Italian auxiliary cruiser Ramb II significant presence of Royal Navy in the Red Sea. With the start of Operation Compass in North Africa and the defeat of the Italian troops at Sidi Barrani on 9-12 December 1940, it became clear that it would be impossible for Italian troops in Libya to reach Italian East Africa to break its isolation. The fuel supplies were dwindling and were projected to be exhausted by June 1941. In anticipation of the inevitable fall of the colony, a plan was developed to send as many ships as possible to Japan or occupied France and to destroy all other ships that
Italian East Africa that was the only one in all Africa. However Ethiopia and Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI) proved to be extremely expensive to maintain, as the budget for the fiscal year 1936-37 had been set at 19.136 billion lira to create the necessary infrastructure for the colony. At the time, Italy's entire yearly revenue was only 18.581 billion lira. The architects of the Fascist regime had drafted grandiose urbanistic projects for the enlargement of Addis Ababa, in order to build a state-of-the-art capital of the "Africa Orientale Italiana", but these architectural plans -like all the other developments- were stopped by World War