Trieste in the First World War

Trieste, Austria-Hungary’s main port on the Adriatic, was the chief goal of Italy’s war. Italy entered the war in May 1915 in return for the promise of Trentino and Trieste, and for more than two years its armies pushed towards the city on the Isonzo and on the Karst plateau, but never reached it. The war cut the port off from seaborne trade. On 3 November 1918 the Italians took Trieste from the sea, without firing a shot.

A port of many nations

In 1719 Trieste was made a free city and grew into the most important port of the Habsburg monarchy, drawing newcomers from the whole eastern coast of the Adriatic. It had shipyards: in the 1890s the coastal defence battleships Wien and Budapest were built in Trieste. On 2 July 1914 the coffins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were carried through the city’s streets from the port to the railway station.

Around 1900, 77.4 per cent of Trieste’s 160,000 inhabitants gave Italian as their everyday language, 16.3 per cent Slovene and 5.9 per cent German. The number of Slovenes, however, grew fast: in 1910 southern Slavs made up 25.9 per cent of the inhabitants, and more of them lived in Trieste than in Ljubljana. The Italian middle class, which ran the town hall, felt threatened, and more and more Italians dreamed of joining the city to the Kingdom of Italy. In 1882 this movement, irredentism, gained its martyr in Trieste, Guglielmo Oberdan. National disputes were fought even over a university: in 1913, after long discussions, its foundation was agreed, but because of the outbreak of war it was never established.

Italy’s goal

When Italy declared neutrality on 3 August 1914, many Italian circles demanded the annexation of Trentino and Trieste. In April 1915 the Entente promised Italy, in the Treaty of London, Trieste, Gorizia and the whole of Istria.

The chief of staff of the Italian army, General Luigi Cadorna, planned his main attack across the Isonzo towards Trieste. On 9 June 1915 the Italians took Monfalcone, less than 30 kilometres from the city along the coast.

The Austrians arrested and interned those suspected of irredentist sympathies. On 28 December 1914 Stanislaus Joyce, James’s brother, was arrested for anti-Austrian remarks, and the camp at Katzenau where he ended up was filled mostly with the emperor’s Italian-speaking subjects. An Italian encyclopaedia of the 1930s wrote that in 1915 the Austrian government regarded Trieste as enemy land, and counted 1,804 volunteers from the city in the Italian army.

Under the guns of the front

The front on the Isonzo came to a halt on the edge of the Karst, and the defenders under General Svetozar Boroević kept to the rule of not giving up an inch of ground on the road to Trieste. In January 1917, in Rome, Lloyd George proposed that the Allies support a spring offensive towards the city with heavy guns.

In the Tenth Battle, in May 1917, the Italians came up to Mount Hermada, the last great obstacle before Trieste. Alarmed for the city, the Austrian high command sent Boroević three divisions from the Russian front, and a counter-attack took back most of the Italian gains. After eleven battles the furthest advance of the Italian front amounted to 12 kilometres, a third of the way to Trieste.

The port fell silent. According to the Italian encyclopaedia, goods traffic, which just before the war reached 3.1 million tons a year, fell to 16,435 tons in 1916. The waters off the city were densely mined, and on the night of 9–10 December 1917 Italian torpedo boats entered the bay at Muggia and sank the battleship Wien.

November 1918

On 16 October 1918 Emperor Charles I announced in a manifesto that Trieste and its surroundings would receive a separate status. It was too late. On 30 October the inhabitants tore down the Habsburg eagles and raised the Italian flag, and power passed to a Committee of Public Safety. The governor left for Graz, and on 31 October the committee asked the Allied fleet in Venice for help by radio. On 3 November the destroyer Audace came alongside the quay, and General Carlo Petitti di Roreto took possession of Trieste in the king’s name. The same day Austria-Hungary signed the Armistice of Villa Giusti.

The local Slovenes had hoped to join the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. After the war the city became one of the centres of the nascent fascist movement, and the German and Slav minorities suffered violence. In July 1920 fascists burned down the Slovene national hall. Trieste passed formally to Italy only under the Treaty of Rapallo, concluded with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in November 1920.