by P Fitzsimons
In the middle of it all, one man particularly stood out—George Wilkins. His route to the Western Front had been a circuitous one. Returning south from the Arctic Circle on foot over 600 miles, he eventually came around Alaska by boat, landed in Ottawa, thence travelled overland to New York before boarding a ship to cross the Atlantic. En route the ship was sunk by a German U-boat. Rescued, Wilkins got to London, and then took the long haul home, by ship down the West African coast to Cape Town and thence across to South Australia. After seeing his mother and settling his father’s estate, Wilkins journeyed to the headquarters of the Australian Flying Corps at Point Cook, just outside Melbourne, and applied for a position based on his previous flying experience. Though nearly excluded because of his colour blindness, the intervention of a kind senior officer saw him quickly receive his commission as a second lieutenant, albeit in a non-operational flying position. Once back in England, when he had presented himself as ready to fly, there had been a big problem. Courtesy of a touch of frostbite from his years in the Arctic he walked with a pronounced limp.
‘Your feet are in a hopeless condition,’ he was informed gravely by one of the military doctors. ‘You did not have medical attention in time, and now it is too late. Nothing can be done. You will never be able to walk properly again.’
Wilkins quietly retorted that his faithful feet were good enough to get him 600 miles across Arctic ice at the rate of 15 miles a day, so he didn’t think they would be a worry, but the Australian Flying Corps doctor would not be moved. Regulations were regulations.
In the end, not to worry. His unique background and set of skills had quickly seen him recommended for service as an official photographer with the Australian War Records Section of the AIF to record the Australian experience from right in the heat of the battle—and it was possible he could do a bit of flying as a part of that. So it was that, in the company of two other men who were quickly establishing themselves as legends in their field—the journalist–writer Charles E.W. Bean and the photographer Frank Hurley—Wilkins had turned up at Passchendaele and quickly got to work. While Hurley’s job was to capture iconic photographs that could be used for propaganda purposes, Wilkins’s task was to record photographically what actually happened on the front lines. There could have been few men better equipped to do it, though Wilkins was shocked by what he was seeing and recording.
‘It seemed like a trip into hell,’ he later recounted. ‘That black night lighted by flames of guns and by signal flares, the air shaking with noise, and the earth shaking underfoot. Human beings seemed insignificant in the midst of all this. It didn’t seem possible that men could go through it and live.’4
And maintain a sense of humour, to boot. On that first night Wilkins was stunned to hear a Digger tell the story of a wounded, mud-covered Tommy, who was said to have told his comrades, ‘I wish I could go back to Blighty and work in a munitions factory. Just think of those blokes getting five bob a day for making those shells—and us getting only one bob for stopping the gorblimey things!’5
Within hours, as he recorded, Wilkins knew exactly how the Tommy felt, and yet his own courage never wavered. He was to become a familiar figure to the troops over the following weeks, always with a camera in hand, traipsing along trenches, limping blithely across no-man’s-land as shells burst around him. He visited field hospitals, slipped into dugouts and rambled respectfully through freshly dug battlefield graveyards, capturing it all on film. Sometimes he would hitch a ride on a plane to get aerial shots of the trenches, but more often he was with the troops in the mud and blood, the death and destruction. Twice he found himself in action so thick he had to put down the camera and get involved himself, and on both occasions he won the Military Cross for his trouble. The commanding Australian of the campaign, General John Monash, called him, ‘the bravest man in my command’.6
Only once, by Wilkins’s own reckoning, did he come close to losing his nerve. One night he was with six soldiers moving towards the front line along a wooden ‘duckboard’ above the sucking mud. Shells were exploding all around, and bullets flying, but they kept going. And then a shell exploded a little way in front of them, hurling shrapnel into the night. One piece of shrapnel hit the leading man in Wilkins’s party right in the neck and so neatly took off his head that it plopped atop the post that had been right beside him when he died. That head now stared back at them.
‘All the rest of us roared with hysterical laughter to see his head there, stuck upon the post. At the moment it seemed hilariously funny.’7
In his time in France, Kingsford Smith met many famous pilots, but few impressed him as much as France’s most famous ace, Charles Nungesser. The blond 25-year-old, known as ‘the fighting pilot’s fighting pilot’, and a lady-killer to beat them all, had about him an aura, a savoir-vivre on the ground, and savoir-faire in the air, that was simply mesmerising.
Stories about him and his plane—famously decorated on both sides with a drawing of a coffin flanked by candles, atop a black heart resting on a skull and crossbones—were the talk of Paris. What about the time he took on three German planes at once, and shot down two of them before taking on the third in such an amazing fashion? As his own undercarriage had been shot to pieces, the fearless Frenchman had manoeuvred the surviving German Albatros close to the ground and then driven his plane down on top of it, effectively bulldogging it to the ground! Then, when the German had jumped out and tried to set fire to both planes, Nungesser had run towards him and felled the Hun with just one punch.
‘What kind of madmen do you Frenchman have as flyers?’ the German flyer asked once he was safely in custody, seemingly more outraged by the punch than being shot down.
‘Some say,’ the smiling French officer is said to have replied, ‘that he is completely mad. Others call him a genius. I think he is a little of both.’8
Whatever he was, Nungesser continued to bring down German planes at an astonishing rate, and yet he was equally famous for his nocturnal activities on the ground. He was the embodiment of the swaggering ‘knight of the air’ and his conquests were legendary. He had taken Mata Hari to bed before her arrest for espionage, and managed to feed her a story about a new French plane under construction with eight supercharged engines, which she had duly passed on to Berlin. He could drink any man under the table in the sweet Parisian night, and still be on the airstrip at dawn, ready to take down another vicious German, if not two.
Once, early in his flying career, he had disobeyed orders, leaving his post on the ground to go skywards and take on eight German planes which were reported to be approaching Nancy in north-eastern France. As it turned out, he threw himself into the fray with such gusto that he brought one plane down and made the others scatter.
The following day, he was hauled before his commanding officer. ‘Lieutenant Nungesser,’ the colonel said. ‘What would you do to an officer who deserted his post?’
‘Sir,’ Nungesser replied evenly, ‘if he destroyed an Albatros with a primitive Voisin, and made seven others run for their lives, he deserves the Croix de Guerre.’
‘I agree,’ the colonel had replied. ‘The Croix de Guerre—plus sixteen days’ arrest.’9
Nungesser famously bowed low and replied: ‘Mon colonel, vous êtes trop genereux.’ Another fifteen decorations were to follow his aerial conquests—with decorations unknown for his even more outstanding amorous conquests—and though he frequently took outrageous risks, and had many crashes which resulted in shocking injuries, somehow he survived them all, to keep climbing skywards and taking on the Germans.
Kingsford Smith had arrived in France with a squadron of sixteen pilots, and after one month there were only three of them left. Under that kind of pressure, many a surviving pilot lost his nerve and mentally collapsed, certain that to take to the skies would mean his own demise. Kingsford Smith did not, and though in letters home he sometimes referred to problems with his ‘nerves’,10 he kept going.
And on this occasion, on the early
morning of 10 August 1917, when Smithy was flying back towards the safety of his own lines, keeping an eye out for potential trouble, he spotted something interesting…
On his starboard quarter, about a mile ahead and as far below, he could see a German plane just coming into Allied territory. Nudging his joystick forward, the Australian pilot quickly swooped and aimed towards the spot where he judged the German would be in forty-five seconds. It turned out he had judged it almost perfectly and opened fire before the poor bastard knew what hit him. Certainly, Kingsford Smith took some peppered flak from the German Archie as they tried to save their man, but it was to no avail. Smithy had the great satisfaction of seeing his quarry hit the ground and turn over. It was a confirmed ‘kill’.
No matter the slight damage inflicted by the Archie, Kingsford Smith was in the mood to continue, and he flew on, looking for other enemy planes he might attack. Shortly thereafter, well into German territory, he noticed something strange about a particular section of road. It was oddly sunken, with the shattered remains of massive poplar trees lining both sides. But what was that black stuff on it? He looked closer…
Could that be a black mass of humanity? Soldiers, in full kit, resting? German soldiers? Nosing down, he realised it was exactly that—German soldiers on their way to the front, having a brief rest—and made an instant decision. He would attack! Cutting the engines so he could glide in quietly closer before they were fully aware of his presence, his ears were suddenly filled with the pleasant sound of the wind rushing over his wings.11
And then Charles Kingsford Smith, a twenty-year-old Australian flyer, became a veritable angel of death. At a velocity of just over 100 miles per hour, he swooped down on the Germans and held his fire until he was so close he simply couldn’t miss…Now!12
The instant his fingers tightened on the triggers, his two machine guns started spitting lead, and before him dozens, upon dozens, of German soldiers were simply flung every which way by his bullets.13 Many of them tried to run out of the way, but they were too densely packed upon each other in the culvert and there was no room to move. He couldn’t miss! And he didn’t.
Screaming now—some kind of primeval shriek that came from deep within him—he kept his guns furiously spitting death for the entire length of the culvert, even as angry flashes from below indicated that some of the soldiers were firing their rifles back at him. Kingsford Smith didn’t care. Perhaps it was his own experience of trench warfare that possessed him—and the knowledge that every one of these Germans he killed might mean one fewer to kill his mates—but something got into him at this moment that he would never quite be sure of.
Perhaps bloodlust…
Executing a tight turn and swooping even lower, he came back for a second run and, shrieking all the while, did exactly the same from the opposite direction. The dozens of prone blobs on the road that didn’t try to scramble to safety clearly marked the results of his previous run, but still the Germans were packed so tightly against the unforgiving walls of the culvert that there remained plenty of targets, and he had no hesitation in emptying his chambers upon them, still possessed by an unearthly joy all the while.
Die, you bastards.
And die they did. For good measure, the young Australian pilot then dropped some incendiaries on huts and set fire to them…
Still possessed by a kind of incandescent and bloody joy which he had never experienced before, Kingsford Smith flew back to his base, landed…rolled to a stop…and turned his engine off. Suddenly, all was silent on this bright, beautiful day, apart from the distant rumble from artillery shells exploding on the front lines, which was so constant you barely noticed it. Birds were singing. Somewhere in the distance he could hear men laughing and talking, one of the mechanics in the hangar over yonder was whistling as he worked on the engine of a nearby SPAD…
What had he done?
What had he done?
Had he really just taken the lives of dozens of men, been the cause of dozens of death-knocks on dozens of doors across Germany, families being told that their husband, father, son, brother, nephew, cousin was dead? Had he really done that?
He had.
Whatever deathly mania had possessed him was now entirely gone, leaving in its place revulsion, sheer revulsion for his act. Climbing shakily out of his plane, he leant against the fuselage and vomited. And vomited some more. And kept vomiting until he was dry-retching, trying to expel the last of this thing that had taken hold of him.
Barely out of his teens, he had just killed many men and hadn’t the faintest idea why. For those few minutes he must have gone completely insane, and now he felt utterly miserable because of it; hated his own weakness for doing what he had done.14
In Dayton, the granddaddy of aviation, Orville Wright, was equally appalled. ‘What a dream it was,’ he wrote, ‘what a nightmare it has become.’15 While Lord Northcliffe, who had maintained a correspondence with Orville’s sister, Katharine, wrote ruefully, ‘I do not suppose that Wilbur and Orville realised the part their work would play in modern warfare. You have probably read of the harrowing experiences of flying men. A great many have been killed…’16
While the business of being a war pilot was clearly a bitter and bloody one, as well as most likely fatal, still the number of those wanting to join the ranks of the ‘angels of death’ were legion. So exciting was the notion of flying, some men were impatient to get through all the proper channels. One of these was a young Gallipoli and Western Front veteran from Sydney by the name of Charles Ulm, who, though twice wounded in battle and sent home, had returned to England when his father had said to him, ‘What are you doing back here when you still have two arms and two legs?’17
No matter, Ulm had already decided there was more for him to do in this war, and by the latter months of 1917 was training in England, where he had become fascinated with flight. This fascination had compelled him to finagle several flights with some friendly military pilots, during which he had taken the opportunity to observe closely everything they did to get airborne, control the plane while in the air, and then get back down. Fancying that he probably had it mastered, he decided to have a go himself on an aeroplane that had been left unattended.
So it was that one day in November 1917, he found himself behind the controls of a plane for the first time. Ulm had no formal training, no pilot’s licence and no authority to be in the plane, but that didn’t bother him. Nor did he care that he risked a court martial if he was found out. After all, he would have to survive the flight to be court martialled, which meant that the worry about what his military masters might think was only a secondary concern.
He gunned the plane forward and only a hundred yards or so onwards, his magic moment came and he was airborne. Despite the fact that he was proceeding on instinct mixed with observation, he somehow managed to circle the field twice before bringing it in for a ‘landing’—read ‘bouncing’.
And like so many who had been blessed with the experience of being in control of a plane, he had returned to the ground a different man. An aphorism among pilots was that your first time flying was better than orgasm, and who could argue? Nothing Ulm had done in his life to that point compared to the thrill he had just experienced and he resolved then and there that, whatever else, flying would be a big part of the rest of his life.
14 August 1917. Despite what they were about—looking for men in other planes to kill—there was something fantastically beautiful about the French countryside, even from this height of 7000 feet, and Charles Kingsford Smith enjoyed it keenly as its green, hazy endlessness stretched magnificently before him. In terms of enemy planes, however, there was no sign and after half an hour or so, their squadron leader fired a Very light from his cockpit signalling to the squadron to return to base. Smithy was about to do exactly that, swivelling his stick to the right to make a graceful turn along with the others, when he saw that one pilot in the squadron had instead turned left, and was now about to fly towards German territory. Th
inking that perhaps this pilot had spotted something, Kingsford Smith decided to follow him. Alas, just a few clouds later, Smithy couldn’t find him anymore and suddenly realised he was on his own, except for the irrepressible hobgoblin called Archie now popping all around.18 Was it him, or was it getting a little warm? Deciding it might be a good idea to head back to base after all, he now turned his plane firmly towards the safety of the western horizon and then he spotted them.
Down there!
Some 1000 feet below him, two Hun two-seaters were cruising eastwards with clearly no idea that he was above them. Nudging his plane down and getting ready to rain hell upon them in a death swoop from on high, Kingsford Smith got himself into position—800 feet and closing…700 feet…500 feet. His airspeed indicator registered that he was descending at the wonderful rate of 220 miles per hour and the two planes, which had looked liked toy models far below, were now looking larger with every passing second.
Now! With grim satisfaction he pressed the trigger to unleash a deadly fusillade upon the nearest of the planes.
Only a second after firing though, it was, bizarrely, his own plane that was vibrating, shaking itself to bits. Around him pieces of the cockpit were flying all over, as splinters cut into his face and blood ran down his chin. It was an instant before he understood what was happening. He was under attack!