One morning last week, two hours before dawn, the boom of a gun broke the almost rural silence of Tirana, the small capital perched in the mountains of the tiny Kingdom of Albania. Boom followed boom until 101 had shaken the sleeping town. A son and heir had just been born to King Zog I and his Hungarian-American consort, Queen Geraldine. The man-child was named Skander after the great Albanian patriot who in the 15th Century stood off the Turks during some 30 years of hard fighting.
Less than 50 miles across the narrow Straits of Otranto, at the Italian ports of Brindisi and Bari, gun crews were also active at the same hour. There, while warships, scores of other vessels, made ready to sail, heavy guns and men were loaded on transports. Three hundred and eighty-four warplanes stood by at airports.
Forty-eight hours later the bed-ridden Queen lying in Tirana's temporary Royal Palace could hear the roar of whole flights of planes overhead—planes that could not possibly be Albania's, since the country had only two. They dropped no bombs but leaflets fluttered down in the spring breeze announcing that "friendly" Italian troops were arriving that day to take over the country and "reestablish order, peace and justice." At four Albanian seaports, the nearest one (Durazzo) only 25 miles from Tirana, warships soon hove into sight, began bombarding. Troops were landed. A skirmish or so developed. The little Albanian army of 13,000 was quickly mobilized, and hardy mountaineer fighters brought out their ancient rifles, pistols, carved daggers.
But in a day's time heavily-armed Fascist legionnaires had overcome this petty resistance and pushed their way up the steep mountain grades to the Capital. In two days they had occupied all the important points of the country, with casualties of only 21 killed, 97 wounded. The Albanian Army vanished into the fastnesses of Albania's Dinaric Alps where, unless the Sons of the Eagle (as the Albanians call themselves) have changed since the Turks dealt with them for five centuries, they can be expected to put up a guerrilla warfare until Kingdom Come.
Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was best man at Zog's wedding last year, arrived to form a "provisional Albanian Government" and II Duce, as quickly as he could spare the time from his Palazzo Venezia desk, was scheduled to announce in Tirana just what he intended to do with his new possession. Best guess was that it would become a protectorate under the sovereignty of His Imperial Majesty King Vittorio Emmanuele III of Italy.
Flight. Meanwhile, at the first approach of danger, 43-year-old King Zog loaded his 23-year-old wife and newly born son into an Albanian automobile converted into an ambulance and sent them, with escort, over a 160-mile stretch of rough road into neighboring Greece. Lodging in a primitive little inn at Fiorina, across the frontier. Her Majesty through her Hungarian grandmother, Countess D'Estrelle D'Ekna, released an appeal to the world: "I left my husband leading his troops—his poor insignificant little Army—into battle. What could Albania do against such armed might as that which ground down on us?"