The Man Called Brown Condor

by Thomas E. Simmons

  An aviator who had grown up in Mississippi was now a colonel in the Imperial Ethiopian Air Corps. Walking down a muddy street to his hotel, wearing a smart uniform cut in the style of Britain’s RAF, he won admiring glances from young women in the marketplace. Colonel Robinson hardly noticed. His mind was on more serious thoughts. In the breast pocket of his uniform he carried two passports, one American, one Ethiopian. He wondered if he would ever be allowed to use the former again. An 1818 US law forbade American citizens to accept commissions in a foreign army at war against a nation in peace with the United States.

  In a letter to his mother, he tried to explain his situation. “I’m now a colonel, Momma. I’m sometimes in the company of an emperor who appeals for peace before the League of Nations. Why don’t they do something to stop this Mussolini fellow? Do you read much about it the paper at home? I’m making more money than I ever have. I will send most of it home to you. The air corps here is small, but I have been given its command. I wonder if anyone at home knows all this or even cares. I love you, Momma. Tell Daddy I love him too. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be alright.” He signed it “Johnny.”

  What he did not tell his mother, but knew full well, was that Ethiopia was in harm’s way. He didn’t have to tell his mother that. Haile Selassie would give her proof enough.

  On any given Sunday, the emperor attended church services carrying a rifle to dramatize the fact that although Ethiopia was praying for peace, she was preparing to fight if necessary. Nearly ten thousand miles away, a picture of the emperor at church with a rifle was carefully cut out of the Daily Herald newspaper and placed with John’s letter in the small drawer of a bedside table. Celeste Cobb sat on the edge of her bed and closed the drawer. “Lord,” she prayed, “please look after my boy, Johnny.”

  John bought the latest English language newspaper available. It was dated July 1935 and carried little news from the United States. It did say that one senator, a Democrat from Missouri named Clark, was calling for a full investigation of all lobbying on Capitol Hill. John wasn’t sure what lobbying was, but it sounded like the senator thought it was a little crooked. A front-page headline blared, “Japan at war with China.”

  The League of Nations is supposed to take care of things like that. Sounds like that War to End all Wars didn’t do the job. War seems to be breaking out like chicken pox.

  Two short articles on flying drew John’s attention. The first stated that Wiley Post, a noted American aviator, was making final test flights for a new floatplane he and his friend Will Rogers planned to fly from Los Angeles to Moscow via Alaska. Another article was closer to home. A new aviation record had been set by two brothers over Meridian Mississippi. Al and Fred Key had set a world endurance flight in a modified Curtiss Robin monoplane using their own method of in-flight fueling. Their flight had lasted an incredible twenty-seven days, five hours, and twenty-four minutes.

  That ain’t bad for a couple of boys from Mississippi. Damn! If that in-flight fueling could be set up right, they could fly around the world without landing. Somebody’s gonna do that one day.

  Two political cartoons appeared on the opinion page. One showed Mussolini juggling arms and treaties while a bystander told Hitler and Stalin, “It might pay for you boys to watch this guy a little longer.” The second cartoon depicted Hitler giving Mussolini a medal for breaking up world peace machinery and the ring of nations surrounding Germany.

  Making one last appeal, Haile Selassie, with tears in his eyes, rose to plead for peace and protection for his country before the body of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. As he began to speak, Baron Aloisi of Italy walked out. Shortly after, the Italian consul in Addis Ababa received orders to withdraw from Ethiopia. To appease Italy, France and England had secretly agreed to keep out of “the Abyssinian thing.” Both countries wanted to keep Italy on their side should Hitler start a war in Europe. Without France and England, the League of Nations could argue but not act to keep the peace. Dejected, disillusioned, Haile Selassie returned home to prepare to defend his people as best he could. Ethiopia would have to stand alone.

  The rainy season ended. With Italian troops massed on the Ethiopian borders, there was little doubt what the dry season would bring. On September 28, 1935, Cornelius Van Enger, US chargè affaires in Addis Ababa, advised all US citizens to leave Ethiopia. He, his wife, and his staff would bravely stay.

  Chapter 17

  Gathered at the River, 1935

  ETHIOPIA HAD CHOSEN TO JOIN THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS IN 1923. Haile Selassie, agreeing with the stated principles of the League, believed his country safer by virtue of the protection that the self-esteemed body promised member states under its Articles of Collective Security. Just the year before, 1922, Mussolini had bullied his Fascist party to power in Italy. Selassie was not blind to the potential threat that posed to his country. Italian colonies bordered Ethiopia on two sides. Now, eleven years later, that threat had grown to a clear and present danger.

  To the north of Ethiopia was the Italian colony of Eritrea. To the south lay Italian Somaliland. Italian troops were massing on both borders. It was clear, not just to Ethiopia but to the world at large, that Mussolini was preparing to attack the proud, independent Christian nation once called Abyssinia. Emperor Selassie formally appealed to the fifty-two member League to act on its covenant to provide collective security to prevent or stop any aggression perpetrated by one member state against another.

  While Selassie appealed to the League to honor its covenant, he ordered his troops to pull back thirty kilometers from Ethiopia’s northern and southern borders to preclude any incident that might be used by Italy as an excuse for war. It was a futile gesture. The League went through the motions of addressing Selassie’s appeal fully aware that its bureaucratic procedures and formal deliberations could drag on for months even without internal interference. In the matter of Ethiopia, Italy provided internal interference at every turn, often aided by France.

  French Premier Pierre Laval was concerned about its Fascist neighbor, Italy, as well Germany’s new government formed by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler. In January 1935, as an act of appeasement, Laval secretly concluded an agreement with Mussolini that conceded France’s disinterest in Ethiopia in return for Italian concessions in favor of French citizens living in Tunisia. The attitude of the British government’s foreign office was no better. The British foreign minister, Sir Samuel Hoare, privately assured Italy that the British Empire had no interest in Ethiopia whatsoever. He was concerned about any threat Fascist Italy’s West African colonies might pose to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. England and France thought it better for Mussolini’s attention to be directed toward conquering and colonizing a backward African country rather than stirring up trouble in Europe. What both France and Britain failed to take into account was that by accommodating Mussolini in his egregious grab for Ethiopia, the act would destroy the credibility of the League of Nations, its post Great War ideal of collective security, and, most damaging of all, the perceived balance of power in Europe. (One nation that did not fail to notice the weakness displayed by the League in regard to Fascist Italy was Hitler’s Germany. His National Socialist German Workers’ Party had adopted Mussolini’s Fascist rationale by 1933.)

  Emperor Selassie realized too late that the faith he had placed in the League of Nations had been a mistake. It became sadly obvious to him that neither the League as a body nor a single member nation would step forward to try and prevent Fascist Italy from violating Ethiopia’s borders. Even worse, none offered Ethiopia any support or material aid. Italy, an industrialized European nation, home of the Vatican, seat of the Christian world, was poised to invade an ancient, agrarian African nation of twelve million people, a Christian nation since Biblical times, the only African country that had successfully resisted colonization by both the Islamic Ottoman Empire from the East and Christian Europe from the West.

  Selassie knew the coming war would be one his p
eople could not win, but they would fight rather than capitulate. His hope was that by fighting he could buy time, time to gain the attention of the world, time for the League of Nations to at least prevent Ethiopia from becoming a Fascist colony. The clock was ticking.

  On September 27, 1935 in Asmara, capital city of Italian Eritrea, a telegram from Mussolini was delivered to the Italian field commander General Emilio de Bono. It read, in part, “You will attack at dawn on the third, repeat, third of October.”

  As fate would have it, the next day, September 28, the following order was issued throughout Ethiopia by means of handbills and telegraphs, transported by donkey, runner, drums, and a handful of liaison aircraft:

  All men and boys old enough to carry a spear will be mobilized and sent to Addis Ababa. Married men will take their wives to carry food and to cook. Men without wives will take any woman without a husband. Women with small children need not go. Those who are blind, cannot walk, or for any reason cannot carry a spear are exempted. Any able man who is found at home after receipt of this order will be hanged.

  Signed: H.I.M. Haile Selassie I.

  In the early morning darkness before dawn on October 3, young Italian troops moved sleepily to their assembly points on the north bank of the shallow Mareb River. Each man was issued four days ration, a half-gallon of water, and 110 rounds of ammunition. Some sat on the ground finishing breakfast. Some nervously checked and rechecked their equipment. Others gathered in small groups. There were the usual attempts by the young and inexperienced to smother pre-battle fear with jokes and bravado. Most left unsaid any reference to the battle Italy had fought and lost to the Ethiopians thirty-nine years before at Adowa in 1896. More than ten thousand of Italy’s finest troops had been killed in the humiliating defeat made more so by the fact that, for the first time, a modern European colonial power had been driven out of a black African nation.

  The soldiers gathered at the river knew that a long, hard, uphill trek lay before them. There were few trails capable of use by motorized vehicles. Mules, not trucks, would have to serve as primary supply transport until passable vehicle routes could be built. Their initial goal, the town of Adowa, was situated at an elevation three thousand feet higher than their starting point. The Italian columns would have to climb rising desert terrain sparsely covered with thorn bush and laced with deep canyons and lava-strewn ravines. If existing routes could not be found, trails leading up steep escarpments would have to be cut. The troops were worried about being ambushed in such terrain. What made them even more nervous were rumors that in the war of ‘96, the Ethiopians castrated Italian prisoners. It gave the young soldiers pause to consider the part they were being ordered to play in building Mussolini’s New Roman Empire. As time grew short, their mouths became dry and talk died away. In the uncomfortable silence, each man was left to his own thoughts.

  The order to advance came at the first light of dawn. Flag bearers unfurled their banners and trumpets blared in a triumphal procession befitting the new conquerors from Rome. The rising sun illuminated a hundred thousand soldiers wading across the shallow Mareb River in three large columns spread along a forty-mile front. In addition to modern rifles, de Bono’s army carried 6,000 machine guns and had at its disposal 700 pieces of artillery, 150 tracked CV 3/35 tanketts (small, two-man tanks carrying twin 8mm machine guns), 140 aircraft, several thousand motorized vehicles, and 6,000 mules. Held in reserve were 100,000 additional soldiers. At the same time there was a lesser, but formidable number of troops massing on Ethiopia’s southern border with Italian Somaliland. The crossing of the Mareb River on that morning, October 3, 1935, was the first step of a Fascist march that in four short years would engulf the world in war.

  High above and slightly to the south of the Mareb, a tiny speck in the sky went unnoticed by the columns marching below. It was an obsolete French Potez 25a2 biplane, its single 450-horsepower engine throttled back to reduce noise. From five thousand feet above the river (eight thousand feet above sea level), a young black pilot from Gulfport, Mississippi looked down on the invading army below. Just seventeen years after the end of the Great War, Colonel John Charles Robinson unwittingly became the first American to witness the first Fascist step in the march toward World War II. (The Great War was not referred to as World War I until World War II broke across the globe.)

  John had taken off from Adowa in the dim glow of false dawn to begin another routine patrol of the section of the northern Ethiopian border along which the Italians were encamped. As the African sunrise made a golden ribbon of the shallow Mareb River, the lone pilot knew this day was different. Clouds of dust streaming in the shallow light of a new day left no doubt that the Italian army was on the move. He was stunned by the panorama of troops and equipment advancing into Ethiopia. Robinson knew his job now was to gather as much information on the ongoing invasion as time allowed, and he knew time was short. Italian aircraft would be lifting off from the airfield at Asmara, Italian Eritrea, just 140 miles away; they would have armed aircraft—single-engine Imams or triengine Marchettis or Caproni 133s, any of which could outrun his obsolete, Lorraine-Dietrich powered Potez biplane.

  John cursed himself for leaving his silk scarf in his room. Constantly turning his head to search the sky for enemy planes, he was rubbing his neck raw on his stiff uniform collar. He flew westward parallel to the Mareb River for a distance he estimated to be fifty miles before he arrived at the western flank of the invading army. Across that distance he had observed three massive columns sloshing across the Mareb into Ethiopia. There seemed to be no end to them. As he wheeled back to an eastward heading, his sharp eyes spotted six tiny dots in the sky to the northeast. It was time to run. John turned southward pointing the nose slightly down to gain speed toward Adowa where he would have to refuel before flying on to Addis Ababa with the terrible news. He found himself shivering and wondered if it was from the altitude chill of the open cockpit or cold fear.

  Constantly checking the sky behind him, he began to relax when he found no following aircraft. His thoughts turned to the weeks that had so quickly passed since his arrival. He had to admit that up to now his time in Ethiopia had been fun—challenging and hard work, but fun. He enjoyed the training flights over the rugged, beautiful country. There were inhospitable stretches of mountainous desert that reminded him of pictures he had seen of the western badlands of North America, high fertile plateaus of grain and coffee farms, grasslands, rugged desert lowlands, beautiful lakes and rivers, jungle wilds, snowcapped mountain ranges, and the great Rift Valley. He had been surprised to find such friendly people in this exotic land. John smiled, remembering the military parade staged in the capital city. Belu Abaka, the nearly seven-foot-tall drum major of the Imperial Army Band, had led the procession past the emperor’s magnificent pavilion especially erected for the occasion in Cathedral Square. Invited to stand with the royal entourage, John had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing when the emperor’s royal lions that had escaped from their cages suddenly made an appearance. The crowds of spectators lining the parade route scattered in all directions. The emperor was not amused.

  John was still smiling when Adowa appeared out of the haze a few miles ahead. Robinson thoughts quickly returned to the present. My God! How long have I been flying straight and level? He quickly whipped the Potez into a hard bank to the right and then to the left to check the sky behind. What the hell am I doing letting my mind wander? Turning his head as far to the left and right as his safety harness would allow, he made one more “S” turn to survey the sky for enemy planes before easing off the throttle and descending toward the rocky plateau ahead.

  There was no airfield at Adowa, just a stretch of flat rocky ground at an elevation of six thousand feet on the edge of town. It would serve well enough. The townspeople had cleared the area of brick-size and larger stones. Weeks before, John had landed a Fokker tri-motor transport on the same stretch of ground.

  Before landing, he flew low over the town to alert the groun
d crew that he was coming in for fuel from the supply he had delivered in the trimotor transport. It would have to be a quick turnaround. Enemy planes launched from Asmara Eritrea could appear at any time. Robinson wasted no time getting back into the air.

  On the ground in Addis Ababa in just under four hours, he ordered his plane to be refueled before getting into a waiting car to be driven to the palace.

  Once past the guards, he was greeted at the main entrance by the chamberlain and ushered through the palace halls directly to His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, working in his study with two scribes. An interpreter was quickly summoned.

  “Please be seated,” Selassie, speaking Amharic, communicated through his interpreter. “Tell me what you have seen, Colonel Robinson.”

  John related all he had observed from the air, careful to speak slowly and pause often for the benefit of the interpreter. While the emperor listened to every detail with solemn attention, his scribes recorded the interpreter’s translation of John’s report and his answers to the emperor’s questions.

  “The same may be taking place on our southern border with Italian Somaliland,” the emperor said.

  John injected, “I expect Lt. Mulu Asha within two hours. He had the morning patrol over the southern border out of Kallafo on the Shibeli River.”

  The emperor hesitated a moment, picking his words carefully. “I know what you must be thinking. We do not have enough machine guns, artillery, aircraft. We have not had time to train enough soldiers in modern warfare and we have too few radios. I naively thought joining the League of Nations in 1923 and the 1928 Treaty of Friendship with Italy would protect us. I was terribly wrong. We cannot win if we do not get help. Nonetheless, we will fight them, we will try to hurt them, slow them down at every mountain pass, river and ravine, hit them and run, bite their flanks, ambush them wherever we can. Our only hope is to buy time to gain the world’s attention. Surely someone will aid us in our struggle.” The emperor paused. “You are an American, and you have left your home far away. I realize this is not your war. If you want to leave, I will understand. But know this, you must make the decision now. My people and I need you, John Robinson, in more ways than you know, but the choice to go or stay must be yours.”