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
Mississippi-in-Africa (since renamed the Supreme Court). In the late 1840s, approximately 300 African-American freedmen from Ross's Prospect Hill Plantation emigrated to Mississippi-in-Africa. They were the largest single group of American colonists to migrate to Liberia. Ross's grandson and heir Isaac Ross Wade contested the will through years of litigation, during which time he occupied the plantation. Wade was supposed to pay the freedmen for their labor. In 1847 the court ruled that the slaves, then technically free, could leave the United States. In 1848 the last group of Ross's freed slaves emigrated to the colony in West Africa. The passage to