Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Altogether, roar it out with Smithy!

  Here’s to the Kaiser, the son of a bitch,

  May his balls drop off with the seven-year itch,

  May his arse be pounded with a lump of leather,

  Till his arsehole can whistle Britannia for Ever21

  Meanwhile, at the Sopwith factory at Kingston-on-Thames, Harry Hawker was busy as never before. A small part of that busy-ness, true, was taking the delightful, the wondrous, the absorbing Muriel Peaty out for Sunday afternoon drives and the odd supper—at least when her rather conservative parents would allow it—but most of it was developing the new plane he had been feverishly working on. From his first days at Sopwith, Harry had prospered, and had gone from being a humble mechanic to a pilot, then test pilot, then the test pilot, then designer, then everything wrapped into one, to the point where no-one was sure if he was Tommy Sopwith’s right-hand man or Tommy Sopwith was his. What was certain was that the Allies were in desperate need of a new plane to counter the Germans’ Albatros and Fokker models—both of which were faster, more manoeuvrable and lethal than the Sopwith Scout—and Harry was pouring his heart and soul, his expertise and energy, into providing exactly that. Most days, between continuing his test flights, he worked at the drawing board in the company of a designer by the name of Herbert Smith trying to create a biplane that would embody every refined feature he had learnt from his years of flying and testing aeroplanes—as well as encompassing the things that fighter pilots were telling him they needed.

  To enable the plane to climb quickly it would need to be light, in fact just half the weight of its contemporaries. For greater manoeuvrability the bulk of that weight—the engine, fuel, ammunition and pilot—had to be tightly packed near the centre of gravity, just forward of the cockpit. Hawker and Smith decided on a tiny fuselage that would be just 7 feet in length, while the wingspan would be a relatively short 28 feet. Power would come from a 130-horsepower Clerget 9B rotary engine. And then there were the guns. Two forward-mounted Vickers .303 machine guns would do the trick—making it the first British twin-gunned plane of the war—and the bulk of the Vickers would be contained within the body of the plane, directly in front of the pilot. That gave the otherwise clean lines of the plane forming up beneath their pencils something of a hump to rather resemble a camel, indeed a Sopwith camel…

  In France, the war in the air was getting progressively bloodier. In August 1916, the Oberste Heeresleitung, the German Supreme Army Command, had embarked on a different tactical approach with its war planes. Instead of sending out patrols of two or three planes at a time from a generally fixed base, they decided to have their best fighters patrol together in packs of fifteen and sixteen planes. These larger squadrons—called Jagdstaffeln, for hunt squadrons, Jastas for short—were not attached to particular ground units; rather their charter was simply to engage in ‘aggressive aerial warfare’, to go where they could do the most damage, to roam along the front line, find the enemy planes and hunt them down. Most highly prized was when you could make an enemy plane crash after diving so steeply that it went into a vertical wreck, or Fliegerdenkmal, an aviator’s memorial, as they laughingly called it.

  The first Jasta was organised by Germany’s greatest fighter ace, Oswald Boelcke, who had toured all over the front to hand-pick die Besten der Besten, (the best of the best), and then trained them to fly the way he flew. Of those selected, it had soon emerged that the best was the same Manfred von Richthofen who had previously looked upon all aircraft with contempt, but was now such an accomplished war pilot that he had shot down eighteen planes in his first four months in the air. A man of particular, if ruthless, style, after his first enemy ‘kill’ von Richthofen had arranged for a jeweller friend in Berlin to have a silver cup engraved with the date and the type of machine downed, and he had kept this practice up afterwards, to the point that he soon had to buy an additional cabinet to hold all the cups.

  So successful was von Richthofen, and clearly such ein geborener Führer (a born leader), that he was given his own Jasta to command, and had immediately made his mark, both in terms of the numbers of Allied planes he and his squadron had shot out of the skies, and, again, in terms of his personal style.

  For now that he was totally in charge, he decided to have whole sections of his plane, an Albatros DIII, painted glaring red. One reason was it just looked better, and he felt better flying around in it than in the rather drab olive-green and brown it had been when it came out of the factory. More practically, the new colour helped to make him instantly identifiable to his own ground forces, so as to minimise the risk of being shot down by them, and to his flying comrades when they were in dogfights. If it was equally true that the enemy would also come to know him well, then so be it. One way or another, he was soon a familiar figure in the hottest dogfights of der Front im Westen (the Western Front). The Germans came to call him der rote Kampfflieger (the red battle-flyer); the French to call him le petit rouge (the little red one); while in British, Australian and Canadian circles and in popular folklore for most of the next century, he would come to be known rather reverentially as—so stunning was his success—‘the Red Baron’.22

  In England, where Charles Kingsford Smith continued to engage in his studies to become a fighter pilot himself, of course he and his fellow students soon came to hear of the Red Baron and his exploits. This was just as they had heard, and even studied, other German flyers such as Boelcke. Boelcke had established the Dicta Boelcke, a list of eight fundamental tactics of aerial warfare which ranged from ‘try to keep the sun behind you’ to ‘always attack from the rear’. (Not that these helped to save Boelcke. On 28 October 1916, he was killed when he collided with one of his comrades, occasioning the RFC to drop a laurel wreath over his base with the message: ‘To the memory of our brave and chivalrous opponent, from the British Royal Flying Corps.’23)

  Then there was Max Immelmann, who had invented and perfected the ‘Immelmann turn’, an aerial manoeuvre to change direction by 180 degrees in as quick a time as possible. For their part, the French boasted great aces including Charles Nungesser and René Fonck, while on the English side there were the likes of Albert Ball, Mick Mannock, Billy Bishop and Jimmy McCudden. All of these men were legends of the skies, ‘aerial knights’, in the popular imagination. Though they were engaged in an activity that had only been effectively invented a couple of years earlier, somehow their exploits struck rapturous chords with all who contemplated them from whichever country, because their activity entailed everything: nationalism, daring, danger, adventure, technological wonder, individual combat, courage and derring-do. And so many men died in the battles of the skies it lent added glamour to those who survived…

  Desperate to be of these heroes’ number, Kingsford Smith kept studying hard, notwithstanding his continuing nocturnal activities, and after passing his exams at Denham, was sent with the other cadets to Oxford University where the next stage of instruction took place. Here he renewed his study of Morse code—a course he breezed through given his previous experience—as well as engaging in studies on aeroplane construction, army co-operation, reconnaissance, scout flying, the internal combustion engine, wireless operations, ground artillery, bomb-dropping, formation flying and patrol, Vickers and Lewis guns and so forth. Essentially, he and his fellow trainees were to learn everything there was to know about flying an aeroplane in wartime—how the fire of anti-aircraft artillery (known as ‘Archie’ to the pilots after a well-known British music hall sketch about Archie, ‘a dog that didn’t bite’) couldn’t really go above 3000 feet; what signals your squadron leader would give you if he wanted you to attack or withdraw; how to work out which way was east if your compass was broken and you couldn’t see the sun; and so on—without actually flying. Would that day never come?!

  Finally, yes.

  One day in mid-March 1917, Catherine and William Kingsford Smith were beside themselves with joy to receive a cable with just a one-word message on it—COMMISSIONED—fr
om their son Second Lieutenant Charles Kingsford Smith of the Royal Flying Corps. And yet, they were likely nowhere near as thrilled as Smithy himself.

  That joy was compounded by an event that occurred when Smithy was in London on leave a few days later with a fellow trainee, Percy ‘Skip’ Moody. The two, in uniform, were just walking down Whitehall past a Life Guard in full regalia when they heard a sudden bang and bash, and were stunned to see the fellow raise his sword to them in a formal salute. It was then that it hit them. The Life Guard was doing that because they were no longer anonymous footsloggers from the trenches—they were dinkum officers!24

  And still there were many pleasures to come, for, shortly afterwards, the great day came when Smithy was posted to No. 8 Reserve Squadron, just outside the village of Netheravon near Salisbury Plain in the county of Wiltshire, where he was to receive his first practical instruction. On a slightly misty morning in March 1917 he turned up to meet his personal instructor, and immediately snapped off a smart salute. ‘Good morning,’ the young Australian greeted him. ‘Can we start now?’

  The instructor, old well beyond his tender years, who had been training up men to head off to their deaths for most of the last eighteen months, sighed wearily. If only these young pups had the first clue as to what their likely fate was, perhaps they wouldn’t be so all-fired enthusiastic to get on with it.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Kingsford Smith, sir.’

  ‘Ever flown before?’

  ‘No, sir, never…’ Which was true, apart from a very brief flight he had had a few months before when a Flying Corps officer had broken regulations to give him a quick lift to Hendon, though Smithy had been nowhere near the controls.

  ‘Well, listen carefully, Smith. You’ve been given all the ground instruction necessary, and by now you should know the important principles of flight.

  ‘These things,’ he continued, as they walked towards a particular Maurice Farman S.11 Shorthorn, ‘are so noisy that we can’t talk in the air…’

  For the first time in his life, Charles Kingsford Smith climbed into the cockpit of a plane with intent, glorying in the feeling of putting his fingers around the joystick, the instrument by which the entire plane was controlled—a plane design which still owed much to the genius of the Wright brothers.

  ‘This is the control column,’ the instructor explained, quite unnecessarily. ‘Pull it back and the nose rises; push it forward and the nose falls. Over to the left and the machine banks to the left. Got that?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ In fact, Kingsford Smith knew it all backwards, as for months now he had been studying the basic flight concepts and practising for this very moment by imagining a simple chair was a seat in the cockpit, and the walking stick he tightly held in his right hand was the joystick.

  For another fifteen minutes or so, the instructor insisted that they remain stationary on the airfield while the Australian observed with his own eyes how the Farman changed its basic ‘shape’ depending on what he did with the controls. By pushing the joystick to the right, for example, he extended the ailerons on the right wing upwards and on the left wing, reciprocally, downwards, and so encouraging the machine to bank that way. The pilot’s feet, resting on the rudder bar, could make the rudder at the back of the plane swivel to the right, meaning that the nose of the plane would be pushed to the right to balance the turn by counteracting the drag of the down-going aileron. And so it went.

  At last they were ready. The instructor waved to a mechanic hovering nearby, who came and gripped the huge, two-bladed wooden propeller.

  ‘Switches off,’ the mechanic called.

  ‘Switches off,’ the pilot affirmed.

  The mechanic pulled the propeller backwards a few turns to suck petrol vapour into the combustion chamber.

  ‘Contact!’

  ‘Contact!’

  With which, the mechanic gave the propeller a mighty heave in the direction it needed to go. A cough, a gurgle, and then the engine caught! In an instant the motor gave the roar of a lion going in for the kill, blowing angry blue-white smoke out of its nostrils, and Kingsford Smith and his instructor were caught in the blast of air drawn over them by the whirling propeller. A wave from the instructor and the chocks in front of the wheels were removed, allowing the plane to roll forwards. Kingsford Smith could just hear the instructor’s words over the howling motor behind them: ‘Remember! Only make very slight movements on the controls. Nothing too jerky. I’ll take off, and then you try and follow my movements while I fly straight and level…‘25

  The propeller continued to whirl, flashing in the soupy morning light and the whole machine began to vibrate—either from the pounding engine itself or perhaps Kingsford Smith’s thundering heart, he wasn’t sure. One way or another, the vibration lessened as the instructor allowed the plane to do what it clearly wanted to do, which was to get faster, and faster still, with the air now flowing over the wings with such speed that they began to vibrate and hum and sing and lift and…and then came the moment.

  Some 150 yards down the field, first the nose started to lift and then the rattling and bumping stopped and…then…

  Quickly Kingsford Smith looked down to find that the earth was falling away and even as the suddenly fierce cold wind slapped his face, flapped the sides of his loosely strapped helmet, pulled on his scarf and blew into every crevasse of his uniform…they were flying. Flying!

  It was at just such a point that some of his fellow cadets had frozen with fear and gurgled a half-strangled request to be taken back down…please…now! Others had experienced such discomfort that they knew that flying was not for them, and resolved to get away from it as soon as possible. For Kingsford Smith, however, the primary emotion, even as he experienced a slightly uncomfortable popping sensation in his ears, was pure, unadulterated joy. Flying was an exhilaration such as he had never known—not even racing his motorbike full pelt along the curves of Rangers Road in Mosman, or breaking the speed record on the trip from the pyramids to Cairo. That, in retrospect, was mere tiddlywinks. This, this was an entirely different world, a world of billowing white clouds that you could simply zoom through or over, of a sun shining more brightly than he had ever seen it, of the landscape below looking like a patchwork of fields, farms, towns and tiny laneways, in which, as he wrote to his parents, ‘roads and streams are just weak streaks of light, houses are tiny squares, and forests patches of moss’;26 below him lay a vast map upon which seemingly little earth-bound pygmies called people were making their way…and Smithy and the pilot soared back and forth above them, free as birds.

  And if it was this wonderful just to be a passenger in a plane, how amazing would it be to have command of one of his own, to actually be the pilot himself? The young Australian couldn’t wait and, once back on the ground, began to count the hours, the days, until he would be able to receive instruction to learn to fly solo.

  Thinking back on that first instructional flight afterwards, he would long be struck by just how secure he felt high in the sky. Somehow, it had seemed like the place he was meant to be, and he felt quite safe in the cockpit, and for Kingsford Smith, by the middle of April 1917, the time had come—after little more than a dozen hours’ dual instruction—to take a plane skywards under no-one’s control but his own.

  Into the cockpit. Flying helmet fastened. Gloves on. A waggling of his joystick to ensure that all was as it should be. And then the polite, ritualised exchange with the mechanic…

  ‘Switch off.’

  ‘Switch off.’

  ‘Petrol on…’

  ‘Petrol on…’

  ‘Suck in…’ and…

  ‘Contact, sir!’

  ‘Contact!’

  And shortly thereafter he was rolling and then accelerating down the strip before that magic moment of lift-off in a plane under solely his own control.

  For this first solo flight—beginning at 7.15 am on 15 April 1917—Charles Kingsford Smith followed his instructions the bes
t he could, and after take-off circled the field twice before easing the throttle back to come in for a landing. At least he tried to throttle back. And he also tried to come in for a landing. Somehow, though, it was less than a ‘landing’ and more of a ‘crashing’, as his wheels collapsed beneath him and he skidded his screeching way to a stop.

  Into his logbook that evening Kingsford Smith wrote enthusiastically ‘FIRST SOLO’, and beneath that, with apparent good humour, ‘CRASHED!’ No matter: the saying among pilots at the time was that ‘no pilot is any good until he has broken wood’,27 and, as it happened, Kingsford Smith was not the only subsequently famous aviator to have a rather unprepossessing beginning on his first time solo. As a matter of fact, Baron von Richthofen himself had also had a difficult time of it. On his own first solo flight he had neglected to throttle back enough and made his approach to the landing field far too fast, with his left wing too low. The result was that instead of gliding smoothly back to earth on a gentle enough angle that the plane’s wheels could caress it, he smashed into the ground and everything gave way in a scream of wrenching steel, torn struts and flying bits and pieces. What had been a plane was now just a mess. Remarkably, a devastated von Richthofen was still able to walk away from it.

  Not to worry, his commanding officer had told him, smiling wryly. ‘Üb weiter.’ (Keep practising.) Which von Richthofen did, although he was to fail his first examination a fortnight later.

  Alas for the Allies, those days of failure by the Red Baron were long gone. And while Kingsford Smith’s April solo made it a great month for him personally, it was a grievously bloody month for the Royal Flying Corps, far and away their worst on record. The cynical press called the pilots and their BE2c craft ‘Fokker Fodder’ and it was in no small part because of the Red Baron.