MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · December 5 · 1934
ON THIS DAY · 5 DECEMBER 1934
Wal Wal
5 Dec 1934 — Italian and Ethiopian troops clash at a watering hole deep inside Ethiopia’s Ogaden, where Italy had quietly built a fort. Mussolini has his pretext a year before he needs it.
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 Chapter 4 — Abyssinia: The League Dies in Africa of The Road to War, 1931–1941 (1935).
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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 →
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