After the Eden-Mussolini confrontation, the British press, to whom Eden was the personification of the new and higher League of Nations morality in international affairs, turned on Mussolini, mocking and assaulting him as the world’s worst dictator. British socialists, Liberals, and Labour Party members all joined in heaping abuse on the Italian ruler. Rome-London relations went rapidly downhill, and in Geneva the League, led by Britain, threatened sanctions if the invasion of Abyssinia went ahead. Isolated, Mussolini decided he had to act quickly.
THE ABYSSINIAN WAR
ON OCTOBER 3, 1935, Italy sent into battle against African tribesmen a large army equipped with all the weaponry of modern warfare, including bombers carrying poison gas. It was a slaughter. Against the Italians’ four hundred aircraft, Emperor Haile Selassie could match thirteen—of which only eight, all unarmed, ever left the ground. Of his 250,000 troops, only one-fifth had modern weapons. Against the ruthless Marshal Pietro Badoglio—who had not scrupled to spray the flanks of his advance with mustard gas, crippling thousands of tribesmen—the Abyssinians never stood a chance.75
“Moral indignation was almost universal,” writes historian John Toland:
How could a civilized nation attack a weak foe forced to battle planes and tanks with tribesmen on horseback? Britain and America, with conveniently short memories of their own pacification programs, were particularly abusive, and the former led the campaign in the League of Nations to invoke limited economic sanctions against Italy.76
Baldwin’s government faced a dilemma. For British ideals now clashed with British interests. Should Britain avert its gaze from Ethiopia to keep Italy as a Stresa Front partner against Germany, or lead the League in branding Italy an aggressor, impose sanctions, and lose Italy? “What was demanded by fidelity to the high principles of the Covenant of the League of Nations,” writes Barnett, “ran clean counter to what was demanded by imperative strategic need.”77
In January 1935, Barthou’s successor Pierre Laval, concerned about Germany, not some tribal fiefdom in Africa, visited Italy and came close to assuring Mussolini that France would not oppose his conquest. In return for Italy’s abandonment of all claims to Tunisia and her acceptance of French hegemony there, Mussolini had won from Laval an explicit promise of a “free hand” in Ethiopia. But the British had by now been converted to moralistic internationalism and the principles of the League of Nations.
So it was that by midsummer 1935 the British had already reached the point where they were admonishing an old friend and ally, a co-guarantor of the Locarno Treaty and a naval power astride their main imperial artery; and doing so in the tone of Dr. Arnold rebuking a boy at Rugby for wickedness and sin.78
THE HOARE-LAVAL PLAN
AFTER ITALY INVADED, supported by tribal peoples anxious to end the rule of the Amharic emperor Haile Selassie, who claimed descent from the Queen of Sheba, Foreign Secretary Sam Hoare and France’s Laval put together a peace proposal. Italy would take the fertile plains of Ethiopia, the Ogaden. Haile Selassie would retain his mountain kingdom. Britain would compensate Ethiopia for its loss with land and an outlet to the sea. The British Cabinet backed Hoare-Laval and Mussolini was prepared to accept. With peace seemingly at hand, Hoare went on holiday, before heading to Geneva to inform Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Conquering Lion of Judah, that he must give up half his kingdom.
But when the plan leaked in the Paris press, a firestorm erupted over this reward for aggression in violation of the League of Nations Covenant. So hot did the fire burn that Hoare and Laval both had to resign, and London and Paris washed their hands of the Hoare-Laval plan. Sir Roy Denman underscores how political panic and the public uproar over the Hoare-Laval plan caused the British Cabinet to act against vital British interests:
Had the Cabinet stuck by Hoare it is likely that Mussolini would have accepted the plan. Had [Prime Minister] Baldwin…explained robustly the British interest in maintaining Italy as an ally against Germany—the real danger—the massive well-drilled Conservative majority in the House of Commons would not have rebelled. As it was, the Stresa front was broken and the new British Foreign Secretary [Eden] was determined to make the classic mistake of trying to ally himself with Hitler and to oppose Mussolini instead of the reverse.79
Richard Lamb underscores the tragedy that came of Britain’s failure to stand by Hoare-Laval:
Mussolini was on the brink of accepting the Hoare-Laval proposals; indeed he had already told Laval that they satisfied his aspirations. His acceptance would have meant the end of the Abyssinian war, and Italy would have happily rejoined the Stresa Front, leaving Hitler isolated.80
But with Anthony Eden—still smoldering at his treatment by Mussolini in Rome the previous summer—now foreign secretary, the possibility of a negotiated solution to the crisis among the Great War Allies was gone. Britain led the League in imposing sanctions on Italy. A limited embargo was declared that did not include oil, Rome’s critical import, and Britain did not close the Suez Canal to Italian troopships. This produced the worst of all worlds. The sanctions were too weak to compel Mussolini to give up a conquest to which Italy’s army had been committed, but they were wounding enough to enrage the Italian people. “The only effect of the sanctions policy,” writes Paul Johnson, “was to turn Italy into an enemy.”81 “The only result of this display,” wrote Taylor, “was that the Emperor of Ethiopia lost all his kingdom, instead of losing half, as Mussolini had originally intended.”82 Bullock describes how Britain’s failure to choose led to total debacle:
By insisting on the imposition of sanctions, Great Britain made an enemy of Mussolini and destroyed all hope of a united front against German aggression. By her refusal to drive home the policy of sanctions, in face of Mussolini’s bluster, she dealt the authority of the League as well as her own prestige a fatal blow, and destroyed any hope of finding in collective security an effective alternative to the united front of the Great Powers against German aggression.83
Had Britain closed the Suez Canal to Italian warships and troopships and been willing to engage the Italian fleet, she could have forced Mussolini to quit Abyssinia. But the strategic result would have been the same. To Il Duce, avenging Adowa was a matter of national honor. When Britain and France turned on him, he turned on them. The Stresa Front was dead.
Six months later, when Britain and France sought out Mussolini to stand with them in the Rhineland crisis, the sanctions on Italy were still in effect. By assuming the moral high ground to condemn a land grab in Africa, not unlike those Britain had been conducting for centuries, Britain lost Italy. Her diplomacy had created yet another enemy. And this one sat astride the Mediterranean sea-lanes critical to the defense of Britain’s Far Eastern empire against that other alienated ally, Japan.
On July 15, 1936, the League of Nations lifted the sanctions on Italy. Even Eden had now come around. Finally, in 1938, writes Henry Kissinger, “Great Britain and France subordinated their moral objections to their fear of Germany by recognizing the Abyssinian conquest.”84 By then it was too late. Mussolini had cast his lot with the Hitler he had loathed.
One British Cabinet minister did deliver a “blast of realism” at the “Tennysonian chivalry” of sanctioning Italy over Ethiopia. Said Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain in 1936, recalling Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it had been “the very midsummer of madness.”85
The damage done to Britain’s security may be seen by looking back to the Great War. With an army of 1.5 million in France and a navy invincible at sea, Britain had brought Italy, Japan, and the United States into her alliance with France. All were needed to defeat Germany. Now Japan had been cast off to appease America, Italy had been driven into the arms of Germany, and America had retreated into neutrality. And Hitler was about to move.
To appease the Americans, Britain had severed its alliance with Japan and radically reduced the real and relative power of the Royal Navy. Now that navy faced the prospect of war
against a German navy in the North Sea and U-boats in the Atlantic, Italy’s fleet in the Mediterranean, and a Japanese navy in the Pacific and Indian oceans that was growing in carriers and battleships as Tokyo cast off the restrictions of the Washington and London naval agreements.
Luigi Villari’s 1956 Italian Foreign Policy Under Mussolini is a defense of Italian policy and an explanation of how Mussolini was driven into the arms of the Nazi dictator he despised. But even British historians concede Britain’s folly in the Abyssinian crisis, and many blame the same man. Wrote Villari:
More than any other Englishman he [Eden] was responsible for blocking any successful effort to attain relatively permanent peace between the two World Wars and for thus exposing England to an “unnecessary war” which “liquidated” the main portions of the British Empire, subjected Britain to many years of austerity after the War, and reduced it to the status of a second-rate world power.86
Privately, Churchill shared a low regard for the Kennedyesque Eden. On Eden’s elevation to Foreign Secretary, he wrote Clementine, “Eden’s appointment does not inspire me with confidence…. I expect the greatness of his office will find him out…. I think you will now see what a lightweight Eden is.”87
Italy, now friendless and alone in the League, enduring sanctions that had begun to bite, seeking friends, turned to Germany. On January 7, 1936, von Hassel, Hitler’s ambassador in Rome, reported that Mussolini regarded Stresa as “dead and buried” and wanted to improve relations: “If Austria as a formally quite independent state were…in practice to become a German satellite, he would have no objection.”88
On November 1, in Milan, Mussolini proclaimed the Rome-Berlin Axis. In 1937, Italy would adhere to the Anti-Comintern Pact of Germany and Japan, established to resist subversion by the Comintern, or Communist International, centered in Moscow. For the League of Nations, the crisis in Abyssinia was the end of the line. A.J.P. Taylor writes,
Fifty-two nations had combined to resist aggression; all they accomplished was that Haile Selassie lost all his country instead of only half. Incorrigible in impracticality, the League further offended Italy by allowing Haile Selassie a hearing at the Assembly; and then expelled him for the crime of taking the covenant seriously. Japan and Germany had already left the League; Italy followed in December 1937…. When foreign powers intervened in the Spanish civil war, the Spanish government appealed to the League. The Council first “studied the question” then expressed its “regrets” and agreed to house the pictures from the Prado…at Geneva.89
By the time of Munich 1938, Hitler had his alliance with Italy. He would seal it on the eve of war by ordering the German population of South Tyrol transferred to the Reich. Germans who adopted Italian surnames and agreed to assimilate could remain. This ethnic “self-cleansing,” this sellout of his Austrian kinsmen, was done by Hitler to demonstrate good faith to his Axis partner. South Tyrol was expendable to Hitler. But Ethiopia was not expendable to Britain. Thus did Britain lose Ethiopia—and Italy.
CHURCHILL AND MUSSOLINI
WHERE DID CHURCHILL STAND on Abyssinia?
Historian Richard Lamb writes that in the House of Commons, the now backbencher Churchill “argued with passion that sanctions must be taken against Italy if Mussolini violated the Covenant of the League of Nations by attacking Abyssinia.”90 William Manchester contradicts him: “Churchill’s steady eye was still fixed on Germany. Compared with Hitler’s Reich, he had told Parliament, Ethiopia was ‘a very small matter.’”91 On July 11, 1935, Churchill had warned against getting too far out in front in urging the League to punish Italy. We ought not to become, said Churchill,
a sort of bell-wether or fugleman to gather and lead opinion in Europe against Italy’s Abyssinian designs…. We must do our duty, but we must do it only in conjunction with other nations…. We are not strong enough—I say it advisedly—to be the law-giver and the spokesman of the world.92
Churchill thought Ethiopia a matter of honor for the League, and the League a vital instrument of collective security against Hitler. But he did not believe Ethiopia was a matter of morality: “No one can keep up the pretence that Abyssinia is a fit, worthy, and equal member of a league of civilized nations.”93 To Churchill, Abyssinia was a “wild land of tyranny, slavery, and tribal war.”94 And there were far more serious concerns. “In the fearful struggle against rearming Nazi Germany I could feel approaching,” Churchill later wrote, “I was most reluctant to see Italy estranged, and even driven into the opposite camp.”95
On October 1, 1935, hours before the Italian army marched, Churchill expressed his feelings about the folly of alienating an old ally that had fought beside Britain in the Great War:
I am very unhappy. It would be a terrible deed to smash up Italy, and it will cost us dear. How strange it is that after all those years of begging France to make up with Italy, we are now forcing her to choose between Italy and ourselves. I do not think we ought to have taken the lead in such a vehement way. If we had felt so strong on the subject we should have warned Mussolini two months before.96
British leaders willing to appease Mussolini to keep him as an ally would be derided as the Guilty Men in the title of leftist Michael Foot’s 1940 book savaging the Tory appeasers. But Churchill had been among them. From the first time he met Mussolini, Churchill seemed taken with the Fascist dictator. Emerging from a talk with Il Duce in 1927, Churchill, then still Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the press,
I could not help being charmed…by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers…. If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you from beginning to end in your struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism.”97
Churchill went on to praise Fascism’s contribution to the world and the struggle against Bolshevism:
I will…say a word on the international aspect of Fascism. Externally your movement has rendered a service to the whole world…. Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the mass of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of civilized society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison.98
Writes Churchill biographer Robert Payne,
With an unusual blindness, even in those times when the blind were leading the blind, Churchill continued to hold Mussolini in high esteem. The man he was later to call “Hitler’s utensil” belonged to the company of “great men” to be admired, placated and helped on their way. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in October, 1935, Churchill staunchly defended him: The Abyssinians were as primitive as the Indians and deserved to be conquered. While the invasion was taking place, Churchill was holidaying pleasantly in Barcelona and North Africa.99
A week before the Italian army invaded Ethiopia, Churchill was hailing Mussolini as “so great a man and so wise a leader.”100
Two years after Mussolini had embraced Hitler, Churchill was still proclaiming the genius of Rome’s Fascist dictator: “It would be a dangerous folly for the British people to underrate the enduring position in world-history which Mussolini will hold; or the amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, self-control and perseverance which he exemplifies.”101 In December 1940, when Britain was at war with Italy, Churchill, in an address to the Italian people, again said of Mussolini, “That he is a great man I do not deny.”102
A.J.P. Taylor, looking back at the fraudulence of Fascism and the “vain, blundering boaster without ideas or aims” Mussolini had been, wondered at the character of British statesmen, Churchill included:
Ramsay MacDonald wrote cordial letters to Mussolini—at the very moment of Matteoti’s murder; Austen Chamberlain and Mussolini exchanged photographs; Winston Churchill extolled Mussolini as the saviour of his country and a great European statesman. How could anyone believe in the sincerity of Western leaders when they flattered Mussolini in this way and accepted him as one of themselves?103
When R
amsay MacDonald returned from his first meeting with Il Duce, he was so effusive in his praise for the achievements of Fascism and Mussolini, one colleague remarked, “There is nothing more for the British Prime Minister to do but to don the Black Shirt in the streets of London.”104
Still, what was the proper course for a disarmed Britain, confronted with an atavistic act of aggression by a friendly Italy? If one believed Hitler was a mortal peril and Italy a valuable ally against a greater menace, Britain ought to have put League of Nations morality on the shelf. “Great Britain’s leaders should have confronted Hitler and conciliated Mussolini,” Kissinger writes. “They did just the opposite; they appeased Germany and confronted Italy.”105
Where did this leave Britain in January of 1936?
Let Correlli Barnett have the last word on the consequences of putting League of Nations morality above vital security interests. After Abyssinia and the collapse of the Stresa Front,
England, a weakly armed and middle-sized state, now faced not one, not two, but three potential enemies: enemies inconveniently placed so as to threaten the entire spread of empire from the home country to the Pacific. And the third and most recent potential enemy in the Mediterranean and Middle East, was the entirely needless creation of the British themselves as Eden himself admitted to the House of Commons in November 1936, in recalling that the “deterioration in our relations with Italy was due to the fulfillment of our obligations under the Covenant; there had never been an Anglo-Italian quarrel so far as our country was concerned.”106
Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War Page 16