The Walwal incident

Late in the afternoon of 5 December 1934, the first shots were fired at the wells of the oasis of Walwal (Ual-Ual, Welwel) in the Ogaden desert. On one side stood several hundred Somali soldiers in Italian service, supported by armoured cars and aircraft; on the other, a much larger but poorly armed Ethiopian force. The firing went on for several hours and ended with the Ethiopians in flight. More than a hundred of them were killed, and several dozen on the Italian side. There had been many similar incidents before on the undemarcated border between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, and they had usually ended in talks. This one, however, happened at a time when Benito Mussolini had been preparing the conquest of Ethiopia for two years. It became a pretext for war and, in diplomatic history, the beginning of the Abyssinian crisis, which ten months later ended in an Italian invasion and finally discredited the League of Nations.

Wells on a disputed border

The Ogaden is a vast, arid plain in eastern Ethiopia inhabited by Somali herders. Whoever controlled the wells controlled the pastures, and Walwal was one of the most important groups of wells in the region; according to Italian sources there were more than three hundred of them. The agreements concluded between Italy and Ethiopia after the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896, and in particular the convention of 1908, laid down that the border was to run at a certain distance from the coast of the Indian Ocean and parallel to it. It was never marked out on the ground, however. Walwal lay well further from the sea than the line that followed from these agreements – that is, by their letter, on Ethiopian territory.

From the mid-1920s, however, the governors of Italian Somaliland, especially Cesare Maria De Vecchi, sent irregular units deep into the Ogaden and pushed the de facto border forward from well to well. Mussolini accepted this, although diplomats pointed out to him that according to the maps and treaties the area did not belong to Italy. By 1930 at the latest a permanent post had been set up at Walwal: a circular earthwork manned by about sixty dubats – Somali irregulars under Italian command – backed by the fort at Uarder (Warder), some twenty kilometres away. Ethiopia protested, but its authority in this remote province was weak. Rome argued that the oasis had belonged to Somali sultanates that had come under Italian protection. When the Treaty of Friendship and Arbitration was signed in 1928, the question of the Ogaden border was left unresolved.

At the turn of 1932 and 1933 Mussolini decided to prepare for war, and the Minister of the Colonies, Emilio De Bono, began drawing up plans. Emperor Haile Selassie I, for his part, tried to strengthen his authority in the Ogaden and appointed new governors there. As late as 29 September 1934 the two governments issued a joint statement assuring each other that they had no hostile intentions.

The boundary commission and ten days of tension

On 23 November 1934 an Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission arrived at Walwal. Its task was to establish which pastures in the Ogaden could be used by nomads from neighbouring British Somaliland. It was accompanied by an escort of about six hundred Ethiopian soldiers under Fitawrari (a military commander’s title) Shiferra, and the British members were guarded by a small detachment of the Somaliland Camel Corps. The Ethiopians had notified the authorities in Mogadishu in advance that the commission would be working in the Ogaden. Both sides knew that there was an Italian post at the wells. The commander of the border zone, Captain Roberto Cimmaruta, nevertheless refused the commission permission to make camp and demanded that the Ethiopians withdraw. Italian aircraft began circling over the camp. According to an account revealed by one of the airmen only in 1977, one of the planes even fired a short machine-gun burst, which no one on the ground noticed.

The British commissioner, Lieutenant Colonel Esmond Clifford, decided that his mission must not become a party to the Italo-Ethiopian dispute. He protested and withdrew with his men to Ado, about thirty kilometres to the north-east. The Ethiopian commissioners left with him, but the escort stayed. For ten days the two sides faced each other, in places only a few metres apart, exchanging threats. The Ethiopians brought up reinforcements and, according to various sources, gathered between 1,200 and 1,500 men. The Italians reinforced the garrison to several hundred dubats and brought armoured cars and tankettes from Uarder. Historians agree that neither side did anything to avoid a clash.

The firefight of 5 December

It is not known for certain who fired first. According to the Ethiopians, the Italian positions opened fire at around 3.30 p.m. According to the Italians, the fighting began at around 5.30 p.m., when the Ethiopians shot a dubat who was on sentry duty in a tree. The commanders on both sides were killed in the first minutes: the Somali non-commissioned officer in charge of the post, and one of the Ethiopian commanders, who was leading a flanking move around the earthwork. The Italians’ technical superiority proved decisive. Armoured cars from Uarder joined the fight, and three aircraft bombed and strafed the Ethiopian camp. Most of the bombs missed, but the machine-gun fire from the vehicles was deadly. The Ethiopians, armed mainly with rifles, retreated in disorder, and the Italian vehicles overran their camp. Isolated skirmishes continued until 7 December.

Casualty figures vary from source to source. The most commonly cited figures are around 107–110 Ethiopians killed and between thirty and fifty dead on the Italian side, almost all of them Somali dubats. Each side had between several dozen and more than a hundred wounded. The round numbers found in some studies, such as 150 Ethiopians and 50 Italians killed, are upper estimates.

From firefight to crisis

On 6 December the Emperor protested against Italian aggression on Ethiopian territory. Rome responded with demands: on 8 December it demanded an apology, and on 11 December also compensation, a salute to the Italian flag by an Ethiopian detachment at Walwal, and the punishment of those responsible. Ethiopia invoked the 1928 treaty and proposed arbitration, and on 14 December it notified the League of Nations of the dispute. On 3 January 1935 it formally appealed to the League for help. Italy rejected arbitration in a case it presented as an obvious attack on its post.

For Mussolini the incident itself was an opportunity, not a cause. On 30 December 1934 he signed a secret directive to his senior commanders that set as its goal not the punishment of those responsible but the complete conquest of Ethiopia, using every means and to a timetable that would allow operations to be concluded before the situation in Europe tied Italy’s hands. A week later, on 7 January 1935, Mussolini signed an agreement in Rome with the French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval, who had replaced Louis Barthou after the Marseille assassination. France ceded to Italy a strip of desert on Libya’s southern border, a sliver of territory on the border of Eritrea and French Somaliland, and a block of shares in the Djibouti–Addis Ababa railway, and declared that it had no economic interests in Ethiopia. Laval later claimed that he had not given Mussolini permission for war, but the Duce understood the conversation as giving him a free hand in Africa in return for cooperation against Germany.

The League of Nations, preoccupied with Manchuria and Germany’s departure, treated the dispute as a local one and referred the parties to the arbitration provided for in the 1928 treaty. Britain and France wanted above all to keep Italy in the common front against Hitler and avoided anything that might antagonise Rome. Meanwhile, from February 1935, Italy mobilised division after division and shipped them to Eritrea and Somaliland. In March Ethiopia appealed to the League again, and under its pressure Italy agreed to arbitration without halting its military build-up. The arbitration commission – two Italians, two arbitrators named by Ethiopia (an American and a Frenchman) and a Greek chairman, Nikolaos Politis – met after long delays. On 3 September 1935 it ruled unanimously that neither side was responsible for the incident, since both had had reason to regard Walwal as their own territory. It did not decide to whom the oasis belonged, because Italy had refused to allow that question to be put to arbitration at all.

Significance

Walwal was essentially a minor border clash. It was given its significance by Mussolini, who needed a pretext, and by the great powers, which for ten months treated the matter as a dispute over wells even though from the spring of 1935 the whole of Europe could see that Italy was preparing for war. By the time the arbitration commission announced its verdict, hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers were already in Eritrea and Somaliland, and its ruling had no effect whatsoever on the course of events. A month later, on 3 October 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia without a declaration of war.

In the history of the road to the Second World War, the Walwal incident exemplifies a pattern that recurred throughout the 1930s. The aggressor presented a clash that it had itself provoked or exploited as an insult demanding redress, and the League of Nations and the Western powers responded with procedures, commissions and attempts at compromise at the expense of the weaker party. Ethiopia, which had placed its trust in arbitration and the League Covenant, lost its independence. Britain and France, which had hoped to save the common front against Hitler at Africa’s expense, lost both Ethiopia and Italy, which in 1936 drew closer to Adolf Hitler. In this sense the crisis that began at the wells of the Ogaden was one of the links in the chain leading from the Mukden incident to war in Europe.