In the summer of 1942, Grandi had a private audience with Victor Emmanuel, where he asked him to dismiss Mussolini and sign an armistice with the Allies before the Fascist regime was destroyed only to be told to "trust your king" and "stop speaking like a mere journalist". Grandi told Ciano that the king must be either "crazy" and/or "senile" as he was utterly passive, refusing to act against Mussolini. In late 1942, Italian Libya was lost. During Operation Anton on 9 November 1942, the unoccupied part of France was occupied by the Axis forces, which allowed Victor Emmanuel to proclaim in a speech at long last Corsica and Nice had been "liberated". Early in 1943, the ten divisions of the "Italian Army in Russia" ("Armata Italiana in Russia", or ARMIR) were crushed in a side-action in the Battle of Stalingrad. By the middle of 1943, the last Italian forces in Tunisia had surrendered and Sicily had been taken by the Allies. Hampered by lack of fuel as well as several serious defeats, the Italian Navy spent most of the war confined to port. As a result, the Mediterranean Sea was not in any real sense Italy's "Mare Nostrum". While the Air Force generally did better than the Army or the Navy, it was chronically short of modern aircraft.