Austrians occupy Durrës

During the night of 26–27 February 1916 Austro-Hungarian troops occupied Durrës, the main port of central Albania. The town was empty. The Italian garrison, which for two months had covered the evacuation of the Serbian army from here, finished embarking on the evening of 26 February, after three days of fighting and shelling. According to the Austrian official history, a company of frontier rifles entered the abandoned port before midnight, and at dawn the commander of one of the brigades, Colonel Farkas, took over the town from the Greek consul. The British chronology of the war and the war diary of The Times record the capture of Durrës under 27 February.

March through the marshes

After the capture of Scutari and San Giovanni di Medua, the Austro-Hungarian XIX Corps of General Ignaz Trollmann moved south along the coast. The main striking force was General Sorsich’s 63rd Infantry Division, made up mostly of units of the territorial reserve, the Landsturm. It advanced across the wintry Albanian lowland, where swollen rivers, lagoons and marshes turned the only road into a strip of mud. Lieutenant-Colonel Krammer’s detachment reached Krujë on 3 February and took the town; according to the Austrian official history the Austrians entered Tirana, abandoned by the Serbs, on 9 February, and on 16 February Kavajë surrendered. The Italian positions in front of Durrës were surrounded on the landward side. The Austro-Hungarian troops were supported by thousands of Albanian volunteers, and the Bulgarians had already reached Elbasan. Supplies, however, reached the Austrians only by a pack track nearly a hundred kilometres long, and the soldiers were underfed.

Dispute in Rome

Durrës was defended by General Giacinto Ferrero’s Italian Savona Brigade, supported by artillery and a battalion of territorial militia. According to Italian studies it numbered about 9,000 men, according to the British official naval history 8,500 men and 36 guns. Since the last Serbs had sailed on 9 February, its presence in the port no longer made much military sense. The Chief of Staff, General Luigi Cadorna, had from the outset regarded the Albanian expedition as a dangerous dispersal of forces and demanded that the garrison be withdrawn. The Foreign Minister, Sidney Sonnino, however, wanted to hold Durrës as a political pledge of future Italian influence in Albania. On 13 February he instructed the consul in Durrës not to hasten the withdrawal and not to give the impression that the Italians were giving up the town without serious resistance.

General Ferrero, warned on 14 February by the fleet commander, Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, decided to evacuate. Transports arrived at Durrës, but the corps commander at Vlorë, General Bertotti, ordered him to hold on, as he did not expect a serious threat. Ferrero had to send the empty ships away; in the open roadstead they were in any case in danger of being wrecked by storms. On 19 February he received reinforcements of two companies from Vlorë. The Austrians set the assault for 21 February, but because of delays in bringing up troops they postponed it by two days.

The assault of 23 February

On the morning of 23 February, after an hour and a half of artillery preparation, the Austro-Hungarian infantry struck the Italian lines on the Erzen river. The heaviest fighting was for the bridgehead at Bazar Sjak on the road from Tirana. Around noon the Austrians took the hill dominating it, and the Italians withdrew across the river and set fire to the bridge. On the left wing Captain Hässler’s Albanian volunteers unexpectedly took the coastal cliff of Sasso Bianco, and Colonel Farkas’s brigade moved along the coastal strip after the retreating Italians. By evening the defenders were holding only the narrow isthmuses between the lagoons that linked the Durrës peninsula with the mainland. According to the Austrian official history, 17 Italian officers and 742 men were taken prisoner on that single day. On 23 February the government in Rome agreed to the evacuation. The next day the Prime Minister, Essad Pasha Toptani, who had ruled in Durrës since 1914, also sailed from the port.

Evacuation under fire

Durrës had no sheltered harbour, and the roadstead was visible from the Austrian positions. On the afternoon of 24 February the Austro-Hungarian batteries unexpectedly opened fire on the quay, and the Italians built shelters of flour sacks by the jetty so that men could continue to be loaded. Embarkation was moved to the nights. In front of the isthmuses the Austrians were held back by the guns of Italian and British warships. According to the British official history, the enemy batteries were engaged by three light cruisers, four destroyers and four auxiliary cruisers, covered further out to sea by two Italian battleships, three light cruisers and two destroyer flotillas. British armed fishing boats, the so-called drifters, closed off the landing place with anti-submarine nets and helped to ferry soldiers to the ships. One of them, Lily Reaich, blew up at Durrës on 26 February with her entire crew.

On the evening of 26 February the last units left the town. A convoy of fourteen steamers reached Vlorë on the morning of 27 February. The Italians had to leave behind all their field artillery and part of their stores, kill several hundred horses and mules that could not be taken along (according to the Austrians nearly a thousand), and abandon about 10,000 old rifles belonging to Essad. The losses are given variously. According to the British official history, of the 8,000 men still ashore on 25 February more than 600 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and 13 guns were lost. Italian studies speak of about 800 killed, wounded and captured. The Austrians stated that they had taken 34 guns, 14,000 rifles, a great deal of ammunition and 17 boats. They put their own losses at 73 killed, including 10 Albanians, about 300 wounded and 50 missing.

After the capture of the port

The Austrian units entered the town in darkness, through a ford shown to them the day before by a herd of buffalo, and on rafts. In the burning port the vanguard first got into a firefight with its own frontier riflemen and, on top of that, was bombed by Austrian aircraft. The Austrian official history writes that the victory made a great impression on the Albanians, while the Italian authorities tried to hide the defeat under the slogan of a “glorious evacuation”.

The capture of Durrës ended the Austro-Hungarian advance through Montenegro and northern Albania. The exhausted troops, hundreds of kilometres of trackless country from their bases, halted on the Shkumbin river, and only Albanian volunteer units pushed further south. The Italians kept Vlorë. Against Cadorna’s wishes the government reinforced the garrison there to three divisions, which in March formed XVI Corps. Durrës remained in Austro-Hungarian hands until October 1918.