Other Forces

Ethiopian warriors.

Warriors of the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Second Italo-Abyssinian War, 1935. There is, as far as I know, no good estimate of the size of the Emperor's forces at the time of the invasion from Italian Somaliland. Some things are clear, however; it numbered hundreds of thousands (far outnumbering the Italian force and its native auxiliaries); it was overwhelmingly composed of irregular tribal levies like this group; there was no standardisation of armaments (rifles of a wide range of origins and ages were used); the Ethiopians had little heavy equipment; and few of the defenders had any formal military training worth mentioning. In fact, the situation was in most respects remarkably similar to that faced by Haile Selassie's predecessor, the great Emperor Menelek, in the First Italo-Abyssinian War (1895-'96); except, on that occasion, the Emperor's untrained tribal army (which had, however, thanks to their Emperor's foresight, at least been armed to a substantial extent with more-or-less modern rifles from various sources) managed at great cost to annihilate the invading Italian Army and its native levies at Adowa (Adwa), in the process inflicting what was probably the greatest defeat suffered by any European power at the hands of an African army during Europe's age of African colonisation. There was to be no repeat performance in 1935. The Italians were better commanded and by no means so complacent as their grandfathers had been, and the imbalance in terms of training and technology was just too heavily in favour of the Italians. Best regards, JR.