Italy attacks Ethiopia

At dawn on 3 October 1935, around five in the morning, Italian troops under General Emilio De Bono crossed the border river Mareb and advanced from Eritrea into Ethiopia. Italy did not declare war. That same day its aircraft bombed Adwa and Adigrat, while in Addis Ababa general mobilisation was proclaimed to the sound of war drums. One member state of the League of Nations had attacked another, with which it had concluded a treaty of friendship and arbitration seven years earlier. For the first time in its history the League declared one of its members an aggressor and imposed economic sanctions on it. Those sanctions, however, were chosen so as not to stop the war, and the most important of those proposed, an oil embargo, never came into force. The invasion of Ethiopia and the response to it became one of the most important tests of the system of collective security before the Second World War, and its failure opened the way to further aggression.

The road to war

Ethiopia was one of only two independent states in Africa, alongside Liberia, and had been a member of the League of Nations since 1923. For Italian nationalists it remained a symbol of humiliation: in 1896 its army had routed the Italians at the Battle of Adwa. Benito Mussolini wanted an empire to rival the possessions of Britain and France, and land for Italian settlers. At the turn of 1932 and 1933 he ordered preparations for war, and on 30 December 1934, a few weeks after the Walwal incident, he signed a secret directive setting the complete conquest of the country as the goal. From February 1935 division after division of the army and of the Fascist militia sailed for Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. By the autumn some 300,000 soldiers had been assembled there, along with hundreds of aircraft and tanks and stocks of poison gas, while tens of thousands of labourers worked in the ports and on the roads.

The Western powers viewed these preparations through the prism of Germany. In January 1935 the French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval, concluded an agreement with Mussolini in Rome which the Duce understood as giving him a free hand in Ethiopia. In April, at the Stresa conference, Britain, France and Italy jointly condemned German rearmament and pledged to defend peace – but only “in Europe”, which Mussolini took as tacit consent to his plans in Africa. In June London concluded the naval agreement with Berlin, which set it at odds with Paris. The British Minister for League of Nations Affairs, Anthony Eden, offered Mussolini a compromise in Rome: Ethiopia would cede part of the Ogaden to Italy in exchange for the port of Zeila and a corridor to the sea through British Somaliland. Mussolini rejected it with contempt. In August France and Britain offered Italy further concessions in Paris, again to no effect. Britain and France announced an embargo on arms deliveries to both sides, and the United States passed the Neutrality Act with a similar effect. In practice this hit Ethiopia almost exclusively, as it had no arms industry of its own. The only country secretly supplying it with weapons was Adolf Hitler’s Germany, which hoped that Italy would become bogged down in Africa and fall out with Britain.

On 3 September 1935 an arbitration commission ruled that neither side was to blame for the Walwal incident. The pretext for war had vanished, but Mussolini no longer needed one. On the evening of 2 October, as sirens and bells summoned people to the squares throughout Italy, he spoke from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. He recalled that when the colonial spoils were shared out after the First World War, Italy had been given only crumbs, and declared that Italy had been patient with Ethiopia for forty years and had now had enough. The next morning the invasion began.

3 October: invasion from two directions

The main thrust came from Eritrea onto the northern plateau, into the province of Tigray. De Bono, who as Minister of the Colonies had prepared the war and in March 1935 had become commander-in-chief in East Africa, led three corps: General Ruggero Santini’s I Corps on the left wing, General Pietro Maravigna’s II Corps on the right, and General Alessandro Pirzio Biroli’s Eritrean Corps, made up of colonial askari, in the centre. Secondary columns also crossed the Mareb in the lowlands on either side of the plateau. Behind the soldiers came sappers and labourers who built roads, because on the Ethiopian side of the border there were essentially none.

In the south, operations from Italian Somaliland were conducted by General Rodolfo Graziani. His forces were at first much smaller and were intended mainly to cover the colony. In the first days of October, however, Graziani sent motorised columns with tanks and aircraft deep into the Ogaden, along the valley of the Fafan river, and also westwards towards the town of Dolo on the Dawa river.

The Ethiopians did not defend the border. Emperor Haile Selassie I, who until the last moment had pinned his hopes on the League of Nations and did not want to give Italy a pretext, had earlier pulled his troops back from the frontier, and proclaimed mobilisation only in the face of the invasion. His army numbered several hundred thousand men, but most of them were the feudal levies of the nobility, armed with rifles of various types, with few machine guns and only a handful of artillery pieces. The Ethiopian air force had a dozen or so aircraft, mostly transports, and a handful of pilots. Only the Imperial Guard was trained on European lines. Gathering the army from all over the country and marching it hundreds of kilometres on foot to Tigray was bound to take weeks.

The first days thus brought the Italians easy gains. They took Adigrat on 5 October and Adwa on 6 October. Fascist propaganda celebrated “Adwa avenged”. On 11 October Dejazmach Haile Selassie Gugsa, the emperor’s son-in-law and governor of eastern Tigray, went over to the Italians, although only a small fraction of his men followed him. On 15 October the Italians entered the holy city of Aksum. On 14 October De Bono proclaimed the abolition of slavery in the occupied territory, intended to convince foreign opinion that Italy was bringing civilisation to Ethiopia. He then halted to build roads and secure his supplies. Mussolini, who wanted quick victories before the sanctions took effect, pressed for a further advance. On 8 November the Italians occupied Mekele, which the Ethiopians had abandoned. In mid-November Mussolini recalled the cautious De Bono, giving him a marshal’s baton by way of consolation, and handed command to Marshal Pietro Badoglio.

The League of Nations names the aggressor

Ethiopia immediately notified the League of the attack. On 7 October 1935, after a report by a special committee of six states, the League Council found that Italy had resorted to war in violation of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Every member of the Council except Italy voted in favour. On 9–11 October the Assembly endorsed the Council’s position: fifty states supported declaring Italy the aggressor and imposing sanctions under Article 16 of the Covenant, and only Italy, together with Austria, Hungary and Albania, which depended on Rome, voted against or abstained. A special committee was set up to coordinate the sanctions, and its inner circle, the so-called Committee of Eighteen, drew up successive proposals.

The sanctions were adopted in October and early November and came into force on 18 November 1935. They comprised an embargo on arms and ammunition, a ban on loans and credits to Italy, a ban on imports of Italian goods and a ban on exports to Italy of certain strategic raw materials, such as rubber, bauxite and aluminium, iron ore, chromium, nickel and tin. They did not cover oil, coal or steel – precisely the things without which the Italian army and industry could not function for long. Nor did Britain close the Suez Canal to Italian ships, although all the supplies for the army in Africa passed through it and Britain could have invoked its control over Egypt. Some of the states that voted for sanctions had no intention of observing them. Germany, outside the League, and the United States, which had never belonged to it, increased their trade with Italy.

The oil embargo that never came

It is often written that the League of Nations condemned Italy and called for an oil embargo that failed. In reality the League did not so much call for an embargo as debate one for several months, and it never adopted it. In early November 1935 a proposal was put to the Committee of Eighteen to add oil and its derivatives, coal, iron and steel to the list of prohibited goods. Its most vocal advocate was the Canadian delegate Walter Riddell, but the Canadian Prime Minister quickly disowned him. The decision was postponed again and again – on 2 November, 12 December, in January and on 2 March 1936. By the time League experts concluded in February 1936 that an embargo could exhaust Italian stocks in about three and a half months, provided the United States joined it, the war had already been decided in Italy’s favour, and a few days later Europe’s attention was diverted by the German march into the Rhineland.

There were several reasons. Mussolini let it be known that he would regard an oil embargo as an act of war, and neither the British Mediterranean Fleet nor the French army wanted to risk a clash with Italy while Germany remained the main threat. Laval did everything he could to avoid a break with Rome. The embargo also had a weak spot in Washington: the United States was not a member of the League, and the Neutrality Act banned only the sale of arms. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull called on American companies to observe a “moral embargo” on oil and other war materials, but American oil exports to Italy and its colonies rose. The British and French therefore argued that an embargo would not work, and the Americans that they could not go further than the League.

The Hoare–Laval Plan

Instead of tightening the sanctions, London and Paris sought a compromise. On 7 and 8 December 1935 the British Foreign Secretary, Samuel Hoare, and Laval, by then Prime Minister of France, agreed a plan in Paris known as the Hoare–Laval Pact. Ethiopia was to cede most of Tigray and slices of the Ogaden and Danakil to Italy, and grant it an exclusive zone for economic development and settlement across a vast area of the south. In return it was to receive the port of Assab in Eritrea with a narrow corridor, which the British press dubbed a “corridor for camels”. Altogether this meant handing about half the country to Italy, directly or indirectly.

Details of the plan leaked to the French press within a few days. In Britain, where Stanley Baldwin’s government had only just, on 14 November, won an election on a platform of loyalty to the League of Nations, a storm of indignation broke out. On 18 December Hoare resigned and was replaced by Eden. Laval held on until January 1936. Haile Selassie rejected the plan, and Mussolini did not even need to reply. Yet it was clear to everyone, and above all to the dictators, that the governments of both powers had been ready to reward the aggressor at the victim’s expense.

Significance

The war that began on 3 October 1935 lasted, formally, seven months. At the end of 1935 the Ethiopians went over to the counter-offensive, and Mussolini authorised the mass use of poison gas, above all mustard gas, dropped from aircraft on soldiers and civilians alike, in violation of the Geneva Protocol, which Italy had ratified. In the spring of 1936 the Ethiopian armies were smashed, and in May the Italians took Addis Ababa. The sanctions, which had not stopped the war, were lifted in the summer of 1936. In Italy they had the opposite effect to that intended: propaganda portrayed them as the “unjust sanctions” of sated powers against a poor nation, and in December 1935 hundreds of thousands of Italian women gave their gold wedding rings for the war. The regime had never been so popular.

For the road to the Second World War the consequences were graver still. The Stresa Front, the only attempt by Britain, France and Italy to restrain Hitler together, collapsed before it had a chance to work. Mussolini, condemned by the democracies but supported economically by Germany, began to draw closer to Berlin. Hitler drew his own conclusions from the League’s helplessness and from London’s and Paris’s preoccupation with Africa: in March 1936 he sent the Wehrmacht into the demilitarised Rhineland. The League of Nations, which had been unable to defend one of its members even though this time it had named the aggressor and set sanctions in motion, ceased to be taken seriously. Smaller states concluded that if attacked they could not count on collective security. Ethiopia, the first victim of Fascist aggression in Africa, regained its independence only in 1941, in the course of the world war whose path its conquest had helped to clear.