A Mongrel Foreign Legion

Christopher Othen is my kinda writer. His taste for weird and wild tales in the back-of-beyond is right in my wheelhouse — and he tells them with great verve and style. He has a wonderful way of treating the misfits, weirdos and outlaws that tend to to gravitate toward conflicts in out-of-the-way places (and sometimes not-so-out-of-the-way places, like NYC and Chicago, which can themselves be as weird and wild as it gets).

If you’re not yet reading his blog — you must. Really, you must. I know several of you have picked up his book Katanga: 1960-63, which covers the bloody, bizarre conflict in Central Africa that helped to shape the ’60s. Good stuff.

Othen’s latest tome features one of the weirder episodes of the “low, dishonest decade,” the 1930s: The Italian invasion of Ethiopia. (BTW, that happens to be the setting for one of my very favorite adventure novels, A Café on the Nile, by Bartle Bull. Another FP must-read).

Lost Lions of Judah is reportedly off to the printer and set to drop this summer. I’ll be downloading it as soon as it hits.

Othen writes:

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in late 1935 outraged the world. Communists saw it as proof of Fascist barbarism, liberals as outdated imperialism; even the empire builders in London and Paris were reluctant to welcome Mussolini into their club.

It was a war between far-right modernity and patriarchal traditionalism. The Italians had airplanes, high explosive, and mustard gas. The Ethiopians preferred swords and spears. Emperor Haile Selassie needed expert foreign help. What he got was a crazy gang of mercenaries who could barely shoot straight and leaned further to the right than Mussolini.

Lost Lions of Judah tells the whole colourful, blood-stained story.

Cavalcade of Mercenaries

Ethiopia’s new foreign friends included Americans posing as fake French counts, Fascist Belgian soldiers, an African-American pilot duo known as the Black Eagle and the Brown Condor (they hated each other), a Cuban veteran of three failed far-right coups, an Austrian Nazi doctor, Swedish soldiers who preferred fighting communism, and an alcoholic English dropout.

The international powers backing Haile Selassie were equally disreputable. Hitler supported Selassie as part of a plot to grab back the Rhineland, and Japanese secret societies pushed a penniless Tokyo princess into marriage with an Ethiopian prince. Together, this bizarre foreign legion tried to save Ethiopia from Fascism.

The Italo-Ethiopian war started as picturesque exoticism for jaded journalists (barefoot soldiers, despot warlords, cave-dwelling priests) and ended in the abattoir of modern warfare (gas attacks, terror bombing, tortured prisoners). Haile Selassie’s foreigners waded through the blood while doing their best to get rich or die trying.

Empire Building

Lost Lions of Judah will be available in hardback and ebook. You can pick up a copy at Amazon.co.uk  (or Amazon.com) and all the usual outlets.

If you need any further encouragement then the book has a great photo section with many rare pictures, including Austrian Nazi Dr Valentin Schuppler posing with the Ethiopian royal family, drunk English pilot Hugh de Wet looking belligerent, and a prosperous Hubert Julian snapped aboard a transatlantic liner.

All that and Evelyn Waugh as a war correspondent.

The Italian campaign was initiated in part to erase the humiliation of the Battle of Adowa in 1896 — which was probably the greatest defeat ever inflicted upon a colonial power by an indigenous force. Thousands of Italian soldiers were slain. It was worse than Isandlwana (1879 Zulu War) and St. Clair’s defeat (1791 Old Northwest Conflict). One of these days I’ll clear the decks and dig into that.