Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (54 page)

Once more, a similar scene played out, with messages winking back and forth in the blackness, and then they were on their way again, at three o’clock in the morning. (This time Warner had the presence of mind to find out from the
Manoa
radio operator just who had won the big baseball game the previous afternoon, and he was joyous to hear that the wonderful New York Yankees had done it again, and beaten the Washington Senators 4–0!
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)

In Longueville, Mr and Mrs Kingsford Smith sat through the night, with family and friends, glued to the wireless, anxiously waiting to hear the latest information. And, of course, they were not the only ones. All across the western seaboard of Canada and the United States, together with Hawaii and aboard many ships that were within range of the
Southern Cross
’s transmitters, radio professionals and hundreds of amateur radio ‘hams’ were listening in to the Morse code transmissions from the plane and even marking out on maps where they reckoned it to be. Those messages were also picked up by the La Perouse Receiving Centre near Sydney, where they were decoded and relayed to local radio stations.

Shortly after the dawn of 1 June 1928 seeped over the horizon, Lyon informed the pilots via the message stick that they were just 375 miles from Honolulu. They had made it through the dark night, and their optimism began to rise that they were in fact, maybe, going to make it! As the sun continued to rise a splendid vista of the marvellous world of the cloudlands they were traversing revealed itself, complete with canyons, cliffs, foothills, mountains and vast shimmering plains stretching away to never-never land.

Just a few hours later, not long after 8 am, from a height of 1250 feet, they saw it. Way off on their port bow, in a slightly surprising direction—but who were they to argue?—there were cliffs rising from the sea and disappearing into cloud.

You bloody beauty! In the cockpit of the
Southern Cross
, a broadly grinning Kingsford Smith and Ulm shared a triumphal handshake, before Smithy nosed the plane over towards the cliffs. In the rear, however, Harry Lyon was not nearly so exuberant. Having spent four years trading in these parts, he knew the islands well, and was troubled that he didn’t recognise this landfall at all. Sure enough, as they drew closer the cliffs suddenly popped up further out of the sea and drifted away…

With a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs, the men realised that the whole thing had been a mirage! What they had been seeing was merely what they wanted to see in the cloud formations, instead of what was actually there. It was deeply disappointing, and a lot worrying, but there was nothing they could do but proceed on their original course based on the setting that Lyon gave them, with their eyes scanning the horizon all the while, willing land to appear and trying to work out what was real and what was not. In the back, Jim Warner was becoming more than a little skittish, as his wandering mind kept returning to the Dole flyers. In the hope of easing his concerns, he passed a note to Lyon asking whether they were lost.

YES, Lyon scrawled back.
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Of the radio beam that had meant to be coming to them from Wheeler Field in Hawaii, there was nothing—because of a problem with the batteries in their receiver. Christ Almighty.

At this point Warner sent out a lugubrious radio message to the world at large:

I guess we really are lost. Radio ‘A’ battery down. Please get ship with receiver to get our bearings on my 740 wave. Will keep going so that they can track us.
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And then, mercifully, they really did see it: land.
Real
land. There!

Just before 10 am local time, Kingsford Smith knew that he had the island of Molokai off his port bow and steered towards it…only to have it disappear on them again! What had appeared to be an island again was in fact no more than the shadow thrown by a wayward cloud. Despite everything, they were still out there in the middle of the ocean, totally alone, totally dependent on finding land. Soon.

Though they continued to sight mirages here and there, generally they kept to their course and, just before eleven o’clock, were rewarded with a vision of high land that didn’t recede when they approached it, but simply grew bigger and more impressive. What they were staring at was a mountain, a high peak, poking above the clouds. This time there really was no doubt.

A note came forwards from Lyon: How high is that lump of land?

About 12,000 feet, Ulm replied with his pencil.

It was, obviously, Hawaii’s highest point, the mountain of Mauna Kea—two words which, in the local language meant ‘white mountain’, courtesy of the fact that its summit was so high it was regularly snowcapped, even in such tropical climes. Now being able to determine exactly where they were, in no time at all—just a little over thirty minutes—they were able to have Maui on the port beam and Molokai on the port bow. Hawaii was at their mercy!

And this time there was no mistake. A bevy of planes had come out to greet them and escort them above the beautiful, fresh greenery of the island—where a patchwork of sugarcane plantations looked like massive garden lawns, amid which the waving people were happy ants—to the landing ground of their dreams. At last, at 12.17 pm, the
Southern Cross
touched down at Wheeler Field, a spot situated 22 miles from Honolulu, and, far more importantly, 2408 miles from San Francisco! They had been in the air for twenty-seven hours and twenty-five minutes, and were on course to do exactly what they had set out to do—conquer the previously unconquerable Pacific Ocean.

When Smithy had brought the plane to a stop and turned all three engines off, the strangest thing happened—a sudden sense of unreality for all of them. For while those roaring engines had indeed been halted, the roaring engine in their heads just wouldn’t quit. As they clambered out of the plane, people were talking to them, excitedly crowding around the bleary-eyed and unshaven new arrivals from the heavens like hot children round cold ice-cream, and throwing traditional leis around their necks,
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but for the life of them none of the crew could hear what they were saying.

Yes…no…what? Delighted. To Jim Warner, everyone sounded like a whole lot of quacking ducks.
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In the end all they could do was to keep nodding their heads, read their hosts’ faces the best they could, keep smiling and try to catch a word here and there in the hope that the shattering noise in their heads would soon stop.

For all that, the warmth of their reception was astounding. The next day was filled with both receiving overwhelming hospitality and expending considerable effort to get away from it, so that they could as quickly as possible be on their way once more. Women fluttered flirtatiously around them while complete strangers clapped them on the back like long-lost brothers and begged to buy them a drink, and they practically needed a social secretary to sort out all the invitations they received. Most invitations had to be refused, as the pressing thing was to get the
Southern Cross
in shape so they could take off again. And yet, the morning after arriving, Kingsford Smith and Ulm happily agreed to make time for the local press to have their photos taken in bathing suits on a sunny Hawaiian beach, while Warner and Lyon looked on in their hot suits, the latter swearing darkly under his breath. Were the pilots the
only
ones who had flown to Hawaii, excuse me, or had he and Jim been on the same flaming plane?
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But back to the work of getting away. While it was one thing to land on the relatively short Wheeler Field with tanks that were nearly empty, it was always going to be out of the question to leave from there because with full tanks a much longer runway would be required. For the moment, though, while they rested at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel right on Waikiki Beach, army mechanics worked on the
Southern Cross
and put just 700 gallons back into the tanks, which was just a little over half of its capacity. This allowed them to easily take off the next day and fly 90 miles to that part of the Hawaiian archipelago that Keith Anderson had reconnoitred for them the previous year, Kauai Island, where more fuel awaited them.

In Australia, meantime, there was a veritable bushfire of coverage for the journey of the
Southern Cross
as blow-by-blow front-page accounts covered nigh on every paper in the land, and no detail was too obscure or minute to include as a ravenous public devoured it all. Maps showed the plane’s route, feature articles focused its technological aspects such as fuel tanks, wireless sets and generator, and every message the airmen had sent over the radio was faithfully recorded, as was every utterance they had said in the public domain since landing.
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In Arabella Street, it wasn’t worth Catherine’s while closing the door as the stream of journalists and friends and relatives was so constant it was close to an unbroken chain and…

Elsie, can you get some more tea at the corner store, because we have run out again!

The coverage in places like America and Europe for the flight was, while not as extensive, certainly comprehensive. The
New York Times
, which rather fancied itself as at the centre of the aviation world, was particularly focused on the flight.

That night the crew slept in the grand home of one of the Kauai residents, and in the wee hours of the morning were roused and taken to their plane, at one end of Barking Sands beach. The moon was still bright, the air languidly muggy and, most importantly of all, the weather was clear.

After Smithy had warmed up the engines—enough to heat the oil so it would flow more freely and lubricate the engines for the stresses of take-off and to produce full power, but not so much that more fuel than necessary was consumed in the process—they were ready. At Smithy’s instigation, one man stood 3500 feet down the 4000-foot long beach, to give him a good indication of just how much distance he had to play with for take-off.

Ready?

Ready.

And
now.
With all three engines at full and terrible throttle the
Southern Cross
started slowly lurching down the beach in the moonlight, as all those who had helped them stood back and covered their ears.

Barking Sands was so named because of the curious sound made by the sands when stepped upon—
Arf! Arf! Arf!
—but never in all its existence had it borne the kind of weight it did then. At first, it seemed that this time the men really had overloaded the
Southern Cross
, as the plane and the beach simply refused to part company for anything more than a little hop, and the take-off had to be aborted. Finally, however, at 5.22 am on Sunday, 3 June 1928, the
Southern Cross
, laden down with just under 1300 gallons of fuel, started whizzing along the beach with sufficient speed—
Aaaaaaaaaaaarf!
—that some 3400 feet along
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she was airborne.
Just.
The nearly full moon, preparing for a partial eclipse on the next night, lay low on the western horizon and surveyed benignly this newcomer to the skies.
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The
Southern Cross
remained perilously close to the water for all that, and they were 25 miles out to sea before they could rise high enough that in the back Jim Warner could safely reel out his radio antennae, which hung from small weights from both sides of the plane. For the life of him he couldn’t work out how Smithy had got her aloft and, as he later recorded: ‘I think Smith “wished” her into the air for those first few miles. There’s a Pilot!’
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But they were not out of danger. Smithy had no sooner got her up to 300 feet than the plane suddenly went through a series of huge bumps, as thought it were a brick bouncing down steep and irregular stairs. Smithy’s arms ached in his sockets as he tried to hold her aloft, and he fully expected one or both wings to crumple under the massive strain they were enduring.
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By the time the turbulance settled down five minutes later, and they had climbed to 600 feet, he was wringing wet with sweat and white as a sheet, his lips pursed and bloodless. That had been close.

But, at least they were still going. Next stop, Suva, some 3150 miles away! This was to be the longest hop on their trip, and certainly it was always going to be the most challenging. They had even added smelling salts to their usual provisions, on the reckoning that staying awake for such a long journey was likely to be one of their many enormous challenges.
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The day before, the
Honolulu Advertiser
had characterised it as ‘a flight to stagger the imagination’. Just this leg alone, after all, was the rough equivalent of the distance of Lindbergh’s flight of the year before, except in this instance there would be no broad barn door of the coasts of Europe and Africa to hit if their direction was off—just the tiny dots of Fiji.

Heading 213.75 degrees south-west by south from Hawaii, Kingsford Smith found his thoughts turning to the grandiloquent. While others before them had forged the aerial passage between the mainland of America and Hawaii, the same could not be said for the passage to Fiji.

‘Balbao,’ he later wrote, firmly identifying with the captain and not the crew, ‘had been the first white man to set eyes on the Pacific; Magellan had been the first to furrow its water with his keel; Bligh had navigated its unknown water for 3000 miles in an open boat. I felt that we were following in the footsteps of these great predecessors, and that we could claim kinship with them. They had traversed virgin waters; we were about to traverse virgin air.’
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