Italian detachment on Corfu

The British chronology of the war records under 11 February 1916 that an Italian detachment arrived on Corfu. The island had been held for a month by the French, and tens of thousands of soldiers of the Serbian army evacuated from Albania were coming ashore there. The Italian presence was modest, but it caused particular indignation in Greece.

A handful of Carabinieri

Contemporary sources speak of a small detachment. The Athens correspondent of the London weekly “The Near East” wrote in a letter dated 9 February that about ten Italian Carabinieri had arrived on Corfu, escorting Serbian deserters there according to his information. The date of the letter suggests that the Italians may have appeared on the island a few days earlier than the chronology states. According to the correspondent, there was a great outcry in Athens. The government banned the sending of the news abroad and protested vigorously in Rome. There was even a rumour that the Carabinieri had had to withdraw because the islanders had risen against them, but the correspondent thought it hardly credible.

The dispute reached the press of the Central Powers. On 12 February Berlin announced by wireless, citing a Swiss press agency, and the “New York Times” repeated, that Prime Minister Stefanos Skouloudis had protested against the Italian intention of sending troops to Corfu for police duties. He was said to have declared that feeling in Greece was such that the government took no responsibility for what might result from Italy’s step.

Why the Italians

The Greeks had received the French with reluctance, but the Italians with real distrust. The same correspondent explained that the Greeks did not place Italy on the same footing as Britain, France and Russia, which had been the protectors of the Greek state since its beginning. Italy was regarded as a neighbour pursuing an imperial policy and as a natural rival in the Balkans and the Aegean. The Greeks could not forgive her for having occupied the Greek-speaking Dodecanese during the war with Turkey in 1912 and not giving it back. Corfu had belonged to the Republic of Venice for more than four centuries, and Italian could still be heard there. The island also lay right next to southern Albania, over which Italy and Greece had quarrelled for years. In the autumn of 1914 the Greeks had marched into Northern Epirus, and the Italians had occupied Vlorë, which the Treaty of London of 1915 promised them as their own.

The Allies explained that the presence of the Italians on Corfu was merely meant to show the unity of action of all four Entente powers. Nobody in Athens was convinced. People asked why the Italians were not helping at Salonika, on Lesbos or on Lemnos, but turned up precisely where they had long been suspected of having designs of their own. Some Greek politicians believed that the other powers should never have admitted the Italians to the French occupation of the island at all.

Uproar in parliament

The affair echoed in the Greek parliament. According to the correspondent of “The Near East”, writing about it in a letter of 20 February, a deputy from Corfu insulted the Italian nation, its army and its king from the rostrum, and the government did not react with a single word. It afterwards had to soften the consequences and enter in the minutes of the sitting that the president of the chamber had reprimanded the deputy, and Skouloudis had to listen to very sharp reproaches from the Italian government. The incident showed how strained relations between Athens and the Entente were in those weeks. Italy, for her part, had her merits towards the Serbs: it was her ships that carried out between half and two-thirds of the patrols and escorts that covered the transport of the Serbian army across the Adriatic.