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Concept
Battles of the Isonzo
Summary
The Battles of the Isonzo (known as the Isonzo Front by historians, soška fronta) were a series of 12 battles between the Austro-Hungarian and Italian armies in World War I mostly on the territory of present-day Slovenia, and the remainder in Italy along the Isonzo River on the eastern sector of the Italian Front between June 1915 and November 1917.
In April 1915, in the secret Treaty of London, Italy was promised by the Allies some of the territories of Austro-Hungarian Empire which were mainly inhabited by ethnic Slovenes and Austrian Germans.
Italian commander Luigi Cadorna, a staunch proponent of the frontal assault who claimed the Western Front proved the ineffectiveness of machine guns, initially planned breaking onto the Slovenian plateau, taking Ljubljana and threatening Vienna. The area between the northernmost part of the Adriatic Sea and the sources of the Isonzo River thus became the scene of twelve successive battles.
As a result, the Austro-Hungarians were forced to move some of their forces from the Eastern Front and a war in the mountains around the Isonzo River began.
The sixty-mile long Soča River at the time ran entirely inside Austria-Hungary in parallel to the border with Italy, from the Vršič and Predil passes in the Julian Alps to the Adriatic Sea, widening dramatically a few kilometers north of Gorizia, thus opening a narrow corridor between Northern Italy and Central Europe, which goes through the Vipava Valley and the relatively low north-eastern edge of the Karst Plateau to Inner Carniola and Ljubljana. The corridor is also known as the "Ljubljana Gate".
By the autumn of 1915 one mile had been won by Italian troops, and by October 1917 a few Austro-Hungarian mountains and some square miles of land had changed hands several times. Italian troops did not reach the port of Trieste, the Italian General Luigi Cadorna's initial target, until after the Armistice.
With the rest of the mountainous length of the Front being almost everywhere dominated by Austro-Hungarian forces, the Soča (Isonzo) was the only practical area for Italian military operations during the war.
Official source
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