Vergarola is a locality south of the Bay of Pula, a town in the Republic of Croatia. With the Treaty of Rapallo of 1920, following the end of World War II and the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Italy occupied Istria and created the province of Pula, which remained under the control of Italian fascism until 8 September 1943, when it was annexed to Nazi Germany with the full support of Mussolini, the Republic of Salò and various fascist and collaborationist military organisations such as Junio Valerio Borghese’s XMAS.
Pula was a military port of the Nazi-Fascist forces and was protected by dozens of sea mines.
Towards the end of the war, Istria, which had already been liberated by the victorious Yugoslav army following the partisan war, came under Anglo-American jurisdiction from June onwards, being classified as Zone A, while the remaining part of Istria remained under Yugoslav control, being classified as Zone B. It is important to consider that, therefore, in this second phase it was the Anglo-Americans who militarily controlled the city of Pula and its port while awaiting the “Treaty of Paris” between Italy and the Allied powers that had defeated Italian fascism and German and Japanese Nazism.
On 18 August 1946 at 1 p.m. in Vergarola, a violent explosion killed at least 64 people, injuring many more, and this year, too, there have been some stances to mark the anniversary.
ANSA in Trieste on 18 August 2024 published the article:
“Sangiuliano, remembering the Vergarolla massacre is a moral duty”.
which he introduces like this:
“the massacre that took place on 18 August 1946 on the beach of Vergarolla, near Pula, Yugoslavia at the time, in which about a hundred people died, Italians, a third of them children”.
As we made clear earlier, Pula in 1946 was not Yugoslavia, but was under Anglo-American control and was a ‘stateless’ city awaiting the decisions that would be made with the Paris Peace Treaty of February of the following year. It is quite serious that an agency such as ANSA [Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata ] would suggest that the then Yugoslavia was responsible for what happened.
The occasion for this statement is the intervention of the Meloni government’s Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, who states:
“Italy must remember the Vergarolla massacre…A terrible crime…for which no culprit has been identified…there is a strong suspicion that it was an intimidation of the Italians in the town. From that moment on, and then with the Paris Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947, almost all the Italians of Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia abandoned their lands and affections.
An agreement will soon be signed for an exhibition on the eastern border to be held at the Vittoriano. Furthermore, in the major cultural heritage projects I have financed the expansion of the documentation centre of the Foiba di Basovizza national monument. Above all, it should be remembered that the Council of Ministers, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as its first signatory, has already approved the establishment of the National Museum of Remembrance to be built in Rome, in memory of the Italian victims of the atrocious violence perpetrated by Marshal Tito’s Communist partisans. The Senate voted unanimously on the proposal, giving a very strong and important signal, and I am convinced that the House will do the same’.
We are witnessing a recurring pattern that is repeated every time issues relating to these events are addressed, in particular the reading of the foibe together with that of the peace treaty and the so-called ‘exodus’. Implicit in this context is the thesis of the Paris Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947 as unjustifiable. Thus, in fact, the current eastern borders are being called into question with continuous hostile initiatives, for now on the level of cultural and political provocation, against the legitimate republics of Croatia and Slovenia.
In this scheme, ‘Italian-ness’ is always reiterated and the appeal to the unity of the political forces, which, in fact, over the years have essentially remained aligned in defence of these claims with bipartisan positions.
It is no coincidence that on 17 August 2024, ANSA also reported the statements made by Senator Tatjana Rojc (PD) in a message addressed to the leaders of the community of Italians in Istria and Istrian exiles:
“We all, almost eight decades after that 18 August, continue to wonder why so much premeditated cruelty occurred”.
Addressing the Italian state ‘for the attention it has paid to this tragedy’ Rojc regrets that ‘it has not yet entered the national collective consciousness on a par with other massacres we commemorate’.
Dredging up the Vergarola episode in order to fuel nationalism and downplay the issue of the state massacres promoted by the neo-fascist and subversive strategy, which bloodied Italy for so many years, is not a new thing but dates back at least a decade, when the Catholic newspaper ‘Avvenire’ published on 14 August 2016 an intervention signed by the journalist Lucia Bellaspiga, daughter of Istrian exiles:
“The remains of a hundred people reddened the sea and fell in shreds onto the pine forest for hundreds of metres”,
“It was peacetime, the war had ended a year and a half earlier, the Italian Republic had been born two and a half months before: the Vergarolla massacre is therefore the first and bloodiest terrorist massacre in the history of the Republic, more than Piazza Fontana, more than Bologna Station… But it was immediately covered up and for almost seventy years covered by a conspiracy of silence’.
Here too, blatant falsehoods are asserted since, although the Italian Republic was born on 2 June 1946, Pula was not part of it. The essential passage, however, is the attempt to establish the existence of an organic strategy of tension operated by the Slav populations to the detriment of the Italians. A unifying theorem that brings together all the issues such as foibe, partisan cruelty, Titino slaughter, exodus and Italy’s unjust exit from World War II.
It is therefore no coincidence that the same journalist was a speaker at the Chamber on the occasion of the ‘day of remembrance’ and moderator at the conference organised by the ‘Ministry of Education and Merit, Department for the education and training system’ on 1 December 2023:
“The Vergarolla massacre: the sea was dyed red”.
It was an online seminar that, in its title and content, took up the same slant as that proposed by many Istrian exiles and was in line with their reconstruction of the issue of the foibe and the so-called ‘exodus’.
It is now necessary to go into the specific episode that Italian fascism has always propagated as a terrorist action by the ‘Titini’ and that for years has been tried to make into a shared national heritage, given that there is a monument in Trieste entitled ‘In Pola in the cowardly attack against the Italians’, assuming as truth given a well-defined political position that is now supported exclusively by the Italian state, the parties of power and other o r reactionary Italian organisations.
As we have mentioned, at the time of the explosion, the territory of Pula was controlled by the Anglo-Americans. The military and civil authorities were not Yugoslavs, just as it was not the Yugoslavs who cleared the bay of Pula protected by anti-submarine mines of various origins and it was not the Yugoslavs who decided where to place them, nor was it the Yugoslavs who declared the area safe for the citizens.
To understand the magnitude of the problem, we can make a comparison to see how other states had to deal with a similar problem, albeit with mines of a partially different type. At the end of World War II, Denmark found itself with hundreds of kilometres of coastline littered with more than one and a half million German mines, which made the beaches impassable for citizens. The problem was tackled by employing thousands of soldiers and prisoners of war without any involvement of civilians, who were barred from the mined areas.
Even today, in various regions of Italy, such as Veneto, Trentino and South Tyrol, there are still frequent discoveries of ordnance dating back even to the First World War, which must be rendered harmless and destroyed in order to safeguard the safety of persons and property. These operations take place by creating a wide safety belt even when dealing with minor ordnance. In the case of Vergarola, we are talking about a rather singular handling.
Charged with the task of clearing the area were the bomb disposal squads from the Venice Navy Command, commanded by Captain Raiola, who piled up large quantities of mines a few metres from the beach, which were declared safe because they had no detonators even though they were full of explosives.
On 18 August 1946, it was a Sunday and a popular sports festival had been organised in Vergarola by the ‘Pietas Julia di Pola’ rowing club, which included not only rowing competitions, but also food stalls and entertainment. It seems unbelievable that the Anglo-American authorities and the most authoritative and recognised Italian civilian figures should have consented to such an initiative with thousands of people in the vicinity of the depot, and when the explosion unfortunately took place, it is clear that the context contributed to making the massacre even more serious.
During the funeral homily, in front of a huge crowd, the Bishop of Pula, Monsignor Raffaele Radossi, stigmatised the Anglo-American authorities who manned the area, holding them responsible for the tragedy for not having removed the mines from the beach and not having exercised the necessary vigilance around the explosives, forbidding the public to frequent the site.
Equally singular is that the Anglo-American military authorities left a huge stockpile of uncontrolled explosives, which could have ended up in anyoneʼs hands, and delegated such delicate tasks to the Italians. In fact, it must be remembered that until 10 February 1947, Italy was still a defeated state, which had not yet signed a peace and border treaty with France, Austria and Yugoslavia and on the fate of the colonies, and guilty of the monstrous alliance with the Nazis. Conversely, Yugoslavia was a state formally recognised as an ally by the Anglo-Americans.
Moreover, the situation in those years was extremely tense and fascists and provocateurs had several times openly threatened to take criminal action if Pula was handed over to the Yugoslavs. But in order to understand how in reality it was the Italian state itself that was operating and directing a terrorist policy against a peaceful solution, certain passages should be recalled.
The puppet National Liberation Committee [CLN] of Istria was created in opposition to Yugoslavia and was financed by the Ministry of Post-War Assistance and the Ministry of the Interior. Unlike the National CLN and the CVL, already by the end of the conflict, the main problem of these bodies in these areas was to oppose the Yugoslav liberation struggle and not to practice the fight against Nazi-Fascism.
Here is also a short extract from the brochure available online:
https://www.diecifebbraio.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/STRATEGIA-DELLA-TENSIONE-IN-ISTRIA.pdf
“… the Christian Democrat deputy elected to the Constituent Assembly Fausto Pecorari (who was later also the contact person for the funding of the Ufficio Zone di Confine, directed by a still young Giulio Andreotti, to the nationalist teams from Trieste), under the chairmanship of which the Executive met in Rome from 23 to 29 May 1947 and voted an ‘agenda’ that we find published in a text by Ciro Manganaro:”
“The Executive (…) on the anniversary of 24 May, raises its reverent thoughts to the Fallen of the war of redemption; it remembers all those who sacrificed their lives for the Italian spirit and the freedom of the eastern Adriatic lands; it admonishes Italians to consider the injustice imposed on the Homeland by the iniquitous peace treaty; invites Giulians and Dalmatians exiled in their homeland to unite around the flags of the National Committee for Venezia Giulia and Zara to preserve and hand down to their children the proud traditions of our people’s homeland, in the constant yearning to return to our homes; informs the government and the nation of the sad conditions of the exiles, calling for urgent and adequate provisions; vows that the homeland will soon regain the spiritual unity indispensable to its rebirth, its future and its independence”.
Apart from the bombastic language, which echoes the interventionist rhetoric of World War I and fascism, the reference to the ‘iniquitous peace treaty’ of 10 February 1947 is also worth noting.
What role the CLN of Istria and its militants played in post-war Italy, and what it became and what function it had, can only be guessed in the light of its unjustified longevity, which distinguishes it by being something completely different from the ‘CLN’ acronym generally associated with the war of liberation from Nazi-Fascism.
“The Istrian CLN would continue to operate until 1966 and would dissolve into the Association of Istrian Communities in June 1967: therefore the current representatives of the organisations of Istrian exiles claim that they descend directly from this grouping.”
It would therefore need to be clarified what kind of liberation these groups of Italians were talking about and what kind of policy they were pursuing, but it is to be assumed that they were certainly not referring to ‘liberation from Nazi-fascism’.
That this ‘CLN’ was in fact an emanation of the Italian state is again confirmed by a note in the same pamphlet:
“The Christian Democrat Antonio De Berti (one of the members of the Julian CLN who went on mission to Rome during the 40 days) accompanied De Gasperi to London to the conference of foreign ministers (September 1945) and, as political advisor, to the Paris peace conference (May-September 1946); he was close to De Gasperi and Bonomi.”
In reality, defeated Italian imperialism operated on two levels, contracting with the victorious powers in the open and, at the same time, building subversive plots by manoeuvring apparently autonomous bodies.
But the post-war Italian state also operated in complete continuity with Mussolini’s imperialism on much more operational fronts, distinguishing itself as the organising centre of Nazi-fascist terrorism. In addition to De Gasperi’s refusal to hand over war criminals to Yugoslavia, the assistance provided to the criminal and duke of Croatia Ante Pavelic after his escape to Austria and Germany at the end of the war is certain. It is completely well known that Ante Pavelic, with his Ustashas trained in Italy in the 1930s, had been the puppet of Mussolini, who put him in charge of the Croatian puppet state functional to Italian fascism, but little has been revealed of his relations with republican Italy. The Italians and British protected criminal Nazi collaborators, Serbian cetnics and Croatian Ustashas, who were not extradited to Yugoslavia. There were several camps for these Nazi collaborators in Naples, Bari, Florence, Modena, Eboli, Reggio Emilia and Padua, where they enjoyed great freedom of movement.
To understand the role of these subjects, we must reread the chronicle of the time. Here is what L’Unità wrote on 23 March 1946:
In Eboli, yesterday, comrade peasant Giarletta Vincenzo was murdered by Slavic fascists. In this town, Pavelic’s Ustashas and Mihailović’s cetnics have been enjoying unconditional freedom for some months now, roaming around the town and the countryside, drunk many times, disturbing the peace of this working population.
The Slavs have become the instruments of the monarchical reaction of the local landlords, who, on this election eve, try to create an atmosphere of panic fear and make the united people’s will for renewal vain once again.
The population demanded through a committee that conferred with the Prefect the immediate removal of the Slavs from Eboli.
On 25 January 1947, the Yugoslav consul in Naples Vicko Glumcic was even murdered and his attaché Engel Josip was seriously wounded. They were massacred with sledgehammers under the eyes of the British command staff by some cetnicians from the guardhouse of camp No. 38 at Poggio Reale.
Following this very serious episode, the Yugoslav representative in Italy, Dr Smodlaka, asked journalists at a press conference:
“How can one justify the defence made by the British military authorities in Italy of Cethnic war criminals?”
Even in 1948, the situation was more or less unchanged, and the following denunciation by Pietro Secchia from the pages of L’Unità of 13 February bears witness to this:
“Scelba complains that there are too many ‘undesirable’ foreigners in Italy. But if it is the Christian Democrat government that notoriously protects and fortifies the tens of thousands of Ustashas, Cetnicians, Petainists and Nazis who unfortunately infest our country!”
Returning to Pula, we recall the connection that XMAS members had with the Italian political formations that operated here.
It is also a geographical link, since opposite the Pula sea outlet is the archipelago of the Brijuni Islands, which, during the war, was home to the Eastern Assault Base of XMAS , commanded by Lieutenant Sergio Nesi.
One of the liaison figures was the well-known Maria Pasquinelli, a member of the National Fascist Party and an elementary school teacher who, although born in Florence, asked to teach Italian in the occupied areas of Yugoslavia. Very active in the drafting of propaganda material, she actively collaborated with Juno Valerio Borghese and joined the XMAS herself.
Also from the brochure STRATEGY-THENSION-IN-ISTRY.pdf we quote:
“Finally, we report the testimony of Mario Merni, who said of Maria Pasquinelli: ‘She often came to hearten us, guaranteed her help and spoke of a “hot coup”.
Pasquinelli was in Pula on 18 August 1946, but was careful not to attend the popular festival on the Vergarola beach, as many of his comrades did. He would later go down in history for his sensational gesture on the morning of 10 February 1947, when he assassinated British General Robert de Winton in protest against the peace accords.
It is quite singular that a Fascist woman, a citizen of a defeated World War II state like Italy, well known and politically active, could succeed in such an assassination of a general of a victorious military occupation force. It is evident that Pasquinelli enjoyed cover and great freedom of action.
The obscure services that the XMAS fascists always provided to Nazi-Fascists and allies and even earlier to monarchist and then republican Italy are well known. It can therefore be understood how Pasquinelli’s initial death sentence was later pardoned in the
- What was considered a terrorist assassination throughout the world was celebrated on the walls of Trieste with the posting of hundreds of flyers with the inscription:
‘Out of the quagmire a flower was born, Maria Pasquinelli. Long live Italy’
Returning to Vergarola, where does the thesis of an attack carried out by the Yugoslav secret services to terrorise the Italian population come from? It is a report produced by the Italian secret services and in particular:
“the source that reported the rumours in Trieste is the Italian 808th Counterintelligence Battalion, a structure created by the Badoglian SIM during the conflict and then kept in operation in the following years, but placed under the direct control of the then OSS. From the researcher Gaetano Dato we learn an important detail: from February 1946 that part of the ex-SID personnel, i.e. the secret agents of the Republic of Salò who had collaborated with the Allies during the war ‘in groups such as Nemo’ were allowed to take up service in the Carabinieri, specifically in the 808th battalion and in Office I. In short, the information on the “rumours” (and we repeat that these are only “rumours”) circulating in Trieste regarding the alleged perpetrator of Vergarolla would have been provided to the British services by Italian services controlled by the US services.”
Croatian newspaper Glas Istre writes on 18 August 2019:
“the investigation into the Anglo-American administration in Pula, which was responsible at the time but had little interest, was never completed. The cause of the explosion was not officially established, nor was a possible perpetrator identified’.
And he quotes statements by the historian Dr Darko Dukovski:
‘it is difficult to believe the information given to the British by the Italian secret services, which at the time included 90 per cent of the people who had operated under fascism…for this reason I would not consider this information published in the Italian press to be credible and we would not draw conclusions based on it’.
Finally, the article ends with a remark by Yugoslav partisan Tomislav Ravnic, who was one of the first fighters to enter Nazi-fascist-liberated Pula and who states:
“this information is a brutal lie whose aim is to demonise the anti-fascist movement… the Anglo-American administration did not protect the citizens, letting them bathe near mines they had not removed. They were careless and that is why the tragedy happened. Those of Tito’s agents are fables, inventions to ease their consciences’.
We can conclude by saying that this issue is just one of the many pieces in the advance of the fascist and warmongering offensive of Italian imperialism, which is moving in a historical groove characterised by its unscrupulousness and aggressiveness. For now, it is a war conducted on the political level of historical revisionism, the rehabilitation of Nazi-fascism and all its collaborators of yesterday and today, but we denounce that this propaganda war is functional to build tomorrow the best conditions to develop effective wars of aggression!
FOR POPULAR DEMOCRACY