Italian invasion of Albania

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italian invasion of Albania lasted only days in April 1939, yet its consequences rippled through the Second World War and reshaped the political map of southeastern Europe. On the 7th of April 1939, General Alfredo Guzzoni led Mussolini's troops in a simultaneous strike on every Albanian port. The Albanian defenders numbered just 15,000 poorly equipped soldiers. Some of those men had been trained by the very Italian officers who now led the assault against them.

  The questions worth asking are not simply military ones. Why did Italy want Albania so badly, and for so long? How did a king who had resisted years of Italian pressure end up fleeing with part of his own central bank's gold reserves? And what does a beloved Belgian comic strip have to do with any of it?

• 2. Italy's Long Ambition

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  Italian naval strategists had coveted the port of Vlorë and the island of Sazan for years before the invasion. Their location at the entrance to the Bay of Vlorë and out to the Adriatic Sea made them prizes of strategic logic. The Italians wanted a military base there that could support operations across the Balkans.

  Before the First World War, both Italy and Austria-Hungary had backed the creation of an independent Albanian state, partly to counter pan-Slavic expansion and partly to limit what they saw as Anglo-French influence exercised through Greece. When war broke out, Italy seized the southern half of Albania to prevent Austria-Hungary from taking it first. That hold collapsed in 1920 after Albanian resistance in the Vlora War and domestic troubles at home forced an Italian withdrawal.

  Mussolini came to power in October 1922 and turned almost immediately back toward Albania. Italy began penetrating the Albanian economy in 1925, when Albania agreed to let Italy exploit its mineral resources. The First Treaty of Tirana followed in 1926 and the Second Treaty of Tirana in 1927, forging a defensive alliance between the two countries. By the late 1920s, most senior officers in the Royal Albanian Army were Italian nationals, Italian loans subsidised the Albanian government, and a third of Albanian imports came from Italy.

  Fascist ideologues also built a cultural case for possession. They commissioned studies claiming racial affinity between Albanians and Italians, rooted in supposed links between protohistoric Italic and Illyrian populations. They pointed to the long reach of the Roman Empire, which had absorbed Albanian territory even before annexing the northern Italian peninsula. Medieval precedent came in the form of Durazzo and the coast, once held by the Kingdom of Naples and the Republic of Venice under what historians call Albania Veneta. Whether or not these arguments persuaded anyone outside Italy, they gave Mussolini's ambitions a veneer of historical inevitability.

• 3. King Zog's Resistance

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  King Zog I was not a passive partner in Italy's slow takeover. In 1931 he openly refused to renew the 1926 Treaty of Tirana, a direct rebuff to Rome. Three years later, in 1934, Albania signed trade agreements with Yugoslavia and Greece, signalling that Zog was willing to diversify his country's relationships. Mussolini responded by sending a fleet of warships to Albanian waters in an act of intimidation. The gesture failed.

  The pressure on Zog intensified in early 1939 as the broader European situation shifted. Nazi Germany annexed Austria, then moved against Czechoslovakia, and Italy found itself the junior partner in the Pact of Steel. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia on the 15th of March 1939 without telling Mussolini in advance, the Italian dictator resolved to act. Albania would be his answer.

  Rome delivered an ultimatum to Tirana on the 25th of March 1939, demanding consent to Italian occupation. Zog refused to accept money in exchange for allowing a full takeover and colonization of his country. Even Italy's own King Victor Emmanuel III objected to the plan, calling it an extremely unnecessary risk for an almost negligible gain. Mussolini pressed forward anyway.

  The Albanian government tried to suppress news of the ultimatum. Radio Tirana kept broadcasting that nothing was happening. But unofficial channels carried the truth, and tension in the capital built quickly. On the 5th of April, the birth of Zog's son was announced by cannon fire. Crowds flooded the streets; the news of the new prince briefly calmed them. That same day an anti-Italian demonstration broke out in Tirana. On the 6th of April, protests spread to Albania's main cities. That afternoon, a hundred Italian aircraft flew over Tirana, Durrës, and Vlorë, dropping leaflets ordering the population to submit. The crowd's response was unambiguous: "Give us arms! We are being sold out! We are being betrayed!"

• 4. The Battle of Durrës

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  At Durrës, the resistance was small, improvised, and fierce. Around 500 Albanians, a mix of gendarmes and armed volunteers, took up positions to hold back the Italian landing. Their commander was Major Abaz Kupi, head of the gendarmerie in the city. Among the defenders was Mujo Ulqinaku, a naval sergeant who commanded the patrol boat Tiranë.

  The Albanian navy at Durrës consisted of four patrol boats, each armed with a single machine gun, and a coastal battery of four 75 mm guns. The defenders were equipped with small arms and three machine guns in addition to this battery. Ulqinaku turned his machine gun on the incoming Italian troops, killing and wounding many, until an artillery shell from an Italian warship killed him. When Italian ships began unloading light tanks, resistance began to crumble. Within five hours, the Italians had taken the city.

  The Italian military reported 25 soldiers killed and 97 wounded at Durrës. Local residents put Italian casualties far higher, at roughly 400 dead. Albanian losses were recorded as 160 killed and several hundred wounded. The gap between the two accounts was never resolved.

  By 1:30 in the afternoon on the first day of the invasion, all Albanian ports were under Italian control. King Zog, his wife Queen Geraldine Apponyi, and their newborn son Leka fled to neighboring Greece, taking a portion of the Albanian central bank's gold reserves with them. Back in Tirana, an angry mob attacked the prisons, freed the prisoners, and sacked the royal residence. Italian troops entered Tirana at 9:30 in the morning on the 8th of April, capturing all government buildings. Columns then pushed on to Shkodër, Fier, and Elbasan. Shkodër surrendered after twelve hours of fighting.

• 5. Aftermath and Empire

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  On the 12th of April, the Albanian parliament voted to depose Zog and offer the Albanian crown to Victor Emmanuel III. The parliament chose Shefqet Vërlaci, identified in the records as Albania's largest landowner, as prime minister. Vërlaci held the position of interim head of state for five days until Victor Emmanuel III formally accepted the crown in a ceremony at the Quirinale palace in Rome. The king then appointed Francesco Jacomoni di San Savino, a former ambassador to Albania, to serve as his representative in the country with the title of Lieutenant-General of the King, functioning in practice as a viceroy.

  Mussolini marked the conquest by formally declaring the creation of the Italian Empire. Victor Emmanuel III took on the additional title of King of the Albanians alongside his existing title of Emperor of Ethiopia, a country Italy had occupied three years before.

  The economic merger followed quickly. A customs union removed most trade restrictions between the two countries and placed the Italian tariff system inside Albania. Expecting economic disruption from the tariff shift, the Italian government agreed to pay Albania 15 million Albanian leks per year in compensation. Italian companies received monopoly rights over Albanian natural resources, and all petroleum passed through Agip, Italy's state petroleum company.

  Albania followed Italy into war against Britain and France on the 10th of June 1940. The country then served as the staging ground for Italy's invasion of Greece in October of that year, though Albanian troops deserted en masse from the front. Greek forces temporarily occupied the southern Albanian cities of Gjirokastër and Korçë. In May 1941, after the Axis Blitzkrieg through the Balkans, Albania was enlarged by the annexation of Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and the Vardar Banovina.

  When Italy left the Axis in September 1943, German forces occupied Albania in a short campaign. By October 1944, with the Red Army advancing and Romania and Bulgaria collapsing, Germany's Army Group E withdrew from the southern Balkans. Albanian Communist forces moved quickly to crush nationalist resistance, and Enver Hoxha, leader of the Albanian Communist Party, became the country's ruler.

• 6. A Comic Strip's Witness

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  The chaos surrounding the Italian annexation reached as far as the drawing table of the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The eighth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, titled King Ottokar's Sceptre, borrowed directly from the events of 1939. The story centers on a fictional Balkan country called Syldavia and the menace posed by its larger neighbor Borduria.

  Hergé pressed his editor to publish the work quickly, wanting to take advantage of the moment. His reasoning was blunt: he felt "Syldavia is Albania." The book appeared in 1939 as the real events it echoed were still unfolding. The invasion was poorly planned and poorly executed, succeeding only because Albanian resistance was so thin. Count Ciano's chief assistant, Filippo Anfuso, put it with sharp sarcasm: "if only the Albanians had possessed a well-armed fire-brigade, they could have driven us into the Adriatic."