Overlord’s blog has a post titled “Sticks and Stones” about the battle Dembeguina Pass during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.  The Italian forces in this particular encounter were armed with the CV-35 tankette.  The article has some interesting examples of how ineffective these little tanks could be:

One Ethiopian soldier whom had been one of the lead element was armed with nothing more than a sword. His name was Tashemm. His rank was Balambaras, which has no real equivalent that we might recognise. It essentially means he was a trusted person. Tashemm crawled out of the tankettes line of fire and moved round behind it. Sneaking closer he concocted his plan. He climbed up on the rear of the tank and hammered on the hatch with his sword pommel yelling in Italian “Open! Open!”. Immediately the crew of the CV-35 opened their hatches with fatal results.

You might ask why the Italians opened up their hatches. The answer is these simple machines lacked radio’s and so had to communicate by word of mouth. At another battle later in the war a large number of tankette crews were killed and wounded simply because they had to open their hatches to communicate.

Read the full blog post here.