# Second Italo-Ethiopian War Fascist Italy's invasion and five-year occupation of Ethiopia, **3 October 1935 – 1941**. It was the rematch for the [[Battle of Adwa]], a stated aim of [[Benito Mussolini]]'s propaganda, and it was won with weapons and methods Italy denied using for sixty years. ## The campaign Italy crossed the Mareb River from Eritrea on **3 October 1935 without a declaration of war**, with roughly 200,000 troops in the initial advance and a total commitment variously estimated at **500,000–685,000** men, 599–800 tanks, ~2,000 guns and 595 aircraft. Ethiopian strength is estimated at **350,000–760,000** with very little modern equipment. [[Haile Selassie]]'s counter-attack at **Maychew on 31 March 1936** failed. He left the country on **2 May**; **Addis Ababa fell on 5 May 1936**; Italy announced annexation on **7 May**. ## Chemical weapons Mussolini personally authorised the use of gas — an initial authorisation on **27 October 1935** and an expansion on **28 December 1935** permitting Badoglio to use "even on a vast scale of any gas and flamethrowers." The agent was principally **sulphur mustard**, delivered by aerial bomb, aerial spray tank and 105mm artillery shell. SIPRI documents **4,336 mustard-filled aerial bombs** and 540 diphenylchloroarsine bombs; total tonnage is estimated at **300–500 tons**. Documented attacks include the Takkaze Valley (22 December 1935), Makale (21 January 1936), Amba Aradam (February 1936, ~40 tons on retreating troops), the Battle of Shire (29 February–2 March), Maychew (31 March) and the Lake Ashangi region (April 1936). Italy was a party to the **1925 Geneva Protocol**. It denied the allegations until **8 February 1996**, when Defence Minister **Domenico Corcione** acknowledged that the Fascist army had used poison gas in Ethiopia — a reckoning forced largely by the historian **Angelo Del Boca** against decades of official denial. > [!warning] The Red Cross bombings are separately documented from the ICRC's own archive > Between December 1935 and spring 1936 there were roughly **17–23 air attacks on Red Cross facilities**. At **Melka Dida on 30 December 1935** about twelve aircraft dropped 3,134 kg of explosives including **252 kg of mustard gas** on the Swedish Red Cross unit, killing **42 staff and patients**. ICRC President Max Huber wrote to Mussolini on 7 January 1936; Mussolini replied on 16 January calling the strikes unavoidable "accidents," despite evidence that the Italian Air Force had observed the hospitals for days. ## Occupation, massacre and resistance Occupation was never consolidated. The ***Arbegnoch*** — "the Patriots," dismissed by the Italians as *shifta*, bandits — fought continuously from 1936 to 1941, including a clandestine urban network, the *Wust Arbegnoch* or "Insider Patriots." Leaders included **Abebe Aregai**, **Ras Imru**, the Kassa brothers, **Belay Zeleke** and **Desta Damtew**; **Abune Petros** was executed after a failed 1936 attack on the capital. On **19 February 1937** two young Eritreans threw grenades at Marshal **Rodolfo Graziani** at a public ceremony in Addis Ababa. Graziani survived with 365 fragments in him. The three-day reprisal, **Yekatit 12**, is one of the most sharply contested atrocity counts in modern African history: contemporary French and American press reported **1,400–6,000** deaths; Del Boca and Anthony Mockler estimate **~3,000**; Ian Campbell's 2017 study argues **~19,200**, about a fifth of the city; the Ethiopian government's figure is **30,000**. Three months later Italian forces executed the monks of **Debre Libanos** — Fascist records list 297 monks and 23 laymen; other estimates run to 1,500–2,000. ## Liberation Ethiopia was freed by someone else's war. A British offensive from [[Sudan]] opened in January 1941, won decisively at **Keren in March**, and entered Addis Ababa in early April; **Orde Wingate's Gideon Force** — about 50 British officers, 20 NCOs and 1,600 trained troops — cleared Gojjam in roughly six weeks. **Haile Selassie re-entered his capital on 5 May 1941**, five years to the day after losing it, escorted by some 7,000 of Abebe Aregai's guerrillas. The Duke of Aosta surrendered at Amba Alagi on 19 May; the campaign ended at **Gondar on 27 November 1941**. > [!warning] Total Ethiopian deaths: a factor-of-ten dispute > Italian wartime estimates put Ethiopian battle deaths at about **70,000**. Ethiopia's submission to the 1946 Paris peace conference claimed **760,300** across 1935–41, counting combat, occupation killings, bombing, massacre and camp deaths. Del Boca regards the Italian figures as the more reliable and the Ethiopian total as a maximalist claim advanced for reparations. **The gap is a difference of scope and purpose as much as of measurement** — carry both figures and say what each counts. ## Why it matters here This is the war that supplies the vault's clearest case of **atrocity denial as state policy surviving the regime that committed it**. Fascist Italy fell in 1943; the official denial of the gas ran to 1996, through every postwar Italian government. Italy has still not undertaken the colonial reckoning that Germany did — a gap that [[Italian History Hub]] tracks into the present, and one reason the Italian right's relationship to its own past differs so sharply from the German one traced at [[German History Hub]]. ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Abyssinia Crisis]] · [[Battle of Adwa]] · [[Haile Selassie]] · [[Benito Mussolini]] · [[Italian History Hub]] · [[Neutrality Acts]] · [[World War II]]