ADF STAFF
When the United Nations asked its member countries to intervene in the Korean War in 1950, more than 20 nations sent Soldiers to the fight. Two African nations volunteered to send troops: South Africa and Ethiopia.
For Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, the fight was a crucial one because of his nation’s history. When Italy invaded his country in 1935, Selassie had asked the League of Nations to come to Ethiopia’s aid but received no support. So, when the U.N. asked for help in Korea, he was eager to show his commitment to regional forces. His Soldiers, the Kagnew Battalions, were named after Selassie’s father’s warhorse. And they fought like no other armies.
The Kagnew Battalions had their own unique code of warfare conduct. They never left a Soldier behind, wounded or dead. No Ethiopian Soldiers were ever captured by the North Koreans or the Chinese. The North Koreans and the Chinese, who had never seen Black Soldiers before, came to fear them and their unfamiliar language, calling them “ghosts.” One scholar later pointed out that the Kagnews “had a special affinity for moving and fighting in the dark.”
Ethiopia’s Armed Forces at that time consisted of the Imperial Bodyguard Division, three army divisions, a small air force with a few Swedish light bombers, and a provincial reserve army. The Imperial Bodyguard Division, known as the Kebur Zabagna, was the elite division, and the battalions destined for Korea were drawn mostly from its ranks.
Before going to Korea, troops trained for eight months under intense conditions in the mountains of Ethiopia, which had terrain similar to the Korean Peninsula.
The first battalion of Kagnews, 1,122 Soldiers, sailed from Djibouti and continued to train aboard the ship during the three-week trip. They arrived in Korea in May 1951 and were designated the EEFK, short for the Ethiopian Expeditionary Force-Korea.
The U.S Army quickly realized that the Ethiopians needed no additional training and assigned them to the U.S. 7th Infantry Division.
Conditions were not always ideal. Many of the Ethiopian Soldiers had never seen snow and were not used to the harsh Korean winters. The Ethiopians could not speak English, and although they had military training, it was different from U.S. tactics. But on the front lines, their ferocity earned them the admiration of their fellow Soldiers, who showed their respect by officially referring to them as the Kagnews, instead of the EEFK. In less than a year, they were heading their own operations. As the war proceeded, Ethiopia dispatched women to Korea to work as nurses.
Perhaps the most famous battles of the war were the two at Pork Chop Hill in 1953, fought while China and North Korea were trying to negotiate a cease-fire agreement with U.N. forces. At one point, as combat historian S.L.A. Marshall noted, “eight Ethiopians walked 800 yards across no-man’s land and up the slope of T-Bone Hill right into the enemy trenches” as enemy forces looked on. “When next we looked, the eight had become 10,” Marshall wrote. “The patrol was dragging back two Chinese prisoners, having snatched them from the embrace of the Communist battalion.”
In the course of the war, 3,158 Ethiopians served, with 121 killed and 536 wounded. The Kagnew Battalions fought in combat 238 times and were awarded many unit and individual citations for bravery.
When the fighting stopped, the Ethiopians had no Soldiers to collect in the prisoner exchange because no Kagnew Soldier had ever surrendered.
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