Artist Unknown: Italy Abyssinia c 1936.

Anon: Italy Abyssinia. c. 1936. Highly unusual propaganda poster shows a large map of north western Africa sandwiched between photos of Benito Mussolini in the poster’s top righthand corner and Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in the poster’s lower left corner. Sparse text written in Flemish and French shows Mussolini haranguing his troops in Naples. The text accompanying Haile Selassie’s photo calls for the League of Nations to intervene in the fighting, but this never happened. This map also includes Ethiopia where Italy, under Mussolini’s belligerent leadership, and Haile Selassie, then Emperor of Ethiopia, fought a war for control of Ethiopia from October 1935 to May 1936. This war is today referred to as the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The invading Italians won the war at the Battle of Maychew in March 1936 after which they annexed the country. During the First Italo-Ethiopian, which was fought in the late nineteenth century, the Ethiopians defeated the humiliated Italians at the Battle of Adowa in March 1896 winning the war. Avenging this loss and expanding its African territory were the main reasons that the Italians fought the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Before the war began, the Italians already controlled Italian Eritrea to the north and parts of neighboring Somalia to the east. 32×24 mint, conservation backed.