DISTANT EVENTS WERE TAKING PLACE THAT WOULD AFFECT BOTH John Robinson and Jim Cheeks. On June 13, 1940, a certain “Mr. Strong” had been taken aboard a Short Sunderland flying boat that took off from Poole Harbor, England, and landed in the harbor at Alexandria, Egypt. There, a certain “Mr. Smith” disembarked the flying boat, boarded a Royal Air Force plane, and was flown to Khartoum, Sudan. Haile Selassie was back in Africa. He was there to encourage his people, fighting as guerrilla warriors, to join the British and Allied forces and drive the Italians out of Ethiopia. On January 18, 1941, Emperor Selassie crossed the Sudan border into Ethiopia near the village of Um Iddla, four hundred and fifty miles northwest of Addis Ababa. There began a hard march that saw him enter his capital of Addis Ababa on May 5, 1941, five years to the day after he had been driven from his country.
Six months later, November 1941, allied forces comprised of troops of the British Army, British Commonwealth Nations of India, Sudan, East Africa, and South Africa, a small commando outfit from the British Mandate Palestine, Free French and Free Belgian units, and Ethiopian irregular forces under Haile Selassie forced the surrender of most of the two hundred fifty thousand Italian soldiers in Ethiopia—most, but not all. About forty thousand Italian troops with various native Italian East African Askaris troops retired to mountain strongholds and began scattered but effective guerrilla warfare against the British and Ethiopians that would not end until October 1943.
A short time after that, John Robinson received a communiqué from Haile Selassie asking if he would assemble a small cadre of pilots and mechanics and return to Ethiopia to set about building a new Ethiopian Air Corps. It was a message John had been waiting for. He knew that the flying school business at home would never be what it had been when thousands of trained pilots returned home after the war. He accepted the emperor’s offer. The question was how to carry it out.
Robinson arranged for five black pilots, all of whom were also aircraft mechanics, to travel with him under contract to Ethiopia. Their names were James (Jim) W. Cheeks, Andrew Hester, Edward Jones, Haile Hill, and Joe Muldrew. The group knew that starting an air force from scratch and teaching flying and aviation mechanics in Ethiopia would not be easy, but they had no idea that just getting there would be a great adventure in itself.
In December 1943, war raged across Europe and the Mediterranean. In May the Germans and Italians under Rommel had been defeated in North Africa and Italy had surrendered to the Allies on September 8, 1943. The Italians may have surrendered Italy, but the Germans had not. Hitler sent troops into the country to contain the Allies. German aircraft out of southern France and northern Italy were still a threat over the Mediterranean, as were U-boats.
The first task Robinson faced was to find a way to get his group to Ethiopia. There would be no luxury ocean liner to take the group merrily across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, through the Suez, and down the Red Sea to French Djibouti the way John had traveled pre-war in 1934. John first tried the Army Air Force transport and ferry service (AAFBU) that had established a South Atlantic route to fly aircraft and supplies via Recife, Brazil, to African and Eurasian continents, but every pound of freight and every cubic foot of space was precious. None was available for Selassie’s intrepid black American aviators and their heavy load of tools and equipment.
Room was finally found for John and his entourage aboard a British merchant ship in one of the many convoys streaming across the North Atlantic with cargos to supply England for the planned invasion of Europe. The happy group was not particularly comforted to hear that although the U-boat threat had been greatly reduced, it had not been totally eliminated. One might think that John, Jim, and the rest, being pilots, would not suffer from seasickness, but they did. Blazing through the ocean at the breakneck speed of nine, sometimes ten knots, the long, stormy, cold voyage across the North Atlantic was miserable enough in itself, not to mention the terrible food, or that the convoy twice received U-boat warnings mid-Atlantic.
Upon their safe arrival in England, there was hardly time to tour London, much less the British Isles. Selassie had made arrangements with his British ally for the immediate transport of Robinson’s team. They and their load of tools and equipment were quickly put aboard a British C-47 Dakota dressed in civil aviation livery. (They would have to refuel in neutral countries that did not allow military aircraft.) The twin-engine workhorse took off from a field in southwest England for an eight-hundredmile flight to Lisbon in neutral Portugal. After refueling and spending the night they took off on the second leg, another eight hundred miles to Algiers. From Algiers it was nearly one thousand miles to Benghazi, Libya. The next leg was eight hundred miles to Cairo, Egypt. The last leg was the longest and stretched the range of the C-47 to the maximum: Cairo to Khartoum, Sudan.
Along the way, the RAF crew allowed John to fly as copilot, glad to get some relief. When John was not asking incessant questions about the plane, he was reading the operating handbook. John was allowed to spend at least ten of the thirty plus hours of flying in the cockpit. By the time they landed at Khartoum, the British crew told him they were confident of his ability to fly a Douglas DC3/C47. John found the type handled much like the Ford tri-motors, or the Farman or Fokker multi-engine planes he had flown in the thirties except that it was more comfortable and faster.
Once on the ground in Khartoum, the real journey began. The intrepid flyers were given an old Chevrolet stake-bed truck with a canvas cover, a guide, fuel and water, stored in five-gallon tins, and canned food supplies. Spare wheels and tires hung on both sides of the truck. Thus equipped, they loaded their tools and equipment and set out for Addis Ababa some four hundred and fifty miles away along a road marked on an English army map as “passable in fair weather.”
Jim Cheeks described the highlights of the trip: “We put the guide in the cab between two of us, one driving, one riding in the cab, while three of us had to ride in back with the gear. We would switch out every four hours. It’s a wonder we made it. We breathed tons of dust and had our kidneys rattled on the worst road I’ve ever been on. The map said passable in fair weather and I learned what that meant. Any rain and we struggled from one mud bog to another slipping and sliding in-between. Man, that was a trip. I think that truck must have been one left over from the British commandos in North Africa, you know, the Desert Rats. I heard they used the same Chevrolet trucks.4 It’s a good thing we were mechanics. We must have taken apart the carburetor and cleaned it and the spark plugs about every fifty or sixty miles. The fuel we carried was dirty. The brakes weren’t too good either. It was rough country. We barely made it up some of the steep passes and going downhill was a thrill. Besides our baggage, tools and equipment, we had to carry fuel, oil, water, and food. On the best twelve hour-day, we made less than fifty miles. We didn’t know where the hell we were. The guide, who spoke a little broken English, had to assure us about ten times a day that we were headed for Addis Ababa. Sometimes we could get cooked food at a village, but we had to cook most of our meals. After seeing a snake or two, nobody wanted to sleep on the ground.
“We had tracked southeastward from Khartoum until we reached what our guide said was the border between Sudan and Ethiopia. It was unmarked and meandered generally southward. Then late one day near sundown, we came to a military outpost surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags and manned by black troops. We all thought the fighting in the area was over and suddenly here were armed troops. We were more than a little concerned. We didn’t even know exactly which country we were in, which side of the border we were on. Then a white British officer came out of a tent and walked to the gate. This white guy asked if we had been attacked or seen any armed men. We hadn’t. He said we had been lucky and then asked if we could shoot a rifle. I asked him if that meant we would have to shoot black men, ’cause if it did, I explained, we weren’t going to do it. He said, ‘Look around you. These black men will bloody well shoot them if they attack this camp.’ The officer said, ‘I’m talking about holdouts from the guerilla war on the Italian side, Selassie’s tribal enemies. They are now mostly raiding bandits. If they attack, it will be at night and I can assure you that if they get through the wire they will try to kill everyone here and it won’t be pretty.’ I looked at John, he looked at the British officer. ‘I believe we’ll take those rifles,’ he said. We had a good meal of some kind of wild meat . . . didn’t ask what it was, exactly. We kept the rifles close and didn’t sleep much. No attack came. We thanked the officer and his troops and left the next morning wishing maybe we had brought along our own rifles.
“We finally made it into Addis Ababa to a huge welcome. Seems the people remembered John Robinson. A week later we were welcomed by the emperor at the palace and then got to work. I’ll add this: John was saddened by what the Italians had done. We didn’t know too much about it, I mean the way he remembered things. He didn’t talk to us about it much, but we could see that he was kind of down a little till we got to work.”
John was devastated by what he found upon his arrival in Addis Ababa. He learned the Italians had executed thirty thousand Ethiopians, virtually every educated and technically skilled Ethiopian they could catch, as revenge for a failed attempt on the life of General Graziani. It would take a generation or more to replace them.
One of the few educators to survive was Mrs. Mignon Inniss Ford who had moved from the United States to Ethiopia in 1931. She had opened the Princess Sanabe School, the only private girl’s school in the country. Her family had close ties with the emperor. She first met John Robinson during the war while he was in the hospital recovering from wounds he had received in combat. During the Italian occupation she hid in the outskirts of the capital, supporting her small children by making clothes.
When Haile Selassie returned after the war, he placed the highest emphasis on schools and lines of communication throughout his country. Mrs. Ford helped reopen the schools. The emperor once again turned to John Robinson to help re-establish lines of communication. Selassie determined that Ethiopia must become an essentially air-minded nation. The terrain demanded it. Modern roads were terribly expensive to build due to the rugged terrain in much of the country. The Italians had built a few roads linking some of the towns but much of the coffee crop, the most important export product of Ethiopia, could take four weeks by donkey to reach the railroad station in the capital for shipment to the sea and international markets. By air, it would take only hours to transport the same coffee. Ethiopia needed John Robinson. Besides rebuilding the Ethiopian Air Corps, he was asked to lay the foundation for an Ethiopian airline.
Jim Cheeks said of the start-up training, “At first we stayed in a hotel. Then John was given a large villa some Italian general had built. We all lived there. It was very nice and we had a cook and two servants to take care of us, do our laundry, clean. The living was good.
“We went out to set up the flying school at what was called Lideta airport. We found the first class of eighteen students waiting. They more or less spoke English. It was a requirement for qualifying for the program. The problem was that at the time, there was only one aircraft to use for training. It was not a plane considered a primary trainer. Ethiopia had somehow gotten hold of a US surplus Cessna UC78. It had been used by the Allies for training navigators and graduate pilots in multi-engine aircraft. It was used overseas for liaison and utility duty. The Americans dubbed it the bamboo bomber because the wings and tail were made of fabric-covered wood. I think the civilian models were called the Bobcat. The fuselage was steel tubing with wood fairings and the whole thing fabric-covered. It had two 245-horsepower Jacobs radial engines. I mean, who starts a student out in a twin?
“All of us flew the thing. It was easy to fly, but we had to convince ourselves that we could take an Ethiopian kid who had never been off the ground and teach him to fly in this five-seat, twin-prop plane without killing them and ourselves. As far as I know, that had never been done since the Wright brothers. We decided to start with a mechanics course so we could rebuild the engines. After that we started teaching flying. Now you have to realize that teaching someone that’s never been in an airplane is difficult enough in a simple single-engine 65-horsepower cub. We started the first class of students at Addis Ababa in that twin Cessna with two 245-horsepower Jacobs radial engines. Most of them had never driven a car. Hell, we had a hard time making ’em wear shoes. But they were smart and proud and wanted to learn. They had gone through a lot just to be selected for training.
“There was another thing about the UC78. The plane did not have feathering propellers. It is bad enough to lose an engine with fethering props. The plane wants to yaw toward the dead engine. But if you lose an engine you can’t feather, the prop on the dead engine just kept wind-milling which produces even more drag. It had barely enough rudder to hold course with one engine wind-milling like that. It didn’t have a steerable tail wheel. You kept it straight on takeoff and landing by tapping on the brakes, right or left as necessary. Cessna claimed the plane had a ceiling of twenty-two thousand feet but would hold only three thousand feet on one engine. That’s not too comforting when you remember that Addis Ababa is seven thousand feet above sea level. Practicing engine-out procedures was some kind of fun I’m here to tell you. You can believe we took real good care of those engines. If we ever were to actually lose one in flight, the remaining good engine would rapidly get us all the way to the crash site. Anyway, we did it, and we did it without killin’ anybody. We were proud of the fact that we trained the first class of Ethiopian aviation cadets in that Cessna bamboo bomber. I don’t know of any other group of instructors or students who participated in such a program. We did it because we didn’t have a choice at the time. We took a bunch of kids that had never been in a plane, had never been off the ground, and taught them to fly in a twin-engine plane because it was all we had. John said we could do it, so we did. It wasn’t long before we got war-surplus light single-engine training planes from the United States and the British. But I tell you, I was proud of that first class.
“By the time our contract was up, we five instructors had trained more than three hundred pilots and mechanics. Many of those students became the leaders of the new Ethiopian Air Force—several of them eventually made general. No one was prouder of those students than John Robinson.
“When our contract was over, most of us chose to go home. The war was over, and compared to our hardship getting to Ethiopia, it was a lot easier getting home. Flying had come a long way during World War II and transatlantic flight was common. John accepted the offer to stay and continue to head up the new, growing air force. Ethiopia had, I believe, become John’s home. It was a tough decision for me to make. Johnny Robinson was my best friend. We had been through a lot together. He was a great guy. But it was time for me to go home. There were other things I wanted to do. I tell you this, it was a time, place, and experience I will never forget.” Jim Cheeks went on to retire after a full career with Lockheed Aircraft.
In 1946 John helped the Ethiopian government reach an agreement with TWA Airlines to furnish technical personnel and aircrews to fly a small fleet of DC-3 aircraft. After this agreement was implemented, John turned his full attention back to training Ethiopia’s small but growing air force.
In order to accelerate the rebuilding of his country, Haile Selassie arranged for scholarship programs at US colleges for Ethiopian students. The emperor knew he would need someone to help prepare these students for the cultural shock they would experience when they left Ethiopia for the first time to travel to the most modern country in the world. Again John helped. He suggested that Janet Waterford Bragg, a nurse, and a pilot in her own right, be contacted. Janet Waterford Bragg was the perfect choice. Bragg organized a sort of receiving depot for arriving young Ethiopian students. She would become affectionately known as “Mom” to hundreds of them. Many of them would arrive in the United States carrying notes to her from John Robinson. Years later, she recalled, “Some of the notes from Johnny had grease smudges on them, the mark of the ever-busy hands-on aviation instructor, head of the air force or not.”
John was busy. He was teaching, he was flying, he was administering the creation of a new air force, monitoring the TWA-operated Ethiopian Air Line, and he was happy. He personally taught Prince Makonnen, Duke of Harar, to fly. They became the best of friends, often flying together. John also gave lessons to Mrs. Ford’s son, Yosef Ford. (Yosef Ford would later move to Washington D.C. and become a professor of anthropology at the Center for Ethiopia.)
Then an incident occurred that brought home the reality of prejudice and politics to an admired and loved black man living in the oldest blackruled nation in the world. In 1948 Swedish Count Gustaf von Rosen, who had flown an ambulance plane during the Italo-Ethiopian War, flew a new Swedish Sapphire single-engine training plane from Sweden to Addis Ababa setting an aviation record. Von Rosen made an offer on behalf of Sweden to supply several of the Sapphire planes as trainers for the Ethiopian Air Force. The emperor accepted the offer and commissioned von Rosen as a major in the Ethiopian Air Force.
Von Rosen had an extensive reputation as a pilot adventurer. After flying a Swedish ambulance plane in Ethiopia (which was destroyed on the ground by Italian bombers), he went to the Netherlands and was hired by Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM). He met and married a Dutch woman. Against the wishes of his wife, he joined the Finish Air Force in the Winter War against the invading Soviet Union in 1939. When Germany occupied the Netherlands, von Rosen went to England leaving his wife behind in Holland. (She joined the Dutch underground and worked bravely until captured and killed by the Nazis.) In England, Von Rosen applied for the RAF but was turned down, in part because his aunt, Baroness Karin von Kantzow, had married Herman Goring, head of the Luftwaffe, and the fact that he had flown for Finland, which was allied with Germany at the time. Instead, von Rosen continued flying for KLM on the route between London and Lisbon. It seems that von Rosen, who was from a wealthy family in neutral Sweden, preferred the adventurous life of a mercenary pilot to family obligations or other pursuits in life. Some who knew him said that he wanted to live the noble life of helping the cause of the underdog. Others said that he did it to feed his enormous ego. Perhaps it was for both reasons.
In any case, when once again in Ethiopia, Count von Rosen let it be known among the diplomatic community in Addis Ababa that he was not pleased to be outranked by Colonel Robinson, a black American, and not happy serving under his command. It appears that his ego and aristocratic sensibilities rebelled against taking orders from any black man under the rank of emperor. Perhaps he was jealous of John Robinson’s reputation as a pilot and the acclaim he received from the emperor and Ethiopian people.
John was aware of the count’s attitude. Friends in the diplomatic community had informed him of von Rosen’s complaints. Nonetheless, Robinson persevered in building up Ethiopia’s new fledgling air force. He intended to do it with or without a jealous count’s cooperation.
Trouble boiled to the surface when Ethiopia was given a surplus American C-47/DC-3 twin-engine transport, which had to be picked up and delivered to Addis Ababa. (The pickup point is not known, but may have been at Djibouti or somewhere in Sudan or Kenya.) A C-47 normally requires a pilot and copilot. John recognized that he and Gustaf von Rosen were the most qualified pilots in Ethiopia. Their differences aside, John picked the count as his copilot to help deliver the plane to Addis Ababa. Von Rosen, curiously, insisted on flying his own plane to the pickup point rather than flying with John. The reason would become clear. Both men flew in separate planes, each carrying a pilot to return their planes to Addis Ababa.
According to witnesses, von Rosen refused Robinson’s order to fly in the right seat as copilot of the C-47, saying something to the effect that John should fly copilot because he, von Rosen, wasn’t about to fly second seat to an American nigger. Evidently von Rosen had insisted on flying himself to the pickup point for that reason.
John reined in his temper, putting the mission ahead of his personal feelings. Over the count’s vociferous protest, John climbed into the C-47 alone, closed the door, started the engines, and flew the large aircraft to Addis Ababa. During flight he was required to reach across the cockpit to perform a copilot’s duties of, among others, raising and lowering the landing gear and flaps, operating the radio, managing fuel, navigating and cross-checking the engine instruments, etc. while flying the plane. John landed in Addis Ababa ahead of the count.
When von Rosen landed, he marched into Robinson’s office and launched into a tirade that ended in a fight that was over almost before it started. Robinson broke von Rosen’s jaw and evidently the pride of Sweden. Von Rosen, after having his jaw set at the hospital, saw to it that a formal complaint was filed by the Swedish consul to the Ethiopian government.
Robinson was put under house arrest for two days. He was visited by Prince Makonnen, Mrs. Ford, Yosef Ford, and several friends including members of the diplomatic corps. Mrs. Ford recalled that John was perhaps more hurt than angry.
It seemed that more was at stake than a count’s broken jaw. The emperor sent an emissary to try and explain to John what the situation involved. Shortly after the war, John’s group of instructors received a few training planes through military aid to Ethiopia from the United States and United Kingdom. By 1948 neither the United Kingdom nor the United States were interested in providing further assistance. However, Sweden had a long missionary history with Ethiopia and since the end of World War II had established support, providing planes, parts, educational and medical facilities, and business interests. Ethiopia, it was explained to Col. Robinson, simply could not afford to lose Sweden’s support. Sweden had promised to provide more Sapphire trainers, Saab B-17 single-engine light bombers, and acquire more C-47 transport aircraft from the United States. Apparently Count Gustaf von Rosen had become the key to continued Swedish support.
It was obvious to John that this was no longer a personal matter. He could handle a case of insubordination in his command, but he could not compete with Swedish foreign policy and aid. John Robinson submitted his resignation from the Ethiopian Air Corps. Von Rosen was put in charge of the new Ethiopian Air Force John Robinson had built.
The emperor sent a personal communiqué to John asking him to remain in Ethiopia and continue development of the new Ethiopian Airlines. John was allowed to keep the villa he had occupied since 1944. His salary was to continue. He also remained an advisor to the Ministry of War.
John joined Prince Makonnen, Duke of Harar, in an import/export business and accepted a royal appointment to head the Duke’s new aviation school. John and the duke became inseparable friends. The incident with von Rosen remained a bitter memory, but John was still flying, the ladies still loved him, his friends stood by him, his income was more than satisfactory—life for John Robinson was good once again. But at home in the United States, Robinson and all he had accomplished was forgotten by all except for his mother and a few friends in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Chicago.
Six years later, on March 14 1954, an L-5 Stinson, returning from a mercy flight, radioed Lideta Airport with the most dreaded words in aviation, “Mayday! Mayday!” followed by the aircraft identifier and position.
On the outskirts of Addis Ababa there was a flaming crash. One of the volunteers, copilot Biachi Bruno, an Italian engineer, was killed outright. The mission command pilot somehow managed to crawl out of the flames before collapsing in excruciating pain. How John Robinson was able to extricate himself from the flaming wreckage can only be attributed to the strong will and determination that had carried him so far during his lifetime.
The staff of the American consulate donated blood to him. An emperor visited his hospital bedside. For two weeks the doctors and nurses did all in their power to save him. It was not to be.
On March 28, 1954, at age fifty-one, the Brown Condor, this remarkable hero, folded his wings. The brotherhood of pilots never say that a fellow pilot has died; they say that their friend has simply gone west into the setting sun.
The people of Ethiopia loved him. His funeral cortege stretched for more than a mile through a city whose population lined the streets to say farewell. John Robinson was buried with ceremony at Holy Trinity Church, Addis Ababa.
Ten thousand miles away in the town of Gulfport, Mississippi, in a house darkened by closed curtains, a proud, heartbroken black woman clutched a telegram. With her hands she laid the paper on her apron-clad thigh and smoothed the wrinkles from the crumpled yellow page as if by doing so she could rub away the terrible words. With trembling fingers, she placed the message on the last page of a thick, worn scrapbook, closed the cover and, holding it close to her heart, wept with the pain only a mother can know.
Another loved, lost airman, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, once wrote of flying and cited the words of his fellow pilot and friend Mermez: “This landscape was still laved in golden sunlight, but already something was evaporating out of it. I know nothing, nothing in the world, equal to the wonder of nightfall in the air. Those who have been enthralled by the witchery of flying will know what I mean . . . those who fly professionally and have sacrificed much to their craft. Mermez said once, ‘It’s worth it, it’s worth the final smash-up.’”
And so it must have been for John Charles Robinson, 1903–1954.
4 One is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London.