The Corfu Incident
Italian troops were already crossing the Albanian border when on the morning of October 28, 1940, Italy’s diplomatic representative in Athens delivered his government’s ultimatum that Greece capitulate. The Greek nation’s rejection of Mussolini’s ultimatum, an occasion annually observed on October 28 as a national holiday, did not find the country unprepared. It had been preceded by several provocative acts which forewarned the Greek government and eventually led, less than two decades later, to the Italian invasion of Greece. The first of these provocations was the 1923 bombardment and occupation of Corfu, an incident crucial not only to Greece but to world history, as it was the first test case of its type for the League of Nations.
