The Italian invasion of Albania

The Italian invasion of Albania was a short campaign in which Fascist Italy, in less than a week, stripped the small Balkan kingdom across the Adriatic of its independence. At dawn on Good Friday, 7 April 1939, some 22,000 Italian soldiers under General Alfredo Guzzoni, supported by the fleet and several hundred aircraft, landed simultaneously at four Albanian ports. They met serious resistance only at Durrës, where a handful of gendarmes, sailors and volunteers held the quays for a few hours. King Zog, who had become the father of an heir to the throne two days earlier, left for Greece with his family that same day. On the morning of 8 April the Italians entered Tirana, and on 12 April an assembly convened under their supervision offered the crown of Albania to the King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III. Albania, a member of the League of Nations, became part of the Italian empire. The operation was poorly prepared and chaotically executed, and it succeeded only because the Albanian state hardly defended itself. In the eyes of Benito Mussolini, however, it evened the score with Hitler, who had seized Prague three weeks earlier, and it gave Italy a springboard from which it attacked Greece eighteen months later.

Name and dates

In Italy the operation was called “Oltremare Tirana” (O.M.T. for short, “Overseas – Tirana”), and the invasion force was named the O.M.T. Expeditionary Corps. In Albania it is referred to as the Italian invasion or the aggression of 7 April (Pushtimi italian i Shqipërisë, agresioni fashist i 7 prillit). Polish literature uses the terms “the invasion of Albania”, “the Italian aggression against Albania” and “the occupation of Albania by Italy”.

The campaign is taken to have begun on 7 April 1939, the day of the landings, and to have ended on 12 April, the day on which the constituent assembly in Tirana deposed Zog and voted for union with Italy. This is how most Italian and Albanian studies date it. Some accounts give 7–10 April, counting only the main operations, while some studies hold that the Italians did not occupy the last places in the north-east of the country, such as Kukës, until around 14 April. The new state of affairs was formally sealed when Victor Emmanuel III accepted the Albanian crown in Rome on 16 April.

Background

From the moment of its creation in 1912, Albania was a strategic concern for Italy. The port of Vlorë and the islet of Sazan at the entrance to the Bay of Vlorë, together with Otranto on the opposite shore, controlled the entrance to the Adriatic through the Strait of Otranto, less than a hundred kilometres wide. During the Great War the Italians occupied Vlorë and much of the country, but in 1920, after fighting Albanian volunteer units, they were forced to withdraw, keeping only Sazan. Nationalists, and later the Fascists, regarded this as a humiliation. When the Italian general Enrico Tellini was murdered on the Albanian–Greek border in August 1923, Mussolini responded with the bombardment and occupation of Corfu.

For the next fifteen years or so, however, Rome’s policy towards Albania was primarily economic. Ahmed Zogu, who came to power in December 1924 with Yugoslav help, soon exchanged Belgrade for the more generous Rome. In 1925 the Italians obtained mining concessions and founded Albania’s bank of issue, granting loans in return. Two treaties concluded in Tirana in 1926 and 1927 – one of friendship and security, the other a twenty-year defensive alliance – turned Albania into a de facto protectorate. The army was trained by Italian instructors, and Italian money paid for the building of roads and the port of Durrës and for a large part of the budget. In 1928 Zogu proclaimed himself king as Zog I. He tried to resist complete dependence: in 1931 he did not renew the first Treaty of Tirana, and in 1932–1934 he rejected demands for a customs union and for Italian to be taught in all schools, dismissed some of the Italian advisers and concluded trade agreements with Yugoslavia and Greece. In June 1934 Mussolini replied with a naval demonstration off Durrës. Albania did not join the Balkan Entente and within a few years had returned to the Italian orbit.

The leading advocate of a solution by force was the Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law. After a visit to Tirana in April 1937 and a trip to Zog’s wedding to the Hungarian countess Geraldine Apponyi in April 1938, he concluded that the king would never accept a protectorate and that Albania simply had to be taken. On 2 May 1938 he presented Mussolini with a memorandum setting out three options: continuing to bind the country economically, partitioning Albania with Yugoslavia, or annexation through a personal union. The Duce gave him the green light for the following spring. Ciano’s men bought influence among Albanian politicians and tribal chiefs, and according to Italian documents cited by the American historian Bernd Fischer, Rome even considered killing the king and stirring up unrest that would justify an intervention. In early 1939 Zog announced that a plot against his life had been uncovered and expelled an Italian agent who had been organising pro-Fascist squads. Ciano tried to agree a partition of Albania with the Yugoslav prime minister, Milan Stojadinović, but in February 1939 the regent, Prince Paul, dismissed him, and his successor, Dragiša Cvetković, was not well disposed towards Italy. Ciano then noted that without Stojadinović Albania would have to be taken without Yugoslavia and, if need be, against it.

The ultimatum

The immediate trigger proved to be the German occupation of the Czech lands on 15 March 1939. Hitler had not warned his ally, who after the Anschluss of Austria and Munich felt more and more like the junior partner of the Axis. Ciano argued to his father-in-law that the Italians needed “compensation” and that Albania was it. On 23 March Mussolini ordered preparations to be speeded up. According to Ciano, King Victor Emmanuel III was against the venture and thought the risk out of all proportion to the gain, since Albania was in Italian hands anyway. At the end of the month, with the Spanish Civil War drawing to a close and Berlin having made it clear that it would not interfere, Mussolini made up his mind.

On 25 March the Italian minister in Tirana, Francesco Jacomoni, presented the king with a draft agreement that meant the end of Albanian independence: the right of Italy to send in troops and occupy ports, airfields and roads, a customs union, Italian advisers in the ministries and equal rights for Italian settlers. Zog played for time, citing the opposition of his ministers. Since the army was not ready, on 31 March Ciano put forward a toned-down set of demands, which still included the right to occupy ports and roads “in the event of a threat”. On 2 April the king replied with a counter-proposal accepting some of the points and rejecting those that infringed sovereignty. Rome ignored it. In the first days of April Italian citizens began to leave Albania, which Ciano presented as proof that their lives were in danger. On 5 April Queen Geraldine gave birth to a son, Leka. That day and the next, demonstrations took place in Tirana and other towns: crowds demanded weapons and shouted that the country was being sold. On 6 April Zog received a telegram from Mussolini stating that the final deadline would expire at noon, and in the afternoon Italian aircraft flew over Tirana, Durrës and Vlorë, dropping leaflets urging the Albanians not to resist. In the evening the king and parliament rejected the demands while asking for further negotiations. Zog appealed to the Western powers and to the Balkan Entente. No one answered.

Forces

Military preparations began at the last minute. The Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, learned of the operation on 29 March, General Guzzoni on 31 March, and on 3 April the Army Chief of Staff, General Alberto Pariani, issued a secret operational order. The air force received its instructions two days before the landings. The original plan envisaged the use of around 50,000 men. In the end larger forces were concentrated in Apulia, but only about 22,000 soldiers took part in the invasion itself, in three waves, with 125 L3 tankettes, several dozen guns and hundreds of lorries and motorcycles. They were supported by between 400 and 600 aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica, depending on the source.

The first wave was divided into four columns. Colonel Arturo Scattini was to land at Shëngjin (Italian: San Giovanni di Medua) and advance on Shkodër. The strongest column, about 4,700 men under General Giovanni Messe, Guzzoni’s deputy – grenadiers, Bersaglieri, a battalion of the 47th Infantry Regiment and two tankette battalions – was to take Durrës and march on Tirana from there. Colonel Giovanni Bernardi was to land at Vlorë, and Colonel Carasi at Sarandë, whence he would move on Gjirokastër. The landing was covered by the Regia Marina under Admiral Arturo Riccardi: two battleships, Giulio Cesare and Conte di Cavour, several cruisers, a dozen or more destroyers and torpedo boats, and transports, including tankers and the seaplane carrier Giuseppe Miraglia, converted into landing ships. Off Durrës a squadron of four heavy cruisers (Zara, Pola, Fiume and Gorizia) was led by Admiral Ettore Sportiello.

On paper the Albanian army numbered some 13,000–15,000 officers and men, but according to Italian estimates only about 8,000 were fit for combat. It had several dozen old guns and a few armoured cars and tankettes, while its navy consisted of four small patrol boats, whose guns had been removed and set up on shore as a coastal battery. In addition there were some 3,000 gendarmes, trained for years by British officers. The army had been trained by Italians, many of whom, as Fischer writes, worked to undermine its will to fight rather than to prepare it. Zog’s plan was to abandon the ports and towns and resist in the mountains, but no one carried it out. There was neither a high command nor any orders. The mountain tribes, who might have fought, had been disarmed by Zog himself. The mobilisation of reserves announced a few days earlier collapsed, and some senior officers and ministers, including the Minister of the Interior, Musa Juka (PL), left the country even before the landings.

Course of events: 7 April

The warships appeared off Durrës as early as the afternoon of 6 April. The transports carrying Messe’s column arrived on the morning of 7 April, half an hour late because of fog. Sources differ on the times; according to most of them the landing began between 4.30 and 5.30 a.m. The town was lit up and it seemed that no one intended to defend it. A boat carrying Italian officers sent ahead was nevertheless refused passage, shots were fired, and when the infantry and sailors began to come ashore onto the quays in close order, rifle and machine-gun fire was opened on them from the harbour buildings.

The defence was commanded by the commandant of the gendarmerie in Durrës, Major Abaz Kupi. According to Albanian sources he had some 360 border guards, infantrymen and sappers and 140 sailors, as well as volunteers with rifles. Altogether this amounted to at most about 500 men with three machine guns, supported by a coastal battery of four 75 mm guns. The first two Italian attempts were beaten off with noticeable losses. At one of the machine guns in the centre of the defensive line fought a naval sergeant, Mujo Ulqinaku, commander of the patrol boat Tiranë, a native of Ulcinj in Montenegro. According to Albanian tradition he fought on alone for the last hour before being killed by a shell from an Italian warship. He was posthumously proclaimed a People’s Hero, and his monument stands today in front of the walls of the fortress in Durrës. A third assault, preceded by fire from destroyers that came right up to the harbour, broke the defence. The unloading of the tankettes was delayed by chaos in the port: for many hours the Giuseppe Miraglia could not berth, because its place at the quay had been taken by a ship carrying troops that were supposed to land last. By around 9 a.m. Durrës was in Italian hands, although isolated shots were still fired for several hours. Kupi escaped to avoid capture.

In the other ports resistance was weaker. At Vlorë the air force dispersed an Albanian force, and the only Italian dead there were lost in an ambush on motorcyclists outside the town and in fighting near the village of Bestrovë. At Shëngjin there was a skirmish with about forty Albanians in which a few men were killed on each side. At Sarandë one Italian officer was killed. By around 1.30 p.m. all the Albanian ports had been taken.

That same day the royal family left the country. Queen Geraldine and her two-day-old son left Tirana for the south at about 4 a.m., an hour and a half before the landings. Zog stayed on for several hours, broadcast an appeal on the radio to fight to the last man – which few Albanians heard, as wireless sets were a rarity – and tried to negotiate with Guzzoni through a delegation. He then followed his wife to Greece (some sources say that he did not cross the border until 8 April). He took with him a considerable part of the gold reserves of the National Bank of Albania, which had been gathered beforehand, and a large retinue of courtiers, ministers and officers followed him. When news of his flight spread through Tirana, a crowd opened the prisons and looted the royal residence. Albania did not declare war on Italy, and the king left no one in the country who could take his place. Albanian historians, even those sympathetic to Zog, regard this as political suicide that deprived Albania of a government-in-exile.

Course of events: 8–12 April

The column from Durrës, which came under fire on the way, halted its march for the night. On the morning of 8 April, between 9.30 and 10.30 a.m. according to various sources, the Italians entered Tirana unopposed. The Albanian garrison of the capital laid down its arms in the courtyard of the Italian legation. The streets and ministries were empty. Ciano flew into Tirana that day. Contrary to the propaganda, he was greeted not by crowds but by General Guzzoni, the air force commander General Giuseppe Valle and a few Albanian dignitaries ready to collaborate. In the afternoon the columns moved on: towards Elbasan, which the tanks reached that same evening, towards Fier and towards Shkodër. Near Shkodër soldiers of the Tarabosh battalion and volunteers put up several hours of resistance. The town capitulated on the evening of 8 April or, according to some sources, on 9 April, and during the fighting a crowd freed some two hundred inmates from the local prison. On 9 April the column from Sarandë took Gjirokastër. Over the following days the Italians occupied Korçë, the borders with Yugoslavia and Greece and the rest of the country. The second and third waves, with artillery, cavalry and the 23rd Infantry Division “Murge”, landed on 8 and 9 April at ports already in Italian hands.

At the same time Ciano was building a new political order. A provisional administrative committee was set up in Tirana under Xhafer Ypi, a former prime minister and until then head of the royal household, who on 10 April thanked Mussolini on the radio for saving the country from disaster. On 12 April a constituent assembly met in Tirana, made up largely of men paid by the Italians or dependent on them. It proclaimed Zog deposed, abolished the constitution of 1928 and resolved to offer the crown of Albania to Victor Emmanuel III and his descendants in a personal union with Italy. The new prime minister was Shefqet Vërlaci, the largest landowner in the country, who had once been Zog’s prospective father-in-law and had long been the king’s enemy. Albanian collaborators argued that there had been no occupation at all, merely a change of head of state.

Losses

Figures for the losses vary considerably. The Italian command announced that 12 Italians had been killed and 81 wounded in the whole operation (the Stefani agency spoke of 11 killed and 53 wounded on the first day, and the minister Jacomoni of 11 killed and 43 wounded at Durrës). Internal Italian reports, however, recorded 25 killed and 97 wounded at Durrës alone. The Albanians claimed that up to 400 Italians had died at Durrës, and Bernd Fischer writes of about 200 killed at Durrës and about 700 killed and wounded in the campaign as a whole; these higher figures have not been confirmed. On the Albanian side, according to Albanian figures, 51 people were killed at Durrës and about 160 in the whole campaign, with several hundred wounded.

Personal union and reactions

On 13 April the Grand Council of Fascism approved the union, and on 16 April, at the Quirinal, an Albanian delegation headed by Vërlaci offered the crown to the king, who took the title “King of Italy and Albania, Emperor of Ethiopia”. On 23 April Jacomoni became the king’s lieutenant-general (luogotenente generale) in Tirana. In mid-April Albania left the League of Nations, from which Italy had withdrawn in 1937; in June its foreign ministry was merged into the Italian one, and the Albanian army was placed under Italian command. The Albanian Fascist Party was founded, the customs union opened the country to Italian capital, and Italian companies took over the monopoly of oil and other raw materials.

The League of Nations did not take up the matter. When the Albanian chargé d’affaires in Paris, on Zog’s instructions, demanded that its bodies be convened, the Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, ruled that the appeal did not come from the Albanian government. Germany expressed “full understanding” for Italian interests. Yugoslavia and Greece, alarmed, did not protest; Turkey did not recognise the annexation. Neville Chamberlain’s government did not renounce the Anglo-Italian agreement of April 1938, which committed both parties to maintaining the status quo in the Mediterranean, as it did not want to push Mussolini into Hitler’s arms. In London and Paris, however, it was concluded that the Duce’s word could not be relied upon, and Athens feared that Corfu would be next. On 13 April Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier announced guarantees of the independence of Greece and Romania, supplementing the guarantee to Poland of 31 March.

Significance

The occupation of Albania was the last act of the spring of 1939, during which the Axis powers destroyed what was left of the Munich order. For Mussolini it was above all a matter of prestige: it was meant to show the Italians that the alliance with Hitler brought them gains, and to show London and Paris that Rome was not merely Berlin’s satellite. Propaganda presented the campaign as a masterpiece of organisation and speed. In reality it exposed the state of the army: units assembled ad hoc, ships with too deep a draught for the Albanian ports, soldiers assigned to motorcycle companies who could not ride, signallers who did not know Morse code, and barrels of diesel oil instead of petrol sent to the base at Durrës. Badoglio and Pariani pointed out these failings in their reports to Mussolini. Ciano wrote in his diary that the number of divisions had been artificially multiplied, the depots were empty and the artillery was obsolete, and that in military matters “a great deal of bluff” had been made. His aide Filippo Anfuso later summed it up by remarking that if the Albanians had had even a well-armed fire brigade, they would have driven the Italians back into the Adriatic.

The invasion hastened the rapprochement between Rome and Berlin, which had been put on hold for the duration of the Albanian affair. On 22 May 1939 Ciano and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed the Pact of Steel. At the same time, in British and French eyes, it ended the period of attempts to detach Mussolini from Hitler, and it led to British guarantees covering the whole of eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Aegean.

Albania became a base for Italian expansion in the Balkans. When Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Italy declared “non-belligerence” and did not enter the war until 10 June 1940, dragging Albania with it. On 28 October 1940 Italian troops advanced from Albania into Greece, and in the Greco-Italian War the Greeks drove them back deep into Albania, taking Korçë and Gjirokastër. It was the Germans who extricated their ally from this predicament in the Balkan campaign in the spring of 1941, when Kosovo and part of western Macedonia were joined to Albania, creating the so-called Greater Albania. After Italy’s capitulation in September 1943 the country was occupied by the Wehrmacht. The resistance was divided: Abaz Kupi led the royalist Legaliteti movement, but the war was won by the Communists of Enver Hoxha, who seized power in the autumn of 1944 for almost half a century.

Zog never returned to his country. From Greece he made his way through Turkey, Romania, Poland and Scandinavia to France and, after its defeat in 1940, to England; he later lived in Egypt and then again in France, where he died in 1961. The personal union with Italy fell apart with Italy’s capitulation in 1943. The campaign of April 1939, whose dead were counted in dozens, was one of the last assaults on an independent European state before the outbreak of a war that would count its dead in millions.