Flying the Southern Cross
Page 1
Michael Molkentin
FLYING THE SOUTHERN CROSS
Aviators Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA
Published by the National Library of Australia
Canberra ACT 2600
© National Library of Australia 2012
Text © Michael Molkentin
Foreword © John Ulm
Books published by the National Library of Australia further the Library’s objectives to interpret and highlight the Library’s collections and to support the creative work of the nation’s writers and researchers.
This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 , no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author:
Molkentin, Michael.
Title:
Flying the Southern Cross : Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith / Michael Molkentin.
ISBN:
9780642277466 (pbk.)
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Subjects:
Ulm, C. T. P. (Charles Thomas Phillippe), 1897–1934.
Kingsford-Smith, Charles, Sir, 1897–1935.
Southern Cross (Airplane)
Transpacific flights.
Dewey Number: 629.13092
Commissioning Publisher: Susan Hall
Publisher’s Editor: John Mapps
Designer: Elizabeth Faul
Image coordinators: Felicity Harmey and Gina Wyatt
Special photography: Digitisation and Photography Branch, National Library of Australia
Production: Melissa Bush
Printed and bound in Singapore by Imago
Cover image: see pages 129 and 157
CONTENTS
Foreword
Author’s note
‘Notes written above the clouds’
Charles Ulm’s log and the 1928 trans-Pacific flight
‘Over Golden Gate 1100 feet’
Take-off in San Francisco, 31 May 1928
‘Our last sight of land for 24 hours’
The first day’s flying, 31 May 1928
‘Perfectly glorious sunset’
Flying into the night, 31 May–1 June 1928
‘Mauna Kea sighted!’
Hawaii, 1 June 1928
‘On the way and happy’
Bound for Suva, 2–3 June 1928
‘A rotten night ahead’
Crossing the equator, 3–5 June 1928
‘Looks clear ahead’
Interlude in Fiji, 5–8 June 1928
‘Worst 2½ hours on whole flight’
Pacific storm, 8–9 June 1928
‘On our way home’
Reception in Australia, 9–16 June 1928
‘The rest is easy’
The years beyond
Appendix: Trans-Pacific flight statistics
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
My earliest recollection of my father Charles Ulm dates to a few days after he completed the trans-Pacific flight in June 1928, when he came to my new home where I was living with my mother and stepfather—bringing a Hornby train set for my seventh birthday.
In his final six years I was with him for odd weekends, maybe a total of ten days.
His newly appointed secretary Ellen Rogers happened to live in the next street. By arrangement she would pick up little Johnny— steam train to the Quay ferry, tram to Martin Place, and his Australian National Airways CEO’s office in Challis House. Then in the tiny black Triumph with ‘Rog’ and a typewriter in the dicky seat to his Dover Heights bungalow where with his big Zeiss binoculars I would watch the great Sydney Harbour Bridge’s arches edging together.
I recall a day on his yacht with him holding me by shorts and shirt over the side for fun; and being ordered below by Captain Ulm when she heeled over defying the Southerly Buster. He explained how wind suction over sails led to the design of aeroplane wings.
John Ulm, 14 years old in 1935 with Charles Kingsford Smith.
School friends asked whether my dad was going to fly in the 1934 London–Melbourne Air Race. He wrote saying no, because he was planning his survey flight for the first regular trans-Pacific airmail services. When he was lost, strangers touched me in the street. They knew who the little boy was. It brought it all in on me.
In 1935 (his own last year) Smithy kindly had me in my father’s pilot seat alongside him for the last flight of the Southern Cross—me wearing my father’s trans-Pacific flying helmet and waving proudly to my school assembled below.
It was after flying in my own war, and with a career developing aviation journalism and Australian international airline expansion, that I came fully to appreciate the centrality of my family name and my father’s towering stature in our aviation history, attested by contemporaries and historians.
Loyal to her last day, ‘Rog’ collated the records which we lodged in the libraries: the ‘Charles T.P. Ulm Collection’. Papers and memorabilia keep coming in to me, though, the latest being his last cabled message to The Sun from Fiji before taking off for Brisbane and triumph.
The Pacific flight raised the eyes of a distant, insular Australia to a world now brought near. Today, a million Australians live and prosper abroad, and we catch planes like buses.
Technical record that it is, my father’s log is about four people: Charles Kingsford Smith and his flying skills, Charles Ulm and his organising ability, and the vital Americans, radioman Jim Warner and navigator Harry Lyon. (Many years later, Harry confided to me: ‘The latest model drift recorder Charlie Ulm had acquired for me was so awkward to hold out the little door to take readings that I threw the goddamn thing into the Pacific’. His dead reckoning saved them all.)
Michael Molkentin has mined the lode from this ‘stuff of history’, uncovering the character of the cast members—their personalities, pluses and minuses, strengths and weaknesses, foibles and failings.
With exacting research, insight and historical integrity he has masterfully crafted his gripping account of Australian achievement. It will sit well with the treasures carefully tended in our pillared National Library, itself Australia’s richest treasure.
John Ulm
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Each chapter in this book begins with an extract from Charles Ulm’s log presented as a facsimile page from the original document, together with a transcription.
Ulm’s log has previously been published on two occasions. In 1928, during the trans-Pacific flight, Sydney newspaper The Sun carried extracts from the log. Later that year, an account of the flight ghost-written by journalist Hugh Buggy, The Story of the Southern Cross Trans-Pacific Flight 1928, also included a transcribed version of Ulm’s log. In both cases Ulm’s words were edited to varying degrees (and at times extensively). In this book transcripts of the log appear for the first time unedited from the original document, held in the National Library of Australia’s Charles Kingsford Smith papers (MS 209, Item 1). The entries are transcribed without corrections to spelling, grammar or punctuation.
The National Library has digitised the log and made it freely available online at http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.ms-ms209-1.
Curiously, three pages are missing from the original log, containing, it appears, entries describing Southern Cross’ arrival in Honolulu, Suva and Brisbane. There is no trace of when and
how these pages were separated from the original. However the versions published in 1928 contain these now-missing extracts, allowing us to fill these gaps in the original document’s chronology.
The crew of Southern Cross described their experiences in various memoirs, articles and interviews. These are quoted freely throughout the narrative, though quotations from Ulm’s log are always attributed as such. A full list of references for quotations from other sources is available at http://publishing.nla.gov.au/refs or www.michaelmolkentin.com.
Throughout the flight, Ulm recorded time based on the time zone of their point of take-off. Occasionally he noted the time at their current location but prefaced this as ‘ship’s time’. The initials ‘PCT’ in the log stand for Pacific Coast Time.
For clarity, measurements in the chapter text are converted to metric values with the exception of altitude, which remains in feet, as it does in modern aviation vernacular.
‘NOTES WRITTEN
ABOVE THE CLOUDS’
Charles Ulm’s log and the 1928 trans-Pacific flight
Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith enjoying their new-found celebrity in the immediate aftermath of the trans-Pacific flight. An honorary commission in the Royal Australian Air Force was but one of many rewards from a besotted nation.
At 13 minutes past ten, on the chilly Saturday morning of 9 June 1928, a blue and silver Fokker monoplane named Southern Cross touched down on the grass airstrip of Eagle Farm aerodrome, just outside Brisbane. There to witness it a crowd of some 15,000 spectators had gathered, eager to experience a moment of monumental historical gravity.
The aeroplane and its crew, Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm, Jim Warner and Harry Lyon, had just completed the first flight across the Pacific. In nine days, these four men covered the 11,917 kilometres from San Francisco to Brisbane in an aircraft constructed largely of timber and fabric. The two Australian organisers of the venture, Kingsford Smith and Ulm, were at this triumphant moment, world famous, each on the threshold of a remarkable career in pioneering aviation.
Southern Cross came to a stop amid a scene of unbridled chaos. The crowd surged forward to glimpse the aviators whose epic journey they had been following in the press for the last week and a half. Throughout the flight Ulm had recorded an almost-constant stream of notes in a logbook to cable to Sydney’s daily newspaper The Sun at the end of each leg. Also, his regular wireless messages from the aircraft had been broadcast live by radio stations into Australia’s lounge rooms. This clever use of the press, conceived by Ulm, involved ordinary Australians, isolated from world events, in a way they never had been before. Indeed, by the time they reached Brisbane, Ulm’s brown notebook—his ‘log’—was almost as famous as he and his companions.
‘Heroes of the First Trans-Pacific Flight’
While the police battled to keep the crowds at bay, Kingsford Smith and Ulm climbed down from the open sides of Southern Cross’ cockpit to be greeted by officials. There and then, amid the din of cheering, the federal government’s Controller of Civil Aviation, on instructions from the Prime Minister, asked Ulm if he would be willing to donate his log to the Commonwealth ‘so that the record of the flight could be preserved for future generations’. Ulm agreed immediately and over the following days the fact became public to widespread acclaim in the press. The Sun declared the log a priceless document of Australian history, describing it as ‘written surely under the strangest imaginable conditions—staccato notes jotted down as Southern Cross tossed and dived in the fury of the storm: notes written above the clouds at 6000 feet; notes written when the ocean was but a few hundred feet below’.
This was not just idle sentiment from one of the flight’s financial backers. When the Parliamentary Library—from which the National Library of Australia developed— accepted the log into its collection in November 1928, the Speaker of the House of Representatives declared it ‘one of our most interesting and treasured items’ and arranged for its permanent display in Parliament House.
Today, Ulm’s ‘staccato notes’ are preserved in the National Library of Australia, along with a voluminous amount of published and archival material relating to the flight. Indeed, the event must rate among the most comprehensively documented in Australian history; an indication of the significance attributed to it by both its contemporaries and generations since. Yet amid hundreds of photographs, private and official correspondence, manuscripts, maps and even the notes used by the crew to communicate during the 82 hours they spent in the air, Ulm’s log stands out as a particularly valuable record.
Though partners in a joint venture, Kingsford Smith (left) and Ulm (right) have received uneven public esteem, both then and now.
On its lined pages Ulm captured, in a hand often unsteadied by turbulence, a unique and authentic sense of the moment. It is not a polished journal written retrospectively after reflection. Ulm’s terse, methodically time-logged entries record his raw impressions as they came to him during the flight. They are rough and incisive—‘unliterary in essence’ as one newspaper editor described them—but therein lies their immediacy and striking sense of authenticity.
The importance of Ulm’s log as a historical document is that it also casts light on the origins of the Kingsford Smith ‘legend’. Although the log was written by Ulm and painstakingly transmitted by him in Morse code following each exhausting leg of the journey, the newspapers used it, somewhat ironically, to highlight Kingsford Smith’s role. Indeed, when
The Sun initially credited the log extracts to ‘Captain Kingsford Smith’, obscuring Ulm’s part in the flight.
The Sun reproduced Ulm’s accounts, it promoted them as an ‘exclusive’ from ‘Captain Kingsford Smith’s diary’ and changed the personal pronouns to suggest that he had written the entries. Although the precise reasons behind this are unclear, it seems likely there was a deliberate editorial decision to give Kingsford Smith—the flight’s chief pilot—the narrative’s focus. Whatever the reason, the results have resonated. In the 1950s, Ulm’s son John found his father’s log displayed in the Parliament House foyer labelled as ‘Kingsford Smith’s diary’. After some ‘gentle ribbing’, recalls Ulm, the Parliamentary Librarian Sir Harold White—an old friend of his—apologetically corrected the oversight. The log, however, remained part of the Kingsford Smith papers, as it does to this day in the National Library’s collection.
Although a party to the creation of the ‘Smithy’ legend, the log also sheds light on Ulm’s contribution to the flight as its organiser and co-pilot for about a third of the flying hours. It provides a useful counterbalance to Kingsford Smith’s immense historical weight, suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, there were others of significant talent and dedication behind the man Australians proclaimed ‘the world’s greatest aviator’.
Kingsford Smith himself well knew that he flew as part of a team. We are the ones responsible for any distortions in the history of his achievements, not ‘Smithy’. Kingsford Smith regularly deprecated the press’ attention and emphasised the contribution made by his colleagues. As he declared on radio station 2BL after landing in Sydney, ‘this flight was not my flight’.
It was a flight by Charles Ulm, Harry Lyon, Jim Warner and the chap that’s talking to you. None could have succeeded without the others. Each man had his own specialised job. And the fact that each man did do his job accounts for our presence here in Australia.
Using Ulm’s log alongside the rest of the National Library’s rich array of sources, this book attempts to explain just how, indeed, these four men and their timber and fabric aircraft managed to do it.
Two young men fascinated by flight
Charles Edward Smith—the family added ‘Kingsford’ later—began life in Brisbane on 9 February 1897, seventh child of Catherine and William Smith. The following year, Charles Thomas Phillippe Ulm was born in Melbourne, third son of Emile Gustave Ulm, a French migrant and his Australian wife, Ada. The first aircraft were yet to fly; indeed, Smith would be almost
seven years old before the newspapers reported the Wright brothers’ first flight. Still, these boys started life in an era of remarkable change. Machines and science were transforming the lives of ordinary people, evoking both anxiety and optimism as the twentieth century dawned.
When they were still young, both boys’ families settled in Sydney’s North Shore. Ulm attended local public schools, considering himself a very ordinary child, though ‘quick of temper, inclined to obstinacy, truthful but outrageously inquisitive’. A tinkerer from a young age, he constantly dismantled his toys to discover their inner workings. As a teenager, this developed into an interest in business and led him to take a job as a stockbroker’s clerk. Ulm would later claim that he had ambitions for a career in either the share market or legal profession.
Accounts of Kingsford Smith’s childhood emphasise his outgoing, almost hyperactive personality and wild ‘streak’. In his home suburb of Neutral Bay and at St Andrew’s Cathedral School he had the reputation of a larrikin and a risk-taker. Kingsford Smith’s surviving school reports suggest intelligence and capability tempered by an unwillingness to conform and perhaps a difficulty to concentrate on any one thing for an extended amount of time. By all accounts, he was a popular and charismatic teenager, perpetually the centre of attention, and a keen smoker and drinker from his midadolescent years. Like Ulm, mechanical things intrigued Kingsford Smith from a young age and as a teenager he bought a motorcycle. He left school at 16 to work as a machinist for the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.
The Great War dramatically changed the lives of these two young men. In September 1914, just six weeks after the declaration of war, the 16-year-old Ulm lied about his age and enlisted under a pseudonym. Landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, within the campaign’s first few days he was buried alive by an exploding shell and wounded. While recovering in Egypt, Ulm contracted venereal disease and was sent home, where his parents insisted on his discharge as a minor.