35: Resolution

Description

After the Italians moved into Ethiopia there was little doubt in how the war would end, unless another European power became involved.

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Sources

Great Britain and the Abyssinian Crisis, 1935-1936 by Louis John Smith
Black Nationalism and the Italo-Ethiopian Conflict 1934-1936 by William r. Scott
‘No More Hoares to Pairs’: British Foreign policymaking and the Abyssinian Crisis, 1935 by Andrew Holt
Canada, Sanctions, and the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935 by Brock Millman
Between Rome and London: Pius XI, the Catholic Church, and the Abyssinian Crisis of 1935-1936 by Peter C. Kent
The Catholic Missions, British West African Nationalists, and the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia, 1935-36 by S.K.B. Asante
The Effect of Italy’s Expansionist Policies on Anglo-Egyptian Relations in 1935 by L. Morsy
The Ethiopian Intelligentsia and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1941 by Bahru Zewde
Imperial Links: The Italian-Ethiopian War and Japanese New Order Thinking, 1935-36 by Reto Hofmann
Imperial Defense in the Mediterranean on the Eve of the Ethiopian Crisis (July-October 1935) by Rosario Quartararo
The Japanese and the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis, 1935-36 by S.O. Agbi
The League’s Handling of the Italo-Abyssinian Dispute by Alfred Zimmern
The Machinery of British Policy in the Ethiopian Crisis by Gaines Post Jr.
The Test of Aggression in the Italo-Ethiopian War by Quincy Wright
The Hoare-Laval Plan: A Study in International Politics by Henderson B. Braddick
The Royal Navy and the Ethiopian Crisis of 1935-36 by Arthur Marder
The World Crisis of 1936 by Marquess of Lothian
British West Indian Reaction to the Italian-Ethiopian War: An Episode in Pan-Africanism by Robert G. Weisbord
British Policy in East Africa, March 1891-May 1935 by James C. Robertson

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 35 - The Second Italo-Ethiopian War Part 2 - Resolution. This week a big thank you goes out to Roberto, Bill, Zachary, Dylan, and Luke who have chosen to support this podcast on Patreon where they have access to ad-free versions of all of the podcast’s episodes plus special Patreon only podcast released once a month. As the tensions between Italy and Ethiopia escalated during 1935 it became clear that if there would be a unified action from other nations in Europe, Britain would have to take a leading role. There was public support for such action, and for support of a League of Nations action against Italy. This was generally rooted in the belief that the League of Nations and its collective security goals would help to provide peace, and to prevent future wars. Among British political leaders there was more doubt, they generally supported the League, but there were growing concerns that the League could not provide for collective security without resorting to military confrontation. The British government would steer away from open conflict as much as possible during this time, which made their policy choices a bit meandering. They would at times oppose Italy strongly at least in words, and then at other times they would take conciliatory tones. All the time they would hope that diplomacy would be brought back into play, and that some kind of reasonable solution could be found. The problem with that hope was that by 1935 there were nations, Italy among them, that were not seeking those solutions at all and were in fact actively rejecting them. This meant that as much as British leaders might search for non-violent solutions, they were constantly pulled closer to war. In retrospect it seems very unlikely that a war would have started under any circumstances at this stage. The British cabinet did not feel that it was in any way sensible and it was doubtful that the League would have united behind such an action with the French constantly urging caution. However, at the time war seemed like a real possibility and the threat of a conflict caused a serious evaluation of the status of the British military. It would eventually lead to additional support behind rearmament which was already underway by early 1936. At the center of these discussions was the status of the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy had been the British Empire’s greatest tool for both peace and war for centuries but the 1930s saw it as a critical crossroads. Budget cuts and naval arms limitation treaties found the Royal Navy of 1935 at a low ebb, while the strength of rival navies around the world would only increase. If Britain was going to war with Italy, the Royal Navy would be the key, but there was the outstanding question of if it was able to fulfill the role? Regardless of British policy, in Ethiopia the fighting continued until it eventually reached its conclusion in early 1936. We will discuss that end, along with reactions from around the world to both the Italian actions in Ethiopia as well as its open flaunting of League restrictions, which would further clarify for many that the League of Nations and its political structure were little cause for concern.

During 1935 the events surrounding Ethiopia, which would be referred to as the Mediterranean Crisis by the British government, would continue to grow. As British public opinion and some within the government pushed for Britain to take a leading role against Italy the possibility of a conflict erupting grew. However, the demands of such a conflict would cause serious problems for other goals that were being pursued by the British government and military, most importantly rearmament. By 1935 the British were in the early stages of a rearmament program aimed at facing threats no earlier than the end of the 1930s. The most likely of these threats was seen as Germany and Japan. It was seen as absolutely essential that while this program was underway the British government find a way to maintain good relations with other powers, especially Japan and Germany. When the Mediterranean Crisis occurred those that were involved in rearmament planning strongly urged that any conflict be avoided at almost any cost. Among military leaders there was the belief that even if a war with Italy went exceptionally well and resulted in a victory, in the end it would leave the British helpless against future aggression from Germany and Japan. This was due to both the monetary and material sacrifices that would have to be made in such a war, but also because all of the long range rearmament plans would have to be put on hold for the duration, and it was difficult to know if they would resume on the other side. Even if there were many voices that did not want to go to war, war planning would still continue out of an abundance of caution. Critical to any action was the support of France, and especially the French Navy. Conversations between the British and French naval staffs would begin on September 18th, and continue for the rest of 1935. They were far more serious in August when it seemed that war was much closer, or as the First Sea Lord Chatfield would say “we were expecting the possibility of hostilities at a moment’s notice.” What the British found was a French government that was very reluctant to go to war and a French military that was in a material situation either equal to or worse than the British. Beyond just war planning, these meetings were important if any action was to be taken by the two governments against Italy. Even sanctions would only be possible if the military, and of course the Royal Navy, were ready to enforce it, or as Chatfield would say on August 16th while in Paris: “There should also be emphasis that the enforcement of sanction could not be undertaken at the moment which was necessarily diplomatically convenient, but only when the Services were in a position to back the enforcement.”

Because of the central role that the Royal Navy would play in any events in the Mediterranean, it is worth discussing the readiness of the service to perform these duties. it was believed that it would take about 2 months for the Royal Navy to be ready, with those two months involving mostly reinforcement and resupply of ships in the theater. More ships would be sent to the Mediterranean during September 1935, including additional capital ships like the HMS Hood and Renown, however there were limits to how many ships the Admiralty wanted to send into the area until it was clear that the French were on board, and that war was imminent, just to avoid being the cause of such a conflict. All ships were given full complements of men and full stores of supplies, although to do so meant that training schools and supply depots were essentially emptied. As tensions escalated there were also discussions about how best to position Royal Navy resources in the theater. The traditional base of the Royal Navy at Malta was seriously compromised due to the power of the Italian Air Force. There were also concerns about the defenses available for the two vital areas on either end of the Mediterranean, Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. Therefore, instead of basing the fleet at Malta the Royal Navy presence in the Mediterranean would be split between Gibraltar and Alexandria. Alexandria was not as nice, from a harbor perspective, and it lacked repair facilities, but Malta was seen as simply too dangerous and so it was the next best option. Even if the fleet had to be moved, morale was still high, as Admiral Sir Guy Grantham would write “I am quite sure everyone in the Fleet felt more than ready to take on the Italian Fleet and was confident that the Fleet would be successful in any sea operation that took place. Morale was high. Little was then known about the efficiency of anti-aircraft defense, the Italian bombers were based a great distance to the west and they were not considered much of a menace.”

The concerns about Italian air power would become even more critical if a war did begin, because the plans for the Royal Navy were to take offensive actions, moving against Italian forces to prevent them from maintaining any control over the central Mediterranean. These actions would almost certainly bring British ships within range of land based Italian aircraft. The relationship between air power and naval power was not well understood in the mid 1930s. There was a firm recognition that aircraft were a threat, and so naval vessels were equipped with anti-aircraft guns, but there was also the generally held belief that air attacks would not greatly hinder fleet operation. This was considered to be true even when facing the Italian Air Force which was at this point in time one of the best in the world, at least from an equipment perspective. One word of caution on this topic, it is important not to backdate the incredible influence of air power on naval operations that would be seen during the Second World War. During 1935 the number of aircraft involved and the capabilities of those aircraft in terms of payload, range, and speed were very different than even in 1939. By that point another generation of aircraft, and the associated technological improvements would be present, and there would also just be more of them as many air forces went through large rearmament and expansion programs. However, even based on the threat level present in 1935 the Royal Navy had some problems. The most important of these was a simple shortage of ammunition. The statistic often provided at this point is that the ships of the fleet had less than half an hour of anti-aircraft ammunition if they were all firing full tilt. This is of course a bit misleading, because anti-aircraft fire was often done in very short bursts, especially at this point in time when the range of the typical armament was quite short. But, it was also not a great situation to be in with a possible war on the horizon, and anti-aircraft munitions were not the only type that the British were desperately short of. There were even discussions about talking with the Germans to try and purchase some ammunition, although these efforts would not progress very far.

All of these force relocations and ammunition discussions were completed as quietly as possible, again out of concern that the Royal Navy might be the one to cause some kind of hostile reaction from Italy. At the same time the plan that would be put in place should a war begin was solidified. The first task was to close off the Mediterranean to Italian shipping, which was relatively easy given the positioning of Gibraltar and Alexandria. Beyond this there were problems, because while the Royal Navy had more large capital ships they were also split with the Italian Navy in between, putting the British forces at risk of being defeated in detail. The Italian Navy had also been fully mobilized on July 1st, which the Royal Navy was not able to do until war was far more likely due to the political ramifications of such a move. This meant that there were no more Royal Navy ships that could be sent without some time for them to be manned, supplied, and sent. The Italian Navy also had the advantage when it came to small ships including submarines. This submarine advantage would just increase in early 1936 when some German submarines were delivered to the Italians. This gave the Italian Navy the ability, should a conflict begin, to interdict British shipping even in areas that were felt to be safe, like the Red Sea. There were in fact Italian submarines in the Red Sea in late 1935, which the British were not aware of, and which would have been a serious and damaging surprise. The greatest advantage for the Royal Navy would always be their allies in the area though, and in mid-December the information given to the Naval leaders in the Mediterranean was that “It appears that our own forces will have to sustain the war for a non-inconsiderable period. France and Greece, however, have promised full use of their ports, and Turkey is willing to cooperate with her limited air force.” Having both French and Greek ports available was useful, although cooperation from those nations beyond that was a bit unknown with neither government ready to make definitive promises that might bring them into a war. All of this kind of broke apart in 1936 during the Rhineland crisis when British attention was pulled elsewhere and the Royal Navy made it clear that it did not have the forces necessary to continue its role in the Mediterranean and to protect the British home islands from German attack.

One of the reasons that the Royal Navy became so important to the overall structure of the crisis was because just five days after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia the League of Nations released an official statement condemning the action, and then on October 9th economic sanctions were announced. These sanctions had widespread support from the League and the nations that were a part of it, however very few of them were actually in any real position to enforce the sanctions. Instead enforcement would fall primarily on the British and the Royal Navy. While sanctions were announced there was not a lot of specific information about these sanctions, because the goal was to try and bring Italy to the negotiating table, not to spark a war. This meant that sanctions would be applied gingerly and also were designed to do little to actually directly hurt the Italian economy. the two most important sanctions that could have been put in place were not, these were an oil embargo and a closure of the Suez Canal to Italian shipping. Italy needed imported oil for its military and economy to function, but the League could not really enforce an embargo because most of the oil that was imported into Italy came from the United States. It was politically impossible for the League members to prevent American companies from working with Italy, because the United States was not part of the League of Nations, and it was also impossible for those members of the United States government that agreed with sanctions to put them in place, there was just too much opposition. A far more feasible option would have been to close the Suez Canal to Italian shipping, the British could have done this. The Suez Canal was critical for the Italian efforts and it was used to supply both of the Italian armies in north and south Ethiopia. It was of course possible for Italian shipping to go around Africa, but this would have added a huge distance to what was already a pretty tenuous supply system. The British were hesitant to take this step though, there were few actions that they could have taken that would have prompted as much international negativity than closing the canal to shipping for a conflict that they were not involved in. Both of these actions would have had an important impact on the war, but they were not put in place simply out of fear that by doing so, war would have become far more likely. These fears were stoked by Mussolini and the Italian government spreading rumors that the Italian Navy was ready to move against the Royal Navy the instant an oil embargo was put in place.

Of course while the British leaders did take some responsibility in meeting Italian aggression, an equal part was played by France, even if it manifested in a very different way. France was focused first and foremost on Germany, and so many of its actions involving Italy and Britain over the fate of a country in Africa were framed with an eye towards the threat across the Rhine. Therefore they made it clear quite early that they did not feel compelled into a conflict between Britain and Italy, and they would make that decision if it was necessary. They also refused to take any military preparations too far out of concern that it would damage relations with Italy. While they refused to do those things, they were very active on the diplomatic side. Some kind of non-violent settlement which would leave Anglo-Italian relations in good standing was the optimal outcome for the French, and so French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval was very active along with his British counterpart Sir Samuel Hoare. These two men would eventually have their names associated with the Hoare-Laval plan, which would be announced in mid-December 1935. This plan was agreed upon when Hoare was in Paris in December, and apparently both men found that it was a reasonable option. However, it was essentially a complete betrayal of Ethiopia. It gave the Italians the ability to annex all of the territory that it had occupied in both north and south Ethiopia. It gave them something like a mandate over large areas of the interior of the country with sole economic rights. It also provided them with the Eritrean port of Assab, and some territory to its south. Louis John Smith in Great Britain and the Abyssinian Crisis would describe it like this “The Hoare-Laval plan was a compromise between Mussolini’s earlier demands, which envisioned the Italian annexation of all of the non-Amharic areas of Abyssinia and the Italian mandate over the central highlands, and the terms put forward by the Committee of Five. As such, it was viewed as realistic by the two statesmen. In fact, the plan confronted Abyssinia and the League with a defeat which neither could have accepted and hoped to survive.” This was obviously a lot of territory, but the reason that the two statesmen believed that it was the correct deal to try and present to the Italians was because it was likely the only deal that the Italians would agree to. It represented more territory than the Italians had taken up to that point, but was far less than everything which was what the Italians were projected to be able to conquer. At this point both men felt that it was far past the point where the Italians would agree to anything less. With the benefit of hindsight this was probably the correct read on the situation.

However, when the deal leaked to the British press during December it was received incredibly poorly. The attacks against Hoare were particularly harsh, both from the public and from Parliament. It very rapidly became apparent that support for such a deal simply did not exist in the Commons, and in fact the situation deteriorated to a point that Hoare would resign on December 19th. There was still the belief that such large compromises were not necessary or desirable, and so the deal fell apart. It also represented one of the last real concrete discussions and possibilities for a negotiated settlement. Sanctions would continue as they had before, but without any noticeable effect on the Italian campaigns. On May 5th, 1936 the inevitable happened and Addis Ababa fell to the Italian army, what followed were three days of sanctioned violence by Fascist militias throughout the Ethiopian areas of the capital, 20,000 people or more were killed, out of a population of just under 100,000. The Italians would occupy the country until the Second World War. Back in Europe the League sponsored sanctions on Italy would be lifted soon after the capital fell, the end of a disappointing series of actions by the League. It was in many ways the end of the League as an effective political unit, after having been confronted by naked aggression from one of its core European members, and having mustered no real response. At the very least it made it clear that the League, for all its good intentions was unable to meet a militant nation without members of the League willing to go to war, and to go to war together. I quite like this quote from 1938, at which point Neville Chamberlain would be Prime Minister and he would say “At the last election it was still possible to hope that the League might afford collective security. I believed it myself. I do not believe it now…I say we must not try to delude ourselves, and still more, we must not try to delude small weak nations into thinking that they will be protected by the League against aggression and acting accordingly, when we know that nothing of the kind can be expected.” This is perhaps a great distillation of the lessons that should have been learned by League Members from events in Ethiopia.

When it came to the decline of the League of Nations it is easy to compare the Italian actions in Ethiopia with the Japanese attacks in Manchuria which had resulted in Japan leaving the League of Nations earlier in the 1930s. The Manchurian incident had been a serious issue for the League which had, similarly to Ethiopia, found the League of Nations unable to craft a coherent and effective response. Interestingly the Japanese leaders saw the two events as quite different. They saw the Italian attack as yet another example of a nation trying to throw off the shackles of Anglo-French hegemony, just like the Japanese had tried to do in Asia. However, they saw the actions taken by Italy as quite distinct from their own in Manchuria. Instead of seeking to remove European influence from an area of the world, as the Japanese had done, the Italians were instead trying to spread European influence into an area that was previously free of it. This put the anti-League sentiments in Japan, which had been strong enough to cause them to exit the organization, into conflict with the anti-European feelings which were always present. In the end Japan simply maintained strict neutrality, and did not go along with League sanctions. The two countries would later be brought closer together due to their two imperialist actions when they both diplomatically recognized the other’s new territories in the late 1930s, the first nations to do so. In Germany the Ethiopian Crisis was seen as very advantageous, as it clearly caused serious rifts in the Stresa Front which had been formed, and especially between Britain and Italy, two nations that had previously been on good terms which might have united against Germany. In some ways Germany and Italy both benefitted from the actions of the other at this time, Italian actions in Ethiopia caused political rifts, and then the remilitarization of the Rhineland hindered the ability of France and Britain to take united actions in regards to Ethiopia.

For Italy the goals of Africa expansion had been realized in Ethiopia, but the result was not as great as was hoped. The cost of the campaign was much higher than expected, and left national finances in ruins. Some estimates put the cost of the campaign roughly equivalent to an entire year of Italian national income. This would cause serious problems for Italy as it found itself with a military that needed drastic refitting and would soon need a huge technological boost as other nations in Europe were just then starting massive rearmament programs. The lack of ability to invest at this stage would leave the Italian military behind in the arms races that would occur before the beginning of the war, something they would never recover from. Obviously the Italian leaders knew that their actions would be costly, but the hope was that they would be able to extract economic benefits from the new territory through exploitation of Ethiopian resources. For example, like in Libya they hoped that a mass of immigration to the new territory would spark its economy, an event that would never really happen and by 1941 there were just over 3,000 Italian farms in all of Ethiopia. The overall return on the investment of taking Ethiopia would not bear fruit as the war would disrupt economic activity. For the Ethiopians the Italian occupation would be violent and brutal. It is estimated that more than 300,000 Ethiopians were killed during the war and during the Italian occupation, an occupation which would see state sponsored racism that would continue until the Italian occupiers were forcefully removed in 1941.