Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  In Australia, meantime, things were also moving.

  Even before Britain had formally declared war, there was never any doubt where its most loyal offspring stood, right down to its bootstraps: with the British Empire! Speaking at a political meeting at Horsham in Victoria on the last day of July, Australian Prime Minister Joseph Cook made clear his position in reference to the deepening European crisis: ‘Whatever happens, Australia is a part of the Empire right to the full. Remember that when the Empire is at war, so is Australia at war. That being so, you will see how grave is the situation. So far as the defences go here and now in Australia, I want to make it quite clear that all our resources in Australia are in the Empire and for the Empire and for the preservation and the security of the Empire.’4

  Just five days later, when Britain did indeed declare war on Germany, Prime Minister Cook was as good as his word, and within twenty-four hours had committed Australia to fighting beside Britain against Germany.

  ‘It is our baptism of fire,’ the Sydney Morning Herald enthused the following day. ‘Australia knows something of the flames of war, but its realities have never been brought so close as they will be in the near future.’5

  Borne along by this sudden surge of patriotism, and the desire to fight for what many saw as ‘the Mother Country’, able-bodied men from Sydney to Perth, from Darwin to Hobart, began to flood into recruiting centres to become part of the Australian Imperial Force, which Cook had promised Great Britain would be 20,000 men strong.

  One who felt the call, despite his advancing years, was the ageing Lawrence Hargrave. Just two days before war had been formally declared, the 64-year-old had turned up at ten o’clock in the morning at the headquarters of the Coast Artillery at Sydney’s South Head, clutching a faded letter which dated from December 1877. Addressed to Mr Lawrence Hargrave Esq, it read:

  I will be glad if you will consider yourself an honorary member of the

  No. 5 Battery V.A.

  Signed,

  W. Gore Beverley, Capt., 5 Volunteer Artillery.

  ‘I have come to report myself,’ the old man told the bemused sentry as he handed him the letter. In Hargrave’s view this letter, given to him some forty years earlier, entitled him to an immediate position with that branch of the artillery. The commanding officer, no doubt equally bemused, took down Hargrave’s name and address and told him they would be in touch.

  There was no such problem for Hargrave’s beloved son Geoffrey, however, and the young man was able to join up immediately, soon finding himself a long, long way from his father’s workshop and part of the 3rd Brigade of the Australian Imperial Force.

  As to young Charles Kingsford Smith, he, too, wanted to join up immediately, and was only prevented from doing so by the outright refusal of his parents to co-operate. He was just seventeen years old, and Australian law had it that it was only males at least eighteen years old who could sign up with parental permission, and 21-year-olds and older who could join without it. Chilla wasn’t at all worried about his age; he knew of plenty of blokes who simply told fibs about their age and got in. (As a matter of fact, his own plan, developed with his cousin Rupert Swallow was for them to turn up to the recruiting station while wearing shoes with the number ‘18’ painted on the soles. That way, when they were asked ‘Are you over eighteen?’ they could truthfully reply that they were indeed! And yet the plan was no sooner discovered by their respective parents than it was crushed like a grape.6)

  Now, Catherine Kingsford Smith, firmly supported as ever by her husband, simply wouldn’t hear of her last-born engaging in any kind of subterfuge. No. No. No. Though it went against the grain for Charles to argue strongly with the mother he adored, on this occasion the young man was so infuriated he threatened not to speak to her for six months unless she relented. After all, his brother Eric had joined up with the merchant navy two years previously and had now transferred to the Royal Australian Navy, so there was already a noble precedent! Yes, dear, but Eric is twenty-seven years old, so it is quite different.

  No, it is not!

  In the end, so passionate was Chilla about joining up that Catherine did relent, a little. She and William agreed that Charles could join up when he turned eighteen, the following February, so long as he promised not to join the infantry,7 and the young man was more or less happy to settle with that. Impatiently, he continued with his work at CSR and followed as closely as he could what was happening with the war, hoping fervently that there would be enough of it left for him to fight in by the time he got there.

  An interesting bloke, George Hubert Wilkins. As the thirteenth and last progeny of a struggling pastoral family of South Australia, he had become fascinated with the natural world while spending time as a child with the local Aboriginal tribe, before becoming equally absorbed in things mechanical and scientific via his education at a technical school in Adelaide. At a young age he had formed a theory that the world’s weather was connected, and that if mankind could achieve an understanding of climate patterns in the polar regions, it might enable accurate predictions to be made as to when the devastating droughts he was growing up with in South Australia would hit.

  Put together, his theory had sent him on a peripatetic course around the world, which had seen him stow away as a seventeen-year-old on a ship bound for Africa in 1909, only to be kidnapped in Algeria in 1910, before making his escape and heading to London to become a pilot and work as a photographer in the company of a journalist from Yanovka in the Ukraine by the name of Leon Trotsky. He then found work as a war correspondent in the Turkey–Bulgaria war of 1912, where he was captured and nearly killed by firing squad and finally became a member of what was intended to be a five-year expedition to the Arctic regions way north of Canada…which…was where he was now, asleep in an igloo just inside of the Arctic Circle and dreaming of an easier way to do such an exploration. By aeroplane!8 By flying over the beautiful white wonderland, free as a bird, instead of endlessly trudging through it with ice-cold feet in snowshoes, fighting frostbite as yapping husky dogs hauled sleds through the eternal whiteness. True, in a plane there would the risk of great turbulence in a blizzard and being heavily shaken by the buffeting winds, shaken…shaken…

  Oh. He was actually being shaken awake. It was a trapper, someone he’d never seen before, a stranger who had just made his way into camp. An enormous man with snow still on his beard and the squinty eyes of one who has spent too much time trying to shield himself from snowblindness. And he had a couple of very interesting bits of news.

  The first, after a bit of chitchat, was that, ‘that damn fool scientist Wilkins has died after shanghaiing his crew’.9 Not at all offended, Wilkins was overjoyed to have been called a ‘scientist’, and didn’t bother to reveal either his identity or the fact that he had shanghaied no-one.

  Which was as well, because the second bit of information was even more stunning…‘By the way,’ the fellow asked him, ‘have you heard the news?’10

  What news?

  War. A big one. The last thing the trapper had heard was that the British were advancing through Germany towards Berlin at a rate of 20 miles a day, so the show was no doubt over.

  A war, involving the British Empire and hence Australia, too, and he, George Wilkins, wasn’t part of it? Wilkins was stricken. It didn’t seem right. A feeling that the Arctic was not the place for him to be was compounded shortly afterwards when he received word that his father had died after a long illness, leaving his mother a widow. Despite his contract with Vilhajalmur Stefansson to stay in the Arctic for another year,11 Wilkins resolved to briefly return home to Australia, see his mother and join up to the war effort at the first opportunity. He too only hoped that it might still be going by the time he could get there…

  In fact, after the first few months had passed there was still plenty of war to go around for everybody who wanted a part of it. And rather than British forces advancing through Germany towards Berlin, as Wilkins had first heard, it was close to the othe
r way around. The troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II had stormed across the Belgian border in early August 1914 and, following their plan, were soon well on the road to Paris. Then, however, a combined British and French force had stopped them, in part because of the superb defensive capabilities of the newly invented machine gun together with the overwhelming power of modern artillery. It had been discovered that machine guns particularly, set up in well-defended positions and covering open ground, could halt even the most ferocious army, and that is exactly what had happened. Of course, the Germans had discovered the same thing when it came to stopping the Allied counterattack. The only way for both sides was to dig in to hold the positions they had, then try to outflank the other, whereupon the other would dig in some more to hold what they had and…

  And within bare months, a 500-mile-long system of trenches had been dug by both sides, stretching from France’s border with Switzerland near Basel in the south all the way up across northern France to the Belgian coast, with a million soldiers manning the barricades and 100 yards or so of vicious no-man’s-land between them—the whole muddy mess, replete with minefields, barbed wire, machine-gun nests and pillboxes, being pounded by some 10,000 artillery guns. It was warfare on a scale unseen before, and the way forward was not apparent to either side, other than to keep pouring in fresh recruits to replace the tens of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded every month the bloody war blazed on. Every yard gained was paid for with blood.

  One bold proposal to break the impasse emerged in late November 1914, from the First Lord of the Admiralty, a man by the name of Winston Churchill. Frustrated that, to this point, Britain’s previously supreme naval power was having little sway on the conflict, he had come up with a plan for the navy to help strike a massive blow. Why not, he put to the War Council, have a powerful squadron steam up through the narrow straits of the Dardanelles and strike at Constantinople, which lay at the heart of Germany’s new ally, Turkey?

  If done on a large enough scale, it would mean the Germans would have to bleed soldiers from both the Western Front in France and the Eastern Front in Russia to fight on a third front in Turkey.

  In the meantime, as the whole war effort became bigger by the week, with more and more resources pouring in, and more soldiers from both sides killed, it had become ever more obvious that Baden-Powell’s observation of six years earlier that Wilbur Wright was ‘in possession of a machine that could alter the destiny of nations’ was being proven correct. This was apparent even in those early days of the war when the primary use of aeroplanes was to dissipate the fog of war, by acting as far forward scouts, with planes carrying pilots and observers over the enemy to report on upcoming terrain and enemy troop movements and positions. They could also occasionally report on how well targeted their own artillery was. But it would not be long before the nature of the struggle for air supremacy was moved up several notches.

  One day shortly after the war began, a young French flyer by the name of Roland Garros—who was already famous in France as the first man to fly across the Mediterranean in 1913—was cruising with an observer at 5500 feet above the town of Saarbrücken, on the German side of the French–German border, when suddenly he saw it. A German plane! Complete with its own observer, the plane marked with large black crosses on its wing was clearly heading towards French lines to do its own bit of spying. What to do?

  The obvious—take a shot. While Garros manoeuvred his plane on a close parallel course to the German, his observer took out the carbine he had with him and did his best to draw a bead on the target, just 300 feet away. To Garros’s frustration, this was not a ‘shot that rang around the world’. In fact, in all likelihood not even the German pilot who was the target heard it. To the amazement of the Frenchman, after the carbine was fired there was no sign whatsoever of a hit having been registered and it was obvious that the observer had completely missed. Cursing wicked fate that had given him a flying companion so hopeless with a gun in his hand, Roland Garros returned to base and planned his next move.12

  At much the same time, the German aristocrat and cavalry officer Manfred von Richthofen was concluding that the air war might be important, and in fact the best part of the war to be fighting in. No matter that in the first days of the war, on horseback with the rest of the Uhlan Regiment No. 1, he and his fellow officers had looked at the planes overhead with such complete contempt that they fired on them all, regardless of whether they were friend or foe—for who knew which was which?

  Then one day von Richthofen was on duty near Verdun when he saw an aerial battle between a German Taube and one of the new French Nieuport fighters. Actually, it was less a battle than a killing, as the Taube was only an observer plane while the Nieuport had a newly installed Hotchkiss machine gun firing 8-millimetre solid brass bullets. Though the Taube dived, darted and dipped to get away—as a sparrow might try to escape a hawk—in the end, the German plane was shot down, exploding into a ball of flame before it hit the ground, not 500 yards from where von Richthofen stood. Despite the death of his countryman, the sheer wonder of the chase took von Richthofen’s breath away. As a lad he had loved to hunt prey with his brothers on the family’s huge estate in Silesia. What must it be like to hunt men?

  He decided on the spot to seek a transfer, to get away from trying to fight this war on horseback—a method that was obviously outmoded—and see if he, too, could not become a war pilot.13 Perhaps then he could avenge the unfortunate German pilot who had died before his very eyes.

  Roland Garros was not the first pilot of either side to be frustrated by the lack of ability to do damage to the enemy. On one celebrated occasion an English pilot had been so angered that he had thrown his empty, impotent revolver at the propeller of a German plane in the hope that it would bring the bastard down.14 But Garros was the first to take matters into his own hands by trying to invent something better.

  Voila! Within a week Garros had organised as his observer a man who was reported to be one of the best shots in the French Army. Maintenant they would see what they could do to a German plane! And sure enough, just an hour after taking off, as the French pilot and his observer were nearing the town of Lunéville, with the majestic Meurthe River ribboning away below to the far horizon through the quilted patchwork of farmlands, they spied a German reconnaissance plane, an Albatros BII. Aux armes, citoyens!

  Bringing his plane in much closer this time, Garros was able to provide an easier shot for his companion. And it might have worked, too. But after the observer had indeed fired two careful shots at the Albatros for no visible results—careful, because all observers with guns had to be very sure not to fire forward anywhere near the propellers of their own plane—suddenly the German observer pulled out a machine gun and started spraying them! Happy just to make an escape from the fusillade of bullets, Garros returned to base, his mind whirring with both frustration and an idea he was forming on the next leap forward in aerial warfare. Certainly, most, when they heard of his idea, would say it was completely crazy, but with the right mechanic helping him, Garros thought he just might be able to make it work. That mechanic, Jules Hue, was extremely capable and together they began to work on Garros’s plan.

  At last the day had come.

  On 9 February 1915 Charles Kingsford Smith turned eighteen, and—with the written consent of his parents in his pocket—his first act was to present himself at the recruiting office at Sydney Town Hall, not even half a stone’s throw from his old school of St Andrew’s, to enlist. With whom, though, was he going to join, if not the infantry, as he had promised his mother?

  Until this point Kingsford Smith had been so keen to ‘join up’ that he hadn’t actually focused on just what he would do, so one thing was as good as another. Just a little more than a week later, 1017 Private Charles Edward Kingsford Smith—all 5 foot 71/2 inches for only 10 stone and 7 pounds of him—found himself on the western outskirts of Sydney at the Ingleburn Army Camp, learning both how to be part of a disciplined army and how to fire
big guns. Neither was easy…

  Fact was, Charles Kingsford Smith and discipline—both self and imposed—simply didn’t quite fit together. As his parents and teachers could attest, while he was a lad of many talents, these did not include such basic things as punctuality, punctiliousness, knuckling down, knuckling under—or doing anything he didn’t really want to do—most particularly following orders he didn’t like, which were…let’s see…most of them.

  Similarly, it was obvious to the young man from the first that artillery was not his thing. After all, there really wasn’t a lot to firing big guns, apart from getting the shell properly into the breech, pulling the lanyard and then coping with the noise of the massive explosion, which could make your ears ring for hours afterwards. Perhaps he’d be better in another division of the army? Something perhaps involving…motorbikes?

  Exactly! As it happened, the army did have a need in the Signal Corps for young men who could drive motorbikes fast. The idea was that in the heat of battle, the dispatch rider would be useful in taking messages back and forth from the front lines. The moment the opportunity to be a dispatch rider came up, just a few weeks after he had begun at the Ingleburn camp, Kingsford Smith grabbed it and was soon transferred to a camp at Broadmeadow, on the southern outskirts of Newcastle, to train with the 4th Signal Troop of the 4th Divisional Signal Company.