closer to collapse. With the crippling of Italy, the Central Powers  had now defeated Serbia and Romania, and forced Russia into r evolution. Vienna’s  war was nearly won, but society was on the edge.

The Caporetto offensive had required so  many trains and railway use that precious food, already in very short supply, could not reach  the cities in the Austrian half of the empire. After the initial euphoria of victory,  this worsened the hunger and discontent of an already war-weary population on the  brink of collapse. Austrian bureaucrats had warned of this danger before the offensive  began, but military command took the risk.

The shock of Caporetto caused the Allies to create  a Supreme War Council to better coordinate their efforts. Despite an Italian investigative  commission after the war, the defeat also contributed to Italian feelings of humiliation  and recrimination that caused political turmoil for years after the armistice . These were  made worse by Cadorna and other nationalists blaming the defeat on treachery from within.

Caporetto was also a watershed moment for Erwin Rommel. He received Germany highest honor, the  Pour le Merite, for his actions during the battle, and he was promoted to Captain. After the war,  Rommel drew on his experiences at Caporetto in his influential book Infantry Attacks, which  emphasized speed, risk, and deception when on the offensive.

He would apply these principles again,  alongside Italian allies, just 20 years later. In WW2, after Rommel’s campaigns in Northern  Africa, in 1944 he took over Army Group B in Northern France, which was preparing for the  Allied invasion. He argued unsuccessfully for the Germans to concentrate their tanks close  to the beaches, and organized the Normandy defences.

But he was soon badly wounded,  implicated in the July Plot against Hitler, and committed suicide. Meanwhile Army Group  B was eventually pushed back across the Rhine River and encircled in the Ruhr pocket. If you  want to learn more about the last battles of the Second World War in the East and West,  we made two epic documentaries about them: The first one is 16 Days in Berlin; the most  detailed documentary about the Battle of Berlin ever produced.

A 4 ½ hour day-by-day  breakdown of one of the biggest battles of the entire war when the Red Army advanced from  the Oder River into the heart of Nazi Germany’s capital. Filmed on original location,  featuring detailed maps and animation, expert interviews and much more. The second  documentary is Rhineland 45 about the last set-piece battle on the Western Front in which  the Allies under Bernhard Montgomery attacked from the Dutch Border and ultimately  crossed the mighty Rhine river.

This 3 ½ hour documentary was also filmed on original  location, features detailed maps and animation, expert and veteran interviews and more. But you  can’t watch 16 Days in Berlin and Rhineland 45 on YouTube because of our uncompromising portrayal  of the war using authentic combat footage. So, where can you watch these two massive  documentaries with a combined runtime of over 8 hours?

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The  money of the lifetime membership allows us to invest more time and resources  into original series and it supports us here at Real Time History directly.  Again, that’s nebula. tv/thegreatwar We want to thank Annabel Blakey for her help with  this episode.

If you want to learn more about Rommel in North Africa, check out our videos about  his victories and defeats on our sister channel Real Time History. As usually you can find all the  sources for this video in the video description below. If you are watching this video on Patreon  or Nebula, thank you so much for the support, we couldn’t do it without you.

I am Jesse  Alexander and this is a production of Real Time History, the only history channel that  is in the right mood for the next war bond.