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were in secret breach of the size limits imposed by the naval treaty and also superior to any individual ship the Royal Navy could send against them. They would be supported by squadrons of powerful heavy cruisers. More crucial still, the U-boats that would one day come so close to bringing Britain to her knees began rolling from the stocks in their tens, then their hundreds.
    Raeder believed that Plan Z would see the Kriegsmarine ready for war by 1945. Hitler alone knew it would come sooner. By 1939, in a series of stunning coups, he had annexed his Austrian homeland to be part of the greater German Reich and had dismembered neighbouring Czechoslovakia over the feeble protests of the British Conservative Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Hitler’s next victim would be defenceless Poland. As the war clouds swelled and grew darker yet again, he cast around for allies and found one in his fellow dictator, the Italian Duce, Benito Mussolini.
    On 22 May 1939, just nine days after the Autolycus hadsailed from Sydney, the Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Italian counterpart, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who was Mussolini’s son-in-law, signed a formal treaty of friendship and alliance. Publicly known as the Pact of Steel, it was sealed at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin in a ceremony that was a glittering Nazi parody of imperial splendour. Tricked out with the usual diplomatic froth about friendship and economic cooperation, it also obliged each country to come to the aid of the other in the case of conflict with a third power. Ciano, who had not bothered to read the fine print, remained blithely unaware that this could plunge his country into war at any minute on Germany’s say-so.
    The Kingdom of Italy had fought on the Allied side against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the old Italian arch-enemy, in the First World War. Victory, though, had brought only political chaos, as a succession of governments teetered and fell. In the 1920s, a new political force emerged from the mess. While Hitler was still a virtual unknown brawling in Munich streets, Mussolini, a former soldier and self-styled journalist, had created Fascism, 5 at first a cult and then an ideology that blended frenzied nationalism with a scorn for democracy and a paranoid loathing of socialism and communism. In 1922, with a bellowed command to his black-shirted storm troopers to ‘believe, obey, fight’, Mussolini seized power in Italy in a virtually bloodless coup, the so-called March on Rome. After a measure of success in restoring the nation’s battered economy – he famously made the trains run on time – he began to indulge a soaring ambition for a new Roman empire that would again dominate Mediterranean Europe and Africa. The Mediterranean itself would become Mare Nostrum, ‘Our Sea’.
    In the 1930s, he, too, launched a building program for new capital ships and cruisers for the Regia Marina, the Italian Royal Navy, including two of the most elegant battleships ever built, the 45,000-ton sister ships Vittorio Veneto and Littorio . There would also be an impressive fleet of destroyersand submarines. But still the Marina would be outnumbered and outclassed by the two navies it would have to contest for supremacy, the French and the British. War on land might offer riper fruit to pluck.
    Italy had imposed a chaotic colonial rule on what is now the North African state of Libya after expelling the Turks in 1911. In 1922, Mussolini mounted a brutal assault to crush the remnants of Libyan resistance, slaughtering tens of thousands of ‘rebels’ and imprisoning perhaps 100,000 more in concentration camps. Libya became the first outpost of his new Rome.
    Emboldened by that contemptuously easy success and the tinsel glory it brought him, in 1935 he invaded another pitifully backward North African state: Abyssinia, or modern Ethiopia. It was a war that hurled the modern technology of the Italian