Twice on 24 October a battle sent an army into a disastrous retreat. In 1812 the French and Italian troops of Eugène de Beauharnais fought the Russians all day for Maloyaroslavets, a burning wooden town on the road from Moscow to Kaluga. They kept it, but the next morning Cossacks nearly captured Napoleon, and after a council of war he turned his army back onto the road it had stripped bare on the way to Moscow. In 1917 German and Austro-Hungarian troops broke the Italian front at Caporetto on the Isonzo after a gas and artillery bombardment that began at two in the morning. A young Erwin Rommel took Monte Matajur, and the Italian army fell back to the Piave.
Maloyaroslavets, 1812: the race for the Kaluga road
On 19 October 1812, after five weeks in Moscow, Napoleon's army began to leave the city and marched south-west toward Kaluga, where supplies were plentiful, meaning to reach Smolensk through country the war had not yet touched. Napoleon's stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, led the way with his IV Corps, which Napoleon Guide puts at about 15,000 men. The first key point on the road was Maloyaroslavets, a town on the new Kaluga road just south of the river Luzha.1
On the evening of 23 October General Delzons's division of Eugène's corps took the bridge and the town, then pulled most of its men back to the low ground by the river, leaving two battalions in the town. The Russians had sent General Dokhturov's corps after the French, and it arrived in the night. At about four in the morning, Philippe-Paul de Ségur writes, Dokhturov's Russians "suddenly rushed in the dark out of the wood with tremendous shouts" and drove the French back to the river.2
A burning town that changed hands again and again
At first light Eugène began to fight his way back. Delzons was killed early in the day. According to Ségur, a ball struck him on the forehead, and his brother, who threw himself over him to carry him off, was killed by a second. The wooden town, built on a steep slope above the river, caught fire under the shelling, and Ségur describes men grappling hand to hand until they rolled down into the flames. Fresh Russian troops kept arriving, among them, according to History of War, Raevsky's men.3
Eugène fed in his divisions one after another and finally his last reserve, Domenico Pino's 15th Division: Italians who, in Ségur's account, had never been in action before. History of War says the town changed hands at least seven and possibly twelve times, while Ségur counts five French advances to the heights. In the end the Russians drew back to the high ground beyond the town, and the French and Italians held it. General Jean Rapp, who arrived with Napoleon that evening, wrote that it was "a day that the army of Italy ought to inscribe in its calendar".4
25 October: "Sire, these are Cossacks"
The French had the town, but Kutuzov's army now stood across the road to Kaluga. Early on 25 October Napoleon rode out toward the battlefield with only a few officers around him. A mass of riders came out of a wood on the right in such regular files that the party took them for French cavalry. In Rapp's memoir the Duke of Vicenza was the first to recognize them: "Sire, these are Cossacks." "That is impossible," Napoleon replied.5
Rapp seized the bridle of the emperor's horse and turned it round, then led the squadron on duty against the raiders. His horse was brought down by a lance wound six inches deep, with Rapp under it. Ségur names the raiders as Platov's Cossacks. They broke off to plunder wagons and guns, and the cavalry of the Guard drove them away. According to History of War and Napoleon Guide, Napoleon carried poison from then on so as not to be taken alive.6
A council in a weaver's hut
That day Napoleon held a council of war to choose between pressing on to Kaluga, turning west to Medyn and going back north past Borodino to Smolensk. In Ségur's account the council met in a weaver's hut at Gorodnya, Davout called the northern road "a desert of sand and ashes" and quarreled with Murat, while Napoleon sat with his head in his hands until he broke up the meeting with the words "Well, gentlemen, I will decide". He chose the road north. Kutuzov, meanwhile, pulled his own army back along the road to Kaluga, so that, in Ségur's phrase, the two armies "turned their backs on each other".7
That decision mattered more than the fighting for the town. History of War calls it disastrous: it wasted a week of good weather, sent the army back through country it had already stripped of food and across the battlefield of Borodino, and made plain that the withdrawal was now a retreat.8
The cost of Maloyaroslavets
The casualty figures disagree. Napoleon Guide puts Eugène's losses at about 5,000 and Russian losses at about 6,000. History of War gives Eugène's Italians about 4,000 to 6,000 casualties, with seven generals killed or wounded. Ségur, who took part in the campaign, also writes of seven generals and 4,000 Italians killed or wounded.9
Caporetto, 1917: the twelfth battle of the Isonzo
Italy entered the war in May 1915, and in two and a half years its army fought eleven battles on the Isonzo for little ground. By the autumn of 1917 Ludendorff feared that Austria-Hungary could not withstand another Italian offensive and decided to strike first. According to History.com, Germany sent seven divisions to the upper Isonzo. A German and Austro-Hungarian 14th Army was formed under General Otto von Below, with the mountain warfare expert Konrad Krafft von Dellmensingen as his chief of staff. The blow was aimed at the northern end of the front, around Caporetto, today Kobarid in Slovenia.10
At two in the morning of 24 October the guns opened fire. The future novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, then a young Alpini officer, wrote in his notebook of being woken by a "deep and heavy rumble in the Bovec basin"; the watch showed two in the morning. The bombardment mixed gas and high explosive, and according to History of War the Italian gas masks could not cope with the German gases. Near Bovec (Plezzo, Flitsch) the Germans fired hundreds of gas bombs from projectors into a gorge behind the Italian line. Simon Jones, drawing on German accounts, writes that pioneers later found 600 to 800 Italian soldiers dead there.11
Breakthrough on the upper Isonzo
The infantry went forward at 6:30 in the morning, according to History of War, and north of Bovec at nine. Using grenades and flamethrowers, the attackers broke through the Italian lines. History of War puts the first day's gain at up to fourteen miles, History.com at about 25 kilometers. According to the Friuli Venezia Giulia regional history site Novecento FVG, German battalions took Caporetto itself that day. According to History of War, Cadorna, the Italian commander in chief, ordered a general retreat on 27 October, by which time the army was already falling back.12
Rommel on Monte Matajur
Among the attackers was Oberleutnant Erwin Rommel of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion, part of von Below's 14th Army. Dennis Showalter writes that his detachment, never much more than 500 men at the point of contact, slipped around the Italian positions on the Kolovrat ridge and took them from behind. On 26 October the battalion took Monte Matajur, a key height near the Isonzo. On the way up, according to Showalter, Rommel's few men rounded a bend and met 1,200 Italians laying down their arms "as their colonel wept". Showalter gives the detachment's haul in the first 52 hours of the offensive as about 9,000 prisoners and 81 guns, for six dead and 30 wounded.13
In December 1917 Rommel and his battalion commander, Major Theodor Sproesser, both received the Pour le Mérite. The historian Wolfgang Mährle calls it Prussia's highest award for bravery and notes that Rommel got it only after a written complaint: through a mix-up, a Silesian lieutenant, Walther Schnieber, had first been decorated for taking Matajur.14
Back to the Piave, and a bulletin of blame
The Italians fell back first to the Tagliamento, but the new line could not be held. Novecento FVG dates the last attempt at resistance, at Pradis, to 5 and 6 November, after which the troops withdrew to the Piave. There the line held, helped by heavy rain, a stiffer Italian defense and the attackers' lack of motor transport; History of War adds that German troops lost days looting Italian food stores.15
On 28 October Cadorna's bulletin blamed his own men. In its first version it said that "the failure to resist of units of the Second Army, which cravenly withdrew without fighting and ignominiously surrendered to the enemy" had let the Austro-German forces break the Italian left wing on the Julian front. The government had the passage toned down, but the original had already spread abroad. Cadorna was replaced by General Armando Diaz, and Britain and France rushed troops to Italy.16
The cost of Caporetto
The figures are disputed, and the argument is mostly about prisoners and stragglers. History.com gives almost 700,000 Italian losses: about 40,000 killed or wounded, 280,000 captured and 350,000 deserters. The historian Alessandro Barbero, quoted by Avvenire, puts the dead at about 40,000, with about 260,000 taken prisoner and about 350,000 stragglers who threw down their weapons, believing the war was lost and they could go home. Gadda was among the prisoners: captured on 25 October, he spent the rest of the war in German camps, from March 1918 at Celle near Hanover.17
On 24 October 1918, exactly a year after Caporetto, the Italian army opened the offensive that became the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The armistice of Villa Giusti, signed on 3 November, took effect on 4 November 1918 and ended the war between Italy and Austria-Hungary.18
Also on 24 October
In 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, American carrier aircraft caught Admiral Kurita's battleships in the Sibuyan Sea and sank the giant battleship Musashi. By the count of Bob Hackett and Sander Kingsepp, she took 19 torpedo and 17 bomb hits. The whole battle is told on our 23 October page.19
Also on this day
- 1812: Battle of Maloyaroslavets. At Maloyaroslavets, the French and Italian troops of Eugène de Beauharnais fought the Russians as Napoleon's army left Moscow for Kaluga.
- 1917: Battle of Caporetto. Near Kobarid on the Isonzo front, Austro-Hungarian and German forces attacked the Italian army in the First World War.
