On May 26, General Alfred von Schenk, commander of the XXIII Army Corps which garrisoned the sector, highlighted these difficulties and proposed to counterattack to reconquer the position of Flondar and gain ground west of Monte Ermada.

It was a very concentrated deployment which during the battle was an obstacle for the defense; the Italian troops, crowded into narrow spaces, found it difficult to maneuver and, lacking adequate shelter, found themselves exposed to the violent Austrian attacks The Austrian counteroffensive began on the morning of 3 June 1917 with an artillery bombardment and a diversionary attack against the sector of the Italian XI Army Corps in the Dosso Faiti sector on the northern flank of the 3rd Army; the Austro-Hungarians initially conquered the position of the hill but were then counterattacked and repelled by the Tiber brigade.

[11] The Austro-Hungarian advance endangered the positions of the 4th battalion of the 86th regiment which occupied height 43 and deployed two companies inside the northern tunnel and another two to cover the rolling stock near the railway line.

The command of the Verona brigade gave orders to these units to immediately abandon their positions and fall back to heights 36 and 58 to cover the railway, but at 05.30 when the companies inside the tunnel tried to exit, they were blocked by machine gun fire from the Austrians who they had already arrived at the north entrance.

At the same time, on 4 June the Austro-Hungarian counter-offensive had also developed further north, at the junction point between the 16th and 20th Italian Division; at 05.30 the attackers had overcome the defenses of the 1st battalion of the 246th regiment belonging to the Siracusa brigade, therefore they occupied height 146.

The first confusing news of the attack reached the high command at 11.00 on 4 June and worried the generals; in his war diary Angelo Gatti reported the impressions of the officers and the rumors about the failure of the departments; he feared that a major enemy offensive was underway with the participation of reinforcements from the eastern front.

[16] In the following hours, however, the high command believed that it was only a local counterattack to hinder the Italian offensive plans, even if controversies continued over the alleged insufficient resistance of some units and episodes of poor combativeness.

[17] The high command expressed all its discontent and imposed harsh repressive measures to quell alleged phenomena of refusal of obedience and indiscipline; little attention was paid to the actual difficulties and suffering of the troops; equally ignored were the tactical innovations employed by the Austro-Hungarians that had surprised the defenses.

General Cadorna returned to the Italian Supreme Military Command of Udine, on which the IV Group air depended, in the early afternoon of 5 June and learned the news of the attack, of the reported episodes of failure and surrender of some departments and the serious losses suffered.

[19] On 6 June he sent a letter to Rome to the Prime Minister Paolo Boselli to illustrate his assessments of the facts; he declared himself worried about the number of prisoners captured by the enemy, once again highlighted the three regiments that would defect and blamed the defeat on the spread of anti-war propaganda and "anti-patriotic theories".

The Austro-Hungarians had successfully adopted the innovative tactics first studied by the German general staff to overcome the great difficulties that arose in the first years of the war due to the organization of enormous continuous lines of trenches.

[22] Starting from 24 October 1917, the use of selected Stosstruppen units and infiltration tactics would have allowed the Austro-Germans to inflict the disastrous Battle of Caporetto to the Italian Army, exhausted by the interminable trench warfare, shaken by bloody losses and material and moral suffering.