Italy was the least fortunate of the three winning countries.
Mussolini was greedy. During the war itself he claimed operations
in the Mediterranean basin as his private domain in which
to direct his 'parallel war' as he thought fit. He reiterated his
territorial claims at every possible opportunity. They included
Nice, Corsica, Tunisia, Djibouti, the Sudan, part of Algeria,
Epirus, Dalmatia. The Italians' weakness, however,- was soon
apparent. It seriously impaired the Duce's pretentions and
undermined his authority. Italian troops managed to occupy a
few slopes of the French Alps before 1942 and afterwards extended
their domination to Corsica and the territory between the
Rhone and the Alps. They held a few toeholds on the Dalmation
coast and in British Somaliland. Croatia was theoretically an
Italian dependency. But there was little profit in such meagre
conquests.
Although the secret police, O.V.R. A., were brutal, the sympathies
ol the military duels were more royalist than fascist and
they tended to be lenient. In Nice they even refused to enforce
the' Vichy government's anti-semitic laws. By 1943 Italy had lost
everything — the empire which she had conquered before the war
and all the territories she had won during the war.