The Charge at Pozzuolo del Friuli, 1917: Genova Cavalleria (XX0082)

Pozzuolo del Friuli, 1917 — A Cavalry Charge to Buy Time

On 29 and 30 October 1917 the Italian army was in full retreat from the Isonzo after the breakthrough at Caporetto. Hundreds of thousands of men and their transport were converging on the bridges of the Tagliamento, and if the advancing Austro-German forces reached those crossings first, the retreat would become a rout. At Pozzuolo del Friuli, two cavalry regiments were ordered to hold the line long enough for the columns to get across.

Why cavalry, in 1917

By the fourth year of the war mounted cavalry had been made obsolete on static fronts by machine guns and wire. But the retreat from Caporetto was not a static front: it was open country, collapsing command, and a need to move small forces quickly to points that were about to be lost. Horses could still do that faster than anything else available. Pozzuolo is one of the very few occasions in the First World War when European cavalry was used as cavalry, for the reason cavalry existed.

The Genova Cavalleria

The Genova Cavalleria, raised in 1683, dismounted to fight in the village itself and charged mounted where the ground allowed. The regiment fought through the afternoon and into the following morning against forces that heavily outnumbered it, in a village that was being fought for house by house.

A battle measured in hours, not ground

The objective was never to hold Pozzuolo. It was to make the enemy stop, deploy and fight for it — and so to buy time that was being measured in hours at the Tagliamento bridges. By that measure the action succeeded: the delay imposed was enough for the retreating columns to complete their crossing. The village was lost, as it was always going to be.

Cost

Both regiments engaged at Pozzuolo — the Genova Cavalleria and the Lancieri di Novara — suffered severe losses in men and horses, and effectively ceased to exist as formations for the remainder of the campaign. Rearguard actions of this kind are among the most expensive things an army can ask of a unit, precisely because success is defined by delay rather than by survival.

After the Tagliamento

The retreat did not end at the Tagliamento; the Italian army fell back further, to the Piave, where the front finally stabilised in November 1917. The army that reformed on that river was reorganised and re-equipped over the following year, and it was that force which broke the Austro-Hungarian line at Vittorio Veneto a year later.