The Man Called Brown Condor (24 page)

John nodded in approval. “Is the phone line to the palace working?”

“Yes,” answered Mulu. “I checked it myself.”

“See that it's checked every morning.” John stood up. “Okay. I've got a meeting with the emperor. Probably to get more good news. Why don't y'all ride into town with me? I'll buy lunch.”

Corriger smiled. “How could we refuse?”

The three, dressed alike in flight coveralls and leather jackets, climbed into the staff car, a dusty, dented 1929 Peugeot painted a dull green the same shade as their aircraft, and like the aircraft it had a roundel painted on the rear door of each side. The Ethiopian roundel consisted of a six-pointed yellow star with alternating long and short points in the center, a red circle surrounded by a yellow middle ring, and a bright green outer ring.

On the drive into town, the three sat in moody silence until Corriger started singing a bawdy French song popular among pilots during the Great War. He changed the words to inflict funny insults on the Italians. He sang it in English for the benefit of his American friend. John and Mulu picked up on the chorus.

After the singing and laughter, the three lapsed into silence once more until Mulu said, “I'm the only sane one among us. I have to be here. It's my country. You both volunteered, you could leave this madness but you don't. You both must be crazy. You know none of us can last long in the air.”

“You have that wrong, my friend,” Corriger said. “We are all sane. It is the world that has gone mad. It is the same for us as it is for you. It is honor that won't allow us to run away. We sing and laugh, yes, because we are afraid to cry.”

John returned to the hotel dining room after his meeting at the palace, sat down at the table, and did not speak so much as a word of greeting.

“I know what the emperor wanted,” Paul said. “You are to be his personal pilot.”

John turned to stare at him. “How the hell did you know that?”

“Ah, mon ami, the answer is simple,” replied Corriger. “The emperor has already flown a few times to show his people he is not afraid. I know because I have been his pilot on such occasions as had Andre Maillet. He has also flown with the Junkers representative, Herr Ludwig Weber, but he is leaving for Germany. So you see, the poor emperor has no choice. His fantastic white French pilot,” Corriger pointed to himself, “has been forbidden to fly to the front. If the famous Corriger was captured by the Italians, it would cause embarrassment to France, an international incident Ethiopia cannot afford. If Corriger is caught by the Ethiopian warriors, they may think he is Italian because he is white and likely will kill him. The famous Corriger does not care for either possibility. Voilà! Robinson! Some fool must have recommended you very highly. It would appear you are considered the best pilot in Ethiopia . . . besides Corriger, of course. ”

“To the front? I'll fly the emperor to the front?”

“Bien sur, mon ami. He is a warrior, too. He will want to see everything for himself and be seen by his soldiers.”

“He shouldn't risk getting in an airplane with the sky full of Italians. They could be here over Addis Ababa any month now, any week. We don't have a single plane that can outrun them. God Almighty! What if I get him killed?”

No one answered.

When they arrived back at the Akaki airfield, John looked out at the pilots and ground crew milling about the planes. He had to smile. Half of them were barefooted. The Ethiopian ground crew and even some of the pilots absolutely refused to wear shoes. They all said the same thing: Shoes were uncomfortable, they could run faster without them, and shoes would trip them up on uneven, rough ground.
The soles of their feet must be as tough as my boots.

“Okay,” Robinson said. “Call 'em over here. I've got a new schedule. It sure ain't gonna be much fun.”

In the days and weeks that followed, John and his pilots continued to fly orders to the northern front and reports to the capital while Mulu Asha and his group covered the southern front where General Graziani still held a defensive position along the border of Italian Somaliland. To the north, out of the town of Bedda on the eastern edge of the Danakil region, Ethiopia lost its first plane and pilot. More were to follow.

The only encouraging news John had was that his efforts to promote black aviation were beginning to be recognized as the war in Ethiopia gained a following in the American press. A letter from his mother told him that the prominent NBC radio network broadcaster Lowell Thomas had picked up on the Brown Condor and mentioned him from time to time during his evening news program. She said the Gulfport-Biloxi newspaper the
Daily Herald
was printing stories about him, too.

After moving out from Adowa and taking the town of Adigrat, General De Bono received a direct order from Mussolini to attack Makale. General De Bono objected, pointing out that to do so would leave the entire left flank of his army uncovered. But the order stood and De Bono obeyed. Makale fell, but at a heavy cost to the Italian troops on the left flank.

Taking into account reports of large Ethiopian troops gathering south of him on a line between Dabat and Bedda, De Bono was determined not to follow such unsound orders again. He stopped to once again consolidate his forces. Robinson and the pilots assigned to the northern front kept Selassie's staff abreast of the fact.

The general stressed caution in his communications with Il Duce, emphasizing the very rugged terrain that made slow work of bringing up his trucks, tanks, and artillery while affording the enemy opportunities for ambush. Ignoring De Bono's reports, messages from Rome impatiently requested resumption of the Italian advance. When a direct order from Mussolini arrived demanding that De Bono immediately resume the march without delay, the general balked, indicating in his reply that to resume the advance without consolidating his forces and supplies could lead to disaster. Six days later De Bono was informed that he was being relieved of his duties. He would be replaced by General Badoglio.

It was not a marked difference in competence that was to greatly alter the nature of the war in Ethiopia. It was a difference of character. De Bono was a capable warrior who saw his role more as a pacifier of the Ethiopian people than as a ruthless conqueror. Badoglio, like Mussolini, considered Ethiopians “savages in need of civilizing.” Badoglio's single aim was to quickly destroy Ethiopian resistance by any and all means available.

Haile Selassie had no pool of trained generals from which to choose his leaders. A few young Ethiopian officers had received training at Saint-Cyr, the French military academy, and a few others at Sandhurst in England, but none of Selassie's generals had formal military training or experience in the traditional sense. He had to choose from among the rases of his country whose followers comprised the army. That presented a problem. Selassie was aware that Italian agents had been in his country for a long time. He suspected, and in many cases confirmed, that some Ethiopians were in their pay: Rases, especially the Galla, were disgruntled from losing some of their power to Ethiopia's new constitution. There were others in the government hungry for power. Because of the danger of internal revolt, Selassie was forced to choose his generals based upon one qualification: loyalty.

But there was another problem: greed. Informants and some Ethiopian military leaders were won over by Italian bribes—the Black Eagle, Hubert Julian, appointed commander of an infantry unit, had been forced to leave the country under such suspicion.

Badoglio arrived on November 20, 1935, only to recognize, as had De Bono, that a consolidation of men, equipment, and supplies was indeed essential before launching the next stage of campaign. The reason? The Italian army on the northern front was under attack.

Selassie had chosen his generals well. In late 1935, Ras Seyoum Mangasha's force of thirty thousand, Ras Kassa's forty thousand, the thirty-thousand-man force of Ras Mulugeta, and Ras Imru with another forty thousand men not only held the northern Italian army, they began to push the Italians back from the Takkaze River.

The Ethiopians quickly learned to move by night, attack at dawn, and then fade away to hiding. These tactics avoided air attacks and murderous artillery fire. They used the night to infiltrate the Italian lines, engaging the enemy with rifles and bloody hand-to-hand battle. Wave after wave of warriors assaulted the Italian fortifications in this manner.

John was flying back and forth to the front daily. For a time, the reports he brought to the capitol were encouraging. One battle in particular greatly raised Ethiopian morale, though at a high price. Ras Imru's forces attacked a group comprised of Italian and Eritrean troops supported by CV3/35 tanks. The two-man tanks were armed with twin 8mm machine guns.

The Ethiopians, some armed only with spears, attacked the Italian forces and cut off their escape route. The Italians turned their twelve tanks against the Ethiopian line, blocking their escape across a ridge at Amba Asar. The Ethiopians immediately broke ranks, not to retreat but to attack in the face of deadly crossfire from the tanks. Running in mass, the Ethiopians engulfed the steel machines by sheer weight of human flesh, killing the crews by shooting point blank through the drivers' and gunners' vision slits. By sundown, the Italian force had lost half its troops.

The Ethiopians pushed back the Italians all along the Takkaze River, exposing the Italian flank. Ras Imru now began to hammer away at it. Simultaneously, Rases Seyoum and Kassa engaged in a siege against the Italians at Warieu Pass. Ras Mulugeta pushed against the Italian third corps and began to encircle the town of Makale, threatening to retake it. If Badoglio was forced to withdraw, it would mean moving seventy thousand men, fourteen thousand mules, and some three hundred artillery pieces down a single road. To do so would open their columns to attack on both flanks.

The Ethiopians accomplished gains against the superior Italian force in spite of being under air attack, something the warriors had never before experienced. They had few automatic antiaircraft guns. To make up for the lack of proper antiaircraft protection, Selassie's warriors were trained to kneel and fire their rifles in mass at attacking planes. The training was effective. After Regia Aeronautica Italiana suffered the loss of 110 crewmen killed and 150 wounded, they learned not to fly low. As a result, their bombing and strafing was less accurate.

John, flying as close to the front as he dared, not only delivered reports confirming the Ethiopians were pushing the Italians back, but saw the Italian lines retreating northward himself. Though Ethiopian losses were great, spirits ran high.

The Italians on the northern front had moved forward less than fifty miles in a month of fighting. Despite Mussolini's badgering, Badoglio was no more willing to resume the drive toward Addis Ababa, nearly four hundred miles to the south, than De Bono had been. After two months, facing the real possibility of an embarrassing retreat, Badoglio sent a message to Rome requesting permission to use “special” weapons. De Bono had refused to use such weapons. Badoglio had no such qualms even if they were illegal according to the Geneva Protocol of 1928, which outlawed “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials, or devices.” By 1935 thirty-nine nations had signed the protocol including both Italy and Ethiopia. But Mussolini not only personally authorized the use of poisonous gases, but he also encouraged their use. Large stores of a variety of ‘special' weapons were shipped and brought up to the front. On January 20, 1936, Badoglio was at last ready to resume the initiative.

From the sky fell a “terrible yellow rain.” The weapon was Yperite: mustard gas delivered in artillery shells and bombs and sprayed from specially equipped tri-motor bombers. The Ethiopian warriors could not understand “rain that burned and killed,” had never faced anything like it. Though terrified, they tried to fight, but in just four days of such brutal attacks, the battle of Tembien Province was over. By the January 24, 1936, the Ethiopian warriors who had fought so bravely against impossible odds could no longer stand up to the deadly clouds of mustard gas that blistered their skin and lungs and blinded their eyes.

John Robinson had seen the terrible price the Ethiopians had paid. From the air, one battlefield looked as if it was spotted with patches of snow, the snow being piles of dead warriors clad in their white garments, thousands of them. Mussolini's sons Vittorio and Bruno and son-in-law Count Ciano all flew Caproni aircraft for the Regia Aeronautica—Vittorio would later record his experiences in his book
Flight Over the Ambas
. In one passage, Vittorio describes how much fun it was making great “white blossoms” on the ground below. The “flowers” he described were composed of the white-clad bodies of Ethiopian warriors blown high in the air as Vittorio's bombs exploded among them.

Meanwhile, the Italians had suffered less than two thousand casualties. Still, they were shaken. Only the use of poisonous gas had stopped the Ethiopian attack.

John increasingly flew closer to the fighting to guide larger planes carrying medical supplies to forward aid stations, some run by the Egyptian Red Crescent others by the Swedish Red Cross. Count von Rosen of Sweden flew his own plane, which he had outfitted as a flying ambulance. All the medical planes were painted white and marked with large red crosses, as were the field hospital tents.

Though never enough, there were medical volunteers aiding Ethiopia. American born soldier of fortune Hilaire du Berrier arrived and offered himself as a pilot, but when the United States and England canceled the military planes Ethiopia had on order, there was no aircraft for him to fly, and instead Du Berrier volunteered to help by working with the medical services. (He would ultimately be captured by the Italians. Undaunted, Du Berrier in 1936 flew in the Spanish Civil War. During WWII he fought with the OSS in China and survived it all.) An impressive list of volunteer doctors from all over the world included Robert Hockman of America, George Dassios of Greece, Shuppler of Austria, Hooper of America, and Balau of Poland. The British furnished an ambulance service commanded by John Melly (who was killed late in the war). Field hospitals and medical teams were sent by Sweden, Finland, Greece, Norway, and America.