“Italy deserves a place in the sun”. Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia – Corriere.it

Benito Mussolini has decided. Even at the cost of causing a crisis in relations with France and Great Britain, his allies in the First World War, Italy must procure an African empire at the expense of Ethiopia. an act of great symbolic value in the eyes of the population, because it is a question of avenging the searing humiliation of Adua, when in 1896 the warriors of the negus Menelik overwhelmed the troops of general Oreste Baratieri.

When he looks out from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, around 6.45 pm on 2 October 1935, the Duce he knows what topics to use to excite the crowd listening to him, in Rome as in all the squares of Italy thanks to the radio connection. Twenty million men have gathered around him, he says: one heart, one will, one decision. And the decision was to go to war against Ethiopia.

Mussolini’s controversy is directed primarily towards the Western powers, which possess immense colonial empires and claim to deny Italy the right to grab a slice of Africa, already almost entirely divided between the European powers. To achieve this goal, continues the dictator, there is not only an army ready to march, but an entire people against which they try to consummate the blackest of injustices: that of taking away our place in the sun. These are arguments that breach the national pride of Italians, even of some anti-fascists. With Ethiopia – exclaims the Duce – we have been patient for forty years! Thats enough!

If the League of Nations, of which Abyssinia is a part, were to decide (as indeed it will) of the economic sanctions against Italy, to those measures, says Mussolini, we will oppose our discipline, our sobriety, our spirit of sacrifice. This is followed by an exaltation of the Italians as a people of poets, artists, heroes, saints, navigators, transmigrants. Then the final appeal to the proletarian and fascist nation to pronounce with a unanimous and thundering voice: Let the cry of your decision fill the sky and be of comfort to the soldiers waiting in Africa.

The same night, between 2 and 3 October 1935, the offensive began in grand style. More than 150,000 soldiers move from Eritrea, including Italians and colonial forces; another 50,000 enter into action from Somalia. Invading forces have plenty of machine guns, artillery, tanks, air cover. Mussolini demands a quick victory.

Meanwhile, on October 10, the League of Nations decrees a series of economic sanctions against Italy, which come into force on November 18. It is overall about rather mild measures, which allow the Duce to present himself as a victim of Franco-British imperialism without paying too high a price. Among other things, the government in London does not close the Suez Canal to Italian shipping, allowing the sending of reinforcements and the regular supply of troops engaged in the Horn of Africa.

Initially the advance encountered difficulties and proceeded slowly, so on 14 November Mussolini replaced Emilio De Bono, commander of the northern front, with Pietro Badoglio. In December the Ethiopians even attempt a counter-offensive, which is cut short also with the use of toxic gases, prohibited by international conventions. Then, in the first months of 1936, the overwhelming superiority of Italian armaments decides the fate of the dispute. Negus Hail Selassi’s armies are annihilated one by one. On May 5 Badoglio enters the enemy capital Addis Ababa and on May 9 Mussolini can triumphantly proclaim the return of the empire to the fatal hills of Rome.

In reality the conflict is intended to continue in the form of an exhausting guerrilla warfare, during which the Italian troops will commit serious atrocities. The Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani himself was wounded in an attack on 19 February 1937 in Addis Ababa. And the consequent ferocious retaliation, with thousands of innocent victims among the indigenous population.

Meanwhile, Mussolini enjoyed his success, which skyrocketed his popularity. The disagreement with London and Paris however led him to a choice that will prove fatal: the rapprochement with National Socialist Germany of his admirer Adolf Hitler, who already left the League of Nations in 1933. The first meeting between the Duce and the Fhrer was near Venice in 1934: it was a matter of settling the differences between the two countries regarding the fate of Austria, on which the Third Reich has obvious annexation aims, but it did not go very well , because the German dictator has submerged the Italian with his river speeches, without an agreement coming out of it. Mussolini immediately had the impression of being faced with a mental degenerate.

Now for Italy needs to break the isolation and the obvious ideological similarities between fascism and nazism come in handy. Shortly after the conquest of Ethiopia, in July 1936, the Spanish civil war broke out, due to the right-wing military uprising against the republic governed by the left. Germany and Italy rush to the rescue of General Francisco Franco, leader of the nationalist deployment, with weapons, troops and planes. Another factor that contributes to bringing Rome and Berlin closer together.

In October 1936, the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law as he married his daughter Edda) went to Germany where he signed a series of agreements. We are not yet in a formal alliance, but the basic understanding is starting to take shape. In a speech held on 1 November 1936 in Milan, the Duce declared that an axis was formed between Rome and Berlin around which all European states animated by the desire for peace collaboration could collaborate. Since then the Axis will be the conventional name of the convergence between fascism and Nazism.