The Shooting of Lieutenant John Edmund Burke
by Paul Brazell
On Sunday, 25 April 1948, Lieutenant John Edmund Burke of the Royal Army Service Corps, or RASC, was shot and killed by a Yugoslav border guard after crossing the border into Yugoslavia while on an excursion with his Austrian-born wife Inge and a fellow officer, Second Lieutenant Philip Marler, also of the RASC.
British newspaper papers initially reported that “The three were picnicking on top of the 3,000-foot Loibl Pass, on the Austro-Yugoslav frontier, when Lieutenant Burke was shot dead by a Yugoslav frontier guard.” A more detailed, and essentially correct description of the incident (apart from the time of day), was provided by the Yugoslav news agency, Tanjug, in a report published in the Vienna-based Arbeiter-Zeitung of 27 April 1948 (courtesy of the Austrian National Library’s online historical newspaper and magazine archive, ANNO).
Early on Sunday morning, a Yugoslav border guard noticed two British soldiers and a woman about 40 metres inside Yugoslav territory. The guard ordered the three to stop, whereupon one of the Englishmen and the woman raised their hands, while the other soldier ran off to hide behind a cement wall. At that moment, a second Yugoslav guard came out of the border guard building and arrested the British soldier behind the wall. The Yugoslav border guards led the three people to the border guard command post. When one of the Yugoslav guards entered the border guard building to inform his superiors of the arrest by telephone, one of the arrested Englishmen, a lieutenant, jumped towards the other guard and grabbed his throat with one hand and his submachine gun with the other. A struggle ensued, during which the guard fired a shot at the ground. This alerted the other border guard, who rushed out of the guardhouse and fired at the lieutenant, who was killed instantly. … According to an English report, the three people were on an excursion. They undoubtedly had no intention of crossing the border.
Naturally, a great deal of diplomatic activity ensued. There were enquiries held on both sides and even a joint enquiry. But the “incident” was resolved fairly quickly. According to a report by the Illustrated London News of 8 May 1948, Mrs. Burke and 2nd Lieutenant Marler were handed over to a party headed by Brigadier Churchill, commander of the British Zone in Austria, on April 29, while the body of Lieutenant Burke was handed over to a party of British officers on May 2.
There were also questions asked back home in parliament, and it is revealing to read Hansard’s transcription of the parliamentary question and answer sessions on April 28th, May 3rd, and May 10th, in which Minster of State Hector McNeil told the Commons that details of the struggle “could not be determined to the satisfaction of both elements of the court … The frontier-line at the Loibl Pass is clearly marked, but on seeing that no Yugoslav sentries were at the barrier the British party elected to pass the frontier in order to get a better view of the scenery. … Second-Lieutenant Marler adheres to his view that Lieutenant Burke initiated the struggle in order to escape, and that he was, therefore, responsible for his own death.”
On 3 May 1948, Lieutenant Burke was buried with full military honours at Klagenfurt’s main cemetery in the district of Annabichl, where most soldiers were buried who died during the British occupation of Carinthia. (You’ll find more background and a photo of Lieutenant Burke’s gravestone on our Annabichl cemetery page.)
According to the Army marriage certificate, his widow Inge’s name was Ingeborg Czechowska, and she was a school teacher. The certificate does not name either of Inge’s parents, but it does state that she was an Austrian citizen. It also states that the couple were married on 7 October 1947 at the Parish Church of Maria Wörth on the Wörthersee, which must be one of the most beautiful places in the area for a church wedding.
We were subsequently able to view the marriage entry in the Maria Wörth parish register, which revealed that Inge’s full name was Ingeborg Maria Czechowska, that she was born in 1926 in Villach, Carinthia, and that she was the daughter of Cornelia “Nelly” Czechowska. Further research revealed that Nelly’s family originally came from Myślenice, today in southern Poland; the town became part of the Austrian empire in the province of Galicia during the partitions of Poland in 1772 and remained under Austro-Hungarian rule until the end of World War I in 1918.
If Lieutenant Burke’s story is not already sad enough, the little research we have done suggests it was actually much sadder. It appears that his father, John Patrick Burke of Woolton, Liverpool, had died when John was but an infant.
In the words of the Runcorn Weekly News of 22 May 1925:
General regret has been experienced this week among the members of the Liverpool Police Force at the death of an ex-comrade, John Patrick Burke, 28 years old, on Tuesday evening at 13 Woolton street, Woolton. He joined the force after the police strike in 1919 and did duty in “Q” Division (Old Swan) prior to being transferred to the Garston sub-division. Illness, following the effects of the war, caused him to give up police duty and he was allowed to retire on a gratuity some months ago. His death followed an attack of pneumonia.
After the death of her husband in 1925, John’s mother, Grace Ellen (née Regan), had subsequently returned to her home town of Margate in Kent. She was recorded there in the 1939 Register living at 35, Dane Hill in the household of Martha R. Regan, a widowed “Boarding-House Proprietor”. Initial research suggests Martha was Grace’s mother and that her husband, Alfred William Regan, had died in 1922. There is a third person in the same household, but his or her record is still closed. It could be son John, although newspaper reports said he worked for the Inland Revenue in Liverpool until 1943, before taking up an engineering cadetship at the St. Helens Municipal Technical College.
Some of the English newspapers reported that Lieut. Burke and Inge had a two-month-old son, Peter, something we were able to confirm with the help of the GRO Army Birth Indices.
Since first publishing this story in April 2025, we have been contacted by a friend of the family, who informed us that “Inge and son Peter made it to England after Lieut. Burke’s death and led full and happy lives until their respective deaths in Spain in the 2010s”; the same friend also wrote that, to their knowledge, neither of them had ever mentioned the incident to family or friends.
In a stark reminder of how disputed both the Austrian-Yugoslav and Italo-Yugoslav borders were in 1948, the Wiener Zeitung of 28 April 1946 included in its reporting on the fate of Lieutenant Burke details of two other border incidents involving Italy and Yugoslavia. The paper reported that Yugoslav forces had fired on an Italian patrol near Grimacco in the province of Udine, “on a strip of border that had been arbitrarily claimed by the Yugoslavs”, resulting in one death on each side and several wounded; the paper also picked up on Italian radio reports that “military authorities”, i.e., British and U.S. occupation forces, had essentially closed the border between the Free Territory of Trieste and Yugoslavia “to prevent communists from entering on the occasion of May 1st.”
Although fatal border incidents were thankfully rare, many years were to pass before outstanding border questions between Austria and Italy on the one side and Yugoslavia on the other were finally resolved. In the case of Austria, the State Treaty for the re-establishment of an independent and democratic Austria was signed on 15 May 1955 at Belvedere Palace in Vienna, while a partition between Italy and Yugoslavia agreed in 1954, which gave Trieste to Italy and allowed the occupation to end, was formally recognised by the two countries only in 1975 with the Treaty of Osimo.
Published 25 April 2025
Last updated 10 July 2026