Mussolini, Mustard Gas & the Fascist Way of War

Ethiopia, 1935–1936

Charles Stephenson

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781399051682
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

"Physically the book is well produced, has numerous maps where they need to be in the text and is well footnoted… a must read in English for understanding the war." -The NYMAS Review In early October 1935 and without any declaration of war some two hundred thousand men, comprising soldiers and airmen of the Italian armed forces, Fascist 'Blackshirt' Militia, Eritrean ascari and Somali dubats, invaded the independent state of Ethiopia (Abyssinia). It was an operation entirely of choice, the chooser being Il Duce: Benito Mussolini. The resultant conflict is often described as a colonial war. while it was certainly launched with the intent of turning Ethiopia into an Italian possession, it was in fact a war of aggression against an independent, sovereign, state with membership of the League of Nations. A state that had, according to one of its nineteenth-century rulers, been 'for fourteen centuries a Christian island in a sea of pagans'. The swiftness of the Italian victory resulted from their possession and ruthless use of technology; most particularly aircraft, mustard gas, and motorisation/mechanisation. Since they were fighting an enemy who possessed none of these things, then they were able to wage, indeed inaugurate, what the prominent military theorist JFC Fuller dubbed 'totalitarian warfare' or, as it became known a few years later, total war. This, he opined, was the Fascist, the scientific, way of making war. In his considered view, the Fascist Army that waged it was 'a scientific military instrument.' This book examines that campaign in military and political terms.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Del Boca and the ‘irreducible Montanelli’
• 2. The Sawdust Caesar
• 3. ‘a terrain of crag and precipice’
• 4. ‘Fascism believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace’
• 5. War in the ‘Old-Style’
• 6. Graziani
• 7. ‘a small masterpiece’
• 8. ‘The Awful Warning’
• 9. Keeping Mussolini awake at night
• 10. An ‘African Thermopylae’
• 11. Amba Aradam
• 12. The Second Battle of Tembien and the Battle of Shire
• 13. Serdo and Gondar
• 14. The Emperor’s Army
• 15. Totalitarian Motorisation
• 16. ‘The March of the Iron Will’
• 17. ‘a policy of terror and extermination’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates Section