TRENTO - Many of today's visitors to the Dolomites are oblivious to the bloody WWI history of these peaceful mountain landscapes. From 1915 to 1917 the hiking paths and ski slopes in Italy's northeast Alps witnessed some of the fiercest fighting and highest casualty rates in the First World War. Before the start of what became known as the Great War the border between Italy and Austria ran through the Dolomites. After war was declared the frontier became the front line with the Italian army dug in to the south and the Austro-Hungarian forces entrenched in the north. The opposing armies fought not only each other but also high-altitude conditions that severely tested their endurance.
On the Marmolada, part of the Sesto Dolomites and the highest mountain in the Dolomite range; in the Tofane mountain group west of Cortina d'Ampezzo; and on the Lagazuoi mountain peaks, the weather faced by the soldiers was just as hostile as the enemy. Bloody battles, advances followed by retreats, and daring operations to conquer summits held by the enemy were interspersed with long pauses enforced by extreme winter cold; at times the whole front was stalled for weeks on end. Exploits on both sides were celebrated as acts of heroism and fuelled tales of glory. Behind the war stories, however, lies a hugely disproportionate lost of life for very modest gains on the field of battle. The armed divisions of both armies were also under the continuous and impartial threat of avalanches. A landslide on December 13, 1919 on the Marmolada's Punto Penia (3,343 metres above sea level) killed 300 soldiers.
Camillo Zadra, superintendent of the Italian Historic Museum of War in Rovereto in the province of Trento, explains to visitors that Austria had been planning an attack on Italy for some time before the war and when fighting broke out the Austro-Hungarians stepped up the pace of fortification. The Tiroler Widerstands Linie (Tyrol Line of Resistance), a continuous line of entrenchment about 250 kilometres long, ran from the Ortles range in the eastern Alps to the Sesto Dolomites. To get supplies to their positions in high altitudes, frantic building projects were started for roads, railroads and cableways. Heavy artillery was hoisted to the top of the Marmolada and the Three Peaks of Lavaredo. The Austro-Hungarian soldiers spent the first months of the war on the Marmolada glacier, exposed to Italian artillery fire and nearly without protection.
By 1916 they started digging long tunnels into the ice, creating a labyrinth that ran for several kilometres to connect their various defensive positions. The City of Ice, as it was called, had storage for war materiel and weapons as well as lodging for hundreds of men. A tactic that both sides developed to conquer enemy positions was to dig underneath them and use mines to blow up the fortified emplacements. Col di Lana, one of the most famous peaks targeted, was heavily damaged by five tonnes of dynamite on April 18, 1919 and the results are still clearly visible today. During the various battles for the Col di Lana summit more than 6,000 Italians and 2,000 Austrians were killed - so many that it became known as the Pass of Blood. The war of mines continued all along the front with attacks from both sides devastating the mountains and taking an enormous toll in human life.
The armies were desperate to control the access routes to the Val Badia in Suedtirol and the east-west Val Pusteria and its railway line, objectives pursued with many acts of bravery. An Alpine platoon occupied a ledge (renamed the Martini Ledge, after the battalion commander) on the Little Lagazuoi, dug tunnels and resisted all attackers for two years, surviving Austrian mines packed with thousands of tonnes of explosives. The main tunnels have been restored and can be visited as part of the open-air Museum of the Great War that covers a wide area on Mount Lagazuoi.
Austrians and Italians, squeezed into long tunnels dug out of the rock or clinging to ice-covered peaks, tried in every possible way to overcome their opponents. For all their bravery, the Italians never succeeding in striking a decisive blow or breaking through to the strategic Austrian railway line on the northern side of the front. The Italian army was routed by Austro-Hungarian troops reinforced with German units at the Battle of Caporetto in October and November 1917 and forced to retreat from a large part of the front. The debacle, which became a byword for a catastrophic defeat, effectively ended the war in the Dolomites. Alpine General Antonio Cantore was a famous Italian casualty and the death of Sepp Innerkofler, one of the most well-known and respected Austrian mountaineers of the time, was greeted with great sadness, even by the Italians. Today the one-time enemies - the Alpini, the elite mountain warfare soldiers of the Italian Army, and the Austrian Kaiserjaeger, the Tyrolean Select Regiment - cooperate in maintaining the war cemeteries and in recovering soldiers' remains that occasionally turn up in the retreating glaciers.
Italy has applied to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) for the Dolomites to be added to its World Heritage List. The 2008 bid was endorsed this May by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the World Heritage Committee's advisory body on natural sites. The committee's final verdict is expected by the end of June. Nine mountain groups, including the Marmolada massif, have been selected as representative of two UNESCO criteria: superlative natural phenomena and outstanding examples representing major stages of earth's history. photo: then premier Romano Prodi at Caporetto Museum in Kobarid, Slovenia in 2007.
