Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (12 page)

Three
WAR!

Rally round the banner of your country,

Take the field with brothers o’er the foam,

On land or sea, wherever you be,

Keep your eye on Germany.

But England, home and beauty have no cause to fear;

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

No! No! No! No! No! Australia will be there…

Australia will be there…

P
OPULAR SONG IN
A
USTRALIA
, 1914–18
¹

A
t 10.15 am on 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro–Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Her Highness the Duchess of Hohenberg, were in an open-topped limousine bathed in bright sunlight, magisterially progressing down a street in Sarajevo, Bosnia–Herzegovina, when a young Serb by the name of Gavrilo Princip ran towards them with a pistol in his hand and fired two shots.
²

A thin stream of blood spurted instantly from the Archduke’s mouth, whereupon the Duchess cried out to her husband of fourteen years, ‘In heaven’s name, what has happened to you?’ And yet, no sooner had she said that, than she too reeled, bleeding from a grievous wound in her abdomen. As she weakened, the Archduke gurgled to his beloved but stricken wife, ‘Sophie, Sophie, don’t die. Stay alive for the children!’

Tragically, both the Duchess and the Archduke passed away shortly afterwards.

Although the assassination in Sarajevo represented to most Australians nothing more than a tiny rumble of dirty thunder on the northern horizon, it was not long before a storm the likes of which no-one had ever seen before, broke out. In a matter of a few weeks, after an outraged Austria–Hungary declared war on Serbia for its failure to take action to quell the subversive organisations that nurtured the likes of Gavrilo Princip, Europe’s two armed blocs were drawn into action against each other. Russia lined up beside her Slavic brothers in Serbia and was joined by France, while Germany stood foursquare with Austria–Hungary.

When, on 4 August, Germany invaded neutral Belgium to get quickly to the French infidels, Britain declared war on Germany and the Great War had begun. Across most of Europe, men, munitions and the machinery of war were mobilised.

At his Fokker Aviatik Gesellschaft factory in Schwerin in north Germany, the struggling young manufacturer Anthony Fokker suddenly received a telegram informing him that his entire stock of aeroplanes would be purchased by the German Army, only shortly before the German Navy tried to do the same thing.
³
Price was no object for either military arm, and a similar injection of funds was apparent across much of Europe, put towards anything that might intensify the war effort.

There were, however, exceptions. In France, on the same day that Fokker received his telegram compelling him to work his factory around the clock, the hero of the cross-Channel flight, Louis Blériot, received a delegation of French government officials at his aircraft factory, Blériot Aéronautique, situated just outside Paris. No matter that in the last six years since his Channel triumph, he and his workers had built more than 800 monoplanes of his design, and that he was the most successful aircraft manufacturer in all of France—he was now to stop work
immediatement.
He and all his men of military age were to at once join the French Army.

Blériot had no choice but to comply, just as factories around the country, bar those staffed mostly by women, had to follow suit for the same reason. It was a week before some form of sanity prevailed and Blériot and his men were released to re-open the factory—just as other key factories were also granted exemption—but even then the reason was not to produce planes at all possible speed. No, the view of the French government was that as the war would be over in six weeks, further orders of planes and munitions would be pointless, and the country would have to focus on fighting with the resources it already had. Flying schools were shut down so that would-be pilots could immediately be shipped to the front line where they would be needed.

In Australia, meantime, things were also moving.

Even before Britain had formally declared war, there was never any doubt where its most loyal offspring stood, right down to its bootstraps: with the British Empire! Speaking at a political meeting at Horsham in Victoria on the last day of July, Australian Prime Minister Joseph Cook made clear his position in reference to the deepening European crisis: ‘Whatever happens, Australia is a part of the Empire right to the full. Remember that when the
Empire
is at war, so is
Australia
at war. That being so, you will see how grave is the situation. So far as the defences go here and now in Australia, I want to make it quite clear that all our resources in Australia are in the Empire and for the Empire and for the preservation and the security of the
Empire.
’
⁴

Just five days later, when Britain did indeed declare war on Germany, Prime Minister Cook was as good as his word, and within twenty-four hours had committed Australia to fighting beside Britain against Germany.

‘It is our baptism of fire,’ the
Sydney Morning Herald
enthused the following day. ‘Australia knows something of the flames of war, but its realities have never been brought so close as they will be in the near future.’
⁵

Borne along by this sudden surge of patriotism, and the desire to fight for what many saw as ‘the Mother Country’, able-bodied men from Sydney to Perth, from Darwin to Hobart, began to flood into recruiting centres to become part of the Australian Imperial Force, which Cook had promised Great Britain would be 20,000 men strong.

One who felt the call, despite his advancing years, was the ageing Lawrence Hargrave. Just two days before war had been formally declared, the 64-year-old had turned up at ten o’clock in the morning at the headquarters of the Coast Artillery at Sydney’s South Head, clutching a faded letter which dated from December 1877. Addressed to Mr Lawrence Hargrave Esq, it read:

I will be glad if you will consider yourself an honorary member of the

No. 5 Battery V.A.

Signed,

W. Gore Beverley, Capt., 5 Volunteer Artillery.

‘I have come to report myself,’ the old man told the bemused sentry as he handed him the letter. In Hargrave’s view this letter, given to him some forty years earlier, entitled him to an immediate position with that branch of the artillery. The commanding officer, no doubt equally bemused, took down Hargrave’s name and address and told him they would be in touch.

There was no such problem for Hargrave’s beloved son Geoffrey, however, and the young man was able to join up immediately, soon finding himself a long, long way from his father’s workshop and part of the 3rd Brigade of the Australian Imperial Force.

As to young Charles Kingsford Smith, he, too, wanted to join up immediately, and was only prevented from doing so by the outright refusal of his parents to co-operate. He was just seventeen years old, and Australian law had it that it was only males at least eighteen years old who could sign up
with
parental permission, and 21-year-olds and older who could join without it. Chilla wasn’t at all worried about his age; he knew of plenty of blokes who simply told fibs about their age and got in. (As a matter of fact, his own plan, developed with his cousin Rupert Swallow was for them to turn up to the recruiting station while wearing shoes with the number ‘18’ painted on the soles. That way, when they were asked ‘Are you over eighteen?’ they could truthfully reply that they were indeed! And yet the plan was no sooner discovered by their respective parents than it was crushed like a grape.
⁶
)

Now, Catherine Kingsford Smith, firmly supported as ever by her husband, simply wouldn’t hear of her last-born engaging in any kind of subterfuge. No. No.
No.
Though it went against the grain for Charles to argue strongly with the mother he adored, on this occasion the young man was so infuriated he threatened not to speak to her for six months unless she relented. After all, his brother Eric had joined up with the merchant navy two years previously and had now transferred to the Royal Australian Navy, so there was already a noble precedent! Yes, dear, but Eric is twenty-seven years old, so it is quite different.

No, it is
not
!

In the end, so passionate was Chilla about joining up that Catherine did relent, a little. She and William agreed that Charles could join up when he turned eighteen, the following February, so long as he promised not to join the infantry,
⁷
and the young man was more or less happy to settle with that. Impatiently, he continued with his work at CSR and followed as closely as he could what was happening with the war, hoping fervently that there would be enough of it left for him to fight in by the time he got there.

An interesting bloke, George Hubert Wilkins. As the thirteenth and last progeny of a struggling pastoral family of South Australia, he had become fascinated with the natural world while spending time as a child with the local Aboriginal tribe, before becoming equally absorbed in things mechanical and scientific via his education at a technical school in Adelaide. At a young age he had formed a theory that the world’s weather was connected, and that if mankind could achieve an understanding of climate patterns in the polar regions, it might enable accurate predictions to be made as to when the devastating droughts he was growing up with in South Australia would hit.

Put together, his theory had sent him on a peripatetic course around the world, which had seen him stow away as a seventeen-year-old on a ship bound for Africa in 1909, only to be kidnapped in Algeria in 1910, before making his escape and heading to London to become a pilot and work as a photographer in the company of a journalist from Yanovka in the Ukraine by the name of Leon Trotsky. He then found work as a war correspondent in the Turkey–Bulgaria war of 1912, where he was captured and nearly killed by firing squad and finally became a member of what was intended to be a five-year expedition to the Arctic regions way north of Canada…which…was where he was now, asleep in an igloo just inside of the Arctic Circle and dreaming of an easier way to do such an exploration. By aeroplane!
⁸
By flying
over
the beautiful white wonderland, free as a bird, instead of endlessly trudging through it with ice-cold feet in snowshoes, fighting frostbite as yapping husky dogs hauled sleds through the eternal whiteness. True, in a plane there would the risk of great turbulence in a blizzard and being heavily shaken by the buffeting winds, shaken…shaken…

Oh. He was actually being shaken awake. It was a trapper, someone he’d never seen before, a stranger who had just made his way into camp. An enormous man with snow still on his beard and the squinty eyes of one who has spent too much time trying to shield himself from snowblindness. And he had a couple of very interesting bits of news.

The first, after a bit of chitchat, was that, ‘that damn fool
scientist
Wilkins has died after shanghaiing his crew’.
⁹
Not at all offended, Wilkins was overjoyed to have been called a ‘scientist’, and didn’t bother to reveal either his identity or the fact that he had shanghaied no-one.

Which was as well, because the second bit of information was even more stunning…‘By the way,’ the fellow asked him, ‘have you heard the news?’
¹⁰

What news?

War. A big one. The last thing the trapper had heard was that the British were advancing through Germany towards Berlin at a rate of 20 miles a day, so the show was no doubt over.

A
war
, involving the British Empire and hence Australia, too, and he, George Wilkins, wasn’t part of it? Wilkins was stricken. It didn’t seem right. A feeling that the Arctic was not the place for him to be was compounded shortly afterwards when he received word that his father had died after a long illness, leaving his mother a widow. Despite his contract with Vilhajalmur Stefansson to stay in the Arctic for another year,
¹¹
Wilkins resolved to briefly return home to Australia, see his mother and join up to the war effort at the first opportunity. He too only hoped that it might still be going by the time he could get there…

In fact, after the first few months had passed there was still plenty of war to go around for everybody who wanted a part of it. And rather than British forces advancing through Germany towards Berlin, as Wilkins had first heard, it was close to the other way around. The troops of Kaiser Wilhelm II had stormed across the Belgian border in early August 1914 and, following their plan, were soon well on the road to Paris. Then, however, a combined British and French force had stopped them, in part because of the superb defensive capabilities of the newly invented machine gun together with the overwhelming power of modern artillery. It had been discovered that machine guns particularly, set up in well-defended positions and covering open ground, could halt even the most ferocious army, and that is exactly what had happened. Of course, the Germans had discovered the same thing when it came to stopping the Allied counterattack. The only way for both sides was to dig in to hold the positions they had, then try to outflank the other, whereupon the other would dig in some more to hold what
they
had and…