The Improvised Navy of the Yugoslav Partisans

 

Tito with sailors from the Partisan Navy
(used with permission)

Freivogel and Rastelli's Adriatic Naval War is a treasury of superb naval images drawn from private collections, alongside the best-informed text I have ever read on the topic. The sheer amount of small but important details suggests to me that much of the book was put together from local knowledge and oral history. The gathering together of this information is a credit to its authors, but it was not the first time I had heard about the improvised navy of those Extemporisers Extraordinaire, the Yugoslav Partisans.

 

That honour goes to Eastern Approaches (2), the travelogue and war diary of the intrepid British adventurer and friend of Josip Broz Tito, Fitzroy Maclean. Yet not even his gripping chronicle records the very beginnings of the maritime struggle against Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany for Istria, Dalmatia and its coast of a thousand islands. That story began as the wartime innovation of Croatian sailors.

Partisan ships and seamen were continuously at sea in spite of adverse weather and were taking every risk in the face of the Italian and German revenge. At first they were weakly armed and badly equipped, and their results in sinking and capturing enemy vessels were never as high as the numbers 'bagged' by 'inefficient' Allies. But when the war ended the Partisans remained on the scene as the only victors, getting rid of their enemies, allies and political rivals as well. (1)

The old Yugoslavia was a land of mountains, ideal for the guerrilla warfare at which its people had had centuries of practice. The Adriatic with its twisting coastline, headlands, bays and islands offered the same type of warfare on the sea. Much of the reason for Tito's success as a leader in World War 2 came from his ability to unite these various fighting groups, and there are several images in the Adriatic Naval War of him bestowing a communist blessing on the sailors.

Italy had long coveted the beautiful Croatian coast and, when the Croatian Ustasha dictator Ante Pavelić did as he was told and handed it over to Mussolini in May 1941, local men formed the beginnings of the resistance later that same year.

Small rowing, sailing or motor boats were used to maintain communication lines between various groups in coastal and island camps. Italians were always trying to stop these movements with new orders and regulations, but the boats were often 'stolen' by their owners, being returned to the harbour in the morning after a specific action was performed.(1)

Actual attacks against the Italians began in January 1942 and became such a nuisance that Italian ships had to be armed or escorted and sometimes travelled in convoys for protection.

Italy had naval dockyards around the Adriatic at Monfalcone, Trieste and nearby Taranto, so it might reasonably be asked what type of vessels the Croatians could possibly have used against such technology. Fishing villages run the length of the coast and the first boats used were nothing more than their everyday vessels like those below in the Mandracio of Novigrad, which I visited in 2018.

The Partisan's aim was to capture from the enemy as much as they could: stores, food, arms and the vessels themselves. The Navy was given official recognition in the coastal town of Podgora around September 1942, a year before the Italian collapse. 

  The first flag of the Partisan NOVJ Navy 

 - Narodno Oslobodilačka Vojska Jugoslavija.

   The People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (3). 

From early 1945 this became the Yugoslav Navy. (Not to be confused with the Royal Yugoslav Navy and merchant fleet 1918-1941 or the Navy of the Independent State of Croatia, untimely born and ineffective.) Ninety percent of the Navy of the Yugoslav Partisans was Croatian, but members also came from the other areas of Yugoslavia and even Italy and countries in Eastern Europe.

There were two classifications of vessels, PČ and NB, reflecting the Croatian words for boat, čamac (pronounced chamats), and brod, ship. PČ means Patrolni Čamac or patrol boat and NB means Naoružani Brod or ‘armed ship’. The Adriatic Naval War describes them initially as having ‘at least one 40mm gun’ and they may have had in addition ‘older British 40mm Vickers anti-guns with 20mm Breda and Scotti machine guns.’ However, photos from the book show them having many more. The old fishing boats of the pre-war villages were also reinforced with planks and stone filling. They were slow but nevertheless had impressive success rates against the Italians and later the Germans.

The Adriatic Naval War lists 17 armed Partisan ships (four German and several Italian), and 70 patrol boats (four German). 

For two years from the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Partisans received no help from either Russia or Britain and stole arms, ammunition, food, stores and even uniforms from the enemy. They became adept at improvisation. They took the machine guns from crashed aircraft and attached them to the bows of their boats, they stole bombs from under the nose of Italians and dismantled them to reuse the parts. Fitzroy Maclean writes how the Yugoslav Partisans remade railway carriages and engines. (One always feels that they’d have a go at anything.) On Vis they enthusiastically learned how to handle heavy weapons and fly aeroplanes and at the very end of the war, they even stole a miniature submarine from Pula Harbour.

After the Italians abandoned Dalmatia, the Nazis invaded until eventually the only unoccupied island was Vis, the furthest from the coast of Split. It is about an hour and a half by modern fast ferry.

The idea of creating an Allied/Partisan air and naval base on Vis was first floated by Fitzroy Maclean. A small airstrip was constructed where damaged bombers frequently crash-landed from both directions at once. The strip can just be seen at the beginning of this short video. Also visible is Tito’s war cave in which he lived from June to September 1944.

The island of Vis has a noble history dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Officially, it was the only island along the coast that was not invaded by Germany after Italy capitulated to General Eisenhower in September 1943. Practically, however, the Germans had spread themselves too thinly this late in the war, and once Tito declared the fight to retain Vis imperative and the Allies established a base there, many of the islands changed hands frequently.

I  was relieved to discover that the charming port of Komiža where the British and Partisan navies docked during the war is inaccessible to large cruise ships. We caught the ferry from Split to the town of Vis and, once there, hired a car, drove across the island to Komiža, parked outside the town and walked. Alternatively, you can put your own car on the ferry.

An excellent book to read about the Allies and Partisans on Vis is ‘Island of Terrible Friends’ by Bill Strutton. Happily, it was not hard to access and I got my copy on an interlibrary loan.

Commando Lieutenant Barton ‘dressed as a peasant and with two Partisans to show him the way, loaded his Sten gun on a mule under a burden of firewood and walked passed a number of German sentries right into the village of Nerežiše on the island of Brać, garrisoned with 200 Germans. One of the Partisans stood guard outside while he knocked on the Commandant’s billet, was admitted, thrust past a screeching woman to a bedroom upstairs, and there, in the faint light of a candle, fired a burst at the German Commandant who, half risen and gaping wordlessly, leaned over and fell. Barton calmly helped himself to the dead commandant’s automatic, his compass, an excellent pair of binoculars and a rifle. [Then] he beat it with his two Jugoslav comrades through a thicket of sentries. (4)

One story I loved occurred when a British doctor expressed his need for an X-ray machine. Upon hearing this, a group of Partisans sailed into Split, held up a local clinic at gun point and demanded the required machine. They then dismantled it and walked out with the pieces under their clothes, got back on board, returned to Vis and reassembled it for the doctor.  

Sources

(1) Freivogel, Z and Rastelli, R Adriatic Naval War 1940-1945 DESPORT INFINITUS 2015

(2) Maclean, Fitzroy Eastern Approaches Jonathon Cape 1949

(3) http://www.ratnakronikasplita.com/kronika/1943-1 

(4) Strutton, Bill Island of Terrible Friends Hodder and Stroughton 1961.

What did Palestine and Yugoslavia have in common?

Answer: Amin al-Husseini.

Related on the female side to Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, revered by radical Islamists, President Tito of Yugoslavia charged him with war crimes.

Before we discover why, it is important to know what Israel was like before Jews fleeing persecution in Europe made its deserts bloom. Indeed, over half of this tiny country was desert and much of the remainder, malarial swamps. In 1857 the British consul wrote, 'the country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants.' Other visitors described it as 'desolate and unpeopled', in 'wretched desolation and neglect' (2). According to Mark Twain, who visited Jerusalem in 1867, the city was so small that one could walk around it in an hour, and hosted a mixed population of Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Copts and other Christians, Latins, Syrians and Abyssinians, speaking a variety of languages. Outside the walls, Bedouins rode wildly across the landscape. 'It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem,' Twain wrote. 'Mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here' (3).

Thirty years later, Amin al-Husseini was born into this unprepossessing community. In a quick overview of his life, one thing is apparent: he always seemed to be fleeing from something. In 1920, he fled from Jerusalem to Syria to escape imprisonment by the British for inflammatory speech during the Jerusalem riots. He was a pivotal figure in the Hebron Massacre of 1929. In July 1937 he fled the British again, disguised as a woman, for his part in the Arab revolts against them and the Jews. Later that year, he fled to Lebanon, this time disguised as a Bedouin. As his relationship with the French and the Syrians deteriorated, he fled from there to Iraq in 1939. 'In October 1941 General Wavell, commander of the British Middle Eastern forces, offered a $100,000 (25,000 pounds) reward for [his] capture...dead or alive...being under a still valid warrant of arrest of the Palestine government for the assassination of Jews, Arabs, and British, including Galilee Commissioner Andrews.' (8). From Iraq, al-Husseini fled 'to Iran and hid himself in the Japanese Embassy'. From Tehran he [fled] to Italy' (8). From November1941, we find him in Germany supported by Hitler. In May 1945 following the dictator's suicide, he fled first from Austria to Switzerland and then to Germany where he was arrested by the French (4). It was while he was in France under house arrest that the request for his indictment arrived from Yugoslavia and so, in 1946, he fled yet again to Egypt where King Farouk of Egypt granted him asylum (5, 7).

As someone who has visited the former Yugoslavia once and since its breakup, Bosnia twice, and Serbia and Croatia many times, I have observed that Bosnia, although rich in natural resources, is the worst off. It is very poor. Unemployment is high. I saw whole villages lying deserted because the inhabitants had left for a better life. Over the centuries Bosnia has been exploited by the Ottomans, the Austrians, the Nazis, and most recently by political Islam. A young sales assistant we spoke to, a university graduate, told us in perfect English that it was generally felt that a war was again approaching.

Those of you who have read the Nobel Prize winning novel by Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, will recall Turks in Bosnia with surnames like Sokolović and Branković. Though referred to as 'Turks', they were actually Bosniaks, Slavs who had converted to Islam in the centuries of the Ottoman occupation. During Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, Germany did not have enough soldiers to control Yugoslavia and, in 1942, Himmler decided to form two SS Waffen Divisions (a third was later added) from these Bosnian Muslims, ethnic Yugoslav Germans and a small percentage of Catholic Croats. (Waffen is German for 'armed' in the same way as Panzer is German for a 'tank'.) The divisions were led by German officers and became operational early in 1943. They were called the Handschar Divisions, handžar being a Serbo Croatian word for a scimitar, the curved sword of the Ottomans. They were Mountain Divisions because Bosnia is very mountainous until you descend to the plain of the Neretva River and commence the drive towards the coast.

Meanwhile in Berlin, Al-Husseini had been comfortably provided for by Hitler since 1941. He was assisting him with the Holocaust. In the spring of 1943, the Nazis flew him to Yugoslavia to help with the organizing and recruiting of Bosnian Muslims into Himmler's SS Divisions (10). Many photographs exist of al-Husseini at this time. After initial training in France, the units were sent to Germany, where al-Husseini met them again, inspected them and blessed them. Swelled by German soldiers, their numbers approached 22,000. In December 1943, the Germans returned the divisions to Yugoslavia for active service in Bosnia, and in October 1944 they were disbanded.

You don't need to have observed the recent anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre to know that there is bad blood between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. The Handschar SS Divisions did more than just fight the Yugoslav Partisans. They developed a reputation for savagery and atrocities against the civilian Bosnian population of Serbs and Jews. In addition, 'Al-Husseini ... had always preached that murdering Jews pleases Allah and is essential to salvation' (5). 

In July 1945, at the request of the Minister of the Interior and Information in the Yugoslav Government, the United Nations placed al-Husseini on their war criminals list (9). He was charged with organizing the SS divisions in Bosnia and being responsible for the massacre of Bosnian Muslims who refused to collaborate with the Germans.

He was never brought to justice. Like his father before him, Al-Husseini was a dedicated antisemite, notable for using inflammatory language and inciting riots against the Jews and the British, and for the murder of his rivals. His family had arrived in Palestine the same century as mine had arrived in Australia and, as 'Palestinian' was not used as a political term until well into my lifetime, he didn't advocate for its statehood. Given that the Koran says the Jews will return to the Promised Land (6) - Surah Al-Ma’idah (5:21) and Surah Al-Isra (17:104) - we may wonder at the extent to which the radical Islamists who admired him have created an unnecessary problem for the modern world. 

1. Taxation in the Ottoman Empire - Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core

2. The Population of Palestine, circa 1875 on JSTOR

3. The Innocents Abroad, Complete | Project Gutenberg    Chapter LIII

4. Unmasking Hajj Amin al-Husseini through his wartime letters and diaries

5. From Hitler to Hamas: A Genealogy of Evil » ISGAP

6. EDITORIAL: The Koran itself says Jews will return to their land

7. The Long Shadow Over Palestine: The Terrorist Legacy of Haj Amin al-Husseini | by Jeff Cunningham | Medium

8, U.S. Dept. of State Withheld Evidence From Nazi Files, Shielded Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from Prosecution for War Crimes in 1948 | Adara Press

9. Ex-mufti of Jerusalem Placed on War Criminals List; Indicted by Yugoslav Government - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

10. 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) 

POWERFULLY PROTECTED - the Ustasha in Australia

I was a political child. In 1972 during the campaign that toppled twenty-three years of Australian Liberal governments, I wore my It's Time badge faithfully to Sunday School every week - It's Time For A Change. I rejoiced when in December Gough Whitlam and the Labor Party roared into office and, even today, I can still sing the song that encapsulated that exciting time in Australian politics. 'The Adventures of Edward Gough Whitlam. Dinki Di tales of an Aussie Boy.'  

From 1952 to 1978 Whitlam held the safe Labor seat of Werriwa in southwest Sydney which contained a substantial migrant community from the former Yugoslavia. 

Unlike their Liberal predecessors, the new Labor Government was not frightened of the Yugoslav communist government or communism in general. They did not permit the freedom of terrorist groups in Australia merely because they weren't communist and therefore not considered a threat. One such group that they banned were the Croatian terrorists, the Ustasha. 

Who were the Ustasha?

They were fascists, which means right wing ultra-nationalists, the opposites and opponents of communism. Fascism flourished in Europe in the interwar years under Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, the Ustasha in Croatia and many others. 

In my 1915 atlas (right) there is no Croatia. It forms part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Various factors, including the fear of land claims from Italy, resulted in Croatia being incorporated into Yugoslavia in 1918 under a Serbian monarchy. The Ustasha were founded in 1929 with the aim of achieving Croatian independence. 

Following the German invasion of Yugoslavia 6th April 1941, Hitler put the Ustasha in charge of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) which included Bosnia and 1.8 million ethnic Serbs (5). The Croatian historian, Slavko Goldstein (2) acknowledges that, although the Serbian monarchy had been guilty of the suppression of Croatia, the punishment the Ustasha meted out to the Serbs was out of all proportion to the crimes.

Estimates of the genocide of Serbs by the Ustasha during World War 2 vary. Hubert Butler (3), the Irish essayist who lived in Croatia before and after the war quotes half a million, while other sources suggest even more. Marcus Tanner (4) writes 'the figure of 600,000 Serb deaths in the NDH is probably much too high as it does not tally with the ethnic composition of Croatia and Bosnia after the war...[but] there is no doubt that the NDH intended to exterminate the Serb population and failed only because it lacked the means.' The Ustasha also killed 75% of the Jews, all the Gypsies, any antifascist who crossed their line of vision, and a cousin of my mother's.

In an attempt to explain the fanatical hatred with which the Ustasha slaughtered Serbs, that even shocked the Nazis, Goldstein quotes the commander of Jasenovac death camp, Ljubo Miloš, 'I know I will burn in hell for what I have done, but I will burn for Croatia.' (2)

The Ustasha find protection in Australia.  

'Like many refugees from countries in Eastern Europe who had collaborated with Hitler and Mussolini,' writes Gough Whitlam, 'and who therefore could not return to their countries of birth, the Ustasha formed close ties with the Liberal Party.' 

'In 1954, I had brought to the notice of the Minister for Immigration [Holt] the distress which had been caused to many migrants in my electorate by a program on a Sydney commercial radio station on the Sunday nearest to 10th April to celebrate "the Croatian National Day" This was the anniversary of the establishment of the Ustasha puppet regime under Ante Pavelić in 1941.' (1)  

In September 1963, the following article appeared in the Tribune (6), the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia.

The Wodonga incident had been staged by the Ustasha, filmed then splashed across the world to demonstrate the 'help' they were receiving from Australian authorities. An embarrassed Minister for the Army 'pleaded that the officer commanding was not aware of the composition of the [Ustasha] 'picnic group' and had merely regarded them as potential recruits'. (1)  

Some selected Ustasha bombings                 Quotes are from (1) unless otherwise stated.

1964 May, Sydney - a supporter is seriously injured by his own bomb. 

1965 February, Geelong - Yugoslav dance.

1967 April, Melbourne - two separate residences.

1967 January, Sydney - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1967 November, Richmond VIC - Yugoslav function.

1968 November, Melbourne - bombs thrown into a residence.

1968 November, Sydney -    Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1969 April, Sydney - residence. 

1969 June - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1969, October, Canberra - USSR Embassy.                                         

1969, November, Canberra - Yugoslav Embassy.

1970, October, Melbourne - Yugoslav Consulate-General.

1971, January - USSR consulate.

1971, February, Sydney airport - bomb threat against Yugoslav musicians.

1971, November, Sydney - Yugoslav agency.

1971, December, Suburban Sydney - Yugoslav film show. 
1972, February, Canberra - Serbian orthodox church. 

1972, April, Melbourne and Canberra - residence and an exhibition.

1972, September, Sydney -- Yugoslav premises. 

The Tribune was not impressed. 

October 28th 1970 - 'There appear to be several flocks of guardian angels watching over the Ustashi. Firstly, there are the Liberal and Democratic Labor Parties. Top Liberals, including Gorton, McMahon and Snedden, have either praised them or defended them. Liberal politicians such as Federal Minister Mr W C Wentworth and NSW Parliamentarian have appeared and spoken at their rallies.  Apparently, the fanatical anti-communist and anti-labor attitudes of the Ustashi make them a valued ally.' (7)

Gough Whitlam agreed. 'The Ustasha had enjoyed immunity under [successive Liberal prime ministers] Menzies, Holt, Gorton and McMahon...If communist rather than anti-communist organizations had been thought responsible for [the terrorist incidents in Australia] all the Liberal Attorneys-General would have been active in pursuing and prosecuting the perpetrators.' (1)

But was it only to do with the fear of Communism? 

While I might rant and rage at the injustice of allowing a persecuted ethnic group to enter Australia only to permit the persecution to continue here, it is true that post war Australia was essentially British and not concerned about migrants it didn't understand and whose language it couldn't speak. 'By focusing their attacks on the Yugoslav community, the Ustaša avoided provoking general outrage and public censure,' writes Kristy Campion (8). 'The violence was considered a Yugoslav migrant problem. It was not until the tourism centre bombings injured sixteen random civilians that decisive political action was taken.'  She notes that contributing factors were the fear the victims had of retribution and the fear of deportation back to the communist Yugoslavia they had left.  

It is fortunate that Gough Whitlam held an electorate with a Yugoslav community. With the Labor party at last in office, the long run of government permissiveness to the Ustasha came to an end and the community had a few short years of peace until the breakup of Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990's. Writing many years after he was an eyewitness to the Ustasha crimes, Slavko Goldstein concluded that Ustasha intellectuals believed that 'if you loved Croatia very much, you must be forgiven completely even if in its name... you persecuted people, drove them into prisons and camps, killed them, or had them killed on a massive scale. If you have expressed remorse with a few general phrases, you have been “purified" and you will receive the honour that you deserve.' (2)

Sources

(1) Whitlam, Gough     The Whitlam Government 1972-1975   Penguin Books 1985

(2) Goldstein, Slavko    1941: The Year Tthat Keeps Returning  NY Review of Books 2007

(3) Butler, Hubert   The Balkan Essays.  Irish Page Press 2016.

(4) Tanner, Marcus     Croatia   Yale UP 1997.

(5) Nationalities and Minorities in the Independent State of Croatia | Nationalities Papers | Cambridge Core

(6) 18 Sep 1963 - "Poem" for terrorism - Trove

(7) 28 Oct 1970 - Powerful protectors of the Ustashi bomb terrorists - Trove

(8) The Ustaša in Australia: A Review of Right-Wing Ustaša Terrorism from 1963-1973, and Factors that Enabled their Endurance Kristy Campion.

researchoutput.csu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/29095069/28757579_Published_article.pdf/

SOME DAMN FOOLISH THING IN THE BALKANS - how Britain, Germany and Austria started World War 1

GAVRILO PRINCIP is famous for Gavrila Princip Street in Belgrade, home to my favourite restaurant Zavičaj's, where I have enjoyed three times now the best craft sausage, roast potatoes, cabbage salad, mustard and a memorable house red.

GAVRILO PRINCIP is also famous for assassinating, in Sarajevo Bosnia, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and starting World War One.

"Assassinate" is too strong a word. I believe he was provoked. 

The underdog is the eternal scapegoat, and Gavrila Princip was a Bosnian Serb, an excellent example of the species because he and his friends were poor, passionate nationalists in a world of rich, arrogant empires. Had he been British or German or even a disgruntled Austrian or Turk, would the notion that one young man could be the cause of such a cataclysmic catastrophe have been quite so popular with our history books?

Serbs had lived in Bosnia for thirteen hundred years and at the time Gavrila fired the fatal shot (or shots, actually, because he killed the Archduchess as well) there were 800,000 Serbs living in Bosnia out of a population of 1.9 million.

Why were the Balkans the underdogs, and why Bosnia in particular?

To answer that question, here is what the Germans thought of the Balkans.

“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” -

Otto von Bismarck 1888, founding Chancellor of Germany and wealthy aristocrat.

And here is what the British thought.

"All these Balkan peoples are trash" -

Alexander Cadogan 1941, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and wealthy aristocrat.

I haven't tracked down the originator of the phrase describing the Balkans as "the powder keg of Europe" but it would have to have been a member of one of the many empires that taxed them, exploited their natural resources and used their populations for military service - the Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Ottoman Turks, Venetians, Italians, the British or the Russians - and who discovered the hard way that the Balkans didn't appreciate being exploited. 

Here is what Gavrila Princip thought. "I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria."

Why did Austria get control over Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the first place?

[In April 1877] Russia went to war with the Turks...Such a general conflagration was just what European Diplomats feared. It was the dreaded Eastern Question, or what to do with Turkey's European possessions once the [Ottoman} Empire collapsed...At the Congress of Berlin in 1878...the Balkans states were not invited to participate beyond presenting their views. The decisions of the Congress were to have tremendous historical impact...In a great blow to Serbia, the provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina were given to Austria-Hungary to adminsister...[This occupation] contained within it the seeds of the First World War. (2)

Those seeds were fertilized and watered with the connivance of Britain and Germany.

In the war of 1877 Serbia allied with Russian against the Turks, during which the Serbs 'reoccupied the whole of Southern Serbia . [but] the agreement that had been reached by the Russians and the Turks ...did not suit Britain or Germany, who feared that they would mean Russian control of the Balkans through a puppet state in Bulgaria. [So] at the Treaty of Berlin Serbia and Montenegro acquired almost complete independence from Turkey but Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. ...Bismarck insisted on this to offset what he regarded as the undue support for Turkey given at the Congress by the British Government. The Austrian garrisons stationed throughout the territories were bitterly resented by the Serbian population...as was the separation of Serbia and Montenegro ...by a fortified strip of territory under Austrian control.'(3)

Bosnia is a country of three faiths but two of these have strong ties to Croatia and Serbia. Austria's actions in Bosnia only amplified Serbian and Croatian nationalism.

'In 1878 the Austro-Hungarian Empire occupied Bosnia...until it was formally annexed in 1908. Fearing general unrest, Austria initially maintained the Ottoman laws, including the agrarian privileging of Muslim landholders. Gradually, however, the new colonial government began establishing control over the three religious communities [Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox] with the aim of curbing political and ideological ties between Bosnia and the neighboring Croatia and Serbia...It tried to promote a sense of unified Bosnian identity [and] it tried to cut off religious ties with the immediate neighbours [Croatia and Serbia]. As education and literacy among the local populations improved, so did their ties with national movements in Serbia and Croatia.[There was a] zeal of national awakening pouring in from Serbia and Croatia.(4)

And then in 1914 on the 28th June, the most sacred day in the Serbian calendar, Archduke Franz Ferdinand chose to parade Austrian imperialism through the streets of Sarajevo.

'Why ever did the royal visit take place on Vidovdan, a great day of mourning for the defeat of the Serbs by the Turks in the fourteenth century?...Was the visit a provocation? Did the Vienna government want some incident to occur that would give an excuse for the subjugation of Serbia?' (1)

I would like to say that Empires have the best interests of their territories at heart but that would be naive. Empires want resources and here are just a few examples of many.

Immediately after it took control in 1878 Austria began to construct a narrow-gauge railway system in BiH to transport Bosnian timber, bauxite, coal, iron ore, zinc and lead. Although the country in World War 2 was supposedly divided by the Vienna Line into Croatian and Italian sections, Hitler helped himself to the bauxite mines near Mostar for aeroplane manufacture. 'In 1900, [in] the rural economy of Croatia-Slavonia 56% of the direct taxes … went to Hungary' (6) and countries under Ottoman Turkey were so heavily taxed that whenever people could leave, they did. Most couldn't, and in Serbia the Ottomans harvested local boys every five years, forcing them to convert to Islam and using them as troops called Janissaries. Between the wars Britain posted mining engineers in Belgrade to help Britain, not Serbia, and was widely believed to have manipulated Serbian politics in order to precipitate the coup d’etat that led to the disastrous invasion of Belgrade in 1941.

After World War 2 a political agitator from Jerusalem named Al Husseini was wanted by Tito’s Yugoslav government as a war criminal, so it is worthwhile taking a look at Britain’s relationship with the Arabs. A day after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, five Arab states invaded in a joint land grab. The evangelist Derek Prince was living in Jerusalem when ‘a fragment [of a shell] flew through an open window…When it was cool enough to handle, I picked it up and examined it…Neatly imprinted on it were the words “Made in Britain”’. (7)

That the British Empire was a cruel colonizer is well known but it seems to have enjoyed better relations in the Middle East. The explanation can be long and convoluted but, put simply, it was due to oil. Britain had established oil supplies in Iraq and Iran during the 1920’s and 30’s, having discovered oil in Iran in 1908. 'Iranian popular opposition to the ... royalty terms [where Iran received only 16% of the profits] was widespread and created political discontent throughout the country' (5). In 1921 Britain gave two thirds of the Holy Land to Jordan in order to protect British interests and the British oil pipeline that ran through it. The action pacified the Arabs alarmed by the arrival of Jewish settlers from Europe. In the remaining land west of the Jordan River, Al Husseini incited violence against the Jews and in 1921, Britain made him grand mufti of Jerusalem in the hope of calming him down. Instead, it made him more violent and, as the official leader of Muslim Arabs he later moved to Berlin to assist Hitler in carrying out the Holocaust. In BiH he formed three SS divisions of Muslim soldiers who committed atrocities against Jews and Serbs, and attracted the ire of Tito.

So, go to Sarajevo and stand in the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, but don't blame him for starting World War 1. As Tito said: foreign land we don't want, our land we don't give.

1. Balkan Essays of Hubert Butler. The Irish Pages Press 2016

2. The Serbs by Tim Judah

3. Conflict in the Balkans by Malcolm Booker. Catalyst Press Sydney 1994.

4. Good People in an Evil Time by Svetlana Broz. Other Press, New York 2004. 

5. The Discovery of Oil in the Middle East | World History

6.  Rural Women in Croatia/Slavonia in 1900 Elinor MURRAY DESPALATOVIC   14421755.pdf 

7. The Key to the Middle East by Derek Prince. Thomas Nelson 1982. 

Adoption, Belonging and Identity - why I write about Yugoslavia

 

Me in Belgrade 1985

I’m not English. I am Yugoslav, Irish and German. Let’s get that straight before we begin. Because I was adopted at birth, identity is my issue. This is what this article is about.

According to the zeitgeist, you have a baby because you love them. You’re gay, or trans, or cis, or whatever you are, but love is what matters.

Okay. The zeitgeist is BS. I am 63 and I have struggled with identity my whole life. You need to know where you come from and you need photos. No child should be conceived without access to photos of their relatives. I didn’t see photos of my relatives until I was 50, but they absolutely opened my world. Here was my hair, my height, my eyes, my whole belonging.

So you might say, my child is happy without photos. But life is long. You don’t give birth to a baby, you give birth to a person and it is that person who will ultimately decide the rights or wrongs of the matter, not you. Unfortunately, when I was born in 1960, the government made the choice that you were a new person without access to your old family. No photos. It was a social experiment and it failed.    

I am an example of why.

I was adopted into a colonial Australian family of English origins, although I’m not English. (About three sixteenths and even two sixteenths of that, my aunt told me, considered themselves Irish. So, we’re down to one sixteenth.)

I cannot be what anyone wants me to be. I have to be myself.

When you’re a child, you do as you’re told. I grew up on English literature, English history, English war stories, English politics, English movies. When I was in kindergarten, we celebrated Empire Day. I read the English novels and poems my mother gave me.

When I was 29, my adoptive father died. My adoptive Mum died when I was 42. The day after her funeral, I met my biological sisters, having met my brother earlier that year.

From that day, everything changed.

As the years went on, I discovered that I no longer enjoyed the English authors Mum had enjoyed. I discovered the truth about English history and English war stories, not the sanitised versions. After marriage to my half Italian husband when I was 31, my tastes began to alter radically.

Now, I really loved my Mum. I loved her family history in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Once she died and my new family began talking about their European roots (which were my roots because we had the same parents) the tug-of-war between the old and the new nearly tore me apart. With a husband and two small children to look after, daily I had this nasty little voice in my head telling me that Mum’s family, which I had loved, was no longer mine because now I had a Real Family. I was one of the Lucky Adoptees who had actually Found Out Where They’d Come From.

This insidious chatterer tortured me. Without mercy it went on and on, week after week until one night three months after Mum died I was in the kitchen washing up while my husband and daughters were watching TV. Suddenly in the dark, Mum was behind me. Suddenly I started to cry. I said, ‘Hi, Mum.’ And then she was gone.

In an instant I was healed. From that brief encounter I knew that Mum’s family and my new family both belonged to me. The Lord had allowed Mum to come and reassure me of that.

People may think I’m crazy being so interested in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, but I look like them. When I got off the train in Belgrade in 1985 and for the first time in my life met people as big as I was, I thought, ‘What is this wonderful place?’ I thought Belgrade was the best city in the whole world. I loved the story of the Yugoslav Partisans in World War 2. When I was only twelve Mum had told me about the women who fought alongside the men.

These Partisans were fighting for the country where I felt I belonged, where half of me had come from. Who I looked like. They impressed the Germans, they impressed the British, they were the only country to stand up to Stalin. I am old enough to remember watching Soviet tanks roll into Prague in 1968 on the TV, merely because Czechoslovakia longed to be free of Moscow. Russia never attempted that stunt in Yugoslavia. Why? One name: Tito. Not a perfect man, but a very interesting one. I loved Yugoslavia because it was wild and mysterious and brave. What did Tito say about it? ‘Yugoslavs are a proud people.’

War is a terrible thing, but I have often wondered, with envy I am ashamed to say, what it would be like to fight passionately for the country where your roots had been for a thousand years or maybe more. How I envy the Australian Aborigines because they belong to the land.

So this is my little piece of history. I like to write about Yugoslavia because I think it’s a great story.

Post Script: It was with some trepidation that I finally took the plunge in April 2024 and had my DNA tested. Below is what awaited me when I opened the email:

My German great grandfather Frank Neimann, who was born in Barth in 1851, has disappeared as has my Italian great grandmother Clementina Cerocchi , born and died in Trieste 1856 - 1916. The 69.4% French was the real surprise. That's from Clementina's husband, Giovanni Tonon. My birth mother knew little about him except that he was an artist and ran a hat store in Trieste with his brother Gastone. She described his origins as 'mysterious' and speculated that he might have been French. 

Well, now we know, although 69.4% does seem an awful lot to get from a great grandfather. 

...three weeks have passed and I have decided that it is impossible to get 69.4% from a great grandfather, so it must be coming from somewhere else. The problem with this theory is that I am in possession of virtually all the births, marriages and nationalization certificates that would disprove it, unless we have serious incest going on and an awful lot of lying.

Have a look at this new table below. This is what happened when I changed the confidence levels on the 23andMe website. (The old results were only 50% confident.) Look at the French when it's 90% confident. Our 69.4% has fallen to 16.9% . Now 16.9% can come from a great grandfather, who is 12.5% plus or minus. (The plus can be pushed up to 22%.) The rest of the WEST section is accounted for by births and marriage records and the naturalization certificate of my German great grandfather.

The EAST section can mostly be accounted for by birth records, with two exceptions. My Slovenian great grandmother we know from the birth records of my grandmother and the testimony of my birth mother. She said she came from a village 100 miles of Istria on the border of Austria. The other exception is my Italian great grandmother Clementina Cerocchi. However, as I got hold of her vital dates from the registry office in Trieste (I walked in off the street), I am reasonably confident.

By looking at the 90% confidence level instead of the 50%, I am left with 38.5% NW Europe whose records I have (except for the Frenchman), and broadly European 35.5%, the records of which I discussed above. 

This makes a great deal more sense.    

Regarding 'broadly European' 23andMe has this to say: 'Much of Europe was buried under miles of ice ten thousand years ago. As the glaciers receded over millennia, Neolithic farmers from western Asia joined Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to settle Europe. Some European DNA is difficult to assign confidently to one population and receives a “Broadly European” designation.'

'Italian by Default'. Adopted? No identity? No problem.

https://www.mwalkeristra.com

 

 

  

 

Rijeka 1919: a decadent poet and an Italian land claim

 

‘Posing for his sexual partner as a martyred saint, Gabriele d’Annuncio was titillating himself with the image of a young man tortured and killed.’

The Pike, Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annuncio, is an unrivalled story of decadence and hedonism requiring, at times, a suspension of disbelief. Death, sadism and eroticism are constant and intertwining themes, to the extent that I wondered, when d’Annuncio urged young Italians into World War 1, whether he did so for the glory of Italy or for his own sexual pleasure. Hughes-Hallett has no scruples on the matter. ‘Throughout the Great War, d’Annuncio was to refer over and over again, and in increasingly exulted tones, to dead soldiers as “martyrs”, whose deaths must be honoured by the sacrifice of further beautiful youths. What had begun as an erotic fantasy shaped by an aesthetic trend would become a motive for slaughter.’ (1)

Before World War 1, Italy was a poor, politically unstable country wracked by feudal lords and mafiosi, and the exodus of families looking for a better life had already begun to give the world its plethora of Italian restaurants. (Read Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (2), written after Mussolini had locked away the mafia and made the trains run on time.) Abiding by a belief that war, hatred and bloodshed would strengthen it and in order to redeem territory promised to it at the Secret Treaty of London in 1915, Italy deserted its allies, Austria-Hungary and Germany, and sent its young men to World War 1 on a salary of a third of a lire per day (3). My husband’s grandfather travelled from Turin to fight on the northeastern frontier. Because he was illegitimate he was put on the front line in the hope that he would be shot first. It was not until he died in 1971 that the Italian government sent his daughter his war medals which she promptly sent back.

Italy is a strange country, held together by dreams of ancient Rome, the Renaissance and a hasty revision of its modern history textbooks. The last time I was in Turin I went for a walk along the Po and read there a series of mounted plaques glorifying the Risorgimento and the rise of the Italian military, both historical failures and examples of the importance to Italy of its own propaganda.

Indeed, what would Italy do without words? It is built entirely upon them, as The Pike proves. It is a very long book, but it is d’Annuncio’s self-styled takeover of Rijeka in 1919, surfing in on a wave of alcohol and cocaine, that concerns my study of War in the Balkans.

At the time Italy had a population of over 38 million and Croatia just 3 million. It was hardly surprising then that d’Annuncio and his contemporaries could claim Rijeka (Fiume), Istria and Dalmatia as Italian merely because a few Italian businesses had crossed the Adriatic and doubled the population in the cities. Yet it is doubtful for how long even this had been going on, for according to Viscountess Strangford who visited Rijeka in 1863, ‘There was but little Italian to be heard, but much more German, and all the rest Slavonic or Hungarian.’ (4) That there had been an increase in Italian settlers since then is likely, because I noticed a steady increase in Italian surnames in the church registries of my mother's village in Istria after Italian unification in 1860. Nevertheless, in 1910, Maude M Holbach, another British visitor to Dalmatia, recorded the following, ‘The population of Dalmatia at the census of 1890 was 507,000 souls of whom 417,000 are of Croatian stock, 90,000 of Serbian, and 16,000 were returned as Italian, the rest being Austrians, Hungarians and Poles.’ (5) 

The chapters in The Pike concerning the fate of Italian soldiers during the war are horrifying and, after the bloodbath when Italy demanded the Slavic territories promised it in 1915, America's Woodrow Wilson retorted, ‘Why does Italy want all these countries that don’t speak Italian?’ (3) 

The answer in part was Gabriele D’Annuncio, the voice of irredentism. Irredentism was an Italian word which meant land that should be considered unredeemed Italian territory. The criteria were:

i) it had once been part of the Roman Empire,

ii) it had once been part of the Venetian Empire,

iii) a few Italians lived there,

iv) a few Slavs lived there who wanted to be Italian (my grandmother),

v) it was south of the Alps and thus its acquisition made the map of Italy look better (the South Tyrol and the western third of Slovenia).

Istria was a good fit for points i) to iv). My mother, however, felt displaced in Italy and after World War 2, took on Yugoslav citizenship. Of Istria she said, ‘We were Austrian then Austria lost the war, then we were Italian and Italy lost the war.’ These Venetian-speaking Istrians lived on the west coast in a strip so thin that my mother told me that Croatian speakers came to her village of Tar in the 1920’s to buy fish. In the days before refrigeration, they couldn't have lived very far away.

It is evident from The Pike that Gabriele D'Annuncio was a metaphorical magician. Though small and unattractive (some would call him odious and repellent) he cast his spell over countless women who didn’t like the look of him but slept with him anyway, actresses, editors, musicians, politicians, the great mass of the Italian populace and sundry minor aristocracy. His mastery with words and manipulation of emotions invariably got him what he wanted, and it’s only a shame that he didn’t live long enough to see Italy after World War 2 lose all the territory his efforts had gained it.

But let us return to Rijeka in 1919.

The war was over and d'Annuncio was 'foremost among those shaping the story of the war's end as one of Italian humiliation, Italian victimisation.' (1) In Paris, the Allies allowed Italy only temporary occupation of the Croatian coast but delayed in granting it the territory promised in the Secret Treaty of London. D'Annuncio 'swore to fight on for the cause of an Italian Dalmatia' even as Italy slumped into depression and civil war. In an ugly mood, a million and a half demobbed soldiers trained in violence filled the cities and countryside, including the elite Italian troops, the arditi. Feared by the people, these arditi were unwelcome at home, they had nothing to do, and they were itching for a fight. They and d'Annuncio were mutually attracted.

Ignoring Italy's dire economic position, D'Annuncio then produced a series of incendiary speeches in Rome to the effect that Italy should 'seize by force what the peace-makers in Paris refused to grant them.' For his efforts in destabilizing an already unstable country, he was kicked out of Rome by the military authorities and sent back to Venice.

Anxious to belong to a Greater Italy, Rijeka's Italian population wrote to d'Annuncio asking him to lead them. The local arditi prepared to mobilize. Emotions ruled the day and violence towards non-Italians quickly overcame the city. D'Annuncio's ego was fueled and, although the government in Rome would not sanction any action against the city by him, on 11th September 1919 he decided to satisfy his fans and enter Rijeka. As if under d'Annuncio's spell, the Italian general protecting the city for the Allies let him and his arditi pass.

Once installed, however, the poet had no idea how to run a city in ways that didn't mimic his own lifestyle, and Rijeka swiftly became 'a bordello, a refuge for criminals and prostitutes...disorder, corruption and craziness.' 'D'Annuncio ‘staged pseudo-sacred ceremonies in the cathedral…and encourage a cult of his own personality so fervid that the Bishop…noted furiously that his flock were forsaking Christ for this modern Orpheus.’(1)

After three months, the government in Rome offered the citizens of Rijeka the option to remain a free city under the protection of Italy, and a plebiscite voted d'Annuncio out. Yet still he remained, ruling his totalitarian city-state by intimidation while the government commenced a blockade. 

Finally, as the new wave of violent fascism erupted around Trieste and Italian ships trained their guns on Rijeka's harbour, d'Annuncio was ordered to vacate the city by 6pm on Christmas Eve 1920. Three days of fighting came to end when the city begged him to leave.

Gabriele d'Annuncio departed Rijeka on 18th January 1921 and in October 1922 Mussolini marched on Rome.

References

1. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy   The Pike WF Howes 2014

2. Levi, Carlo   Christ Stopped at Eboli, Einaudi 1945.

3. Duggan Christopher   The Force of Destiny, Penguin 2008

 

4. Strangford, Emily Anne Beaufort Smythe   The Eastern Shores of the Adriatic in 1863. Richard Bentley, London 1864

5. Holbach, Maude M   Dalmatia, the Land Where East Meets West, 1910. William Clowes and Sons Ltd, London.

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