Just three days into the Campaign, the ‘shame of Adowa’ was wiped out when Regia Aeronautica warplanes bombed the town into submission. “A new cycle has begun for our country,” one volunteer wrote his father back in Italy. “The Roman legionaries are once more on the march.”³¹ Almost immediately thereafter, however, their 20th Century descendants began to bog down in the country’s rough terrain, where its few roads were hardly more than footpaths.

The confusion of desert sinks alternating with steep-sided plateaus and deep gorges was challenging for any modern army, but familiar to the defending natives, who successfully ambushed the invaders on numerous occasions. In a particularly extraordinary encounter, an entire unit of tankettes trying to negotiate a mountain pass was over-run by waves of Ethiopians who tore off the drive-chains with their bare hands. Engagements such as these encouraged Haile Selassie, who still believed he could swamp the Italians with concentrated masses of warriors.

In his first general order of the war, he declared, “Everyone will now be mobilized, and all boys old enough to carry a spear will be sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and cook. Those without wives will take any woman without a husband.” He exempted only mothers with infants, “the blind, those who cannot walk, or for any reason cannot carry a spear. Anyone found at home after the receipt of this order will be hanged.”³²

Selassie was sure that time was on his side. Hence, the longer his armies could delay the Italians, the greater their supply problems owing to League of Nations’ sanctions, which needed about half-a-year to take effect. Morale continued to be very high in Abyssinia throughout the war. The Italians, it was universally believed, had been beaten before, and would be defeated again, regardless of their temporary advances.

But the ‘Lion of Judah’ was having internal problems of his own. With spreading news of the invasion, long-smoldering inter-tribal rivalries erupted in bloodshed and plundering across his heterogeneous Empire, while thousands of subjects resentful of his brutality fled to aid the foreigners. Meanwhile, the Italian juggernaut rolled irrepressibly forward, taking the ancient Abyssinian capital of Axum on 15 October, and destroying a powerful motorized Ethiopian relief column near Hamaniei less than a month later.

Caught off balance since the day the Italians crossed the Mareb River, Ethiopian forces finally collected themselves for an offensive on 15 December. Their tactics were simple: To throw the largest horde of men possible at a single target again and again, regardless of losses, until the enemy was overwhelmed through sheer weight of numbers. Six years later, Mussolini’s troops and their Axis allies would experience the same kind of battlefield encounters on the Eastern Front, when confronting tidal waves of Soviet soldiers.

On the same day Axum fell, immense hordes of Haile Selassie’s warriors descended on the Dembeguina Pass. Traveling only by night, they had arrived at their assault positions unobserved by Regia Aeronautica observer aircraft. With the first morning light, they attacked en masse. “There seemed to be more of the enemy than we had bullets,” recalled one Italian veteran, as the entire Gran Sasso Division was pushed out of Dembeguina with heavy losses.³³ Ethiopian forces continued to advance for another week, retaking the Scire area. When news of their success reached the Emperor, he was beside himself with joy, vowing a repetition of his predecessors’ victory at Adowa. “This time,” he promised a press conference of foreign journalists, “we will not expel the Italians, but exterminate them.”³⁴

Mussolini had the same in mind for the Ethiopians. To break their onslaught at Dembeguina, he ordered the first mustard gas attack since World War One on 22 December. He was also determined to set an example of ruthlessness as a guarantee against future perceptions of Italian weakness. The tribal warriors died like masses of gnats killed by insecticide.

In less than three months since the Campaign began, the Italians were brought to a standstill after a conquest of just 130 kilometers. They had been stopped by virtually impassable terrain far better known to its native defenders, who took their toll on the occupiers with sniping and hit-and-run raids. Addis Ababa still lay some 600 kilometres away.

Advised of the situation, Mussolini granted a leave of absence to his Secretary of the National Fascist Party, dispatching him to Asmara, in Eritrea. Achille Starace was given command of a mixed group of Blackshirts and Bersaglieri, which he formed into a mechanized column of truck transports aimed at clearing the way to Gondar, the capital of Begemder Province.

Living up to his reputation as ‘the Panther Man’, he told his men before setting out, “This is the most risky, most difficult, and most important venture of the Campaign. Don’t waste a shot! We are carrying all the ammunition we are going to have on this expedition. Our column must be like an electric live wire. Death to the touch! Truck drivers must learn to keep to the right of the road under pain of severe penalties!”³⁵

His Wikipedia entry admits, “The road building skills of Starace’s men turned out to be of almost equal importance to their military skills. But, on the morning of 1 April, the trucks of his East African Fast Column (Colonna Celere de Africa Orientale) entered Gondar in triumph. They had covered approximately seventy-five miles in three days.”³⁶

Gratified by the Panther Man’s achievement, Mussolini ordered his forces to dig in, as Italian engineers built the country’s first modern roads. When completed, they could bring up heavy artillery, 150 tanks, and 400 warplanes.

Meanwhile, skirmishes raged around the defensive perimeter, where masses of attacking tribal warriors were mowed down by machine-gun and rifle-fire. Undisciplined as they were, the Ethiopians were effective in close-quarter fighting, particularly members of the Emperor’s elite Imperial Guard, singled out by Marshal Pietro Badoglio for their “remarkable degree of training combined with a superb contempt for danger.”³⁷ Italians unfortunate enough to be taken dead or alive by the Ethiopians, however, were routinely decapitated or mutilated, just as their Emperor promised.

Through the testimony of a prisoner-of-war, the Italians learned that contraband was being smuggled into Ethiopia disguised as ‘humanitarian aid’ by Christian evangelicals from Scandinavia. When crates with false bottoms for concealing pistols and ammunition were found covered by stacks of Christian bibles, Mussolini angrily ordered his commanders, “I authorize you to drive away the Swedish missionaries!”³⁸ His native allies were not above irregularities of their own, however, as the castrated genitals of enemy warriors figured prominently in the dowry of Azebu Galla brides.

Shortly after New Year’s Day 1936, the roads were ready for renewed conquest. A four-day battle beginning 12 January climaxed at Genale Wenz with destruction of the Abyssinians’ southernmost army. Inexplicably, the Italian victory prompted many thousands of Christian Askaris in Somalia to desert from the Royal Colonial Troop Corps and join up with the freshly defeated Ethiopians. Haile Selassie embraced their desertion as a sure sign of ultimate triumph. Victory seemed confirmed a few days later, when his forces surrounded the Italians at the Warieu Pass with what appeared to be the entire male population of East Africa. Elsewhere, a column of the invaders was trapped in the Ende Pass by Ethiopian ingenuity, when some concealed Amharan tribesmen sowed confusion and chaos among the invaders by skillfully mimicking Italian bugle calls!

Mussolini’s legionaries were not slow to collect themselves, however. Hordes of rifle-wielding Ethiopians were cut to ribbons by mortar grenades and fragmentation bombs falling from diving Fiat warplanes. A major contributor to the slaughter was squadrons of Lancia armored cars. Their twin-barreled turrets spewed out heavy machine-gun fire concentrated enough to often break a massed charge of foot soldiers. By 24 January, the only barrier forbidding the Italians from resuming their advance had been formed by enormous mounds of enemy dead.

The Ethiopians’ last major counter-offensive was the turning-point of the war, when an immense army led by Haile Selassie’s own Imperial Guard fell on the enemy at Maych’ew on March 31st. By then, Italian snipers knew that if they could bring down a tribal leader, even in the midst of apparent success, his followers lost all heart for continuing the fight. As one headman after another fell to Fascist sharp-shooters, Ethiopian resistance began to melt away in sections.

The process was accelerated by relentless machine-gun fire on the ground and from the air, until the shattered remnants of the Kebur Zabagna, together with the rest of the army, abandoned Abyssinia’s final offensive. They held their positions against renewed Italian assaults on 2 April, eventually breaking and running after forty-eight hours of relentless shelling. Surviving Kebur Zabagna officers stopped the route with spear-points and bullets long enough to collect their panicked forces for another effort. Their desperate counter-attacks beginning on 24 April put off Italian attempts to seize Degeh Bur, but, less than a week later, the city fell, and, with it, all Ethiopian resistance in the south.

On 9 May, Marshal Badoglio, who had assumed overall command from General Emilio De Bono the previous November, paraded through Addis Ababa surrounded by tanks and armored cars, with squadrons of warplanes flying in formation overhead. Meanwhile, Haile Selassie entrained with his entourage of wives and retinue of slaves for French Somaliland, where the British had a warship waiting at the port of Djibouti to complete his rescue.

The following night, on the other side of the world, an expectant crowd of nearly half-a-million people was jammed shoulder to shoulder in the capacious Piazza Venezia, overflowing into the streets beyond. Twenty centuries earlier, this date had been celebrated as the Roman Lemuria, when the spirits of the dead returned annually to the world of the living for propitiation. Tonight, several powerful air-raid spotlights focused on the high, deserted balcony hung with scarlet Medieval tapestries. Suddenly, a tremendous shout went up from the anxious multitude, as the Duce’s familiar, stocky figure appeared on the brightly illuminated balcony.

One of his British admirers was a woman radio announcer, who described the scene for B.B.C. listeners, her enthusiastic voice dramatically competing with the ‘live’ sounds of an immense, hysterically jubulent crowd intermixed with the strains of martial music: “The Duce has told them them that the war is over. And now they will go back to their homes, and they will realize that in seven months, Italy has acccomplished one of the greatest military feats known in history. You will hear now that the band in the square playing, and the people are still calling him, and the balcony is still lighted. And he will appear again. Yes, he has just appeared at this moment, standing on the balcony, this lonely figure of a man, who has led thirty-four millions to this colossal victory in spite of sanctions, in spite of the hostility of the world.”³⁹

Mussolini waved the agitated masses into silence, then declared, “Blackshirts of the Revolution! Italians in the Fatherland and the world–Listen! With the decision you will learn of in a few moments–a decision approved by the Fascist Grand Council–a great deed has been accomplished. The destiny of Ethiopia has been sealed on this day, the 9th of May, in the fourteenth year of the Fascist Era. All knots have been cut by our shining sword. The African victory stands in the history of our Fatherland as whole and pure as the fallen Legionaries and their survivors who had dreamt and wanted it. Italy finally has her empire!”⁴⁰

His success came sooner than military experts in Europe and America had expected, and much to the chagrin of League of Nation members, who counted on a long war to bring down the Fascist regime. The twenty-seven-week campaign had cost the Italians only 1,500 dead. The Ethiopians suffered ten times as many fatalities. Toward the climax of the fighting, the Regia Aeronautica operated 386 warplanes of all types, 72 of which were lost to accidents and enemy ground-fire, including 122 aircrew casualties. No less valuable than the mineral riches won in the Ethiopian conquest was Italy’s revived military reputation. For the first time since World War One, Italy was taken seriously as a world power, able to victoriously assert her will, even in the face of world opposition. The Duce’s prestige, if not his popularity, soared abroad. At home, he was hailed as a 20th Century Caesar.

A few days after peace was declared, Mussolini engaged in an acrimonious interview with an outspokenly anti-Fascist woman reporter from Britain’s famous newspaper, The Daily Mirror. “While other, enlightened nations are no longer expanding colonial holdings and, in fact, many of their own citizens and leaders urge an end to imperialism altogether as inhumane,” she scolded him, “your government barges ahead with its obsolete notions of empire-building. Why is Italy so behind the times?”

In a measured tone that ill-concealed his impatience, the Duce lectured her, “Fascism sees in the imperialistic spirit–especially in the tendency of nations to expand–a manifestation of their vitality. In the opposite tendency, which would limit their interests to the home country, it sees a symptom of decadence. Peoples who arise or re-arise are imperialistic.” In a pointed reference to the reporter, he said, “Renunciation is characteristic of dying peoples.”⁴¹

During early June, Haile Selassie appeared in Geneva, Switzerland at the League of Nations, which had been convened in special session at his request. As he began to tell of Abyssinia’s plight, some Italian journalists present set up a ruckus by jeering and whistling at him. Their antics were featured around the world in newsreels contrasting the dethroned Emperor as a quietly dignified statesman with the apish behavior of Fascist bullies. These enduring images of the pre-World War Two era were in the minds of European and American leaders who lavished foreign aid on Ethiopia for the next thirty years.

Little of their assistance, however, ever reached the masses of East Africans enduring the worst effects of famine and squalor. While they were crushed under decades of unrelieved misery, the Emperor outfitted floating palaces for himself, and ruthlessly put down a revolt by young intellectuals and army officers demanding an end to oppression in 1960. Fourteen years later, they finally succeeded in deposing the despised ‘King of Kings’ and killed him. Far many more Ethiopians–upwards of nearly two million–had died under his despotism than the 15,000 who fell in the mid-1930s’ conquest of their country. Today, the name of Haile Selassie is far more hated in Ethiopia than memories of Benito Mussolini. Indeed, while the assassinated ‘Elect of God’ is almost universally condemned throughout East Africa, at least some descendants of tribal warriors, like the Somalis, Askari, and Eritreans who fought against the Emperor, still recall the Duce with nostalgia, if not reverence.

Italian rule lasted until Haile Selassie was set back on the throne by British forces in 1941. But during Fascism’s brief administration, hospitals and schools had been built, general hygiene institutionalized, modern agriculture introduced, inter-tribal warfare ceased, and many adult males found employment in a new, immense colonial army. Less than a year after the fall of Addis Ababa, the Italian military presence in Abyssinia was drastically reduced, as the former enemy state settled down to become an imperial holding. The first campaign of Mussolini’s War was the success he envisioned, but it set him on a course to far greater trials than he could imagine.