Freedom
April and May 1945

Liberated areas of the Julian March

Long before the decisive spring offensive of May 1945, the IX Corps of the NOA and POA maintained an extensive liberated territory in the Julian March and western Slovenia. Following Italy's capitulation in September 1943, the national liberation movement in the Slovenian Littoral gained new momentum — many former soldiers and mobilised Littoral Slovenes joined partisan units that gradually took control of the mountain areas.

In January 1945, the IX Corps controlled extensive hilly and mountainous areas: the Cerkno region, the Baška grapa, the Šentvid plateau, the Trnovo Forest and Čaven. The partisan network operated along the entire Vipava Valley and the Karst. This liberated territory, which encompassed much of the hilly hinterland of the Rapallo border, became the logistical and organisational base for the spring offensive.

In parallel, during the winter months of 1944/45 the IX Corps cut German transport axes and disrupted enemy supply lines. German defences contracted to traffic corridors and towns, while partisans freely administered the countryside and smaller settlements.

The Overseas Brigades

During the Second World War, fascist Italy interned more than 60,000 Slovenes from the occupied territory of present-day western Slovenia in concentration camps as political internees, along with several thousand Croats and Serbs. When Italy capitulated in September 1943, these internees came under the control of Allied occupation authorities.

In addition, more than 10,000 Slovenes and Croats who were Italian citizens — from the Slovenian Littoral, Istria and Venetian Slovenia — had been conscripted into the Italian army and assigned mainly to punitive labour units, the so-called special battalions. Furthermore, around 6,000 anti-fascist Littoral Slovenes and Istrians were interned in prisons and special camps across the Italian interior and on the islands of Tremiti, Lipari, Ustica and Ponza.

Those in northern Italy made their way back to the Slovenian Littoral and Istria after the capitulation. The larger group, located in central and southern Italy, was gathered by the Allies at the central assembly camp in Carbonara near Bari, under the authority of Marshal Badoglio.

Immediately after Italy's capitulation, in October 1943, a delegation of the NALJA arrived at the camp and, by agreement with the Allies, established its own base. It negotiated the self-organisation of camp life and the removal of the Chetnik guard, which enabled the formation of a camp committee of the CPY and the 1st Overseas Brigade on 20 October 1943. In November, the internees were transferred to the partisan camp in Gravina, which became the assembly point for all Yugoslav overseas soldiers.

Badoglio and the Allies initially refused to permit the transfer of former Italian soldiers — conscripted Slovenes and Croats — to the NALJA. Nevertheless, a significant number escaped from the assembly camps to NALJA collection points in Taranto, Naples, Foggia and Brindisi. Around 20,000 Littoral Slovenes and Istrians from Sardinia who had not come into contact with the NALJA were transferred by the Allies to Corsica and then to southern France, where they were held until December 1945.

• ↗ Overseas Brigades of the NALJA · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ Overseas soldiers · Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia

Liberation of the Julian March

The liberation of the Julian March in 1945 was fundamentally different in character from the resistance and liberation in the rest of Yugoslavia. The territories west of the Rapallo border — the Soča Valley, the Gorizia region, Trieste (Trst), Istria — had been state territory of Italy since 1920. The Slovenes and Croats who lived there were Italian citizens who had risen up against their own state. Their political adversary was not merely a wartime occupier, but a system that had by law forbidden them their language, Italianised their surnames and denied them any political representation.

This resistance therefore cannot be equated with the national liberation struggle in the rest of Yugoslavia, where partisans were liberating territory occupied during the war. In the Julian March, it was a revolt within the borders of the fascist state — liberation from an authority that had been legally established there for a quarter of a century. It is precisely this that gives the Littoral resistance its particular significance and explains why the desire to preserve this memory among today's population is so vivid: it is an experience that has no parallel in any other part of Slovenian territory.

From the German and Anglo-American perspective, the spring battles took place on Italian territory, which had changed sides to the Allies in 1943. From the Italian perspective, it was Italian territory under German occupation — after the capitulation in 1943, Germany placed the Julian March under direct military administration as the Operational Zone Adriatic Littoral (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland, OZAK), though formally the territory remained Italian until the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. From the Slovenian and Yugoslav perspective, however, it was ethnically Slovenian and Croatian territory that must not remain in Italy after the war. The liberation of the Julian March was thus simultaneously a military operation and a political project: a fight against fascism and a demand for a change in state borders. This dual character — liberating and territorial — marked everything from the partisan struggle to the Paris Peace Conference.

When the collapse of the Third Reich became inevitable in spring 1945, the Yugoslav supreme command launched a plan for the rapid occupation of the western provinces, before Western Allied forces could reach them. Political urgency dictated the pace: this is also one of the reasons why Trieste (Trst) was liberated on 1 May, while Ljubljana was not until 9 May — the Adriatic port took precedence over the capital in Yugoslav strategic calculations. A key role was played by the 4th Army of the NALJA under General Petar Drapšin and the IX Corps of the NOA, the home force of Littoral Slovenes who knew the terrain and enjoyed deep trust among the population. German units in the Julian March — including the garrisons in Gorizia (Gorica), Trieste (Trst) and Pula (Pulj) — found themselves in a hopeless position under pressure from all sides.

The German garrison of Trieste (Trst) found itself in an impossible position: the Yugoslav encirclement from the east and the Allied advance from the west made capitulation inevitable. On 2 May 1945 it laid down its arms. Two occupying forces with diametrically opposed goals found themselves in the city — and Trieste became the scene of a close, tense coexistence for forty days.

The following weeks were marked by tensions between the Yugoslav administration and the Allied forces. The Yugoslav army was supported by Littoral Slovenes and part of the Italian working class; the Allies insisted that the fate of Trieste (Trst) would be decided at the peace conference, not on the battlefield. The dual presence was geopolitically fragile and diplomatically untenable.

Istria

The Istrian coast was swept by rapid liberation that same week. Koper was liberated around 1–2 May 1945, together with Izola and Piran.

Pula (Pulj), the strategic port at the southern tip of Istria, was liberated on 8 May 1945 — the day of the German capitulation. But Pula (Pulj) was in a special position: the Western powers, as part of arrangements concerning the Julian March, soon placed it under Allied administration, which quickly led to complications regarding who would govern there.

The arrival of Yugoslav units was received with mixed feelings: the Slovenian- and Croatian-speaking population celebrated, while part of the Italian-speaking population harboured uncertainty about the future.

Part of the Julian March remained within the Morgan Line in Zone B — under Yugoslav administration. This demarcation would, until 1954, profoundly shape the daily lives of the mixed population living there, and would become the driving force behind one of the great postwar demographic shifts — the "exodus" of the Istrian Italians.

Understanding this emigration requires context: the demographic pressure on Istria and the Julian March was not one-directional. According to the research of historian Milan Pahor (Slovenian Emigration from the Julian March 1918–1941), already in the interwar period, under pressure from Italian Italianisation policies, around 105,000 Slovenes and Croats had emigrated from the Julian March — either to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia or overseas. This was the forced emigration of those whom the Italian authorities had forbidden to use their language and denied the basic conditions for survival — thereby permanently destroying the foundations of centuries-old coexistence of different communities on the same territory. Violence against one community — systematic and backed by the full power of the state — created a wave of retaliatory measures when the balance of power shifted after the Second World War.

Most of the Italian-speaking population of Istria, Rijeka (Reka) and Dalmatia chose to emigrate to Italy in the years 1945–1956 — a phenomenon known in Italian historiographical tradition as the esodo istriano. It is estimated that around 200,000 people left Istria, of whom according to official statistics approximately 70% were Italian-speaking and 30% Slovenian- and Croatian-speaking. In some coastal towns, up to 90% of the pre-war Italian-speaking population departed.

• ↗ Milan Pahor: Slovenian Emigration from the Julian March 1918–1941 · SIstory
• ↗ Italian emigration (Istrian exodus) · Wikipedia (sl)

Forty days of Yugoslav administration

From 1 May to 12 June 1945, the Yugoslav army administered Trieste (Trst) and most of western Julian March. These forty days were, for Littoral Slovenes, the first time since 1918 that they had lived in a city with Slovenian as a public language, Yugoslav governing bodies and without the threat of fascist repression. For Yugoslav diplomacy, this period was an argument that Trieste (Trst) belonged in the Yugoslav sphere.

For the Western Allies — Britain and the United States — the Yugoslav presence in Trieste (Trst) was a geopolitical threat: allowing Tito to control the Adriatic port meant allowing communist Yugoslavia access to the Mediterranean. Pressure on Belgrade was intense and relentless.

General Morgan and the demarcation line

Negotiations for the withdrawal of Yugoslav units were led by British General W. D. Morgan, Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Harold Alexander. Morgan was sent to Belgrade with a clear mandate: to achieve the Yugoslav withdrawal from the Julian March west of the agreed demarcation line.

Marshal Tito demanded that the peace conference first pronounce on the fate of the territory before the Yugoslav army would withdraw. The West rejected this — and pressed with the threat of cutting off Allied economic assistance to Yugoslavia. In the end, Tito relented: on 9 June 1945, an agreement was signed in Belgrade between Marshal Tito and Field Marshal Alexander.

The agreement provided that the Yugoslav army would leave Trieste (Trst), Gorizia (Gorica) and the western parts of the Julian March by 12 June 1945. On that day, the demarcation line that the public named after the negotiator came into effect — the Morgan Line.

The provisional dividing line on Slovenian territory ran from the coast north of Koper, east of Trieste (Trst) across the Karst, west of Ajdovščina to the eastern edge of Gorizia (Gorica) and across the Banjšice and Šentvid plateaux, to the confluence of the Idrijca with the Soča and onward to the Austrian border 5 km east of Tarvisio.

After: Wikipedia, entry Morgan Line

Zone A and Zone B — the new dividing line

Zone A · Allied Military Government (AMG)

Zone A comprised Trieste (Trst) with its hinterland, western Gorizia (Gorica) (part of the Gorizia province) and Pula (Pulj) with part of western Istria. This zone was administered by the Allied Military Government (AMG), headquartered in Trieste (Trst). The minority community of Littoral Slovenes remained in this zone under foreign administration.

The formal absence of fascist repression did not mean peace for the Slovenian community. In Zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste, between 1945 and 1954, numerous organised and spontaneous attacks by Italian nationalists on Slovenes took place — particularly in Trieste (Trst) and Gorizia (Gorica). The attacks were part of a broader political conflict between Italian nationalism and the Slovenian and Croatian population, which supported annexation to Yugoslavia or at least equal rights within the Free Territory of Trieste. Historian Marta Verginella documented around 550 episodes of violence in the period 1946–47 alone, which claimed 20 lives. The violence was directed by the illegal paramilitary organisation Divisione Gorizia, which the Italian press described as pogroms but the Italian mainstream largely silenced. The attacks intensified during visits by the Allied border commission and during the Paris Peace Conference.

• ↗ Slovenes attacked in broad daylight · Primorski.eu
• ↗ Marta Verginella · Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana
• ↗ Italian amnesia: the repression of Slovenes "forgotten" · Insajder

Zone B · Yugoslav Military Administration

Zone B encompassed the remainder of the Julian March between the Morgan Line and the Rapallo border. It was administered by the Yugoslav army. The part of Zone B comprising present-day Slovenian territory was ethnically and linguistically homogeneous — Slovenian.

The Morgan Line was not a permanent border — it was a diplomatic response to an open question that the peace conference would still have to resolve. It played the same role as the demarcation line after the First World War: it was a temporary dividing line.

Timeline of liberation and diplomatic arrangements

Sources and bibliography

• ↗ Morgan Line · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ 4th Army NALJA · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ IX Corps NALJA · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ Liberation of Trieste · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ Liberation of Trieste · Wikipedia (en)
• ↗ Julian March · Wikipedia (en)
• ↗ Free Territory of Trieste · Wikipedia (en)
• ↗ Free Territory of Trieste · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ Overseas Brigades NALJA · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ Overseas soldiers · Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia
• ↗ Milan Pahor: Slovenian Emigration from the Julian March 1918–1941 · SIstory
• ↗ Katja Hrobat Virloget: In the Silence of Memory — The "Exodus" and Istria (2021) · UP Press
• ↗ Istrian exodus · Wikipedia (sl)
• ↗ Slovenes attacked in broad daylight (Marta Verginella) · Primorski.eu
• ↗ Italian amnesia: repression of Slovenes · Insajder
• ↗ The western Slovenian border — from the arrival of the YPA in Trieste to the Paris Peace Conference · zgodovina.si
• ↗ Determination of the western Slovenian border in the 20th century · Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia