The Corfu incident

On the afternoon of Friday 31 August 1923 a squadron of the Italian navy under Vice Admiral Emilio Solari dropped anchor in the roads off the town of Corfu, capital of the Greek island at the mouth of the Adriatic. An Italian officer handed the Greek prefect a demand for the immediate surrender of the island. Before the authorities could communicate with Athens, the ships opened fire on the old Venetian fortress above the harbour. No troops had been stationed there for a long time; instead it housed refugees from Asia Minor, many of them children and orphans. More than a dozen people were killed and dozens wounded. In the evening several thousand Italian soldiers came ashore, and the Italian flag was raised over the fortress. This was how Benito Mussolini, Prime Minister of Italy for less than a year, responded to the murder of an Italian general on Greek soil. It was the first act of armed aggression by Fascist Italy and the first serious test for the League of Nations, which was supposed to protect small states from the violence of great ones.

Murder on the road to Kakavia

The dispute over the border between Greece and Albania had dragged on since the Balkan Wars. The Greeks claimed southern Albania, which they called Northern Epirus; the Albanians regarded it as their own. The decision was eventually entrusted to the Conference of Ambassadors, the meeting of the great powers’ ambassadors in Paris which since 1920 had overseen the implementation of the peace treaties. It set up a delimitation commission made up of British, French and Italian officers. Its chairman was the Italian general Enrico Tellini, a veteran of the Libyan war who had been wounded and captured at Caporetto and later commanded the Italian forces at Vlorë. The Greeks distrusted him from the outset. They believed that as an Italian he favoured Albania, which Rome regarded as its sphere of influence, and the Greek delegate on the commission, Colonel Botzaris, openly accused him of doing so.

On the morning of 27 August 1923 a car carrying the Italian section of the commission was travelling from Ioannina towards the border crossing at Kakavia. Near the village of Zepi, still on the Greek side of the border, the road was blocked by felled trees. Shots rang out from the undergrowth. Five men were killed: General Tellini, Major Luigi Corti, Lieutenant Mario Bonacini, the driver Remigio Farnetti and the Albanian interpreter Thanas Gheziri. The killers took nothing and vanished. They were never caught, nor was it even established who they were. The Italian press and the Albanian government immediately blamed the Greeks. The Greek government and some observers, among them the Romanian consul in Ioannina, pointed to Albanian bandits who crossed the border in those mountains. The Greek historian Aristotle Kallis considers that a good deal of evidence supports this view, but the circumstances of the crime remain unclear. Because the Italian fleet was ready for action surprisingly quickly, some contemporaries even suspected that Mussolini had inspired the attack himself. This was never proved.

The ultimatum

News of the crime reached Rome on the evening of 27 August. From the first moment Mussolini decided that it was a political murder for which the Greek state was responsible. Greece was then governed by the revolutionary cabinet of Colonel Stylianos Gonatas, formed after the military coup of September 1922 and the execution of six royalist politicians and generals blamed for the defeat in the war with Turkey. Real power lay with the leader of the revolution, Colonel Nikolaos Plastiras. Italy, like the other powers, had not recognised this government, and relations between the two countries had long been poor. On the morning of 28 August Mussolini noted in his own hand that the crime had been committed by “bands paid by Greece” and that in retaliation Italy would occupy Corfu by force.

The plan was already in place. Since the war with Turkey in 1912 Italy had occupied the Dodecanese, an archipelago inhabited mainly by Greeks. In the Venizelos–Tittoni agreement of 1919 it had promised to hand most of the islands to Greece in return for support for Italian claims in Anatolia. When the victories of Mustafa Kemal buried those claims, Mussolini declared the promise void, and the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July 1923, awarded the Dodecanese to Italy. Rome intended to announce the annexation as soon as Turkey and Greece had ratified the treaty. In case of Greek protests, the navy minister, Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, had secretly prepared “coercive measures” over the summer: a naval demonstration in the Aegean and the seizure of Corfu as a pledge. The ships were to be ready by the end of August. Tellini’s murder provided the pretext for putting the plan into action.

On the evening of 29 August the Italian minister in Athens, Giulio Cesare Montagna, handed the foreign minister, Apostolos Alexandris, a note containing seven demands. The Greek government was to apologise at the Italian legation in the most solemn form, hold a requiem mass in the Catholic cathedral in Athens in the presence of the entire cabinet, and render military honours to the bodies of the dead, while the Greek fleet was to salute with a salvo the Italian squadron that would sail into Piraeus. Within five days Greece was to conduct a rigorous inquiry with the participation of the Italian military attaché, Colonel Perrone, sentence the guilty to death and pay an indemnity of 50 million lire. It was given 24 hours to reply. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, wrote that these terms were “far worse than the ultimatum after Sarajevo”.

Greece replied on the evening of 30 August, within the deadline. It denied responsibility for the crime but accepted four of the demands in modified form: the commandant of Piraeus would express the government’s regret, the mass would be held in the presence of members of the cabinet, a detachment of troops would salute the Italian flag in front of the legation, and soldiers would render honours to the bodies as they were carried aboard an Italian ship. It rejected the participation of an Italian officer in the inquiry, a death sentence imposed in advance and a lump-sum indemnity as incompatible with the sovereignty of the state. Instead it offered fair compensation to the victims’ families. Mussolini treated the reply as a rejection of the ultimatum. That same night Solari’s squadron left Taranto for Corfu, while a second group of ships sailed for Leros in the Dodecanese to threaten Athens.

Bombardment and landing

The forces sent to Corfu were huge in relation to the objective: according to Polish accounts, four battleships, including the flagship Conte di Cavour, several cruisers, more than a dozen destroyers, submarines and troop transports. Sources differ on the size of the landing force, giving anything from 5,000 to 10,000 men. The island was defended by about 150 Greek soldiers and gendarmes. The ships appeared off the town at around 3 p.m. The Italian envoy, Captain Antonio Foschini, demanded that the prefect, Petros Evripaios, surrender the island and hoist a white flag. The prefect had been unable to obtain instructions from Athens, because the Italians had cut communications, and refused.

The ships opened fire, reportedly at first with blank rounds, then with live ammunition. The targets were the old fortress above the harbour and the buildings of the new fortress, which housed a police school. Both were sheltering refugees, Greeks and Armenians who had fled Anatolia a year earlier after the defeat of the Greek army and the burning of Smyrna. Italian intelligence knew they were there, although some authors maintain that the commanders on the spot did not. The bombardment lasted around a quarter of an hour, while Italian aircraft circled over the town. The most commonly cited figures are 16 civilians killed and about 30 wounded; other sources speak of about 20 dead and more than 30 wounded. Most were children. There were no soldiers among the victims. A representative of the British organisation Save the Children called the bombardment “inhuman and revolting, wholly unjustified and unnecessary”.

Once the white flag had been raised, the Italians went ashore. The prefect and the Greek officials were arrested and taken aboard ship, and the small garrison withdrew into the interior of the island. At 5 p.m. Montagna informed the government in Athens that Italian troops had occupied Corfu “in a peaceful and temporary capacity”. A communiqué from Mussolini circulated to diplomatic missions gave assurances that Italy was not committing an act of war but merely defending its prestige and demanding due reparation. The next day the neighbouring islets of Paxos and Antipaxos were occupied. Admiral Diego Simonetti was appointed governor of the island. In his speeches Mussolini recalled that Corfu had belonged to the Republic of Venice for four centuries. The Italian postal service opened an office on the island selling Italian stamps overprinted “CORFÙ”. All this looked more like the prelude to annexation than a temporary pledge.

Greece, Geneva and Paris

Martial law was declared in Greece. Plastiras reportedly wanted to put up armed resistance, but caution prevailed: the fleet was withdrawn to a bay near Volos to avoid a clash with the stronger Italian navy. A service for those killed on Corfu was held in the Athens cathedral to the tolling of every bell in the city, followed by demonstrations in the streets. The Italians closed the Strait of Otranto to Greek shipping and detained Greek vessels in their ports, while in Italy the action was greeted with enthusiasm, even in the opposition press. King Victor Emmanuel III, forewarned by Mussolini, approved the dispatch of the fleet and returned to Rome from his summer residence.

On 1 September Greece appealed to the Council of the League of Nations, which happened to be sitting in Geneva at the same time as the Assembly. It was the first time a small state had brought a complaint of aggression against a great power – and a permanent member of the Council at that. The Italian delegate, the former Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, declared that the League was not competent, since national honour was at stake, there was no war, and the matter was already being dealt with by the Conference of Ambassadors, whose agent the murdered general had been. Mussolini let it be known that Italy would sooner leave the League than allow it to interfere. Britain initially sided with Geneva. Curzon wrote that if London did not support the Greek appeal, the League “might as well shut its doors”, and Lord Robert Cecil, the British representative on the Council, was its ardent champion. The France of Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré, however, chose Rome. Since January its troops had been occupying the Ruhr, and Paris feared that if the League sat in judgement on Italy over Corfu, it might one day wish to judge France over the Ruhr. It also needed Mussolini’s support on German reparations. On 1 September Poincaré instructed his representative in Geneva to support a settlement by the Conference of Ambassadors, and the French press abruptly softened its tone towards Italy.

Without France the League could not impose sanctions, and the British Treasury and Admiralty warned that a blockade of Italy would in practice mean war. In the first week of September, therefore, the crisis moved from Geneva to Paris, and the League was left as a mere intermediary. Italian troops remained on Corfu for almost four more weeks.

Significance

The Corfu incident was the first test of the system of collective security on which the post-war order was meant to rest. It went badly. A great power had bombarded a town belonging to a member state of the League, occupied its territory before anyone had been found guilty, and openly denied the League the right to deal with the matter – and the other powers preferred to come to terms with it rather than restrain it. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson later summed it up bitterly: “We silenced the League.”

For Mussolini it was his first appearance on the international stage, and at home it was hailed as a triumph. He learnt that threats and the fait accompli worked, that France could be drawn to his side, and that Britain would not risk war for a small state. The same method – an ultimatum, violence against a weaker country, contempt for Geneva and reliance on divisions among the powers – served him in 1935 in Abyssinia, in 1939 in Albania, and on 28 October 1940, when after yet another ultimatum he attacked Greece itself. On that occasion Italian troops set out against the Greeks from Albania – from the very mountains in which General Tellini had been killed. In the spring of 1941, after Greece’s defeat at the hands of the Germans, the Italians once again marched into Corfu, this time for more than two years. But they had taken the first step on that road in August 1923, when Europe discovered that Fascist Italy had no intention of abiding by the rules on which the post-war peace had been built.