The Operations
At the declaration of war, there were no French troops in Italy, so Marshal François Certain Canrobert moved in to Piedmont in the first massive use of railways. The Austrian forces counted on a swift victory over the weaker Sardinian army before French forces could arrive in Piedmont. However, Count Gyulai, the commander of the Austrian troops in Lombardy, was very cautious, marching around the Ticino River in no specific direction for a while until eventually crossing it to begin the offensive. Unfortunately for him, very heavy rains began to fall as soon as he did this, allowing the Piedmontese to flood the rice fields in front of his advance, slowing his army's march to a crawl.
The Austrians under Gyulai eventually arrived in Vercelli, menacing Turin, but the Franco-Sardinian move to strengthen Alessandria and Po River bridges around Casale Monferrato forced them to fall back. On May 14, Napoleon III arrived in Alessandria, taking the command of the operations. The initial clash of the war was at Montebello on 20 May, a battle between an Austrian Corps under Stadion against a single division of the French I Corps under Forey. The Austrian contingent was three times as large, but Forey pulled off the victory, making Gyulai even more defensive. In early June, Gyulai was near the rail center of Magenta with the army fairly spread out, and unfortunately caught defending too far east of the river. Napoleon III attacked the Ticino head on with part of his force while sending another large group of troops to the north to flank the Austrians. The plan worked, which led to Gyulai retreating very far to the quadrilateral fortresses in eastern Lombardy, where he was relieved of his post as commander.
Replacing Gyulai was Emperor Franz Josef I himself, feeling up to the simple task of defending the well-fortified Austrian territory behind the Mincio River. He would experience his first and last command at the Battle of Solferino. The Piedmontese-French army had taken Milan and slowly marched further east to finish off Austria in this war before Prussia could get involved. The Austrians found out that the French had halted at Brescia, and decided that they should attempt to surprise them by suddenly switching onto the attack. The French had also gone on the offensive, but neither side was sure of where exactly the other was until they suddenly met. Ludwig von Benedek with the Austrian VIII Corps was separated from the main force, defending Pozzolengo against the Piedmontese part of the opposing army. This they did successfully, though the rest of the Austrian army retreated as soon as a great storm hit, abandoning several towns to the French.
At the same time, in the northern part of Lombardy, the Italian volunteers of Giuseppe Garibaldi's Hunters of the Alps defeated the Austrians at Varese and Como and the Piedmontese-French navy landed 3,000 soldiers and conquered the islands of Losinj (Lussino) and Cres (Cherso) in Dalmatia.
Read more about this topic: Second Italian War Of Independence
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)