The Man Called Brown Condor (36 page)

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.
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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.