Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (19 page)

Into his logbook that evening Kingsford Smith wrote enthusiastically ‘FIRST SOLO’, and beneath that, with apparent good humour, ‘CRASHED!’ No matter: the saying among pilots at the time was that ‘no pilot is any good until he has broken wood’,
²⁷
and, as it happened, Kingsford Smith was not the only subsequently famous aviator to have a rather unprepossessing beginning on his first time solo. As a matter of fact, Baron von Richthofen himself had also had a difficult time of it. On his own first solo flight he had neglected to throttle back enough and made his approach to the landing field far too fast, with his left wing too low. The result was that instead of gliding smoothly back to earth on a gentle enough angle that the plane’s wheels could caress it, he smashed into the ground and everything gave way in a scream of wrenching steel, torn struts and flying bits and pieces. What had been a plane was now just a mess. Remarkably, a devastated von Richthofen was still able to walk away from it.

Not to worry, his commanding officer had told him, smiling wryly. ‘
Üb weiter.
’ (Keep practising.) Which von Richthofen did, although he was to fail his first examination a fortnight later.

Alas for the Allies, those days of failure by the Red Baron were long gone. And while Kingsford Smith’s April solo made it a great month for him personally, it was a grievously bloody month for the Royal Flying Corps, far and away their worst on record. The cynical press called the pilots and their BE2c craft ‘Fokker Fodder’ and it was in no small part because of the Red Baron.

As the Allies launched a two-pronged offensive on the Western Front, with the British attacking at Arras and the French on the Aisne, British forces relied on their air arms to do heavy reconnaissance and artillery spotting work, providing superb hunting for the likes of the Red Baron and his
Jasta 11.

By this time, Manfred von Richthofen’s younger brother, Lothar, who was also in
Jasta 11
, had convinced him that having the only plane on the Western Front painted red made him a target like no other, and that as his fame grew the Allies would seek him out and destroy him at any cost. The solution was for all pilots in von Richthofen’s
Jasta
to have their planes painted red, with some minor variations on each one. Lothar’s red plane had yellow trimmings; Schäfer painted the back of his fuselage and rudder black; while Karl Allmenröder had a daub of white on his plane’s nose; Kurt Wolff used green and so on.
²⁸
Soon, other
Jasta
s followed suit with different colours, most particularly those that came under von Richthofen’s command, for with his continued success he was quickly given control of other squadrons.

Only the Red Baron’s Albatros remained insolently in all red, quickly identifiable to his flying comrades, but no longer the sole target that he had been. And so was born von Richthofen’s ‘Flying Circus’, so called by the Allies because of the bright colours that were now flying around all over the skies of France, before returning to their canvas hangars at night, not unlike circus tents. Wherever the fighting was heaviest, so would be the Circus, with von Richthofen in the lead.

In the month of April 1917, alone, von Richthofen’s
Jasta 11
shot down eighty-nine Allied planes, of which the Red Baron personally accounted for twenty-one.

Some of those shot from the skies would, of course, live to fly again. One such survivor was a big bear of a man, a West Australian by the name of Norman Brearley, who had achieved great renown within his squadron of the Royal Flying Corps for his daring manoeuvre to bring down a heavily defended German observation balloon. Soaring way above it, he had intentionally stalled his plane by lifting its nose with insufficient throttle, pushing his foot down hard on the rudder bar at the exact moment the engine stopped and then, with his joystick pulled back, steeled himself. Sure enough, in an instant his plane was spinning earthwards as if it had been hit, and was now out of control and not worth wasting any more ammunition on. Only at the last second, still above the balloon, did Brearley kick the rudder again and then push forward on his joystick to bring the plane back under control and level out a little, just in time to fire his machine guns on the balloon from close quarters and blow it out of the skies. The force of the explosion shook his plane frightfully, but he survived.

Only a few short weeks later, however, Brearley took a bullet from ground fire through both of his lungs, and this sent him into a crunching crash-landing in the middle of no-man’s-land. Crawling out of the wreckage more dead than alive, the 26-year-old was saved by a brave Scottish soldier who crawled under fire to retrieve him, and upon medical examination was told he would never fly again.

Well, he’d see about that. Sent home as an invalid, at every port that his ship stopped at on the way back to Perth, he dived over the side and swam back and forth alongside the vessel, and underwater for as long as he could, determined to strengthen his lungs…
²⁹

Instruction continued. By May 1917, Kingsford Smith was training in a SPAD S.VII, a single-seater biplane fighter from the Sociéte Pour l’Aviation et ses Dérivées, Blériot’s factory in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. It was a plane that had already achieved great success on the Western Front, most particularly in the hands of the French hero Georges Guynemer. (Guynemer was, in fact, such a hero that when he died, French school children were taught that he had flown so high that he simply could not come down again.) True, it was said of the SPAD that if ever you lost engine power it had ‘the gliding angle of a brick’, but while so ever the engine worked it could be a very effective weapon.

Now that Kingsford Smith and his fellow cadets could actually fly a plane, the next thing they needed to learn was how to shoot down the enemy. In subsequent weeks they were taught how to fly in staggered formation (six planes, for example, would usually fly in two Vs, with one above and behind the other); how to follow the signals of the squadron leader as in, when he waggled his wings once it was a signal to attack, twice and it was time to withdraw, and so forth.

As to how to manoeuvre so as to best shoot down other planes, this was most particular. The essential idea was to be able to swoop down on your opponent from above, in a position where the enemy pilot would be powerless to see you approaching and you could simply shoot them out of the skies. If the enemy plane had an observer with a machine gun then the same thing applied—if you came at it from the tail, the observer wouldn’t be able to fire at you for fear of shooting off his own tail. There was also, of course, instruction in how to prevent exactly the same happening to you, and how to take evasive action when one found oneself under attack.

The key to a lot of the manoeuvres was
speed
and
height.
If in doubt, the pilots were advised to go fast and go high. The faster and higher you went the less likely it was that the enemy ‘dog’ could get up behind you. And the higher you went the more you could see, and your height could always be converted to even more speed. If you spied anything below, you could dive down upon it 60 per cent faster than the speed of level flight. If you needed to get away when under attack yourself, diving down would gain you maximum velocity.

Now, whatever else happens, ‘
Beware the Hun in the Sun!
’ Remember that just as you will want to swoop down from on high, so too will the enemy want to do the same, so as you fly, keep glancing skywards for any sign of them. Their preference will be to attack you with the sun directly behind them, making them effectively invisible in the glare.

There were so many things to learn, and so little time to learn them in, and yet, though studying hard was not really in his nature, Kingsford Smith applied himself as never before. This was not some dull conjugation of Latin verbs; this was perhaps the difference between life and death.

Chaps, if you are hit and find yourself spinning towards earth, one thing is extremely important: a pilot’s instinct when in a spin is to
pull back
on the joystick to try to bring the nose up and flatten out, but you mustn’t do that. When spinning downwards, you must understand the wings are no longer producing sufficient lift, and the aerodynamic forces on your plane have changed to the point where the correct response to get out of it is counterintuitive. Indeed, back in 1914, an Australian chap by the name of Harry Hawker risked his own life in a Sopwith Pup over Brooklands to prove that when you are in a spin you must push the joystick
forward
(after applying pressure on the rudder opposite to the direction in which you are spinning), and that is your best chance of bringing the plane back under control. As a matter of fact, if you really master the art, you could even use it as an evasive manoeuvre to lose height rapidly so that any enemy plane that tries to match your spin and follow you will be incapable of drawing a bead on you, and the current reckoning was that the German planes were likely to experience structural failure when diving at high speed if the pilot chose not to spin with you, so you were a winner every way.

And so it went. The course was not easy—in fact it was so arduous and dangerous that over one-third of Kingsford Smith’s class did not complete it through failure, injury or death.

Nevertheless, finally, after all the training was done, the great day came in early June 1917 when Smithy was posted to No. 23 Squadron and was on his way to the Western Front to actually fly against the Germans! True, there would be still a little more training to do once they got there, but the main thing was that No. 23 Squadron was initially based by an airstrip next to la Lovie Chateau, on the beautiful flat farmland, just 8 miles to the north-west of the Belgian town of Ypres, where the battles on the Western Front were at their most vicious. Initially, No. 23 Squadron’s role—commensurate with their official motto ‘Always on the Attack’
³⁰
—would be to fly over the lines to attack both German troops and observation balloons, as well as whatever enemy planes they came across.

Was Smithy perhaps a little unrealistic in his expectations of what awaited him? Perhaps. At the very least, the commanding officer of the squadron, Major Wilkinson, decided it was necessary to take him in hand before he went on active duty and tell it to him straight.

‘Now listen, young fellow,’ the old man said, in words that Smithy would never forget. ‘You’re going to die. In fact, you’re as good as dead now. Do you know that we are losing three men a day from this outfit, and every one of them are young fools like you? You can’t fly. You know nothing of aerial warfare and you are due to go out like a lamp. The ones who live are the ones who obey orders. Get this, and get it once and for all. Obey your patrol leader always. If you lose your patrol mates in the air, turn and fly straight back here. Do that for weeks until you know something about your machine and something about this bloody business we’re at, and then you might have a chance of doing some good in the squadron.’
³¹

Oh yes, and welcome to France.

Though of course he was slightly anxious about what might await him, one thing that continued to give Kingsford Smith confidence and a curious kind of faith that he would be okay, whatever the major said, was his treasured photo of Nellie Stewart, which he was careful to put as a talisman in every plane that he flew. Others, of course, in the Royal Flying Corps and in the Australian Flying Corps had their own good luck charms, which included everything from small boomerangs, guaranteed to make sure they would return, to models of ‘lucky’ black cats to rabbits’ feet.

Similarly, German pilots had very strong beliefs in the protective powers of things such as four-leaf clovers, small models of pink pigs and of chimneysweeps complete with a brush and ladder. Others still believed in toys of poisonous red mushrooms with white dots, while still more thought that carrying a one
Pfennig
coin in your pocket could help keep the bullets from your plane.

Manfred von Richthofen did not believe in any of them. In fact, when once someone suggested a charm, he was quick with his reply. ‘I have a most effective talisman,’ he said sharply. ‘My Spandaus…‘
³²

And when it came to using those Spandau machine guns, he also had very specific ideas, often in sharp contrast to those of his compatriots. Other pilots would no sooner see an enemy plane than their guns would start chattering, sending out a spray of bullets in the hope that one or several would strike a devastating blow. Not the Red Baron. Habitually, he held his fire until right upon the enemy and only squeezed the trigger when he was all but certain of hitting the petrol tank, which was his usual target, and certainly what he taught those in his
Jasta
to do. He had no interest in spraying the whole plane and hoping that it would be disabled when just one bullet in the petrol tank was a near guarantee that it would be a blazing wreck and victory would be his.

The
Jasta
s commanded by the Red Baron continued to exact a terrible toll on the Allied pilots, and Kingsford Smith had arrived on the Western Front at a particularly bloody time. In many squadrons, including that of the still only twenty-year-old Australian, the casualty rate—in terms of pilots killed and wounded—was running at 25 per cent
a week.
A ‘veteran’ was anyone who had managed to survive for longer than a month.

Five
ACES AT DAWN…

We were a carefree, cigarette smoking, leave seeking lot of young devils, who feared nothing; except being brought down behind enemy lines…