ITALY: The Emperor Is Dead

The names were like a dirge to the war-weary Italians. First it was Eritrea, then Somaliland, then Ethiopia and Cyrenaica. Last week the one Italian venture into empire that was worthy of the name was gone, too. Ancient Tripolitania, gleaming with modern roads, watered by giant aqueducts, colonized with thousands of eager peasants, had fallen to the Allies (see p. 26). Italians had only the sands blown across the Mediterranean by the sirocco to remind them of the 1,239,112 sq. mi. of African empire they had owned.

To the Italian people Tripoli was a proud name, a “jewel city.” They saw logic in Mussolini’s empire-mongering when Tripolitania produced olives, grapes, barley, wheat, almonds and figs for the homeland. It cost millions of lire to get production started, but the returns were in food, not, as in other of Il Duce’s ventures, in crippled and dead soldiers.

There was a glamor about Tripoli. It was ancient Oea under Phoenician traders 1,000 years before Christ was born. It was a Roman colony after the fall of Carthage. It was the seat of Barbary coast pirates who waged a losing war against the U.S. Navy in the early 1800s. Since 1912, when the Italians wrested it from Turkish rule, it had bolstered the Italian ego. Since 1933, when Mussolini began exploiting its riches, it had inflated Italian pride. Losing it was a shock.

Until Tripoli fell, the Italian press and radio carried only vague reports of fighting moving west in Libya. When the capitulation could no longer be kept from the people, there were lame excuses that Tripoli was no longer strategically important. But the Italians asked: “Where was Rommel?” They remembered Winston Churchill’s pledge of December 1940 to rip Mussolini’s overseas empire into tatters. They wondered how long it would take before the tide of battle surged across the Mediterranean to their own shores.

The loss of the last remnant of African empire squashed Mussolini’s already crawling prestige. For “El Piccolo,” King Vittorio Emanuele, who docilely hitched his destiny to Mussolini’s bombast, it meant that he could no longer call himself “King-Emperor.”

In Ethiopia’s capital at Addis Ababa, King-Emperor Haile Selassie did not see fit to offer his condolences.