The East African Campaign appears in Romain Gary’s memoir less as a sequence of decisive victories than as an uneasy interval between the heroic war his mother imagined and the routine service he experienced. Posted with the Lorraine Squadron to Bangui and later returning to operations in Sudan, he confronts boredom, self-reproach, and the discomfort of being far from the fighting he believes he ought to face. The contrast shapes his account of the campaign: military duty continues, but its meaning is measured against his mother’s expectations and his own recurring sense of inadequacy.

Posting to Bangui and Frustrated Service

Romain Gary recalls that he was sent to Bangui, in French Equatorial Africa, with three Blenheim bombers to provide air cover. The assignment offered little of the danger or activity he associated with a fighting front. His squadron’s frustration found an unauthorized outlet when its airmen dive-bombed the Governor’s Residence with light exercise bombs, a gesture intended to communicate their dissatisfaction to the authorities. They were not punished; in his telling, this was the sort of conduct expected of them.

The airmen also staged a street procession, organizing Bangui’s unsuspecting civilians to carry banners demanding that the fliers be sent to the front. The episode turns their inactivity into a public performance: rather than accept a quiet posting, they enlisted the town in a comic protest against it. That discontent, however, did not remain harmless. Gary describes pilots courting danger in worn-out aircraft, and recalls a low pass over elephants that ended in a crash, killing both an elephant and the pilot. He emerged without injury but was struck by a Belgian game warden and sentenced to fifteen days’ close arrest. Colonel Astier de Villatte eventually secured his release, and Gary rejoined the squadron, then operating on the Abyssinian front.

The Campaign Nears Its End

When Gary returned to the squadron in Sudan, the Ethiopian campaign was already drawing to a close. From Gordon’s Tree airfield at Khartoum, the fliers no longer encountered Italian fighters. Anti-aircraft fire still greeted some missions, but the operations had lost much of the intensity that the men had wanted when they protested their posting. They generally returned at sunset and took off again at dawn to bomb Italian garrisons.

The pattern—mission, return, and another early departure—makes the campaign feel both active and stagnant. Gary sets the repeated sorties against his mother’s letters, which praised his supposed heroic achievements. The distance between those reports and his own account is a source of shame: he believed that the hope placed in him by his mother, and by the people of the Buffa Market, required more than the service he felt he was actually giving. The memoir’s emphasis falls not only on what the squadron did, but on the discrepancy between military routine and the heroic identity imagined for him at home.

Boredom, Risk, and Memory

Gary’s account links the campaign’s quiet stretches with a readiness among the fliers to seek danger for themselves. The Bangui crash shows the consequence of that impulse, while his arrest and eventual return to the squadron mark a brief interruption in his service. The episodes do not amount to a simple story of battlefield achievement: they reveal a young airman trying to make an unsatisfying posting feel consequential, sometimes at serious cost to others.

His recollection is also marked by uncertainty. Gary says that a severe bout of typhoid in Damascus left temporary amnesia and blank spots in his memory around the months before September 1941. He recounts the campaign retrospectively, including his return to the squadron in Sudan, but does not present every part of this wartime period as fully recoverable. That limit matters to the portrait: the campaign is shaped both by remembered routine and by gaps left by illness.

Significance in the Memoir

The East African Campaign gives concrete form to the conflict between filial obligation and lived experience that runs through Gary’s wartime narrative. His mother’s praise casts him as a hero, yet his account stresses boredom, restless conduct, and the feeling that he has not earned that praise. Even the return to operations in Sudan does not resolve the mismatch; by then, the campaign is nearing its close and the work consists largely of repeated sorties against Italian garrisons.

Rather than presenting service as a steady ascent toward glory, Gary recalls an uneven sequence of postings, protest, reckless episodes, punishment, and renewed duty. The campaign’s significance lies in that contrast: it shows how the image of the dutiful, heroic son could persist even when the airman himself felt remote from the fighting and unequal to the expectations placed upon him.