| 1848: War in Italy, Finale
Three Days of Custoza
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2009
Following the destruction of the pope's divisions in mid-June, Radetzky's Austrian army spent the remainder of the month and early July fortifying Verona and gathering supplies and reinforcements. By mid-July Radetzky had available the 12,000 men of Welden's corps and a new III Corps in Tirol. Two other brigades went to bolster Mantova's garrison.
Small clashes continued, as the Piedmontese probed Radetzky's positions along the Adige and threatened a landing on the shores of Lake Garda using steamships seized at Peschiera. The sharpest skirmish came on 8 July, when a battalion of Vienna volunteer light infantry fought a series of small patrol actions.
Carlo Alberto decided to blockade Mantova in hopes of repeating the successful capture of Peschiera. But operations against Mantova, a much larger fortress than Peschiera, required far more troops and the king deployed most of his army there, with only a weak screen left in front of Radetzky.
"Never was a position so ill chosen or so contrary to military tactics as ours in July 1848," wrote Enrico Della Rocca, chief of staff to the Piedmontese crown prince. "From the extreme right to the extreme left our line covered thirty-one miles."
Radetzky quickly took advantage, setting 23 July as the date for his offensive. Thurn's III Corps would attack southward from its positions near Trent a day early to draw Piedmontese attention. The main army would then launch a frontal attack from Verona, with the IV Corps in Mantova ready to pin the Piedmontese in front of the fortress and hopefully cut off the enemy retreat. Thurn's leading columns, guided by volunteers from the Tirolean Landesschützen, actually moved out on the night of the 21st and serious fighting broke out around Lasize and Cola near the eastern shore of Lake Garda.
The main attack began with a heavy bombardment by rockets, cannon and howitzers. The weight of the Austrian assault fell on the Piedmontese 3rd Division, which had stationed the small regular armies of Tuscany (two regiments which had returned to the front earlier in the month), Parma and Modena (one weak regiment from each) in the front lines.
Carlo Alberto had placed his headquarters at Marmirolo near Mantova, to direct operations against the fortress. De Sonnaz, the Piedmontese corps commander facing Radetzky, brought up another division and launched a counter-attack which threatened to turn Radetzky's left flank near Somma Campagna. This would have placed De Sonnaz's troops between Radetzky's army and its base at Verona.
Faced with this threat, Radetzky ordered a change of front for the 24th. His I Corps would push toward the Mincio, the II Corps would shift to attack Somma Campagna and Custoza from the north while the III Corps drove the Piedmontese out of their positions north of Custoza (from which they could threaten the main army's rear) and into Peschiera.
The Austrians spent most the 24th executing Radetzky's new plan, with serious fighting around Somma Campagna and at Ponti on the western side of the Mincio just south of Peschiera. Simbschen's brigade at Somma Campagna lost 1,160 prisoners, most of them deserters. But by early morning on the 25th all the Austrian troops were in place. On the Austrian side about 33,000 men in four corps (the staff history admits to 44,000 but this is not upheld by Radetzky's strength returns) faced 22,000 Piedmontese, who planned a general offensive of their own to follow up their success at Somma Campagna the day before.
Eusebio Bava led the Piedmontese in three main columns, driving toward Valeggio, Salionze and Monzambano on the Mincio in an effort to trap Radetzky's I Corps between them and the river. Another Piedmontese division on the opposite bank, led by De Sonnaz, was to complete the encirclement by sealing the bridges from the opposite bank. Refusing to cooperate with Bava, De Sonnaz kept his troops in place for three hours, allowing the Austrians to send most of their I Corps against Bava's left flank, the Aosta Brigade. A second, more forceful order from the chief of staff, Salasco, arrived about 11 a.m.
"The general read the letter, shrugged his shoulders, and said to me, 'It's impossible,' " the messenger, staff captain Luigi Torelli, reported later. "Then he added, 'My troops are unable to move due to fatigue.' "
The main Austrian effort came from the I Corps pushing down the road from Castelnovo through Oliosi and on to Valeggio. Wohlgemuth's brigade captured the bridge at Monzambano and pushed on to drive Bava out of Valeggio. Here the Austrians stood on both banks of the Mincio guarding Valeggio's stone bridge, with De Sonnaz to the west and Bava to the east. Only De Sonnaz's refusal to move his troops saved Wohlgemuth from annihilation.
In the same situation 18 years later the Austrian forces threatening the bridge did not capture the crossings at all but were instead promptly counterattacked, trapped and annihilated by Giuseppe Salvator Pianell's division. But De Sonnaz was no Pianell, and Wohlgemuth turned his full attention on Bava's troops.
In the center the Piedmontese held, but the Austrians launched a series of frenzied bayonet attacks on the Custoza heights, backed by artillery barrages.
"From the furious and repeated attacks of the enemy," Della Rocca wrote, "the duke (Victor Emanuel) and I concluded that he intended, at any cost, to carry our position and thus cut our army in two."
Della Rocca and his duke had made exactly the conclusion for which Radetzky hoped. The wily old marshal was not after half the Piedmontese army; the furious attacks at Custoza were designed to hold the Piedmontese divisions there in place while the Austrian right wing rolled up the Piedmontese along the banks of the Mincio and trapped Carlo Alberto's entire force. By evening, the Piedmontese had fallen back into Villafranca in preparation for a general retreat. At this point Carlo Alberto, apparently not trusting his civilian contractors in a retreat (and with good reason, as most had already fled in panic), issued the army's remaining rations to the troops. Only the bridges at Volta and Goito, south of Valeggio, still remained available as escape routes for the now-exhausted Piedmontese — and De Sonnaz promptly compounded the problem by abandoning Volta.
An infuriated Carlo Alberto ordered De Sonnaz to personally lead an attack to eject the Austrians from Volta and re-capture the bridge, but the Austrians held out in house-to-house fighting.
The Austrians also experienced some failings of their own, as Radetzky's IV Corps failed to advance from Mantova and seize the bridge at Goito, completing the entrapment of the Piedmontese. Exhausted and short of food, the Piedmontese army would have had little choice but to capitulate. But Della Rocca noted only one half-hearted Austrian cavalry attack on his retreating division. Just a squadron and a half of the Novara Lancers served to protect the right-most Piedmontese division's retreat into Villafranca.
The Piedmontese fell back toward Milan, after rejecting an offered armistice. An attempt to make a stand along the Adda River failed when Austrian engineers quickly threw a bridge over the river and Radetzky's men poured across to outflank the defenders. The Piedmontese abandoned the river line, with Carlo Alberto determining to make a stand at Milan. There, his army found little aid in the city that had only months before been the heart of the Italian revolution. No food or supplies had been gathered by the Milanese nationalists, and nothing had been done to prepare the city's defenses.
"The city was silent and deserted," Della Rocca reported. "The few inhabitants who remained were cold, disappointed, and reproachful."
The Austrians arrived on the morning of 4 August, and the king threw himself at them at the head of his guard regiment, the Sardinia Grenadiers, hoping, according to Della Rocca, that a bullet would find him. Unable to find death in battle, Carlo Alberto decided to spare the great city, offering to surrender Milan to Radetzky in exchange for allowing the Piedmontese army to retire to its own territory. News of the arrangement finally provoked a reaction from the city's people.
"The whole city rose," Della Rocca wrote. "A howling mob assembled round the Greppi Palace, hurling abuse at the king and his officers."
Enraged Milanese fired at the king when he showed himself on a balcony to speak with them, and members of the mob potted the palace windows throughout the night. Escorted by his army, Carlo Alberto left the city and the war. On 9 August the Piedmontese chief of staff, Salasco, signed a six-week armistice with his Austrian counterpart, Hess, agreeing to evacuate all troops from Austrian territory and from Parma and Modena.
The August armistice did not end all of the fighting in Italy, but did close out the most important campaign. Revolutionary Venice held out for just over a year, finally surrendering on 22 August 1849. Rome rose in 1849 as well, but Giuseppe Garibaldi's rebel forces fell before a combined French, Spanish, Austrian and Neapolitan attack. Piedmont renewed hostilities in March, 1849, well before the Armata Sarda could recover from its 1848 defeats. Radetzky defeated the Piedmontese in a three-day campaign, crushing them in a major battle at Novara. The Piedmontese army collapsed and Carlo Alberto went into exile.
The 1848 campaign, the blueprint for 1866, depended on Radetzky's crafty strategy. As in 1866, superior Austrian artillery made a significant difference as did the hard-fighting Austrian infantry. Much of Radetzky's method is simply the application of sound Napoleonic theory, laying down an Austrian example for the commanders of 1866 to follow.
Radetzky managed his army extremely well in the battles of May through July 1848, something the bumbling bibliophile Albrecht did much less well 18 years later. Though criticized by observers at the time and by later historians for his slow rate of march, the slow pace kept the troops fresh enough to fight repeated battles over several days, as at Custoza. But by placing only part of his forces in the front lines, Radetzky exposed them to defeat in detail before the reserves could be committed. This almost happened at Novara in 1849.
Both Italian and Austrian strategies in 1866 depended heavily on the example of 1848. The manuevers at Custoza were very similar. Cialdini's campaign plan of 1866 is almost a copy of Durando's drive on Vicenza in 1848. In 1848, Piedmontese soldiers fought heroically only to be let down by high-level incompetence; the 1866 battle saw similar results. Details differ somewhat on the Austrian side: Grenzer regiments, so important in 1848, no longer served in a front-line role in 1866.
Known more today as the inspiration for a Strauss march, Radetzky's performance during the 1848 crisis clearly entitles him to his pre-eminent place in the Vienna Arsenal's pantheon of Austrian army commanders. Eighteen years later, his protégé Albrecht would try to re-create Radetzky's success.
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