Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Between such trips there was more intense training to do with field telephones, which were being extensively used at Gallipoli, with route marches on which they took their Lee-Enfield .303 rifles with attached Pattern 1888 bayonets slung over their backs, and with such basic fare as sentry duty and digging fresh latrines. Generally it was so hot, with temperatures rising as high as 125 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, that the only way the men could cope was to rise at 4.30 am, work from 5 am till 9 am and then knock off till 4 pm, when they would go about their business for another two hours. From this point the evening was theirs, to either get some grub, write letters, or go into Cairo proper and amuse themselves as much as their army pay would allow.

  The Australian soldiers frequented all kinds of places, and were common sights everywhere in the city—being pulled through city streets in horse-drawn gharries, or patronising the American Comosgraph picture theatre, the Cairo British Recreation Club and the Obelisk Hall on Emad al-Dine Street. They were also frequent visitors to the brothels in the Birket district off Ezbekiya gardens, where, for just a few piastres they really could sleep with the sister of one of the urchins. Back to the camp for some kip, and then it was all on again the following morning from reveille at 4.30 am.

  Giving some focus to their training, and the fact that they really were in the middle of a war, was the constant stream of severely wounded Australian soldiers coming back to Cairo from Gallipoli.

  As Chilla wrote to his parents:

  There are hundreds of men in the hospitals here who have been wounded in the Dardanelles. One poor devil was despatch–running for some weeks and in heavy shell fire all the time; he got out without a scratch, but is now totally blind—shell blindness it is called—due to the fumes and concussion. He is only about 19 years old and quite cheerful over it. Other chaps have arms and legs blown off and no face left perhaps, but none of them seem to regret having gone…21

  And yet Kingsford Smith, like most of his comrades in the Light Horse, was desperate to go Gallipoli too, to get to the front line, see the action, to fire and be fired upon, to test himself.

  Her name was Muriel Peaty, and on a spring day nearly as beautiful as her, as she was driving with a long-time school friend through London’s magnificent Richmond Park, their car stopped—just like that! And it wouldn’t go again, no matter how many times she stared at the thing called the carburettor, tried to turn the crank, stamped her foot and said ‘bother!’ or willed it to start. And then this rather good-looking fellow with this frightfully broad Australian accent came along in his own car and asked if perhaps he could help?

  Muriel’s mother had always been very firm about speaking to strangers, whatever the circumstances, even an extremely good-looking one who took the trouble to introduce himself—‘Harry Hawker’, he said his name was—and so Muriel reluctantly declined his offer. But when he drove by half an hour later and she and her friend were still there, he insisted on helping, and she accepted his offer with thanks.

  ‘Was it petrol, after all?’ he asked brightly as his opening remark, which rather stunned the eighteen-year-old Muriel, because by this time she had worked out that it was indeed that. But how on earth had he worked that out so quickly, she asked.

  ‘If a girl breaks down,’ he said cheerily, ‘she will invariably take everything down that is detachable, before she looks into the petrol tank.’22

  Charmed, she was sure.

  And yet she really was charmed only a short time later when this fellow had sorted everything out, using his own tin of spare petrol. So charmed, in fact, she was very happy to exchange cards with him, before she and her friend went on their way. Nice card it was, too—even if he’d had to use a friend’s card. Apparently he worked at Sopwith’s at Kingsford-on-Thames, where they made all those planes. She liked the cut of this man’s jib. And she rather felt that he liked hers too, from the warm but still very respectful way that he looked at her and spoke to her. Quite made her feel all funny inside, it did, Mother…

  Charles Kingsford Smith could smell death all around. As in really smell it. He was right in the middle of the mightiest pyramid of them all, King Cheops—a treat for many but this Australian hated every moment of it. He wrote to his parents:

  It is all built out of fine granite, and it looks as if it has been recently cut, instead of 6,000 years ago. All this in pitch darkness when the candles go out, and to stand there and smell the faint dead sort of smell, and feel cold draughts of air from somewhere, and realise that you are surrounded by 200 feet of stone every side, is enough to give you the horrors.23

  He was not, he knew, a man for confined spaces. He needed air, movement, freedom, horizons stretching unimpeded in every direction.

  Back in Neutral Bay, Chilla’s letters were eagerly awaited and devoured by the family, usually after Catherine had asserted her maternal rights to read them first. The youngest of her brood was chatty and enthusiastic about his experiences of the war so far. One letter, which he sent in August 1915 was of particular note:

  You will be interested to know that I have a chance of joining the Aviation Corps and am going to make close enquiries as to the time of training, etc. before I could be bomb-dropping on German troops. If by joining the Corps I could get to the front within a reasonable time, I will do so and let you know immediately. There would be no trouble to get in, as I was offered a place by a Captain in the job…24

  For if riding his motorbike fast was a pleasure, how much more fun would it be to fly a plane? When the local planes were buzzing around and about over Cairo and the pyramids, the young soldier estimated they appeared to travel about twice as fast as a motorbike and, no doubt, were even more thrilling. Still, less a conversion on the road to Damascus than one on the road to Cairo, he didn’t mind re-converting, and only a fortnight later his parents received another letter, announcing a change of heart: ‘I have chucked the idea of transferring to the Aviation Corps, because I wouldn’t get to the front for months, and anyway I want to stick to the O.C. and the troop after being with them for so long.’25

  For Kingsford Smith getting to the front—specifically to Gallipoli—remained the priority. And from the moment that the eighteen-year-old discovered that if he did join the Aviation Corps it would involve at least four months of training, and therefore seeing no action for at least that period of time, he decided to put the whole flying thing on hold. He had to get to the front.

  At that front, the killing went on. In the early hours of 7 August 1915, four waves of soldiers from the Australian Light Horse, with 200 men in each, were ordered to run, two minutes apart, 30 yards across open ground with bayonets fixed and no bullets in their rifles, straight at entrenched Turkish machine-gun positions. The first wave was cut to pieces, and fell back upon the second wave, which nevertheless, scrambled out when the whistle blew and was equally mown down. As the third wave of Australians prepared to go, a strange, pleading call could be heard from the Turkish lines. ‘Dur! Dur! Dur!’26 (Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!) Do not keep running into our guns, slaughtering yourselves.

  But they did as soon as the whistle blew, and the third wave was slaughtered.

  Finally, some semblance of sanity prevailed, and the fourth whistle did not blow. But the queue of those in front of Charles Kingsford Smith waiting to get to Gallipoli began to move quickly…

  Four

  IN THE TRENCHES

  They’re sticking at it still, incomparable heroes, all. We are lousy, stinking, unshaven, sleepless…I have one puttee, a man’s helmet, another dead man’s bayonet. My tunic rotten with other men’s blood and partly spattered with a comrade’s brains.

  LIEUTENANT ALEC RAWS, FROM MELBOURNE, WRITING TO A FRIEND, ABOUT CONDITIONS IN THE TRENCHES ON FRANCE’S WESTERN FRONT1

  At last, the longed for news came through to Charles Kingsford Smith and his comrades. They were going to Gallipoli! True, they would have to leave their motorbikes behind, at least for the moment, but hopefully if they were able to break
through against Johnny Turk and get into the open country leading to Istanbul, then the bikes could follow them over. The main thing was, they were going…

  Kingsford Smith set about packing his kitbag, with his main worry being whether to take his photo of Nellie Stewart or leave it safely behind in storage with his other effects.2 In the end, he decided to take it.

  In the wee hours of a desperately cold morning in the last week of September 1915, the eighteen-year-old devotee of all things mechanical wearily waded the last few yards through the waters and onto the shores of Gallipoli. It had been something of a harrowing voyage aboard the HMT Melville, and while the first view of their destination—with flames and shell-bursts all around—was a little shocking, at least they were there. As they landed, an enemy Albatros plane tried dropping bombs on them as a welcome, but fortunately did little damage.

  Though Kingsford Smith was excited to finally be in the middle of actual combat, it did not take long for that excitement to wear off. What he saw all around him and what he experienced hour by hour, day by wretched day, had nothing to do with excitement, glamour or even adventure, and everything to do with screaming men, severed limbs, dead bodies and unremitting terror. For the first ten days Chilla was there, he was under heavy fire around the clock. Sleep came in tortured snatches, meals in much the same manner, and performing his ablutions was a nightmare. Certainly the trenches—more or less an elongated grave without end—gave some protection, but that was no guarantee of survival, particularly when his role in the war was to leave those trenches and scurry like hell back and forth with messages. Sadly for him, on these rugged slopes, without his motorbike, all that was left was to take ‘shanks’s pony’ at full gallop, hopefully fast enough that an enemy sniper—of whom there were many—couldn’t draw a bead on him and pick him off.

  And now, up and out of one trench, with his written message tucked securely in his pocket, he would suddenly be in open ground and running as fast as his legs could carry him, his lungs burning, his heart bursting, as spurts of dust kicked up around him followed an instant later by the crack of the sniper’s rifles, as they tried to nail him. Like the rugby winger he once was, he would run, trying to step to the left and right as he went, to throw their aim off, until up ahead he would see the ‘try-line’, another safe trench he could dive headfirst into, to deliver his message. Such was his daily chore, perhaps as often as six times a day.

  There was also the sprayed fire of the machine guns to contend with. At one point Kingsford Smith had come under such sustained fire from one sniper atop Hill 971—a Turkish stronghold that dominated the area they were in—that any previous certainty he would survive the war wavered. Finally he scrambled to safety with only a bullet hole in the edge of his cap.3

  And yet, while snipers and machine gunners were a real problem, the danger they presented simply didn’t compare to the Turkish artillery. For if Kingsford Smith hadn’t liked big guns sending large projectiles back in Ingleburn Army Camp, he positively hated it now…

  Always it would be the same thing. There would be a distant boom, and shortly after its sneering cadences had rolled over the men would come a whistling sound…followed by a massive explosion. If the shell landed right on you, you wouldn’t have known anything—it would have been immediate blackness and your mates would be lucky to find your tooth fillings. But if it was a near miss, the next thing would be a shower of shit and mud and sometimes the body parts of your fallen comrades thrown everywhere from the point of impact, mixed with searing, scything pieces of deadly shrapnel. Time and time again Chilla nearly lost his life, if not from bullets hitting the ground all around him, then from a piece of shrapnel whizzing by so close he could hear it.

  And all for what? Far from having brought Turkey to its knees, all the Allies could claim to hold was a narrow patch of ground approximately one mile wide by half a mile deep. It was ground so poor that, in the words of one Australian soldier, one square mile ‘wouldn’t feed a bandicoot…’4

  The general sense of hopelessness deepened as winter settled in on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Night after night the creeping cold came up from the depths of the Dardanelles, stole across the battered landscape and into the trenches, where it would stealthily begin turning flesh to ice, laying siege to the soul, and start seeping into men’s very bones. At the beginning of winter the tepid sunlight of dawn would just manage to chase the cold away, at least a little, and at least for those who had made it through the night, but then not even the sunshine could do it and the best one could hope for was numbness to relax its agonising grip. Frostbite was common, with men losing fingers and toes to its deathly, icy grasp.

  Everyone was affected by the cold, and personally, Charles Kingsford Smith came down with such crippling rheumatism that he could barely move, let alone run between trenches as he had done. To keep himself useful he became a cook’s assistant and then a clerk in the Signal Office, though even those two fairly sedentary activities were an agony for him. So obvious was his disability that his commanding officer presented the opportunity to him to go back to Egypt, but Kingsford Smith declined for much the same reason that he had decided not to pursue becoming a pilot. That is, the great solidarity he felt with the men in his corps and the fact that it was bred into him to see things through. He did not want to leave Gallipoli before they did, and refused to scarper until the job was done.

  And yet sometimes, lying in his trench, shuddering, aching, trying vainly to take his mind off the agonising pain of it all—telling himself that at least he was alive, as opposed to so many of his comrades who had been lost—Kingsford Smith would find himself gazing up at the daytime skies, where Allied planes would whizz about and occasionally engage their Turkish counterparts. From the first days of the Gallipoli action, both sides had used land-based planes and seaplanes—with the Allies using a prototype aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal, as their base—in reconnaissance missions, bombing runs, antisubmarine and shipping strikes. And aircraft activity had only increased as the months had passed.

  Whatever else, to Kingsford Smith sheltering in his ditch, it was clearly a different existence up there. Not for those pilots, the mud, the muck, the wretched trenches. They were free. Before the war Kingsford Smith had never seen a plane, but he was fascinated by the mechanics of the machines, the wonder of how on earth they managed to stay aloft, and he began to ponder again the possibilities of a change in his military career and becoming a pilot.

  Back in sunny Sydney, Catherine Kingsford Smith did not like it one bit. By the closing months of 1915 there was a tone in her son’s letters that she barely recognised. Gone was the enthusiasm, the joy, the sense of adventure, the sheer cheekiness that had previously characterised his letters. Everything now seemed to be downbeat, glum, occasionally even bordering on fearful, which was so unlike him.

  ‘Snipers are pretty bad at the foot of our gully,’ he had written to them on 27 November, ‘and get our chaps fairly often. One has to do a sprint, or else have a bullet after him.’5

  For Catherine, the image of her son in Turkey, pursued by bullets with his every move, was enough to keep her awake at night, tossing and turning, worrying about him. And yet the happy circumstance was that by the time the family had received the troubling letter, the evacuation of Gallipoli—along with her son Charles—had already been successfully completed.

  In late October, the decision had been taken by the newly arrived Major General Sir Charles Monro that the only sane thing to do was to withdraw and, despite sneers from Winston Churchill about Monro—‘He came; he saw: he capitulated.’—things moved quickly from then. After the worst winter storms in forty years hit the peninsula in late November, with hundreds of Allied soldiers getting frostbite, in early December the evacuations of the 136,000 men began. Each night more and more shivering soldiers were moved onto ships, with those who remained instructed to be as active, conspicuous and noisy as possible to make it appear to the Turks that the Allied presence was undiminished. By day
, hostile Allied aeroplanes patrolled the skies in heavy numbers to keep Turkish reconnaissance planes from spotting any telltale activity at Anzac Cove.

  Kingsford Smith and his men of the 4th Light Horse got out on the night of 11 December, and by 18 December there were just 40,000 shivering soldiers left. Over the next two nights, every man jack of them got away, with the Turks stunned to find on the morning of 20 December that the invaders had gone. Gallipoli had been successfully evacuated, with not a single casualty—a stunning military feat.

  For Kingsford Smith, as for his fellow Australian soldiers, while there was disappointment that their campaign had not succeeded, there was also relief to be out of there—‘I really am glad to see the last of it,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘No doubt there will be mixed feelings at home about this great retreat, but in everyone’s opinion it was the only thing to be done as advance was impossible, and to continue there meant the loss of valuable lives every day which could be ill spared. One thing everyone agrees is that the Turks are honourable and clean fighters and have never been guilty of anything to earn the name “Unspeakable”.’6

  The most wonderful thing of all was to be back in Egypt. Fresh meat! Vegetables! Children! Women! People going about their daily lives without being plastered with shot and shell. And, from freezing to his very core in the Turkish trenches, the eighteen-year-old was now back in the Egypt’s Sinai Desert where, on a hot day, the temperature could reach as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. At least it would have been that hot in the shade, if there had been any shade to be in. But there wasn’t. There were just vast tracts of endless desert, and the Australian soldiers were the only living things silly enough to be in it, burning up in the heat. The first package Chilla received from his parents upon his return contained a wonderfully warm sheepskin vest that would have been a godsend just a couple of weeks earlier.7