The Battle Of Gondar

I Know What You're Thinking

IT IS NOT A TYPO. Plus, you'll have to wait until the very end of this Intro to come to the resolution, or - might I sneak it in half-way there? because I am indeed horrid that way.  

     Well, mentioning that title gives me carte blanche to include a click-baity picture, if Art will pause in sucking out the contents of that spent fuel rod.

     No, I'm afraid it's not feasible for him to substitute for Windscale, it takes him months to get through a single rod and th

     ANYWAY I thought that I'd continue to squeeze content from Alan Moorehead's 'Desert Trilogy' and Chapter 14 of the first volume, "Mediterranean Front", which gives one an impression of the scale of the Second Unpleasantness in the Med, the Middle East and Africa.  

     Firstly, though, I must paint you a picture of Alan's official unit, 'Pubic Relations', which was, at least initially, regarded with immense suspicion and antipathy by the army and it's heirarchy.  More akin to 'Pubic Relations', to be coarse about it.  "- the firmly entrenched belief that publicity and propaganda had nothing whatever to do with the army" was prevalent when he arrived in the desert in summer of 1940.  So be aware that the authorities did not flatter or accommodate PR or it's members.  Art!

The lavishly-equipped PR unit in the field

     In May of 1941 Alan had arrived in Addis Ababa, the capital of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was known then), where the occupying Italian colonial forces had withdrawn, leaving the British (and Commonwealth) to occupy it, principally to prevent the native Abyssinians from committing mass murder in revenge.

     At the same time as things were apparently winding down in Abyssinia, the Teutons and Italians in Libya had begun a counter-offensive, re-capturing the important port of Benghazi.  Al realised he needed to get from Addis Ababa back to Egypt, a process made more problematic by the fact that he had no transport, and even if he did it would take weeks travelling overland.  Art!

     This will give you an idea of the distances to be covered, and in 1941 you'd be lucky to have a road rather than a trail, with nothing up to the standards of a European road net.

     Al's first intent was to get to Diredawa and the airport there, where he had been told he could catch a plane taking General Cunningham to Nairobi, from where he could catch any other planes travelling to Egypt.  Thus began a 280 mile journey by car, crossing the Awash Gorge - Art!

     - then Miessa and Aidem.  When he arrived at Diredawa airport, and enquired about the airplane for General Cunningham, they knew nothing about it.  Art!

Diredawa 1941

     It might be at a satellite landing field twelve miles away, which meant Al and his two companions driving off, getting lost, going back to Diredawa to get fresh directions, getting lost again, and heading back to Diredawa again.  Don't forget, this is the era of maps, often inaccurate, and compasses, with no roadside signs to helpfully point out locations or distances.

     On their return they came across the satellite field by pure chance, Hooray! and the General's plane, even bigger Hooray!

     Except it's no longer travelling north to Nairobi in Kenya.

     Oops.  Al had absolutely 0% clout to get this changed, so - back to Diredawa again.  Art!

     Here the Commonwealth part applies.  Al was offered a seat on a South African Air Force Junker 85, one of their passenger fleet converted to a bomber, if he got to their airstrip next morning.

     Next morning he was refused passage as the plane was already overloaded.

     Ooops again.  Sounds like fate conspiring.  By this time Al was convinced that he'd be stuck in Abyssinia for the rest of the war, if not his life.  Art!

     

Jijiga

                            
     Next port of call was the airfield at Jijiga, where he hoped to catch an RAF mail plane to Aden, across the Straits of Hormuz (that again!).  However - a word cropping up with horrid inevitability - when he got there the station colonel informed him that the mail plane had long since ceased to fly into or out of Jijiga.

     On this day Bardia on the Libyan coast had fallen to the Axis, making Al positively froth with desperation at not being where the war was.

     Then the gods, or more likely an officer who knew what the PR unit was, smiled on Al, for next morning a Blenheim bomber turned up at Jijiga, asked around for him and said they were to fly him to Aden, as a variety of personal air-taxi.

     O Frabjous Day!  Art?

Aden 1941

     From Aden he got onto a troopship in a convoy travelling to Suez, which was a lot slower than an aircraft, but he'd used up his accumulated brownie points with that Blenheim.  So troopship it was.  What was a mere 1,770 miles after all his accumulated travelling to date?

     As for Gondar (CHECK MAP FOR SPELLING), this was the last of the Italian colonial possessions to fall to British (and Commonwealth) forces in late November 1941, that being the end of Italian East Africa.  Art!

   That last illo as proof of spelling, you pikers.

    There you have it, the life of an official war correspondent during the early years of the Second Unpleasantness. 

"The Home Planet"

Yesteryon Conrad was ferreting through one of the smaller Book Hills, looking to see if any were due for binning or sending back to a charity shop.  Only one so far, but it's an ongoing project.  Art!

     This is a mighty hardback book, with a rather poignant backstory.  It was published in 1988, when the Sinister Union was undergoing both perestroika and glasnost, both of which would collapse it in just three more years.  It was co-published with 'Mir', a long-defunct Sinister publishing house, and has extensive photographs of Earth (and the Moon) taken from space.  It also has quotes in various cosmonauts national tongue, as well as South Canadian astronauts.  Art!

     This one is merely described as 'Crescent Earth', with the Moon as a backdrop. Art!

      "The coast of Africa", not very helpful as we're not told which coast.

    One other thing is that this book hasn't been opened in decades, and all the pages were stuck together around the edges, so I've gone through all of them and unstuck them.  So, after all that effort, you can rest assured you're going to get more illos.  I bet you can hardly wait. 

You Couldn't Make It Up

Conrad notes that Elong Tusk, former best mate of the Orange Land Whale, and now his deadliest enemy, has formed a new political party.  Art!

     See that arrow pointing to the right?  NOT FORESHADOWING AT ALL and the Toxic Tangerine Toad has responded as his spiteful petty seven-year old mentality surely would, threatening to deport Tusk back to Africa.  Except then he could claim to be oppressed and emigrate as a priority to South Canada.  Art!

     Hmmm one wonders what the Tesla board of directors feel about this new and interesting development, and also what the shareholders are doing, apart from pulling out their hair in handfuls.

     Watch this space and lay in supplies of popcorn.

Not Another Scandi-Crime Saga

Conrad has made a point of not watching any of these when they arrive on Netflix, because there is a limit to how much police procedural one can watch set in Sweden.  Or, occasionally, Denmark.  Even more occasionally, Norway.  Art!

     Which leads Your Humble Scribe to wonder if there are any Finnish police procedural television shows?  Art!

     "Sincerely Yours In Cold Blood" appears to be a re-enactment of real crimes, so that doesn't count.  Because I said so, before you ask.  'Helsinki Syndrome' is about domestic terrorism, so that doesn't count either.  So that's 6 over a span of 10 years.  Hmmmm.  I may check some of these out on Netflix.  

Hyvästi!