Haile Selassie returns to Addis Ababa

On 5 May 1941 a column for which Ethiopians had waited five years came down into the capital from the Entoto hills, which close off the basin of Addis Ababa to the north. At its head marched the 2nd Ethiopian Battalion, made up of émigrés and refugees who had crossed the border from Sudan in January. Behind it, in an open car, rode the Emperor Haile Selassie I, and behind the car marched the soldiers of the Sudanese Frontier Battalion, the core of the force that since January had been clearing his way through the province of Gojjam. Riding at the front of the column on a white horse was Lieutenant Colonel Orde Wingate, commander of that force, known as Gideon Force. According to the British history of the military administration, the streets along the route were lined by seven thousand partisans of Abebe Aregai, a leader who had fought the Italians in the province of Shewa throughout the occupation and had never submitted to them. Waiting for the Emperor in the city was General Alan Cunningham, whose troops had taken the city a month earlier.

The date was no accident. Exactly five years earlier, on 5 May 1936, Marshal Pietro Badoglio’s troops had marched into Addis Ababa, and Benito Mussolini had proclaimed from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia that Ethiopia was Italian. Chronological lists often say that the Emperor returned “five years to the day after he had been forced to flee”. That is not quite accurate. Haile Selassie had left the capital by train for Djibouti on 2 May 1936, three days before the Italians entered. 5 May was the anniversary of Badoglio’s triumph, and it was this date, a symbol of Ethiopia’s humiliation, that the Emperor and the British set out to erase.

From Khartoum to Debre Markos

The road home began in the summer of 1940, when Italy entered the war and the Emperor, an exile living in Bath in England since 1936, became overnight an ally of Britain, and his country one of the theatres of the East African campaign. In July he flew to Sudan. General William Platt, commanding in Khartoum, treated him with reserve and doubted whether his return would spark a rising. The war showed, however, that the Emperor had been right and the sceptics wrong. From August 1940 the small Mission 101 under Colonel Daniel Sandford was at work in Gojjam, reconciling the quarrelling leaders of the partisans, the so-called Patriots, and in November Major Wingate arrived in Khartoum, convinced that small, mobile units led by the Emperor could blow Italian rule apart from within.

On 20 January 1941 Haile Selassie crossed the border near Um Idla. Gideon Force numbered a few hundred Sudanese and Ethiopian soldiers and a few dozen British officers and NCOs; it had no artillery, and its supplies were carried by camels, which died in huge numbers on the mountain tracks. A British publication of 1942 calculated that their bones lay along the whole route from Sudan – some fifteen thousand animals. With night raids, ruses and propaganda Wingate persuaded the Italian commanders that he had many times as many troops behind him. On 12 March the Emperor was given a ceremonial welcome at Enjabara, two days later he entered Burie, and on the night of 3–4 April, after several weeks of harassment, the Italian garrison abandoned Debre Markos, the capital of Gojjam, and withdrew across the Blue Nile. On 6 April, the day Cunningham’s troops entered Addis Ababa, Haile Selassie raised the Ethiopian flag over the fort at Debre Markos. There Ras Hailu, the former ruler of Gojjam, who had collaborated with the Italians for years, paid homage to him.

A month of waiting

Debre Markos is less than three hundred kilometres from Addis Ababa, and yet the Emperor covered that distance only a month later. The reasons were partly practical and partly political. British troops had occupied the capital without a fight, but there were still several tens of thousands of Italian civilians in it, and in the surrounding forts stood Italian units which, under the terms of the city’s handover, had been left their weapons to protect the white population. Cunningham feared that the Emperor’s arrival would set off an outburst of joy that could easily turn into revenge for the years of occupation, above all for the massacre that Italian Fascists and soldiers had carried out in Addis Ababa in February 1937 after the attempt on the life of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. The troops that might have kept order were meanwhile needed elsewhere: on 13 April the 1st South African Brigade set off north towards Dessie and the Amba Alagi massif, where the Viceroy, Prince Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, was holding out.

Behind these fears lay a more serious question: what authority did the Emperor actually have? On 4 February 1941 the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, declared in the House of Commons that the British government – which had recognised the Italian annexation in 1938 and withdrawn that recognition in December 1940 – would welcome the reappearance of an independent Ethiopian state and recognised Haile Selassie’s claim to the throne; but he added that, while military operations continued, the country would need outside assistance and advice. In practice this meant that Ethiopia was treated as enemy territory under military occupation. It was governed by the British Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA), answerable to the Commander-in-Chief Middle East. At its head, as Chief Political Officer to General Archibald Wavell, was Major General Philip Mitchell, Governor of Uganda until the outbreak of war. His deputy in Ethiopia, Brigadier Maurice Lush, set up the provisional headquarters of the military administration in the Viceroy’s palace in Addis Ababa on 6 April. The Emperor, who had never recognised the Italian conquest, had no intention of being a guest in his own capital.

London, however, wanted to hurry matters along. According to the British history of the military administration, prepared by Lord Rennell of Rodd, on 9 April the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, proposed at a meeting of the Defence Committee that the Emperor be formally restored to his throne in Addis Ababa straight away. A telegram to Wavell of 10 April said that the Emperor should return to the capital as soon as possible, but that during the occupation he would follow the advice of the British military authorities. Cunningham himself soon concluded that the Emperor’s presence in the country, but outside the capital, was awkward for everyone, and that his authority might help to prevent acts of violence against Italians. He therefore gave orders for the Emperor’s journey to be speeded up. A major obstacle, though, was the lack of transport and the wrecked roads, including a blown bridge over the deep gorge of the Blue Nile.

On the way to the capital Haile Selassie stopped at Fiche and at the monastery of Debre Libanos, where in May 1937 the Italians, on Graziani’s orders, had shot hundreds of monks, deacons and pilgrims. The last halt was on Mount Entoto above the city, at the spot where at the end of the 19th century the Emperor Menelik II had founded his first capital before moving it down into the basin below.

5 May 1941

The entry into the city was staged to show that it was a sovereign returning to his capital, not a ward of the British army. According to British accounts the Emperor was escorted by British armoured cars, and the column also included a car carrying Sandford, whose Mission 101 had kept faith in the Emperor’s return alive in Gojjam through the hardest months. British war correspondents, lacking any other vehicle, rode in the procession on a city fire engine. In the palace where the Italian viceroys had resided for the past few years he was received by Cunningham with a guard of honour of British African troops. There, too, the Ethiopian dignitaries who had gathered to witness the moment paid him homage. According to an account cited by the historian Anthony Mockler, Abebe Aregai, bowing low, said that he had never submitted to the enemy and had not expected to see the Emperor alive again. After the ceremonies his seven thousand men marched back in good order to their camp outside the city. The British history of the military administration stressed that not a single incident occurred.

Most important of all was the speech the Emperor made to the assembled crowds. According to the text that has come down to us, he called the day the beginning of a new era in the history of Ethiopia, but his most often quoted words concerned the defeated. He urged his countrymen not to repay evil with evil, not to commit the atrocities that the enemy had committed against them, and not to sully Ethiopia’s good name with deeds worthy of the enemy. In a country where only four years earlier thousands of the capital’s inhabitants had been slaughtered within a few days, and where poison gas had been used against civilians and partisans throughout the occupation, this was a remarkable appeal. It was largely heeded: there were no mass acts of revenge in Addis Ababa, although in the provinces, especially where all authority had broken down, Italian soldiers and settlers were sometimes attacked.

That same day, 5 May, General Platt handed over to Cunningham the direction of Patriot operations east and south of the great bend of the Blue Nile. The British official history notes that from then on Cunningham exercised it largely through the Emperor and Sandford. Gideon Force, part of which had had to break off its pursuit to give the Emperor a fitting escort, returned to its last task. Wingate pursued the column of Colonel Saverio Maraventano, which was retreating from Debre Markos, and in the second half of May, by bluff and night attacks, forced it to surrender at Agibar. According to the British official history, 1,100 Italians and 7,000 colonial troops went into captivity. The Emperor took the salute as they marched past.

Who rules Ethiopia?

The dispute over authority broke out almost at once. On 11 May Haile Selassie appointed seven ministers and a governor of the province of Shewa, in which the capital lay. The British regarded this as contrary to the principle that the army would govern the country until the end of hostilities. Lord Rennell of Rodd observed that the appointments were largely a formality, since there were neither ministries nor officials, and the Emperor had no income beyond British subsidies. To get round the difficulty, the new ministers were treated as advisers to the British military administration officers in their respective fields. The dispute did, however, hasten the dispatch from London, on 17 May, of detailed instructions: the British government welcomed the rebirth of an independent Ethiopia, but until the military situation changed the Emperor was to follow strictly the advice of the British military authorities, and the country remained under British control.

Wingate, too, soon disappeared from the scene. After bringing in the prisoners from Agibar he was summoned to headquarters at Harar, where he learned that Gideon Force was to be disbanded and that he himself was to go to Cairo. An ardent supporter of the Emperor, he believed that the British administration was taking from him the power that London had promised to restore. He did not even have the chance to say goodbye to him. In July 1941, ill with malaria and embittered, he tried to take his own life in a Cairo hotel. He survived, and a few years later he created the Chindits in Burma.

Place in the war

The Emperor’s return came at an exceptionally grim moment for Britain. In April the Germans had overrun Yugoslavia and Greece, from which the British corps had been evacuated; in Libya Erwin Rommel had driven the British back to the Egyptian frontier and surrounded Tobruk; and on 2 May war had broken out with Iraq. Against this background Ethiopia was the only place from which good news was coming. It was also the first country conquered by an Axis power to have its independence and its rightful ruler restored. For occupied Europe, including the governments-in-exile in London, it was proof that the dictators’ conquests need not be permanent. For Haile Selassie himself it was the end of a road that had begun with the Italian invasion in October 1935 and the vain appeal to the League of Nations in Geneva in June 1936.

The war in Ethiopia, however, was not over. The Viceroy was still holding out at Amba Alagi, and after his surrender resistance continued from the forces in Galla-Sidamo and around Gondar, which capitulated only in November 1941. Scattered Italian units and some of the settlers waged a guerrilla war until the autumn of 1943. Nor was independence complete at once. The British military administration treated the country as occupied territory: it took away captured weapons, controlled finance and trade and introduced the East African currency. Only the provisional Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement, signed on 31 January 1942 – on the British side by Mitchell – recognised Ethiopia as a sovereign state, although it imposed British advisers on the Emperor and left the British in control of the railway to Djibouti, the Ogaden and a strip of the borderland with British Somaliland. Under pressure from the Emperor, and with growing support from the United States, it was replaced in December 1944 by a new agreement in which Britain for the first time called Ethiopia an ally and gave up most of its privileges. The Ogaden returned to Ethiopia in 1948, and the last disputed border areas in 1955.

In December 1942 Ethiopia declared war on Germany, Italy and Japan, and in 1945 it was among the founding members of the United Nations. Haile Selassie went on to reign for more than thirty years. Ethiopians still celebrate the day of his return, 5 May, as a liberation holiday, Patriots’ Victory Day.