The sun is almost down upon Italy's last day in Ethiopia. Now street-fighting has started in Gondar. Snipers' shots and the crack of pistols can be heard, but a last Hartbees-Wellesley (an American-built Mohawk) is settling safely upon the lone airdrome. Smoke from cannon mouths lies in the valleys below us in blue wreaths.
The sun has finally descended in red glory behind the mountains of Lake Tana and tomorrow all Ethiopia will belong once more to Haile Selassie.
From the point of view of altitude, fighting for Gondar has been tougher on the troops engaged than any other campaign of the war. Here soldiers have battled at 10,000 feet. At night they have camped in drafty tents pitched in chilly hollows at anywhere from 9500 feet upward.
The rarefied air has been the defenders' best friend and the attackers' enemy. Without effort one grows sleepy; with even slight exertion the lungs begin to cry out for air.
In the bowl of green hills covered with acacia trees and marked with rocky declivities where the Italians have entrenched themselves, complicated trench systems could be taken only by uphill bayonet charges. There was little cover for troops to lie down and gather strength.
The Italians never forsook a position without planting it thoroughly with mines. Sappers from West, East, and South Africa had to cover the small glades of forest and the nearby fields watching carefully for hidden mines before the infantry could move up.
Gondar is seven days by motor convoy from Addis Ababa (Ethiopia's capital) and three days from Asmara. Virtually all supplies except fresh meat had to be brought the entire distance into the field.
The final attack on Gondar would have begun earlier but the northern roads were inaccessible as the rains lasted extraordinarily late this year.
Through regular air reconnaissance and the interruption of clandestine mail service through the mountains from Gondar to Asmara—where live the families of many of the besieged—the British had a fairly complete picture of life within Gondar, even before its surrender. Children were evacuated long ago and only five women remained within the city, all reputedly ladies of frail frame.
Rome radio complained that the British bombed Gondar's hospital. South African airmen at first thought they knew exactly which it was. Originally there were only half a dozen red crosses upon Gondar's roofs, but with the Mohawks, dozens of red crosses appeared upon Gondar's roofs.
Some points which ordinarily would be sought out by bombers have been untouched in an effort to avoid unnecessary destruction. It would have been easy for the British, commanding a powerful air force, to wipe out Gondar in a two-hour air raid as the Germans did Coventry, but the city itself has been spared.
Bringing peace to Ethiopia is costing Britain about $15 million a year in public maintenance but the magnificent Italian roads are already showing signs that they will not last forever.
As your correspondent finished this dispatch, a chieftain muffled in a white scarf and with a black sun helmet like Haile Selassie's rode by upon a dappled horse. Behind him followed his gunbearer, a bearded man in draped clothes trotting to keep up with his master. Thus the Ethiopians are content to go from one pathetic little bone-littered village to the next.
WRITER FINDS GONDAR A CITY OF CONFUSION
Gondar, Ethiopia—December 3 & 5, 1941
Wrecked by the continuous bomb and shellfire of the fierce days of the battle, Gondar, the city of castles, today is a confused scene of rejoicing by the incoming British troops and even of a cocky acceptance of defeat by the gold-braided Italian officers who held out so long within the embattled citadel.
Airplanes buzzed back and forth from the 9000-foot tableland above Gondar as your correspondent, covered thickly with dust, came into the town after an all-day drive in a tiny campaign car that negotiated the unbelievable curves of the 30-degree slopes of the mountainside road that was the secret of the Italian undoing.
Gondar stood figuratively athwart the only highway controlling the route through western Ethiopia connecting Asmara in the north with Addis Ababa in the south. But precisely where the ramparts are dizziest and even the talented Italian road engineers never attempted to go, British engineers with East African labor built a secret highway over the heights. Three to four hundred trucks of the infantry brigade, often pulled by tractors in danger of toppling into the abyss, descended from the tableland toward Lake Tana and, aided by Ethiopian patriots, took the Italians from the rear.
Far from being an obscure mountain town, Gondar is—or was—a full-grown city with three-story office buildings and many villas and large, deep air-raid shelters now scarred by the siege and virtually without food, clothing, or supplies.
The British authorities have confined many prisoners in the Portuguese castle dungeons, but since these total approximately 12,000 Italians and 11,000 Africans, the problem is difficult. Many officers have been allowed to return to their modest homes. Their healthy appearance belies reports of starvation; their demeanor is self-assured and chatty and in some cases verges upon the bumptious.
Unlike the defeated General Nasi, who is a Sicilian, most of the officers seem to originate from northern Italy and many are physically large and well set-up fighting men. They were outnumbered by the rainbow mixture of the British forces more than two to one but fought bravely against superior aircraft and are fully aware that whatever military honors remain to Italy in the Ethiopian campaign are theirs.
The colonel of aviation in charge of Gondar ordered the single remaining Italian plane burned before the British armored cars entered Azozo Airdrome, a mile south of Gondar. When your correspondent photographed it today in the bomb-pierced hangar, the pails of the last remaining gasoline which had been used to destroy it still hung on the landing gear and the nosecap.
All through the night, rifle and machine-gun fire was heard from the surrounding hills and fires blazed up as irregulars discovered stores of cordiate. The city itself, with doors ajar and unremoved bodies lying in many buildings, was absolutely dark except for flickering candles behind closed shutters. The dynamo that supplies the city's power is halted for lack of gasoline, pending the opening of a direct road from the northern tableland where the removal of mines may take several days. One party of peace negotiators was blown up by a mine and a British major had both legs broken.
General Nasi surrendered unconditionally to officers of a Kenya armored car unit Wednesday, November 26, at 4 p.m., after a final eleven-hour battle brought the attacking forces into the very streets of the city. The same officers to whom General Nasi surrendered had been in Gondar earlier in the afternoon, but they had been forced to withdraw.
I was with infantry detachments all that morning and watched magnificent assaults on hill after hill in very tough going. When these infantrymen marched into Gondar that night they were very tired after fighting all day but not too tired to sing and cheer. The Ethiopians spent the night celebrating, blowing horns and building huge victory bonfires on the hills around the city.
HANDY ANDY BUILDS TANKS; FOOLS ITALIANS
Gondar, Ethiopia—December 4, 1941
One of the mysteries of the long battle for Gondar and Lake Tana—the unexplained appearance of an unidentified plane over the no man's land between the British and Italian lines—was solved today when a young engineering officer from Cape Town confessed that he was the pilot of the phantom plane.
In an interview on the summit of a 10,000-foot escarpment where he was helping to build a new highway, Alfred Stadler, a young lieutenant who is a member of the engineers corps, told this correspondent the story.
“We engineers were working upon a swamp section of the road a few weeks ago when we found an abandoned Gloster Gladiator fighter,” said the young, flaxen-haired engineer, who spent time in Aurora, Illinois, and Cedar City, Iowa, studying tractors. “The pilot had been hit by ack-ack and forced to land. Since the $20,000 plane was under shellfire from Italian artillery and located in an inaccessible spot, no attempt at salvage was made after the pilot walked safely into our line
s. But we engineers, who never get much chance at anything but hard labor and little glory, became curious. One day I had a look at the plane. I found she had a bullet hole through the oil-cooling system and instrument board but nothing else wrong.
“We got a little of this and a little of that and I fixed her up. Finally, the boys said to me, ‘Why don't you fly her?’ We waited until the enemy artillery was busy on other objectives and then went out again. The elephant grass was six feet high around her. We used the propeller as a lawnmower and taxied her up and down, clearing a path for a take-off. Italian artillery kept landing shells on the hill behind the plane but we kept on working.
“I took off with the rest of the engineers all waving at me. I flew over brigade headquarters and several other places, astonishing everybody. Wishing I were an aviator instead of an engineer, I flew until all the petrol that had been left was used up and then I landed near our camp.”
It is unlikely, however, that the engineers will part with the demon pilot without a struggle because Stadler's talents are fully in accord with his “Handy Andy” appearance. During the last two battles involving the fortifications outside of Gondar, he constructed the only 60-ton tank ever seen in Ethiopia. It was made from three-ply and beaver board, superimposed on a bulldozer used in road construction. It had sewage pipes of six-inch caliber for armament.
When the phony tank ran across the meadows it crushed the elephant grass so completely that the Italians were convinced it was genuine. Eventually, Stadler's tank drew so much artillery fire—which disclosed the location of the enemy gun positions—that the inventor was obliged to abandon it and flee across the meadows back to his own lines.
When the war is over Stadler plans to continue selling American-made tractors to South African farmers. If a tractor can be made to fly and fight battles, he would like to make it.
BRITISH CENSORSHIP
(Killed by British censors)
British headquarters at the front, Gondar,
Ethiopia—probably December 6, 1941
Why Britain lost upon the publicity front one of the most glorious campaigns she has ever won in the field—the war against Italy in Abyssinia, East Africa—is illuminatingly revealed here. Not knowing why both British and American war correspondents deserted the field with an alacrity comparable only to that shown by the Italian army, at a time when the difficult campaign around Lake Tana remained unsettled, this writer crossed Africa to write at least one definitive account of this heroic and fragmentarily understood victory.
From his brief experience here it is clear why the glories of this campaign have become known only in a mutilated and inconsecutive form. Abyssinia is a place where a No Priority for Journalists sign was hung out at the earliest moment and remains prominently displayed as the difficult Tana campaign nears its close.
Some hard things have been said about British military censorship, not all of them deserved. Censorship is not the trouble here. What is faulty, and ensures that the African campaign will come close to being muffled in the same obscurity as the past year, is the misused and inadequate technical means for transmitting news, and the inability of any authority high or low to recognize and correct this condition.
For months, British and South African journalists (and a sole American) who followed earlier phases of the campaigns were restricted to 400 words daily—not 400 each, but a total of 400 words. When Haile Selassie entered Addis Ababa, one of the greatest days of moral vindication in the history of the British Empire, the correspondents through hours of persuasion got their total raised to 800 words. In this way, the Germans—with triumphant details of sweeping the Balkans, which occurred at the same time—were able to blanket completely the British victory in Abyssinia, obtained against far greater odds. This blunder ranks with some of the biggest of the old London Ministry of Information in the days before the Blitz.
Learning that the chief battle for Gondar was imminent, this writer set out for the scene by the quickest means possible. This involved sixteen days' journey by train, motorcar, steamer, airplane and Arab dhow, the elapsed distance between headquarters at Nairobi and here being a circuitous route of about 4000 miles.
By a last-minute airplane journey across the Gulf of Aden, and from Addis Ababa to this front, the correspondent was able to arrive two days before the conflict which separated Italy from Lake Tana and made Gondar's capture inevitable. He witnessed the entire progress of the battle and was given every facility but communication. By returning to the air field and interviewing observer pilots, the correspondent was able by a peculiar fluke to get details of the Italian surrender before either military press officials or indeed the general staff itself.
Such good fortune was unavailing against the ironclad No Priority rule which still holds. The correspondent's story was delivered into the hands of press officers at about five o'clock, approximately one hour after the Italian surrender. It was brief, covered a single typewritten page, and contained nothing which required censorship. However, it was marked by a competent officer with the No Priority instructions provided by military regulations. When the official communiqué was transmitted at eleven that evening—six hours after the Chicago Daily News story was prepared—the latter still reposed on the desk in the signal tent. Night gave way to morning and while the communiqué was already in London, this correspondent's story still awaited transmission from the front. No mistake was involved; the entire stoppage was completely in accord with practices which have dominated this entire campaign. Eventually the dispatch departed at nine in the morning, having been held for ten hours after the official communiqué.
A novice might think that once transmitted from the Gondar front, a dispatch of such importance would go directly to the western hemisphere by not more than a single re-routing. But the transmission method is almost unique in its inadequacy. This message had to go to Addis Ababa, to there await again its No Priority turn, and be transmitted to Nairobi. There it had to be re-censored and thence transmitted to London. From London, it was sent to Canada and the United States.
Under such circumstances it is small wonder that British and American newspaper owners considered it wisest to withdraw their correspondents from a campaign which, however interesting in itself, was hopelessly bogged down in mishandling from a publicity standpoint. It would cost Britain millions of dollars to buy the space thus thrown away—and it is not for sale. If Britain's African victories fail to match her continental defeats in their impression upon the American public, it is because her soldiers' courage cannot become known under present conditions.
WRITER IN BOMBER'S PLACE IN AFRICAN RAID
ON FASCISTS
With the Advance Wing of the South African Air Force,
Northern Ethiopia—December 22, 1941 (Delayed)
One of the strictest rules of this unit forbids taking war correspondents upon bombing raids. The danger of complications is far too great.
In the recent siege of Gondar, South African pilots did most of their attacks upon the entrenched Italian positions not at night, the least dangerous time for bombing, but by daylight. Their Hartbees biplanes, whose maximum speed was once 180 mph but which the rigors of a long campaign had cut down to 150, were not precisely vehicles in which headquarters would prefer correspondents to fly. Furthermore, the Hartbees are open-cockpit two-seaters. Since the fuselages were cramped and bomb loads relatively heavy, taking a correspondent along would mean displacing the rear gunner. Obviously, no correspondent could be allowed the responsibility for protecting the plane's tail against diving attacks from the rear.
But, recognizing this rule as inflexible, it is interesting to imagine what his experience would be if he were permitted to take part in a raid, or should do so by a subterfuge. Within this field the impossible becomes the possible.
Our mythical correspondent sat long upon his canvas cot in a patched tent upon this chilly Ethiopian plateau discussing with the pilot what should not be done.
“Whatever you do,
don't shoot off the tail of your own plane,” said Luke, chunky elder gunner and intelligence officer of the squadron.
The oily-black, gas-operated Vickers, which the gunners dismount each night and keep as tenderly as babies in their tents beside them, was then brought in.
“You can shoot anywhere, even straight down if you need to. But you must stand up in the cockpit in order to take aim. I have found most success in leaning as far out as possible and firing under the tail. The angle of deflection is much less noticeable that way and you can easily sweep around crosswise.”
Asked what ensured against being ejected from the cockpit when standing up, Luke said: “You have a strong cord—we call it the monkey's tail—attached to the rear of your parachute harness, enabling you to stand without being thrown out.”
Lying in bed in the morning, our correspondent heard the first sortie leave. He then arose before his pilot—a small, modest, quiet young South African named Al—and tested his parachute harness. At 7:30 the Hartbees' 750-H.P. Rolls-Royce motor was already whirring. At 8:38 the two planes taxied to the head of the bumpy mountain runway, and departed at 8:40.
The pilot and gunner of the second plane waved to our correspondent in the cockpit of the lead plane as they came in sight of Gondar. Two murderous-looking fighter monoplanes were approaching from the brown canyon to the east. The writer swiveled the gun around and prepared for action but they proved to be American-built Mohawks. At twice the speed of our correspondent's machine they passed 1000 feet below and whirled over the green hills like sharks over the seabottom.
After finding the ground signals from the King's African Rifles, the plane slanted toward the Italian lines. From the air almost nothing could be seen of a living human being. Puffs of smoke from shells landing upon the hillside betrayed where the Italians were hidden. As the plane's phone system was broken, our correspondent was unable to communicate with the pilot. But before leaving he had asked Al to indicate when the bombing dive was approaching.
Weller's War Page 18
