Entente notifies Greece of the transfer of the Serbs to Corfu

The British chronology of the war records under 10 January 1916 that the Entente governments notified Greece of their intention to ship the Serbian army to the island of Corfu. The note was delivered in Athens by the ministers of the Allied powers and received by the prime minister and foreign minister, Stefanos Skouloudis. According to a dispatch of the French Havas agency, the Allies declared that they considered it an obvious duty of humanity to transport part of the Serbian army as quickly as possible to a place close to the Albanian coast, “in order to save these heroic soldiers from starvation and destruction”. Corfu was chosen because it offered suitable sanitary conditions and the possibility of supply. The Allies said they did not suppose that Greece would object to receiving the Serbs, her allies, who were to stay on the island only briefly. They added that they had no intention of infringing Greek sovereignty.

An army on the Albanian coast

The remnants of the Serbian army had by then been waiting on the Albanian coast for several weeks. After the retreat across the mountains they had gathered around Scutari, where the government and the high command had settled, and a smaller part in the area of Durrës. There were neither supplies nor ships there, and soldiers were dying of hunger, exhaustion and disease. The Italians, who held Vlorë and had occupied Durrës, believed they would be unable to supply a whole army across the Adriatic in the open Albanian ports, exposed to raids by the Austro-Hungarian fleet from Kotor. The British correspondent Gordon Gordon-Smith wrote that Rome also did not want to reinforce its troops in Albania, where they might come into contact with the Germans, with whom Italy was not yet at war. The British and French at first intended to feed and rebuild the Serbian army on the spot, but in the end it was decided that it had to be taken out of Albania.

The Allies agreed that the rebuilding of the Serbian army would be undertaken by France, then governed by the cabinet of Aristide Briand. On 31 December 1915 the French general Piarron de Mondésir arrived in Albania. According to the British official history of naval operations, he wanted to embark about 143,000 men at San Giovanni di Medua, Durrës and Vlorë and ship them to French Tunisia. The Serbs did not want to sail to Africa. The British Rear-Admiral Ernest Troubridge, who since 1915 had headed the British naval mission in Serbia and enjoyed the Serbs’ confidence, warned for his part that Medua, shallow and close to the enemy, was unsuitable for embarking a whole army. Serbian historians also stress the role of Russia: the regent Alexander appealed for rescue to Tsar Nicholas II, who interceded for the Serbs with the Allies. On 7 January 1916 the first 16,000 Serbian soldiers set off south from Scutari to Durrës, and Corfu was chosen as the destination instead of Tunisia.

Why Corfu

Gordon-Smith reckoned that Corsica and Algeria had also been considered. Corfu, however, had many advantages. It lay a few hours’ sailing from the Albanian ports, so the same ships could shuttle back and forth, and a long voyage of transports exposed to submarine attack was avoided. The climate resembled that of Serbia, and from the island the rebuilt army could later easily be shipped to the Salonika front. The obstacle was Greek neutrality, and a particularly strong one. When in 1864 Britain handed the Ionian Islands over to Greece, in the Treaty of London Britain, France and Russia, with the consent of Austria and Prussia, proclaimed the “perpetual neutrality” of Corfu and the neighbouring island of Paxos, and Greece undertook to respect it.

The Allies counted on Greece not refusing hospitality to Serbia, with which she was formally bound by the alliance of 1913. True, in October 1915 Athens had refused the Serbs military help, but neither side had renounced the treaty. Haste was forced by events in Montenegro, where Austria-Hungary had just begun its conquest of the country and was threatening Scutari. The note of 10 January was therefore not a request for consent but a notification. The very next day the French landed on Corfu. The Greek government later complained that they had done so before its reply arrived. The Allies retorted that they had expected no reply to a notification.