Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (20 page)

C
HARLES
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH
¹

The glorious thing in the flying service is that one is a perfectly free man and one’s own master as soon as one is up in the air…

T
HE
R
ED
B
ARON
, F
REIHERR
M
ANFRED VON
R
ICHTHOFEN
²

S
howtime…

More specifically, it was time for ‘dawn show’, as the pilots called early morning missions over enemy lines. In his French-made SPAD plane Kingsford Smith went out on this, his first mission on the early morning of 14 July 1917, flying through air so thick and warm it could have been fresh cream. Certainly he was excited to be a part of the mission but also a bit nervous, as he streaked above the flashes of khaki uniforms he could see below which were the men in the muddy, bloody trenches of their own lines he knew so well from his own experience, and then an instant later glimpsed the grey uniforms of the Germans. As he passed over the enemy, puffs of black smoke appeared all around and his plane was briefly buffeted by the explosions of ‘Archie’ just below, the Hun’s way of saying welcome to this part of the war. (A curiosity of the anti-aircraft artillery fire, he soon discovered, was that while the German ‘Archie’ exploded with puffs of black smoke, the Allied puffs were generally white.) Doing his best to stay in formation with the rest of his squadron of seven planes, he was also scanning the horizon for enemy aircraft and quickly learnt his first lesson. That was that no matter how carefully you scanned every cloud and the far horizon for any sign of the Hun, it was no guarantee that you would get fair warning of being under attack. For suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, as No. 23 Squadron cruised at 11,000 feet, a circus of German aircraft was all over them, firing and manoeuvring to get into position to shoot them down without exposing their own
Rückseiten
(backsides), as targets. A mad scramble of twisting, turning planes ensued, rolling, looping, diving, climbing and slipping away. Kingsford Smith did his best and even fired his guns at one German plane that momentarily came into his sight. But when his guns jammed, there was nothing for it but to race away from the rising sun and head west, back to his own lines, pursued by three German planes the whole way. Mercifully, the Germans didn’t want to continue the pursuit once the Australian was above his own ‘Archie’, and Kingsford Smith was able to return safely to base, notwithstanding the fact that he had bullet holes all over his SPAD, with around a dozen near where his head had been.

Now ‘blooded’ for battle, a little more experienced and relieved to be still alive—there were many, many pilots who didn’t even survive their first day on the Western Front—the young Australian pilot was slightly more confident when he went out the following day. This time he was with seven other planes and he felt a surge of bloodlust when they saw twenty German planes coming directly for them at an altitude of 8000 feet. The squadron leader waggled his wings in the manner that gave the signal to attack and in an instant they were again in the thick of it.

It was an exceedingly odd thing that despite everything happening in a blur of movement, time almost seemed suspended, with each second passing like the slow dripping of honey. In one such moment of suspended time, a German aircraft appeared right before him. Kingsford Smith zeroed in, squeezed the trigger and fired perhaps fifty shots straight at the pilot. He then had the satisfaction—and it really was that—of seeing the Hun pilot throw his arms in the air and fall back, as his plane began to tumble out of the sky. Going down, getting faster, until the German plane was billowing black smoke in a sickly corkscrew for the ground. Had the pilot been alive after those first few seconds, there was no chance whatsoever he could have survived the crash.

Strangely, although Kingsford Smith had just killed a man, it didn’t feel like that, as though he had just ended the life of some mother’s son. Rather, he had ‘bagged my first Hun’,
³
as he proudly put it in a letter to his own mother the following day. True, his gun had jammed immediately afterwards, and he had had to ‘tootle off home’, but it had been a great beginning.

Day after day, the squadron went out on sorties and returned an hour or two later. Sometimes the men would be intact, with as many returning as had gone out. Other times they would be missing a few men. Night after night they would sit at the dinner table in the mess hall and where the evening before someone had been laughing and joking and singing and telling riotous stories, there would now be an empty chair. Those chairs would fill up soon enough as freshly trained pilots arrived from England, and now America, but many of these men would quickly be gone too. Killed. Shot out of the skies and frequently plunging to their deaths in the middle of flaming wrecks.

How did the survivors cope in such circumstances? Only just. Generally, they drank a lot of alcohol. After all, they were the key players in a game in which the stakes could not be higher. They were playing for both their lives and often the destiny of entire battles and the lives of many men below. When their friends played that game and lost, or they played that game and won, one way or another did they not deserve a drink, or ten? Kingsford Smith certainly felt that way. You flew, you fought, you returned to earth and you could scarcely credit that you had survived. You found out who of your comrades had been killed—often gazing to the east as the twilight deepened,
willing
a particular plane to appear—you drank the better part of the night away, and the following day you did it all again.

The carnage went on and the only place where it was worse than in the air was on the ground, where artillery shells continued to land and bullets fly and men died on a daily basis in numbers never before seen in warfare—with a total of 2250 troops being killed on all sides on an average day on the Western Front.

On the last day of July 1917, just a few short weeks after Kingsford Smith had arrived in France, the Battle of Passchendaele began, with the Allies making a concerted effort to break through the Western Front, shatter the German lines and push on to the German submarine bases in Belgium. (Part of the urgency to do this was the fear that after the Russian Revolution in February, it would not be long before the Russian war effort collapsed, enabling all the German soldiers on the Eastern Front in Russia to return to the Western Front, whereupon the war would be lost for the Allies.)

All five Australian divisions in France were thrown into the assault to capture the key Belgian village of Passchendaele, which heavily armed veteran German troops defended from the top of a series of ridges on which they had constructed many thick concrete pillboxes. On the front side of the ridges were trenches manned by more German soldiers. Behind the ridges lay heavy German artillery, ready to lob high-explosive shells into the valleys of thick mud soaked with the blood of those who had already died trying to make the breakthrough. Over days, and then weeks, and then months, the Allied soldiers continued their assault. On a good day only hundreds of them were killed. The conditions were straight from Dante’s
Inferno.

In the middle of it all, one man particularly stood out—George Wilkins. His route to the Western Front had been a circuitous one. Returning south from the Arctic Circle on foot over 600 miles, he eventually came around Alaska by boat, landed in Ottawa, thence travelled overland to New York before boarding a ship to cross the Atlantic. En route the ship was sunk by a German U-boat. Rescued, Wilkins got to London, and then took the long haul home, by ship down the West African coast to Cape Town and thence across to South Australia. After seeing his mother and settling his father’s estate, Wilkins journeyed to the headquarters of the Australian Flying Corps at Point Cook, just outside Melbourne, and applied for a position based on his previous flying experience. Though nearly excluded because of his colour blindness, the intervention of a kind senior officer saw him quickly receive his commission as a second lieutenant, albeit in a non-operational flying position. Once back in England, when he had presented himself as ready to fly, there had been a big problem. Courtesy of a touch of frostbite from his years in the Arctic he walked with a pronounced limp.

‘Your feet are in a hopeless condition,’ he was informed gravely by one of the military doctors. ‘You did not have medical attention in time, and now it is too late. Nothing can be done. You will never be able to walk properly again.’

Wilkins quietly retorted that his faithful feet were good enough to get him 600 miles across Arctic ice at the rate of 15 miles a day, so he didn’t think they would be a worry, but the Australian Flying Corps doctor would not be moved. Regulations were regulations.

In the end, not to worry. His unique background and set of skills had quickly seen him recommended for service as an official photographer with the Australian War Records Section of the AIF to record the Australian experience from right in the heat of the battle—and it was possible he could do a bit of flying as a part of that. So it was that, in the company of two other men who were quickly establishing themselves as legends in their field—the journalist–writer Charles E.W. Bean and the photographer Frank Hurley—Wilkins had turned up at Passchendaele and quickly got to work. While Hurley’s job was to capture iconic photographs that could be used for propaganda purposes, Wilkins’s task was to record photographically what
actually
happened on the front lines. There could have been few men better equipped to do it, though Wilkins was shocked by what he was seeing and recording.

‘It seemed like a trip into hell,’ he later recounted. ‘That black night lighted by flames of guns and by signal flares, the air shaking with noise, and the earth shaking underfoot. Human beings seemed insignificant in the midst of all this. It didn’t seem possible that men could go through it and live.’
⁴

And maintain a sense of humour, to boot. On that first night Wilkins was stunned to hear a Digger tell the story of a wounded, mud-covered Tommy, who was said to have told his comrades, ‘I wish I could go back to Blighty and work in a munitions factory. Just think of those blokes getting five bob a day for making those shells—and us getting only one bob for stopping the gorblimey things!’
⁵

Within hours, as he recorded, Wilkins knew exactly how the Tommy felt, and yet his own courage never wavered. He was to become a familiar figure to the troops over the following weeks, always with a camera in hand, traipsing along trenches, limping blithely across no-man’s-land as shells burst around him. He visited field hospitals, slipped into dugouts and rambled respectfully through freshly dug battlefield graveyards, capturing it all on film. Sometimes he would hitch a ride on a plane to get aerial shots of the trenches, but more often he was with the troops in the mud and blood, the death and destruction. Twice he found himself in action so thick he had to put down the camera and get involved himself, and on both occasions he won the Military Cross for his trouble. The commanding Australian of the campaign, General John Monash, called him, ‘the bravest man in my command’.
⁶

Only once, by Wilkins’s own reckoning, did he come close to losing his nerve. One night he was with six soldiers moving towards the front line along a wooden ‘duckboard’ above the sucking mud. Shells were exploding all around, and bullets flying, but they kept going. And then a shell exploded a little way in front of them, hurling shrapnel into the night. One piece of shrapnel hit the leading man in Wilkins’s party right in the neck and so neatly took off his head that it plopped atop the post that had been right beside him when he died. That head now stared back at them.

‘All the rest of us roared with hysterical laughter to see his head there, stuck upon the post. At the moment it seemed hilariously funny.’
⁷

In his time in France, Kingsford Smith met many famous pilots, but few impressed him as much as France’s most famous ace, Charles Nungesser. The blond 25-year-old, known as ‘the fighting pilot’s fighting pilot’, and a lady-killer to beat them all, had about him an aura, a
savoir-vivre
on the ground, and
savoir-faire
in the air, that was simply mesmerising.

Stories about him and his plane—famously decorated on both sides with a drawing of a coffin flanked by candles, atop a black heart resting on a skull and crossbones—were the talk of Paris. What about the time he took on three German planes at once, and shot down two of them before taking on the third in such an amazing fashion? As his own undercarriage had been shot to pieces, the fearless Frenchman had manoeuvred the surviving German Albatros close to the ground and then
driven
his plane down on top of it, effectively bulldogging it to the ground! Then, when the German had jumped out and tried to set fire to both planes, Nungesser had run towards him and felled the Hun with just one punch.

‘What kind of madmen do you Frenchman have as flyers?’ the German flyer asked once he was safely in custody, seemingly more outraged by the punch than being shot down.

‘Some say,’ the smiling French officer is said to have replied, ‘that he is completely mad. Others call him a genius. I think he is a little of both.’
⁸

Whatever he was, Nungesser continued to bring down German planes at an astonishing rate, and yet he was equally famous for his nocturnal activities on the ground. He was the embodiment of the swaggering ‘knight of the air’ and his conquests were legendary. He had taken Mata Hari to bed before her arrest for espionage, and managed to feed her a story about a new French plane under construction with
eight
supercharged engines, which she had duly passed on to Berlin. He could drink any man under the table in the sweet Parisian night, and still be on the airstrip at dawn, ready to take down another vicious German, if not two.