Weller's War: A Legendary Foreign Correspondent's Saga of World War II on Five Continents (review)

After Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, Haile Selassie famously warned League of Nations members that unless they stood up to imperial expansion, they would be next. So much for early warnings. Six years later, Italy's defeat signaled the remarkable resilience of the battered British. What lessons could be taken from that? One, certainly, is that once war gets under way, truth is an early casualty. Rarely acknowledged, the British had a lot of help from a most unlikely source, the Belgian Congo, and nearly all those fighting on both sides were Africans.

George Weller's eyewitness reports bring this lost historical chapter alive. Weller arrived in the Congo in the summer of 1941, soon after a motley cavalcade, drawn mainly from Belgium's notorious Force Publique, had set out on a 2500-mile forced march across Africa to avenge the conquest of Belgium. Leapfrogging the continent in an aging Fokker, he caught up with them at the battlefront, interviewed survivors of the campaign, and then wound up with the Italians in retreat.

Outnumbered and outgunned, the Belgian forces evened the odds by adopting guerrilla tactics:

The Congolese Force Publique . . . fought under the most difficult conditions in their first foreign war. They have learned the secret of resting through days of terrific heat, scouting strange territory under protection of the cool night and attacking at dawn. They have learned the laborious routine of camouflaging positions with bundles of elephant grass changed daily because it yellows in the tropical sun . . . [and that] a small but mettlesome force, even in a strange land, may keep a large and irresolute army upon its own territory permanently in a state of uncertainty and self-defense.

(131)

Ironically, many of the troops under Italian command—organized in traditional, regular army units—were Eritreans. The Belgian government reproduced Weller's account of the campaign as a pamphlet, but it was ignored then and has been mostly unknown ever since.

Not anymore. The Africa material in this far-ranging collection runs only to about eighty pages, but it reads like a screenplay.

Weller returned to Leopoldville to file his dispatches. Next he set out overland for the remote village of Irumu to discover the truth behind Stanley's enormously popular—and lucrative—1890 bestseller, In Darkest Africa. Like the story of his 1871 meeting with Livingston, it recounted a thrilling rescue of another marooned white man, this time a besieged German in southern Sudan. His book told an electrifying tale of a ferocious close-quarter battle with Undussuma tribesmen that he barely survived. Only the battle never took place. Skirmishing, yes, but as aging combatants told Weller, when the Undussumas saw Stanley's superior firepower, they quickly retreated. Three days later, after burning several villages, Stanley completed his mission and returned to write a largely fictional self-encomium. Weller begins, "The history of white exploration of inner Africa has been exclusively written by the white man himself. . . . In Africa as little is known today of what the black man thought about the white man's coming as is known in the United States about how the American pioneers seemed to the Indians" (137). He concludes by placing Stanley's grossly inflated account within a wider political context: "Stanley's defeat of the Undussumas, like Kitchener's taking of Khartoum, paved the avenue toward today's British hegemony over the sources of the Nile, and it resulted in control of the Egyptian cornerstone of Middle East strategy" (142).

Once done with Stanley's embellishments, Weller traveled across the continent back to Ethiopia to report on Britain's final battles with Italian forces and the demise of Italian East Africa. His last piece came from Addis Ababa, where he interviewed Haile Selassie laying claim to Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. His reporting previewed the conflicts that would rend the region for decades...