First White Prisoners

An eclipse of the moon threw Ethiopians last week into the brief panic an eclipse always produces in Ethiopia, but they were soon boastfully exuberant again when good war news came in from both the North Front and the South. Premature "little rains," not due until next month, made them believe that Allah, Jehovah and their assorted pagan gods were sending the 1936 Rainy Season ahead of time to save Ethiopia. Italy's motor transport was immobilized in many places by the "little rains," wheels spinning impotently in sticky red mud. Sodden and soaked Italian bombing planes could not get off the ground. Only light Italian ships were able to fly in pursuit of non-existent Ethiopian planes or to scout for Ethiopians invisible beneath the mist.

On the North Front there was little doubt that Italian forces had either been driven from Tembien Province north and west of Makale or had withdrawn voluntarily. Repeatedly Addis Ababa claimed that Makale had fallen but Italians held it strongly entrenched and Ras Seyoum, Ethiopia's hulking northern commander, was not fool enough to storm it. He had. however, a splendid present for his Emperor who was temporarily mudbound in Dessye--four white Italian prisoners, footsore and ragged but otherwise in a fine state of preservation. Instead of having them mutilated in the oldfangled Ethiopian" way, newfangled Haile Selassie, according to dispatches, "showered his first white prisoners with food."

By their own account the Italians had been captured on Dec. 14, near the Takkaze River, after an Italian advance column of 1,600 black Askaris had been ambushed in a mountain defile and radioed for tanks to support their line. Sixteen white Italians, in ten light tanks and two trucks, hustled to the rescue. Continued one of the prisoners:

"Suddenly Ethiopian firing opened on all sides. Our officer was killed and the men leaped from the cannons and ran. The drivers of the leading tank were shot, and as that tank blocked the way of the other nine they, too, were forced to halt. Two of us were in the last tank. We saw men climb out of the others to be shot in short order. We remained inside and when the Ethiopians came they opened the door which we had forgotten to lock. We called out 'Friends' and we were not injured."

Up to his neck in trouble in the South was Haile Selassie's "Good Son-In-Law," spunky little Ras Desta Demtu. After repulsing an Italian advance with 60,000 men, he suddenly found himself facing a much stronger Italian column that had advanced unexpectedly several miles in 24 hours. Frantically he signalled for help.

In the North, Dictator Mussolini's flying son Vittorio was vexed by a shell which knocked the machine gun support off his plane and exploded freakishly with little damage in the cockpit, after which he made a neat landing, unscathed.

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