Ethiopia, Italian invasion

There are two points that emerge from these chapters that are worth drawing brief attention to here. First, it is clear that in those rare cases since the First World War when chemical weapons have been used on a substantial scale, it has always been against an enemy known to be deficient in anti-gas protective equipment or retaliatory capability. Second, in all substantiated cases of chemical warfare during the twentieth century, the employment of chemical irritants, such as tear gas, has always preceded the resort to more lethal chemical agents. This is true for the First World War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of China and the Yemeni Civil War. In Vietnam, where irritants were used on a scale approaching that of the First World War, the reports of uses of more lethal chemicals remain unsubstantiated. These points seem to... 

The unrest abroad in the mid-thirties revived interest in incendiary bombs. In 1935 a reporter on the New York Herald Tribune covering the Italian invasion of Ethiopia found a partially burned bomb that had been dropped by an Italian plane. He shipped it back to his newspaper, which gave it to Professor Joachim E. Zanetti of Columbia University, a CWS reserve officer. Zanetti passed it on to the CWS, which then analyzed it. In the summer of 1936 Maj. Gen. Claude E. Brigham sent an officer to Europe to gather information on incendiary bombs. In December of that year, the CWS added an incendiary project to its program, and chemists began experiments. These experiments provided them with the experience and data that were to prove extremely useful when the service began to produce incendiaries a few years later. 

The first major use of chemical weapons after World War I came in 1935 during the Italian-Ethiopian War. On 3 October 1935, Benito Mussolini launched an invasion of Ethiopia from its neighbors Eritrea, an Italian colony, and Italian Somaliland. Ethiopia protested the invasion to the League of Nations, which in turn imposed limited economic sanctions against Italy. These sanctions, although not crippling, put a deadline pressure on Italy to either win the war or withdraw. 

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