Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (70 page)

One who received a particularly hard time was Tom McWilliams, who seemed to be attacked from all sides for having failed to even
attempt
to turn their receiver into a transmitter. In response, McWilliams steadfastly stuck to what he had said all along—they as a group had decided against it, because the chance of ending up without a transmitter or a receiver was too risky—the receiver was their lifeline.

Though the inquiry was declared closed on 7 June, suddenly on 13 June 1929 the whole thing was resumed to enable the Crown to call a surprise witness…a man by the name of William Angus Todd.

And wasn’t that a turn-up for the books!

Both Kingsford Smith and Ulm knew this man as Bill Todd, the second mate of the
Tahiti
, who had first taught them the principles of navigation, and was then going to accompany them on their flight across the Pacific, until he had been asked to leave after too much boozing. For the purposes of this exercise, however, he was no longer ‘Bill’ from the
Tahiti
, but a witness who was out to do them damage.

But, oh, what a story he told, his red-visaged countenance of the heavy drinker getting even redder as he progressed.

‘In October 1927 at the Hotel Roosevelt in San Francisco,’ he recounted to the hushed courtroom, ‘we were talking about finance. Finances were extremely low. We were discussing some method of getting enough money to get the flight started. During that conversation Ulm said that had his plan for getting lost in central Australia for four or five days been followed, sufficient money would be available and public sympathy and support would enable them to have no cause to worry. Keith Anderson and myself were present. Anderson’s only comment was that it would not work…’

Pandemonium broke out in the courtroom. Here was a first-hand witness, claiming the whole thing was a long-planned scam! Ulm, for one, looked thunderstruck and beside himself with rage at Todd’s claims.

Why, counsel now wanted to know, had he not come forward earlier?

He had been in New Zealand, he said, ill in a Wellington hospital, and it was only on reading press reports of Ulm’s denials when a previous witness had claimed to have heard Ulm say the best way to get publicity would be to get lost in the middle of Australia, that he realised the significance of this conversation he had had with him.

Whatever the sensation Todd’s claims in the courtroom made, however high the tension had climbed as a result, and however much the journalists were furiously scribbling down every word, none of it seemed to have had any effect whatsoever on Jack Cassidy, who was the counsel for Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm. M’learned friend was nothing less than acidly amused with Todd’s fantastic claims when he tiredly and rather theatrically took the trouble to cross-examine this clearly completely unreliable witness.

‘So we may take it,’ he suggested of Todd’s impulse to suddenly come and give evidence to the inquiry,’ that you did it out of a sense of public duty?’

‘I did so,’ declared Todd defensively, ‘because I saw the statement that he had denied saying it. I
heard
him say it.’

Cassidy, no longer acidly amused but outright angry, got straight to the nub of it: ‘You have got your knife into Ulm, have you not?’

‘I won’t admit that at all.’

Cassidy took Todd through some of the details of his problematic relationship with Ulm, pointing out that a contract between him and Ulm and Kingsford Smith had never been formally signed.

Cassidy: ‘Were you pressing that they should sign it?’

Todd: ‘I did, on several occasions.’

‘They were in serious financial straits?’

‘Yes, they were.’

‘And you had the right to go back to your job if you wanted to go?’

‘Yes…’

‘Have you anything against Litchfield?’

‘Not at all…’

‘Did you say to Litchfield that if you ever got a chance to do Ulm a bad turn, you would do it?’

Mr Todd was sure that there must be a mistake, because he was quite sure he had said no such thing.

With another theatrical pause, Cassidy steadied for a moment, almost as if he wanted to make Todd think that the worst was over…before he bored in hard again.

‘You understand I am suggesting that you are a man whose word cannot be relied upon?’

Yes, Mr Todd understood that.

‘You understand I am suggesting that you did this from spite?’

‘Yes, I can see that quite clearly…’

As it turned out, Cassidy almost seemed better informed about Todd’s background than he was himself. Step by step, the barrister walked him through it, from the fact that he had no previous flying experience to the fact that he had feared that his nerves might ‘crack’ under the strain of the proposed flight. He also highlighted the fact that Todd was claiming Ulm had made this statement on the same day that Todd had crashed the car while drunk—a day when it would be surprising if Todd could remember
anything.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners
now, and at the hour of death
…

If it had been a horrifying, gut-turning job to bury Anderson and Hitchcock, it was probably a worse one to exhume them. And yet, by prime ministerial command, it was a job that had to be done and, after a tough journey overland from Alice Springs lasting a mere two weeks, courtesy of a new-fangled, twin rear axle, four-wheel-drive truck, an A3 Thornycroft, the men assigned to the task were now in position to do exactly that. Under the command of Constable George Murray of Alice Springs, the eight-man party, which included four Aboriginal guides, had arrived at the haunting scene late on the afternoon of Wednesday, 13 June 1929; just hours after Todd had given his devastating testimony. The plane stood forlornly facing the east, tilted to one side by the punctured tyre, and somehow the members of the party were all immediately struck by the pathos of this ‘man-made machine…marooned in the pitiless waste of primeval nature’.
⁵
They shook off the feeling and immediately got to work on exhuming poor Bobby Hitchcock.

Under the command of Constable Murray, they dug a trench parallel to the grave until they reached the level of his body. Then, after they carefully laid matting at the bottom of the trench, they were able to roll the body onto it, before lifting it up and delicately placing the remains in the pine coffin they had brought for that purpose, and then painstakingly sealing the lead lid.
⁶

If it was a process troubling to the white men in the party, it was deeply disturbing to the Aboriginal stockmen who had again accompanied them. At night it had been their practice to sleep a small distance from the white fellas, but on this night they camped beside the white men, between two large fires which they had placed almost in a manner to ward off evil spirits.
⁷
Of such spirits there was no sign, but a very strong wind blew up overnight, rocking the
Kookaburra
to an extent that two of the white men folded back its wings for fear that it would tip over.

At the first light of dawn, Constable Murray and another white man arose and exhumed Anderson’s body, repeating the same grisly process. It was weird, and seemed almost supernatural, how the glow of the rising sun cast a strange bluish light over the country around them, while the burnt and blackened area in which they were digging seemed to remain dark and sombre.
⁸

By mid-morning, Keith’s body, too, was sealed in a pine coffin, and with both dead bodies secured atop the Thornycroft, the party set off for the long journey back to what passed for civilisation in the Northern Territory. They took with them the small blackened penknife they had found in the cockpit, the one that Anderson and Hitchcock had used to try to clear an air strip with, all of its blades pathetically broken.
⁹

Charles Ulm was recalled to the stand to refute Todd’s devastatingly damaging testimony.

‘What do you say to Todd’s statements [about the virtue of staging crashlandings to generate publicity]?’

‘I say that Todd is a deliberate liar of the lowest order, and that the statement was malice.’

‘Is there any reason for his being malicious?’

‘He thinks,’ answered Ulm firmly, ‘that with Anderson dead there is nobody to refute his statement. He is an excellent navigator, but he is a big chap with a frightful temper. There were times in America when the crew had to go without meals. On these occasions Todd would abuse me. As you see, he is a big lump of a fellow, and you can’t do anything with him. I would have knocked him down otherwise…’

Ulm was followed in the dock by one Harold William Lilja, a sales manager, who—fortunately for Ulm and Kingsford Smith—gave devastating testimony against Todd.

Lilja told the court that he had met Todd just after he had left the
Southern Cross
expedition and was returning from San Francisco on the
Makura
, upon which he was working as a navigator.

‘On the ship,’ Lilja said in a confident, no-nonsense, this-is-precisely-what-happened voice, ‘Todd told me he had his knife into Ulm because Ulm had been the cause of his leaving the expedition.’

At last, after a week and a half of deliberations, on the morning of 24 June the Air Investigation Committee assembled in Sydney to announce its findings and Kingsford Smith and Ulm were able to find out if their reputations had been ruined or repaired.

It took Brigadier General Wilson only seven minutes to read the report in front of the packed courtroom. There were several key points. Firstly, and most importantly, the committee found that the crash-landing of the
Southern Cross
was
not
premeditated, which thus dealt with the most heinous allegation of all. Against that, the committee recorded its suspicions that Ulm had exaggerated his diary entries with a view to publication, and that he probably had talked about the virtues of getting lost even if he hadn’t meant them. McWilliams was strongly criticised for his failure to convert the wireless into a transmitter, as the committee recorded that it was ‘surprised at Mr McWilliams’ lack of knowledge. It attributes the failure to communicate by wireless to ignorance or lack of initiative on the part of Mr McWilliams.’
¹⁰
The report also reserved some rather trenchant criticism about the lack of emergency rations, the inadequate equipment that the
Southern Cross
carried and the failure to make a bigger signal fire by using available oil but…

But the bottom line remained the same: their forced landing had been genuine, and not some put-up con job on the public sympathy.
¹¹

Although Kingsford Smith and Ulm were immensely relieved that they had been found innocent of the most devastating accusation that had been levelled against them, there was little time to focus on it. For after all had been said and done, and written, it was time to resume the trip to England that they had been on three months earlier, when they had crash-landed at Coffee Royal. They still had to go, and for the same reason as before—to buy the planes they needed to get Australian National Airways off the ground.

On the very day after the findings by the Air Investigation Committee had been released, at 2.25 pm on 25 June 1929, the
Southern Cross
took off from Richmond air base bound for England once more—this time extremely well stocked with thirty fresh sandwiches, a dozen apples, lots of chewing gum, spare antennae, tools and water—departing before a bare handful of family and friends as the big crowds had simply vanished.

On board were Kingsford Smith, Ulm, Litchfield and McWilliams, exactly the same crew as before, too bloody right they were.

When, the day before, a reporter from
Smith’s Weekly
had intimated that Kingsford Smith and Ulm were taking a risk in including the maligned McWilliams once more as their radio operator, Smithy very quickly turned savage: ‘Why don’t you stop mouthing such nonsense…go and find a large toilet and pull the damned chain on yourself?’
¹²

A relatively uneventful trip followed through Derby, Singapore, Rangoon, Allahabad, Karachi and Baghdad, with the crew’s spirits rising as they made good time and seemingly left their troubles in Australia behind. There was something about being in the air that just
cleansed
them. The first real glitch they had came in Athens when, after refuelling and a good night’s sleep in a hotel near the airport, they tried to leave.

Where was their permit, an official in gold braid asked them.

‘What permit?’

‘The permit which says you can leave,’ the official said.

‘We don’t have one, and didn’t know we needed one.’

‘Well, you can’t leave.’

‘But we’re not bothering anyone. Why can’t we go?’

‘Sorry, no permit.’

‘Okay, we’ll wait. But can we give the engines a whirr to keep them loose?’

‘Whirr? What you mean—whirr?’ asked the official.

‘Just give the plane a dry run…take her to the end of the runway and bring her back—just to make sure the engines are okay.’

‘Just a run, no flying?’

‘No flying.’
¹³

In fact, of course, Smithy gunned the engines and the crew in the
Southern Cross
—‘#!?*#! Those sons of bitches!’—were soon winging their way to Rome, and from there to London, where they arrived in the record time of twelve days and eighteen hours.
¹⁴