Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  There was, frankly, little the army could teach Chilla about how to ride a motorbike fast, after his already intense training around the streets of Neutral Bay, though it was an absolute joy to have the official brassard of a dispatch rider on his arm when in traffic, because it signified that he was given special leave to disobey road rules. Beyond that, he engaged in lessons about such basic things as rifle drill, bayonet practice, correct method of dress, how to salute officers and specific signalling skills, such as the operation of field telephones, flag signalling, and how to send and receive Morse code. The key to learning Morse code, he found, was memorising which configuration of dots and dashes went with what letters of the alphabet, and then practising over and over again, until he could instantly recognise letters and then whole words and even whole phrases.

  At least it was something to occupy his time until he could do what he wanted to do most, which was to get back on the motorbike.

  One day, about a month or so after her Chilla had departed for the Broadmeadow camp, Catherine Kingsford Smith was just finishing off the washing-up after lunch when their street was suddenly filled with the sound of roaring engines, as though twenty motorbike riders were trying to outdo each other over who could make the worst cacophony of deafening sound. Like everyone else in the quiet leafy street, she rushed outside to see what on earth was going on…only to find her laughing youngest child on his massive army motorbike—a Bullock Precision Big Four machine with a 4.25-horsepower engine—tearing up and down the street, and around and around, waiting for her to appear. Oh, my dear, my dear! On his arm, the brassard of a dispatch rider; on his face, a grin as wide as Sydney Heads. All up, a devastatingly handsome young man in uniform, her boy. He was home on a couple of days’ leave and couldn’t wait to show his mother—and, yes, everyone else in the neighbourhood—his new mount. Wasn’t she a beauty?

  Yes, Chilla. And in all the excitement and carry-on, Catherine clear forgot about the appointment she had in town, and now it would be too late to catch the ferry, but a still laughing Chilla told her not to worry; he would race her along to the car ferry, riding pillion, at double speed. And to her amazement, she agreed…

  Had the time of her life, too.

  Yes, sir, there was just something about her youngest son…

  While Chilla adored his mother in turn, still Nellie Stewart ran a close second in terms of his affections. Having seen her perform on several occasions, Chilla was completely smitten by her talents and beauty, though in a completely reverential and respectful sense. He was so taken with her that his sister Elsie, who had embarked on a theatrical career and knew Nellie Stewart slightly, arranged a brief meeting between the two, during which Miss Stewart handed her younger brother a signed photo.

  The inscription read:

  Dear Charles Kingsford Smith

  May you live for those who love you; for the work

  God has assigned you; and the good you can do.

  Nellie Stewart15

  From the moment he received it, Chilla treasured the photo to such an extent that his mother had it framed for him. Thereafter, Chilla, about whom it was said would have misplaced his head if he hadn’t had it screwed on, always knew precisely where his photo of Nellie was—and that was, always within arm’s reach.

  Nearly there now…Garros and his mechanic had succeeded in working out a rough system to fire their weaponry through the propeller of their plane. The obvious key was to ensure that the one in thirty bullets that would hit the propeller would, instead of shattering it, be deflected harmlessly away. To accomplish this, they modified a previous system developed by Raymond Saulnier—the same aircraft designer who in 1909 had helped Louis Blériot design and build his Blériot XI—and positioned the Hotchkiss machine gun close to the stem of the propeller. Then onto that stem they attached strong, angled steel.

  By 1 April 1915, Garros was finally ready to test his system. While cruising over the town of Bruges, in Belgium, at a height of 4500 feet, he spied four German Albatros planes, 1000 feet higher than him on his starboard quarter. Quickly, he nosed his plane upwards so it was heading straight at the Germans and tightened the pressure of his finger on a piece of wire he had attached to the trigger. What was certain at this point, he knew, was that very soon one plane was going to be tumbling to earth, and he could only hope it wasn’t his own, with a shredded propeller.

  Steady…steady…steady…now!

  Just 100 feet away from the nearest German plane, an Albatros BII, Garros fired off four bursts of twenty-five 8-millimetre brass bullets, and was satisfied to see them peppering all along the fuselage of the German plane. From below, German and Allied troops watched what was happening with morbid fascination. It was strange, but they could swear they saw flashes of fire coming from the nose of the French plane!

  High above the ground, the shocked German observer on the first plane that Garros aimed at responded by firing his Mauser rifle carbine at the French attacker, even as his pilot desperately dived to get away from the chattering guns. But Garros followed him down, waiting for the moment. Again the German plane crossed directly in front of Garros and again he fired his machine gun through the propeller, his own plane juddering a little as some of the bullets were deflected off his propeller. Suddenly, a shooting flame burst from where the German aircraft’s petrol tanks were situated, then engulfed the entire aircraft. Garros followed the flaming hulk down and, despite his savage exultation, coolly noted with surprise that the German machine didn’t simply fall out of the sky as he had assumed it would, but spiralled down to destruction. As it hit the ground the Frenchman was close enough to hear, despite the howl of his own engine, the final explosion which completely incinerated the plane and its two occupants. A new force in aerial warfare had just been unleashed…and in the next fortnight, Garros shot down four more German planes.16

  So it was done. Churchill’s plan to send a powerful naval squadron through the Dardanelles to shell Constantinople had been adopted, and all that was necessary to see it through was to secure the land from the Turkish forces that were dug in on either side of the straits.

  As the destroyers approached the shores of Gallipoli, in the graveyard hours of 25 April 1915, many an Australian soldier of the 3rd Brigade, AIF—including 23-year-old machine-gunner Geoffrey Hargrave, known as ‘Stirrups’ to his comrades—was fervently calling upon a higher being to protect him in the coming hours, not knowing just what it was that awaited him. Now the order came through to stop smoking, and maintain complete silence. All that Geoffrey could hear was the gentle throb of the engines…all that he could see was the slightly darker blobs of other destroyers carrying other comrades to the same fate, whatever that may be.17

  And now it was time. The hissed command went out. ‘Prepare to man the boats…’

  Just 200 yards from the beach, the destroyers hove to and, as silently as possible, the ships’ boats were lowered to the waters below, followed by the soldiers who quietly clambered down the ships’ sides and into them, before they began to pull away towards the shore.

  And stroke. And stroke. And stroke. Carefully, quietly, floating phantoms on the water, gliding to their goal…

  Then they heard it. Distant gunfire, as scattered as a light rain falling, followed by surprisingly melodic splashing as bullets hit the water all around. The Turks were waiting for them.

  And then one of the men in the first boats slumped forward, lifeless, a bullet through his head. And then another man groaned and slipped sideways. And now the scattered rain of bullets had become a heavy shower, before turning into a full-blown storm, and they were right in the middle of it. As soon as the bow of their boat touched the Turkish shore, Hargrave and the other Australian soldiers of the 3rd Brigade jumped into the water and began scrambling forward, eager to get to grips and look for the 200 yards of open land they knew awaited them before they reached the first steep incline. But where was it? There was no open land, just a small beach tucked into near-cliffs, from the top
of which fire was now pouring down on them! They had been landed at the wrong spot.

  Everywhere now, in this first dull glow of dawn, soldiers were falling, screaming, clutching their stomachs, or legs, or the end of a bloody stump where their other arm should have been. Forward! Fight!

  And upwards…

  For the survivors of that first assault, the only way forward was straight up and right into the withering fire coming directly down upon them—all of them betrayed by the rising sun, whose rays picked them out on the cliffs and made them progressively better targets. And still they climbed, managing, somehow, to fire back and make headway. At least some did…18

  In just the first twenty-four hours, 2000 Australian soldiers were killed or wounded. Mercifully—for both Geoffrey Hargrave and his family—Stirrups was not among them and was able to dig in with the other survivors. A preliminary assessment was that it looked as though they would not be marching on Constantinople in just a couple of weeks, as had been first planned, and it might take a little longer.

  It was a Tuesday afternoon in late April and Anthony Fokker had just received an urgent summons from German High Command to travel from Schwerin to Berlin to solve a technical problem. A day earlier, he was informed, a French pilot by the name of Roland Garros had been forced down and captured, and it had quickly been discovered that he had a machine gun firing through the propeller of his plane at the rate of 600 bullets a minute, though some bullets were in fact being deflected off. This meant that Fokker’s own planes were hopelessly outdated. He must come down—Schnell! Schnell! Schnell!—and work out the secrets of the captured plane. Fokker began that very afternoon and continued to work into the night on the German air-cooled Parabellum machine gun.

  Never mind that in his entire life the young Dutch engineer and designer had never even held a machine gun in his hands. The technical problem was a fascinating one, and he knew immediately that he could do far better than Garros’s primitive system. He was working with a two-bladed propeller that revolved 1200 times a minute, meaning that the muzzle of the machine gun would have a blade in front of it 2400 times every sixty seconds.

  How to work it? The solution came to him in a blinding flash. The only way to have the gun shoot through the whirring propeller was to have the propeller effectively fire the gun.19 Fokker quickly rigged up a synchroniser system whereby every time one blade of the propeller was at a certain point in its revolution, it would trigger the firing of a bullet from the muzzle of the machine gun. To imagine, for a moment, the revolution as a clock face, he set it up so that the muzzle was at twelve o’clock, and it would fire every time one propeller blade hit the nine o’clock position—allowing maximum room for the bullet to fly through. It worked a treat, and it would ever afterwards be Fokker’s proud boast—although others would claim he was exaggerating, as previous work had been done upon the problem—that just forty-eight hours after the problem had been presented to him, he was able to demonstrate his new system to the stunned German generals. What is certain is that they could barely believe their eyes. Within weeks, aerial warfare was truly revolutionised, with tens of thousands of bullets soon bursting through the propellers of both sides at every turn of the blades. Planes had now, effectively, been turned into flying machine guns.

  No-one knew quite what happened to the 23-year-old Geoffrey Hargrave. One minute he was making his way back from trenches under heavy fire, and the next he wasn’t. When Turkish shells achieved direct hits you never found anything, and that is likely what happened to him on the grey morning of 4 May 1915. In one catastrophic moment his life was over and he lived on only in the memory of those who had known him.

  Nowhere, perhaps, did that memory burn as intensely as in his father Lawrence Hargrave. For the news, once the cable arrived at the family home in Woollahra, hit the inventor horrifyingly hard, and the death of his wonderful son and collaborator near consumed him with grief. Their time spent together was all he could think about, talk about and dream about. The things they had done together, built together, refined together. And now Geoffrey was dead. Ultimately, and sadly, the news proved to be the death of Lawrence Hargrave as he became bed-ridden and seemed to lose the will to live. He died, still lying there, a short time later.

  Geoffrey Hargrave was only one of the many Australian soldiers who died during those first horrendous weeks on the Dardanelles, and with the Allied commitment to remain at Gallipoli seemingly as strong as ever, it was obvious that reinforcements would have to be sent for. They would come from camps in Egypt, as well as in raw recruits in Australia…

  On the bright, clear morning of 31 May 1915, Charles Kingsford Smith, with the 4th Signal Troop, which was now attached to the 4th Light Horse Brigade, sailed through Sydney Heads, aboard the Ajana. The troopship headed down the coast of New South Wales and then Victoria, before heading west, first across the Great Australian Bight and then on the long haul to conquer the Indian Ocean.

  Certainly Kingsford Smith had been on ships before, most particularly back and forth to Canada as a young lad. But this was nothing like that. This was thrilling. An enormous adventure. War!

  Though army discipline did not sit any better with him now than it had at the beginning, life was a lot easier, principally by virtue of the fact that he had made so many close mates in his section. The way they were living, cheek by jowl by towel, sleeping on hammocks hanging tightly together in the mess—so as to make room for the horses on the other decks—you pretty much had to form close bonds with your fellow soldiers, or life would have been untenable. In the many shipboard concerts that the Light Horse commanders organised to relieve the tedium of drills, parades, vaccination shots and endless soundings of the bugle to indicate when the soldiers should get up, go to bed, to church services, have breakfast, lunch and dinner, Kingsford Smith more than came into his own, and was a particularly popular member of the corps. When the Ajana crossed the equator and the ship’s crew set up a large canvas bath on the deck to baptise into the realm of King Neptune those who had ceased to be ‘pollywogs’ and would now become ‘trusty shellbacks’, Kingsford Smith was one of the handful of soldiers who could claim to have already been initiated into the sacred realm. Him and King Neppy? Practically best mates! He, hence, had the right to help initiate the others in scenes of high hilarity.

  And yet it wasn’t long before the eighteen-year-old was in scenes of terrible, terrible slaughter. Bodies were cut to pieces, axes and knives cutting through flesh, blood everywhere. It was the horses. Quite why they were dying in such numbers was not absolutely clear, only that it was ghastly. Every morning would bring more dead or dying nags, dragged up from the holds and cut up on the deck into quarters before being slung over the side, their dismembered bodies floating momentarily in the wake of the Ajana, bobbing up and down in the Indian Ocean before disappearing.

  Forever…

  Were they themselves, also, going to die? It was the question that bubbled under the thoughts of most of the soldiers, if not all of them. And the answer was almost universal. No, they were not going to die. Some of their mates would die, no doubt, and that would be tragic, but there was a general sense among them that they personally would be spared death’s scythe.

  The ship sailed on, and, at least nominally, none of the men on board knew any better than the Germans where they were heading as it was a military secret. Still, given the well-publicised events in Gallipoli in recent months, none of them would be too surprised if they were heading in that general direction, and so it proved.

  After six weeks’ sailing west across the Indian Ocean they turned north-west to the cleft in the landmass that was the Gulf of Suez before disembarking at the town of Suez itself, to board a train heading to Egypt’s capital, Cairo. As they stepped down the gangplank, fully laden with their kit, the men were easy targets for the seemingly hundreds of young Arab urchins begging them for ‘baksheeeesh, George, baksheeeesh’, or their older brothers offering to sell them carved elephants, cushion covers, s
carves or their own sisters for a short time—‘very clean, very hi-jean’—and if not her, what about at least some ‘feeeelthy pictures’? Cheap!

  Yeah, yeah, yeah…

  Kingsford Smith and his comrades of the 4th Light Horse Brigade were quickly installed in a blazing hot camp, a veritable tent city, in the desert at Heliopolis on the north-western outskirts of bustling Cairo, with all its teeming population and extraordinarily exotic smells. Just before Chilla arrived, a journalist from the Egyptian Gazette had written an evocative description of what that camp was like: ‘The men seem cheerful and at home. Large wood fires burn beneath and around oval iron pots of tea; toast too, seems a great favourite, baked and often sadly burned in the wood ashes. The many lines of beautiful and much loved horses strike the onlooker immediately; they have practically constant attention night and day.’20

  For his part, Kingsford Smith had little to do with the horses, as his focus remained on his motorbike, and his task was to be a constant traveller delivering messages between the Heliopolis camp and another camp near the pyramids, dashing along the 8 miles of dusty road. In short order, in fact, he had established a new record for the journey—of seven minutes and forty seconds.

  It was an exhilarating, amazing thing to race a motorbike at over 60 miles per hour—over a mile a minute!—past the local peasants on camels, and he didn’t particularly mind that neither the peasants nor the camels were too happy about it. The young Australian could not have been more pleased. As ever, he simply loved speed, and was constantly trying to work out ways to go even faster, perpetually tinkering with his engine, experimenting with different tyres, and taking ever greater risks in his desperate dashes, much as he had done when racing along Kurraba Road at Neutral Bay.