Most months and days in the Ethiopian calendar are remembered as the feast day of a named saint, but not Yekatit 12. On this day and the two that followed in late February 1937, Italian Fascists slaughtered between 17,000 and 20,000 innocent civilians in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and caused additionally the suffering of many thousands more. That morning, drawn in by the promise of alms, a crowd of Ethiopians, mostly clergy, the blind, the disabled, and women and children, had gathered in the grounds of the palace which was the seat of the Italian occupation. When three hand grenades were tossed onto the palace’s balcony from which speeches were being made, injuring members of the high command, it marked the beginning of a largely forgotten and long-neglected war crime. The Addis Ababa Massacre makes not only a compelling but overwhelming case as to why this neglect can no longer stand.

An informative Background chapter that places the massacre within the broader context of Italy’s conquest and occupation of Ethiopia begins Ian Campbell’s comprehensive account. The second chapter of his narrative history, The Trigger, is an account of the actual event that sparked the massacre. In chapters 3 to 7 Campbell details, hour by hour, the three days and nights of killing that followed: a slaughter in which “most of the victims had no idea why they were being attacked” (76). The next two chapters, “The Aftermath” and “Roman Justice” add additional details to the various attacks on the city’s residents. Two concluding chapters, “The Reckoning” and “The Cover Up,” follow, and the volume concludes with a few pages of “Reflections” and an “Epilogue” that provide an update on the major personalities, groups, and events subsequent to the massacre and the end of the occupation.

Particularly valuable to the understanding of this event is Campbell’s focus on Guido Cortese, federal secretary of the Fascist Party, and Marshall Rodolfo Graziani, the Viceroy and Army head—the two individuals ultimately responsible for the massacre. That Graziani should be given a pass due to his being hospitalized with injuries from the original incident is not defensible. Nor is his claim in his later memoir that the widespread killings were all about defending the capital from an imminent rebellion, and that he did not himself give the order for the human carnage that followed the thrown grenades. Law and order had in fact been restored to the city by early afternoon on the first day (91), and while it is correct that Cortese gave voice to the order to seek reprisals and commit atrocities, Campbell notes this was in full accord with Rome’s orders and a command Graziani would also have delivered. This command, the announcement of carta bianca (“the order of do as you please”), was what resulted in the killing without mercy. “Ethiopians were hunted through the streets and into their dwellings…beaten, shot, bayonetted or clubbed to death….” (117–8) or as Campbell summarizes, “A premeditated and carefully planned pogrom would then be conducted, plumbing the bestiality and depravity beside which even the slaughter at the palace would pale in comparison” (92).

Similarly, Campbell’s comprehensive examination of the different elements of the occupation forces is critical to fully grasp the nature of each one’s involvement in terrorizing the city’s population—the regular army of conscripts under Graziani; battalions of Blackshirt militia, whose numbers were greater than the regular army and made up largely of ex-servicemen; military police (carabiniere); colonial troops of Eritrean, Libyan, and Somali askari; and militarized workers and resident Italians, significant numbers of whom were members of an Italian diaspora from Argentina.

Campbell has used a broad array of sources to reconstruct the various incidents that comprise the massacre. His sources include a rich assortment of contemporary accounts as reported by British, American, and French envoys, and a few rare diaries of other foreign nationals who lived and worked in Addis Ababa at the time; especially a Hungarian physician, and an Italian journalist revolted by what he observed. Adding significantly to this history are interviews Campbell conducted with survivors, who, as mostly young children and teenagers, were witnesses to these atrocities. Their recollections add substantially to the reader’s understanding of the extent of human suffering, the viciousness with which the fascists terrorized the local population, and the serendipity of survival in a time of war. Lest there be any doubt as to the veracity of this textual and oral evidence, the book is profusely illustrated with over one hundred and fifty photographs, the majority contemporary to the time, including a few dozen which were taken by the fascist occupying forces proudly documenting the atrocities they had committed.

Obviously a labor of love and commitment (the book is dedicated “to the innocents who died in the Massacre of Addis Ababa”), Campbell’s focus on small details can occasionally be overwhelming. There are only so many ways one can depict how thousands of men, women, children, babies, the elderly, and the imprisoned were killed—stabbed, bayoneted, disemboweled, decapitated, hanged, bludgeoned with shovels, or burned alive in their homes. The killing was barbaric; the methods inhuman. Whether these killings occurred between certain hours on the first, second, or third day of the massacre will be less critical for most readers. The detailed descriptions of different sorts of military weapons the Italians used in the occupation are interesting, but the speed at which tanks or armored cars moved, their weight, the chassis on which they were they built, and whether their machine guns could be replaced by flamethrowers, seems somewhat unnecessary (106–8). So too are the model number, the caliber, and manufacturer of certain machine guns (49–50), but for the reader who wants such specificity, it is all there.

This is the third of three books Campbell has written on aspects of the Italian occupation. The other two, The Plot to Kill Graziani (2010) and The Massacre of Debre Libanos (2014) are both published by Addis Ababa University Press and therefore less accessible. With the publication of The Addis Ababa Massacre by Oxford University Press, there is no longer any reason for this war crime not to be included among the other barbarous evils that stained the twentieth century.