Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (24 page)

To bear his coffin the following afternoon, Major Blake chose six captains of the Australian Flying Corps—the same rank as von Richthofen. Too, an honour guard from the other ranks was chosen, comprising twelve Australian soldiers in full dress uniform, and each of these men used spit and polish to be absolutely impeccable for the occasion.

Wreaths were presented by other Allied squadrons, and von Richthofen was buried in the overgrown cemetery of the village of Bertangles, with the propeller of his plane serving as the initial cross at the head of the grave. As a final salute, each man in the honour guard fired three shots into the air. Photos were taken, and copies of these were dropped by an English pilot above a German air base, together with a note confirming von Richthofen’s death:

To the German Flying Corps,

Rittmeister Baron Manfred von Richthofen was killed in aerial

combat on April 21st 1918. He was buried with full military

honours.

From,

British Royal Air Force.

In a later note, the German pilots were further advised that if they wished to, they could fly, unmolested, over his grave on the following day between 3 pm and 6 pm, to drop their own wreaths—an opportunity that many of von Richthofen’s fellow pilots availed themselves of.

So ended an extraordinary saga, albeit with a noteworthy addendum…

Von Richthofen’s place as commander of his ‘Flying Circus’, was taken initially by
Oberleutnant
Wilhelm Reinhard, until he crashed three weeks later, at which point the new commander was a German ace with eighteen kills to his credit, one
Oberleutnant
Hermann Göring…

‘No longer fit for combat duty.’

He was
what
?

No longer fit for combat duty, son.

That was the phrase used by the English doctors, and nothing the Australian said could change it. In response, Charles Kingsford Smith was disgusted,
bristling
with indignation. Now mostly recovered, he believed, from his wounds of the previous year, he had returned to England via the usual six-week journey by ship—this time going on the
Orontes
across first the Pacific Ocean via Wellington, Tahiti, the Panama Canal, New York, then the Atlantic Ocean. Only to be told by medical officers that they would no longer give him clearance to fly! Kingsford Smith could have understood their reasoning if part of flying had been pedalling like mad with your feet, but as the only use for his feet was to operate the rudder, and he was fully capable of doing that, even with his injured foot, it simply didn’t make sense.

Do you hear me?!

Accustomed to such indignation from brave men, and trained to counter it regardless, the military doctors simply closed his folder and refused to change their determination.

The role he was offered now was as a flying instructor with No. 204 Training Depot, at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey. And as a matter of fact, he would no longer be part of the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps, as that had ceased to exist from 1 April 1918, when it had merged with the Royal Naval Air Service to become the Royal Air Force. A job as a flying instructor wasn’t remotely what the Australian had in mind when he had returned to Great Britain, but at least he would be back in the air once more and besides that most crucial feature, his time there was not without its pleasures. Kingsford Smith was able to keep more than busy when not instructing, attracting local women to his bed, and was so successful his fellow officers referred to him as ‘King Dick’.
³⁸
At one point, on a course at Shoreham, his colleagues were stunned when they were billeted at a hotel where two girls were resident, one of whom was the hotelier’s daughter. In the space of just two days, King Dick had bedded them both, while simultaneously having an affair with an Italian violinist playing in an orchestra up in London.

‘He just seemed to hypnotise women,’ one of those colleagues, James Cross, would recall to author Ian Mackersey many years later.
³⁹

Whatever Kingsford Smith’s activities, by this stage of the war the truth was that there was quite likely more action to be had between the sheets than in the air. Simply put, the combined industrial might of the Allies was now so strong that Germany and its fellow Central European powers—Austria–Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire—couldn’t keep up and that most definitely applied to the war in the air. Things were so bad that from the middle of 1918 onwards, German Supreme Army Command tried to keep its planes out of the air as much as possible, to reduce opportunities for
den Engländer
to shoot them down.

This was deeply frustrating for the Allied pilots, particularly Australia’s premier air ace, Captain Arthur Harry Cobby of the Australian Flying Corps No. 4 Squadron, who was then credited with twenty-five kills of enemy planes and thirteen balloons. In an effort to get the Germans to come out and play, Cobby and the men under his command began to engage in the practice of swooping in low over enemy aerodromes, to drop, yes, old boots upon them!

Inside the boots would be messages addressed to ‘the footsore aerial knights of Germany’, inviting them to quit their cowardly ways and come up and have a go. More than a few German pilots, seething with rage, did exactly that, and were shot down for their trouble, allowing Cobby to take his tally up to twenty-nine.
⁴⁰

Elsewhere, other Australian pilots were also making outstanding contributions to the war effort, none more so than a charismatic chunk of a man by the name of Ross Smith, who had begun the war with the Light Horse in Gallipoli and Palestine before training to become a pilot. A swashbuckling larrikin as a soldier, he was known as a fearless, born leader in the air, with a notable capacity to fly well beyond the realms of regulation—not particularly caring what the higher-ups thought so long as he did damage to the Germans. (It was also said of him by one of his pukkah British colleagues that, ‘For an Aussie he had a fine command of English and an unusually impressive diction…’)

On one legendary occasion Ross Smith and his observer, Stan Nunan, came up with a plan to attack a newly established German aerodrome in northern Palestine. On their first pass over it, they dropped some of their bombs near the hangars to ensure that all the German mechanics would scramble to their trenches and give them an empty canvas on which to execute their own brand of artistry. Then Ross Smith practically dropped out of the sky, so quickly did he bring his Bristol Fighter down onto the runway.

Let the fun begin. As the plane came to a halt, Nunan jumped out with a revolver in one hand and a Very pistol in the other, while Smith manned the Bristol’s Lewis gun and trained it in the direction that the German soldiers and mechanics could be expected to come from. Sure enough…

Nunan fired first the revolver into the petrol tank of one German plane, causing fuel to gush forth, and then the Very pistol at the resulting puddle, whereupon the plane exploded with force enough to singe his eyebrows and wake the dead. And then another and another! Smith, in the meantime, ensured that the motor of their own plane was kept at fair throttle, ready for the getaway, even as he kept the Lewis gun firing at the Germans, who were now gathering themselves.

Of course, it couldn’t last. Suddenly, twenty German soldiers appeared running towards them, all with rifles, all firing. Nunan, unfortunately, was having a great deal of trouble getting the fourth German plane to explode and couldn’t bear to leave before the job was done. Smith, understanding perfectly his desire to destroy the plane above and beyond the desire to get away, taxied the plane up behind Nunan and between them they were able to throw their remaining bomb at the German plane and destroy it before taking off
in extremis
, with bullets whistling around their ears and into the fuselage of the plane.

Smith was just that kind of man and if fortune favoured the brave, it positively
adored
him, notwithstanding the scars he bore on both cheeks courtesy of a bullet having passed through his face, taking a couple of teeth with it. A scar on his forehead bore witness to how close another bullet had come to ending his life in the same engagement.

In fact, it was a measure of how highly regarded both Ross Smith and Lawrence of Arabia were that when the latter needed to be transported somewhere in the swirling desert, it was the former who was sent for.

On one occasion, on 22 September 1918, the two were having breakfast in the desert with some others when an enemy plane came over.
⁴¹
In an instant, Smith had put down his plate of porridge, got into his plane and, with his observer, ‘climbed like a cat into the skies’, as Lawrence described it, followed by another Australian pilot and his observer. When a third one of their compatriots looked to Lawrence in the manner of, ‘Well, are you going to come, too?’, the Englishman’s response was such that he later felt bound to record his feelings. ‘No, I was not going to air-fight,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘no matter what caste I lost with the pilot. He was an Australian, of a race delighting in additional risks, not an Arab to whose gallery I must play.’
⁴²

No matter. Within five minutes, Ross Smith brought the German plane down in flames close to the nearby railway and then returned to take up the porridge which had been kept warm for him, all with nary a word…until half an hour later another plane came over. Despite Smith being about to put marmalade on his toast and take some coffee, he was gone once more, again followed by the second Australian pilot, and this time it was the latter who did the honours.

A strange bunch these Australians, and Lawrence of Arabia could never quite fathom them, though he admired them enormously.

His name was George Price and on this crisp morning, the Canadian conscript from the town of Moose Jaw, in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, was with a patrol of A Company of the 28th Battalion, advancing on the small Belgian town of Ville-sur-Haine, then held by the Germans. He was in the lead of this ground force and had entered two houses looking for a Hun machine-gunner who had been firing on them a short time before. The Canadians had just left the second house and returned to the street when a single shot rang out from a German sniper, and Price immediately fell to the ground.

Dead.

It was 10.58 am, on 11 November 1918. Two minutes after his death, the war was officially over and Germany had surrendered under the terms of an armistice which had been signed six hours before in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne.

Sadly for George, there had not been time to inform all units of the armistice before it occurred.

Six
APRES LA GUERRE

[Being a pilot] is the only first-class thing that our generation has to do.

So everyone should either take to the air themselves, or help it forward.

L
AWRENCE OF
A
RABIA
,
ON WHY
,
AFTER LEAVING BEHIND HIS CELEBRATED LIFE IN THE
A
RABIAN
D
ESERT
,
HIS NEXT STEP WAS TO JOIN THE
R
OYAL
A
IR
F
ORCE AS A HUMBLE AIRCRAFTSMAN UNDER AN ASSUMED NAME
¹

My mind was filled with aviation to the exclusion of everything else.

C
HARLES
K
INGSFORD
S
MITH
,
WRITING IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
,
ON HIS STATE OF MIND IN
1919
²

T
he last few tragic deaths notwithstanding, the celebrations in Allied countries were heartfelt and overwhelming. In Paris the news burst up the Champs Elysees, swept around the Arc de Triomphe, and hurtled down every boulevard and avenue, instantly turning everyone it touched into a dancing, singing ball of delight. Guns were fired in the air, Parisians waved flags and stormed into the streets even as beautiful girls kissed strangers—most particularly those in uniform—and the whole city resounded throughout the rest of the day and into the night with the sound of cheering and singing, most particularly ‘La Marseillaise’. As
The Times
correspondent in Paris noted after close observation throughout the day:

…the chilliest-hearted mortal could not miss the significance of the fact that the only colour in the crowd is provided by uniforms and flags. Practically every woman is in deep black. But today it was as if the dead themselves had told us to consider their sacrifice as redeemed and rejoice for them, as well as for ourselves. Women veiled in crepe, with red eyes and pale faces were radiant among the rest, as though sorrow had never touched them. For four years the hysteria of sorrow has been sternly repressed; it is but right the hysteria of joy should be expressed…
³

So too in London, where from 11 am people gathered in front of Buckingham Palace and began calling for the King, the King, the KING!

And there he was! At a quarter past eleven, a joyous cheer rang out as His Majesty King George V, wearing the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, stepped regally out onto the balcony, accompanied by the Queen, Prince Arthur and Princess Mary as the guards in the courtyard presented arms, and the band crashed out the chords of the national anthem, officers stood at attention, civilians removed their hats, and everyone cheered. And this was just the beginning. Union Jacks sprang out everywhere, together with, most notably, the Australian and American standards. Work ceased, the crowds swelled, people sang both ‘God Save the King’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ until they could sing no more, and Australian soldiers distinguished themselves by climbing all over the Victoria Memorial as everyone laughed and screamed out their approval. And on into the wild night they went. The war was
over
!
⁴