Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Things had been nearly as grim on the American side of the Atlantic. All the crews attempting to cross from New York had failed to achieve their objectives through a variety of crashes, equipment malfunction and simple failure to leave the ground. Six men had been killed in the process. Some of the surviving crews had repaired and reconfigured their aircraft, and were now readying to take off once more, but there remained one lone entrant, still readying for his first attempt—Charles Augustus Lindbergh—in his plane, the Spirit of St Louis. When this unknown, with his tiny single-engined plane, had first announced his intention to fly solo, the papers had dubbed him the ‘Flying Fool’.13

  This, in spite of the fact that another aviator, a Russian by the name of Ivan Federov, announced an even grander intention. A member of the All Inventors Vegetarian Club of Interplanetary Cosmopolitans, Federov announced that in the coming September he was going to fly all the way to the moon. He would be going in a 30-metre-long rocket that was half aeroplane and half giant projectile. His co-pilot would be a man by the name of Max Valier, whom he described as a ‘German moon fan’.14

  But back to Lindbergh, the real Flying Fool…

  It had been a long haul just to get to this point, but Lindbergh did not lack confidence. Indeed, that quiet, unassuming confidence that things would work out come what may—mixed with a very strong work ethic to do everything possible to make sure that they really did—was his most defining characteristic.

  He woke on the morning of 19 May 1927 and worked with his team on his plane out at Roosevelt Field, just as he had been doing for the previous few days, and waited for a report that would tell him the weather over the Atlantic was all clear. This did not seem likely, as reports had been uniformly bad, and during the day drizzle over New York did not cease. That evening he was relaxed enough to go and see a performance of the hit Broadway musical Rio Rita, and it was while he was returning from that that his world suddenly changed…

  On a whim, one of his companions, the chief engineer for Wright Aeronautical, which manufactured the Whirlwind engine his plane was using, decided it would be a good idea to check the latest weather reports for over the Atlantic. They pulled over on 42nd Street so that another Wright man, Dick Blythe, could make the call from an office he had access to. And suddenly he came running back with the news—the weather over the Atlantic had unexpectedly cleared!15 Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee…Lindbergh knew immediately that his hour had come.

  Returning to the Garden City Hotel where he was staying to snatch a few hours’ sleep, Lindbergh first had to fight off the journalists waiting in the foyer, each of whom wanted just one more quote—something, anything, please!—before at last getting back to his room. Outside his door he was pleased to see George Stumpf, a burly National Guardsman from St Louis who had been sent there by Lindbergh’s backers as something of a security guard. Stumpf’s sole job was to keep the corridor quiet and intruders away from his door. Lindbergh uttered a quick goodnight to Stumpf, told him he would soon be on his way to Paris, and within minutes was in his bed right on the edge of blessed sleep when…tap-tap-tap…when…tap-tap-tap…when…tap-tap-tap…it seemed someone was knocking on his door.

  It was the security guard. ‘Slim,’ Stumpf said, using Lindbergh’s St Louis nickname. ‘What am I going to do when you’re gone?’16

  Lindbergh, a moderate man by nature, did not at this point leap out of his bed and strangle Stumpf dead. Though aggrieved, he merely said, ‘I don’t know. There are plenty of other problems to solve before we have to think about that one.’

  And then he tried to get back to sleep. Alas, he soon knew it was hopeless. So what else could he do? He decided to head straight to the airport to make his preparations. The plane itself was already packed, and he knew down to the last tiny item what was on board and where. In terms of keeping the weight to a bare minimum, Lindbergh had been so disciplined that he had declined to accept $1000 from a rich New York stamp-collector businessman who had simply wanted him to carry a pound of mail to a friend in Paris. He also declined to take a parachute, on the grounds it weighed too much. No sextant—a simple compass would suffice—and beyond that he would steer by dead reckoning alone. After all, although he had minutely tracked his route and intended to stay exactly on it, the large landmass to his east meant that even allowing for catastrophic miscalculation he was bound to cross a coast somewhere between Northern Europe to the west coast of Africa! A radio? Why bother, when by leaving its weight behind he could get another 25 gallons of fuel on the plane? Lindbergh’s intense focus on weight extended to cutting the corners off his maps, making his own boots out of the lightest material he could find and ripping unnecessary pages from his notebook.

  As to supplies, if he succeeded he would be flying for two days, but he took supplies enough for just one—two ham sandwiches, two roast beef sandwiches, a hard-boiled egg sandwich and a quart of water. ‘If I get to Paris I won’t need anymore,’ Lindbergh smilingly replied when asked, ‘and if I don’t get to Paris I won’t need anymore either.’17

  (This central idea of stripping down to all bar the bare essentials had a long and noble history in aviation. It is a matter of recorded fact that on 7 January 1785 two intrepid adventurers, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and Dr John Jeffries, set off from Dover to cross the English Channel in a hot air balloon. When they got into trouble, they began ditching everything not nailed down, including their clothes, in an effort to stay aloft. When that still wouldn’t do it, both men performed their ablutions over the side of the basket and did indeed make the French coast!)

  At 7.51 am on the morning of 20 May 1927 Lindbergh sat in his Ryan monoplane, put on his goggles, adjusted his flight helmet, and poked his head out the cockpit window to talk to his two mechanics on the ground: ‘What do you say—let’s try it.’18

  They nodded and removed the chocks from in front of the wheels. As Lindbergh began to gun the engine, the purple-blue violets that so flourished on the airstrip that they threatened to engulf it, now leaned back in horror at the shattering noise. A mangled propeller in a large blackened circle in that field of flowers—right beside where the Spirit of St Louis stood—marked the spot where René Fonck’s last attempt to fly the Atlantic had ended.19 Lindbergh resolutely refused to look at it, but kept staring straight forward to where his destiny lay.

  And now…

  As the Spirit of St Louis cleaved the misty morning and hurtled drunkenly down the muddy runway, heading in the direction of Paris if it got off the ground and a carefully positioned ambulance from the Nassau County Hospital if it didn’t, the 500-strong crowd gathered for the occasion leaned forward in nervous anticipation. Many in that crowd were simply neighbours to the field who had been attracted by the early morning noise and excitement, and were stunned that such a tiny plane was really going to attempt to fly such a vast ocean. Others, like Anthony Fokker—one of the most respected figures in aviation manufacturing, and one of the last people to chat with the pilot before take-off—were of the aviation community and knew only too well the risk Lindbergh was taking.

  It was known that this was Lindbergh’s first attempt to take off with the plane completely full, loaded with 451 gallons of fuel—145 gallons more than it had ever held before20—meaning that it now weighed two and a half tons. Would he…? Could he…?

  He could! He did! Nearing the end of the runway’s allotted 5000 feet the plane lifted off, cleared the telephone wires at the end of the field by just 20 feet, and brought a great cry of exultation from the crowd—as nearby trees swayed and shook in the trailing air swirls. Lindbergh quickly disappeared into the low-lying haze. Just like that, he was gone! On his way!

  Myriad reporters ran for their telephones to get the words to their newspapers, and shortly it was the people of America and France, and indeed much of the world, who held their breath. In Lindbergh’s home town of Little Falls, Minnesota, the phone lines were soon buzzing with the news, rousing the good burghers from their slumber: �
��The “kid”, Lindbergh, is on his way, can you believe it?’21

  It was admirable to have set off, but could this young fella possibly make it all the way to Paris, when so many others had failed? Lloyd’s of London, which had initially posted odds of 10 to 1 against any team winning the Orteig Prize that year, thought it so unlikely that Lindbergh would do it—and so dangerous that he even try—it refused to offer odds for him at all.

  It was a mark of Lindbergh’s inexperience that by the time he had flown across Long Island Sound to the mouth of the Connecticut River, just over 35 miles of the Atlantic beneath him, this was the longest stretch of water he had ever flown over. He was pursuing the Great Circle route he had minutely planned out, which turned on the fact that the shortest way between two points on the planet, just as a piece of string goes around a globe of the world, proceeds in what appears to be a curve on a flat map. This required him changing compass direction every hour, which was exacting but necessary. Thus, after Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts fell away behind him, he set off for the lovely green mass of Nova Scotia and the white tips of Newfoundland before embarking on the truly big leap, 2300 miles to hopefully the southern tip of Ireland, then England, then France.

  Just before night fell he came around a granite peak and down to buzz low across the harbour township of St John’s, Newfoundland—and let the world know he was still going. The citizens of that tiny town stared skywards, open-mouthed at this vision. Onwards Lindbergh flew and shortly thereafter was stunned to see icebergs. Around them stretched a green, rough, cold-looking sea that somehow seemed both intimidating and hungry. And then the long night descended. If all went well, it would be many hours before he would again see the light. If it went badly, eternal blackness would be his lot.

  As he flew, he had no idea, of course, of the reaction of the world as it followed his path. That night in Manhattan, at the Hotel Commodore, 1200 powerful industrialists were gathered for a black-tie dinner. Before proceedings began, one of them stood up and offered an impromptu benediction: ‘I am proud to live under that flag,’ he said, pointing to a small star-spangled banner on the table. ‘I am thinking of a young American boy who left this morning for Paris with a sandwich in his pocket. May God deliver him there safely.’22 These words were cheered to the echo.

  Across America, people huddled around their radios waiting for news, or prayed for his safety, even as print journalists churned out millions of words in paeans of praise. One of them was Will Rogers, the syndicated columnist, most renowned for his humour. But on this occasion he began his column: ‘No attempt at jokes today. A slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before. He is being prayed for to every kind of Supreme Being that has a following. If he is lost, it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had.’23

  Charles Lindbergh was lost. Or at least he momentarily thought he was, as he glanced at his compass and seemed to be 30 degrees off course. Then he remembered. A particularity of many places in high Arctic latitudes is that ‘magnetic variation’—the difference between ‘true north’ and the direction in which the compass needle indicates is north—can vary from nil to 90 degrees, as the compass needle aligns itself with the Earth’s lines of magnetic force and other influences such as large iron ore deposits. The magnetic variation at St John’s, Newfoundland, was at that time 20 degrees west, but could change by as much as one degree per six-tenths of a mile, meaning the American pilot had to be extremely vigilant in consulting his charts and changing his heading to keep properly on his Great Circle route.

  Another challenge was making allowance constantly for the strength and the direction of the wind that was hitting him. It was for this reason he generally kept to a low altitude so he could see the waves beneath and judge from the way the foam blew off the top of them that strength and direction.

  Here and there he was spotted. Five hundred miles west of Ireland, the steamer Hilversum saw the Spirit of St Louis, and promptly reported its position. So too, the steam collier Nogi spotted him and gave a fresh position. He was still out there. Still going! Stock exchanges in Amsterdam and Berlin gave updates together with changing stock prices. In Tokyo the latest news on Lindbergh was posted on bulletin boards situated in the main street.

  Far over the Atlantic, the Spirit of St Louis never missed a beat and kept arrowing eastwards. With generally good weather and only one or two squalls here and there, Lindbergh’s greatest enemy was sleepiness. Forty hours without sleep. Forty-two…forty-four…it would be so easy, so wonderfully easy…just to close his eyes and let go…let go…and NO! With a start he would come to, put his head out the window into the icy slipstream and for as long as two minutes at a time, he wouldn’t feel sleepy anymore. And then it would return…the drowsiness…the heavy lids…the mild hallucinations of phantoms filling the cockpit with him. Time and again, he had to slap himself hard to return to full consciousness, to try and banish the demons from his mind.

  ‘Alone?’ an editorial of the New York Sun asked on his second day of flight. ‘Is he alone at whose right side rides Courage, with Skill within the cockpit and Faith upon the left? Does solitude surround the brave, when Adventure leads the way, and Ambition reads the dials? Is there no company for him for whom the air is cleft by Daring and the darkness is made light by Emprise?

  ‘True, the fragile bodies of his fellows do not weigh down his plane; true, the fretful minds of weaker men are lacking from his crowded cabin; but as his airship keeps her course he holds communion with those rarer spirits that inspire to intrepidity and by their sustaining potency give strength to arm, resource to mind, content to soul.

  ‘Alone? With what other companions would that man fly to whom the choice were given?’24

  All talk of the ‘Flying Fool’ had long ago vanished, and Lindbergh was now nothing less than the ‘Lone Eagle’.

  Perhaps nowhere in Australia was news of Lindbergh’s progress followed so ravenously as in the offices of Interstate Flying Services. For Lindbergh was doing to the Atlantic Ocean what Smithy and Keith Anderson had long dreamed of doing to the Pacific Ocean. Conquering it. And to Kingsford Smith’s delight, Charles Ulm shared much the same dream!

  At this time Ulm, who had not long before divorced his wife, Isabel, was boarding with a woman by the name of Mary Josephine Callaghan at her home in Lavender Bay, and often after work Smithy would drop him there on his way home to Kuranda, sometimes popping in for a drink. Since Ulm had joined their aviation company, things were looking up a little, even though they hadn’t, in fact, beaten Major Brearley for the Adelaide–Perth mail tender. This upturn was in part courtesy of their new partner having organised a week of taking joyriders aloft during festivities for the opening of the new Parliament House in Canberra, during the first week of May. And so, of course, as the beer flowed free, Lindbergh’s attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean prompted Kingsford Smith to share with Ulm his own ambitions. Ulm confessed he would love to do the same thing—not least because completing such a challenge would automatically put their aviation business into the big time.

  What they needed, they decided, was to do some ‘Big Feat’ which should bring them what they wanted: fame, money, status. Something like…flying around Australia in a record time! This was the very plan that Smithy had tried to push with West Australian Airways, to no avail, four years earlier, but now there was no boss to stop him. If they could pull it off, it would give them the credibility they craved, and the experience at long-distance flying they needed to make an attempt at crossing the Pacific.

  At the time, the record for the round-Australia journey was held by E.J.Jones of the Department of Civil Aviation, who, back in August 1924, had—together with Lieutenant Colonel Brinsmead as his passenger—flown the 7500 miles in twenty-two days and two hours. This had neatly halved the previous record of forty-four days, which had been set a few months before.

  Now, Smithy and U
lm reckoned it was time to halve it again. They began to make plans, even while Lindbergh was still in the air and had just emerged from his first dark night.

  An island? Land? No, fog. Fogginess of mind, fog over the sea—the thing is that it faded as he approached. And then so did another island. And many more. And then one of the islands didn’t fade. It really was land. ‘It is like rain after a drought,’ he wrote, ‘spring after a northern winter. This is earth again, the earth where I’ve lived and now will live once more…I’ve been to eternity and back. I know how the dead would feel to live again.’25

  Checking on his maps, he worked out—as the people below ran out of their houses and waved joyously up at him, it was Lindbergh and he was alive!—that after crossing an entire ocean in twenty-six hours of flight, he was less than 3 miles off course to the south, and above the Three Sisters near Dingle Bay on the south-western coast of Ireland, three small but easily identifiable peaks. Originally, Lindbergh had hoped to get within 50 miles of it.26 The American swooped down lower to get a closer look.

  Now, this village was in an extremely isolated part of the world, a place where aeroplanes were little more than a rumour and an unlikely one at that, t’be sure, t’be sure. That very day, as a matter of fact, a young lad by the name of Hugh Curran was walking along a road near his house in the tiny hamlet of Baile an Fheirtéaraigh, thinking about a scary story his teacher had told him the day before at school. Apparently in ancient Gaelic times, a giant eagle would swoop down from out of the skies and pluck young kids who had behaved naughtily. And then it would take them away and eat them. It was at just that moment that Hugh heard a sound he had never heard before—a roar coming from above. He turned around and saw that very eagle swooping down from the sky, screaming, and coming straight for him! If only he had not been naughty!