Durrës in the First World War

Durrës, the main port of central Albania, was in 1914 the country’s provisional capital, first of Prince Wilhelm of Wied, then of Essad Pasha Toptani. In the winter of 1915 and 1916 it became the port through which the Allies took off the remnants of the Serbian army, and fleets clashed off its roadstead. From February 1916 to October 1918 it was the supply base of the Austro-Hungarian forces in Albania, and shortly before the end of the war it was bombarded by the warships of four Entente states.

A capital without a state

Prince Wilhelm of Wied, a German aristocrat chosen by the great powers to rule Albania, arrived in Durrës on 7 March 1914. His principality had neither an army nor money. In June Muslim insurgents came right up to the town, and on 15 June the Dutch gendarmerie officer Lodewijk Thomson was killed in the fighting for it. The outbreak of war in Europe cost the prince his backing, and on 3 September 1914 Wied sailed from Durrës aboard an Italian warship.

At the beginning of October the former war minister Essad Pasha Toptani entered the town without a fight and with Serbian help, and formed a government there. His authority soon shrank. In the spring of 1915 the insurgents besieged Durrës from the landward side, and the town was protected mainly by the guns of Italian warships in the bay. The siege was lifted only by the Serbs, who entered Albania at the turn of May and June but halted at the gates of Durrës. Rome, which the Treaty of London promised influence in central Albania, did not want them in the port, where an Italian legation was at work.

Port of the Serbian evacuation

At the end of that year the Serbian army crossed the mountains of Albania to the Adriatic. Durrës, an open roadstead without quays or cranes, became its supply base and evacuation port. The British correspondent Gordon Gordon-Smith saw the camps of some twenty thousand soldiers around the town, men who arrived there as “walking skeletons”. The port lay close to the Austro-Hungarian base at Kotor. On 6 December the cruiser Helgoland sank sailing vessels with supplies here, and by 20 December the Italian Savona Brigade had come overland from Vlorë, occupied the hills above the bay and laid a minefield in front of the port. As early as 29 December, in the First Battle of Durrës, two Austro-Hungarian destroyers ran onto it.

After the conquest of Montenegro Durrës became the main evacuation port, and the last ship with Serbian soldiers sailed from here for Corfu on 9 February 1916. From the north the Austro-Hungarian XIX Corps was approaching. On 23 February it pushed the Italians back onto the peninsula on which the town stands, and on 24 February Essad Pasha left Durrës. The Italians evacuated under fire from enemy batteries, and on the evening of 26 February the last units sailed for Vlorë. During the night of 26–27 February the Austrians entered the empty port. According to the British official history the Italians lost more than 600 killed, wounded and captured, according to Italian accounts about 800.

Under Austro-Hungarian occupation

For more than two and a half years Durrës was the supply base of the Austro-Hungarian forces on the Albanian coast. Vienna treated Albania as an “occupied friendly country”: local administration was left to the Albanians, an Albanian gendarmerie was formed and Albanian schools were opened.

After the armistice with Bulgaria, General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey wanted to stop the Austrians evacuating troops through the Albanian port. On 2 October 1918 a force of Italian, British, American and Australian warships bombarded it. The Austro-Hungarian submarine U-31 torpedoed the British cruiser Weymouth, killing four sailors. According to an archive devoted to the American submarine chasers, it was the only major naval engagement of the war in which the United States Navy took part. Shells also fell on the old town, and Prince Wied’s palace was so badly damaged that it was never rebuilt.

The bombardment hastened the evacuation. The last Austro-Hungarian units sailed on 10 October, and on the morning of 14 October the Italians entered Durrës. In December 1918 a congress of Albanian leaders met here under Italian occupation and formed a provisional government, and the town briefly became the country’s capital again.