The Man Called Brown Condor (27 page)

Like all mothers, Celeste Cobb could read between the lines of her son's letters. Sometimes, when she was alone in her kitchen reading a newly arrived letter (four to six weeks old), she could feel the sadness she knew must lie in her Johnny's heart. Too proud to show her fear, she would quickly dry her eyes with her cotton apron and busy herself with household chores. She tried especially hard not to cry in front of Charles Cobb. She knew how worried he was about his boy, and she did her best to put up a brave front.

Because of the press coverage he received in the United States, which was forwarded to Generals Badoglio and Graziani via Rome, John Robinson garnered special attention from the Regia Aeronautica. It was rumored that a price had been put on Robinson's head payable to any Italian pilot who brought him down. Through skill, luck, and prayers, John continued somehow to get through.

To many members of the Regia Aeronautica's squadrons, the war had turned to sport. They were unopposed. The sky belonged to them. Searching for targets of opportunity, they made a sport of shooting small groups of “savages in need of civilizing” wherever they caught them in the open. It was good target practice, but not totally without hazard.

Two young Italian sportsmen decided to go hunting one afternoon. They each took off in the latest Italian plane to arrive in Ethiopia, the IMAM RO 37, a two-place reconnaissance biplane. Normally they carried an observer-gunner in the rear cockpit, but this day the two machine guns mounted in the nose would be sufficient for their sporting purposes. They would each fly solo.

Not too far in front of the Italian lines, they spotted a group of warriors wearing traditional white shammas. They caught them late in the day on open flat ground and began to take turns making low strafing runs on the retreating Ethiopians. The warriors were tired and hungry. There was nowhere for them to hide and they could run no more. They had lost everything except courage.

One of the young Italian pilots, swooping in low for his gun run, noticed that the Ethiopians had stopped and turned to face him. He saw orange flashes. They were all kneeling, firing their rifles at him. He pulled up and banked steeply away to watch his wingman make a run. His wingman did not pull up in a turn but continued a slow climb toward the Italian lines. Something was wrong.

The first pilot followed his fellow airman. As he easily closed on him, he could see a trail of vapor streaming from the aircraft. It had to be fuel. A few moments later, the stricken aircraft's propeller stopped turning. With a dead engine, the pilot had no choice but to put the IMAM down. He picked a reasonably flat area of scrub brush and made a successful landing. The second IMAM circled low overhead and rocked his wings when the pilot of the downed aircraft stepped from his cockpit and waved.

It was late in the day. The pilot of the second plane knew the sun set rapidly near the equator. There was no way a rescue team could find the downed airman before dark. He pulled up and flew an expanding circle around the area. Maybe he could find and alert an Italian scouting party.

About three miles away, he saw not an Italian scouting party but a group of about thirty Ethiopian soldiers on a hilltop. It seems he had not been the only one to see his friend go down. As he watched, the warriors began leaving the hill in the direction of the downed plane. Pulling up in a tight turn, the pilot leveled his wings, lined up on them, and fired. They quickly dispersed and tried to take cover behind scrub bush. The Italian hit many of them before he ran out of ammunition. He continued to make passes hoping to slow them or turn them back, but when he did not fire, they knew he was bluffing, that he was out of ammunition. Fifteen or so of them stood up and began moving again.

The sun would be down in less than thirty minutes. The young flyer had plenty of fuel and time enough to reach a landing field behind his lines before darkness, but he felt compelled to take a gamble. He would not leave his comrade there alone. After all, he reasoned, if his friend had made a successful landing without damage to his crippled aircraft, he could do the same. His friend could jump in the rear cockpit and they would be home in time for supper.

Flying low over the site, he surveyed the landing path of the downed plane. It looked chancy but he would do it. He swung around to line up for the landing. He throttled back. Slowing his plane to just above stalling speed, he dragged onto the landing site with just a little power so he could touch down at the lowest possible speed to shorten the landing roll. His wheels touched. The plane bounced along the rugged ground, the lower wings scraping over scrub bushes, the propeller chopping through a few of them. The pilot could see his friend running toward him.

Without warning, the right wheel slammed down into a hole. The jolt bottomed out the landing strut with such force it was torn loose. The plane careened violently to the right, dropped the lower wingtip into the dirt, and swung. Turning the plane around, it kicked up a huge cloud of dust. It came to a stop resting on the left gear and right wingtip. The idling wooden propeller struck the ground and tore itself to pieces. Fearful of fire, the pilot leaped from the cockpit. The only fire was that in the setting African sun.

“Mother of God! You should have left me. In the morning you could have brought help to find me.”

“I'm afraid that would have been too late, my friend. There are others who have already found you. Now they will find us both. They are coming from that far little hill over there . . . maybe twenty of them, maybe less. I cut their numbers down some.

“We can't fight them off until morning. If we run now, maybe we can lose them in the dark.

“They'll know we'll travel toward our lines which must be thirty or forty miles to the north. We can try. Do you have a canteen? We'll need water in this godforsaken desert.”

“It really doesn't matter.” As he spoke, the Italian pilot drew his pistol and crouched beside the wreckage of his plane. “It seems your friends, some of them at least, have arrived in record time.”

“Where? I can't see in this fading light.”

“Just there to the left about two hundred meters. I see only one.”

A rifle shot rang out. Then a second shot. Young Ethiopian runners had been launched ahead of the main party to quickly reach the plane wreck and pin down any survivors. The Italian hunters had become the prey. Firing occasional shots, two of them held the flyers at bay as the last gleam of dusk faded into darkness.

The two young pilots sat back-to-back, pistols drawn, waiting to be rushed from any or all sides.

“I've heard they are good night fighters.”

“Save the last bullet for yourself. You know what they did to the last flyers they caught.”

“I saw the report. It seems we should have paid more attention.”

A report was circulated to all Italian pilots about two airmen who had been downed at Daggah Bur. They had been found beheaded, their bodies mutilated.

While the Italians waited in darkness, the Ethiopians, masters of the art of night infiltration, drew straws for the honor of using their knives.

“I'm sorry to have caused all of this. I was foolish to have flown so low. We've been warned about that. You were crazy to try to pick me up, but I want you to know I am grateful to you, my friend.”

“I, too, am sorry, but you would have done the same for me. With a little luck we would have made it. Now we finish it together.”

As the light of dawn crept over the desert, a pair of hyenas cautiously approached the site of the wrecked planes. Overhead, vultures circled. The two pilots stared up at them with glazed, unseeing eyes. The men's feet were bare, their flying boots and leather jackets missing. Just below their chins, black flies covered their gapping throats like living, squirming beards. Slit from ear to ear, the flyers had bled out onto the sand in great dark pools, the now clotted blood a feast to beetles and ants. The vultures flapped down near the bodies and begin a rude debate with the hyenas over how to divide the spoils of war.

Badoglio's army of the north cautiously pressed on toward the capital. His continued deployment of gas was not limited to the battlefield. Civilians were also targeted in his attempt to terrorize the local population. From low flying, tri-motor planes, gas was repeatedly sprayed like insecticide over villages as well as Red Cross and Red Crescent camps and ambulances. A second gas, phosgene, was introduced. It had the pleasant odor of fresh mown hay and could be breathed in or absorbed through the skin. Once introduced to the body in sufficient quantity, phosgene, like mustard gas, attacked lung cells, preventing the passage of oxygen into the blood thus causing its victims to suffocate slowly, agonizingly for days after exposure. (Records show Mussolini himself authorized the use of the weapons.)

One by one, the Ethiopian armies were destroyed. Ras Mulugeta was killed at Amba Aradam. The armies of Ras Seyoum and Ras Kassa had been blown to pieces by the Regia Aeronautica which rotated its aircraft in such a way as to keep at least a dozen planes over the battlefield at all times during daylight hours.

Only Ras Imru's forces remained stubbornly undefeated. Badoglio halted once again to prepare a new drive against Ras Imru. He ordered forty-eight thousand artillery shells, seven million rounds of small arms ammunition, and hundreds of tons of bombs. Ras Imru had no supply depots, no reserve troops. As they ran out of ammunition, they attacked at night with swords and clubs.

Haile Selassie had reason to be proud of his troops. The Italians recorded the interrogation of a mortally wounded Ethiopian officer. When asked who he was, the man replied, “I am the commander of a thousand men.” When asked why he did not lie down on the stretcher they had provided, he told them he preferred to die on his feet. He said, “We swore to the negus that we would hold against you or die. We have not won but we have kept our promise.” He pointed to the valley below. It was littered with nearly nine thousand dead Ethiopians. He joined them before nightfall.

To the south, General Graziani was having a more difficult time. He had run into the “Hindenburg Wall,” named after the German line of defenses of the same name built during the Great War, a defense line designed and set up by Wahib Pasha, advisor to Ras Nasibu. And as April 1936 arrived, the beginning of the rainy season added to Graziani's problems. The earth turned to mud and the rain-swollen creeks and rivers became difficult to cross. The Ethiopians dug in at the Jerar River. Besides being firmly lodged in caves and hollows, they dug trench positions.

When Graziani suffered heavy losses and was stopped at the line, he brought up another of his “special” weapons. His troops employed flamethrowers. Not only were there flamethrowers carried by troops, there were also CV 3/35 tankettes that had been converted to flamethrower tanks, their fuel carried in special armored trailers pulled behind and connected by hoses. Using motorized infantry, aircraft, bombs, artillery, tanks, flamethrowers, and poison gas, it still took Graziani ten days of fierce fighting to finally break the “Hindenburg Wall.”

Unlike so many of the foreign volunteers who drifted away as the situation grew steadily worse, John was determined to serve as long as he was needed. He was called to fly the emperor once more. With only one forty-thousand-man army left, the negus was determined to lead the last battle himself. When the emperor arrived at the field, John was shocked to see how worn and weary the small, dignified ruler appeared. He and a small staff boarded the Staggerwing and sat in silence. They all knew John was flying them to the last battle.

When they landed, Haile Selassie turned to John. “Colonel Robinson, you have served me and my people faithfully and well. You have endangered yourself unselfishly. You have done everything asked of you. Now you must go home and tell your nation what you have seen. I failed to convince the League of Nations to understand that it is not just my country that is at stake. If they refuse to act in the future as they refused to stop Fascist aggression in Ethiopia, then what you have seen here is not the end. It is only the beginning.”

John could say nothing. He bowed his head in respect.

Haile Selassie looked up at John. “Take my hand, friend.” The emperor extended his hand. John, with tears in his eyes, grasped it. “Thank you, John Robinson. May God keep you. I pray we meet again.”

John returned to Addis Ababa. By this time, the capital suffered bombing raids daily. There was finally a use for the captured 1896 Italian cannons. They were used around the city for air-raid warnings: one shot for air-raid warning, two shots for all clear. Robinson refueled the plane, hid it in a remote corner of the field, and waited, hoping to receive a call to fetch the emperor from the field of battle.

Across a lush green valley near Mai Ceu, thirty-one thousand Ethiopian soldiers plus the imperial guard faced forty thousand well-equipped Italian and Eritrean troops. Another forty thousand Italians held in reserve were deployed between the Belago and Alagi passes, poised to fill any gaps in the Italian line or take advantage of any breech in the Ethiopian defense.

Haile Selassie sent a message to his wife describing the battle:
From five in the morning until seven in the evening, our troops attacked the enemy's strong positions, fighting without pause. We also took part in the action and by the grace of God remain unharmed. Our chiefs and trusted soldiers are dead and wounded.

With only twenty thousand men left, the emperor ordered his troops to retreat. Because the few Red Cross and Red Crescent hospitals had been bombed out of existence, the Ethiopians could do nothing for their wounded but carry them. The retreating army was under constant air attack as they moved toward Lake Ashangi. Italian planes dropped seventy tons of explosives on the exhausted Ethiopians. Men and pack animals were blasted to pieces. The Italian planes faded away, only to refuel and rearm, this time with mustard gas. They returned to contaminate the waters along the shore of Lake Ashangi with the poison. Many of the thirst-crazed troops who drank from the lake died.