What I Am Reading: "Haile Selassie's War" by Anthony Mockler

I'd like to say upfront that this is a crusty British military history by a crusty, white British historian. I know I should have looked for an African voice to tell an African story, but this is the best that I could find at medium-lengthed notice, and if any readers have any recommendations on the topic of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, please let me know.

This war, which goes by a few different names (just as Ethiopia was referred to at the time by its medieval name, Abyssinia, by outsiders), was the other war against fascism that preceded World War 2. Ethiopia, at the time a feudal empire attempting to modernize, was the only African state (other than Liberia) to hold out against European colonizers, defeating the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. After Mussolini consolidated his power in the '20s and early '30s, he viewed the nation, bordering the colonies of Italian Somaliland and Eritrea, as a sitting target to expand his sphere of influence and national prestige.

Mussolini's rise to power is well-known, but Haile Selassie came to power in Ethiopia at the same time. Born Tafari Makonnen, Selassie came to power as the last several Ethiopian emperors had, through a combination of armed force and palace intrigue, and not through primogeniture. He had served as the Regent and designated heir of Empress Zewditu (Zauditu in Mockler's spelling) and slowly increased his power until he was formally crowned upon her death in 1930. Selassie was a modernizer and reformer, including militarily: he brought in Belgian officers to train a new class of Ethiopian cadets to form a modern military, as the Belgians were not his colonial neighbors and thus would not have ulterior motives.

Meanwhile, the Italian fascists reorganized their empire; forming Cyrenaica and Tripolitania into one colony of Libya and brutally repressing native rebellions there; as well as leaving its architectural mark on Eritrea. They were not expansionist from the beginning, however; early border disputes with the Ethiopians, scuffles between local potentates, were resolved peacefully as late as 1932, with no active plan for conquest by Mussolini. But by late 1934, a fairly routine border incident caused considerable Italian saber-rattling, and it was known for many months that Mussolini planned a military action. The dictator of the insecure country needed to save face, and the Anglo-French appeasement policies gave him the leeway he needed to maneuver.

The invasion force was built openly, as Italy moved a massive amount of troops, material, and money to its neighboring colonies. The force was made up of regular Italian Army soldiers, Eritrean soldiers, and regiments of Blackshirts. On the other hand, Haile Selassie was leading a feudal nation, one where he had only recently finished consolidating power. Some of his local nobles and tribes were of questionable loyalty, due to ideological differences or loyalty to Selassie's deposed or imprisoned rivals; and many were of questionable effectiveness. Nevertheless, as the Italians moved across the border in 1935, there were only a few major defections. The Ethiopian elite was more cohesive in the face of a foreign threat than the Italians had planned upon.

The Italian advance was slow and cautious, initially under the command of the elderly General Emilio De Bono. Mussolini was constantly agitating for faster movement; especially in the opening months of the war, as he was afraid that British policy would shift to oppose him more firmly if the Labour Party came to power in the 1935 election. They did not, however; the Suez Canal stayed open, and no sanctions were enacted. Despite the slow advance, the Italians did not initially encounter much resistance; Addis Ababa was chaotic as Selassie called his banners. A European negotiation produced a bad peace deal for the Italians to offer the Ethiopians; amidst the public outcry it went unnoticed that no actions to support the Ethiopians were undertaken.

Meanwhile, in November of 1935, the Ethiopians counter-attacked. Some of their forces broke out far enough that they almost crossed into Eritrea, but they were halted by Italian use of mustard gas, a recurring tactic in the war. At the mountains, Selassie's massing army held out in an inconclusive battle, failing to break out or encircle the Italians when they had the chance. Selassie's strategy was to hold the Italians off in the north, then sweep in with a large counterattack from the south.

The traditional Ethiopian tactic was to meet the enemy in pitched battle, and win through strength of numbers, regardless of the scale of the action. Despite the obvious drawbacks of this tactic in the face of the Italians superior technology, discipline, and firepower, traditionalists refused to consider engaging in guerrilla warfare.

This tactic brought the Ethiopians some success in the more rugged terrain and mountains, but they were outmaneuvered by Italian tanks and motorized forces in the plains. They also met disaster in the forests near the Kenya (southern) border, as the Italians turned back the Ethiopians’ southern sweep and broke through their defenses. The northern front also broke, and the Ethiopian armies fell back or melted away. At this point, the end of March, 1936, Selassie personally led his remaining forces in a counterattack, and met the Italians at the Battle of Maychew ("Mai Ceu" in Mockler's spelling). Mockler seemed to think that victory was still possible by the Ethiopians at this point, but the Italian defenses held them off for long enough for ammunition to run out and morale to break (and bribed enough of the locals not to join in the battle). The Italians then spent April of '36 rolling up the remaining Ethiopians across all fronts, not meeting much resistance. The fighters dispersed to provincial capitals as the Italians marched into Addis Ababa, and Haile Selassie made the controversial decision to leave the country and appeal to the League of Nations for assistance. This assistance was not forthcoming, and he settled down to exile in Bath, England.

Meanwhile, the Italians arranged for the submission of any remaining minor potentates as they reorganized their East African holdings into Africa Orientale Italiana, a mega-colony. This included one of Selassie's rivals, Ras (a noble title) Hailu of Gojjam, who was the closest thing to an alternate emperor that they had. Other of Selassie's cadre of noblemen, such as his loyal and respected cousin, Ras Kassa, fled into exile with Selassie, remaining with the Ethiopian population in Jerusalem. Those who remained behind, including Ras Kassa’s children, faced brutal repression by the Italians, especially after a ring of young noblemen attacked Addis Ababa unsuccessfully. Many community leaders were executed in reprisals. After the violence failed to quiet the country or better establish Italian rule, Mussolini switched his governors out, and placed Prince Amedeo, the Duke of Aosta, nephew to King Emmanuel, as the Viceroy of the AOI. The Duke had a similar lack of success bringing disgruntled local leaders and roving bandits to heel. The same couple of Italian generals rotated around the colony’s leadership at this time, Rodolfo Graziani (known for his repression in Libya and commander of the southern invasion force) and Pietro Badoglio (replacement for De Bono in the main force).

This book did not just cover the fall of Ethiopia, of course, but it also covered its reconquest. As tensions mounted in Europe and war approached, neither the British nor the Italians felt particularly ambitious in East Africa. The Italians vastly outnumbered the British on paper, but had their hands full administering their vast colony, and would be cut off from homeland reinforcements in the event of war. The British started to mobilize in the Sudan colony. British policymakers ultimately decided, after some debate, to involve Haile Selassie, as he would be able to tally Ethiopian forces. Ethiopians seemed to accept their Emperor, as he was their best guarantee of independence, and not just the replacement of Italian rule with British.

The Italians, meanwhile, overcame their lethargy when the support of French Somaliland was taken out of play by the fall of France and the Vichy regime. They invaded British Somaliland in August of 1940 and captured it without much of a fight, as the British commander retreated. They also made some incursions into Sudan and Kenya, but never any large-scale attack. The British made efforts to rally and arm the Ethiopians, but did not commit a preponderance of resources at first. The Sudanese colonial leadership (and their army, interestingly modeled and titled on Egyptian lines) was not even eager to bring Haile Selassie in, but he slowly gained legitimacy as Churchill and Anthony Eden pushed for action. Some border skirmishes had turned into embarrassing defeats for the Sudan Colony, and Churchill sought progress anywhere.

The British sought to recreate the success of Lawrence of Arabia, and after a few false starts, they eventually found him in Orde Wingate, later more famous in the China-Burma-India theater of the war. Wingate, coming to command the Gideon Force as he named it, stressed mobility over strength, and husbanding of weapons instead of passing them out to any armed band presenting itself. He was so confident of his guerrilla ambitions that the Middle Eastern high command, under Gen. Archibald Wavell, internalized the idea that they would not need to send regular troops into Ethiopia. His forces were made up of British operatives and trained Ethiopian refugees, as well as whatever tribesmen they could rally to their side during their advance. Wingate had to contend with all kinds of "local experts" from the colonizer community, each pushing their adopted tribe or other project. For instance, some wanted to free the rebellious Galla tribe of Ethiopia from the rule of Selassie's dominant Amhara elite.

As the British agitated on the border, the Italians shored up their defenses and sent Ras Hailu to the border area to try to sow Ethiopian division. Elsewhere (and not covered in the book), Italian troops were repulsed from Egypt, and the British advanced the Ethiopian operations in an effort to capitalize on this momentum, late in 1940. In the north, the British troops (including South Africans and Indians) pushed into Eritrea, running fast through the desert and schlepping through the mountains. Their progress was not as fast as they intended, but the Italians did surrender the province. There was a norm, or unspoken agreement, that the governmental handoff between white men should take place as seamlessly as possible, to avoid any African empowerment in the process.

After this, Gideon Force crossed into Ethiopia at last, alongside Selassie and his loyalists. Wingate intended not to drive the Italians out of the province they entered (Gojjam) but to tie them up and harass them there. Over a series of skirmishes, they succeeded in pushing the Italians back from fort to fort, but were never able to capitalize enough to destroy the force that they were chasing. They eventually captured the provincial capital as the Italians fled, and Ras Hailu handed his loyalty and his ancestral province over to Haile Selassie.

In the mean time, the decisive blow was struck elsewhere. The British colonial government of Kenya, about which Mockler has very little positive to say, finally sent an army into Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, and was able to occupy key points such as Mogadishu without much resistance. This was the force that overtook the bulk of Italian resistance by capturing Addis Ababa, and moved rapidly to keep the white Italian colonists safe from their former African subjects. This ended the war beyond the mop-up of Italian remnants. The Kenyan-British authorities were reluctant to let Haile Selassie into his capital, but succumbed to pressure from Wingate, Selassie, and British leadership. Mockler decides crisply to end his narrative there.

As noted, the book is a fairly straightforward military history, and contains voluminous and minute information on the battles, skirmishes, and commanders making up this narrative, which I have recounted only in the broad strokes. I wouldn't say that Mockler has any explicit colonialist perspective, but perhaps the implicit colonial perspective of a British gentleman who is able mostly to view war as a series of rousing engagements (though he calls out both Italian and British bigotry many times). He is a bit too enamored in my mind with decisive and unknowable turning points of battles, pointing out several instances where the Ethiopians or the Italians might have turned the tide. This may or may not be true, but I lean more toward an interpretation of history that has to do with how many guns a side brings to a fight, how good their organization is, and how many supplies they can bring in. This logistical aspect is not ignored, but is not always explicitly treated as the decisive element.

The slogan of African American volunteers of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War was that "this ain't Ethiopia, but it'll do." Ethiopia and Spain were the key military preludes to World War 2, and though Spain more closely resembled the mechanized European warfare that was to come, the fall of Ethiopia is an important story about an ancient African state's resistance to both fascism and colonialism. Though sometimes he is just dragged along with the tide, Selassie also operated skillfully enough to come out of the war as (1) the head of (2) an independent nation. I don't know a lot about subsequent Ethiopian history, but this book has enough meticulous details on the organization of the Ethiopian state and political system (charts of the royal family, provincial maps, lists of titles and ranks) that I think I wouldn't have much trouble following the subsequent careers of its Ras' and its Negus Negusti.