by P Fitzsimons
Flying. Flying. Flying. Still flying. And flying on. Beneath them, little in the landscape changed. It remained as inhospitable as ever, and impenetrable for any aircraft that wanted to remain intact after coming to earth. The only thing that did change was the falling amount of precious petrol left in their tanks, and the rising amount of concern they felt. And then they saw another settlement, also a mission to judge by the crosses dotted around at the top of every building.
Now more desperate than ever, Ulm dropped out another message: Please place white sheets pointing direction of Wyndham, and mark in larger figures number of miles.42
This time the message resulted in an instant burst of activity below with people darting indoors before reappearing bearing sheets. While they sorted themselves out, Ulm and Kingsford Smith checked their petrol gauges and did some calculations. By their best reckoning they had just two hours of flying time left if all went well.
If that was bad, still worse was the arrow and number below them. For a lot of sheets and towels laid out on the ground clearly made an arrow pointing due east—yes, east, there could be no doubt about it—and the number that went with it clearly said: 250.
But how could that be? This new information was so confusing because there was no way that the two directions they had been given could both be right. And yet there could be little doubt that these last directions were correct, so clear and precise were they. With little choice but to give it a go, Smithy turned the Southern Cross due east and concentrated on throttling down to get as much distance out of the petrol they had remaining as they could possibly manage.
Clive Chateau knew it, he just knew it. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. It had to be. All day long at Wyndham he had been hoping against hope—even as the rain had continued to belt down beneath a low cloud cover—to hear the distant throb of approaching engines. All through that grim morning and into the early afternoon, despite hoping against hope, he was not surprised to hear nothing. For how could Kingsford Smith possibly find the small town of Wyndham in such conditions—an even smaller dot in the western wilderness than Fiji was in the Pacific Ocean? Clive was not the only one who was worried. Through all the trials and tribulations of the Southern Cross, McWilliams had been sending out an account of their situation, which meant that radio operators throughout Australia, and through them the press and then the flyers’ families were aware that the men were lost, low on fuel, and running out of possible solutions to potential disaster.
It was clear that the situation was hopeless. The Southern Cross was battling a headwind and fuel had fallen so low that it was obvious they were not going to be able to get remotely close to Wyndham. The only sensible thing to do, it seemed, was to head back to the last mission they had seen and bring the Southern Cross down as near to it as they could get. That way at least they would have help…and yet it soon became devastatingly clear that even that was a forlorn hope as the engines were clearly running on fumes alone. With just minutes remaining, at best, until the engines cut out on them, Smithy’s eyes roved such landscape as they could see through the storm looking for a spot to land where they would not be killed on impact. Nothing looked remotely promising, with boulders, ravines, termite mounds, gum trees and the distinctive boab trees all conspiring to deny the Southern Cross a single flat, open stretch.
And then he saw it. Up ahead about a mile, and a short distance to the right was a small patch of flat ground. It was far too small to land safely on if it was dry, but it was clearly muddy and that meant he would be able to slow down all the more quickly by bogging the wheels, if he could just touch down on the right spot.
The easiest decisions in all the world to make are, of course, those when there is really no other choice, and this was just such an occasion. With the engines threatening to cut at any second there would not even be time to fly around the intended landing spot to reconnoitre, and he would have to nail the landing first time.
For McWilliams in the back, there was just enough time to get out a quick message on the radio to the waiting world:
Have become hopelessly lost in dense bush. Now faced with forced landing at place we believe to be 150 miles from Wyndham in rotten country. Wish us luck. We will communicate again as soon as possible.43
Staggering along at just above stalling speed, Kingsford Smith dragged the Southern Cross in, nose-high, hanging on the screaming propellers, aiming to touch down on the first yard of mud. Suddenly the windscreen was filled with the vision of boulders and trees whipping past on either side. Triple throttles chopped, and the Southern Cross dropped like a shot bird. Contact! The wheels dug into the soft ground and instantly all four of the crew were hurled forward as the spent bird went from flying through air to slushing through wet mud. Smithy stayed wrestling the wheel and dancing a hot jig on the rudder pedals, desperately trying to bring the plane to a controlled stop.
Somehow, extraordinarily, after just 100 squelching yards he managed it, switched off the engines and…
And it was always like this.
After a forced landing, or a crash, there was the sudden cessation of that monotonous blare of the motors, replaced by searing silence, save for the tinkling of the exhaust manifolds cooling, and the wonderful realisation that you were still alive! And substantially unhurt!
It felt like a miracle.
Thirteen
COFFEE ROYAL
A nation’s hero may become a nation’s whipping boy overnight…
CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH, 1929
Somehow, somehow, somehow, in that godforsaken part of the world, Smithy, against all odds, had got the plane down intact, and his crew with it.
‘Smithy,’ Hal Litchfield said, after he had picked himself up from the bulkhead where he had landed, ‘you’re a marvel.’
‘Pure luck,’ Kingsford Smith smiled in reply.
‘No, not luck, Smithy,’ Charles Ulm said, and he meant it. ‘Nobody else could have put her down in this mud without tipping her on her nose. Look, she didn’t run an inch over a hundred yards!’1
McWilliams jumped down from the fuselage and pointed out to the others how close a spindly 12-foot gum tree had come to the propeller on the starboard engine. Just another foot forward and the propeller would have shattered against it. As it was, it looked like if they had petrol and a rough flat strip to work with, they could take off again!
But where exactly were they?
Apart from lost-lost in the never-never, that is? That would be something they would have to work out in the hours to come, though it was at least clear that they had landed on a swamp with many tidal inlets. For now, the most important thing was to take stock of just how they were going to survive until help could get to them.
The stocktake of available food did not take long, as the base of it was seven sad sandwiches. Inconceivably, the emergency rations that were meant to be in the plane had been removed by persons unknown before the flight, and the only thing approaching provisions that they had on board was 8 pounds of Allenbury’s Baby Food intended for the postmaster’s baby at Wyndham. Completing their raggedy roundup was a couple of pounds of coffee, a box of matches, a flask of brandy and a packet of biscuits. The one necessity they didn’t lack was fresh water, as they found a waterhole nearby.
Well, there was no other option but make the best of it. To get as good an understanding as they could about the place they had landed, Smithy and Ulm tramped through the muddy swampland—while dodging crocodiles!—to reach and climb to the top of the only hill in the area. Once there they looked in every direction, hoping against hope to see any sign of the mission, or perhaps a column of smoke that would indicate some human habitation nearby, but all they could see was mile after mile of swampland, just as they had seen from the air. At least from that height the wings and body of the Southern Cross stood out as a massive silver and blue cross against the landscape, and they had some hope that it would be easy to spot from above.
By the time they got back to the plane, M
cWilliams had succeeded in doing what he could never have done while the plane was flying, which was to rig up a long-wave aerial, by wrapping copper wire as high around the tree in front of the propeller as he could get it, and already he had news! Despite the roaring of the engines which he could still hear in his ears if not in actuality, he had picked up signals, and had already heard Perth tell Darwin that the Southern Cross was missing. That was promising, as surely it couldn’t be long before planes came looking for them, and they would be saved.
And so, after getting a desultory fire going, and nibbling sparingly on half a sandwich each, followed by a little bit of baby food—the Ritz, it wasn’t—they decided to follow up with a chaser of coffee mixed with brandy.
‘Well, mates, we may be lost, but at least we’ve got coffee royal to drink!’2 Smithy mocked, as he took his first sip.
A short time later they settled down for the night. Or at least tried to…Only minutes after it became dark, they had visitors. First in ones and twos. Then in their dozens. Then in their hundreds. Then in their thousands! Mosquitoes! Swarms of them! On their faces. Their arms. Their legs. Everywhere! Stinging little mongrels. Noisy little bastards that sounded, yes, like three-engined Fokkers. In the ensuing hours each man cursed, slapped and cursed some more, trying to snatch a few minutes’ sleep here and there until the weight of the combined pain of all the stings outweighed their extreme fatigue, after a twenty-eight and a half hour flight which had finished in a semi-controlled crash-landing. Mongrels.
It was no April Fool’s joke—not bloody likely it wasn’t. On the morning of Easter Monday, 1 April 1929, Australia awoke to the news—emblazoned across every front page in the land—that the Southern Cross was missing, and had very likely crash-landed in extremely rough country.
Six-column bold-face headlines in subsequent editions told much of the story.
SOUTHERN CROSS FORCED DOWN IN BAD COUNTRY3
SILENCE UNBROKEN
SEARCH FOR THE SOUTHERN CROSS4
VEIL OF SILENCE
NO NEWS OF SOUTHERN CROSS5
OMINOUS SILENCE: WHERE IS ‘VETERAN’ SOUTHERN CROSS?6
GRAVEST FEARS FOR SAFETY OF SOUTHERN CROSS CREW7
It was Sydney’s Sun that went biggest with the story announcing, with huge headlines across the entire page, that at dawn of that very day, a rescue plane, sponsored by the Sun in conjunction with the Melbourne Herald, would be on its way to find Smithy and the boys.
Which was to the good, because it seemed unlikely that the Federal government would be sending any search planes. That much had been made clear by Prime Minister Stanley Bruce who, when accosted at his front door while wearing a bathrobe and slippers by a Daily Telegraph journalist, and asked why the government wasn’t doing anything about finding the Southern Cross, had shrugged his shoulders and replied that it was not for the government to ‘interfere in private ventures…’
His response was not good enough for many people in Sydney, particularly. For it was there that a friend of Smithy’s by the name of John Garlick, who was also Sydney’s Chief Civic Commissioner—effectively a State government-imposed lord mayor, after Sydney Council had been accused of graft—started up a Citizens Southern Cross Rescue Committee and held a mass meeting at Sydney Town Hall to raise money to launch a serious search.
‘Australia’s national heroes are in danger,’ he cried. ‘They are in dire distress. It is the duty of the Australian people to hurry to their rescue.’8
And so said all of them. And so said all of their wallets.
No less than £2000 was promised in the first twenty minutes of the meeting. Just two days after that, with thousands of Sydneysiders contributing everything from a shilling to several pounds, they had gathered £7000. With that money, they were able to hire the Canberra, a de Havilland DH.61 Giant Moth six-passenger, single-engined biplane, boasting at the controls a distinguished former Australian Flying Corps pilot by the name of Les Holden (of the Holden’s Motor Body Builders family) and his crew, to begin the search. For his part, Smithy’s old boss at West Australian Airways, Major Norman Brearley, was quick to send his three best pilots out in three of his planes—half of his fleet—to search the Kimberley. Within a day, pilots Jim Woods, Bertie Heath and Eric Chater—all former colleagues and good friends of Smithy from his days of flying with West Australian Airways—were on their way, each searching his allotted part of the map, before returning to refuel and going out again to the next part. (The flight of Woods was the one sponsored by the Sydney Sun and Melbourne Herald.) Time was of the essence. After all, the natives in those parts were said to be cannibals!9
At Arabella Street, the wider Kingsford Smith family had gathered at the homestead. This was a crisis, and a time for them all to come together. Such was their confidence in Chilla, they felt certain he would have found a way to come down all right, and it was just a question of finding him. They were all conscious that he had been ill with the flu for the week before departure.
‘I do hope he has not suffered a relapse,’ William had told the Daily Guardian the day before. Then, pointing out his newly renovated house, all of which had been done at Chilla’s direction and expense, he proudly added, ‘Not many of the outside public know this side of Charlie’s nature. They know him only as a hero of the air.’10
Between them, the Kingsford Smith clan decided that Leofric would be the one liaising with the authorities to ensure that everything that could be done, was done. In the meantime, Catherine stayed glued to the radio, hoping for news, while William manned the phone, fielding no fewer than fifty calls from family, friends and journalists in the first day. The board of Australian National Airways had equally come together at their offices in Martin Place and were meeting with radio and flying experts to try to narrow down just where the Southern Cross could be.
Meanwhile, watching all the developments extremely closely was Keith Anderson, who of course knew the country around where Smithy and that prick Ulm had disappeared very well, courtesy of his time with West Australian Airlines. A regular at Sydney’s Customs House Hotel, situated close to Circular Quay, Anderson told anyone who would listen that he was convinced that the Southern Cross would be found somewhere in the Port George area, because he had analysed all the communications from the plane, and it was obvious what had happened. They had overshot Wyndham in the storm, hit the coast, and then bounced back and forth looking for it, until they ran out of petrol.
‘I would give anything to be able to go and look for the boys,’ Anderson said in the presence of the hotelier, John Cantor.
‘Right,’ Cantor immediately replied. ‘I will back you.’11
And indeed, Anderson had been convincing enough in his analysis that it wasn’t long before Cantor raised some funds from friends and acquaintances who also believed it made sense to send Anderson in his new Widgeon to start looking. And no matter that the plane was yet to receive its official certificate of registration. There was no time to worry about paperwork.
Anderson began immediate preparations, engaging—surprisingly, although he was in desperate need of any work he could get—Bobby Hitchcock to go with him as his mechanic. They were going to find Smithy!
And then, in response to the general outcry, the government relented and the prime minister at last ordered the seaplane carrier HMAS Albatross, which was then berthed in Sydney, to head to the other side of the massive continent with six RAAF No. 101 Fleet Co-operation Flight Supermarine Seagull III amphibians on board to begin searching the area where the Southern Cross was thought to have disappeared. In the meantime, luggers had left the rich pearling grounds off the West Australian coast and begun searching the coast for any sign of wreckage that might have washed ashore.
Now, Australia watched, and waited. Anxiously…
SOUTHERN CROSS MEN HAVE NOW BEEN MISSING OVER 40 HOURS:
NATION’S ANXIETY
GRIM SILENCE STILL BROODS OVER LOST PLANE
DESPERATE SEARCH FOR MISSING AVIATORS—
ANOTHER DISAPPOINTING DAY12
What no-one could work out was why there had been no contact from the Southern Cross. After all, it had both a wireless and wireless operator on board. What on earth were they doing out there? Were they alive? Were they dead, or horribly injured, perhaps? What on earth were they doing?!
Basically, they were starving, even as the mosquitoes feasted. Slowly and surely. The sandwiches were gone after just the first couple of days, and the baby food had to be divided into tiny portions and mixed with water to make it last longer. After an attempt by ‘Mac’ to hunt for game with his revolver came to nothing, they decided to go after rather smaller game. Specifically, well, there were…snails. No, they didn’t provide as much meat as the birds or kangaroos Mac had been hoping for, but by God they were a whole lot easier to catch and could be found low down on the mangrove trees. Though they tasted godawful, and were gritty with sand, once boiled up and with their shells cracked off with stones, they at least provided a tiny bit of sustenance to fuel the many activities the Southern Cross crew embarked upon.