Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  In this brief respite from the war, Kingsford Smith and his comrades frequently went swimming in the Suez Canal in the heat of the day, and often paddled out to passing steamers in the hope that some kind soul would throw them a tin of cigarettes or some other luxury. Both Australia, and the war, seemed far, far away…

  The lassitude of the desert notwithstanding, in March Smithy was able to proudly write to his parents that after a promotion he was now Corporal Charles Kingsford Smith, and could eat in the Non-Commissioned Officers’ Mess. No more washing up!

  Among British pilots, a rather different version of the Psalm 23 was gaining favour, most particularly among those who flew the rather unreliable BE2 planes. Known as the ‘Pilots’ Psalm’, its rhythm was simple.

  The B.E.2c is my ‘bus, therefore I shall want.

  He maketh me to come down in green pastures.

  He leadeth me to where I will not go.

  He maketh me to be sick, he leadeth me astray on all cross-country flights.

  Yea, though I fly over no-man’s land where mine enemies would compass me about I fear much evil,

  for thou art with me,

  thy joystick and thy prop discomfort me.

  Thou preparest a crash before me in the presence of mine enemies,

  thy RAF anointeth my hair with oil,

  thy tank leaketh badly.

  Surely to goodness thou shalt not follow me all the days of my life,

  else I shall dwell in the House of Colney Hatch forever.8

  Oh, the sheer pleasure of it!

  After six months in the dirty dust-bowl of North Africa—the hazy horizons, sandstorms, surly Arabs, shiver-me-timbers nights and boiling hot days—to be in Europe was not far short of paradise. After a slightly nervous jaunt across the Mediterranean—looking out for German subs the whole way—Charles Kingsford Smith, with the rest of the men of his Signal Corps, arrived in Marseilles on 8 June 1916 and exulted in the wonder of being back in the very hub of western civilisation.

  Trees in the boulevards! Cafes! Pubs! People waving at you in the streets! Arriving in France after well over a year in Turkey and Egypt was like coming home, exciting a feeling like you were back among your own people. No matter that only shortly after arriving in the Mediterranean city they were entrained to the town of Bailleul, a little east of Armentières in the north-west of France—it still felt like civilisation once more.

  The thing that Chilla most enjoyed about being in Europe? The French girls. How beautiful they were! As he gushed to his parents in one enthusiastic letter: ‘Some of them would turn the head of a statue.’9

  But to business—the business of war. Only a short time after arriving in France, Chilla was promoted to the position of sergeant in his motorbike section of the 4th Divisional Signal Company, meaning another slight rise in pay, and a lot more responsibility. To this point there had been no doubt about his ability to lead men—or at least to be the most dominant one in a group of friends—it was just that the army was now giving him a chance to demonstrate that such ability could be useful in war.

  As it happened, Chilla had landed in France at a particularly difficult time in the terrible saga of the Western Front. The Battle of the Somme had started on the first day of July 1916, as the Allies tried to punch through the German lines on a 12-mile front, north and south of the Somme River. On that first day the British—attacking heavily defended German positions across open ground—suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead. Just under three weeks later, as part of the same battle, it was Australia’s turn…

  On the warm evening of 19 July, the Australian 5th Division attacked across a boggy 400 yards of open ground the entrenched German positions atop Fromelles ridge, at the behest of a British general for whom it seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t. One survivor, W.H. ‘Jimmy’ Downing, later recorded what happened. ‘Stammering scores of German machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat criss-crossed lattice of death…Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb…Men were cut in two by streams of bullets [that] swept like whirling knives…It was the charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless.’10

  At rollcall after just the first catastrophic night, the 5th Australian Division had lost 5533 killed or wounded. Nevertheless, three more Australian divisions were thrown into the fray over the next few weeks, and another 23,000 Australian lives were lost or shattered.11

  Into just such a scene of carnage and devastation did Kingsford Smith enter, when he arrived at the front on an evening in late July. If Marseilles had been a different world from Cairo and Gallipoli, this was a place beyond his previous imagination, even for one of his already horrifying experience. From the moment of his arrival on the front line, the air was riven by the man-made thunder of devastating artillery fire, and the muddy, bloody ground—where green meadows once had been—was torn apart as shells landed. Men screamed and died around him, while others sobbed openly, simply unable to go on. In his own dug-out on that first black night, Kingsford Smith lay, vainly hoping to catch some sleep, but it was soon apparent that this would be impossible, and he switched instead to trying to survive through the night, pressing himself tightly into the embrace of a mother earth that was herself shuddering with every fresh outrage of artillery fire that landed upon her. The dawn, the dawn, the dawn…would he ever see one again?

  Somewhere near 4.30 am, the German artillery loaded their weapon of choice for killing Allied soldiers on the Western Front, a Minenwerfer—literally, mine thrower—capable of hurling across a short distance a 220-pound shell, of which 110 pounds were explosive, with devastating results. Following their strict routine, the German officer yelled above the cacophony of battle, ‘Feeertig!’ (Reeady!) and then ‘Feuer!’ (Fire!)

  An instant later the gun erupted like an angry volcano, with the shell disappearing in a searing streak of flame into the darkness, as it was lobbed towards the Australian lines. Of course the Germans didn’t know exactly where it would land, only that it would be right among those who had been sending exactly the same kind of devastation on them and theirs.

  This particular shell, however, reached its peak perhaps some 500 yards ahead of where Charles Kingsford Smith lay, and then began its descent. Did it have his name on it? Too early to tell…

  With every gust of wind and reverberation of air around it, the shell’s descent slightly changed direction—every tiny such change making a huge difference as to exactly where it would land and detonate. In his dug-out, Kingsford Smith lay wide awake—Had he really been so naïve as to think of war as simply an adventure? What on earth had made him come to the conclusion that nothing could be worse than Gallipoli? Even over the sound of so many other exploding shells all around, he now heard a whistling, getting louder, screeching now, squealing…was this it?…and involuntarily flexed his whole body and covered his ears, as if that might possibly save him.

  The shell landed in the soft, bloodied mud just 20 yards away from him and detonated an instant later, hurling earth and bodies everywhere. Much of the former and parts of the latter landed on Kingsford Smith and, for a split second, everything was indeed blackness, precisely as he feared death might be. But then he took stock. The fact that he wanted to breathe meant he wasn’t dead. He was still alive, despite the weight of muck now upon him. Somehow, barely, he moved, and struggled to push his head up to the surface, managing to burst through to the open air once more to take big, gasping breaths, almost as though, in extremis, mother earth had given birth to him once more.12

  Welcome to the Western Front.

  Kingsford Smith did make dawn of that day, not that it provided much relief. And then he could actually see what he had only imagined the night before. It was all so much worse—mud, blood, barbed wire, grotesquely shattered corpses with eyes staring to eternity, men weeping, explosions near and far, and nothing,
absolutely nothing resembling the world he once knew.

  If there was one saving grace, it was that his job at the front allowed him periodic release from it, as he carried messages back and forth between headquarters and the front lines. (As a general rule, he loved the ‘back’ from the front lines part, and was less enamoured about the ‘forth’.)

  After all those years of hurtling his motorbike around the corners of the streets back home and the constant dashes between the pyramids proper and Cairo, now Charles Kingsford Smith came into his own, roaring from the front lines to various military headquarters usually at least a mile or two behind the fighting, and then back again. For one of the keys to being a good dispatch rider was speed, pure and simple, and given going fast was something he had always been interested in, during war or peace, he excelled from the first.

  And yet, as good as he was at tearing along on his motorbike, dodging trenches, bunkers, bomb craters and the like to get the message through, danger was all around him. One afternoon, just a couple of weeks after arriving, he was tearing along when perhaps 30 yards in front of him a shell landed, throwing up an enormous wave of billowing mud and muck, not to mention whistling, scything shrapnel. There was no time to take evasive action and all he could do was to try to hold on as he headed into it, careering from one side to another…and then…finally…across the road and into a ditch. Although shaken, the main thing was that he had survived by the barest of margins. And, as he was acutely aware, many didn’t.

  On another occasion that he would never forget, when intense artillery fire rained down upon a bit of earth which had recently served as a mass grave for German soldiers, their stinking, decomposing bodies were thrown to the surface, their death’s-head grimaces scarring into his consciousness forever more. When the artillery stopped, a few Australian soldiers overcame their disgust long enough to dash forward to souvenir some of the buttons and other items from the German corpses, but Kingsford Smith was among those who simply couldn’t stomach it.13

  Surely, surely there was something better in this war than this?

  Just maybe…For while Kingsford Smith and his mates had been in the trenches over the last two years in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, other Australians had been making a name for themselves in the air with the Australian Flying Corps. This antipodean version of the Royal Flying Corps had begun at Point Cook, just outside Melbourne, a couple of years earlier, on the strength of a pair of Royal Aircraft Factory BE2a two-seater biplanes and a duet of British-built single-seat Deperdussin monoplanes, two English flying instructors and a request for military volunteers who wanted to learn how to fly.

  The first Australian pilots to see action had aided the Indian Army against the Turks in Mesopotamia from April 1915, and it had grown from there. No. 1 Squadron Australian Flying Corps had been formed in early 1916 and had operated with great success from, first, Egypt, and then the wider Middle East, and two more squadrons had been formed. As well as supporting the actions of the Australian Light Horse, some Australian pilots would go on to fly directly in the service of Colonel T.E. Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—fomenting revolution among the Arabs, to attack the Turk’s Ottoman Empire from within—and generally the Australians were regarded as ‘top-drawer’. The work of these pilots was at least matched by Australians flying for the Royal Flying Corps in action against the Germans in France, and Whitehall wanted more of them.

  So much so, that just before Kingsford Smith’s unit had arrived at the Western Front alongside the British Expeditionary Forces, the Secretary of the War Office had written to AIF Headquarters in France, to the effect that, ‘in view of the exceptionally good work which has been done in the Royal Flying Corps by Australian-born officers, and the fact that the Australian temperament is specially suited to the flying services, it has been decided to offer 200 commissions in the Special Reserve of the Royal Flying Corps to officers, non-commissioned officers, and men of the Australian Force…’14

  And so it was that on the fine morning of 21 September 1916, the sergeant major of Kingsford Smith’s 4th Divisional Signal Company announced that applications were invited from those who wanted to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps.15 This would entail going to Britain to train, before likely coming back to France as a fully fledged pilot going at the Hun. The option of applying was not something that the nineteen-year-old Kingsford Smith considered at all, if ‘considering’ can connote at least a small amount of time spent pondering.

  ‘It was the chance of a lifetime,’ he later recounted. ‘It proved to be the chance of my flying life, and it was a decision I made without a moment’s hesitation.’16 He sent off his application that very afternoon.

  Hundreds of others, of course, had the same idea, but for whatever reason Kingsford Smith’s application was accepted within a week—the prevailing view that dispatch riders made good pilots would have helped—and before he knew it he and nearly 150 other Australians had been pulled from the front lines and sent by train to Flanders in Belgium, where they were to undergo further assessment.

  For despite what Kingsford Smith had thought, he and the other applicants had not yet been fully accepted into the Royal Flying Corps; they were still just a mere part of a wider squad and had to prove they were made of the right kind of stuff to grace His Majesty’s Flying Corps. That much was apparent from the kind of questions they had to answer soon after arriving in Flanders.

  Have you attended university?

  Do you play polo?

  What musical instruments do you play?

  Do you sail?17

  Now quite how being able to play polo was going to help you to fly a plane was not immediately apparent to any of them, but the Royal Flying Corps seemed to think it was important, so most of the Australians were happy to play along.

  Polo? Of course! Who didn’t play polo?

  Did he play any musical instruments? Here, Kingsford Smith could be truthful and say that he played the piano, guitar, ukulele and harmonica.

  Sailing? As a matter of fact, Captain Cook had been his grandfather, and he had been taught personally by the great man.

  One way or another, Charles Kingsford Smith really did sail on through in a manner that would have made Captain Cook proud—Chilla’s rather aristocratic, double-barrelled name wouldn’t have hurt—and he was soon on his way to England. Immediately upon arrival at his first training base, on 16 November 1916, he proudly cabled his beloved parents to that effect:

  Address now, RFC Cadet Battalion. Denham, England. Well, love Smith.18

  In fact, however, there still remained a fair way to go before he would be judged as the right stuff to get into the cockpit of an aircraft and begin to learn how to fly it, as was made clear by the commanding officer on the first day after he had formed the Australians up for a parade in the courtyard.

  ‘You are,’ the officer said, with only a small sniff of distaste, ‘Australians.’

  So far, so good…

  ‘You come to me from France, very fit, but—ahem—you want to forget all about flying. You are to be prepared as officers and—ahem—I trust, gentlemen. Good afternoon—er—gentlemen!’19

  And so began ten weeks of studying everything from military law to hygiene, to types of German aircraft, to French customs, to topography and infantry training. (True, not all of the courses were related to flying, but one couldn’t be a pilot unless one were an officer, what? And one couldn’t be an officer unless one bally-well understood how the military worked at all levels, what?) They were to be prepared as ‘officers and gentlemen’, and would at least look the part, after being issued with their cadet uniform, which included a double-breasted tunic and a Glengarry cap with white puggarees.

  Most of their training was hard work, often tedious, and deeply frustrating, in the sense that it was all just so many preliminaries and very far removed from what they had all signed up to do, which was to fly aeroplanes. And yet there was no way around it—if they didn’t pass each and ev
ery exam that would be set for them, they simply wouldn’t be allowed to go on to the next stage. More to the point, this would mean that their likely next port of call would be back in the trenches of France, whence they came. (It was amazing, how that could concentrate a man’s mind when it came to memorising reams of dull infantry statistics, the essential contours of an Albatros, as opposed to a Fokker or Taube, and just what angle of ascent a Sopwith could manage before it would stall.)

  There were other things to do besides study, of course. Many times, at the end of a long day’s instruction, there would remain just one lonely figure pacing up and down the courtyard, his gasping breath making regular puffs of white in the cold night air as he kept going, hour after hour. That man, of course, was Charles Kingsford Smith. It always was. And his punishment was nearly always for the same transgression. While it was permissible to go into town on a pass, to have a drink and perhaps a carry-on with some of the local lasses, it was not permissible to return in the wee hours of the morning, no matter how clever you thought you were, or just how beautiful she was.20

  Still, ‘Smithy’, as he was now known, always seemed to take it in fairly good cheer, on the reckoning that the odd punishment simply went with the fabulous territory he was in. On other nights the air cadets would sneak away and poach pheasant, and if successful, cook them so they could eat, drink and make merry, all in the comfort of their own barracks. Much of the ‘making merry’ involved standing around the piano and singing bawdy songs—an activity where, again, Smithy shone, much as he ever had, and he was one of the most popular men in the squadron.