Italian North Africa - Brief History

Brief History

Italian North Africa, unlike Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI) existed in two phases: from 1911 to 1934, as Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and after 1934, as Libya. Indeed, from 1934 to 1939, Italian North Africa was then known even as Libya as the North African territories were consolidated into one colony, Italian Libya.

Successively Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1939 called coastal Libya the Fourth Shore (Quarta Sponda) of Italy: it was united to metropolitan Italy. The term Fourth Shore derives from the geography of Italy being a long and narrow peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean with two main shorelines, the First Shore on the east along the Adriatic Sea and the Second Shore on the west along the Tyrrhenian Sea. The third shore was the one facing south the Ionian sea and central Mediterranean (from Cape Leuca in the southern tip of Puglia, to the southern shores of Sicily near Trapani). The Adriatic Sea's opposite southern Balkans shore, with Dalmatia, Montenegro, and Albania, was planned for Italian expansion as a possible Fifth Shore, with Libya on the Mediterranean Sea becoming the Fourth. Thus the Fourth Shore was the southern part of Imperial Italy, an early 1940s Fascist project of enlarging Italy's national borders around the Italian Mare Nostrum.

From 1940 to 1943, during World War II, Italy attempted to conquer Egypt and Tunisia to enlarge the Italian North Africa. Indeed Axis's military advances (with Rommel) in North Africa allowed Italy to lay claim to significant portions of western Egypt: Italian fascists anticipated creating a client Kingdom of Egypt under Italian control from 1941 to 1942 and successively claimed Tunisia from 1942 to 1943.

After Italy's ill-fated South of France invasion, Mussolini demanded Tunisia, along with Djibouti, Corsica and Nice from France. However it wasn't until November 1942 that Italian troops seized Tunisia, with German Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps troop support, from the French Vichy regime colonial administrators. Tunisia was added administratively to the existing northern Italian Libya Fourth Shore, in Mussolini's last attempt to accomplish the fascist project of Imperial Italy.

In the last months of 1942 some Tunisian Italians did join the Italian Fascist Army. All legally established territory of Italian North Africa was dissolved by early 1943, but Tunisia remained the last de facto Italian administered territory until all Tunisia fell to American and British forces. In May 1943 the Allies victorious Tunisia Campaign (1942—1943), part the Western Desert Campaign, regained all the Tunisian territory for France. The French colonial authorities then closed all Italian schools and newspapers.