Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  Yet that shocking lead-up did not dampen the enthusiasm of the 85,000 people who turned up at Oakland airport on the foggy morning of Tuesday, 16 August 1927, to see the Dole Air Race formally begin.3 Eight impossibly tiny aircraft, each one single-engined, lined up in a semicircle at one end of the dusty runway. Around the planes, moving back and forth, were the aviators themselves—fifteen men and a young woman—together with assorted mechanics covered in three-parts grease to two-parts oil, making last-minute preparations for take-off.

  And there they go! Ah, how the crowd near burst with excitement, pressing against the wooden fence that kept onlookers at a safe distance, as just before noon the first plane in the queue, Oklahoma, responded to the dropped chequered flag and accelerated, lifted off, waggled its wings, and headed out over San Francisco Bay, before heading west-south-west to Hawaii…

  But look there! Before their very eyes, the second plane away, El Encanto—one of the pre-race favourites—clearly totally overloaded, lost control a couple of seconds after take-off and collapsed down onto its left wing in a shrieking metal groan of agony. At least its two flyers survived and were seen to crawl away from the wreckage as quickly as their knees could carry them, fearful that the huge quantity of petrol they had on board would ignite and explode. The next plane, Pabco Flyer, also momentarily got off the ground, before it too gave up the unequal struggle with gravity and returned to earth, becoming bogged in the marsh at the end of the runway. And so it went…

  Golden Eagle, Aloha and Woolaroc got away okay, but though Miss Doran—carrying the sole woman in the race, ‘the prettiest little pigeon on wings’,4 Mildred Doran, as part of its three-person crew—managed to take off, it returned ten minutes later before taking off again. Pabco Flyer was now freed from the marsh, but crashed more seriously on its second attempt. Another plane, Dallas Spirit, also had to return shortly after take-off with engine trouble.

  A little over twenty-six hours later, Woolaroc did indeed land safely in Honolulu to win the race, followed a couple of hours later by Aloha. But that was it. Though the people waited, and waited, and waited, with their leis at the ready to drape around the necks of the arriving pilots, no more planes arrived. In fact, no traces of Golden Eagle or Miss Doran were ever found. Equally tragically, when Dallas Spirit went to look for them, it too—with its pilot and navigator, William P. Erwin and Alvin Eichwaldt, both veterans of the Great War—simply vanished into the Pacific’s gaping blue maw.

  All up, ten lives were lost in the course of just that one race and…

  And these Australian pilots wanted to do what?!?! To go three times as far as Hawaii, across the entire Pacific?! Three times further than Lindbergh had gone! They must be insane.

  It was no exaggeration to say that in the history of aviation—as young as it was—there could have been no worse time to be asking aeroplane manufacturers, fuel companies and business people to provide planes, fuel or cash for such a venture. In most cases the Australians didn’t even get through the front door of their target companies. Yes, Lindbergh had accomplished something phenomenal the year before, but he was an American and that was probably a one-off. The Dole Air Race had conclusively proved that flying over the Pacific Ocean in a heavily laden single-engine machine was an extremely dangerous exercise and it would be sheer lunacy to encourage and finance more pilots to needlessly risk their lives.

  Against all that, however, what the Dole Air Race gave the Australians was some very clear lessons in how not to go about a long ocean flight. The more they looked at it, the more it became obvious that they needed the best equipment available across the board, and that started with the best plane. And that best plane was made by the very same man who had been the bane of Kingsford Smith and other Allied flyers in the Great War—Anthony Fokker.

  By now Fokker was well established in the United States, to the point of being the most respected manufacturer in the business, and something worthy of note was that the first plane to make it from San Francisco to Hawaii had been a Fokker tri-motor. Too, the key to a successful journey was to have a robust plane capable of carrying an enormous load of fuel, and at the time the record for the largest load of fuel lifted in a plane was held by two Americans who had crossed the country from coast to coast in a Fokker.

  As to engines, what also made a huge impression on Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson was that the only two planes in the Dole Air Race that had made it safely to Hawaii had been powered by Wright Whirlwind engines, just as Lindbergh’s Ryan monoplane had been blessed with one. When Richard Byrd had successfully flown to the North Pole and back the previous year, he too had been flying a Fokker powered by three Wright Whirlwind J-4 engines, made by a company of which Orville Wright had a significant share. The key thing about the engine was that it was air-cooled rather than liquid cooled, which meant that it was a lot lighter, required less maintenance and was less vulnerable to malfunction.

  Bit by bit, the Australians came to the conclusion that their ideal machine would be a Fokker powered by three Wright Whirlwind engines and thus capable of carrying a crew of four, including a radio man and navigator to accompany the two pilots. This was a far more expensive option than their original plan of a single-engined Ryan monoplane, but what was expense when they were dealing with their own lives? They felt they would somehow find the money.

  George Wilkins had so many problems he could barely keep track, though there was no problem working out what the key one was. He needed money. Badly. Money to keep his project going, to get back to Point Barrow and the 500 gallons of fuel he had cached there and complete the job he had started—to fly across the roof of the world all the way to Spitzbergen in Norway. The two wrecked Fokkers of the last two seasons’ attempts were in storage in Seattle, and now he had no money to finance the plane he truly wanted—a Lockheed Vega, with a 225-horsepower engine capable of propelling it at 135 miles per hour. The Vega was an ideal plane because, unlike the Fokkers, it was very fast and fuel efficient, yet not so big that it needed five or six men to handle. When he and the redoubtable Ben Eielson would make the next attempt the following year, they were determined to have a more streamlined, cheaper operation, and the Lockheed would be just perfect for that. Now without the support of the Detroit Aviation Society and the Detroit News, as they had effectively given up on him, what he had to do was to sell his Fokkers for whatever he could get for them, and use that money to buy the Lockheed.

  And then, while in Seattle, he read it—a bloke called Kingsford Smith was in San Francisco with a couple of other Australian pilots, and they were looking for a plane to fly across the Pacific with.

  Wilkins immediately dispatched a cable to Kingsford Smith:

  Have Fokker I can sell you, without engines or instruments.5

  Who immediately wired back:

  Re Your wire. Come down to ‘Frisco and talk it over.

  George Wilkins did exactly that, meeting Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson a few days later in their hotel. The older man was not long in coming to the point. As a matter of fact, the first words he spoke to his fellow Australians simply followed up his telegram. ‘I think I have the machine you require for your Pacific flight,’ he said flatly. ‘It is a tri-motored Fokker. No engines or instruments, but the wings and airframe are in excellent condition.’6

  One didn’t achieve as much as George Wilkins had in his life by wasting one’s time on small talk. And Charles Kingsford Smith was at least his equal in wanting to get on with the task at hand. ‘Well, George, I’d very much like to see the machine. Where is it?’7

  There was an easy affinity between the pair. Australians in America, they were both pursuing a dream, both adventurers, and both war veterans with a slight limp.

  The sticking point was the price. Although £3000 was a more than fair sum for Wilkins to be asking—as it was only about a third of what he had paid for his plane8—the simple reality was that Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson just didn’t have that kind of money for a Fokker without engi
nes or instruments.

  To this point they were living on the money they had from their own capital in Australia, while the money promised from the New South Wales government was held in escrow, to be released if and when they made their start—a government, they noted, which had just changed hands in the October 1927 elections. Their supporter, Premier Jack Lang, had been obliged to hand over the reins to his conservative opponent, Thomas Bavin. They presumed that Bavin would honour the commitments of Lang, but when that money did arrive it would not be enough to pay for the Fokker and fit it out with everything. Where could the rest of their required funds come from? None of their submissions to companies in the United States had produced the tiniest scrap of interest. The answer was not apparent on the instant, but as Wilkins took his leave Kingsford Smith made the promise that they would get back to him as soon as possible, once they had organised their finances. The first step was to cable the New South Wales government and request an extension of funds by another £1000.

  Request denied. Back to square one.

  Where to now?

  Where to now? Sometimes, it was hard to keep track. For Charles Lindbergh, the craziness surrounding him simply didn’t dissipate with the passage of the weeks and then months. ‘I was astonished at the effect my successful landing in France had on the nations of the world,’ he later wrote. ‘To me, it was like a match lighting a bonfire…’9

  With the flying ability of a ‘Lone Eagle’, and the courage and strength of a grizzly bear, Lindbergh also had the stated morals and apparent manner of a good, God-fearing Sunday school teacher, and America obsessively loved him for it. Everyone wanted a piece of him, and some were prepared to pay for it—with the formerly humble pilot receiving five million dollars worth of commercial offers within a week of landing. Many a man facing one-hundredth of that level of adulation would have been destroyed by the temptations and trappings of fame. Lindbergh, however, remained humble. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and eschewed casual sexual relationships—he was precisely the kind of man fit to be put on an American pedestal. ‘The important thing,’ Lindbergh later reminisced of this time, ‘was to meet and marry a girl you would stay in love with. I intended to pay particular attention to that. It meant not falling in love with one of the first women you met—a question of time, patience and intelligent selection.’10

  He registered his extreme distaste for the promiscuous approach, and told stories of some of the appalling things he had seen in the aviation world, how some pilots would have one-night stands, night after night after night, and others would even use prostitutes. Well, that was not for him. ‘My experience in breeding animals on our farm had taught me the importance of good heredity…’11

  Wherever he went he was photographed, had questions shouted at him, had women faint at his very sight. In St Louis there was even a fight between some women over a corncob he had just gnawed on. In Dayton, Ohio, he not only met Orville Wright, but spent the night in the great man’s residence. Back in his home town of Little Falls, souvenir hunters had stolen the doorknobs off his childhood home.12

  And yet he kept moving, embarking on what was essentially an aviation missionary tour in the Spirit of St Louis, across America, visiting eighty-two cities in forty-eight states, as no less than 25 per cent of the entire population turned out to see him in person. At one point, though, he took pause. Passing west over the Rocky Mountains in South Wyoming, he spied desert ahead. With no-one in it! Not a soul. No matter that there were thousands of people and many journalists waiting for him at the next town, he simply had to have some respite, and he brought the Spirit of St Louis in for an expert landing.

  Silence. Blessed silence. The peace was so overwhelming, he decided he needed to spend the night there, a night that would set the course of the rest of his life, as he took some hard decisions. ‘I would reduce my obligations, give away some of my possessions, concentrate my business and social interests. I would take advantage of the civilisation to which I had been born without losing the basic qualities of life from which all works of men must emanate.’13

  Enter Sidney Myer.

  It was at this time that, through the loose network of well-heeled Australians living in California—of whom Harold Kingsford Smith was a notable—Kingsford Smith, Ulm and Anderson met the Melbourne retailing magnate and got on well with him from the first. Myer was an interesting man of no little ability. Having arrived in Australia from Poland in 1899, speaking practically no English, he had started a store in Bendigo that went bust, then sold various goods door-to-door to rebuild. With his capital re-established, he opened another store in Ballarat that so prospered he was able to open another one and then another one and another one after that, until the beginnings of a whole Myer chain was developing around the country. He had done so well out of the business personally that he and his wife had decided to buy a mansion in Burlingame, just outside San Francisco, and when not in Melbourne—which was most of the time—it was the place they regularly took their holidays.

  One way or another, Myer was a man who had the capacity to back himself against enormous odds and, most importantly, felt a duty to help those who were trying to do the same thing. But really, gentlemen, do you actually think it is possible to fly a plane across the entire Pacific Ocean? They assured him it was feasible, and they had found the very plane to do it in, if only they could get the money together to buy it.

  Well, Mr Myer would like to help. But the thing was, boys, he simply didn’t feel right having any part in a venture of which he was convinced the best-case outcome was that they would only break their necks, and the worst was their being killed outright. Their counter to his concern was that with or without his financial support they would find a way to do it, and he was therefore absolved of any guilt should the worst case indeed happen.

  Finally, Sidney Myer came to a decision. He would simply give them £1500, no strings attached, and it was theirs to do with what they would. If they chose to spend the money on their venture that was their business, and no concern of his. He wished them well.

  Eureka! And a double eureka when, shortly afterwards, the New South Wales government came good after all, with a £1000 extension on the original £3500 guarantee.

  Wilkins agreed to turn the machine over to them on the first condition that he receive a down payment of £1500 immediately, with the rest to be paid once they had left for Australia and their money from the New South Wales government was thus released from escrow. The second condition was that the machine be test-flown and prepared by a pilot chosen by Wilkins, who could also instruct Kingsford Smith on how to handle such a large, multi-engined machine.14

  Done!

  It wasn’t that the flyers were flush with cash, because the process of getting the plane they had bought from George Wilkins back into the air was going to be an expensive one, but they at least had enough to make a down payment of £1500 to Wilkins and use the rest to get the work done.

  Kingsford Smith cabled Wilkins to that effect, and the deal was formalised. The three aviators in San Francisco were now feeling so confident that things were on track that they decided to engage the services of their old mate Bill Todd from the Tahiti to be their navigator. Yes, they had all learnt the rudiments of navigation under his tutelage, but none of them wanted to trust their lives to his own calculations when they could get an expert like Todd to take a leave of absence from his maritime service and join them.

  Todd soon moved into the Roosevelt Hotel with them, on the promise that it would not be long before they were ready to go. He was happy to have a break from shipboard life and, the laws of Prohibition notwithstanding, had soon ferreted out every speakeasy within staggering distance of the hotel. On excursions to such places as Izzy Gomez’s, Monk Young’s, Coffee Dan’s, the House of Shields or Cafe Du Nord, to which you could gain access if you knew the password of the day, Todd was frequently joined by Smithy, who continued to have an enviable capacity to drink a great deal by night, before performing wel
l the next day, before doing it all again the next night and then the next day. (For ones so disposed, California was probably the best place to be during Prohibition. San Franciscans had voted overwhelmingly—83 per cent—against the introduction of the Prohibition laws, and more or less ignored them when they were brought in. Although there were raids, no-one particularly cared. It was, for example, the stuff of legend that the speakeasy in the Hotel D’Oloron on Columbus Street had been raided so many times that when the courts would shut one address down, ‘the owner simply cut a new door in the wall, slapped on a new address and continued pouring drinks’.15)

  Christ! It turned out that every other aspiring aviator in the country had come to the same conclusion about the virtues of the Wright Whirlwind engine as the Australians, who were now informed that they were at the back of a very long queue—ninety orders long in fact—to get their hands on three such engines. It would be a wait of six months, minimum. What to do?

  It was all very well to be in America—land of the free, home of the brave—but they had been there long enough to know that a good lot of the grease on which the wheels of the country turned was who knew who, and how much influence could thus be brought to bear on key decision makers. So it was that via a man who was to become a great friend, Locke T. Harper—a leading executive of the powerful Vacuum Oil Company—they were able to arrange an introduction to Rear Admiral Christian Peables, the US Navy’s second-highest ranking man on the West Coast.