The Italians take Addis Ababa

At 4 p.m. on 5 May 1936 Marshal Pietro Badoglio drove into Addis Ababa at the head of a motorised column of Italian troops. For three days the Ethiopian capital had been without a government: Emperor Haile Selassie I had left by train for Djibouti, and the city was being ravaged by looting and fires. Badoglio telegraphed to Rome: “Today, 5 May, at 4 p.m., at the head of the victorious troops, I entered Addis Ababa.” That evening Benito Mussolini announced from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia that the war was over and that Ethiopia was Italian. Four days later Italy annexed the whole country, and King Victor Emmanuel III assumed the title of Emperor of Ethiopia. The capture of the capital is often presented as the end of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. That is how Mussolini saw it, but it was only partly true. Ethiopia never surrendered, its emperor never renounced the throne, and fighting against the remnants of the army and against guerrillas continued until the country’s liberation in 1941.

The road to the capital

When Italy invaded Ethiopia on 3 October 1935, few expected the war to be over within a few months. The first weeks brought the Italians easy gains in Tigray, but in December the Ethiopian armies went over to a counter-offensive and in places forced them on to the defensive. It was then that Badoglio, who had replaced General Emilio De Bono in November, received Mussolini’s permission for the mass use of poison gas. From the end of December aircraft dropped bombs filled with mustard gas and sprayed it over troops, villages, pastures and river fords. Air power, artillery and gas, against which the Ethiopians had no protection whatsoever, decided the war.

At the beginning of 1936 the Ethiopian armies were destroyed one after another. In January, in the south, Rodolfo Graziani annihilated the army of Ras Desta Damtew on the Ganale Doria river. In the north Badoglio halted the Ethiopian advance in the First Battle of Tembien, in February he crushed the army of Ras Mulugeta at Amba Aradam, and at the end of February and the beginning of March he defeated the armies of Ras Kassa and Ras Seyoum in the Second Battle of Tembien and the army of Ras Imru in the Battle of Shire. On 31 March the Emperor led his last army, including the Imperial Guard, against fortified Italian positions at Maychew. After a day’s fighting the Ethiopians withdrew, and on 4 April aircraft massacred the retreating columns at Lake Ashenge with bombs and gas. The northern army ceased to exist. On 1 April a column under the secretary of the Fascist Party, Achille Starace, took Gondar, and on 15 April the Eritrean Corps entered the abandoned town of Dessie, from which a road led to the capital.

On 26 April Badoglio set out from Dessie on the final advance, which propaganda dubbed the “March of the Iron Will”. The main column, General Italo Gariboldi’s motorised division of well over ten thousand men in hundreds of lorries, moved along the imperial road through Debre Berhan, preceded by Eritrean battalions. Some 400 kilometres of mountain roads lay ahead. Resistance was negligible. The most serious obstacle proved to be the road blown up at the Termaber Pass, which delayed the advance by a day and a half. A second Eritrean column marched in parallel, while from the south Graziani was advancing on Harar through the Ogaden, where at the end of April he had broken the last Ethiopian defences.

The Emperor’s departure and chaos in the capital

After the defeat at Maychew Haile Selassie made his way through the mountains by night marches, visited the holy city of Lalibela and reached Addis Ababa on 30 April. The next day, at a stormy council, some of the dignitaries wanted the Emperor to stay and lead the struggle from the mountains of the west. The view that prevailed, backed by Ras Kassa, was that the Emperor should go to Geneva and plead his country’s cause before the League of Nations. The government was to move to Gore in the west, and the Emperor’s cousin Ras Imru, still fighting at the head of the remnants of his army, was appointed regent for the duration of his absence. On the morning of 2 May the Emperor and his family left by train for French Djibouti, taking with them the gold of the state bank. From there a British cruiser carried him to Haifa, from where he travelled to Jerusalem and then to England.

After the Emperor’s departure anarchy gripped Addis Ababa. Demobilised soldiers, deserters from the front and the urban poor looted shops and houses, set whole districts on fire and fired shots in the streets. Several hundred people were killed. Foreigners took refuge in the legations, and the defence of the British and French legations later became the stuff of legend. The French government, worried about its citizens and about the Djibouti railway, urged Rome to occupy the city as quickly as possible. Italian Eritrean units could have got there sooner, but Mussolini wanted Italian rather than colonial troops to be the first to enter the capital. Badoglio therefore arrived only on the afternoon of 5 May. Italian patrols occupied key points in the city and shot suspected looters on the spot, and the flag was raised over the Italian legation.

An empire on paper

On the evening of 5 May sirens called people into the squares all over Italy. Mussolini announced from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia that the war was over and Ethiopia was Italian. On 9 May, from the same balcony and before a crowd in Rome, he proclaimed the reappearance of the Empire “on the fated hills of Rome”. That day a decree declared that the territories of Ethiopia were placed under the full and entire sovereignty of the Kingdom of Italy and that Victor Emmanuel III assumed for himself and his successors the title of Emperor of Ethiopia. The Fascist Grand Council conferred on Mussolini the title of “Founder of the Empire”. On 10 May troops from the northern and southern fronts met at Dire Dawa, on the railway from Addis Ababa to Djibouti. On 1 June Ethiopia, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland were merged into Italian East Africa. Badoglio became the first viceroy, but as early as 11 June he was replaced by Graziani, and the marshal returned to Italy.

Victory did not, however, mean that the Italians controlled the country. They held the capital, the main towns and the roads – in essence only the north and the east. In the vast west and south, untouched by the war, stood the remnants of the Ethiopian forces, estimated at several tens of thousands of men. Ras Imru operated from the Gore area and Ras Desta in the south. At the end of July 1936 Ethiopian units attacked Addis Ababa itself and were driven off only after several days of fighting. Ras Imru surrendered in December 1936, and Ras Desta’s last regular forces were destroyed on 19 February 1937. Desta fell into Italian hands soon afterwards and was shot. On that same 19 February an attempt was made on Graziani’s life in the capital, after which the Italians massacred thousands of its inhabitants. From then on guerrillas, known as the Patriots, fought on in the mountains, and Italy never managed to break them. Nor did the war formally end in Geneva. On 30 June 1936 Haile Selassie addressed the Assembly of the League of Nations, but on 4 July the League decided to lift the sanctions, which expired in mid-July. It did not, however, formally recognise the annexation, and even in 1937 several states, among them the United States and the USSR, still refused to recognise it.

According to official figures published in June 1936, the war cost Italy slightly more than 1,100 Italian soldiers killed, some 1,500 Eritrean soldiers and several hundred labourers. Historians regard these figures as understated. Ethiopian losses were incomparably greater and are difficult to establish. Italian estimates spoke of about 70,000 Ethiopian soldiers killed, while the Ethiopian government, in a memorandum of 1946, listed 275,000 killed in combat, not counting the victims of the occupation. To these must be added the civilians killed by gas and bombs.

Significance

The capture of Addis Ababa was the greatest triumph of the Fascist regime and the high point of Mussolini’s popularity. It also showed the whole world that the League of Nations had failed to protect one of its members, even though this time it had named the aggressor and imposed sanctions. The sanctions were lifted once the conquest was an accomplished fact, and Britain and France went back to seeking an understanding with Mussolini. For the dictators it was proof that in the 1930s aggression paid. Adolf Hitler took advantage of the powers’ preoccupation with Africa when he sent troops into the Rhineland in March 1936, and in the autumn of 1936 he formally recognised the Italian conquest. Germany, the only great power in Europe that had not taken part in the sanctions, became Italy’s natural partner. In the autumn of 1936 the Rome–Berlin Axis was formed, in the Spanish Civil War the two dictators were already fighting on the same side, and in 1937 Italy left the League of Nations. Mussolini, who in 1934 had sent divisions to the Brenner to defend Austria, accepted its annexation by the Reich in 1938 without objection.

The empire proved costly and short-lived. Holding Italian East Africa swallowed enormous sums, and tens of thousands of soldiers were tied down there fighting the guerrillas. When Italy entered the war in June 1940, this colony, cut off from the mother country, was one of the first possessions it lost. British, Indian and African troops, together with the Ethiopian Patriots, destroyed it in the East African campaign, and on 5 May 1941, exactly five years after Badoglio’s entry, Haile Selassie returned to Addis Ababa.