Weller's War

by George Weller

  While preparing a definitive story of a hitherto unknown campaign, the writer is using as his quarters the former bedroom of General Gazzera. The only battle he has engaged in is against hundreds of tiny aggressors, too small for the Belgians to capture, who are still defending Gazzera's mattress against all comers.

  Before reaching the Ethiopian rampart held by Italian troops, Belgian colonials from the Congo had to hold together an armed column of trucks carrying soldiers, porters and munitions 1400 miles across almost uninhabitable country. The first aim of the attack was Asosa, in the region drained by the Blue Nile, about 300 miles north of the Italian headquarters at Saio.

  Starting from Watsa, in northeastern Congo, the first battalion to depart climbed slowly out of the Congo watershed, whose crest is marked by the Sudanese frontier, and descended by way of Yei. En route the troops pitched camp where the aging Theodore Roosevelt came before the great war for his last shooting expedition; where the scarce white rhinoceros still hides, and giraffes and elephants abound.

  At Juba, with the burning bowl of the Sudanese plain before them, the column turned north along the White Nile. River boats brought them in five days to Malakal where dwell the strange, long-legged Shilluk people, a cattle-keeping tribe of extremely thin physique who wear tan, knee-length tunics. When the clothespole Shilluks first saw the sons of Congo cannibals, with their sharpened teeth and tattoo-corrugated faces, it was difficult to say which were the more surprised.

  At Melut the column turned east, pushing their American trucks through two days of blistering, waterless desert. Major Isidore Herbiet, known to his battalion as Tata—meaning father—prepared for attack. The King's African Rifles, consisting of natives from East Africa, commanded by Colonel William Johnson, were already moving into line and awaited Belgian help.

  Asosa is surrounded by hills and possesses barracks, a radio station, a hospital and an airdrome. It required three days for the battalion, with sweating porters carrying machine guns on their heads, to mount from Kurmuk, a Sudanese border town, to hill positions outside Asosa, at over 5000 feet.

  The combined attack of Congolese troops and the King's African Rifles began March 11, just six weeks after the Belgians left the Congo. The Italians were taken by surprise and abandoned Asosa, pushing south to join their next garrison along the Ethiopian massif at Ghidami, 120 miles distant.

  Belgian losses were chiefly through bacillic dysentery, whose mortality is 30 per cent, and amoebic dysentery, whose death rate is 5 per cent. Sudden changes of climate worked devastatingly upon the Congolese porters, who also suffered from pulmonary diseases caused by exposure aboard the double-decker Nile barges. Accustomed to the warm, damp nights of the humid Congo basin, they caught bronchitis and pneumonia in the parched and grassy Sudanese lowland, where days were hot and windless and nights chilly and breezy.

  At Asosa the Belgians discovered porters who receive wages of 1 franc (2½ cents), the same amount second-class infantrymen would have spent on sandals from the Congo. The terrific heat of the Ethiopian paths had burned their bare, calloused feet nearly to the bone.

  Asosa finished with virtually no losses except by disease. The battalion was given the far harder task of doubling back across the Sudanese desert to the Nile port of Melut (225 miles), ascending the river to Malakal, then doubling back east again to the Ethiopian foothills (275 miles) to close the bag. The Italians had already killed the single Englishman guarding the Sudanese highway frontier post in this utterly lonely land of yellowed grass and mosquito-infested swamp.

  There was a growing danger, when the Italians were still strong and well organized, that their withdrawal into western Ethiopia might abruptly turn into a dangerous attack upon British positions in the Sudan. At almost all points the Italians were better armed and provisioned than Allied troops. Everything depended upon a single Belgian battalion moving fast and intact around three sides of a Sudanese desert square, then advancing east along the torrid road to Gambela in time to prevent General Gazzera from striking first along the same road.

  The Belgian battalion, composed of 700 men and about 400 porters, made the 800-mile journey through country where the temperature ranged constantly above 100 degrees. This meant eleven days of the severest hardship for men alternately buffeted brutally in trucks, then forced to descend to heave them from the sand.

  Belgian commanders knew their battalion could not enter the first habitable place, Gambela, at the foot of the mountain rampart below Saio, without fighting. Lacking air protection, they were completely exposed to reconnoitering Italian planes.

  The King's African Rifles, trying to force the Italians south along 120 miles of ravines of Italian highland, were in the meantime halted by Gazzera. The Italians were planning, if not to strike at the Sudan immediately, to summon their energies for a bitter defense of Saio's natural fortress and agriculturally rich plateau. Besides having ample munitions, an excellent system of trenches and artillery emplacements and a firsthand knowledge of the country, the Italians had selected one of the few areas capable of supporting a colonial army living upon the land. Although harsh Sudanese swamp lies below Ethiopia's back doorstep, the mountains are comparable to Switzerland for green fertility. Here is the same rich, reddish soil which, passing into the White Nile, helps furnish lower Egypt every floodtime with virginal topsoil.

  The province of Galla Sidamo is the storehouse of western Ethiopia. Gallas, despised by Ethiopia's ruling Amharites as second-rate warriors, are excellent farmers and cattlemen. From the writer's window standing corn rivaling Iowa's can be seen in dozens of upland pastures.

  Gambela is the first village in Italy's Ethiopian empire captured and held by Belgium's expedition from the Congo. It lies where the Sobat River emerges from the Ethiopian mountains into the Sudanese plain, about forty miles from the Italian headquarters at Saio. Today its dusty little square beside the 200-foot-wide river is lined with fast little Fiat campaign cars and seven-ton Lancia trucks. On the Lancias are painted designations like Gruppo Motorizzata di Harar (“Motorized Unit of Harar”), showing the distance the Italians retreated across Ethiopia when striving for a final punch against the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan for possession of a chain of airdromes along the White Nile, and to cut off the West African sources of American supplies. The single battalion of Belgians forestalled the blow.

  Belgian subalterns, some with experience in the French Foreign Legion, sleep on cots in these Italian trucks. By day they watch 80 Italian drivers temporarily saved from a British prison camp because they alone know the secret of the Lancia's eight changes of gearshift. The Italian chauffeurs are thankful, since Ethiopian guerrillas' notion of squaring accounts is mutilation. They are being paid wages plus living expenses, in accordance with international law, and appear happy their war is over.

  The Italians defended Gambela bitterly. They knew that if they lost the village they would be forced to retreat up into the mountain stronghold of Saio where General Gazzera had established his headquarters. Gambela was the only point whence either a motorized or river expedition could start. As long as Gazzera held it, he might take the offensive. If the Belgians won it, the Italian position would become defensive only. The Fascists would be walled inside Ethiopia.

  Gambela is barely large enough to support its country store, full of tin pans and cheap candy beads, operated by an Ethiopian Greek. However, several one-story barracks and a radio station show that England has understood Gambela's political importance. Here, many miles inside the Ethiopian frontier, the British flag floats overhead. The Sudanese policemen—recruited from the tall, cranelike Shilluk people—defend this tiny British possession.

  The British had obtained from Haile Selassie a territorial concession here the size of an American city block. This outpost of empire—“Little England”—serves as an excellent listening post for politics along the Ethiopian watershed and is legally as British as Hyde Park. Curiously, the Italians had allowed Major John Morris, who has been here sixteen years, to r
emain with his garrison of Sudanese.

  Morris is a tall, blonde Briton in his later fifties. He spent several rough and tumble years in the western United States before America became too tame for his taste. His old friendship with the Duke of Aosta was rewarded when Aosta, then Italy's viceroy, sent a private warning that a declaration of war by Mussolini was impending. This enabled Morris to escape to the Sudan. Aosta also gave orders that the Gambela territory should be respected regardless of the war situation.

  Three months after the Belgians gained Gambela, Aosta was imprisoned by the British in the same Sudanese resthouse where Morris took refuge after receiving Aosta's message. When Morris returned to Gambela he found everything intact.

  To storm Gambela—key port of the Ethiopian White Nile and gateway to the Sudan—the Belgians, fatigued by their 800-mile, eleven-day journey from Asosa, had to make a frontal attack. The Italians placed machine guns under sycamore trees along the river, making an attack by water impossible. A second line of eight machine guns covered the road from the Sudanese desert as far as the Sugarloaf, a 300-foot, conical hill. The flanks of the peak were ringed by Italian machine guns.

  The Belgians sent Congo infantrymen creeping through the brush, led by a white officer. They silenced the machine guns on the river and prepared to handle Sugarloaf.

  The Italians called the Belgians' tribesmen Niam-Niams. A “Meat-Meat” is a black so meat-hungry that he is a cannibal. Gazzera termed the Belgians' use of Niam-Niams barbarous. The Congolese, aware of Italian worries about their appetites, asked to charge the sides of Sugarloaf with bayonets. They wiped out the machine-gun nests.

  The Belgians lost three infantrymen killed, plus three white officers and fifteen Congolese wounded. Belgian losses increased the next day. The Italians refused to tell their casualties, but numerous bodies were found in the streets here.

  After the Belgian battalion took Gambela, the Italians retreated by mountain road 4000 feet to Saio in orderly retirement. Belgian officers here pay tribute to the fighting of the younger Italian officers, particularly the Askari subalterns from Eritrea.

  Exhausted and suffering almost to a man from dysentery, the Belgian battalion settled down to hold Gambela against the Italians behind and above them. The Belgians were alone between the hostile Ethiopian rampart and the Sudanese plain, without either artillery or aircraft. However, the African radio brought the news that another battalion was en route across the Sudanese plain and a third was assembling in northeastern Congo, preparing to dare the same journey across Africa.

  This chain of mountains, source of the White Nile's waters and lower Egypt's life-renewing soil, is crisscrossed by ravines. Although Belgium's battle against Italy is over, death still lurks. Everywhere along the steep road up to the Italian headquarters at Saio, signs protrude in the eight-foot elephant grass: WARNING! LAND MINE!

  The Italians, though ill-starred upon the battlefield, are probably the world's experts at making pursuit dangerous. They not only mine the roads but set sensitive traps in the tall grass, some so close that if two cars meet along a one-way mountain road whichever turns outward has an excellent chance of being blown up.

  Yet the Belgians, after taking Gambela, started up toward Saio. The columns of reddish rock rising from the grass offered an ideal situation for guerrilla warfare. Gazzera waited to make his resistance atop the plateau. There a violent torrent called the Bortai, crossing the road at a right angle, was the first natural division between the Italians on the heights and the Belgians in the bullet-swept ravines.

  The Belgians, strengthened by a company of Stokes 80-mm mortars and a battalion, moved to attack, led by Lt. Colonel Vandermeersch, who, because of his exceptional height is called Kasongo Mulefu, “awfully tall.” Their forces, totaling about 1500 men and 600 porters, were insufficient to seize the heights. The Italians were reinforced until they had 7000 men, and became so bold that the Belgians had to take the offensive to conceal the small number of their forces.

  In the first battle of the Bortai, on April 15, the Belgians lost two valuable officers. Lieutenant Simonet, scouting alone between the lines, stumbled into an Italian ambush and was killed. Sergeant Dorgeo, a former Foreign Legionnaire, who had arrived in the Congo after escaping from Narvik, was unfamiliar with his surroundings. He was surprised by three Italian officers who emerged from the brush holding up their hands and shouting: “We're English.” Not sure the King's African Rifles, supposedly fifty miles to the north, might not have sent a liaison party to the Bortai, the Belgian officer lowered his revolver. He was mowed down by Italian snipers in the bush. In the ensuing fight the Belgians lost a native corporal and four soldiers. But 3 Italians and 40 Eritreans were killed, and 70 wounded.

  During the first struggles at the Bortai, the Belgians learned to respect the Italian spotting system. The Italians posted an observer in a tree with a sniper; a squad of infantrymen hid around the tree. But the artillery barrages following such observations were often wastefully long. Usually the Italians continued pounding with 77s an hour after the Belgian patrols had stolen back to their own lines.

  Nine days later the Italians took full advantage of their superior positions and armament. After a two-hour barrage they attacked. It was the first time the men from the Congo had heard the terrible concert of modern gunfire in full chorus.

  Using machine guns, automatic rifles, baby machine guns and hand grenades, squads of Eritreans, with Galla snipers, filtered through the Belgian left and right.

  One hero of the unequal struggle was a porter who rushed unarmed into the gunfire to aid two radio operators. He rescued their apparatus intact. (Belgian officers often were saved by their men.) The Belgians were forced to withdraw beyond a pair of hills that screened them from view.

  Following the two battles, the Belgian situation in the rear became critical because of weather and a break in the slender trans-Sudanese communications.

  May 1 until June 15 is the end of the dry and the beginning of the rainy season. During these weeks the single road across the Sudanese plain turns to mud. The water levels of the rivers Sobat and Baro, flowing into the White Nile, are insufficient for Nile barges. While the Italian troops ate plentifully on their highland gardens, the Belgians between Bortai Brook and Gambela were on half rations. The heat mounted to 110 in the shade, 128 in the sun. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from the plain.

  The Gambela airdrome, whose single hangar still bears the ironical words Roma Doma—“Rome is Master”—was too short for planes carrying food. Some could be dropped from the skies, but it was impossible to feed 2500 men this way. Lt. Colonel Martens, a small man known for his ability to absorb tropical heat, was hard-tested to hold the situation together.

  Several porters obliged to carry food to the front lines, forty miles away on a cold rainy plateau, died from undernourishment and fatigue. The officers, living on canned beef and rice, were also affected.

  Beriberi broke out and even today the writer finds cases still being treated at Gambela. The food supply fell so low that the officers took the camouflage nets covering the trucks and seined the river for fish.

  The month of May, when no fighting took place, was the most difficult and tragic for the Belgian Force Publique. But victory was nearer than any knew.

  Trapped by rains, the Belgian expedition was in a precarious situation until early June when the rivers Sobat and Baro rose, enabling reinforcements coming from the Congo via the White Nile to reach them.

  The Belgians' first plan was to cut off Gazzera's army—strongly encamped up in Saio—from Mogi, another town on the uneven, 5500-foot plateau. Mogi is the garden center of the thickly ravined highland, and Italian porters were bringing the principal fresh foodstuffs for the Saio garrison, numbering about 8000 men against the Belgians' 2000.

  To hold Bortai Brook, the Belgians atop the plateau facing Mogi could spare only about 250 men from their two battalions. These Belgians had to descend from the plateau and launch their attack from Gambela, the
fever-infested port where the Congolese themselves had been isolated for the past six weeks.

  From Gambela it was a two-day climb on all fours by mountain goat path to the Mogi positions, and another day for each porter to descend. The maximum burden the most courageous black bearers from the jungle could carry upon their heads was 35 pounds each. Nine of this was food they ate en route. The bearers' legs were cut by the razor-sharp elephant grass, their bodies weakened by dysentery and malnutrition. Porters with names like Katanabo, Bungamuizi, Kabome and Sawila are still being cited for bravery and endurance in the officers' reports.

  The Mogi siege was even more expensive in soldiers than porters. The hope to cut off Mogi was that the King's African Rifles and the British East African Regiment, blocked farther north in an attempt to take Ghidami, might be able to press south and join the Belgians.

  Under Captain-Commandant Pierre Bounameau, they attacked Mogi on June 9, shortly after taking Gambela. Their rear was covered by the arrival by river of another Congo battalion under Major Antoine Duperoux.

  The Italian garrison, of about 300, held their well-fortified position stoutly. Realizing Mogi could be taken only at heavy cost, the Belgians dug in around the town and sent patrols to ambush the road to Saio on which Italian food was carried.

  Lt. Colonel Martens ordered his Belgians to increase patrols upon the Saio Plateau to make the Italians believe they were facing superior forces. Elephant grass, which the Italians had burned in April in order to have a sweeping line of fire, had grown high again, so the Belgians used a ruse familiar to American pioneers in fighting the Indians; they moved their cannon and machine guns frequently to suggest multiple points of fire. Meantime the alarmed Gazzera tripled the Mogi garrison, bringing it to 900 men.