THE FRONT: Death at Dessye

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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.