Battle of Vittorio Veneto
1918 battle
The Battle of Vittorio Veneto was fought from 24 October to 4 November 1918 near Vittorio Veneto on the Italian Front during World War I. After having defeated Austro-Hungarian troops during the Second Battle of the Piave River and recognizing the dire internal situation of Austria-Hungary caused by the course of the war and the blockade of the Adriatic at sea, the Royal Italian Army launched a major offensive: the Italian victory marked the end of the war on the Italian Front and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, contributing to the end of the First World War just one week later. The battle led to the capture of over 5,000 artillery pieces and 448,000 Austro-Hungarian troops, including Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croatians, Poles, Romanians, Ukrainians, and also a small number of Austro-Hungarian Italians.
Name
When the battle was fought in November 1918, the nearby city was called simply Vittorio, named in 1866 for Vittorio Emanuele II, monarch from 1861 of the newly created Kingdom of Italy. The engagement, the last major battle in the war (1915–1918) between Italy and Austria-Hungary, was generally referred to as the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, i.e. 'Vittorio in the Veneto region'. The city's name was officially changed to Vittorio Veneto in July 1923, about nine months after Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party had ascended to power.
Background
During the Battle of Caporetto, from 24 October to 9 November 1917, the Italian Army suffered over 300,000 casualties (dead, injured and captured) and was forced to withdraw, causing the replacement of the Italian Supreme Commander Luigi Cadorna with General Armando Diaz. Diaz reorganized the troops, blocked the enemy advance by implementing defense in depth and mobile reserves, and stabilized the front line around the Piave River.
In June 1918, a large Austro-Hungarian offensive, aimed at breaking the Piave River defensive line and delivering a decisive blow to the Italian Army, was launched. The Austro-Hungarian Army tried on one side to force the Tonale Pass and enter Lombardy, and on the other side to make two converging thrusts into central Venetia, the first one southeastward from the Trentino, and the second one southwestward across the lower Piave.
“Battle of Vittorio Veneto” enters the record as 1918 battle. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Battle, Vittorio and Veneto can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q662961. The Library of Congress control number is sh85144034. Authority coordinates are 45.956, 12.347. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918, 1866, 1861 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Vittorio Veneto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.