ON THIS DAY ·
Battle of Maychew
31 Mar 1936 — Haile Selassie’s last army attacks the Italian line and is broken by artillery, air power and mustard gas — a weapon banned by conventions Italy had signed. The road to the capital is open.
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The moment in context
Italy turned the clash at Wal Wal, which occurred well inside Abyssinian territory, into the pretext for a war it had long intended to fight. Haile Selassie appealed to the League while Italian troops and supplies moved openly through the Suez Canal all year, an early sign of how little the machinery of Geneva frightened a determined aggressor. In October 1935 Italian armies advanced from Eritrea and Somaliland against a fellow member state, and the contest was desperately unequal from the start.
From Italian invasion of Abyssinia, chapter 4 of The Road to War, 1931–1941 (1935).
The place: Battle of Maychew — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — A regime that needed a triumph. Fascism sold itself as the antidote to Italy’s “mutilated victory” of 1918, and by 1934 the promised greatness was overdue: the corporate economy…
- The turn — Paris, December 1935. The Hoare–Laval pact is the hinge because it revealed the system’s two guarantors negotiating against their own verdict: while the League’s…
- What it changed — The Stresa Front becomes the Axis. Sanctioned by his Stresa partners while Germany stayed benevolently neutral (and kept buying Italian goods), Mussolini reversed his alignment inside…
Then ask the room: Britain and France chose not to close the Suez Canal or embargo oil. Was half-hearted sanction worse than none at all? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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