Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men

by P Fitzsimons

  The first chore was to get a fire going on the hill, and then keep wood up to it thereafter, ensuring that in the daylight hours there was always a plume of white smoke heading skywards that search planes would be able to see.

  Meantime, on the first full day at ‘Coffee Royal’, as they decided to call their place, Smithy, Ulm, McWilliams and Litchfield hunkered down, accompanied by perhaps ten thousand flies that seemed keen on swarming around and crawling all over them as if they were massive dog turds on legs. Key among the men’s frustrations was that they had been unable to communicate with the outside world, even though Mac had rigged up an aerial that had allowed them to receive transmissions, on battery power alone. Hal Litchfield, meanwhile, once the storm had cleared, had been able to take their bearings from the stars, and they knew exactly where they were—latitude 15” 35’ South, longitude 124” 45’ East—about 150 miles from Derby and 300 miles due west of Wyndham. They also knew they were somewhere in the area of the Port George Mission, but had no idea where that mission lay—most frustratingly, no-one gave its position over the radio, and it was not marked on the maps they had. A brief point of discussion was whether they should go on an exploratory march to look for the mission, but lost in the wilderness as they were, ‘the dear old Southern Cross’, as Smithy thought of her, ‘seemed at least a home, where we should be wise to remain’.13 At least, the massive wingspan of the plane would surely be easily spotted from the air when the rescuers came their way, whereas if they had been alone on the ground, they would be near invisible.

  What they most needed, of course, was to solve the radio problem. There had been no trouble transmitting when the Southern Cross had been in the air, as the Aladdin wind-powered generators on the sides of the cockpit had provided plenty of current to the radios. But now that they were on the ground, they had to find a way to get one of the generators to turn equally fast, as the transmitter could not operate without the A/C current they provided. Smithy, a man of no little ingenuity and energy in such matters, just as he had displayed when running the Gascoyne Transport Company, took the lead in trying to solve the problem. First they detached one of the generators from its bracket on the fuselage, and then chocked up one side of the undercarriage on a log resting on rocks, before digging out beneath one of the 4-foot-diameter landing wheels. Smithy also began to carve a wooden roller to attach to the end of the generator. The theory was once they had the wheel spinning furiously, they could hold the roller against it, and that would generate enough electricity to transmit a message to the outside world. It was exhausting, back-breaking work, but they kept at it. They needed to turn the generator at about its normal speed of 2000 revolutions per minute, so they would have had to turn the big wheel about 100 times a minute. Not easy in the heat and the flies and the mud…

  At least, in the meantime, they were able to listen to how the search was proceeding, and learnt that the first of the rescue planes would be leaving Derby the following day to look for them, while a launch was going to head up the Drysdale River. There was some hope that the morrow would bring succour, although no hope that the night would be anything but hell on earth as the mosquitoes now seemed to have organised themselves well enough to come at them in waves.

  And then things got really bad: Tom McWilliams tried to cheer them all up by playing his mouth organ. At least he did so until, with their last reserves of energy for the day, the others prevailed upon him to stop.

  ‘A major horror of the episode,’ recorded Charles Ulm.14

  Good God, what a place.

  Another plane!

  On Wednesday, 3 April 1929, at Drysdale Mission, 150 miles north-west of Wyndham, the residents were almost positive that the mysterious plane that had come and gone so quickly must now have returned and they rushed out in the midday sun expecting to see it.15 But no, this was another, much smaller, single-engined plane and, after circling low, something dropped from it and landed nearby. It was a message from the pilot:

  We are looking for another plane, missing since Sunday. Answer these questions in the following manner. Wave sheet to mean Yes. Place sheet flat on the ground to mean no. First question, did plane pass here? Second question, did it throw out a letter? Third question, which way did it go?16

  Up in the West Australian Airways plane, pilot Jim Woods, with none other than the still deeply worried Clive Chateau as an observer, watched carefully the response.

  To the first question there was a violent waving of the sheet, meaning they had definitely seen the Southern Cross…

  To the second question, one native placed a sheet on the ground, while another waved a sheet…meaning, Woods supposed, that the answer was indeterminate.

  And finally, the crucial third question. Which way were they heading? Now, a squad of eleven natives formed up and, evenly spaced out, resolutely marched in the south-westerly direction.

  Now, now, they were getting somewhere!

  That evening, their fourth at Coffee Royal, Ulm was so weak he could manage only a bare scrawl in his diary.

  I feel gone in the arms and legs. The flies are unbearable, the mosquitoes damnable. We had gruel for lunch.

  There remained an enormous amount of interest in where the Southern Cross was, and sympathy for the crew’s plight was as widespread as it was deep, though the Sydney Morning Herald on that very day had been intemperate enough to question why on earth Kingsford Smith and Ulm had been so impetuous as to head to the remote Wyndham instead of taking the established route to Darwin, and take off without having received a positive weather report from their desired landing ground. Steering from there ‘by God and by guess’,17 surely they had been practically asking for trouble?

  In a blistering editorial, the Sun weighed in, in reply: ‘Judging by the very many mistakes in fact on the subject of the flight and in its theories and criticisms, there is some ground for believing that the “Herald” this morning came out rather “by God and by guess”…’18

  Friday, 5 April.

  The wretched time passed exceedingly slowly for the men. Only a few days before, an hour’s worth of fuel had exhausted itself in what seemed like just a few minutes. Now, in this sweltering heat, a few minutes seemed to pass as slowly as whole hours. Listening on the radio, they were at least pleased to hear that the Canberra would likely soon be on its way to search for them.

  Saturday, 6 April.

  What’s that?

  What?

  That! That sound? It sounds like…it is…a plane! A plane in the distance! About four miles off! Like mad things, suddenly re-energised in this hot and hazy mid-afternoon, the four men staggered to the hill and lit the fire again, managing to send billowing plumes of white smoke into the air that the crew on the plane couldn’t fail to see…

  But somehow they did.

  The plane droned off into the distance and disappeared…

  Smithy, for one, felt angry with his own impotence. Here he was, a man born to fly, capable of flying most planes the way an expert violinist might play a Stradivarius, and yet he was hopelessly earthbound and powerless to alter the course of the plane of their salvation by even one degree. And why wasn’t the bloody pilot looking for smoke, the way he would have been had he been up there?! They so wanted that plane to come their way and save them, but nothing worked—not smoke, not prayers, not anything!

  A few hours later, another plane appeared and then it too disappeared, after getting their hopes up. Shattered, desperately lonely and feeling as if the world had forsaken them, they returned to camp. Christ Almighty. If the sight of those two planes had done one thing, however, it seemed to have re-energised Smithy, almost as if he had come to the conclusion that if they were ever going to get out of there, it would have to be by virtue of their own endeavour.

  Working like a madman, he completed his system to get the generator working.

  That evening, at roughly the same time as the day shift of flies reluctantly handed over duties to the night shift of mosquitoes, they tried t
heir luck. Smithy and Litchfield spun the wheel, while Ulm held the generator to it, and they kept spinning till they could spin no more—about thirty seconds, before they fell to the ground exhausted19—as Mac tapped furiously away.

  ‘…—……—……—…’

  ‘SOS…SOS…SOS…we are at 15” 35’ S, longitude 124” 45’ E.’

  There was no way of knowing, of course, whether the message got through, but as they slumped, exhausted, to the ground, the grim countenance of Mac was a fair indication that it probably hadn’t. God Help All Of Us, indeed.

  The last of their precious tobacco was gone and they were reduced to trying to smoke the leaves of the gum trees and mangroves. It was a close call, but on balance they decided that they would probably rather die, or at least go without, than smoke them again.

  On a more serious matter, another decision had to be taken about whether Mac should try to convert the radio from being a receiver to being a transmitter. A method of doing precisely that had been broadcast from Sydney in the hope that the crew of the Southern Cross would hear it—and they did—but, after long discussion, they decided not to risk destroying the radio altogether. For them, the radio was a lifeline and by following closely reports of the rescue operation, they sensed—prayed—it could only be a matter of time before they were found, so long as they could actually survive that long.

  In the meantime, they tried a new system with the generator, whereby they joined up the belts from their pants to make a kind of belt-and-pulley drive to turn the wooden roller faster than before, once they got the wheel spinning. In faraway Adelaide, a ham radio operator, Lance Coombe, was surprised to suddenly pick up very faint wireless signals in Morse code and could pick up the letters V…K…but then it faded just as quickly…20

  In Sydney, Bon Hilliard was beside herself with fury. Keith was her fiancé, they were about to build a life together, and she had some say in this matter. And she insisted, stamping her foot, that Keith not risk his life in this foolish manner. It was crazy! She didn’t know a lot about aviation, but she knew enough to know that you couldn’t prepare a plane for a long flight like that in just a couple of days, and that the Widgeon wasn’t designed for long-distance travel. Besides, how could he possibly go looking for Smithy and Ulm after the way those two had treated him over the Pacific flight? Keith had to understand that if he was intent on doing this, then the marriage was off—off, do you hear?

  Keith, in his manner, listened quietly, but told Bon that it was just something he had to do. He loved her, he hoped she would reconsider, but he could hardly leave them out there when he reckoned he had a fair idea where they were, could he? Besides, years before, Smithy had twice plucked him from the West Australian wilderness—once when he had been lost for three weeks!21—so this would be a payback.

  He was going, and that was that. And quickly. So rushed was he to leave, in fact, that there was no time to install a working radio, or check that such a basic thing as a compass was fitted—Hitchcock had a pocket compass22—that the tool kit was complete, that the engine was in as good a shape as it possibly could be.

  At dawn the following day, he and Bobby Hitchcock were at Richmond air base, and getting ready to fire up the Kookaburra. As they took off, on their way to find the Southern Cross and her crew, they left behind on the tarmac a weeping Bon Hilliard, who had relented at least enough to come to see them off.

  Not far behind Anderson and Hitchcock in taking to the air was the Giant Moth, Canberra, with pilot Les Holden at the controls, though the latter plane, with its much stronger Bristol Jupiter nine-cylinder radial, 435-horsepower engine, quickly overtook the Kookaburra and moved well ahead.

  Tuesday, 9 April.

  Another plane in the distance. It passed by once. It passed by again. It didn’t see them. If they had more energy they might have despaired at this point. But such a strong emotion was beyond them, so weak did they feel on the tenth day of being lost in the wilderness. Should they, perhaps, try another tack, and build a raft, which they could drift down the river on, and get all the way to the coast? No. The idea might have held merit for stronger men, but for blokes in their condition the only idea that gained unanimity of opinion was to lie like sick dogs in the shade under the wing of the Southern Cross, and hope that their rescue would come.

  Ulm wrote in his diary:

  Mac and I are much weaker today. Hunger pains are most distressing. Smithy and Litch are failing too. To be passed three times by a plane is just heart-breaking. If only La Perouse radio station would send out the exact position of Port George Mission we would try to walk to it. But we don’t know where it is. Matches are giving out: only 22 left. And the water hole is drying up.

  On the upside, Ulm and Kingsford Smith were both elated, but also stunned, to hear that Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock had taken off in the Kookaburra, and were coming to look for them.

  Two cables were waiting for Keith Anderson when he finally made it into Alice Springs on the late afternoon of 9 April. One was from Lieutenant Colonel Horace Brinsmead, the Controller of Civil Aviation in Australia, who had been shocked to hear that Anderson and Hitchcock had left. After all, it was a major flight across the entire country, and the usual way of doing things would have been to put several weeks’ preparation into it beforehand to make sure that any risks were reduced as much as possible. Certain that Anderson and Hitchcock were putting themselves at risk, Brinsmead formally insisted that they abandon their flight—even though they were already halfway there—until their plane could be better prepared. But Anderson would not be dissuaded.

  ‘This has nothing to do with my search. I am flying under private arrangements, and intend going on,’ he told one newspaper.23

  The other cable, though, was a beauty. It was from Bon, sending Keith all her love and telling him that she really did still want to marry him. Hurrah! This was a piece of wonderful news.

  For the truth of it was, when it came to the Widgeon, he and Bobby really were having their troubles. There was something wrong with the compass, which meant that at some angles it was pointing as much as 45 degrees off the correct direction—making it worse than useless—and they couldn’t find a way to fix it. And someone had stolen their tool set while they were in Broken Hill. Most worryingly of all, they’d had serious engine trouble south of Oodnadatta. Sitting in the forward seat of the plane, directly behind the troublesome Cirrus engine, Hitchcock had seen a locknut coming loose on one of the exposed pushrods to the valve on one cylinder, making the whole engine vibrate badly. Anderson had made an emergency landing, and Hitchcock had fixed it the best he could, using a chisel instead of spanners, but it was a real worry. Still, they decided to press on, and early on the morning of 10 April, they were at Alice Springs airstrip, again preparing to leave.

  Before take-off, a mechanic who was loading the last can of petrol pleaded that it would be more prudent to substitute a can of water for the can of petrol. Slightly amused, Anderson demurred.

  ‘No thanks, petrol is worth more to me than water.’24

  And with that, away they went, lifting off at 7.35 am.

  For 100 miles flying north of the Alice, Anderson simply followed the Overland Telegraph Line, which headed through Katherine and all the way up to Darwin. About halfway up that line, they could then follow another line that would take them all the way to Wyndham. It was the surest way to navigate in that part of the world, as they basically couldn’t get lost so long as they kept it in sight. And even if they did have to land they could always shinny up the pole, tap into it—or at worst, cut it—and help would soon be at hand.

  Still, Anderson was in a hurry. At a place called Woodford Crossing, well before the offshoot telegraph line, he decided to turn west, and duck across the Tanami Desert to get to Halls Creek on the southern edge of the Kimberley, which should save them several hours on their way to Wyndham. It was a risk, but a calculated one.

  Oh…mother.

  Five hours after they had headed acr
oss the desert on the short cut, Bobby Hitchcock felt, through the seat of his pants, the engine of the Kookaburra making the strange vibration again. He looked ahead, and sure enough, the locknut on the jiggling pushrod was working loose. Before his horrified eyes, it loosened further and the vibration increased; then the engine lost power and their plane lost altitude. The plane was heavily laden with petrol, and three cylinders just weren’t enough to keep it in the air.

  They were going to have to take it down in some of the harshest, hottest country in Australia. Below them stretched an endless expanse of turpentine scrub and loose, dry sand. But they had no choice. Keith Anderson throttled back, and made ready to bring the Kookaburra in for a landing…

  And away they went.

  Over at Carnarvon, Major Brearley had at last received permission to suspend the normal postal services that he had contracted to supply, which meant that he could now put another three planes in the air to search for the Southern Cross. He watched them take off with some satisfaction, and relief, as the situation had become desperate, with ten days having passed since the Southern Cross had disappeared. Where on earth could they be?

  That evening at Coffee Royal, Charles Ulm wrote in his diary:

  Smithy is failing fast. He reels as he walks. Hunger pains are nearly driving Mac and me insane. We discovered a thin, long bean weed today and cooked and ate some. We don’t like them but there is some nourishment in them.

  Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock were in trouble. Even though Keith had brought them in for a perfect landing the day before, and Bobby had quickly been able to fix the engine, the problem was trying to take off. Best as they could, they had hacked away at the turpentine scrub in the terrible heat of the day to clear an airstrip—using just a penknife, their bare hands and a rising sense of desperation—but when they tried to take off, the soft sand had so sucked at the wheels that they couldn’t get the speed they needed, and then the stump of a turpentine shrub had punctured one of the tyres, bringing the plane to a sickening, juddering halt. Compounding everything, their water was gone, their supplies were dwindling, and the heat was belting down. They were not far from the kind of country that even the hugely experienced and well-equipped George Wilkins had beaten a hasty retreat from when he had passed through four years earlier. It felt like they were the only two living things in the hostile environment and if they stayed much longer they would not be able to survive.