Incidents of War - The U.S. Navy Occupies Dalmatia, 1918-1919

On November 4, 1918, the fast-dissolving Austro-Hungarian "dual monarchy" concluded an armistice with Italy and the Allied powers.  The terms included complex military clauses, and also provided for "temporary" Allied occupation of certain areas until a formal treaty of peace could be concluded, by which the final ownership of those places would be determined.

One of the areas to be occupied by Allied forces was the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, from Trieste to the Albanian frontier.  Dalmatia constituted a major chunk of this littoral.  After nearly a thousand years of Venetian domination, when Napoleon abolished the Most Serene Republic in 1797 he gave the place first to Austria, and then took it back for France.  Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Dalmatia was handed back to the Hapsburgs, who added it to Croatia, a subsidiary kingdom to Hungary.  By the early twentieth century most of the inhabitants were Croats or other Slavs, but there was a strong Italian presence in the larger towns (the last "indigenous" Dalmatians having died out in the nineteenth century).  When Austro-Hungarian authority collapsed, local civil government was "usurped" by various nationalist groups, mostly interested in becoming part of the newly proposed "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes" (later renamed "Yugoslavia"), but in the larger towns -- Zara, Fiume, Spoleto (today Zadar, Rijeka, Split) Italian-oriented. 

For occupation purposes, the entire eastern coast of the Adriatic, from Trieste to the Albanian border was divided into three sectors.  Italy was given the northern sector, the regions adjacent to Trieste and what is now the Slovenian coast and the Croatian islands, while the U.S. received Dalmatia proper, in the middle, and the French the southern region, including the territory of Ragusa, which, prior to Napoleon, had been an independent republic.  Now Italy wanted to annex all of the region, claiming it as part of the Venetian heritage, while France had its eyes on possibly acquiring a base or two in the area, to help support its interest in a Yugoslav state, so the Americans were the only occupiers who didn't have a political agenda.

France and Italy immediately sent troops to conduct the occupation.  Surprisingly, at the time of the Armistice, there were American troops in the region, the 332^nd Infantry Regiment  having been sent to Italy earlier in 1918.  These troops were, however, under Italian command in the days immediately following the Armistice, and Italy had cleverly employed them in the furtherance of her interests; where the locals would have resented the presence of Italian troops, they welcomed the Americans, not realizing that they were acting under orders from Rome.  As a result, the U.S. pulled the regiment out. 

Rather than send in fresh troops, the U.S. decided to conduct the "occupation" of Dalmatia with naval forces, who supported the local provisional civil authorities – mostly pro-Yugoslav – with the ships and personnel of the Adriatic Squadron, usually one old cruiser and two or three destroyers based at Spalato.  The squadron’s mission was threefold; oversee the disarmament and security of former Austro-Hungarian warships and military installations in the area, maintain order, and, pursuant to President Wilson’s policy of “self-determination of peoples,” provide the security necessary for the local people to express their political desires through plebiscites.  While the French, and particularly the Italians, encountered problems during the occupation of their sectors, due to their political and territorial goals, the U.S. did not.  The local provisional governments cooperated with the Americans, who were viewed as “honest brokers.”  American personnel performed relief work, supported reconstruction efforts, and acted as peacekeepers, parties of marines and bluejackets landing occasionally to help the local provisional governments maintain order, particularly as the collapse of Austria-Hungary had left many troops stranded far from home. 

Even Italy, despite her aggressive pursuit of territorial annexation, requested American support on several occasions.  For example, the U.S. Navy was asked to provide peacekeepers to prevent rioting between Italian and Serb inhabitants at Trau (Trogir) in 1919.  Later, an Italian Army unit, acting without orders, decided to occupy some territory to which Italy had an historic claim, prompting the Italian government to request support from Rear Admiral Philip Andrews, commanding the Adriatic Squadron.  Andrews was able to convince the free lancing Italian troops to evacuate the area without using force and without embarrassing the Italian government.

American forces pulled out of Dalmatia in the autumn of 1921, upon implementation of the Treaties of Trianon and St. Germaine, which settled frontiers among Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Yugoslavia, and arranged for the disposition of the surviving Austro-Hungarian warships. 

Although Italy did secure the northern part of the occupation zone, the Istrian peninsula, plus the city of Zara and some offshore islands, as well as Fiume, after the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio seized it, most of the region became part of Yugoslavia.

The population-to-troops ratio for the American occupation of Dalmatia was extraordinarily high.  The Adriatic Squadron usually had no more than about 1,500 personnel, including the admiral and his staff.  Few of these men ever actually operated ashore.  Yet, leveraging the positive attitudes of the local people toward the U.S., they sufficed to assist the local provisional authorities in maintaining order for a population of perhaps a million people spread over numerous islands and an adjacent mountainous mainland totaling about 5,000 square kilometers.