Death at Dessye

Spruce, white-haired Marshal Pietro Badoglio is a good soldier and a good soldier is supposed to think only about the task at hand. He was given the Italian High Command in Africa a month ago with one order: Speed up the war. Bending over his maps at Asmara last week Marshal Badoglio realized that to speed up the war the Ethiopian army either must be goaded into risking a major battle, or the present allegiance of tribal chiefs to Haile Selassie must be broken down. Over his maps Marshal Badoglio thought he saw a cheap way to do both. Dessye, 150 miles from the Italian Northern Front, is a straggling, semidesert town nestling in the shadow of tremendous 3,000-foot bluffs (see cut). On a sandy knoll surrounded by spindly eucalyptus trees was an old building sometimes used as a royal palace. Not far away was a new stone building with a corrugated iron roof and a huge Red Cross painted on it: the mission of U. S. Seventh Day Adventists, now being used as a hospital. Outside, thousands of troops were quartered in straggling rows of tents. Pale little Haile Selassie was in that palace last week visiting his northern army, and with him was his 12-year-old son, Ras Makonnen. In Dessye, too, was practically every foreign correspondent assigned to Addis Ababa, eager to see a little of the warfare that they were supposed to write about. Most of them had pitched their tents within the compound of the Adventist hospital. At 8 a. m., high over the yellow cliffs came ten Caproni bombers, flying wing to wing in V-formations of five planes each, the morning sun flashing silver on their wings. With a healthy regard for Ethiopian anti-aircraft batteries they stayed nearly 3,000 feet up. Over the palace they dropped a whistling shower of bombs that shot columns of dirt higher than the eucalyptus trees. Immediately it was apparent what they were after: the death of Haile Selassie. Wrecking the palace, the planes swung back to the other place where he might conceivably be, the mission hospital. One bomb went clean through the Red Cross sign on the roof, destroyed two wards and the instrument room. The last rackful of bombs was reserved for the military encampment outside town and a large red tent, which again might contain the Emperor.

Haile Selassie was in neither palace, nor hospital, nor tent. When the Capronis came over the cliffs the little Negus happened to be standing in the middle of a street talking to General Birru and Doctor Zervos. Hardly had the sound of the first bomb screeched from the yellow cliffs than His Majesty sprang to a nearby antiaircraft gun, pushed fumbling frightened soldiers aside, and sent belt after belt of bullets ripping up at his enemies. His small son stood in the palace garden unconcernedly watching the bursting bombs.

The advantage to Italy in the death of Haile Selassie was obvious, but Good Soldier Badoglio forgot one thing. When a soldier is wounded, he screams and sometimes dies. When a war correspondent is wounded his scream is heard around the world. Some 1,000 bombs dropped in the 17 minutes the planes circled over Dessye killed 53 persons, wounded 200. In the melee somebody shot Correspondent Georges Goyon of the Havas News Agency through the knee, and a Miss Petra Hoevig, Red Cross nurse serving in the Adventist hospital, broke her leg jumping into a trench for safety. They were rushed to Addis Ababa by plane. Typical of the reaction of newshawks was that of Herald Tribune Correspondent Linton Wells. For weeks he has chafed publicly at the dirt and discomfort of the country, the surliness of minor Ethiopian officials. Yet no sooner had his ears stopped ringing from the bombing raid than he rushed to his typewriter to start his daily dispatch thus: "I witnessed today one of the most inhumane acts of warfare it has been my misfortune to see in 20 odd years of experience of wars. So wrote all the rest. A Dr. Loeb, Wartime surgeon in the German army, hustled newshawks to where he had laid out the body of a woman who had had both legs and a breast torn off by bomb splinters. ''This." said he, "is the best proof of the benefits of civilization I ever saw."

The bombs in the Dessye raid were not the cheap lightweight fragmentation bombs of other Italian air raids. Two unexploded 200 pounders were carefully carried to the ruins of the Emperor's garden, where the Negus and his kinky-haired son posed for photographers with a foot on each, in the attitude of successful lion hunters.

At the same hour next morning Italian bombers were back again, killing more people but again missing Haile Selassie. The hospital's medical supplies were ruined. Fortunately many of the war correspondents had brought their own. All through the night one Franz Roth, Associated Press photographer, worked with Red Cross doctors anesthetizing patients. If Italians had outraged the world and missed the Emperor, their two bombing raids did have one expected result. At a secret chieftains' meeting enraged Emperor Haile Selassie finally agreed that the time had come to meet the Italians in open battle, let it be known that he would hurry north to lead 600,000 men against Marshal Badoglio. Stupid indeed was the announcement of the Italian embassy in London in the face of dozens of eye-witness accounts:

"Bombing of the American Hospital is denied. Italian aviators have always respected the sign of the Red Cross even when certain it is being abused for personal protection. Furthermore there is no information of the existence of American Red Cross units in Dessye, nor has the Italian Government ever been notified of the presence of any American hospital in the midst of the Ethiopian forces in accordance with provisions of Article XI of the Geneva Convention of 1929."

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