The end of the Corfu incident

On 27 September 1923 the Italian flag was lowered over the old fortress in the town of Corfu. Italian warships and a Greek destroyer rendered it honours, and once the Greek flag had been hoisted the Italian flagship saluted it with a salvo. The troops that had landed on the island on 31 August went back aboard their transports. The Greek prefect, arrested by the Italians on the day of the landing, returned to the town, and a crowd of inhabitants carried him shoulder-high to the prefecture, waving British and French flags. Greece, however, paid a high price for this joy. The day before, the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris had awarded Italy the full indemnity demanded by Benito Mussolini: 50 million lire. It justified this by “a certain negligence” on the part of the Greek authorities in pursuing the murderers of General Enrico Tellini, even though neither the perpetrators nor any Greek responsibility for the crime had been established.

The compromise of 8 September

After the occupation of Corfu the dispute was conducted in two forums. In Geneva, Greece demanded that the League of Nations take up the matter, while Italy denied that the League had any competence at all. In Paris, the Conference of Ambassadors was in session; it comprised representatives of Britain, France, Italy and Japan, and the murdered Tellini had been its agent. A way out of the impasse was proposed on 6 September by Lord Robert Cecil. The League Council did not pronounce on its own competence but sent Paris the minutes of its proceedings, which contained a list of proposed terms of settlement based on what the Greeks had already accepted on 30 August and on proposals by the Greek delegate, Nikolaos Politis. Mussolini could claim that he had submitted only to the Conference of Ambassadors, and the Greeks that their case had been heard by the League.

On 7 September the ambassadors deliberated for almost eight hours, and on 8 September they sent Athens their terms. The highest Greek military authorities were to apologise to the representatives of Britain, France and Italy; a requiem mass attended by the government was to be held in the Catholic cathedral in Athens; and the Greek fleet was to fire a 21-gun salute at Piraeus to the Italian squadron, which was to be accompanied by British and French warships. Military honours were to be rendered to the bodies of the victims when they were embarked at Preveza. The investigation into the murder was to be supervised by an international commission of British, French and Italian officers chaired by a Japanese lieutenant colonel, Shibuya, which was to complete its work by 27 September. The amount of compensation was to be set by the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague, but was not to exceed 50 million lire, which Greece was to deposit in a Swiss bank as a guarantee. The British regarded these terms as moderate. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, even wrote that they were more pro-Greek than pro-Italian.

The Greeks accepted the terms on 8–9 September, on the advice of the British minister and of their own diplomats, and on 11 September deposited the money in Switzerland. Mussolini accepted the terms as satisfying Italy’s demands, but stipulated that he would not leave Corfu until Greece had carried them out in full – that is, until the murderers had been caught and punished. In the capitals of the smaller states there was a growing conviction that the Italians had no intention of leaving the island, or wanted to keep it as a bargaining chip in their dispute with Yugoslavia over Fiume.

The Avezzana formula

The decisive moment came on 13 September. Britain threatened that unless Italy set a date for evacuation, it would no longer hold the League Assembly back from an open debate on Corfu. The Italian ambassador in Paris, Romano Avezzana, agreed to withdraw the troops by 27 September, but in return the ambassadors accepted his declaration: unless the commission showed that the Greek government had been guilty of no negligence whatsoever, Italy would receive the full 50 million lire. This ingenious formula reversed the burden of proof. It was Greece that had to prove its innocence. The British ambassador, Lord Crewe, did not warn London what it meant, and the Foreign Office grasped it only two weeks later.

Greece carried out the remaining terms. The apology, the salute to the flags and the mass, set for 19 September, passed off without incident. The commission of inquiry, which had been working in Epirus since 17 September, was divided. The Italian, Colonel Beaud, behaved like a prosecutor; the British officer, Major Harenc, tried to establish the truth; the Frenchman, Colonel Lacombe, tried to reconcile the two; and the Japanese chairman had no influence over anything. Most of the commissioners believed that, despite minor errors, the Greeks had done all they could in difficult, mountainous terrain. Beaud, however, threatened to resign, and the preliminary report of 22 September stated, by way of compromise, that the Greek investigation could be considered negligent in certain respects, even though only one of the commissioners saw this as Greek culpability.

On 25 September Avezzana demanded payment of the full sum, citing his declaration, and threatened that otherwise Italy would regain its freedom of action on Corfu. France backed him without reservation. Curzon considered such a ruling unjust, since Greece was to pay the maximum penalty without proof of guilt, but he did not want the whole responsibility for prolonging the occupation to fall on Britain. On 26 September the ambassadors awarded Italy 50 million lire, bypassing the court in The Hague, and Avezzana announced an immediate evacuation. The note conveying this decision was delivered in Athens on 27 September, the day the Italians left the island. Greece agreed to pay on 29 September. The Swiss bank transferred the money to Rome only with the consent of the Bank of Greece, and the Italian squadron sailed from Corfu on 30 September. According to press reports at the time, Mussolini earmarked part of the sum for the relief of Greek and Armenian refugees – people like those who had been killed when the fortress was shelled.

Echoes in Geneva

On 28 September, after the evacuation, delegates of several smaller states, among them Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland and Persia, criticised Italy’s conduct before the League Assembly to loud applause from the hall. That was as far as it went. The Council referred to a committee of jurists the questions of whether armed “reprisals” without a declaration of war were compatible with the League Covenant and whether a state was responsible for political crimes committed on its territory. Their opinion, delivered in early 1924, was cautious and ambiguous, and the Italians managed to prevent any wider discussion of it. The British minister in Athens, Charles Bentinck, wrote that Greece had “once again been sacrificed to the peace of Europe”, and Harold Nicolson of the Foreign Office summed up: we had silenced the League, fined Greece without proof of guilt and dissolved the commission of inquiry – “and thus a settlement was reached”.

In Greece the decision caused dismay, but its leaders understood that, given Mussolini’s determination, they had come out of the crisis relatively cheaply and had recovered the island. The question of the Dodecanese, where the dispute had essentially begun, receded into the background, and in 1925 Italy incorporated the archipelago. A few months after the crisis Yugoslavia, which had ostentatiously stood by Greece during the dispute, agreed in the Treaty of Rome to the annexation of Fiume by Italy.

Significance

Mussolini presented the end of the crisis as a great victory, and in Italy it was received as such. He had indeed obtained almost everything he had demanded in the ultimatum, except the capture and execution of the murderers. Yet he had had to leave an island he may have wished to keep for good. From the whole affair he came away with a profound contempt for the League. On 5 October he told the French ambassador that pacifism led to war, that the League was “the quintessence of pacifism”, and that he could not understand how a great power could submit to an assembly of small states.

The end of the incident revealed a mechanism that was to be repeated many times in the 1930s. The League of Nations did not confront the aggressor, because the aggressor was a great ally. The powers preferred a settlement reached outside Geneva at the expense of the victim of aggression. France traded principle for support over the Ruhr, and Britain backed off when it realised that defending the League might require the use of force. The historian James Barros, author of a monograph on the crisis, called Corfu the first in a series of concessions by the powers that culminated in the surrender of the Sudetenland to Germany fifteen years later. When Mussolini attacked Ethiopia in 1935, he was already convinced that Geneva would do nothing London and Paris would not accept. This time the League did impose sanctions, but they were so limited that they failed to stop the war. Every revisionist, with Adolf Hitler at their head, drew the same lesson: whoever acts quickly and does not flinch at threats can count on the democracies offering a compromise rather than resistance.