Had he moved in the summer of 1935 he
would almost certainly have got away with that too
- but the cautious streak in his make-up gained the
upper hand. There would be a much better oppor-
tunity in 1936 when Mussolini was looking for
German support instead of opposing it.
The Stresa meeting in April 1935 was not
only concerned with Germany. Mussolini was,
himself, planning a breach of the League Cov-
enant, at Abyssinia’s expense. The French were
willing to connive at Mussolini’s aggression.
They were searching for a diplomatic bargain to
gain Mussolini’s support against Hitler. Foreign
Minister Laval had paved the way when he vis-
ited Rome in January 1935. Mussolini and Laval
then agreed that France and Italy would check
Hitler’s militaristic ambitions. On the question
of Abyssinia, Laval appears to have reassured the
duce that France would not impede Italy. But at
Stresa Mussolini was left in no doubt about the
strength of British public feeling if Italy should
attack Abyssinia. The final Stresa communiqué,
which upheld the sanctity of treaties and con-
demned Germany’s breach of them, carefully
avoided reference to any but European conflicts.
What was left undone was more important. The
powers realised that Hitler’s next step would be
to remilitarise the Rhineland. But the three Stresa
powers, Italy, Britain and France, took no
decisions on how this threat might be met in
time. The British government remained anxious
to conciliate.
In the autumn of 1935 Europe’s attention was
fixed not on Hitler but on Mussolini’s war of
aggression waged against Abyssinia, the practi-
cally defenceless kingdom of Emperor Haile
Selassie. Mussolini felt he had adequately pre-
pared the ground diplomatically with France and
Britain and that in view of the German danger,
which he exploited, the two democracies would
acquiesce. The British government, he believed,
would defy pro-League outbursts of public
opinion. But Mussolini had miscalculated the
British government’s resolve in an election year.
Throughout 1935 he built up a huge army, even-
tually reaching 650,000 men, with modern
weapons and poison gas, to overcome the
Abyssinian tribesmen. On 3 October 1935 he
launched his war on Abyssinia. The Italian army
after some initial success became bogged down.
The democratic world admired the plucky resis-
tance of the underdog. At Geneva the League
condemned Italy as an aggressor and voted for
sanctions. But sanctions were not rigidly imposed
nor did they include oil, necessary to fuel Italy’s
war machine. In any case Italy had stockpiled oil
in Africa in expectation of sanctions. Sanctions
proved an irritant, the main result of which was
to create a patriotic reaction in Italy itself.
In Britain in June 1935, Ramsay MacDonald
finally retired and Stanley Baldwin became prime
minister. Sir Samuel Hoare, who replaced Sir John
Simon at the Foreign Office, conferred with Laval
in December 1935 on partition plans of Abyssinia
which, it was hoped, would bring the war to an
end through secret mediation between Mussolini
and the Abyssinians. The so-called Hoare–Laval
Pact was a ‘compromise’ plan which would have
given Mussolini a large part of Abyssinia. He
might well have accepted such a solution but
when the French leaked the agreement, in Britain
there was a great public protest that the League
was being betrayed and the aggressor rewarded.
The British Cabinet, finding itself in an embar-
rassing position after fighting an election on the
issue of support for the League, placed the blame
on Hoare and refused to endorse the proposals he
and Laval had agreed upon. Hoare resigned on 19
December 1935. That is how Anthony Eden, who
had himself favoured compromise, now inherited
the Foreign Office.
Mussolini resumed his military campaign, and
his troops occupied Addis Ababa in May 1936.
The war was being conducted in the most bar-
barous fashion. The Abyssinians had no means of
defence against air attack or poison gas. The bru-
tality of the Italian occupation and the suppres-
sion of tribesmen still resisting in 1937 was a
precursor of Nazi terror in occupied Europe
during the Second World War. Thousands of
defenceless Abyssinians were massacred, while
Haile Selassie made his dignified protests in
Geneva. The war had brought Mussolini cheap
glory, but it also isolated him and drove him to
seek closer relations with Germany.
1
THE CRUMBLING PEACE, 1933–6 211
