Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (17 page)

If there was one saving grace, it was that his job at the front allowed him periodic release from it, as he carried messages back and forth between headquarters and the front lines. (As a general rule, he loved the ‘back’ from the front lines part, and was less enamoured about the ‘forth’.)

After all those years of hurtling his motorbike around the corners of the streets back home and the constant dashes between the pyramids proper and Cairo, now Charles Kingsford Smith came into his own, roaring from the front lines to various military headquarters usually at least a mile or two behind the fighting, and then back again. For one of the keys to being a good dispatch rider was
speed
, pure and simple, and given going fast was something he had always been interested in, during war or peace, he excelled from the first.

And yet, as good as he was at tearing along on his motorbike, dodging trenches, bunkers, bomb craters and the like to get the message through, danger was all around him. One afternoon, just a couple of weeks after arriving, he was tearing along when perhaps 30 yards in front of him a shell landed, throwing up an enormous wave of billowing mud and muck, not to mention whistling, scything shrapnel. There was no time to take evasive action and all he could do was to try to hold on as he headed into it, careering from one side to another…and then…finally…across the road and into a ditch. Although shaken, the main thing was that he had survived by the barest of margins. And, as he was acutely aware, many didn’t.

On another occasion that he would never forget, when intense artillery fire rained down upon a bit of earth which had recently served as a mass grave for German soldiers, their stinking, decomposing bodies were thrown to the surface, their death’s-head grimaces scarring into his consciousness forever more. When the artillery stopped, a few Australian soldiers overcame their disgust long enough to dash forward to souvenir some of the buttons and other items from the German corpses, but Kingsford Smith was among those who simply couldn’t stomach it.
¹³

Surely,
surely
there was something better in this war than this?

Just maybe…For while Kingsford Smith and his mates had been in the trenches over the last two years in Gallipoli and on the Western Front, other Australians had been making a name for themselves in the air with the Australian Flying Corps. This antipodean version of the Royal Flying Corps had begun at Point Cook, just outside Melbourne, a couple of years earlier, on the strength of a pair of Royal Aircraft Factory BE2a two-seater biplanes and a duet of British-built single-seat Deperdussin monoplanes, two English flying instructors and a request for military volunteers who wanted to learn how to fly.

The first Australian pilots to see action had aided the Indian Army against the Turks in Mesopotamia from April 1915, and it had grown from there. No. 1 Squadron Australian Flying Corps had been formed in early 1916 and had operated with great success from, first, Egypt, and then the wider Middle East, and two more squadrons had been formed. As well as supporting the actions of the Australian Light Horse, some Australian pilots would go on to fly directly in the service of Colonel T.E. Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—fomenting revolution among the Arabs, to attack the Turk’s Ottoman Empire from within—and generally the Australians were regarded as ‘top-drawer’. The work of these pilots was at least matched by Australians flying for the Royal Flying Corps in action against the Germans in France, and Whitehall wanted more of them.

So much so, that just before Kingsford Smith’s unit had arrived at the Western Front alongside the British Expeditionary Forces, the Secretary of the War Office had written to AIF Headquarters in France, to the effect that, ‘in view of the exceptionally good work which has been done in the Royal Flying Corps by Australian-born officers, and the fact that the Australian temperament is specially suited to the flying services, it has been decided to offer 200 commissions in the Special Reserve of the Royal Flying Corps to officers, non-commissioned officers, and men of the Australian Force…’
¹⁴

And so it was that on the fine morning of 21 September 1916, the sergeant major of Kingsford Smith’s 4th Divisional Signal Company announced that applications were invited from those who wanted to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps.
¹⁵
This would entail going to Britain to train, before likely coming back to France as a fully fledged pilot going at the Hun. The option of applying was not something that the nineteen-year-old Kingsford Smith considered at all, if ‘considering’ can connote at least a small amount of time spent pondering.

‘It was the chance of a lifetime,’ he later recounted. ‘It proved to be the chance of my flying life, and it was a decision I made without a moment’s hesitation.’
¹⁶
He sent off his application that very afternoon.

Hundreds of others, of course, had the same idea, but for whatever reason Kingsford Smith’s application was accepted within a week—the prevailing view that dispatch riders made good pilots would have helped—and before he knew it he and nearly 150 other Australians had been pulled from the front lines and sent by train to Flanders in Belgium, where they were to undergo further assessment.

For despite what Kingsford Smith had thought, he and the other applicants had not yet been fully accepted into the Royal Flying Corps; they were still just a mere part of a wider squad and had to prove they were made of the right kind of stuff to grace His Majesty’s Flying Corps. That much was apparent from the kind of questions they had to answer soon after arriving in Flanders.

Have you attended university?

Do you play polo?

What musical instruments do you play?

Do you sail?
¹⁷

Now quite how being able to play polo was going to help you to fly a plane was not immediately apparent to any of them, but the Royal Flying Corps seemed to think it was important, so most of the Australians were happy to play along.

Polo? Of course! Who
didn’t
play polo?

Did he play any musical instruments?
Here, Kingsford Smith could be truthful and say that he played the piano, guitar, ukulele and harmonica.

Sailing?
As a matter of fact, Captain Cook had been his grandfather, and he had been taught personally by the great man.

One way or another, Charles Kingsford Smith really did sail on through in a manner that would have made Captain Cook proud—Chilla’s rather aristocratic, double-barrelled name wouldn’t have hurt—and he was soon on his way to England. Immediately upon arrival at his first training base, on 16 November 1916, he proudly cabled his beloved parents to that effect:

Address now, RFC Cadet Battalion. Denham, England. Well, love Smith.
¹⁸

In fact, however, there still remained a fair way to go before he would be judged as the right stuff to get into the cockpit of an aircraft and begin to learn how to fly it, as was made clear by the commanding officer on the first day after he had formed the Australians up for a parade in the courtyard.

‘You are,’ the officer said, with only a small sniff of distaste, ‘
Australians.
’

So far, so good…

‘You come to me from France, very fit, but—ahem—you want to forget all about flying. You are to be prepared as officers and—ahem—I trust, gentlemen. Good afternoon—er—gentlemen!’
¹⁹

And so began ten weeks of studying everything from military law to hygiene, to types of German aircraft, to French customs, to topography and infantry training. (True, not all of the courses were related to flying, but one couldn’t be a pilot unless one were an officer, what? And one couldn’t be an officer unless one bally-well understood how the military worked at all levels, what?) They were to be prepared as ‘officers and gentlemen’, and would at least look the part, after being issued with their cadet uniform, which included a double-breasted tunic and a Glengarry cap with white puggarees.

Most of their training was hard work, often tedious, and deeply frustrating, in the sense that it was all just so many
preliminaries
and very far removed from what they had all signed up to do, which was to fly aeroplanes. And yet there was no way around it—if they didn’t pass each and every exam that would be set for them, they simply wouldn’t be allowed to go on to the next stage. More to the point, this would mean that their likely next port of call would be back in the trenches of France, whence they came. (It was amazing, how that could concentrate a man’s mind when it came to memorising reams of dull infantry statistics, the essential contours of an Albatros, as opposed to a Fokker or Taube, and just what angle of ascent a Sopwith could manage before it would stall.)

There were other things to do besides study, of course. Many times, at the end of a long day’s instruction, there would remain just one lonely figure pacing up and down the courtyard, his gasping breath making regular puffs of white in the cold night air as he kept going, hour after hour. That man, of course, was Charles Kingsford Smith. It always was. And his punishment was nearly always for the same transgression. While it was permissible to go into town on a pass, to have a drink and perhaps a carry-on with some of the local lasses, it was
not
permissible to return in the wee hours of the morning, no matter how clever you thought you were, or just how beautiful she was.
²⁰

Still, ‘Smithy’, as he was now known, always seemed to take it in fairly good cheer, on the reckoning that the odd punishment simply went with the fabulous territory he was in. On other nights the air cadets would sneak away and poach pheasant, and if successful, cook them so they could eat, drink and make merry, all in the comfort of their own barracks. Much of the ‘making merry’ involved standing around the piano and singing bawdy songs—an activity where, again, Smithy shone, much as he ever had, and he was one of the most popular men in the squadron.

Altogether, roar it out with Smithy!

Here’s to the Kaiser, the son of a bitch,

May his balls drop off with the seven-year itch,

May his arse be pounded with a lump of leather,

Till his arsehole can whistle Britannia for Ever
²¹

Meanwhile, at the Sopwith factory at Kingston-on-Thames, Harry Hawker was busy as never before. A small part of that busy-ness, true, was taking the delightful, the wondrous, the absorbing Muriel Peaty out for Sunday afternoon drives and the odd supper—at least when her rather conservative parents would allow it—but most of it was developing the new plane he had been feverishly working on. From his first days at Sopwith, Harry had prospered, and had gone from being a humble mechanic to a pilot, then test pilot, then
the
test pilot, then designer, then everything wrapped into one, to the point where no-one was sure if he was Tommy Sopwith’s right-hand man or Tommy Sopwith was his. What was certain was that the Allies were in desperate need of a new plane to counter the Germans’ Albatros and Fokker models—both of which were faster, more manoeuvrable and lethal than the Sopwith Scout—and Harry was pouring his heart and soul, his expertise and energy, into providing exactly that. Most days, between continuing his test flights, he worked at the drawing board in the company of a designer by the name of Herbert Smith trying to create a biplane that would embody every refined feature he had learnt from his years of flying and testing aeroplanes—as well as encompassing the things that fighter pilots were telling him they needed.

To enable the plane to climb quickly it would need to be light, in fact just half the weight of its contemporaries. For greater manoeuvrability the bulk of that weight—the engine, fuel, ammunition and pilot—had to be tightly packed near the centre of gravity, just forward of the cockpit. Hawker and Smith decided on a tiny fuselage that would be just 7 feet in length, while the wingspan would be a relatively short 28 feet. Power would come from a 130-horsepower Clerget 9B rotary engine. And then there were the guns. Two forward-mounted Vickers .303 machine guns would do the trick—making it the first British twin-gunned plane of the war—and the bulk of the Vickers would be contained within the body of the plane, directly in front of the pilot. That gave the otherwise clean lines of the plane forming up beneath their pencils something of a hump to rather resemble a camel, indeed a Sopwith camel…

In France, the war in the air was getting progressively bloodier. In August 1916, the
Oberste Heeresleitung
, the German Supreme Army Command, had embarked on a different tactical approach with its war planes. Instead of sending out patrols of two or three planes at a time from a generally fixed base, they decided to have their best fighters patrol together in packs of fifteen and sixteen planes. These larger squadrons—called
Jagdstaffeln
, for hunt squadrons,
Jastas
for short—were not attached to particular ground units; rather their charter was simply to engage in ‘aggressive aerial warfare’, to go where they could do the most damage, to roam along the front line, find the enemy planes and hunt them down. Most highly prized was when you could make an enemy plane crash after diving so steeply that it went into a vertical wreck, or
Fliegerdenkmal
, an aviator’s memorial, as they laughingly called it.