Many people are eagerly watching the calendar, awaiting the arrival of Black Friday on November to take advantage of tempting deals, even if it means braving the crowds to do so. But, while each year we laugh at the videos circulating of these scuffles, the truth is that the White Friday was much worse. Unlike today’s shopping frenzy, this event didn’t happen in stores but during World War I: in the Dolomites of the Alps, where a series of avalanches, some deliberately triggered by cannon fire, took the lives of thousands of soldiers.

In Italy, they call it Santa Lucia Nera (Black St. Lucia) due to the day on which it occurred, December 13, which was not actually a Friday but a Wednesday (the English-speaking press changed it for unknown reasons). It was 1916, and Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies were stationed on a mountain front stretching from the town of Stelvio on the Swiss border to the northern shores of Lake Garda, and from the east of the Adige River to the Sette Comuni plateau in Veneto, through the Pasubio massif between the provinces of Vicenza and Trento. This rugged battlefield added meteorological hazards to the inherent dangers of war.

During the fall and winter of 1916, rains arrived as early as mid-October, and nearly a hundred snowfalls followed in the Val di Sole (a valley in northwestern Trento surrounded by various mountain ranges and alpine chains, such as Orttles-Cevale, Brenta, and Adamello-Presanella), with temperatures dropping to minus forty degrees Celsius in places like Vermiglio. By December, a high-pressure ridge over western Russia and a low-pressure system in Western Europe caused what is known as thermohaline circulation, which would have devastating effects.

White Friday 1916
The Italian Front, 1915-1917. Credit: CortoFrancese / Wikimedia Commons

This circulation pattern typically causes heavy precipitation in the southern Alps and unusually high temperatures in the Mediterranean region, as it raises sea temperatures and concentrates water evaporation in the southern part of the range. That winter, snowfall was three times the maximum levels recorded in subsequent decades, between 1931 and 1960.

After nine straight days of snowfall, the accumulated layer far exceeded normal levels and was critically unstable. In just the twenty-four hours before December 13, two meters of snow fell at one thousand meters of altitude.

The snow layers grew even more massive, dense, and heavy… and then warm, humid winds from the Mediterranean delivered the final blow: the warm currents and rain weakened the foundations of these snow masses, and the hot air melted them. The next step was inevitable: dozens of avalanches occurred in various locations, burying an uncertain number of soldiers, estimated between two thousand and ten thousand. They began in Val Chiese (Chiese Valley, in Trento), where between December 11 and 18, six avalanches killed 120 Italian soldiers from the 41st Reggimiento di Fanteria.

White Friday 1916
Column of Italian soldiers in the Alps, 1916. Credit: Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine / Wikimedia Commons

In fact, deadly avalanches in the Dolomites were a constant, and that year several had already occurred earlier; some as early as March and April (in Malga Caldea, Fuchiade, Tabià Palazze-Malga Ciapela, Val Cismon-Val Vecchia, Monte Verena, Caserma Campellio, etc.); another in November (Forcella Plumbs). More followed White Friday: on December 30 at Uomo Basso, on December 31 at Monte Cukla-Rombon, on May 25, 1918, at Canalone Lagoscuro… to name only the largest.

The deadliest day was the 13th. Around 6:00 p.m., a wall of snow slid down the Vallon Tofana, burying another hundred Italians from the 3rd Battery of the 1st Reggimiento di Artiglieria da Montagna. Three and a half hours later, it was the turn of thirty-three soldiers from the 694th Century quartered in Pieve di Livinallongo del Col di Lana. At midnight, the 7th Reggimiento Alpini barracks were also hit by snow. This situation repeated itself in some twenty locations along the Dolomites, each suffering deadly casualties.

In some places, the death toll was in the dozens, such as in Valle Andraz sul Col di Lana (forty dead), San Valentino di Monte Baldo (thirty-five), Monte Novegno (thirty-three), Val Pruche (thirty), Malga Ces-Colbricon in San Martino di Castrozza (twenty-six) or Val Travenanzes sulle Tofane (twenty). In others, the numbers were smaller, and in some, the exact number has never been established, such as in Val del Gatto, where it is estimated that about thirty lives were lost. But not only the Italians suffered from this disastrous day.

White Friday 1916
Interior of one of the Austro-Hungarian tunnels of the Eisstadt in Marmolada. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

The Austro-Hungarian army had built a barracks on the summit of Gran Poz della Marmolada in August, at about 3,350 meters of altitude, intended to house the 1st Battalion of the Imperial Rifle Regiment of the Kaiserlich-königliche Gebirgstruppe (Imperial Mountain Troops).

The mission of those three hundred and twenty-one men—two hundred and twenty-nine Austro-Hungarian riflemen and one hundred and two Bosnians from a support column—was to defend control over the highest mountain in the Dolomites (3,343 meters), which at the time served as a natural border with Italy and was therefore contested.

While the Italians were camped on the rocky cliffs of the southern face, the Austro-Hungarians were positioned on the northern cliffs, sheltered from direct mortar fire thanks to the refuge of the so-called Eisstadt (City of Ice), ten kilometers of tunnels inside the mountain excavated ad hoc. However, the new headquarters, named after the unit it was designated for, the Kaiserschützen (Imperial Riflemen), consisted of classic wooden barracks in the open air, designed to improve the troops’ accommodation conditions.

White Friday 1916
Austro-Hungarian soldiers in a cable car in the Alps, 1918. Credit: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

This was ironic, as that situation made them vulnerable not to the enemy but to nature: the snow accumulated on the summit was already twelve meters thick, and warm wind currents began to melt it. As one officer put it, the mountains in winter are more dangerous than the Italians. To make matters worse, their superiors did not rise to the occasion.

The position’s commander, Rudolf Schmid, realized the danger and wrote to his superior, Field Marshal Lieutenant Ludwig Goiginger of the 60th Infantry Division, requesting permission to evacuate due to the weather conditions.

But the request was denied because the superiors were safe in the valleys, from where they could not adequately grasp the snowfall on the summit or the instability of the accumulated layer. Schmid’s request could not be repeated; the weather worsened again, and a new storm cut telephone communications, blocking the cable cars that handled supply tasks and isolating all the advanced posts. Thus, tragedy struck; the worst fears of that officer became reality on December 13 at five-thirty in the morning.

White Friday 1916
Remains of an Austro-Hungarian position on Marmolada destroyed by the avalanche. Credit: Felsigel / Wikimedia Commons

At that hour, with the entire company asleep except for the sentries, the layer of accumulated snow and ice on the summit (about one million cubic meters, two hundred thousand tons) gave way and, with a sinister roar, crashed onto the barracks. The roofs and walls of the barracks could not withstand the tremendous impact and collapsed like paper, crushing the soldiers in their bunks. At least two hundred and seventy of them perished or were buried alive beneath the white tsunami. Only forty bodies could be recovered, leaving the rest in situ; Schmid and his assistant were not among them, as they survived with minor injuries.

The disaster might have been smaller if another request, this one from Lieutenant Leo Handl, to allow the troops to leave the barracks and settle in the tunnels had been heeded; it was also denied because temperatures inside ranged from zero to five degrees below zero. Meanwhile, on the other side of the mountain, in the Antermoia valley, the Italian barracks at Punta Serauta were also engulfed by a snow slide that wiped out the dozen soldiers inside. As we mentioned earlier, these were not isolated incidents, and throughout the day, similar tragic events occurred.

According to documentary information that is not very specific, soldiers helped nature in this deadly mission: seeing how easily the snow collapsed, both sides fired cannon shots at the areas of highest accumulation to trigger avalanches onto enemy positions. Many of these were small posts whose defenders vanished forever without their bodies being recoverable, or worse yet, without anyone realizing. At least two thousand soldiers and several dozen civilians perished in total, although some estimate the number of victims as high as ten thousand when adding other cases plus subsequent mud and rock slides. Today, due to the retreat of the glaciers, human remains from that episode occasionally resurface.

White Friday 1916
An Italian soldier standing guard in front of his compatriots’ graves at Col di Lana, facing the Marmolada glacier. Credit: Italian Army Photographers 1915-1918 / Italian Army / Ministry of Defense of Italy / Wikimedia Commons

On the centenary of White Friday, the University of Bern in Switzerland conducted a study that concluded that December 13, 1916, marked one of the worst meteorological disasters in European history and one of the deadliest avalanche events globally, alongside the one that occurred in Peru on May 31, 1970 (when the Ancash earthquake triggered a mudslide that swept through the city of Yungay and ten nearby villages, causing thirty thousand deaths), the lahar—volcanic mudflow—in the Colombian town of Armero in 1985, and the landslides in Haiyuan (China, 1920) and Khait (Tajikistan, 1949).

As an epilogue, it should be noted that on December 5, 2020—almost exactly one hundred and four years later—similar weather conditions to those on the day of Santa Lucia Nera triggered another massive snow slide on Marmolada. The Pian dei Fiacconi alpine shelter, located at an altitude of 2,626 meters and not far from Gran Poz, was buried; fortunately, it was closed for renovation, so there were no casualties.

More recently, on July 3, 2022, a gigantic serac (large block of fragmented glacier ice) collapsed, generating an avalanche eighty meters wide and twenty-five meters high on the slopes of Marmolada; eleven people died, and eight others were injured. The mountains always impose their own law.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on November 13, 2024: Viernes Blanco, las avalanchas que sepultaron a miles de soldados en los Alpes durante la Primera Guerra Mundial

SOURCES

Mark Thompson, The White War. Life and death on the Italian Front 1915-1919

VVAA, Diciembre 1916: Il mese della Morte Bianca

Giuseppe Ciabatti, Storie di montagna. Le valanghe di Santa Lucia

Silvia Musi, Grandi valanhe: le vittime

Wikipedia, Viernes Blanco

  • Share on:

Discover more from LBV Magazine English Edition

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.

Follow LBV Magazine on Google News