On 30 May 1848, in the First Italian War of Independence, General Eusebio Bava's Piedmontese corps held off Field Marshal Radetzky's Austrians at Goito, on the Mincio near Mantua, and at nightfall the Austrians drew back. The same day the besieged fortress of Peschiera surrendered. In 1431 Joan of Arc was burned at Rouen.
Battle of Goito
30 May 1848 · 178 years ago
A war for Lombardy
Piedmont-Sardinia went to war with Austria in March 1848. After an attack on the outskirts of Verona at Santa Lucia on 6 May, the Piedmontese waited for the fortress of Peschiera, which they were besieging, to fall.1
Reinforced by Nugent's corps, Radetzky set out to relieve Peschiera. Rather than strike the Piedmontese positions head on, he marched his army out of Verona on the night of 27 May in three columns to Mantua, so as to cross the Mincio there and come at the Piedmontese from the south.2
Curtatone and Montanara
On 29 May the Austrians came out of Mantua and broke the Tuscan division under De Laugier at Curtatone and Montanara. Bava meanwhile concentrated almost his whole corps at Goito, on the Piedmontese side of the Mincio, while the King held the heights of Volta behind him.3
The battle
Bava had about 20,000 men at Goito, more than the Austrians expected to find there. On 30 May the Austrians set off only around midday. According to the Enciclopedia Italiana and Fabris, Radetzky did not mean to fight a serious action that day; an Austrian veteran's memoir of 1852, catalogued under Karl von Schönhals, calls that claim very risky, Goito being a point of the highest importance (our translation).4
On the Piedmontese side, a reconnaissance at three o'clock found only enemy vedettes, and the King set off back to his headquarters. At half past three the outposts were attacked and the guns opened fire. The Piedmontese artillery outgunned the Austrian batteries and stopped Benedek's advance guard on the Austrian right.5
To Benedek's left the Wohlgemuth brigade drove back the Cuneo brigade on the Piedmontese right. Bava brought up his second line, the Guards and the Aosta brigade, with the Duke of Savoy, the future Victor Emmanuel II, at the head of the Guards. Fabris and Bava both credit the Aosta brigade with throwing the enemy back, Bava singling out Major Mollard's battalion. Accounts differ over the Strassoldo brigade further left: the Italian ones say it never came up to help Wohlgemuth, the Austrian ones that it attacked, was thrown back and got no reinforcements. D'Aspre's II Corps, marching further west, never came into the fight.6
As evening came on, Bava sent in the Nizza cavalry against the retreating enemy. Radetzky ordered the fight broken off, and a violent storm and days of heavy rain followed.7
Two names for one fight
The Austrian accounts call Goito a “Gefecht”, an engagement, not a battle. The veteran puts it bluntly: “The Piedmontese gave this action the proud name of the Battle of Goito and claimed the victory. It was nothing more than an engagement undertaken somewhat rashly on our side and broken off without a decision. We fought with 12,000 against 20,000, when we ought to have appeared on the field with 30,000” (our translation). Captain F. J. Grüll, whose history of the campaign draws on the Austrian field records, counts about 10,000 Austrians in the fight against 22,000, and blames a reserve corps left idle at Rivalta and brigades sent in one after another.8
Counting the cost
The Austrian I Corps lost about 68 killed, some 330 wounded and over 220 missing or captured. The Piedmontese losses were lighter, about 300 killed and wounded.9
Charles Albert himself was bruised by a shot, and the Duke of Savoy was wounded. On the Austrian side Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, at the head of a division, was wounded in the arm.10
Peschiera, and a victory not exploited
While the battle was being fought, the garrison of Peschiera, its food gone, asked for terms. The Duke of Genoa signed the capitulation at Cavalcaselle that day with Major Ettingshausen, sent by the fortress commander, Baron Rath; the Piedmontese entered the fortress the next morning, and the garrison marched out with the honors of war.11
The news reached Charles Albert on the battlefield that afternoon. Bava writes: “After the cavalry charge I went to tell His Majesty that the enemy was in retreat, pursued by our troops; and His Majesty in return told me of the surrender of Peschiera.” The army, he adds, met the double news with “festive cries repeated a hundred times of: Long live the King! Long live Italy!” (our translation). Bava also praised the artillery, to which he owed the victory in part, and the Enciclopedia Italiana says it was highly praised.12
Radetzky, his main object lost, withdrew across the Mincio by way of Mantua. The Piedmontese did not follow up, and Bava soon had to answer the charge of failing to exploit the victory. On 25 July Radetzky routed them at Custoza, and an armistice followed on 9 August.13
Also on this day
First Battle of Chruślina
30 May 1863 · 163 years ago
During the January Uprising, Polish insurgents under Marcin Borelowski and Zygmunt Koskowski were attacked by Russian troops near the village of Chruślina. They beat off the attacks and inflicted heavier losses, but facing far larger numbers they withdrew toward Garwolin.
1431: At Rouen, Joan of Arc was condemned as a relapsed heretic and burned at the stake. The trial record dates the final sentence to the last day but one of May, and the Parisian diary known as the Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris dates her death to 30 May, the eve of Corpus Christi. Her life is told in Joan of Arc: the Maid of Orléans.14
