When did World War II really begin?
By Dr. James E. Sulton Jr.
JA International Correspondent
Almost every school textbook in America fixes September 1, 1939, as the birth date of World War II, the morning Germany’s tanks rolled into Poland. But that date reflects a distinctly European – and arguably Eurocentric – chronology.
A growing body of historians argues the war began nearly four years earlier, on October 3, 1935, when Fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia. Reframing the war’s origin around this event does more than nudge a date on a timeline; it corrects a historical memory that has long marginalized Africa’s role in the conflict that reshaped the 20th Century.
On the morning of October 3, 1935, some 200,000 Italian soldiers under Marshal Emilio De Bono crossed the Mareb River from Eritrea into Ethiopian territory without a declaration of war, while a second force under General Rodolfo Graziani attacked from Italian Somaliland. Mussolini’s forces used mustard gas sprayed from aircraft over villages, livestock, rivers, and pastures, a war crime Haile Selassie later documented in horrifying detail before the League of Nations. By May 1936, Addis Ababa had fallen, and Mussolini annexed Ethiopia into the new colony of Italian East Africa. This was not a minor colonial skirmish; it was the unprovoked destruction of a sovereign, League-recognized member state by one of the very fascist powers that would go on to form the Axis.
What makes 1935 more than just an isolated atrocity is what it revealed and set in motion. The League of Nations declared Italy the aggressor and imposed economic sanctions – but pointedly excluded oil, the one commodity that could have crippled Italy’s war machine and lifted even those weak sanctions in July 1936 once the conquest was complete. Britain and France even secretly negotiated the Hoare-Laval Pact to hand Mussolini much of Ethiopia outright, a plan abandoned only after public outrage forced its collapse.
When Haile Selassie addressed the Assembly in Geneva in June 1936, he warned the assembled powers with chilling clarity: “It is us today. It will be you tomorrow.” His prophecy was not rhetorical flourish – it was a precise reading of what collective security’s failure in Africa meant for Europe.
That failure had immediate consequences. The Ethiopian crisis shattered the Stresa Front, the fragile Anglo/French/Italian alignment meant to contain Hitler and pushed Mussolini into the arms of Nazi Germany. This culminated in the Rome-Berlin Axis of October 1936 – the very alliance structure that would fight World War II.
Hitler, watching the League’s paralysis, remilitarized the Rhineland in March 1936 without consequence, correctly calculating that an organization too weak to stop tanks in Ethiopia would not stop tanks in the Rhineland either. As one University of Birmingham historian put it, the Ethiopian crisis “destroyed [the League’s] credibility and encouraged further aggression” on the road to 1939.
This is not merely a contrarian thought experiment. A peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Modern History explicitly argues that World War II began four years before the internationally recognized 1939 date, pointing to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia as one of the central tensions that allowed the wider war to metastasize. Historian Richard Pankhurst has further noted that in the postwar settlement, Italy and the Allied powers themselves formally agreed that, as far as Ethiopia was concerned, World War II began with the October 3, 1935, invasion. Ethiopian resistance to Italian occupation never fully ceased and merged directly into the British-led East African Campaign of 1940–41, meaning the fighting that began in 1935 simply continued, uninterrupted, into the war the West recognizes as “official.”
Insisting on 1939 emphasizes the moment the war reached European borders over the moment it began destroying nations and exposing the world’s collective failure to stop fascist aggression. Ethiopia was a full member of the League of Nations, invaded without cause, gassed without restraint, and abandoned without consequence – and the powers that abandoned it paid dearly for that abandonment within three years.
Recognizing 1935 as the true starting point does not diminish September 1939. Rather, it restores Africa, and the Ethiopian people’s early, costly resistance to fascism, to their rightful place at the beginning of the story rather than its margins.
Overall, the war in Ethiopia was a major military success for the fascist regime in Italy, achieved relatively quickly and with considerable propaganda value. However, it also placed a significant strain on an already seriously unbalanced budget, weakening Italy’s long-term economic position. Simultaneously, the inability of the League of Nations to prevent the invasion discredited it internationally right on the eve of the Second World War.
