Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  Gaza fell in November and in December the British captured the ancient city of Jerusalem. The first Australians to ride in were from Western Australia, the 10th Light Horse. They were greeted by a nun who was repairing the tiles on the roof of a convent at the edge of town and ceased her task to wave to them. They were mud-splashed and unshaven and weary from their prolonged progress through the cold hills in the rain. ‘Christ met each man on the threshold of the city,’ says the official historian, Gullett. ‘The influence was, perhaps, not lasting. War is not a Christian mission.’ The populace—Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Christian—had suffered under Turkish military rule and they were in a carnival mood by the time the Australians entered. The men were shocked by the dishevelled condition of the town. They had expected a golden city. They visited the sacred sites, the Church of the Nativity, the Garden of Gethsemane, as well as the Mosque of Omar and the Wailing Wall.

  In Palestine the men were treated most cordially by the Jewish settlers, orange orchardists. The Australians thought they charged a lot for their wine but officers pointed out that the villagers had been through lean years. At Wadi Hanein an entire brigade was entertained at a feast and a dance to celebrate the capture of Jerusalem. A furious speech about deliverance was made by the village schoolmaster—in Russian. The Jewish matrons and girls wept at it. Afterwards the Australians danced with the women. This was the best time they had had, said some of the light horsemen, since they’d landed in Egypt.

  There were many Turkish spies in Jerusalem, and when Fast’s Hotel, an officers’ club in Jerusalem, was suddenly emptied, the rumour started in the bazaars that the building was to become the Commander-in-Chief’s advanced headquarters. So the Turks foresaw operations either along the main road to Nablus or on the western side of the Jordan Valley. That winter of 1917–18 the British forces began to operate on the other side of the Jordan Valley, in terrain now part of the state of Jordan. That was the centre line of the advance. On the western side they were well and truly within what would be the modern state of Israel, for that was where Beersheba lay. To the east, T.E. Lawrence and the Arabs were operating. For the force in the valley, the rain in the winter of 1917–18, combined with severe cold, was a trial to light horsemen operating in the open, though firewood was found and bivouac sheets and extra blankets were issued.

  Chauvel advanced on Derra from Amman, the present capital of Jordan, with his two divisions and the camel brigade. At a place name Es Salt the Australians ran into a massive Turkish force. The Beni Sakr tribe around Es Salt had been persuaded to support the attack but wisely enough absconded. By midnight on 4 May, Chauvel’s mounted infantry, including the Light Horse, retreated back across the Jordan, having lost fifteen hundred men.

  The high command were a little embarrassed by this failure, but it could be blamed on the inadequacy and tiredness of the Australian, New Zealand, British and Indian troops engaged. Chauvel’s corps was rested. When it set off again it overtook the Turks, and cut off their retreat through Nazareth. Otto Liman von Sanders, the German general who was now the enemy Commander-in-Chief, was very nearly captured in Nazareth, as Chauvel had planned. The supply situation became chaotic for von Sanders and the Hejaz railway was subject to attacks, not least by Lawrence. He also believed himself outnumbered and would not discover that he was wrong until the British and Australians captured more than 75 000 of his men in the late summer of 1918.

  The Anzac Mounted Division was stationed by the Jordan River as a decoy. Many of its men were sick from bad water and sanitation, and exhausted. The division was supported by a composite body of Jewish infantry recruited in England and in Palestine itself, and the 20th Indian Infantry Brigade. Their job was to move around a lot and raise plenty of dust to keep Turkish forces arrayed in front of them.

  New camps were built, 15 000 dummy horses were erected out of canvas, fake campfires were lit at night, and sleighs drawn by mules jogged about the sea of dust in the daytime. The Australian and British pilots were very active overhead and that helped the deception. While this was going on, T.E. Lawrence, with a strong Arab force, sent agents around the Amman district buying up all available horse feed, dropping hints that it was needed for the maintenance of British cavalry in the Jordan Valley. So in September 1918, while Allenby was massing his forces on the west, the enemy was kept in place in the Jordan Valley to the east by this display from Chauvel’s corps. Most of the rest of the British force camped near the coast in the olive groves and orange orchards of Jaffa.

  By 16 September 1918 Chauvel had secretly moved his headquarters 50 miles (80 kilometres) north, leaving the old camp standing, with a few men to keep the lights burning at night and kick up dust with dragged logs. Chauvel was to lead his corps across the Esdraelon Plain to Megiddo, which in ancient days had been called Armageddon. He was to capture Nazareth and then cut off the Turkish army held in place by the men he had left over in the Jordan Valley. Beyond the Jordan Valley Lawrence and the Arabs were advancing. A column assisted by Arab tribes and the Druze blew up a bridge and destroyed a section of the Hejaz Railway and then demolished further sections north and west. So as the general assault on Damascus under the British general Allenby was about to begin, railway traffic moving south towards three Turkish armies was suspended. Chauvel intended to take a line running from Haifa on the coast through Nazareth to Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. A battle was fought at Megiddo and won. Allenby sent a cable to the government in Melbourne which read in part, ‘The completeness of our victory is due to the action of the Desert Mounted Corps under General Chauvel.’

  The plan for the capture of Damascus involved a swing to the east and an advance on the city by the Pilgrim’s Road. The Arab Northern Army and Lawrence came under Chauvel’s orders. The rest of his corps, with the Australian Mounted Division leading, would advance over the Golan Heights and make for Damascus. Despite facing a series of Turkish rearguards, Chauvel made the gates of Damascus by the evening of 30 September and cut the road on the other side through the Barada Gorge that led to Beirut. He entered Damascus next morning while the 3rd Light Horse Brigade continued to pursue the Turks northwards. Chauvel was now responsible for a city over whose control the political struggle had begun, involving not only Arab and Syrian leaders but his own liaison officer, Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawrence.

  Chauvel was not politically informed enough to deal with these complications, or with Arab hopes or the relationship between Emir Feisal, the Arab leader, and Lawrence. When Chauvel dealt with the disorder in the city, which involved cracking down on the looting of the Arab militias, the action was lampooned by Lawrence as ‘triumphal’. But Chauvel’s job was an enormous one—to keep order on the streets of a city of 300 000 people, secure food, cooperate with the police, and care for a horde of sick and wounded Turks and the 20 000 prisoners his corps had taken in the city. His own troops were suffering from malaria and influenza at an appalling rate.

  Various troops, including Australian Light Horse, pursued the Turks beyond Aleppo on the coast of modern Syria, which the Arab militias captured on 25 October. Five days later an armistice was signed with the Turks. Over six weeks, Chauvel’s three divisions had marched and fought their way over 300 miles (480 kilometres) and taken well over 70 000 prisoners, all at a cost of only 533 battle casualties.

  The secular Young Turks reformers who—in this acute Turkish crisis—had seized power from the Sultan in Istanbul tried to rouse the Arabs to a Holy War against all Christians in the Empire. The Arabs treated the call with indifference. Most of them had been only intermittent fighters under Feisal. Raids on moving trains on the Hejaz Railway and the annihilation of Turkish outposts were their contribution to the war. The British and Australian troops were contemptuous of them both racially and as soldiers.

  After the Armistice the Australians and New Zealanders attacked an Arab village named Surafend. There had been attacks by Arabs on Australians, and a man from Surafend had certa
inly shot and killed a New Zealand trooper. Vengeful Australians and New Zealanders descended on the town, killing many men, beating others and putting the village to the torch. They also torched the nomad camp on the edge of town. The racial contempt of the era helped validate their actions in their own minds, but Allenby later addressed them with furious contempt and failed to send them a departing order of commendation as they shot their horses under orders—no room on the transports for livestock—and prepared to leave. An Australian pointed out to Allenby the injustice of his lack of commendation and he issued a glowing one as a result. But Surafend remained a taint on the general honour and extraordinary military performance of the Light Horse.

  FLYING OVER PALESTINE, FLYING OVER FRANCE, FLYING TO AUSTRALIA

  During the campaign in Palestine and Syria, on the morning of 21 September 1918, British and Australian bombers had discovered the main Turkish column in retreat in a gorge on Wadi Fara Road. Wadi Fara, a tributary of the River Jordan, is to the east of Nablus, and in modern-day Jordan. The Wadi Fara had been reconnoitred by a number of Australian aircraft, including one in which Hudson Fysh was the observer. Within a few years Fysh would be entering into partnership with three Queensland graziers and a fellow war flyer to create Qantas. Already reconnaissance planes like Fysh’s had machine gunned a Turkish train arriving from the west at nearby Bisan, and dropped bombs on the airfields of Amman. Number 1 Squadron had sunk all Turkish vessels on the lake of Tiberias at the head of the Jordan River. At El Afule in Samaria, the land of the Samaritans, young Captain A.R. Brown, a draper from Tasmania, led a dawn patrol in which five machines dropped forty bombs and fired 4000 machine-gun rounds into retreating columns. Then at Burka and Jenin the Turks were similarly attacked—‘They were closely packed,’ wrote the official historian, ‘and nearly every bomb fell plum among them.’

  But what they were able to do at Wadi Fara surprised even the airmen of Number 1 Squadron. Here they bombed the lead vehicles of a large Turkish column and filled the neck of the defile through which the road passed with gutted vehicles and splintered wagons and concussed and burned bodies of men and camels. Clive Conrick, a young man whose family ran sheep and cattle on a station named Nappa Merrie on Cooper’s Creek, recorded in his diary his machine gunning of the men caught below, some of them climbing the cliffs above the road to get away. He saw ‘chips of rock fly off the cliff face and red splotches suddenly appear on the Turks who would stop climbing and fall and their bodies were strewn along the base of the cliff like a lot of dirty rags’. Then, when his pilot climbed again to escape the ridges, Conrick had an opportunity to strafe the trucks and the troops on the ground once more. During the day the Turkish survivors waved white flags but, wrote Conrick, ‘It was quite impossible for us to accept the surrender of the enemy, so we just kept on destroying them.’ This young flyer had been born at Australia’s heart in 1891, at the station where, thirty years before, Burke and Wills had died. The Dig Tree stood on the property and was part of the landscape of his childhood. Before joining the Flying Corps he had appropriately been a member of the small and select Camel Corps.

  L.W. Sutherland, an observer in another plane that day, recognised that on this battlefield the aircraft, which many still considered a novelty of military campaigning, was the dominant power. ‘For the first time in the war, we, the newest arm of the service, had the most onerous work in a major operation . . . But oh, those killings! Only the lucky ones slept that night.’

  Every day there were attacks on retreating Turks, organised to slow them down for capture by ground forces. Those who survived the air attacks and finished their march gave themselves up to the Light Horse in the hills on the southern fringe of the plain of Armageddon. British and Australian mounted divisions headed off these traumatised columns of the rearguard of the Turkish Seventh Army. They, like the Australians who had subjected them to a hellish day, knew that a new and lethal dimension had entered war. Aircraft were no longer a novelty.

  So nothing was immune from the ruthlessness of young Australian airmen. In mid-August 1918 a large cavalry camp on the coast at Mukhalid was attacked. They strafed the horse lines and the tents and then swept along at 200 feet, machine gunning the beach where at least 300 men and many horses were bathing. Horses galloped and bathers rushed out of the water and into the gullies behind the beach.

  Even when the Germans received new aircraft, the Pfalz Scouts, they were beaten out of the air over the desert. Sometimes, in the spirit of European (Australian) attitudes towards the wogs and Gyppos, the men of Number 1 Squadron would go ‘felucca-ring’, diving on the small lateen-rigged boats used by Arabs on the Sea of Galilee. There was a touch of civilised feeling, though, when Oberleutnant Gerhardt Felmey, the leading German pilot flying against Number 1 Squadron, in an excess of fellow feeling, dropped messages and photographs of recently captured Australian airmen on their home field, so that their fellow flyers knew that they were safe and their families at home could be reassured. A number of Australians began to do the same over German airfields.

  By October 1918 the Turkish army was in such ragged and speedy retreat that only the aircraft could keep up with them. In France and Belgium too the German army was in retreat and in the open and at the mercy of aircraft.

  Three Australian squadrons operated on the Western Front, and a further four training squadrons based in England served as replacements. This is a good indication of the short life of young airmen, often former infantry or Light Horse. In training, they lived a gracious life and went up to London to vaudeville and theatre. But casualties amongst them, even in the absence of enemy fire, were frequent and horrifying. One pilot wrote, ‘A great pal of mine was on his very last flight—his last test before qualifying . . . a mist arose, he flew into the ground and was killed.’

  There were other Australian airmen, the so-called Half-Flight, who served from the war’s beginning. Lieutenant White, whom the nurse Vera Deakin would later marry, was captured by the Turks while his plane was on the ground in Mesopotamia (Iraq), having delivered an engineer beyond the lines to cut telegraph wires. Australian airmen of the Half-Flight were among those who surrendered in April 1916 in the besieged garrison at Cutt, eighty miles south of Baghdad. Few of them survived captivity, many being already weakened in health by the diseases rampant in Cutt.

  As for battle, Australia’s ace, Harry Cobby, who would later run the Civil Aviation Board in Australia, was just one who found the air very crowded over the Western Front—with up to a hundred aircraft in a melee. ‘Hectic work. Half-rolling, diving, zooming, stalling, “split slipping”, by inches you miss collision with friend or foe. Cool precise marksmanship is out of the question. Even more so in the somewhat more cumbersome reconnaissance aircraft.’ A mix of vehemence and respect for their opponents characterised the young men who flew the planes—as was shown in the honours done to the Baron von Richthofen when he crashed in Australian lines. After an AIF honour guard had attended his burial, Australian airmen were very quick to rush to the lines at Morlancourt near the Somme to lay wreaths on his grave.

  On 14 and 15 June 1919, two officers of the Royal Flying Corps, Captain J.W. Alcock and Lieutenant A.W. Brown, flew across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vicars-Vimy aircraft, a non-stop flight of 17 hours and 27 minutes. Both airmen were almost instantly knighted, though it would not be long before the young Alcock would be killed in an aircraft crash in Rouen.

  The Australian government, composed of men who tended to look upon the Atlantic as a small pool, were motivated to offer a prize of £10 000 for the first successful flight from Britain to Australia. A number of Australian airmen in England immediately took up the challenge. They were required to land in Australia within the specified thirty days of taking off, and they would need to do so by midnight on 31 December 1920. The competing pilots must be Australian. The starting place was Hounslow aerodrome, or a seaplane station on the south coast of England, and t
he landing place was to be ‘in the neighbourhood of Port Darwin’. The pilots of the Australian squadrons who had survived the war took up the challenge in numbers.

  The first to take off, in a Sopwith Wallaby, on 21 October 1919 were Captain G.C. Matthews with Sergeant T.D. McKay. McKay was a mechanical engineer, Matthews a master mariner and a Scot who had flown with the 3rd Australian Squadron. These aviators, forgotten to history, flew across the world before crashing at Bali on 19 April 1920 and being forced to abandon their flight. On 12 November 1919, Captain Ross Smith with his brother Lieutenant Keith Smith of Adelaide, and Sergeants Bennett and Shears, took off in a Vicars-Vimy supplied by the manufacturer. Ross had taken part in the attacks on Wadi Fara as well as defending Lawrence’s Arab columns on their eastern campaign against the Turks. He was twice decorated with the Military Cross and three times with the Distinguished Flying Cross, and he had had the experience of flying a Handley Page bomber from Cairo to Calcutta in late 1918. Keith had been rejected for service with the AIF, took passage to England and there enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps. He was fully trained but did not see active service. He had been put on the unemployed list of the RAF the week before he started his flight.