The Fascists’ suppression of Libya prepared them for their invasion of Ethiopia

The third group was made up of officers broken in during the First World War and later transferred to Libya. It was here in the 1920s that a new generation of officers with good experience in counter‐insurgency was formed. In Libya, officers trained on the field to fight a war based on mobility, coordination, logistics and communications: in fact, it was in the 1920s that soldiers with experience typical of a colonial army began to emerge in the [Regio Esercito].⁴⁸

The testing ground of Libyan ‘pacification’ helped form an expertise which found its natural use in the Ethiopian campaign of 1935–36 and later on, in the operations to quell Ethiopian resistance. To a certain extent this reversed the scheme which had existed for almost two decades and had seen officers trained in Eritrea being transferred to Libya with their acquired experience: in the mid 1930s it was experience matured in counter‐insurgency in Libya that counted most for transfer to Ethiopia.

Pietro Maletti, for example, remained in Libya from 1917 to 1935, where he was one of the protagonists of ‘pacification’ in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. In 1935 he accompanied Graziani to Somalia, and remained in Italian East Africa until 1939. Tactics and procedures used in the ‘pacification’ of Libya were also employed in Ethiopia, leaving behind an equal amount of bloodshed and violence. It was the men led by Maletti who carried out the massacre in Debra Libanos and Engecha in May 1937.

General Maletti died in 1940, while fighting the English in Libya.⁴⁹ His profile is reminiscent in many respects of General Ottorino Mezzetti’s. Mezzetti, when still a lieutenant, had his first colonial experience in the Congo, from 1903 to 1906, and then in Libya from 1911 to 1912. After fighting in the First World War, in 1924 he was again in Libya, first in Tripolitania and then in Cyrenaica, taking part in the ‘re‐conquest’ of the two territories. From 1937 to 1939 he was governor of Amara.⁵⁰

(Emphasis added.)