Dates with Destiny

Not long ago I was hav­ing din­ner at a small cot­tage beside a lake in cen­tral British Columbia hun­dreds of kilo­me­tres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neigh­bour from down the shore. As we talked he men­tioned that he had grown up before the Second World War in the Adriatic port city of Rijeka, where his father had worked in a fac­tory mak­ing tor­pe­does. “Most of the tor­pe­does used by the Axis dur­ing the war were made there,” he informed me.

It so hap­pened that I knew some­thing about Rijeka, or at least I knew some­thing about Fiume, which is what Rijeka was called before the war when it was a pos­ses­sion of Italy. I had once researched the city for a book that was never writ­ten, and I learned that Fiume/Rijeka is one of those places that are not allowed a peace­ful his­tory. Over the cen­turies it has been con­trolled by Romans, Magyars, Habs­burgs and Italians. Today, Rijeka belongs to Croatia and lies not far from its bor­der with Italy. The city is crowded onto a nar­row flat­land extend­ing around the bot­tom of the Gulf of Kvarner. Behind the down­town, pale build­ings mount the encir­cling hills. Though it dates back many cen­turies, much of Rijeka has been rebuilt since the war, when occu­py­ing German troops wrecked the port before aban­don­ing it. Today the prin­ci­pal vis­i­tors are tourists, who make their way along the Turisticka magis­trala (Tourist Route) and stroll through St. Vitus’s Cathedral.

In September 1919, when the city was still known as Fiume and had just been handed over to the new coun­try of Yugoslavia, the flam­boy­ant Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio drove down the road from the north in an open motor­car filled with flow­ers, lead­ing a small army of his fel­low Italian patri­ots. Believing that Italy had been promised Fiume by the Allies dur­ing World War i, which had ended the year before, they were deter­mined to cap­ture the city. Recruits spilled out of the vil­lages and hills to join the pass­ing col­umn and by the time D’Annunzio reached the out­skirts of Fiume he com­manded a force of 2,500 men. When the mil­i­tary gov­er­nor tried to stop him, D’Annunzio threw open his heavy great­coat, expos­ing his war medals, and dared the gen­eral to shoot. Witnesses to this the­atri­cal con­fronta­tion record that the gen­eral col­lapsed in D’Annun­zio’s arms in tears, then joined his march into the city.

D’Annunzio declared Fiume “a sym­bol of lib­erty,” then uni­lat­er­ally annexed it to Italy. The lead­ers of the Great Powers, who had promised the city to the Yugoslavs, decided to ignore him. When U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was told that there were thirty thou­sand Italians liv­ing in Fiume, he pointed out that there were a mil­lion Italians liv­ing in New York. Would Italy be claim­ing the American city next? Wilson and the other Allied lead­ers expected D’Annun­zio’s free­lance regime to col­lapse. But it didn’t, at least not right away. For fif­teen months the poet ruled over Fiume like some pirate king, plot­ting the over­throw of for­eign gov­ern­ments, declaim­ing long-winded speeches from the bal­cony of his palace (where he is said to have invented the fas­cist raised-arm salute), and dis­patch­ing his pri­vate navy to raid the ship­ping lanes of the Adriatic Sea. 

Finally, in November 1920, Italy and Yugoslavia set­tled the mat­ter them­selves and Fiume became a free state. D’Annunzio turned around and declared war on Italy, but once Italian shells started rain­ing down on the city dur­ing the so-called “Christmas of Blood,” he quickly sur­ren­dered and retired to his villa at Lake Garda to cul­ti­vate his eccen­tric­i­ties. When Mussolini came to power two years later, he annexed Fiume to Italy — just what D’Annunzio had wanted all along — where it remained until the end of World War ii.

All of this I learned from my researches. But I had not known that on the west­ern out­skirts of the city lie the dilap­i­dated remains of a tor­pedo fac­tory that had been the city’s major indus­try. It was built in 1853 as a metal foundry mak­ing ships’ anchors. Production diver­si­fied under the man­age­ment of an English engi­neer named Robert Whitehead, who began mak­ing tor­pe­does — the new long-range under­wa­ter weapon invented by Giovanni Luppis, a retired naval offi­cer from Fiume. Eventually the com­pany grew to be the largest tor­pedo man­u­fac­turer in the world. Elio told me that dur­ing World War ii it was turn­ing out thou­sands of tor­pe­does a year for the use of Axis U-boats. Which is where world his­tory and per­sonal his­tory collided.

On September 3, 1939, less than nine hours after Britain declared war on Germany, a German sub­ma­rine fired a tor­pedo into the hull of a pas­sen­ger steamer, the Athenia, mak­ing its way from Liverpool to Canada. It was the first shot fired in the Battle of the North Atlantic. One of the pas­sen­gers aboard the Athenia was a young woman who would become my mother-in-law — twenty-six-year-old Dorothy Brealey, on her way back to Vancouver from a hol­i­day in England. She spent all night in a lifeboat; then she was res­cued and con­tin­ued to Halifax. More than one hun­dred peo­ple died in the attack. 

As I told Elio this story, its mean­ing seemed to become clear to him, but just in case it hadn’t I drove the point home. “So,” I said, “your father tried to kill my wife’s mother.” 

Not many strangers meet­ing for the first time have such a con­nec­tion, I thought, but what did it mean? I did not know what Elio was think­ing. I was think­ing about the tenac­ity of the past and how it reap­pears in the most unex­pected places. Somewhat at a loss for words, we clinked wine glasses and changed the sub­ject.