The Dalmatian Island of Brac in WW2, Local and Foreign Fascists, Communists, Deserters, “We just want the war to be over”, and the uses of young women in wartime

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The island of Brac (pronounced Brach) is the largest in the Adriatic Sea. Around 1900, it had a population of 30,000, which meant that it was already crowded. All but the local nobility were dirt poor, living hand-to-mouth from fishing, making and selling wine, growing olives, or raising livestock. The soil was too rocky to do much farming. Around the same time, a plague hit the vineyards, forcing thousands upon thousands of locals to emigrate out of fear of starvation. The situation on the mainland in Dalmatia was not an option, as the soil was just as bad…if you could find any to buy (assuming that you had any money in the first place). Almost everyone ended up in Chile, with a sizable amount landing in Argentina and Southern California (the family who started Starkist are originally from Brac). The population hasn’t even approached that size since then, maxing out at somewhere around 20,000.

It’s a beautiful island off of the coast near Split, the city in which I reside. Its main industry is tourism, having long supplanted fisheries and wineries. People on the island live well, many very, very well. I go there a lot.

On the south side of the island you can find Zlatni Rat (Golden Cape), which is in my opinion the best beach in the entire Adriatic. It’s fine pebble, which means that you can run around in it as the pebbles are rounded down and very small and smooth. It also means that you don’t get dirty as there is no sand. The beach lies in the canal between the islands of Brac and neighbouring Hvar, and the current cools the water temperature by 1-2C in the peak of summer, meaning that it is always refreshing.

The pace of life on the island is slow, something that people appreciate more and more these days. Being Dalmatian islanders, the residents of Brac are known for their friendliness and openness (except when it comes to their wallets), and the food that they serve is excellent.

Note: Time for a history lesson. Please forgive me.

When it comes to my favourite historical subjects, I have a tendency to visit, re-visit, and then continue to again re-visit several very different topics. Readers will notice this over time when it comes to my writing, one subject in particular being New York City at the turn of the previous century up until the 1930s, another being the Manson Murders (note the physical address assigned to this Substack). I dig and I dig and I dig until I exhaust my interest, only to return to it in a year or two.

As I get older, I appreciate local histories more and more. I really enjoy excavating down to the village level, as that is where you meet the most colourful characters and encounter the best stories, especially when oral histories are available. When I briefly lived in Switzerland, I did this for the town of Solothurn and its surroundings. I have been doing the same for Dalmatia (and bordering regions) for quite some time as well, especially the immediate area in and around the city of Split.

“The Balkans produces more history than it can consume” is a quote misattributed to Winston Churchill, but one that has been referenced so often that it has now become a truism. The original quote was in reference to the Greek island of Crete, but because it is true for the whole of the Balkans (or Southeastern Europe, if that is your preference), it has passed into the realm of the real. Despite its laid back reputation and sunny weather and disposition, the island of Brac is no exception to this rule.

Besides noticing the very Mediterranean topography, visitors to the island will not be able to avoid noting just how Venetian the town centres look. This is due to the fact that the Venetian Empire ruled the island (and much of the Adriatic) for several centuries. Even though the Italian regions of Abruzzo, Marche, and Apulia are geographically much closer to Central Dalmatia and its islands, its Venice that has left the largest imprint to this day. Even the local dialect is full of Italian words (taken from Venetian pre-Italian standardization). Locals will say “pomedora” for tomato, or “portan” for front door. Pants are “pantalone”, and the kitchen is “kuzhina”. Over the centuries, Venetian officials and traders settled the island, which is why Italian surnames are still relatively common even if the Italians themselves are almost entirely gone.

Napoleon ended the Venetian Empire, and the Austrians took control of Dalmatia when Napoleon met his Waterloo. Even though forming between 2-4% of the population of the province (now Kingdom of Dalmatia within the Habsburg realm), Italians continued to form its political, economic and cultural elite. The Croatian language was only made official and permitted to be used in government, schools, and on signs just prior to the end of the 19th century, and only after serious political conflict between pro-Italian ‘Autonomists’ and pro-Croatian ‘Populists’. Even after this historic victory was achieved, the fear of Italian encroachment was ever-present, as local Italians and assimilated locals who defined themselves as Italians looked on the creation of the modern Italian state enthusiastically, hoping that it would one day extend to the Eastern Adriatic coast. In their view, Italian culture was superior to that of the “barbaric Slavs” (an argument not without merit, in my opinion).

These fears weren’t without cause, as Italy entered the First World War by negotiating the secret Treaty of London (1915) that saw most of Dalmatia ceded to it in the event a victory by the Triple Entente or over the Central Powers.

Thanks to Woodrow Wilson and his famous 14 Points, the Treaty of London was scrapped at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-20), much to the consternation of the Italians. Nevertheless, they took the opportunity of a power vacuum in Dalmatia resulting from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire to send their forces to occupy as many islands and towns on the coast as possible to create a fait accompli that the Great Powers would be forced to accept…..except the Americans refused to do just that and instead sent a naval fleet into the Adriatic to chase the Italians out from many places in Dalmatia. The arrival of the Americans was greatly cheered by locals who in many places actively fought the Italian occupation. The Italians were forced to reduce their appetite along the Eastern Adriatic coast, agreeing to a border with the newly-established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later known as Yugoslavia. It was this American action that led Italians to describe their efforts in the First World War as a vittoria mutilata (mutilated victory), providing the initial fuel for what would become Italian Fascism.

Dalmatians lived in dread of their land being seized by the Italians and being forced to live under Italian rule. It was this fear in combination with the power vacuum in Dalmatia at the end of the First World War that led local elites to demand immediate unification with the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro, seeing Yugoslavia as the only guarantee against Italian irredentism. So strong was this fear that many local elites in Dalmatia (and on the island of Brac) began to promote Yugoslavism as an identity over that of the Croatian one, with serious effects over the next few decades.

The political climate of the island of Brac (almost entirely Croatian in composition in those years, with a smattering of Italians and then an even smaller cohort of Serb officials and their families arriving beginning in the 1920s) reflected that of the rest of Dalmatia during the 1920s and 30s. The initial euphoria of the creation of the first Yugoslav state quickly dissipated, and despite certain island elites maintaining loyalty to the Serbian King, the vast majority of the island’s residents rallied around the Croatian Peasant Party (80% by the late 1930s) due to poor economic conditions, the assassinations of several Croatian political leaders by the regime, and also because of the heavy-handed dictatorship introduced in 1929. Islanders wanted investment, development, electricity, expanded markets for their products, and a rising standard of living. Fascism and communism were rejected by the overwhelming majority of the islanders who just wanted to live better lives on their island paradise.

World War 2 on Brac

The problem with wanting to be left alone is that it takes two to leave you alone: you and everyone else. Like much of the world, Brac was not permitted to be left to its own devices by World War 2. With the Axis invasion and defeat of Yugoslavia in April of 1941, the country was partitioned into several parts. Initially, the island of Brac was awarded to the newly formed Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a puppet regime of both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Officials of this new regime began to wash ashore the island, but the Italians decided to rectify their mutilated victory by claiming even more land in Dalmatia. At the end of May of 1941, much of Dalmatia was handed over to Fascist Italy, rendering the pseudo-Independent State of Croatia stillborn, as its leader was forced to sign it over to Mussolini. In an instant, this new state lost much of its support.

Under the Treaty of Rome, Brac was to remain within NDH, but the outbreak of rebellions across the Croatian state by Serbs (largely, but not entirely, due to massacres of Serb peasants by Croatian Fascists) led to Italy expanding its military occupation to over half of the puppet state by July of 1941. On Brac, the Italian garrison began to remove Croatian flags from government buildings and replace them with Italian ones, despite the protests of the NDH regime. The Croatian Fascists (Ustashe) on the island, already tiny in number, were slowly forced off of the island and back onto the mainland. The only Croatian forces permitted on the island by the Italians were small groups of gunmen manning poorly-armed checkpoints. Meanwhile, small groups of communists began to gather in the countryside and plan.

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia was banned by the government in 1921 after a communist assassinated the Minister of the Interior that year. This ban remained in effect up until the end of the country in 1941. In the twenty years between these two events, communists were forced underground, working illegally while being mercilessly hunted down by the police. Many, many communists were captured, imprisoned, and tortured by the regime, with some being outright murdered. Party leadership was decimated time and time again, and what little leadership remained by 1937 was almost entirely wiped out by the NKVD in Moscow during Stalin’s show trials and mass executions.

These major setbacks didn’t deter most of Yugoslavia’s communists, who by now were almost entirely fresh-out-of-university and fanatically Stalinist. Around 1,500 of these communists managed to travel to Spain in 1936 and 1937 to fight on the side of the Spanish Republic, with around half being killed.1 The communists also managed to infiltrate certain political parties that were permitted to reform during the late 1930s, with the HSS (mentioned above) being a favoured safe haven.2

Only the island of Brac, communists were few and far between, but what they lacked in numbers they made up for in fanaticism. The first two months after the collapse of the First Yugoslavia saw them stash arms in countryside caches, usually bunkers, waiting for central party officials to give them further directives. The first turning point for the communists in WW2 Yugoslavia was the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. This was the signal (which was given) for communists to organize and rise up against the “fascist occupiers” all across what was Yugoslavia.

This uprising was not uniform. Some areas were more fertile for rebellion than others. For example, Western Bosnia and Eastern Lika (in Croatia) were rebelling even if the communists were not present, as Serbs in these areas were being massacred by Croatian Ustashe. On Brac, the situation was quite different: even though the Italians occupying the island were “the enemy”, they initially took a very delicate approach to their presence as they were playing a long game. For the Italians, the aim was to reduce what little influence the Croatian state had on the island, so as to prepare it for a future annexation to Mussolini’s Italian empire. The Italians were well aware of the presence of small communist cells on the island, but as they were not bothering them, they chose to ignore them.

The communists on the island began their efforts in a small fashion: painting communist slogans that celebrated the USSR and the Communist Party on village and town walls, and then desecrating images of Croatian officials and Benito Mussolini. This greatly perturbed the few Croatian government officials on the island, but the Italians did not react despite the formal Croatian protests. This red activism then moved towards more visible support for communism, the Soviet Union, and the Allies by way of singing songs within earshot of Croatian and Italian officials and soldiers.

Soon enough, Partizan bands began to form under the complete control of local communists, and raids on tiny Croatian forces manning checkpoints began in earnest. At the same time, key local elites who sided with the Croatian government began to be assassinated by the communists, which was perfectly fine with the Italians, as they viewed these Croatians as impediments to the Italianization and eventual annexation of the island by Italy.

Most people on Brac did not want any part of the war. There were celebrations on the island when the Independent State of Croatia was declared on April 10, 1941, but attitudes towards this new regime quickly soured due to the tiny presence of the government on the island, especially because it was forced to cede large parts of Dalmatia to Italy. “What kind of nationalists give up large parts of their own country?”, was a question that was frequently asked at the time. In parallel to this, many young men from the island refused to show up to recruitment centres for the Croatian Army out of fear that they would be sent to fight on the Eastern Front against the USSR. There were so many of these deserters lingering on the island that many of them eventually ended up joining the communist-led Partizans. The Croatian regime eventually agreed to stop calling up men from Brac to serve on the mainland, but by that point it was already too late.

A de facto non-aggression pact between the Italians and the communist-led Partizans ruled the island for the first year of the war, to the incredible frustration of the Croatian regime, especially considering that their officials were being murdered there. Not only that, but three Ustashe on the island were executed by the Italians for refusing to give up their guns and rifles. By 1942, the Partizans began to attack the poorly-manned Croatian checkpoints, deflating morale even further. So bad was the situation for the Croatian state on the island that some of the men on the checkpoints began to defect to the Partizans, bringing over guns and ammo with them. To make matters even worse, the Italians began to routinely disarm these checkpoints out of fear that even more arms would fall into the hands of the Partizans. By mid-1942, support for the Croatian state on the island had almost completely disappeared.

This did not mean that the island began to support the communists or Partizans in large numbers just yet. Locals were most concerned with mitigated war circumstances, especially when it came to food supplies, as famine was never too far away in Dalmatia. They were grateful that the Partizans had not attacked the Italians out of fear of Italian retribution. At the same time, locals were not enthused with the requisitioning of foodstuffs and other supplies by the Partizans from local farmers and merchants. The communist-led Partizans were attuned to this sentiment, which saw them outright reject launching a full-scale rebellion against the Italians on the island, going so far as to execute their own commander who insisted that they begin this action.3

The Women of Brac During WW2

Dalmatian women are on average very, very pretty. It’s in Dalmatia where the Slavic meets the Mediterranean, and the combination of the two more often than not is very appealing to the male eye. Dalmatian women tend to be taller on average with very long legs, and olive complexions here are quite common too.

Being both a Slavic and a Mediterranean culture, male pride is the rule as well. With male pride comes intense territoriality when it comes to local females. When you add wartime and Italian males far away from home, their girlfriends, and their wives, the environment becomes instantly combustible.

Long-time readers of my writing know that I consider myself an Italophile and that I grew up with a lot of Italians. This means that I know Italians, especially Italian males, and especially how horny they are. Italian men are in my opinion by far the horniest European men. Go near any industrial park around the city of Milan to see what I mean.4

On Brac in 1941, problems quickly erupted between occupying Italian forces and locals as Italian soldiers began talking to young females, no doubt trying to lure them into sexual liaisons. Italian soldiers, bored, homesick, and stuck on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, would visit families to buy or trade supplies for local wine. In time, they would begin to become familiar with certain families in villages and towns, becoming “too close” to their girls.

On August 25, 1941, local Ustasha officals in Sumartin posted a sign saying:

“The Ustasha authorities forbid women and girls from swimming in the presence of Italian soldiers on Kopita Beach. Whoever ignores this order will be called to account and will have their heads shaved.”5 The Italian commander in nearby Selca ordered that this sign be taken down, but not before it was photographed and sent to his superiors.6

Heads were shaved, as there were instances of local females falling for Italians. The communists loved this, because not only did it embarrass the local Croatian officials, but it also fed into communist catechism on female liberation and sexual equality. This bylaw was a product of “patriarchal fascism”, and only through communism could women’s liberation be achieved (more on this in a bit).

Women on the island were used as couriers, spies, lookouts, and much, much more. The most infamous case was the use of an entire town of females as lure. On August 5, 1943, the town of Bol celebrated a feast day in which a dance was to be held in the evening. Communists told the townsfolk to invite the Italian unit occupying the town to the dance, which the Italians were all too happy to attend. The combination of being lulled to sleep by the lack of Partizan activity in Bol with young, male horniness led to disaster for the Italians….and later for locals.

Prior to the feast day, Partizans infiltrated the town and hid in friendly homes until the dance began. During the course of the evening, around 500 Partizans quickly overwhelmed the 23rd Alpine Garrison Company of the Italian Army which was comprised of a captain (Leo Banzi), a lieutenant (Renzo Raffo), three NCOs, and 66 soldiers, along with 6 carabinieri (police). The Italians put up little resistance as they were too busy enjoying themselves, but did manage to kill the local Partizan leader and wound two of his comrades. Banzi and Raffo were forced to sign a letter that was dispatched to the larger nearby Italian garrison that urged them to surrender to Partizan forces. Knowing that Italian reinforcements were on the way, the Partizans quickly scattered into the hills with arms and ammo taken from the Italians in the surprise raid. Two Italians were killed, five were wounded, and Sergeant Comba was executed for being one of the few to dare to fight back.7

The entire Italian garrison was taken into custody by the Italian military police, sent to Sibenik on the mainland, and tried by the command of the 15th Infantry Division (Bergamo). Tried and convicted for dereliction of duty, Captain Banzi and 27 others were executed by firing squad less than a week after the surprise raid, with 23 others sentenced to 15 years in prison, the rest released back to their units. General Mario Robotti of the 2nd Italian Army issued a statement to the Italian Armed Forces that the sentencing was ‘harsh but deserved’, and that this event was a “stain on the brave tradition of the 2nd Army”.8

Recommend Fisted by Foucault to your readers

You’ll never think of Foucault the same way again