by P Fitzsimons
As the Allies launched a two-pronged offensive on the Western Front, with the British attacking at Arras and the French on the Aisne, British forces relied on their air arms to do heavy reconnaissance and artillery spotting work, providing superb hunting for the likes of the Red Baron and his Jasta 11.
By this time, Manfred von Richthofen’s younger brother, Lothar, who was also in Jasta 11, had convinced him that having the only plane on the Western Front painted red made him a target like no other, and that as his fame grew the Allies would seek him out and destroy him at any cost. The solution was for all pilots in von Richthofen’s Jasta to have their planes painted red, with some minor variations on each one. Lothar’s red plane had yellow trimmings; Schäfer painted the back of his fuselage and rudder black; while Karl Allmenröder had a daub of white on his plane’s nose; Kurt Wolff used green and so on.28 Soon, other Jastas followed suit with different colours, most particularly those that came under von Richthofen’s command, for with his continued success he was quickly given control of other squadrons.
Only the Red Baron’s Albatros remained insolently in all red, quickly identifiable to his flying comrades, but no longer the sole target that he had been. And so was born von Richthofen’s ‘Flying Circus’, so called by the Allies because of the bright colours that were now flying around all over the skies of France, before returning to their canvas hangars at night, not unlike circus tents. Wherever the fighting was heaviest, so would be the Circus, with von Richthofen in the lead.
In the month of April 1917, alone, von Richthofen’s Jasta 11 shot down eighty-nine Allied planes, of which the Red Baron personally accounted for twenty-one.
Some of those shot from the skies would, of course, live to fly again. One such survivor was a big bear of a man, a West Australian by the name of Norman Brearley, who had achieved great renown within his squadron of the Royal Flying Corps for his daring manoeuvre to bring down a heavily defended German observation balloon. Soaring way above it, he had intentionally stalled his plane by lifting its nose with insufficient throttle, pushing his foot down hard on the rudder bar at the exact moment the engine stopped and then, with his joystick pulled back, steeled himself. Sure enough, in an instant his plane was spinning earthwards as if it had been hit, and was now out of control and not worth wasting any more ammunition on. Only at the last second, still above the balloon, did Brearley kick the rudder again and then push forward on his joystick to bring the plane back under control and level out a little, just in time to fire his machine guns on the balloon from close quarters and blow it out of the skies. The force of the explosion shook his plane frightfully, but he survived.
Only a few short weeks later, however, Brearley took a bullet from ground fire through both of his lungs, and this sent him into a crunching crash-landing in the middle of no-man’s-land. Crawling out of the wreckage more dead than alive, the 26-year-old was saved by a brave Scottish soldier who crawled under fire to retrieve him, and upon medical examination was told he would never fly again.
Well, he’d see about that. Sent home as an invalid, at every port that his ship stopped at on the way back to Perth, he dived over the side and swam back and forth alongside the vessel, and underwater for as long as he could, determined to strengthen his lungs…29
Instruction continued. By May 1917, Kingsford Smith was training in a SPAD S.VII, a single-seater biplane fighter from the Sociéte Pour l’Aviation et ses Dérivées, Blériot’s factory in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. It was a plane that had already achieved great success on the Western Front, most particularly in the hands of the French hero Georges Guynemer. (Guynemer was, in fact, such a hero that when he died, French school children were taught that he had flown so high that he simply could not come down again.) True, it was said of the SPAD that if ever you lost engine power it had ‘the gliding angle of a brick’, but while so ever the engine worked it could be a very effective weapon.
Now that Kingsford Smith and his fellow cadets could actually fly a plane, the next thing they needed to learn was how to shoot down the enemy. In subsequent weeks they were taught how to fly in staggered formation (six planes, for example, would usually fly in two Vs, with one above and behind the other); how to follow the signals of the squadron leader as in, when he waggled his wings once it was a signal to attack, twice and it was time to withdraw, and so forth.
As to how to manoeuvre so as to best shoot down other planes, this was most particular. The essential idea was to be able to swoop down on your opponent from above, in a position where the enemy pilot would be powerless to see you approaching and you could simply shoot them out of the skies. If the enemy plane had an observer with a machine gun then the same thing applied—if you came at it from the tail, the observer wouldn’t be able to fire at you for fear of shooting off his own tail. There was also, of course, instruction in how to prevent exactly the same happening to you, and how to take evasive action when one found oneself under attack.
The key to a lot of the manoeuvres was speed and height. If in doubt, the pilots were advised to go fast and go high. The faster and higher you went the less likely it was that the enemy ‘dog’ could get up behind you. And the higher you went the more you could see, and your height could always be converted to even more speed. If you spied anything below, you could dive down upon it 60 per cent faster than the speed of level flight. If you needed to get away when under attack yourself, diving down would gain you maximum velocity.
Now, whatever else happens, ‘Beware the Hun in the Sun!’ Remember that just as you will want to swoop down from on high, so too will the enemy want to do the same, so as you fly, keep glancing skywards for any sign of them. Their preference will be to attack you with the sun directly behind them, making them effectively invisible in the glare.
There were so many things to learn, and so little time to learn them in, and yet, though studying hard was not really in his nature, Kingsford Smith applied himself as never before. This was not some dull conjugation of Latin verbs; this was perhaps the difference between life and death.
Chaps, if you are hit and find yourself spinning towards earth, one thing is extremely important: a pilot’s instinct when in a spin is to pull back on the joystick to try to bring the nose up and flatten out, but you mustn’t do that. When spinning downwards, you must understand the wings are no longer producing sufficient lift, and the aerodynamic forces on your plane have changed to the point where the correct response to get out of it is counterintuitive. Indeed, back in 1914, an Australian chap by the name of Harry Hawker risked his own life in a Sopwith Pup over Brooklands to prove that when you are in a spin you must push the joystick forward (after applying pressure on the rudder opposite to the direction in which you are spinning), and that is your best chance of bringing the plane back under control. As a matter of fact, if you really master the art, you could even use it as an evasive manoeuvre to lose height rapidly so that any enemy plane that tries to match your spin and follow you will be incapable of drawing a bead on you, and the current reckoning was that the German planes were likely to experience structural failure when diving at high speed if the pilot chose not to spin with you, so you were a winner every way.
And so it went. The course was not easy—in fact it was so arduous and dangerous that over one-third of Kingsford Smith’s class did not complete it through failure, injury or death.
Nevertheless, finally, after all the training was done, the great day came in early June 1917 when Smithy was posted to No. 23 Squadron and was on his way to the Western Front to actually fly against the Germans! True, there would be still a little more training to do once they got there, but the main thing was that No. 23 Squadron was initially based by an airstrip next to la Lovie Chateau, on the beautiful flat farmland, just 8 miles to the north-west of the Belgian town of Ypres, where the battles on the Western Front were at their most vicious. Initially, No. 23 Squadron’s role—commensurate with their official motto ‘Always on the Attack’30—would be to fly over the
lines to attack both German troops and observation balloons, as well as whatever enemy planes they came across.
Was Smithy perhaps a little unrealistic in his expectations of what awaited him? Perhaps. At the very least, the commanding officer of the squadron, Major Wilkinson, decided it was necessary to take him in hand before he went on active duty and tell it to him straight.
‘Now listen, young fellow,’ the old man said, in words that Smithy would never forget. ‘You’re going to die. In fact, you’re as good as dead now. Do you know that we are losing three men a day from this outfit, and every one of them are young fools like you? You can’t fly. You know nothing of aerial warfare and you are due to go out like a lamp. The ones who live are the ones who obey orders. Get this, and get it once and for all. Obey your patrol leader always. If you lose your patrol mates in the air, turn and fly straight back here. Do that for weeks until you know something about your machine and something about this bloody business we’re at, and then you might have a chance of doing some good in the squadron.’31
Oh yes, and welcome to France.
Though of course he was slightly anxious about what might await him, one thing that continued to give Kingsford Smith confidence and a curious kind of faith that he would be okay, whatever the major said, was his treasured photo of Nellie Stewart, which he was careful to put as a talisman in every plane that he flew. Others, of course, in the Royal Flying Corps and in the Australian Flying Corps had their own good luck charms, which included everything from small boomerangs, guaranteed to make sure they would return, to models of ‘lucky’ black cats to rabbits’ feet.
Similarly, German pilots had very strong beliefs in the protective powers of things such as four-leaf clovers, small models of pink pigs and of chimneysweeps complete with a brush and ladder. Others still believed in toys of poisonous red mushrooms with white dots, while still more thought that carrying a one Pfennig coin in your pocket could help keep the bullets from your plane.
Manfred von Richthofen did not believe in any of them. In fact, when once someone suggested a charm, he was quick with his reply. ‘I have a most effective talisman,’ he said sharply. ‘My Spandaus…‘32
And when it came to using those Spandau machine guns, he also had very specific ideas, often in sharp contrast to those of his compatriots. Other pilots would no sooner see an enemy plane than their guns would start chattering, sending out a spray of bullets in the hope that one or several would strike a devastating blow. Not the Red Baron. Habitually, he held his fire until right upon the enemy and only squeezed the trigger when he was all but certain of hitting the petrol tank, which was his usual target, and certainly what he taught those in his Jasta to do. He had no interest in spraying the whole plane and hoping that it would be disabled when just one bullet in the petrol tank was a near guarantee that it would be a blazing wreck and victory would be his.
The Jastas commanded by the Red Baron continued to exact a terrible toll on the Allied pilots, and Kingsford Smith had arrived on the Western Front at a particularly bloody time. In many squadrons, including that of the still only twenty-year-old Australian, the casualty rate—in terms of pilots killed and wounded—was running at 25 per cent a week. A ‘veteran’ was anyone who had managed to survive for longer than a month.
Five
ACES AT DAWN…
We were a carefree, cigarette smoking, leave seeking lot of young devils, who feared nothing; except being brought down behind enemy lines…
CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH1
The glorious thing in the flying service is that one is a perfectly free man and one’s own master as soon as one is up in the air…
THE RED BARON, FREIHERR MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN2
Showtime…
More specifically, it was time for ‘dawn show’, as the pilots called early morning missions over enemy lines. In his French-made SPAD plane Kingsford Smith went out on this, his first mission on the early morning of 14 July 1917, flying through air so thick and warm it could have been fresh cream. Certainly he was excited to be a part of the mission but also a bit nervous, as he streaked above the flashes of khaki uniforms he could see below which were the men in the muddy, bloody trenches of their own lines he knew so well from his own experience, and then an instant later glimpsed the grey uniforms of the Germans. As he passed over the enemy, puffs of black smoke appeared all around and his plane was briefly buffeted by the explosions of ‘Archie’ just below, the Hun’s way of saying welcome to this part of the war. (A curiosity of the anti-aircraft artillery fire, he soon discovered, was that while the German ‘Archie’ exploded with puffs of black smoke, the Allied puffs were generally white.) Doing his best to stay in formation with the rest of his squadron of seven planes, he was also scanning the horizon for enemy aircraft and quickly learnt his first lesson. That was that no matter how carefully you scanned every cloud and the far horizon for any sign of the Hun, it was no guarantee that you would get fair warning of being under attack. For suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, as No. 23 Squadron cruised at 11,000 feet, a circus of German aircraft was all over them, firing and manoeuvring to get into position to shoot them down without exposing their own Rückseiten (backsides), as targets. A mad scramble of twisting, turning planes ensued, rolling, looping, diving, climbing and slipping away. Kingsford Smith did his best and even fired his guns at one German plane that momentarily came into his sight. But when his guns jammed, there was nothing for it but to race away from the rising sun and head west, back to his own lines, pursued by three German planes the whole way. Mercifully, the Germans didn’t want to continue the pursuit once the Australian was above his own ‘Archie’, and Kingsford Smith was able to return safely to base, notwithstanding the fact that he had bullet holes all over his SPAD, with around a dozen near where his head had been.
Now ‘blooded’ for battle, a little more experienced and relieved to be still alive—there were many, many pilots who didn’t even survive their first day on the Western Front—the young Australian pilot was slightly more confident when he went out the following day. This time he was with seven other planes and he felt a surge of bloodlust when they saw twenty German planes coming directly for them at an altitude of 8000 feet. The squadron leader waggled his wings in the manner that gave the signal to attack and in an instant they were again in the thick of it.
It was an exceedingly odd thing that despite everything happening in a blur of movement, time almost seemed suspended, with each second passing like the slow dripping of honey. In one such moment of suspended time, a German aircraft appeared right before him. Kingsford Smith zeroed in, squeezed the trigger and fired perhaps fifty shots straight at the pilot. He then had the satisfaction—and it really was that—of seeing the Hun pilot throw his arms in the air and fall back, as his plane began to tumble out of the sky. Going down, getting faster, until the German plane was billowing black smoke in a sickly corkscrew for the ground. Had the pilot been alive after those first few seconds, there was no chance whatsoever he could have survived the crash.
Strangely, although Kingsford Smith had just killed a man, it didn’t feel like that, as though he had just ended the life of some mother’s son. Rather, he had ‘bagged my first Hun’,3 as he proudly put it in a letter to his own mother the following day. True, his gun had jammed immediately afterwards, and he had had to ‘tootle off home’, but it had been a great beginning.
Day after day, the squadron went out on sorties and returned an hour or two later. Sometimes the men would be intact, with as many returning as had gone out. Other times they would be missing a few men. Night after night they would sit at the dinner table in the mess hall and where the evening before someone had been laughing and joking and singing and telling riotous stories, there would now be an empty chair. Those chairs would fill up soon enough as freshly trained pilots arrived from England, and now America, but many of these men would quickly be gone too. Killed. Shot out of the skies and frequently plunging to their deaths in the middle of flaming wrecks.
How did the survivors cope in such circumstances? Only just. Generally, they drank a lot of alcohol. After all, they were the key players in a game in which the stakes could not be higher. They were playing for both their lives and often the destiny of entire battles and the lives of many men below. When their friends played that game and lost, or they played that game and won, one way or another did they not deserve a drink, or ten? Kingsford Smith certainly felt that way. You flew, you fought, you returned to earth and you could scarcely credit that you had survived. You found out who of your comrades had been killed—often gazing to the east as the twilight deepened, willing a particular plane to appear—you drank the better part of the night away, and the following day you did it all again.
The carnage went on and the only place where it was worse than in the air was on the ground, where artillery shells continued to land and bullets fly and men died on a daily basis in numbers never before seen in warfare—with a total of 2250 troops being killed on all sides on an average day on the Western Front.
On the last day of July 1917, just a few short weeks after Kingsford Smith had arrived in France, the Battle of Passchendaele began, with the Allies making a concerted effort to break through the Western Front, shatter the German lines and push on to the German submarine bases in Belgium. (Part of the urgency to do this was the fear that after the Russian Revolution in February, it would not be long before the Russian war effort collapsed, enabling all the German soldiers on the Eastern Front in Russia to return to the Western Front, whereupon the war would be lost for the Allies.)
All five Australian divisions in France were thrown into the assault to capture the key Belgian village of Passchendaele, which heavily armed veteran German troops defended from the top of a series of ridges on which they had constructed many thick concrete pillboxes. On the front side of the ridges were trenches manned by more German soldiers. Behind the ridges lay heavy German artillery, ready to lob high-explosive shells into the valleys of thick mud soaked with the blood of those who had already died trying to make the breakthrough. Over days, and then weeks, and then months, the Allied soldiers continued their assault. On a good day only hundreds of them were killed. The conditions were straight from Dante’s Inferno.