Second Italo-Ethiopian War

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Second Italo-Ethiopian War began at 5:00 am on the 3rd of October 1935, when two hundred thousand Italian soldiers crossed the Mareb River into Ethiopia without a formal declaration of war. The invasion is regarded as the largest colonial campaign in history. It would last only seven months before Emperor Haile Selassie was forced into exile, but the violence it unleashed on Ethiopia's people would not end until 1941. Three questions shadow every account of this war: why did the international community do nothing to stop it, how did Italy use weapons banned by international law, and what became of a nation that fought back with repeating rifles against tanks, bombers, and mustard gas?

• 2. The Road to War

  ›

  On the 14th of December 1925, Italy's fascist government signed a secret pact with Britain aimed at reinforcing Italian dominance in the Horn of Africa. The agreement leaked, causing indignation in France and Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government denounced it as a betrayal of a League of Nations member. That quiet diplomatic treachery set the tone for the decade that followed.

  The specific spark came from the Walwal oasis in the Ogaden. In 1930, Italy built a fort at Walwal, well beyond the 21-league limit set by the Italo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1928, placing it squarely inside Ethiopian territory. In November 1934, an Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission arrived there, accompanied by roughly 600 Ethiopian soldiers. The Italian commander, Captain Roberto Cimmaruta, refused to let the British camp nearby. For ten days, both sides exchanged menaces, sometimes separated by no more than two meters. On the 5th of December 1934, shots were fired. Italian armoured car machine gunfire caused about 110 Ethiopian casualties; between 30 and 50 Italians and Somalis were killed.

  Mussolini read the diplomatic landscape shrewdly. On the 7th of January 1935, a Franco-Italian Agreement gave Italy essentially a free hand in Africa in return for Italian cooperation in Europe. French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval told Mussolini outright that Italy had a "free hand" in Ethiopia. In April, the Stresa Front agreement with Britain and France appeared to endorse Italian ambitions further. British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon insisted that the final Stresa communique declare the three powers committed to stability only "in Europe" - a word Mussolini interpreted as British acceptance of an Ethiopian invasion. By the summer of 1935, 300,000 Italian soldiers had been transferred to Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Ethiopia was running out of time.

• 3. Two Armies, One War

  ›

  Ethiopia mobilized between 350,000 and 760,000 men equipped with repeating rifles, though the army was profoundly outmatched in every technical dimension. The best Ethiopian units were the Imperial Guard, the "Kebur Zabagna," who wore a distinctive greenish-khaki uniform modeled on the Belgian Army and were better trained and equipped than other Ethiopian troops. Most fighters wore a white cotton cloak called the shamma.

  Haile Selassie himself spent every available resource on the defense. From January to July 1935, Ethiopia imported approximately 16,000 rifles, 600 light machine guns, and half a million bullets from Europe before the League of Nations arms embargo came into force. Germany, hoping to keep Italy occupied in Africa and away from Austria, secretly continued supplying Ethiopia. German shipments included 10,000 Mauser rifles, 10 million rounds of ammunition, 36 Oerlikon 20 mm cannons, and 30 Rheinmetall-Borsig 37 mm anti-aircraft guns. The Ethiopian Air Force possessed 13 aircraft and four pilots at the outbreak of the war, three of them obsolete Potez 25 biplanes.

  Fifty foreigners joined the Ethiopian forces, a diverse group that included the African American pilot John Robinson, French pilots Pierre Corriger and Andre Maillet, the German pilot Ludwig Weber, and a Swedish military mission under Captain Viking Tamm. A former Ottoman general, Wehib Pasha, served as a military adviser and designed a defensive line known as the "Hindenburg Wall" for use in the south.

  Italy's mobilization operated on an entirely different scale. About 685,000 soldiers were sent to East Africa, along with 6,000 machine guns, 2,000 pieces of artillery, 599 tanks, and 390 aircraft. Mussolini also deployed approximately 80,000 Blackshirt volunteers, the Voluntary Militia for National Security, to give the campaign a deliberately fascist character. The most effective units were the Eritrean Ascari, indigenous infantry commanded by Italian officers, who were regularly used as advance troops. The Italian colonial force even included volunteers from the Italian diaspora in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.

• 4. Poison From the Sky

  ›

  Italian forces used between 300 and 500 tons of mustard gas against both military and civilian targets, violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The gas had been produced during the First World War and subsequently shipped to East Africa. Mussolini authorized its use as early as the 27th of October 1935, in a telegram to General Graziani: "The use of gas as an ultima ratio to overwhelm enemy resistance and in case of counter-attack is authorized."

  After Ethiopian forces killed and mutilated Italian airman Second Lieutenant Tito Minniti, whose aircraft crashed behind enemy lines on the 26th of December 1935, Mussolini expanded the authorization. He ordered Badoglio on the 28th of December that "the use even on a vast scale of any gas and flamethrowers" was permitted. Italian authorities publicly justified the gas campaign as retaliation for Minniti's death. The timeline exposed that justification as false: authorization had come two months before his death.

  From late December 1935 through the following months, over 2,000 quintals of gas were dropped on Tigray, poisoning the waters of the Tekeze area so that soldiers and civilians who drank from the rivers were indiscriminately struck. The Regia Aeronautica also attacked Red Cross units. On the 30th of December, a Red Cross unit was bombed at Dolo and an Egyptian ambulance was attacked at Bulale. On the 4th of March 1936, a British Red Cross camp near Quoram was struck by low-flying aircraft whose crews could not have missed the large Red Cross markings.

  Haile Selassie later described the campaign to the League of Nations. Special sprayers on aircraft vaporized what he called a "fine, death-dealing rain" across vast stretches of territory. Groups of 9, 15, or 18 aircraft flew in succession so that the gas formed a continuous sheet. Soldiers, women, children, cattle, rivers, lakes, and pastures were drenched. British Major General J. F. C. Fuller, assigned as an observer with the Italian forces, concluded that mustard gas "was the decisive tactical factor in the war." Historian Walter Laqueur estimated that up to one-third of Ethiopian casualties resulted from chemical weapons.

• 5. Collapse of the North

  ›

  In December 1935, the Ethiopian army completed its mobilization and launched the Christmas Offensive, aimed at splitting Italian forces in the north and invading Eritrea. On the 15th of December, 20,000 soldiers of Ras Imru Haile Selassie attacked the thin Italian defensive line along the Tekeze River, held by four battalions of Blackshirts under General Filippo Diamanti. Fierce battles at the Dembeguina Pass followed, with heavy losses on both sides, and the Ethiopians initially broke through.

  Mussolini had already lost patience with Marshal Emilio De Bono's cautious conduct of the northern campaign and replaced him in November 1935 with Marshal Pietro Badoglio. Badoglio received fresh corps and authorization to use chemical weapons. Beginning in February 1936, he launched a systematic series of encirclement battles. At Amba Aradam, General Ruggero Santini's I Corps and General Ettore Bastico's III Corps surrounded Ras Mulugeta's force of approximately 80,000 men. Mulugeta ordered a retreat on the 15th of February; by the 16th Badoglio ordered air attacks on the remnants of his army. Ras Mulugeta and his son were killed on the 26th of February by Azebo Oromo brigands who slaughtered Ethiopian stragglers.

  At the Second Battle of Tembien, Italian forces encircled the armies of Ras Kassa Haile Darge and Ras Seyoum Mengesha. About a third of those forces were surrounded; the remainder could not hold together in retreat. At the Battle of Shire, on the 3rd and the 4th of March, 120 fighters and bombers dropped 63,600 kilograms of explosives, mustard gas, and incendiary bombs on Ethiopian forces crossing the Tekezé River, causing between 3,000 and 5,000 casualties.

  On the 31st of March 1936, Haile Selassie personally commanded the final Ethiopian offensive at the Battle of Maychew. He could muster only about 30,000-35,000 men against roughly 40,000 Italian and colonial forces supported by artillery and air power. On the 4th of April, the Air Bombing Brigade under General Vincenzo Magliocco dropped 700 quintals of bombs, including mustard gas, on retreating Ethiopian soldiers exposed on the basin of Lake Ashenge without air cover. Thousands were killed. The organized Ethiopian army on the northern front effectively ceased to exist.

• 6. Fall of the Capital

  ›

  On the 2nd of May 1936, Haile Selassie boarded a train in Addis Ababa bound for Djibouti, carrying the gold of the Ethiopian Central Bank. The Italians could have bombed his train and chose not to, offering tacit acquiescence to his departure. Ras Kassa Haile Darge had advised the Emperor to go to Geneva and appeal to the League of Nations before leading a renewed resistance.

  Before he left, Selassie ordered the government moved to Gore and named Imru Haile Selassie as Prince Regent. After the Emperor's departure, rioters rampaged through Addis Ababa, looting and burning much of the capital, killing several hundred people. Mussolini ordered that only Italian troops and not Askari troops make the official entry into the city, causing a three-day delay. At 4pm on the 5th of May, Badoglio drove into the capital at the head of General Italo Gariboldi's motorized column. Badoglio sent Rome a telegram that read: "Today, the 5th of May, at 4pm, at the head of the victorious troops, I entered Addis Ababa."

  On the evening of the 9th of May 1936, after sirens summoned the population throughout Italy, Mussolini appeared on the balcony of Palazzo Venezia and delivered a proclamation to a crowd of 200,000 people. "The destiny of Ethiopia has been sealed today," he declared, and "Italy at last has her empire." That same day, the Grand Council of Fascism recognized him with the title of "Founder of the Empire." General Enrico Caviglia later observed that the adulation drew Mussolini into a climate of flattering rhetoric that "dangerously accentuated the already extreme confidence he had in his own political ability."

• 7. Massacre and Resistance

  ›

  On the 19th of February 1937 - Yekatit 12 on the Ge'ez calendar - Eritrean rebels Abraham Deboch and Mogos Asgedom attempted to assassinate Marshal Rodolfo Graziani in Addis Ababa. The reprisals that followed have been described as the worst massacre in Ethiopian history. A 2017 historical study estimated that 19,200 people were killed in the three days after the attempt, representing 20 percent of the city's population.

  Federal Secretary Guido Cortese gave the order that defined the killing: "Comrades, today is the day when we should show our devotion to our Viceroy by reacting and destroying the Ethiopians for three days. For three days I give you carte blanche to destroy and kill and do what you want to the Ethiopians." Italians set fire to houses, broke into the homes of local Greeks and Armenians and killed their servants. Some posed on the corpses of their victims for photographs. The day is commemorated in Ethiopia as Yekatit 12; a monument stands in Addis Ababa in memory of the victims.

  Resistance did not end. Abebe Aregai, the former police chief of Addis Ababa, led the most successful Ethiopian guerrilla movement after 1937, operating in units of fifty men. New Viceroy Amedeo, the 3rd Duke of Aosta, appointed on the 21st of December 1937, attempted a more conciliatory approach, building 2,000 miles of new paved roads, 25 hospitals, and 14 hotels. But the occupation required spending that outpaced the Italian economy: the budget for Italian East Africa from 1936 to 1937 required 19,136 billion lire for infrastructure alone, while Italy's annual revenue was only 18,581 billion lire.

  Liberation came on the 5th of May 1941, exactly five years after the fall of Addis Ababa, when Haile Selassie made a formal entry into his capital city after Allied forces drove the Italians out. The 1947 Paris peace treaty required Italy to pay Ethiopia $25,000,000 in reparations. Ethiopia submitted a separate damage bill of £184,746,023, itemizing the destruction of 2,000 churches, 535,000 houses, and the slaughter or theft of millions of livestock.