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Having spent a decade accumulating poison gas in East Africa, Mussolini gave Badoglio authority to resort to Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness), which included destroying villages and using gas (OC 23/06, 28 December 1935). Mussolini was even prepared to resort to bacteriological warfare as long as these methods could be kept quiet.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the Tenth Army to invade Egypt by 8 August. Two days later, no invasion having been launched, Mussolini ordered Marshal Graziani that, the moment German forces launched Operation Sea Lion to invade Great Britain, he was to attack. [19] Beaten in the Battle of Britain, the German invasion never took place.
On 9 May 1936 Mussolini proclaimed the establishment of the Italian Empire in East Africa ("l'Impero"), with King Victor Emmanuel III as Emperor of Ethiopia. [40] In 1939, Italy invaded Albania and incorporated it into the Fascist state.
A map of Ethiopian Empire, the land at the centre of the crisis.. The Abyssinia Crisis, [nb 1] also known in Italy as the Walwal incident, [nb 2] was an international crisis in 1935 that originated in a dispute over the town of Walwal, which then turned into a conflict between Fascist Italy and the Ethiopian Empire (then commonly known as "Abyssinia").
Benito Mussolini had no plans to invade Egypt, intending to remain on the defensive in Libya if war came. After the fall of France in 1940, the 5th Army could send reinforcements east and on 7 August, Mussolini ordered an invasion to occupy Egypt and establish a land connection with Italian East Africa. In August a lull fell on the frontier.
Mussolini claimed that the world was divided into a hierarchy of races (though this was justified more on cultural than on biological grounds), and that history was nothing more than a Darwinian struggle for power and territory between various "racial masses". [71] Mussolini saw high birthrates in Africa and Asia as a threat to the "white race".
The Second Italo-Abyssinian War (1935–1936), ordered by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, was the last colonial war (that is, intended to colonise a country, as opposed to wars of national liberation), [36] occupying Ethiopia—which had remained the last independent African territory, apart from Liberia.
The East African campaign (also known as the Abyssinian campaign) was fought in East Africa during the Second World War by Allies of World War II, mainly from the British Empire, against Italy and its colony of Italian East Africa, between June 1940 and November 1941.