Battle of Caporetto

On 24 October 1917, after a short and intense bombardment that included gas, Austro-Hungarian and German divisions broke through the Italian line in the upper Isonzo valley near the town of Caporetto. Small assault groups pushed along the valley floors and bypassed Italian positions on the heights, which found themselves cut off. Within days the Italian Second Army was in collapse, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were captured or streamed westward. The Italian army finally held a new line on the Piave river, more than 100 km back, in November. Cadorna was replaced by Armando Diaz, and a year later the Italians counterattacked at Vittorio Veneto.

In Italian 'Caporetto' became a byword for disaster, and the defeat set off a long argument about blame. Cadorna's own bulletin blamed cowardice in the Second Army, a charge historians have largely rejected in favour of failures of command and defensive doctrine and a harsh disciplinary system that had worn down morale. Ernest Hemingway, who reached the Italian front as an ambulance driver only in 1918, made the retreat the centrepiece of A Farewell to Arms, and his version shaped how English speaking readers imagine it. A museum in Kobarid tells the story from all sides and has won a European museum prize.