Anniversary Advance

Dearly does the Fascist mind love Fascist anniversaries. After marking time for a fortnight, Italy's armies in the north and south of Ethiopia waited last week till the dawn of the 13th anniversary of the Blackshirt March on Rome, then struck simultaneously.

In the North. Italy's troops had drawn up on a 60 mile A-A-A (Aksum-Aduwa-Adigrat) front. Between them and Makale, their next important objective, stood the 8,000 ft. mountain of Gual Azai. To protect the Italian forces leftward under General Santini from a flank attack, General Diamanti led 3,000 Blackshirts and an indefinite number of black-faced Askaris in a nine-mile drive round the mountain. General Alessandro Pirzio-Biroli commanding the centre moved his men forward at the same time to capture the rich Feres Mai Valley and a number of important wells. Nowhere last week did the Ethiopians fight back very hard. Safely behind the Italian lines Emperor Haile Selassie's renegade son-in-law, Ras Gugsa, strutted about in a helmet and new Italian uniform that General de Bono has given him, returning the stiff salutes of Italian sentries with broad grins.

In the South. Fighting was fiercer, Italian progress more impressive. Troops under command of General Rudolfo Graziani were stretched not 60 but 400 mi. on a "provincewide front" from the Webbe Shibeli almost to the borders of British Somaliland. Fierce nests of Ethiopian sharpshooters and unseasonable rains that bogged tanks and trucks hub-deep had held up the southern advance for days, but now Italian troops, moving again in three columns, had crossed over half the Ogaden Desert, were drawing closer & closer to Harar, chief stronghold of Ras Nassibu, commander of the Ethiopian armies of the south in Ogaden. Scouting planes zooming high over Harar found the inhabitants already streaming off to the hills, only a few squads of soldiers in the streets. Fifty miles south of Harar, southern Ethiopians shot down their first Italian battle plane. Flashed United Press from Harar:

"Grim evidence of the determination of Ogaden authorities to risk everything on a climactic mass engagement was visible in the tortured labor of corps of ebony peasants--old men. women, boys and girls --sweating in a blistering sun to perfect the [Ethiopian] Army's last line of defense.

''The laborers worked stripped to the waist. One group carried stones on their heads as their slave forefathers did in the days of Solomon, piling rubble along the railroad at Dire Dawa for possible necessary emergency repairs.

"No one stopped work, even for a minute. If anyone walked too slowly, a hippopotamus whip in the hands of a military overseer snaked out to draw blood.

"A finish fight for the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway . . . may come within ten days."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.