What Africa eventually heard via the verbal telegraph was that on arriving in British Nigeria, de Gaulle was faced with a demand from Churchill to repudiate the offer. Why? The guess was that Churchill was not desirous of having de Gaulle undersell him in the strategic market, trading bases to Roosevelt for recognition or less where Britain had traded bases for destroyers. … No official explanation ever came from London. This much was certain; de Gaulle opened a door into Africa for America, and Britain shut it.
As for the interviewer, while making full allowance for de Gaulle's difficult position, he vows that he will never again ascend, even unwittingly, in a trial balloon. Never again, he hopes, will he find himself drifting alone over Africa under a leaking envelope of propaganda in a basket from which the chief pilot has bailed out. Let the general mount to the skies. The lesser aeronaut has grounded himself for the duration.
V
The Belgian Campaign
in Ethiopia
This remains the unique eyewitness account by a reporter of a forgotten, yet important, military campaign between colonial empires in Africa. Much was at stake—more than just Haile Selassie's rule in his country, an ousting of Italy, and a sense of vindication by a defeated Belgium in striking a victorious blow against the occupying Axis power. Also up for grabs was who would control crucial access in Africa to Sudan, to the Red Sea, and to the Arabian Peninsula.
The Emperor Haile Selassie (1892-1975) had ruled Ethiopia—often called Abyssinia by Europeans—since 1930. Once Mussolini's forces invaded in 1935, and took the capital Addis Ababa in 1936, Selassie went into exile in England after giving an impassioned speech before the League of Nations that described how freely the Italians used chemical weapons on unarmed civilians. (They would also execute both his sons-in-law; a daughter died in captivity in Italy.) Mussolini now held an important chunk of African territory, alongside Somaliland, in the Italian Empire. Selassie, with the help of British, Belgian, and Free French troops, was unable to leave exile and recover his capital until May 1941.
Following the de Gaulle interview and its aftermath, Weller proceeded up the Congo River by boat. He stopped in Stanleyville (present-day Kisangani) and nearby Yakusu and caught several stories there. Then, thanks to the pilot Dewez and his aging Fokker—flying over the Sudan—Weller joined Belgian Congo forces in Saio at the end of a twenty-five-hundred-mile odyssey across the continent's waist. There he witnessed what resembled a conflict from the prior world war: African against African on behalf of European powers. Weller's photos show open-cockpit biplanes, rattletrap trucks, bygone rifles. His expense reports tell their own story: $26.20 for a month of porters, $32.12 for camp equipment, $127.44 for food. (He came down with amoebic dysentery.)
The seven stories, which ran in early October, were finished in Juba in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and sent from Léopoldville the third week of September, upon Weller's return. A Belgian information office in New York soon proudly published the dispatches in a booklet. Mistakes which appeared both in the newspaper and the booklet have been corrected here against the cablese.
As a thank-you for helping him in the field, Weller cabled the CDN to purchase subscriptions to Time, Harper's, and the Atlantic for Major General Auguste Gilliaert, Belgian Congo.
CONGO'S ADVICE: BRIBE HITLER OR BUMP HIM OFF
Yakusu Station, River Stanleyville, Belgian Congo–
September 17, 1941
“When is the war going to end? How can two tribes continue fighting so long? Why does your tribe not give a big present to this chieftain, Hitler, to persuade him to surrender?”
Such are the questions two tribes of Congo fishermen, the Lokeles and the Yawembes, and three tribes of forest hunters, the Esoos, the Bambolis and the Torumbus, are continually asking the courageous band of missionaries who have undertaken their material and spiritual improvement.
Less than a dozen quiet, hard-working men and women have made themselves responsible here for keeping 150,000 black people physically healthy as well as at peace with each other and themselves.
Congo boatmen, who nightly face the jaws of crocodiles and hippopotamuses to spread their fishing nets across the violent river, arrange their tribal difficulties to end in early armistices. They think whites ought to do the same. Their proposal for handling Hitler is simple: offer him a bribe in the form of a valuable woman of the allied tribe. This method has brought an end to hundreds of jungle wars and the tribesmen believe it would be similarly successful in Europe.
For a week World War II was not known in the jungle. The long, hollow drums, whose muffled tattoo sends the news of every marriage and death from village to village, were silent. Then paddlers in dugout canoes, who had gone upstream as far as Stanleyville, began asking the mission staff searching questions. The Belgian government gave orders that all native queries should be answered with absolute honesty and straightforwardness. No attempt was to be made to whip the villagers into war frenzy or to complicate their lives with political dogma.
These river and forest people are genuinely mystified over why the war is continuing so long. If offering Hitler a woman fails, they have a second solution ready.
“It would be easy to defeat your enemy,” they tell British missionaries in this American-financed station, “if your tribe would all go on a fast. Starve yourselves for two days. Being hungry will make you strong. When you feel at your strongest take your spears and knives, get in your canoes and cross to your enemy's side of the river and kill them all.”
AGED CRATE SHOWS NEED FOR AIRPLANES IN AFRICA
Stanleyville, Belgian Congo—October 11, 1941
When you have been piloting the same military transport for one full year over Central Africa's sea of trees, you start watching the new American designs and wondering when they will be available for service here.
When you have landed the same ship at postage-stamp jungle airports for two years, you begin peering over your mechanic's shoulder for flaws. When she has had three years of tropical sun and rain, you are ready for new wings. When she has had four, you pack two parachutes. After five years in trans-African service, you are on your own and the passengers on their insurance.
Lieutenant Jean Joseph Dewez, the Belgian Congo's ace military pilot, has passed the limit and has been on his own for several years now. At the controls of his flying crate, which is the flagship of little Belgium's Congolese air arm and was the mainstay of the recent heroic campaign in Ethiopia, Dewez has winged more hours than younger jungle pilots have miles. The bush people call him “Ndeke Lipumbu,” meaning beautiful bird.
Dewez is a small, shy, Thurberesque man in his middle thirties. His pockets are always filled with orders, memoranda, maps, Ethiopian thalers, Sudanese pounds, Egyptian piastres and countless letters. What pocket space remains is occupied by small green lemons with which he bulges all over.
Dewez is the kind of man who is always trying to do favors and never asks any. Nevertheless, he has been getting restless lately. He walks around the hangar in the brown shorts of the Congolese Force Publique, with his sun helmet pulled down over his eyes, concealing the misgiving upon his face.
Hardly anyone could blame Dewez for getting worried. He is flying the oldest transport plane in Africa. It was assembled in 1929. It is a Fokker ten-passenger monoplane, of the type the Dutch airlines to the Far East discarded five years ago for American Douglases, which themselves are outmoded today.
The Fokker is the grandpa of today's trans-African Lockheed. But Dewez still goes groaning impartially across the broad brown Congo, the great equatorial forests, the Mountains of the Moon, the glassy Sudanese marshes, the rolling Kenya uplands and far up Ethiopia's forbidding highland. Whenever protests of senile rage come from the three 240-horsepower Gnome-Rhone engines—which may be above the uninhabitable Nilotic swamps, or over Ituri Forest, where pygmies hunt in the shadows of 200-foot trees—Dewez wheedles, humors and nurses the motors along until the next patchpocket airdrome comes in sight.
To bring
Dewez' three-horse buggy into the field is a task suitable only for a man with five arms. Besides manipulating the stick, the enormous wheelbrake and three separate motor controls, Dewez must somehow manage to wind, organ-grinder fashion, the hand lever leveling off the tail elevator. The lever is cunningly tucked away behind him, two feet above his head. Try using full wrist action back up there yourself and imagine how pleasant must be an ice cream freezer in motion, operated overhead and backwards, when the cabin temperature is 100° and the tropical trees are rushing up toward your face. Dewez literally cranks his ship into the field.
Your correspondent got acquainted with Dewez' hack through riding it from the Belgian field headquarters in Northeastern Congo to Ethiopia and return. Dewez is pleased with his ability to keep his relic pushing 115 miles an hour, and small wonder. He has neither a copilot nor a parachute. At the other set of controls, carefully avoiding touching them, sits Lulengo, the totally black son of cannibals from Matadi in the lower reaches of the Congo. He is Dewez' mechanic.
If the thin crack in the cowling above Dewez' windshield, now admitting light, should open under air pressure—as surely it would if Dewez put the Fokker into a steep dive—and something loose should hit Dewez between the eyes, Lulengo would simply fold his hands and await the inevitable.
Dewez usually addresses Lulengo in Lingala, which is the lingua franca among Congo tribes, and Lulengo calls Dewez “master.” Dewez retains Lulengo because, unlike white mechanics, he always confesses frankly when he doesn't know what is wrong. Lulengo's chief duties are refueling and winding the propellers before the takeoff. This he accomplishes with an old-fashioned pole looped with leather. Lulengo's only two words of English were learned when Dewez recently was doing flying ambulance work with the South African forces in southern Ethiopia. They are: “No good.”
When engaged in errands of mercy, Dewez indicates that he is no longer a military pilot by painting a large white circle upon the Fokker's crackerbox fuselage with a bright red cross inside it. When the ambulance work ends, he whitewashes the cross. Dewez is conscientious about this change. Aboard the plane he keeps a Bible in his map case, with cotton batting for his passengers' ears and molasses kisses that Lulengo offers to all seatholders.
While piloting it is necessary for Dewez to keep the side windshields open to hear the first protest in the three engines. Sitting six to eight hours daily with 720 horsepower hammering less than six feet away has made him partially deaf.
During the height of the Ethiopian campaign, Dewez often flew more than ten hours daily carrying British wounded along the Diredawa-Mogadiscio-Nairobi route. Two hundred hours monthly is still his average. The wheel must be gripped and the plane steered every second because the Fokker was already old when automatic pilots began to be installed. Furthermore, a permanent combination of indigestion and dysentery is an ailment common to tropical flyers who sleep on alternate nights atop mountains and in the desert. Dewez is no exception.
Few pilots' eyes can hold out against the burning Sudanese plain which, when flooded, is one of the most blinding terrains in the world. But Dewez, sitting at the Fokker's cracked wheel, simply glances for guidance within the cowling, which he has made to look like a downtown telephone booth, with numbers indicating compass directions and crude pencilings outlining the principal mountain passes. Time was when Dewez dared to slant the Fokker's nose downward and watch a giraffe nibbling a tree or a herd of elephants blundering through the grass.
But he will not be able to indulge in such whims again until United States factories are able to deliver the planes already ordered for the Congo.
While spending the night at Juba, in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, somebody lifted the ninety hard-earned dollars from his trousers pocket which Dewez planned to send to his wife in Nairobi. Yet he refused to delay our takeoff. He earnestly felt his pockets to see whether he had enough lemons, much needed among the Belgian forces encamped in the Ethiopian highlands. They stave off beriberi; also, the soldiers have discovered that if you offer an Ethiopian girl a lemon and she accepts, that means she wants your friendship to ripen rapidly.
Keeping pasted above him as a talisman a 1931 Congolese airmail stamp, which bears the pioneer picture of his Fokker showing the same license and lettering as today, Dewez cocked his sun helmet forward and stared ahead through the Ethiopian mountains. Through his sunglasses he studied his British engine gauge, his German altimeter and Italian horizon lever. The latter often rotates during level flight in a manner the Fokker itself could not possibly do under any circumstances. He can read his Scotch compass, even in blazing sunshine, only with the aid of his flashlight. Dewez is prouder of the altimeter than of any other instrument in the plane. It was made in 1914.
THE BELGIAN CHAMPAIGN IN ETHIOPIA
A Trek of 2500 Miles Through Jungle Swamps and Desert Wastes
Saio–Gambela–Bortai Brook–Saio, Western Ethiopia–
October 3–9, 1941
Blitzed at close quarters in Europe, Belgium has crossed the entire African continent to take revenge on the Axis. In a tropical campaign whose like for hardship has not been witnessed in this war, Belgium has bested Italy in Ethiopia.
Belgium has hewn her black police force of the Congo into a modern army. To strike at Germany's partner, that army—the Force Publique, with another army of patient porters to bear food and munitions up dizzying mountain trails—has traveled from the damp groves of the Congo jungles, homeland of gorillas and pygmies, across the watershed lying between the Congo and the Nile, down the other side into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan along the White Nile and, finally, across the salty wastes of western Sudan to the mighty rampart of mountains guarding inner Ethiopia.
To carry provisions, the Belgian expedition transported a Congo fleet of twelve 10-ton barges with a 33-foot baby tugboat across the African continent. The journey began above Stanley Pool near Léopoldville and ended at the foothills of the Abyssinian highland. From Léopoldville to Aketi the midget navy traveled 1000 miles up the Congo River. From Aketi they rode narrow-gauge flatcars 450 miles through Paulis to the railhead at Mungbere, then motored 400 miles to Juba where they re-launched into the White Nile, then by water across the Sudan to Ethiopia. Bridges limited to eight-ton loads were required to carry thirty-ton trailers and one collapsed in the Sudan. Another proved a tight squeeze, being barely an inch and a half wider than the baby tugboat's beam. In navigating the turbulent White Nile, the Belgians found that the tug drew five inches more than the deepest channels. The difficulty was met by running the tug at top speed into a mud bar, then seesawing it across by shifting the crew and the cargo forward.
To reach the Italian stronghold the Belgians also had to surmount heavy tolls of dysenteric and pulmonary diseases. In the face of an army superior in numbers, firepower, strategic positions and not inferior in personal bravery, the Belgians have seized for the British—with whose campaign their own was coordinated—the natural mountain fortress.
The British, now besieging the last Italian forces near Gondar, aim to recover control of the Blue Nile's Ethiopian headwaters in Lake Tana. Thanks to tiny Belgium's daring expedition, England no longer needs to worry about the White Nile's headwaters—the other source of lower Egypt's indispensable fertile topsoil and life-giving water. Congolese troops have delivered this to Britain, with a corresponding effect on London's bargaining power with the Egyptian government.
The Italian army under General Pietro Gazzera, Mussolini's one-time war minister, had its headquarters in this mountain town. At 5621 feet, Saio commands a matchless view of the mountains toward Addis Ababa as well as of the broiling Sudanese swampland, which the Belgians conquered before assaulting the chain of Italian garrisons.
In the bitter engagements culminating in the siege of Saio, the Belgians were outnumbered three or four to one. For as long as two months, due to impassable roads and ebb conditions on the White Nile's tributaries, the Congolese troops were cut off from supplies. Their condition was continuously mo
re precarious than their antagonists'.
The Italian-built network of smooth autostrade ends more than 300 miles away. (A cavalcade of Belgian trucks bearing prisoners to Addis Ababa, trapped in the mountains, will not be able to return until the dry season turns mud into dust.) Although Haile Selassie has succeeded in sending sixty loyal guardsmen to nearby Gore, capital of the province, where they are under British command, a leader of one such mission in the area outside Belgian operations has been decapitated. Control of the province of Galla Sidamo is closely disputed between “patriots” and guerrillas, armed with rifles and ammunition stolen from Italian magazines.
Suggestions a year ago that Italy should be attacked were considered premature; the Congolese army, organized chiefly as a colonial constabulary, had defense obligations of greater importance. Risks of taking the force upon a trans-African expedition several times as long as any similar caravan ever had attempted, through virtually uninhabited country, were closely studied by the Congo's war staff and the Belgian refugee cabinet in London.
Mussolini's forces had deeply indented the British in Kenya and there was the possibility they might seize Sudanese air bases along the White Nile, severing Africa horizontally and preventing American arms from reaching the Middle East.
Although some Belgian officers here have been too far from London and too close to Italian machine guns to know or care whether Belgium and Italy are formally at war—several Saio staff frankly confessed uncertainty today as to how things stood legally—the pattern was already complete before the black sons of the Congo embraced their wives and children the last time and faced eastward.
The counter-invasion of Ethiopia developed rapidly after the Sudan frontier was crossed on February 2. Belgium's heroic campaign has been curtained in secrecy not only for military reasons but because Congolese troops were inaccessible. Foreign correspondents following the army's progress around Asmara (Eritrea), or north from Mogadiscio (Italian Somaliland), were separated from the Belgians by the Italian lines. Coming from the Sudan, heavy rains had erased the trans-swamp road to the foothills of the Ethiopian mountains. As far as Belgium is concerned, hostilities are suspended and the army's only task is to ensure order while the British complete the cleanup. Your correspondent is the first to don a Belgian uniform and join the trans-African force in the field.
Weller's War Page 13
