"...quite famously, the Emperor, especially as Crown Prince, had been amongst the greatest skeptics of a general war on Austria's part, and had even been a dovish skeptic of the intervention in Serbia in 1911-13. He may have been politically reactionary and a centralizing conservative, but he was not an adventurist, that much was clear.
Nonetheless, war had arrived thanks (in Ferdinand's view) to the militancy of the French and he was not going to let the war go to waste. Uniquely amongst the belligerents, Austria had few if any territorial goals to attain or achieve; Vienna had little interest in absorbing more troublesome Italians and if there were to be any border revisions with Germany, they would be minor ones at best. While some planners had dreamed of detonating the Reich into smithereens and re-imposing Austrian influence over Bavaria and the other Catholic South German states, that went out the window with the Hofburg Affair. Rather, the goal from the get-go was to end any German auspices of unilateral intervention and political interference in Central Europe and the Balkans for good, and cripple Italy economically and militarily to end any threats to Istria and Trent. As such, the military strategy for Austria was simple - hold Germany in the Bohemian passes and upon the Inn River, and then massively attack Italy across the Isonzo River and southeastwards from Trent. The goal, and hope, was to draw the Italian Army in, defeat it in the vicinity of Udine with overwhelming numbers, and then cut off its route of retreat across the Piave by seizing the high grounds of the Asiago Plateau and the massif of Monte Grappa immediately to its south, from which that valley could be controlled.
Ferdinand was skeptical that this plan would be as easy as Dankl and others suggested it would be, as aware as anyone else of Italy's rapid rearmament starting in early 1917 over concerns of France's growing technological and naval edge, but approved the plan. Because in the end, as the first weeks of the war proved, the goal for Austria was not a military victory so much as a unifying political one; tens of thousands of volunteers rallied to the call across both halves of the Empire, with the Honved as eager to march to glory as anyone else. Magyarism seemed snuffed out, at least in that instant, and quite suddenly the culmination of the crisis begun in the days after his succession seemed to require the war to continue and, most importantly, the war to be won.
As such, on March 15, 1919, the Austrian elite Alpenkorps launched a massive attack from their primary base at Trent, using sparing air cover to harass Italian defenders, with the main thrust aimed at Asiago and a smaller mobile mountaineer division attacking from their high ground towards the plateau of Feltre and Santa Giustina, from which the headwaters of the Piave flowed. The next day, March 16, came the main attack, with over a million men, split roughly evenly from the two halves of the Habsburg Empire, crossing the symbolic border of the Isonzo (Suca in Slovene) into the teeth of Italy's prepared forward defenses, which while stoutly-built were underequipped in terms of modern guns; they were aided by an artillery barrage as well as naval and aerial bombardment beyond anything modern European armies had yet experienced. The goal was to take Udine within five days, and to seize Treviso within twenty, and after the success of overrunning a number of Italian fortresses in the first day of the war, Vienna was optimistic that the knockout against the Italians would, indeed, work.
Austria would not just sit on the defensive in the Bohemian passes mowing down Germans as they attacked into chokepoints - they had a war to win..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor
(Up next - the Austrian offensive of mid-March from the Italian perspective)
