ON THE SAME MORNING, OCTOBER 6, THAT GENERAL DE BONO was celebrating his victory at Adowa, John was having breakfast with Mulu Asha.
“When I got to my room yesterday, there was a girl there.”
“I’m glad you brought that up. I did not know quite how to approach the subject. What happened was not planned,” Mulu replied.
“You know?”
“Yes. She came to my family’s house last night and told us. She is my sister’s best friend. You must understand. She did not intend for you to find her there. She is no servant, my friend. She is the daughter of a chieftain, a Ras, and the former wife of a friend of mine, a student pilot. He was killed in a training accident more than a year ago.
“Word travels fast in Addis Ababa. You are better known to our people than you realize. When word came that you were back from Adowa and had gone to the palace, she and my sister took fruit and flowers and supervised two hotel servants to clean your rooms so everything would be fresh and clean. You have come a long way to help us. It was a small thing, but still something they could do to show our people’s appreciation. My sister and the servants had just departed when you arrived and surprised the lady as she was leaving. When she saw you, I think she lost her head for a moment. Great God, man! You don’t know how shocking you looked. She said you were covered with caked blood and dirt, there was oil and blood on your face, your uniform was torn, and you looked dreadfully shaken. She could not simply run past you out the door and leave you like that.”
“Please, what is her name? I want to see her again . . . at least to thank her.”
“My friend, it is best that you not know who she is for now. She is a little afraid to see you. And there is her family to consider. Her father is . . . well, a high ranking official. This is no ordinary lady. You will have to wait and see. Besides, my commander, it appears that you and I are going to be very busy flying from here on out.”
“Well, damnit! I must have some sort of name for her . . . what is the Ethiopian word for ‘lady’?”
“If she was single it would be weiserit for miss, but since she is a widow you would address her as madame. The word is weisero.”
“All right. Tell her I don’t have to know who she is, but I desperately want to see her, to be with her when there is time. We don’t have to be seen by anybody. I won’t embarrass her. Will you tell her that for me? Maybe the three of us could meet together, we could always have a chaperone. Do you understand the word chaperone?”
And so they did when there was time. The three met to dine or picnic, sometimes at the farm of their friend Ras Tamru. John learned some words of Amharic and his weisero learned a little English, but she did not reveal her true identity and John never asked. He just knew he needed her. In the months that followed, she provided him with beauty and peace when his world was filled with the ugliness, frustration, and horror of war.
The following morning, Paul Corriger joined John and Mulu at the Akaki airfield, which was commonly referred to as simply the new airfield. The first few years of flying activity in Addis Ababa had taken place on the racetrack and polo grounds. However, the foreign diplomatic set had been so irate at this interference with their Sunday sport that the emperor finally gave in to their complaints and ordered a landing field constructed on the outskirts of the capital.
“Paul,” John asked, “how many aircraft are flyable?”
“Demeaux says it’s a good day. We have ten that might get off the ground—two Fokker F-Vllb/3m, the Farman F-92, five Potez 25s, the Breda Ba15, and one Junkers W33c. Demeaux is doing the best he can. Parts are scarce. We have trouble getting them past the French customs at Djibouti. I’m surprised they let shipments of fuel through.”
“Ten flyable planes and eighteen pilots, the new ones with less than a hundred and fifty hours total time. The Italians have two hundred modern planes and well-trained pilots. Not very good odds. When our planes are gone, daily contact with the front will be gone.”
“Why worry?” Mulu said. “When the planes are gone, most of us will be gone.”
“That’s a happy thought.”
“I’m just trying to be logical.”
“The army still has a few field radios,” Paul suggested, trying to change the subject.
“I’ve seen ’em,” Robinson answered. “One man cranks a generator by hand while another works a telegraph key. In the mountains they often have trouble reaching the next relay station and those have trouble contacting the radio at the palace. As far as international traffic goes, there is one commercial station downtown. It’s always busy with government traffic and three dozen news reporters fighting to get their stories out. I’ve been told the American consulate has just received a transmitter. Cornelius Van Engert begged Washington for one because he was frustrated trying to get his official traffic out through the commercial one in town. What they sent was an old transmitter and generator that came from an obsolete submarine from the Great War. Four American sailors came with it to keep the thing working.”
Mulu brought up a subject he had tried before. “The Potez 25s came with machine guns but the army took them.”
John sat down at his desk. “I know there’s been talk of arming our planes, but adding guns would be like putting spiked collars on rabbits to fend off dogs. If they catch us rabbits, they’ll shoot us out of the air, guns or no guns. Their IMAM RO 37 is at least thirty miles an hour faster than a Potez 25. If we put a gun, ammunition, and gunner in the back cockpit, the extra weight will slow us down even more. The Italians know we don’t have a real fighter. We’re messengers. That’s our job. We can carry a message from the front in hours that would take runners days to deliver. Every month, every week, every day we have even a single plane left is important. We have to convince every pilot we have how important he is and that his only chance is to run if he sees a speck in the sky.”
“We have told them,” Paul answered.
“Well tell ’em again, dammit! Who went out this morning?”
“Bahru Kaba to the south, Asfaw Ali north. Tesfaye is transporting fuel to the southern front at Neghelle, and Mishka Babitcheff is here on standby,” Corriger replied.
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.
After the battle of Tembien, those Ethiopians still able-bodied melted away in small groups. Counting on there being little need for Italian air support in the area, John thought it was safe for him to make a quick reconnaissance of any new Italian movements. It was a mistake. The Italian pilots, no longer needed in coordinated mass attacks, had been set loose on their own. They were out hunting for sport, shooting at remnants of retreating Ethiopians. They found it fun.
As Robinson finished his run and turned for home, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He swiveled his head to see two dots in the sky to the north. As he watched, the specks grew larger. John was a very good pilot, but had no combat experience. He had never been shot at in the air. His plane was unarmed. A chill climbed up his spine.
Come on, you rabbit. This ain’t no game. Those dogs are after your hide.
John pushed the throttle forward to the stop. At sea level, his engine was rated at 450 horsepower. In the thin air at twelve thousand feet, the engine wouldn’t produce near its rated horsepower. The two Italian planes slowly gaining on him were new IMAM RO 37 bis—biplanes of the Italian 103 Squadron equipped with 560-horsepower engines and armed with machine guns. They could reach speeds of 180 miles per hour. There was no question that they would catch the 450-horsepower Potez with a top speed of only 130 miles per hour.
As he flew southward, John knew his only hope was to trade the danger of being shot down for the danger of flying into the clouds that lay hovering over and among the low mountaintops ahead. He flew directly for them. He had to reach the clouds.
Robinson looked back and saw the two Imams now only about a mile behind. The next time he looked, he saw they were much closer, maybe eight hundred yards. Orange flashes were coming from both planes. Those bastards are firing at me. John fought to stave off panic. You panic, you die. Fighting to overcome a big knot of clawing fear in the pit of his stomach, he remembered what the man on the ship crossing the Atlantic had told him. If they get behind you, use your rudder to skid the plane back and forth. They’ll think you are turning. It will throw their shots off, they’ll aim too far ahead of you.
The Italians were too anxious. They were flying abreast, shooting at too great a distance, each interfering with the aim of the other. But they continued to close the distance to within a few hundred yards. John felt bullets popping through the fabric of his plane. Panic was rising—he could taste its foulness in his mouth. Snyder help me. He remembered a trick his instructor had used one playful afternoon in Chicago returning from a lesson in aerobatics. A fellow instructor in a faster plane had gotten on their tail in mock dogfight. In spite of his combat experience, Snyder was having trouble shaking him off until he pulled a stunt to force the other pilot to overfly him. John hoped the old Potez would hold together. He took more hits as the Italians got closer. Then he chopped the throttle, yanked back hard on the stick, and slammed full left rudder. The Potez slowed suddenly and whipped into a snap roll. The horizon spun violently. The glass gauges on his instrument panel shattered and he felt a hot burning across his forearm. The plane had pitched up into the line of fire of one of the Imams. At the same moment, the two Imams flew past the Potez, maneuvering violently to avoid ramming it, nearly having a midair collision with each other. The Italians, suddenly in front of the Ethiopian plane, thought they were now the targets. They both racked into steep turns. Seeing John flying straight ahead, the Imams continued their turns to get back into shooting position behind the Potez. John, nearing the cloud dead ahead, looked down, desperate to recognize some terrain feature to orient himself. There below he was sure he recognized the Takkaze River. If it was the Takkaze, he knew it led through a narrow pass in the mountains. He quickly aligned himself with it, noted the compass course, and plunged into cloud.
The Italians were not willing to be so foolish. They stayed in the clear, chasing up and down the line of clouds believing no pilot in his right mind would long stay in clouds clinging to the mountains. Surely he would circle back out. They would be waiting for him.
Inside the cool, turbulent air of the cloud, John broke out in a sweat. He felt no relief. The hard knot of near-panic was swelling up in his gut again. His mouth was dry. Thank God his compass had not been shot away. He had no choice now but to try and hold the course as steady as he could, the course of the Takkaze. But was it the Takkaze?
He had no instrument to tell if his wings were level. The altimeter and airspeed indicator had been shot away. He could not tell if he was climbing or descending. He could only hold the stick in a frozen position. If the compass moved, he tried to stop it with a little rudder. He strained to see through the gray fluff that surrounded him. He knew about vertigo and how easily it could trap a pilot into believing he was turning or climbing or descending or spinning when he wasn’t, or make him think he was flying straight and level when he was doing any or all those other things. He had escaped the Italians, but unless he broke out of the clouds and soon, he would lose either to vertigo or the side of a mountain—or both.
The dark gray of the cloud began to lighten, then brighten. Suddenly the Potez broke into sunlight. John was startled to find he was descending in a slight turn with the rocky slope of a mountain ridge directly ahead. He banked away sharply, brushing the edge of another cloud. He continued banking left and right in large arcs across the sky to avoid both cloud and rock until he could at last orient himself and set course for home.
The clouds became more scattered as he flew southward. He could only judge his altitude by rough comparison to the mountains. He constantly checked behind him. The Italians were gone. His knees were shaking. His face and limbs were numb with cold. He was short of breath, lightheaded, tiny stars winked across his vision, sure signs of hypoxia. I‘m too high. He began a descent. As altitude decreased, his lungs gathered more oxygen. His vision sharpened and the numbness of the cold began to wear off. He became aware of a throbbing pain in his lower left arm. He could not move his left hand from the throttle. He looked down. The palm and fingers of his glove were stuck to the throttle control with clotted blood. By the time he landed an hour later, the pain in his left arm was acute. He felt weak from loss of blood. When he didn’t get out of the cockpit, his ground crew climbed up on the wing to help. They wanted to carry him, but he walked to a waiting car, the only one on the field, and was driven to the hospital.
The doctor who dressed his arm told him a bullet had passed through the flesh of his forearm but not broken a bone. John mumbled something to himself. The doctor made out the word “rabbit.”
“What’s that about a rabbit?”
“I said it’s gonna be embarrassing to tell my men ’bout a dumb rabbit that got his self caught by a couple of dogs.”
It was the second of three wounds John would sustain.