Pictured: ‘WEAPONRY: Behold the most opportune weapon.’ A propagandistic (and racist) postcard by Enrico De Seta depicting a giant Fascist deploying sulfur mustard against Ethiopians. (Source.)
From an article on the International Committee of the Red Cross’s website:
Junod also confronted the appalling reality of mustard gas and its effects: “That evening [18 March 1936] I had occasion to see with my own eyes [a Fascist] aircraft spraying the ground with an oily liquid, dropping like fine rain and covering a huge area with thousands of droplets, each of which, when it touched the tissues, made a small burn, turning a few hours later into a blister. It was the blistering gas the British call mustard gas. Thousands of soldiers were affected by severe lesions due to this gas…”
Potentially NSFL recording of the gassing and its effects. Click here for potentially NSFL photographs.
Sulphur mustard (commonly known as mustard gas) was a chemical weapon that differed from older asphyxiating gases such as chlorine and phosgene in that it was less lethal: for WWI, the idea behind it was to merely debilitate soldiers rather than massacre them. Even so, sulphur mustard still killed some victims directly and they could die within the span of either minutes or decades depending on the level of exposure. The most immediate effects of moderate exposure were skin blisters and eye irritation, but high exposure could be lethal: some victims inhaled it repeatedly and thereby blistered their throats in the process, killing them.
For survivors, recovery from the short‐term effects usually took as long as six weeks. On the other hand, long‐term effects included skin cancer, scarring, respiratory issues, and blindness, which some WWII veterans are still suffering, and it is probable that some elderly Ethiopians have these problems as well. Unfortunately, I know of nobody interviewing Ethiopian victims of sulphur mustard.
The Fascists, no doubt encouraged by their earlier successes deploying it against Libya (where they held chemical warfare storage facilities throughout the 1930s), decided to reuse their sulfur mustard against Ethiopia when they were only two months into invading it. Quoting Lina Grip’s and John Hart’s The use of chemical weapons in the 1935–36 Italo‐Ethiopian War:
Chemical weapons do not appear to have been used in the war until Ethiopia launched its ‘Christmas offensive’ of 1935, which blunted [a Fascist] offensive and succeeded in temporarily cutting off some communication and supply lines.10 In December 1935 [Fascist] aircraft dropped tear gas grenades and asphyxiating gas over the Takkaze Valley in north‐eastern Ethiopia. [The Fascists] controlled the air and initially dropped sulphur mustard air bombs but later shifted to the use of aerial spray tanks.
Sulphur mustard air bombs reportedly caused most of the chemical weapon casualties.11 The use of sulphur mustard played an important rôle in shifting the momentum of fighting in favour of the [Fascists] and in demoralizing the Ethiopian forces. Its use resulted in many long‐lasting, painful injuries and in a significant number of deaths.12
[The Fascists] also used chemical weapons in the Battle of Shire (29 February–2 March 1936), the Battle of Maychew (31 March 1936) and in attacks on the remnants of Ethiopian forces in the Lake Ashangi region starting in April. The last reported use of chemical weapons by Italy was in April 1936.13 That month the Ethiopian Government also provided a list of towns it said had been attacked with chemical weapons (see table 1).
Although the Ethiopians did have some gas masks, they were evidently in low supply, and many Ethiopians died from sulfur mustard:
[The Fascists’] use of chemical weapons had a strategic effect on the conduct of the war and, as operations progressed, [they] were able to deliver large quantities of sulphur mustard against target areas. Chemical weapons were used to protect the flanks of [Fascist] supply routes and lines of attack and as a ‘force multiplier’ to increase disruption in the Ethiopian forces by hindering communication, demoralizing troops and confusing troop movements.14 A Soviet estimate states that 15 000 of the 50 000 Ethiopian casualties in the war were caused by chemical weapons.15
Similarly, quoting Laura J. Hilton in World War II: A Student Encyclopedia, volume I, page 278:
The [Fascists] employed it to protect their flanks by saturating the ground on either side of the advancing columns. They also targeted Ethiopian communications centers and employed mustard gas against Ethiopian military personnel.
In fact, the [Fascists] deployed more than 700 tons of gas against the local population, either as bombs (each container contained about 44 pounds) or sprayed from aircraft. Their use of chemical weapons was indiscriminate, targeting both military and civilian areas. One‐third of all Ethiopian military casualties in this conflict resulted from exposure to chemical agents.
Aside from the effects on the population, this atrocity also had geopolitical effects:
The [Fascist] decision to employ chemical weapons on a large scale in Ethiopia prompted other nations to renew their production of such weapons and to plan for protecting their armed forces and civilian populations.
France began production at a phosgene facility at Clamency in 1936. The U.S. government reopened mustard gas and phosgene plants in New Jersey the following year. The Soviet Union opened three new chemical weapons production plants. And in November 1938, after the Munich Conference, the British government issued tens of thousands of gas masks to civilians and mandated a minimum level of production of 300 tons of mustard gas per week, with 2,000 tons held in reserve.
Grip’s and Hart’s presumption that the ‘last reported use of chemical weapons by Italy was in April 1936’ is, unfortunately, inaccurate. Even after the conflict officially ended in 1936, the Fascists continued deploying sulphur mustard against Ethiopian antifascists, most notably against those in Amazegna Washa during 1939:
On April 3, the siege of the cave began. The Arbegnoch put up stiff resistance, which was initially successful. The [Fascists] were in a difficult position, as the steep rock walls on either side of the cave left them exposed to enemy fire.
The Ascari used machine guns, artillery, grenades and tear gas bullets, but failed to flush out the partisans. The situation had reached a stalemate, even though they even tried to use flamethrowers. After seven days of siege, the [Fascist] command decided to call up the chemical warfare platoon from the port of Massawa in Eritrea, which arrived with hundreds of artillery shells loaded with arsine and an airplane bomb containing about 212 kg of mustard gas.
On April 9, the chemical platoon, after funneling the mustard gas into 12 containers connected to electric detonators, dropped them in front of the cave entrance and blew them up. Thus began the inferno of Amazegna Washa.
(Emphasis added in all cases. Source.)
Click here for a lengthy explanation on why the Fascists deployed chemical weapons against Ethiopians.
Quoting Ian Campbell’s The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, pages 35–7:
When the time came, terror from the air was indeed the cornerstone of the invasion strategy. It was further strengthened during the Occupation, for the most common method of fighting the Ethiopian Patriots was to follow what had been done to their counterparts in Libya: blackmailing them into surrender by terrorising the civilian population.
This was accomplished largely by the bombing and aerial spraying of Ethiopian men, women, children, animals, crops and drinking water with toxic chemicals provided by the Asmara‐based Chemical Warfare Service known by the Italians as Section K.
The use of these chemical weapons was not, however, an isolated decision or a panic reaction. Neither was it, as was later claimed, a response to atrocities committed by pastoralists against two Italian pilots who had had to make an emergency landing after carrying out a horrific and deadly bombardment of their remote community. The deployment of chemical weapons was all along intended to be a key component of the invasion strategy, to be deployed in the event that the Ethiopians put up serious resistance.
To this end, as early as August 1935, before the [re]invasion had begun, and despite Italy’s being a signatory of the Gas Protocol, Section K had set up an advance unit near Mogadishu in neighbouring Italian Somaliland.
By October, when the invasion of Ethiopia was launched, an extensive chemical weapons facility covering 12.5 hectares had already been established, with facilities for preparing deadly liquids and gases for the invasion. It contained no less than 17 warehouses for storage, together with 35,000 gas masks and decontamination materials for the protection of Italians.29
By December 1935, the [Fascist] advances on both northern and southern fronts had virtually ground to a halt in the face of Ethiopian resistance, despite the fact that many of the Ethiopian rank and file were barefoot and often armed only with antique rifles or spears. The [Fascist] response was the deployment of poison gas and the systematic bombing of Red Cross field stations.30
Until 1996, when [Rome] finally admitted having used chemical weapons, the reaction in Italy to charges of having used such weapons in Ethiopia was denial and, indeed, self‐righteous indignation at such a suggestion. Yet the intention to use such weapons was common knowledge by September 1935, when Mussolini was being exhorted by members of the public to demonstrate to Britain Italy’s power and military might by displaying ‘diabolical savagery’ in Ethiopia, and ‘saturating the plains of Somalia and the forests of the Tigray in a week with gas bombs’.31
For the [Regio Esercito] the great value of chemical weapons was as a means of destroying Ethiopians—soldiers and civilians—en masse from a safe distance without having to confront the enemy directly, but only from aeroplanes.
That this policy was public knowledge in Italy is illustrated by the fact that in early October a group of Bologna university students, having swallowed the propaganda put out by Mussolini regarding Ethiopians, exhorted him to conduct ‘a war to the limits’, against the ‘inhuman, vile […] bestial Abyssinian people’, and insisted that in the process the Italians should deploy chemical weapons to ensure that they themselves would not be put in harm’s way.
In a telling admission of Italian martial spirit that probably infuriated the Duce, who always proclaimed multiple deaths on the battlefield as positive expressions of Italian valour, they wrote, ‘We are Italians, and we want to keep our sacrifice to a minimum—especially when it is a question of fighting animals like the Abyssinians.’
The students knew that chemical weapons were expensive but regarded them as the most effective method of dispensing death from a safe distance, in order to preserve the lives of young Italians ‘who will be needed as the productive forces of tomorrow’s empire’. Dismissing international treaties as applying ‘only to weak states’, they went on to reassure the Duce that, in any case, ‘How can anyone check if Italy does or does not use gas?’32
By January 1936 the application of poisonous chemicals had been further refined by the Regia Aeronautica to provide for high‐volume discharge during low‐flying aerial spraying of Ethiopian civilians and their crops, animals and water sources, bringing the number of Ethiopian deaths during the invasion to an estimated total of more than a quarter of a million.
After the [Fascists] reached Addis Ababa in May 1936, chemicals were also used liberally on the remaining fighting units, as instructed by Mussolini in telegrams to Graziani marked ‘Secret’ and passed on, in, for example, Graziani’s orders to General Alessandro Pirzio‐Biroli to secure the surrender of the Ethiopian commander Dejazmach Wendwessen Kassa in September: ‘Since it is now impossible to use troop columns owing to the rains, […] the goal can be attained by use of all means of destruction from the air day after day, mainly using asphyxiating gases.’33
Poison gas, administered from the air, was used extensively and, after the Occupation began, became the principal weapon used against the resistance.
The reluctance of the Italians at the time, and for the next half‐century, to admit the use of chemical weapons against the Ethiopians appears to have stemmed not from fear of being accused of breaking international law—of which, after all, the invasion of Ethiopia itself was already a massive breach. Rather, it was the shame of having to admit that they were deploying a weapon widely viewed in Europe as one of last resort.
Thus, given the poorly armed Ethiopian army, and the absence of an Ethiopian air force, resorting to chemical weapons would suggest military incompetence in conventional warfare on the part of the [Fascists], or even cowardice.
Since documentary evidence now shows that during the Occupation much of the gas was used on civilian targets, the reluctance to admit its use becomes even more understandable, as does the [Fascists’] decision not to use gas against the British during the war of liberation in 1941, which they would not have been able to hide from the international community.
Further reading: I gas di Mussolini. Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia
Click here for events that happened today (February 29).
1932: The Imperial Japanese 11th Infantry Division landed near Liuhe behind Chinese lines in Shanghai.
1940: Berlin approved Nikolaus von Falkenhorst’s invasion plan for Norway. On the other hand, Fascist submarine U‐20 failed to notice the illuminated neutrality markings on the neutral steam merchant Maria Rosa and sank her in the English Channel, slaughtering twelve to the exclusion of seventeen. Fascist steamers Heidelberg and Troja also left the Dutch island of Aruba in the Caribbean Sea after dark in an attempt to evade Allied patrols.
1944: The third major Wehrmahct offensive launched at Anzio, Italy, which would again fail to dislodge the Allies. Berlin awarded Oberfeldwebel Otto Meyer and Hauptmann Fritz Schmidtmann of the Kampfgeschwader 55 wing the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, and the Axis submarine I‐37 torpedoed the merchantman SS Ascot in the Indian Ocean and then machine‐gunned the fifty‐two survivors in the water, massacring forty‐five. Elsewhere, an Axis merchant ship suffered an Allied torpedo, and Axis destroyer Asashimo faced off an Allied vessel that tried to stop an Axis convoy en route to Truk, Caroline Islands. Coincidentally on Truk, the Axis slaughtered… seventy victims of forced prostitution (‘comfort women’) in an attempt to destroy incriminating evidence before the American invasion arrived… aside from that, the Kempeitai staff at Rabaul, New Britain discussed moving its headquarters from the center of town to a safer location due to Allied bombing. Lastly, Hitachi Zosen laid down the keel of landing ship № 152, and Nachi refueled from oiler Teiyo Maru in Mutsu Bay.
I hope I never see another pith helmet for as long as I live.