Italians reinforce Fiume

On 17 November 1918 units of the Italian Third Army under General Enrico Asinari di San Marzano marched in five columns into Fiume, today’s Rijeka. At the same time sailors and marines landed from the ships. A British chronology of the war records under 17 November the Yugoslav National Council’s protest against the Italian occupation of Fiume, and under 18 November the reinforcement by Italian troops of the naval division that had been lying in the port for two weeks. Both events were parts of a single whole: the Italians took over a city that until then had formally been subject to the authorities of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs.

Until mid-November there was dual power in Fiume. The governor’s palace and the government offices were held by men of the Zagreb National Council, and the city was guarded by the Croatian battalions of Lieutenant Colonel Petar Teslić. The Italian National Council, which on 30 October had proclaimed union with Italy, could count only on the ships in the harbour, whose crews did not go ashore. On 15 November a battalion of Serbian troops from the Volunteer Division, about 700 men under Lieutenant Colonel Vojin Maksimović, arrived from Zagreb. In response the Italian government authorised a landing, and Admiral Umberto Cagni sent to Fiume a destroyer and a cruiser with a battalion of infantry and carabinieri, as well as a ship with two battalions of marines. According to Croatian historians, the Italian commander persuaded Maksimović to leave the city, promising that Italian troops would not enter it and that order would be kept by French units. The Serbs withdrew to nearby Kraljevica, and immediately afterwards the Italians marched into Fiume. Teslić’s units were disarmed and the civil authority of the National Council was removed. Exactly how many troops came with San Marzano is not known. Accounts give from about 13,000 to 16,000 soldiers, among them Sardinian grenadiers and cavalry.

The Italians invoked the armistice with Austria-Hungary, which allowed the Allies to occupy strategic points. The 1915 Treaty of London, however, had not assigned Fiume to them, and the inter-Allied naval commission for the Adriatic had allotted the Kvarner Gulf to the British zone. For this reason small detachments of the other Allies were also stationed in the city alongside the Italians. The French occupied part of the port, a battalion of British infantry arrived around 25 November, and at the end of the month, on 26 November according to the British chronology, a battalion of the American 332nd Infantry Regiment. This regiment had fought on the Italian front in 1918 and remained under Italian command after the armistice. The Italian forces, however, outnumbered the others many times over, and by the spring of 1919 some 20,000 of them were stationed in Fiume.

Under the protection of the Italian army the city was governed by the Italian National Council, headed by the physician Antonio Grossich. The Croats of Fiume and neighbouring Sušak were excluded from power, and in December an Italian census, which the Croats regarded as conducted under duress, showed the city to be 62 per cent Italian. The loss of Fiume and the Italian advances on the Dalmatian coast hastened the Zagreb National Council’s decision on a rapid union with Serbia. The dispute over the city moved to the Paris Peace Conference, and in September 1919 Fiume was seized by the volunteers of Gabriele D’Annunzio.