765.84/2977: Telegram
The Ambassador in Italy (Long) to the Secretary of State
[Received December 9—9:35 a.m.]
890. Piccolo in a news despatch today reports about the bombardment and states that the news given out by the Abyssinian Government is false. It proceeds
“Our planes … attacked not a city but a true and proper military base populated exclusively by troops and bristling with cannons and machine guns. Dessie, as already reported, had been abandoned by the civil population to make way for the thousands upon thousands of regular and irregular troops.
These objectives—as evidenced by the photographs taken—were accurately identified although scattered throughout the ample valley of Dessie: these were the Ghebi, the powder house, the telephone central, the air field, the Italian Consulate, which had been transformed into Ethiopian military headquarters, and military camps.
The famous hospital was, according to official and press investigations, evacuated of all wounded; it housed only elements having nothing to do with the hospital, particularly military chieftains who had thought it prudent to hide under the Red Cross flag. The Ethiopians, in fact, use the Red Cross not for humanitarian purposes but to save their own skins; in fact almost all the tents in the military encampments and even the evacuated zones were conspicuously marked by the Red Cross.”