The White War — When the Dolomites Became a Battlefield
# The White War — When the Dolomites Became a Battlefield
By Luxury Dolomites | Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
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In the summer of 1915, an Austrian soldier named Sepp Innerkofler stood at the summit of the Paternkofel — a rocky peak above the Tre Cime di Lavaredo — and looked down at an Italian position two hundred metres below. Innerkofler was no ordinary soldier. He was one of the most celebrated alpine guides in the Dolomites, a man who had climbed every significant peak in the range and whose knowledge of the mountains was unmatched. He had been guiding climbers to summits for decades. Now he was trying to find a way to drop rocks on them.
He never made it. An Italian rifle shot found him on the summit. He fell where he stood.
Sepp Innerkofler's death is, in miniature, the story of the war that was fought in the Dolomites between 1915 and 1918 — a conflict so strange, so brutal, and so unlike anything that had come before that historians still struggle to find adequate words for it. The Italians called it the Guerra Bianca — the White War. It was fought on glaciers, on vertical rock faces, in tunnels carved through living ice, at altitudes where the cold alone could kill a man in his sleep.
It was one of the most extraordinary military campaigns in human history. And almost nobody has heard of it.
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## How a Mountain Became a Front Line
When Italy entered the First World War in May 1915 — switching sides from its pre-war alliance with Austria and Germany to join Britain, France, and Russia — it inherited a front line of extraordinary geographic difficulty. The border between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire ran directly through the heart of the Dolomites, across passes and ridges that professional mountaineers had only recently learned to navigate with lightweight equipment.
Both sides quickly understood that whoever controlled the high ground controlled the valleys below. And so began a race to occupy every peak, every ridge, every rocky outcropping that could provide a military advantage. Within months, soldiers who had never climbed anything more challenging than a flight of stairs were being sent up vertical rock faces with rifles on their backs and artillery shells in their packs.
The logistics were nightmarish. Getting food, water, ammunition, and reinforcements to positions at 3,000 metres required the construction of roads that were, by any reasonable definition, impossible. The Austrians built a road to their position on the Lagazuoi by carving it directly into the cliff face — a feat of engineering so audacious that sections of it still exist today, used by hikers who have no idea what they are walking on.
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## The City of Ice
The most extraordinary engineering achievement of the entire campaign was hidden from view entirely.
In the winter of 1916, Austrian engineers began excavating tunnels inside the Marmolada glacier — the highest peak in the Dolomites, at 3,343 metres. What started as a practical solution to the problem of keeping soldiers alive in extreme cold became, over the following two years, something that defies easy description.
By 1917, the Austrian position on the Marmolada had become an underground city — the Città di Ghiaccio, the City of Ice. It comprised fourteen kilometres of tunnels, illuminated by electric light powered by generators. It contained dormitories for over a thousand soldiers, a kitchen capable of feeding them all, a bakery, a post office, a telephone exchange, a chapel, a hospital ward, and — most astonishingly — a theatre, where Austrian soldiers performed plays and concerts for their comrades at an altitude of 3,000 metres, surrounded by a living glacier in the middle of a world war.
The glacier was not merely their shelter. It was also their enemy. The ice moved constantly — expanding, contracting, shifting — and the tunnels required continuous maintenance to prevent collapse. Several soldiers were killed by falling ice during their construction. And the glacier kept no secrets forever.
Today, as the Marmolada glacier retreats due to climate change at a rate that alarms glaciologists worldwide, it is slowly returning what it has kept for over a century. Every summer, items emerge from the melting ice: rifles, ammunition crates, personal letters, uniforms, military equipment — and, with increasing frequency, the remains of soldiers who were buried by the glacier a hundred years ago and preserved, perfectly intact, in its cold embrace.
In the summer of 2022, a section of the glacier collapsed, killing eleven hikers. In the aftermath, the bodies of at least six soldiers from the Great War were found in the ice below — Austrian and Italian, lying side by side, separated by nothing but a century of ice.
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## The Tunnels of the Lagazuoi
If the Marmolada was the most extraordinary fixed position of the war, the Lagazuoi was the site of its most extraordinary tactical innovation.
The Lagazuoi is a massive, sheer-sided mountain that dominates the entrance to the Falzarego Pass. In 1915, Austrian forces occupied its summit and Italian forces occupied the slopes below — a situation that strongly favoured the Austrians, who could simply drop things on the Italians with considerable effect.
The Italian response was to go underground. Their engineers began tunnelling directly through the mountain, with the goal of planting explosives beneath the Austrian positions and destroying them from below. The Austrians, discovering what was happening, began tunnelling in response — creating a subterranean war within the mountain itself, where teams of miners worked in darkness and silence, listening for the sounds of their enemies digging on the other side of the rock.
The Italians detonated their first mine in June 1917, destroying an Austrian position and its garrison in a single catastrophic explosion. The Austrians retaliated. The mountain was blown apart, piece by piece, over the following months. Today, the crater left by the largest explosion is still visible from the valley below — a raw wound in the rock that shows no sign of healing a hundred years later.
The tunnel systems of the Lagazuoi are now open to visitors, and walking through them — even in summer, even with electric lighting — is one of the most viscerally affecting experiences available anywhere in the Alps. The tunnels are narrow, cold, and dark. The rock above you was shattered by explosions. The men who carved these passages through solid limestone with hand tools, working in conditions of extreme cold and altitude, were doing something that required a kind of courage that is almost impossible to imagine.
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## The Forgotten Soldiers
One of the strangest aspects of the White War is its human geography. The front line ran through communities that had existed in these mountains for centuries — Ladin villages, Austrian farming hamlets, Italian mountain towns. The people who lived in the valleys were not merely bystanders. They were caught in the middle of a conflict between two empires whose politics were entirely beyond their understanding or control.
Many of the soldiers on both sides of the line were themselves from the mountains. Austrian alpine units were recruited from the Tyrol and the Trentino — men whose fathers and grandfathers had climbed these peaks for pleasure, who knew the terrain with an intimacy that no military training could replicate. Some of them were fighting alongside mountains they had climbed as children, defending positions they had once visited as tourists.
The Italian Alpini — the elite mountain infantry corps that still exists today — were drawn from throughout the Alpine regions, and their casualties were catastrophic. In the course of the war, the Alpini lost over 40,000 men on the Dolomite front alone — killed by enemy action, by avalanches, by frostbite, by altitude sickness, by the simple, grinding attrition of surviving at extreme altitude in conditions that would have defeated a peacetime expedition.
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## Walking the Front Today
The traces of the White War are everywhere in the Dolomites, if you know where to look.
The Alta Via hiking routes that traverse the range follow, in many places, the supply lines of the Great War. The refuges where hikers rest today were often built on the foundations of military positions. The scars on the rock faces — the places where the stone is still raw and broken — are the marks of explosions that happened a century ago.
At the Museo della Grande Guerra on the Lagazuoi, the artefacts of the conflict are displayed with remarkable sensitivity — not as trophies or curiosities, but as the belongings of human beings who found themselves in an impossible situation and did what they could to survive it. The leather boots, the tin cups, the family photographs, the handwritten letters — these objects make the history immediate and personal in a way that no book can quite replicate.
For those who want a deeper engagement with this history, Luxury Dolomites can arrange private guided walks along the original front lines, with access to tunnel systems and fortifications that are not open to the general public. These experiences are led by historians with specialist knowledge of the campaign — guides who can tell you not just what happened here, but what it felt like to be present in these mountains a hundred years ago, when the most beautiful landscape in Europe became, for three extraordinary years, a theatre of war.
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Contact us at info@luxurydolomites.com to arrange a private historical experience in the Dolomites.
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Tags: White War Dolomites, Grande Guerra, WWI Dolomites, Lagazuoi tunnels, Marmolada glacier, City of Ice, Alpini, alpine warfare, Dolomites history, luxury travel Italy