Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (16 page)

And yet sometimes, lying in his trench, shuddering, aching, trying vainly to take his mind off the agonising pain of it all—telling himself that at least he was
alive
, as opposed to so many of his comrades who had been lost—Kingsford Smith would find himself gazing up at the daytime skies, where Allied planes would whizz about and occasionally engage their Turkish counterparts. From the first days of the Gallipoli action, both sides had used land-based planes and seaplanes—with the Allies using a prototype aircraft carrier, HMS
Ark Royal
, as their base—in reconnaissance missions, bombing runs, antisubmarine and shipping strikes. And aircraft activity had only increased as the months had passed.

Whatever else, to Kingsford Smith sheltering in his ditch, it was clearly a different existence up there. Not for those pilots, the mud, the muck, the wretched trenches. They were
free.
Before the war Kingsford Smith had never seen a plane, but he was fascinated by the mechanics of the machines, the wonder of how on earth they managed to stay aloft, and he began to ponder again the possibilities of a change in his military career and becoming a pilot.

Back in sunny Sydney, Catherine Kingsford Smith did not like it one bit. By the closing months of 1915 there was a tone in her son’s letters that she barely recognised. Gone was the enthusiasm, the joy, the sense of adventure, the sheer cheekiness that had previously characterised his letters. Everything now seemed to be downbeat, glum, occasionally even bordering on fearful, which was so unlike him.

‘Snipers are pretty bad at the foot of our gully,’ he had written to them on 27 November, ‘and get our chaps fairly often. One has to do a sprint, or else have a bullet after him.’
⁵

For Catherine, the image of her son in Turkey, pursued by bullets with his every move, was enough to keep her awake at night, tossing and turning, worrying about him. And yet the happy circumstance was that by the time the family had received the troubling letter, the evacuation of Gallipoli—along with her son Charles—had already been successfully completed.

In late October, the decision had been taken by the newly arrived Major General Sir Charles Monro that the only sane thing to do was to withdraw and, despite sneers from Winston Churchill about Monro—‘He came; he saw: he capitulated.’—things moved quickly from then. After the worst winter storms in forty years hit the peninsula in late November, with hundreds of Allied soldiers getting frostbite, in early December the evacuations of the 136,000 men began. Each night more and more shivering soldiers were moved onto ships, with those who remained instructed to be as active, conspicuous and noisy as possible to make it appear to the Turks that the Allied presence was undiminished. By day, hostile Allied aeroplanes patrolled the skies in heavy numbers to keep Turkish reconnaissance planes from spotting any telltale activity at Anzac Cove.

Kingsford Smith and his men of the 4th Light Horse got out on the night of 11 December, and by 18 December there were just 40,000 shivering soldiers left. Over the next two nights, every man jack of them got away, with the Turks stunned to find on the morning of 20 December that the invaders had gone. Gallipoli had been successfully evacuated, with not a single casualty—a stunning military feat.

For Kingsford Smith, as for his fellow Australian soldiers, while there was disappointment that their campaign had not succeeded, there was also relief to be out of there—‘I really am glad to see the last of it,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘No doubt there will be mixed feelings at home about this great retreat, but in everyone’s opinion it was the only thing to be done as advance was impossible, and to continue there meant the loss of valuable lives every day which could be ill spared. One thing everyone agrees is that the Turks are honourable and clean fighters and have never been guilty of anything to earn the name “Unspeakable”.’
⁶

The most wonderful thing of all was to be back in Egypt. Fresh meat! Vegetables! Children!
Women!
People going about their daily lives without being plastered with shot and shell. And, from freezing to his very core in the Turkish trenches, the eighteen-year-old was now back in the Egypt’s Sinai Desert where, on a hot day, the temperature could reach as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit
in the shade.
At least it would have been that hot in the shade, if there had been any shade to be in. But there wasn’t. There were just vast tracts of endless desert, and the Australian soldiers were the only living things silly enough to be in it, burning up in the heat. The first package Chilla received from his parents upon his return contained a wonderfully warm sheepskin vest that would have been a godsend just a couple of weeks earlier.
⁷

In this brief respite from the war, Kingsford Smith and his comrades frequently went swimming in the Suez Canal in the heat of the day, and often paddled out to passing steamers in the hope that some kind soul would throw them a tin of cigarettes or some other luxury. Both Australia, and the war, seemed far, far away…

The lassitude of the desert notwithstanding, in March Smithy was able to proudly write to his parents that after a promotion he was now Corporal Charles Kingsford Smith, and could eat in the Non-Commissioned Officers’ Mess. No more washing up!

Among British pilots, a rather different version of the Psalm 23 was gaining favour, most particularly among those who flew the rather unreliable BE2 planes. Known as the ‘Pilots’ Psalm’, its rhythm was simple.

The B.E.2c is my ‘bus, therefore I shall want.

He maketh me to come down in green pastures.

He leadeth me to where I will not go.

He maketh me to be sick, he leadeth me astray on all cross-country flights.

Yea, though I fly over no-man’s land where mine enemies would compass me about I fear much evil,

for thou art with me,

thy joystick and thy prop discomfort me.

Thou preparest a crash before me in the presence of mine enemies,

thy RAF anointeth my hair with oil,

thy tank leaketh badly.

Surely to goodness thou shalt not follow me all the days of my life,

else I shall dwell in the House of Colney Hatch forever.
⁸

Oh, the sheer pleasure of it!

After six months in the dirty dust-bowl of North Africa—the hazy horizons, sandstorms, surly Arabs, shiver-me-timbers nights and boiling hot days—to be in Europe was not far short of paradise. After a slightly nervous jaunt across the Mediterranean—looking out for German subs the whole way—Charles Kingsford Smith, with the rest of the men of his Signal Corps, arrived in Marseilles on 8 June 1916 and exulted in the wonder of being back in the very hub of western civilisation.

Trees in the boulevards! Cafes! Pubs! People waving at you in the streets! Arriving in France after well over a year in Turkey and Egypt was like coming home, exciting a feeling like you were back among your own people. No matter that only shortly after arriving in the Mediterranean city they were entrained to the town of Bailleul, a little east of Armentières in the north-west of France—it still felt like civilisation once more.

The thing that Chilla most enjoyed about being in Europe? The French girls. How beautiful they were! As he gushed to his parents in one enthusiastic letter: ‘Some of them would turn the head of a statue.’
⁹

But to business—the business of war. Only a short time after arriving in France, Chilla was promoted to the position of sergeant in his motorbike section of the 4th Divisional Signal Company, meaning another slight rise in pay, and a lot more responsibility. To this point there had been no doubt about his ability to lead men—or at least to be the most dominant one in a group of friends—it was just that the army was now giving him a chance to demonstrate that such ability could be useful in war.

As it happened, Chilla had landed in France at a particularly difficult time in the terrible saga of the Western Front. The Battle of the Somme had started on the first day of July 1916, as the Allies tried to punch through the German lines on a 12-mile front, north and south of the Somme River. On that first day the British—attacking heavily defended German positions across open ground—suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead. Just under three weeks later, as part of the same battle, it was Australia’s turn…

On the warm evening of 19 July, the Australian 5th Division attacked across a boggy 400 yards of open ground the entrenched German positions atop Fromelles ridge, at the behest of a British general for whom it seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t. One survivor, W.H. ‘Jimmy’ Downing, later recorded what happened. ‘Stammering scores of German machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat criss-crossed lattice of death…Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb…Men were cut in two by streams of bullets [that] swept like whirling knives…It was the charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless.’
¹⁰

At rollcall after just the first catastrophic night, the 5th Australian Division had lost 5533 killed or wounded. Nevertheless, three more Australian divisions were thrown into the fray over the next few weeks, and another 23,000 Australian lives were lost or shattered.
¹¹

Into just such a scene of carnage and devastation did Kingsford Smith enter, when he arrived at the front on an evening in late July. If Marseilles had been a different world from Cairo and Gallipoli,
this
was a place beyond his previous imagination, even for one of his already horrifying experience. From the moment of his arrival on the front line, the air was riven by the man-made thunder of devastating artillery fire, and the muddy, bloody ground—where green meadows once had been—was torn apart as shells landed. Men screamed and died around him, while others sobbed openly, simply unable to go on. In his own dug-out on that first black night, Kingsford Smith lay, vainly hoping to catch some sleep, but it was soon apparent that this would be impossible, and he switched instead to trying to survive through the night, pressing himself tightly into the embrace of a mother earth that was herself shuddering with every fresh outrage of artillery fire that landed upon her. The dawn, the dawn, the dawn…would he ever see one again?

Somewhere near 4.30 am, the German artillery loaded their weapon of choice for killing Allied soldiers on the Western Front, a
Minenwerfer
—literally, mine thrower—capable of hurling across a short distance a 220-pound shell, of which 110 pounds were explosive, with devastating results. Following their strict routine, the German officer yelled above the cacophony of battle, ‘
Feeertig
!’ (Reeady!) and then ‘
Feuer
!’ (Fire!)

An instant later the gun erupted like an angry volcano, with the shell disappearing in a searing streak of flame into the darkness, as it was lobbed towards the Australian lines. Of course the Germans didn’t know exactly where it would land, only that it would be right among those who had been sending exactly the same kind of devastation on them and theirs.

This particular shell, however, reached its peak perhaps some 500 yards ahead of where Charles Kingsford Smith lay, and then began its descent. Did it have his name on it? Too early to tell…

With every gust of wind and reverberation of air around it, the shell’s descent slightly changed direction—every tiny such change making a huge difference as to exactly where it would land and detonate. In his dug-out, Kingsford Smith lay wide awake—
Had he really been so naïve as to think of war as simply an adventure? What on earth had made him come to the conclusion that nothing could be worse than Gallipoli?
Even over the sound of so many other exploding shells all around, he now heard a whistling, getting louder, screeching now, squealing…
was this it?
…and involuntarily flexed his whole body and covered his ears, as if that might possibly save him.

The shell landed in the soft, bloodied mud just 20 yards away from him and detonated an instant later, hurling earth and bodies everywhere. Much of the former and parts of the latter landed on Kingsford Smith and, for a split second, everything was indeed blackness, precisely as he feared death might be. But then he took stock. The fact that he wanted to breathe meant he wasn’t dead. He was still alive, despite the weight of muck now upon him. Somehow, barely, he moved, and struggled to push his head up to the surface, managing to burst through to the open air once more to take big, gasping breaths, almost as though,
in extremis
, mother earth had given birth to him once more.
¹²

Welcome to the Western Front.

Kingsford Smith did make dawn of that day, not that it provided much relief. And then he could actually see what he had only imagined the night before. It was all so much worse—mud, blood, barbed wire, grotesquely shattered corpses with eyes staring to eternity, men weeping, explosions near and far, and nothing, absolutely
nothing
resembling the world he once knew.