It was the war that changed everything, and yet it's been mostly forgotten: in 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia. It dominated newspaper headlines and newsreels. It inspired mass marches in Harlem, a play on Broadway, and independence movements in Africa. As the British Navy sailed into the Mediterranean for a white-knuckle showdown with Italian ships, riots broke out in major cities all over the United States.
Italian planes dropped poison gas on Ethiopian troops, bombed Red Cross hospitals, and committed atrocities that were never deemed worthy of a war crimes tribunal. But unlike the many other depressing tales of Africa that crowd book shelves, this is a gripping thriller, a rousing tale of real-life heroism in which the Ethiopians come back from near destruction and win.
Tunnelling through archive records, tracking down survivors still alive today, and uncovering never-before-seen photos, Jeff Pearce recreates a remarkable era and reveals astonishing new findings. He shows how the British Foreign Office abandoned the Ethiopians to their fate, while Franklin Roosevelt had an ambitious peace plan that could have changed the course of world history-had Chamberlain not blocked him with his policy on Ethiopia. And Pearce shows how modern propaganda techniques, the post-war African world, and modern peace movements all were influenced by this crucial conflict-a war in Africa that truly changed the world.
"Jeff Pearce has written, with validated accuracy, a great study on the Italo-Ethiopian War and its impact. In Prevail he has presented an enthusiastically readable work…The reader will meet the exceedingly brave Ethiopian people and their leader, Haile Selassie as they, abandoned by the world, resist invasion by the most powerful military force at the time. Presented in Prevail is a piece of hist
Thomas E. Simmons, award-winning author of The Man Called Brown Condor
"Pearce's Prevail is spellbinding reading. A historical account that is both well-researched and fluid in its writing. Pearce has done justice to this moment in Ethiopian history. A worthy and necessary addition to the growing literature about this period."
