The Man Called Brown Condor (25 page)

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.

B
Y LATE 1935, IT WAS CLEAR THAT NOT A SINGLE MEMBER
of the League of Nations would move to stop the invasion of Ethiopia and the slaughter of its people. Though no governing body of any nation would act to aid Ethiopia, there were demonstrations of support by citizens of many countries. In England, three thousand young men offered to volunteer to fight for Ethiopia. In America, there was a rally of ten thousand people, both black and white, at Madison Square Garden. Blacks in many communities of the United States staged boycotts of Italian-owned businesses. In Cairo, Egypt, the faithful prayed to Allah to spare Ethiopia.

Some support came unexpectedly. In Fascist Berlin, a film entitled
Ethiopia 1935
carried an anti-Italian theme. Germany secretly wanted the Ethiopian war to continue. It would keep Italy from interfering with Hitler's plan to annex Austria, an ally of Italy. Toward that goal, Germany clandestinely supplied thousands of Mauser rifles and ammunition to Ethiopia (likely smuggled across the border from Anglo-Egyptian Sudan).

There were statesmen throughout the west who intuitively realized the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia foreshadowed universal conflict, yet all met passive resistance that prevented any organized effective means of stopping Mussolini's aggression. France did the most to hinder Ethiopia by barring shipment of any war materials through their colonial port of Djibouti. They didn't want to antagonize their Fascist neighbor Italy. As long as Italy was bogged down in Africa, it wouldn't be a threat to France.

As early as October 1935, Haile Selassie acknowledged that his loyal followers had but two choices. They could either submit to becoming an Italian colony after more than two thousand years of self-rule or continue to resist Fascist aggression alone with no hope of aid. It was an agonizing choice. The battle of Tembien had shown the terrible price in loss of lives continued resistance would cost. His council of chiefs, supported by the fierce pride of the people, left him but one choice: to lead his people as long as they had the will to defend their land.

Haile Selassie was not blind to what lay ahead for his nation. The only hope was that Ethiopia could buy time, time in which the Western world might say “enough” and pressure Italy to cease its imperial brutality against a people that never threatened it or meant it harm.

To boost his warriors' morale, Selassie determined that he should be seen among them at the front. It was a decision that placed a heavy burden on John Robinson of safeguarding the life of the emperor of Ethiopia while in the air.

American newspapers carried a small feature among the articles concerning the Italian-Ethiopian war stating, “Piloted by John C. Robinson, a Negro from Chicago, Emperor Haile Selassie made his first plane flight in several years to inspect Ethiopian defenses.” It was the first of many flights the emperor would take, his life dependent upon the flying skills of a black aviator from Mississippi.

A civilian Beechcraft plane finally arrived in Addis Ababa. The wings, fuselage, engine, and other various parts were carefully removed from their shipping crates and assembled by Corriger, Demeaux, and Robinson. When finished, they all thought it was the most beautiful aircraft they had ever seen. (To this day, many pilots would agree.) It was a cabin biplane called a Staggerwing because its wings were inversely staggered, the lower wing set slightly ahead of the upper wing. The fuselage tapered smoothly from the streamlined engine cowling over the cabin gracefully back to the tail. It had clean lines and an added feature which helped increase its speed: retractable landing gear. It also was equipped with the latest gyro-driven instruments, which allowed it to be flown safely in the clouds and at night without outside references. The plane was officially called the Beechcraft B17 and had been ordered with a 420-horsepower Wright engine. The interior was finished in leather and could carry up to five people including the pilot. As soon as it was assembled, it was painted the same green color used on the other Ethiopian aircraft and decorated with the Ethiopian roundel as well as the symbolic insignia the Lion of Judah, in deference to the fact that it was the emperor's personal plane.

John immediately began test-flying the Beechcraft and found it a delight to fly. It could perform decent aerobatics, and what's more it could reach a speed of 200 miles per hour in comparison to the old Potez which could barely make 130 miles per hour. John's confidence in the Beechcraft grew with every test flight.
With this plane I can keep the emperor safe.

Both John and Mulu Asha were flying reconnaissance and courier missions daily under constant danger from attack by the aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica. The loss of pilots and planes had only served to increase their flying to the point of exhaustion. In a letter to his friend and former student, Harold Hurd, John told of flying conditions at the front:

The only thing I can say for myself is that I am trying to do my best in whatever mission or duty I have. We are having a hard fight over here with our limited amount of modern war equipment. Every man, woman, and child is doing their part to help, and I am sure with God's help and our courage we will come out okay in the end. Sometimes I have to fly almost constantly. I went two weeks without pulling my boots off during what little time I have to sleep. This is when I am along the northern front. I am glad to do my part, but these conditions might help to finish my flying career . . .

Mulu Asha brought back reports from the southern front indicating increased activity. During the early stages of the conflict, the Italians had established a defensive line running from the Kenyan border to British Somaliland parallel with the border of Italian Somaliland. The defensive role did not please an ambitious Italian commander, chaffed at the fact that on the northern front, Badoglio, having been given ten divisions, was getting all the “glory” while he had been given but one division and ordered to sit. His name was General Rodolfo Graziani.

The general finally had enough of doing nothing. He set out to change his defensive role. He expanded port facilities at Mogadishu and opened new supply roads. He motorized his division by buying hundreds of motor vehicles supplied mainly by American manufactures via British automobile dealers in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. He then communicated his desire for action to Mussolini who, because of successes on the northern front, was at last willing to listen.

While all this was taking place, Mulu brought promising reports from the southern front. The two Ethiopian armies of the south had very different leaders than those of the north. One army was under the command of Ras Desta Damtu, the other under Ras Nasibu, who had traveled extensively abroad. Both were young, progressive, and loyal. There was also Ethiopia's only female general, Weizero Asegedech, who led the thirty thousand warriors of her late grandfather, Ras Tassama. Her warriors were armed with modern rifles and machine guns she had bought for them herself.