This chapter recounts the large-scale wartime repatriations of civilians from Italian overseas territories. From the very start, demographic colonization aimed at establishing sizable and permanent settler populations in various parts of the empire had necessitated policies of both voluntary and involuntary repatriation of individual colonists and settler families. Reasons for such individual repatriations ranged from illness, to inability to work, to “immoral” behavior that could damage fascist prestige in the colonies and encourage insubordination on the part of fellow colonists. In contrast to such individual movements, the removal of Italian civilians from Italy's African territories carried out between 1940 and 1943 took place under the banner of state-sponsored humanitarianism. Once Italy joined the conflict, a number of repatriations occurred on so-called hospital ships. The three missions from Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI) to Italian ports carried out between 1942 and 1943 on the “white ships” or navi bianche—four transatlantic cruise ships painted white with the red cross—remain the best known of such efforts and brought approximately 27,778 citizens back to the peninsula.