Battle of The Piave River - Prelude

Prelude

Italy's defeat at Caporetto led to General Luigi Cadorna's dismissal and General Armando Diaz replaced him as Chief of Staff of the Italian Army. Diaz set up a strong defense line along Piave River. Up until this point in the war, the Italian army had been fighting alone against the Central Powers; with the defeat at Caporetto, France and Britain sent reinforcements on the Italian front. These, apart for accounting for less than a tenth of the Italian forces in theater, had however to be redirected for the major part to the Western Front as soon as the German Spring Offensive began in March 1918.

The Austro-Hungarian Army had also recently undergone a change in command, and the new Austrian Chief of Staff, Arthur Arz von Straussenburg, wished to finish off the Italians. Straussenberg's army group commanders, Franz Graf Conrad von Hötzendorf (the former Austrian Chief of Staff) and Svetozar Boroević von Bojna, both wished to make a decisive assault against the Italians, but could not agree about the location of the attack. Conrad wanted an attack from the South Tyrolean Alps towards the Asiago Plateau and Vicenza. Boroević first favored a defensive action, but then when pressed preferred a frontal attack along the Piave River. Straussenburg himself was in favour of an attack on the western part of the front (the "Giudicarie" sector) leading to Brescia. Conrad and Boroević had a dislike for each other, and Straussenburg and the emperor, unable to decide between these two strong personalities, divided the army equally between them, reserving only a small part of the forces for a diversionary action on the Giudicarie sector. The preparation of the offensive began in February 1918, after a meeting in Bolzano between the Austrian and German high commands. It was strongly recommended by the Germans, as Ludendorff hoped that it could force the increasing American forces in France to be diverted to the Italian front, so Straussenberg modeled the attack after Erich Ludendorff's offensive on the Western Front.

The Austrians, differently from their previous success at Caporetto and from the subsequent attempts to breakthrough on Mount Grappa, did not prepare the attack as a pinpoint one, but as an all-out frontal attack, employing the entire residual strength of their army all along the front. The Austro-Hungarian formations were trained to employ the tactics developed by the Germans on the Western Front for the Operation Michael as Austrian officials, returning from the Eastern Front, were extensively trained alongside their German counterparts. There were also innovations on the Italian side. Analyzing the defeat of Caporetto, the staff of Armando Diaz concluded that the main tactical causes of it were the lack of mobility of Italian units, caught in a too rigid defensive scheme, the too centralized command and control system, and the lack of depth of Italian defences, where too many soldiers were simply stuck on the frontline. The new schemes prepared for the battle led to the abolition of the continuous entrenchment and in the development of a highly mobile defence system, in which even the smaller units were allowed to freely move between previously recognized strongpoints, independently decide to retreat or counterattack, or directly call the support of the artillery. Moreover, 13 divisions, equipped with 6000 trucks, were organized in a central reserve, ready to be sent where it was needed.