Roughly 100,000 Italian troops advanced from the colony of Eritrea into Ethiopian territory near Adigrat, launching the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Benito Mussolini sought to avenge Italy's humiliating 1896 defeat at Adwa and build a new Roman empire in Africa. The League of Nations condemned the invasion but imposed only limited sanctions, exposing the organization's fatal weakness.
Emperor Haile Selassie's forces, many armed with spears and outdated rifles, faced an Italian army equipped with tanks, aircraft, and, in violation of international law, mustard gas dropped from planes over civilians and soldiers alike. Marshal Emilio De Bono led the initial thrust from Eritrea, capturing Adwa within days, the same town where Ethiopian forces had crushed an Italian army four decades earlier.
Haile Selassie personally appealed to the League of Nations in Geneva the following year, delivering a prophetic warning that inaction against aggression would embolden further conquest: "It is us today, it will be you tomorrow." The League's sanctions, which excluded oil, proved toothless, and Italy annexed Ethiopia by May 1936, merging it with Eritrea and Somaliland into Italian East Africa.
The invasion's diplomatic fallout mattered as much as its battlefield brutality. Britain and France's reluctance to confront Mussolini convinced Hitler that the League of Nations would not seriously oppose aggression, a lesson he applied within months to the Rhineland and, later, far beyond it.