FALL OF EMPIRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 February 1943, Page 4

FALL OF EMPIRE

ITALY’S AFRICAN DREAM HUGE TERRITORIES LOST. FEW FRAGMENTS ELSEWHERE REMAIN. With the fall of Tripoli, Italy has lost in little more than two years the whole es£ a vast African empire which she has been building up for some 40 years and on which, in the last decade, she had expended enormous colonising efforts in one of the most grandiose schemes the world has known. Until Italy became an active partner in Germany’s war in 1940, her territories in North Africa were immense. Fronting the whole of the Mediterranean coast from French Tunisia to Egypt was Libya, with Tripolitania as its western and Cyrenaica as its eastern sectors; and, except for the small territories of French and British Somaliland, Italy possessed the whole of north-east Africa —Eritrea facing the Red Sea, Abyssinia in the interior, and Somaliland facing the Indian Ocean. All is now gone. In fact, Italy's dream of overseas empire has been reduced to two fragments of actuality—the Dodecanese Islands off the coast of Turkey, and the tiny island of Pantellaria, between Sicily and Tunis. ENGINEERING ENTERPRISES. Before the Abyssinian adventure, the Italian population of East Africa was only about 3000, but under the Fascist scheme of empire-building, money and people were poured into the territories until there were nearly 130,000, apart from the large army sent for the conquest of Ethiopia. Asmara, the administrative centre of Eritrea, connected by rail to the port of Massawa, had a European population of 50,000. It was lavishly equipped with automobile workshops as part of an enormous motor transport company, subsidised by the State and serving the whole of East Africa. Engineers, mechanics and their families were transported complete from Italy; and the automobile industry was matched at nearby Decamere by a large ‘and admirably-equipped branch of "the Caproni aeroplane company. Thus, in 1940, Italian East Africa probably had larger and better engineering equipment than the whole of the rest of Africa, excluding the Union of South Africa. When the United States joined Britain and the Allies, an American technical military mission was despatched to East Africa and Egypt. Under its guidance and with American material, the former Italian engineering plants were adapted to Allied needs and have played a large part in the assembly and delivery to Egypt of large quantities of aircraft and other armaments which have assisted the Eighth Army to hasten the departure of Italians and Germans from Libya. LIBYAN COLONISATION. Mussolini’s dream of recreating a Roman empire in North Africa began to take shape in 1938-39. Libya is more than twice the size of Egypt and, though desert in the interior, has fertile coastal areas in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. Here the largest scheme of organised colonial migration ever attempted-' by any nation was planned. Within the four years, 1938-42, more than 100,000 peasants, scratching a bare living from the hillsides and plains of the homeland, were to be sent to found a new Mediterranean nation of the “fourth shore.” Until war intervened, the scheme was proving a considerable success from the viewpoint of the Italians, if

not from that of some of the indigenous inhabitants who were ejected from their ancestral lands and whose protests were suppressed with diabolic cruelty. In one month in 1938 the Fascist Government settled 20,000 emigrants in 10 new-built farming centres —Oliveti, Bianchi, Giordani, Breviglieri, Crispi and Gioda, in Tripolitania, and Baracca, Oberdan, D’Annunzio and Battisti, in Cyrenaica. At the heart of all stood the ancient Mediterranean capital of ‘Tripoli, ion the modernisation of which vast sums had been expended, providing shipping and land transport facilities and magnificent buildings. But of the gorgeous fabric of the Fascist vision of a new empire only the tattered fragments remain.