Another excuse used by Victor Emmanuel was that Mussolini was allegedly still popular with the Italian people and that it would offend public opinion if he dismissed Mussolini. The Vatican favoured Italy exiting the war by 1943, but papal diplomats told their American counterparts that the king was "weak, indecisive and excessively devoted to Mussolini". 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. As Italy's fortunes worsened, the popularity of the King suffered. One coffee-house ditty went as follows:  By early 1943, Mussolini was so psychologically shattered by the successive Italian defeats that he was so depressed and drugged out as to be almost catatonic at times, staring blankly into space for hours while high on various drugs and mumbling incoherently that the war would soon turn around for the Axis powers because it had to. Even Victor Emmanuel was forced to concede that Mussolini had taken a turn "for the worse", which he blamed on "that woman" as he called Mussolini's mistress, Clara Petacci. On 15 May 1943, the king sent Mussolini a letter saying Italy should sign an armistice and exit the war. On 4 June 1943, Grandi saw the king and told him that he had to dismiss Mussolini before the Fascist system was destroyed; when the king rejected that course under the grounds that the Fascist Grand Council would never vote against Mussolini, Grandi assured him that it would, saying the majority of the "gerarchi" were now against Mussolini.