Italian Invasion of Ethiopia
Italy invaded Ethiopia in October 1935 and the League of Nations demonstrated that it could not stop a great power. Mussolini's reasons were the standard imperial ones plus revenge for Adwa in 1896, and the pretext was a clash at the Walwal oasis, well inside Ethiopian territory, in December 1934. Ethiopia appealed to the League, of which it was a member. The war was fought with some 400,000 Italian troops against an army that had a few aircraft, almost no artillery and rifles of several incompatible calibres. Italy also used mustard gas extensively, sprayed from aircraft over troops, villages, herds and water sources, and bombed Red Cross hospitals, all of which Rome denied and the documents confirm. Haile Selassie went to Geneva in June 1936 and addressed the assembly in Amharic, telling the delegates that it was their own turn next and that God and history would remember their judgement. Italian journalists in the gallery had to be removed for jeering. The League voted sanctions and excluded oil, coal and steel, and the Suez Canal stayed open to Italian shipping. Britain and France had meanwhile drafted the Hoare-Laval pact proposing to give Italy most of what it was taking, which leaked and destroyed both ministers. Ethiopia was annexed in May 1936, and resistance continued in the countryside until the British campaign of 1941 restored the emperor. The League never recovered its standing, and Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland while the crisis was running. Italy's own reckoning came slowly. The gas was denied officially until 1996, the looted obelisk of Axum was returned in 2005 after sixty-eight years, and no Italian officer was ever tried for anything that happened in Ethiopia.
- Year: 1935 CE
- Category: Political
