The Long Slog South from Addis Ababa
At Dira Dawa Morris Hirsch received orders to return to Addis Ababa. He cheered up, hoping that he might well reunite with the Three Musketeers to journey back to South Africa together.
The 1st South African Division had been rerouted to North Africa. Other units had a long slog back to Nairobi and South Africa due to the drastic shortage of shipping. Morris and the Three Musketeers were given a rickety old bus in which to join the convoy.
The Italians had not settled or been militarily concerned with the southern region of Ethiopia, so much of the drive to the Kenya border was mud and slush in the middle of the "Big Rains" in April, 1942. What should have taken hours took days. They camped every night at the roadside.
It was such a contrast to the rapid coastal advance that had opened the campaign. Then the South Africans had made sure they had ample motorized transport, light tanks and well equipped field ambulances because they remembered the terrible toll human porterage and disease took in the East African Campaign of WWI. (General Smuts had conducted that campaign in 1917. The German forces, mostly native troops with German officers, ranged all over Tanganyika and surrendered in Northern Rhodesia undefeated, and uniquely, were allowed to keep their arms.)
The port of Kismayu had been quickly captured and the Battle of Juba River easily won. The 23rd. Nigerian Brigade rapidly advanced to Mogadishu, covering 275 miles in three days! When General Wavell asked Cunningham when he might capture Mogadishu he replied "Got it." The Italian forces abandoned Mogadishu to defend the mountain fortress of Ethiopia. The Allies won battle after battle and the colonial (native) troops and the Italian troops often lost morale and surrendered. Great numbers of prisoners were taken.
The details of this exhilarating campaign had excited and frustrated Morris, relegated to the Barberton Training Camp in the Eastern Transvaal.
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
References:
Excerpt from Dr. Morris Isaac Hirsch's Unpublished Memoirs. Hirsch Archives.
Also: The "Apostles of terror": South Africa, the East African Campaign. SciELO SA. On Line version ISSN 2309-8392
Photo Credits: Hirsch Archives