Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (100 page)

Lester Brain, who discovered the lost
Kookaburra
, went on to a glittering aviation career and became the first general manager of Trans-Australian Airways. A book by Neil Cadigan was recently published on him, entitled
A Man Among Mavericks: Lester Brain
,
Australia’s Greatest Aviator.
Lester Brain died on 30 June 1980.

Information on John Stannage is, frankly, hard to come by. It is known that by the late 1930s he and his wife Beris had moved back to New Zealand and opened a radio shop called Stannage Wireless in Auckland, and he also seems to have tried his hand briefly at radio broadcasting, on 1XB. In 1944 he wrote and published his reminiscences about his time flying,
High Adventure
, and when this was well received followed it up in 1950 with an affectionate biography of his former boss,
Smithy.
And then he faded from view…

Nancy-Bird Walton passed away peacefully in her Neutral Bay home on Tuesday, 13 January 2009.

George Hubert Wilkins lived a long and fruitful life—amazing for the number of things he did. In the northern summer of 1931 he was the captain and key mover of an expedition to take a Nautilus submarine under the North Pole. They said it couldn’t be done and…and in that particular instance they were right. Nevertheless, Wilkins did much of the work whereby it later was done and he is acknowledged as, effectively, the father of exploration in that region—this, despite a litany of spectacular aeroplane crashes.

A measure of the respect in which he was held by the scientific community is wonderfully recounted by Simon Nasht in his book
Last Explorer.
Nasht tells the story of what happened after Sir Hubert Wilkins died suddenly and unexpectedly, aged seventy, in his Framingham, Massachusetts, hotel room on 30 November 1958, and was subsequently cremated. Four months later, on 17 March 1959, the American submarine USS
Skate
broke through the polar ice cap at a point near the North Pole and scattered Wilkins’s ashes in that part of the world that he, more than anyone, had done so much to explore.

Ben Eielson, George Wilkins’s faithful pilot, was tragically killed in 1929, just a year after his great triumph with Wilkins. Typically, he was flying into the black heart of a raging storm to try to rescue the crew of a whaler stuck in ice off the coast of Alaska. It was three months before a rescue party found the plane and the dead pilot.
³⁰

And Robert Buie, the man many credit as being the one who shot down the Red Baron? Not long after accomplishing that feat he suffered a heart attack and was invalided out of the front line and sent home to Australia. There, he tried to get a war pension, but this was refused by the government on the grounds that his heart condition was not believed to be war related.
³¹
He subsequently lived a relatively gentle life, fishing and oyster farming on the Hawkesbury River, on the New South Wales central coast, where he had grown up. A certain renown followed him as the man who had shot down the Red Baron and I remember my own mother proudly telling me that the man who had accomplished that feat had lived not far from us, on our farm at Peats Ridge. Alas, on Anzac Day 1964, at the age of seventy, Robert Buie was found dead in his boat, adrift on the Hawkesbury. His headstone in Brooklyn cemetery has the simple epitaph: ‘
He shot down the Red Baron.
’ (And for what it’s worth, I reckon he did exactly that.)

As to the Red Baron himself, Manfred von Richthofen, his fate after his death at the age of twenty-six was a curious one. Immediately after the war was over, his body was moved from Bertangles to a nearby German military cemetery on the outskirts of the French town of Fricourt. It was from there in 1925 that his brother Bolko claimed it, intending to rebury him in the family plot at Schweidnitz Cemetery—beside their father, who had died of natural causes in 1920, and their 28-year-old brother, Lothar, who had been killed when his plane had crashed in 1922. And yet once the German government became aware that one of the Fatherland’s most famous sons was returning to German soil, it managed to persuade Bolko to have him buried in the Invalidenfriedhof Cemetery in Berlin, a place where most of Germany’s greatest military heroes and leaders are interred.
³²

On the occasion of his re-interment, on 20 November 1925, none less than the German President, Paul von Hindenburg, attended, together with the German Chancellor Hans Luther, and most of the cabinet and the good and the great of the day. In 1938, Hermann Wilhelm Göring, then Adolf Hitler’s Minister for Economic Affairs, and given the responsibility for the German rearmament program, added a massive monument atop the grave.

When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, it transpired that the Invalidenfriedhof was in the Communist Russian eastern sector, meaning that the von Richthofen family, who substantially lived in the western sector, could only visit the gravesite with special permission. It was because of this that Bolko applied for permission from the East German government to once again reclaim his brother’s body and this time do what he had intended to do in 1925, and bury him in the family plot. Though this did not happen before Bolko died in 1971, the reburial did take place in 1976, and that is where Manfred von Richthofen lies to this day, in the family’s tomb in Wiesbaden.

Charles Lindbergh’s life was forever altered by his feat of flying solo over the Atlantic, and although his fame never faltered, his popularity certainly did. In 1941—by which time the couple had three other children in addition to their deceased oldest child, the kidnapped Charles Jnr—Lindbergh emerged as a leading exponent of the view that America should not enter World War II, just as his father, a Congressman from Minnesota, had been outspoken against America entering World War I. At Des Moines, in 1941, Lindbergh was quoted as saying, ‘the three most important groups who have been pressing this country towards war are the Roosevelt administration, the British, and the Jews’.
³³
To be fair, he went on to soften that seemingly anti-Semitic slur by saying how he, for one, could understand Jews agitating the way they did. ‘The persecutions they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. But instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. A few farsighted Jewish people realise this. But the majority still does not.’

And then to the line that finished him.

‘Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.’

His reputation never recovered, though after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor a few months later he did drop his resistance to the war and joined the American Army Air Forces, and went on to fly fifty combat missions in the Pacific—downing one Japanese plane. After the war he devoted himself, among other things—which we’ll get to—to writing his memoirs, and his 1953 autobiography,
The Spirit of St. Louis
, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Lindbergh kept flying, and he was one of the few pioneer aviators of his generation not to have died in a plane crash. And over the years, most particularly from the mid 1950s on, he couldn’t help noticing how much the America beneath his wings was changing from what it once had been. The vast tracts of wilderness he had seen from the air were, year by year, and then month by month, disappearing. It turned him into a committed environmentalist.

‘Few men,’ he said in a rare chat with reporters, while passing through Hawaii in 1971, ‘have seen with their own eyes, as I have in the past 50 years, the serious breakdown—catastrophic in some instances—of America’s land surface. I have seen the fences pushed westwards, enclosing once-open land. I have seen bird and animal life disappear. I have seen forest land converted to agriculture, farm land in turn become suburban subdivisions, mountains slashed through with superhighways, rivers and lakes fouled by pollution, the skies hazed by smog—all evidence of human thoughtlessness about the environment.’
³⁴

(Interestingly, the changing face of the land surface can be illustrated by what happened to Roosevelt Field, from where Lindbergh set off to fly to Paris, and where Kingsford Smith landed after his own cross-Atlantic flight. When I visited there in early January 2009, I was fascinated to find that the whole thing is now a wall-to-wall shopping mall.)

From the mid 1960s Lindbergh was an active supporter of the World Wildlife Fund. ‘Where civilisation is most advanced, few birds exist,’ he wrote in an article for
Readers Digest
in 1971. ‘I realised that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.’
³⁵

Three years later, early on the morning of 26 August 1974, he died in Hawaii, aged seventy-two. A particularity of his funeral was that it was held within three hours of his death, a final blow struck for the privacy that he had so fiercely fought for in his life. And yet that privacy did not last…

In the late 1990s, a German woman, Astrid Bouteil, who had grown up in the small Bavarian town of Geretsried, just south of Munich, came across a magazine article about Lindbergh together with 112 letters he had written to her mother and recognised him immediately as…her father. This was the man who visited them—her mother Brigitte, and her two brothers Dyrk and David—for a few days, twice a year, every year, going by the name of ‘Careu Kent’. Astrid confronted her mother, Brigitte Hesshaimer, who cried and acknowledged that their affair had begun in 1957 and continued until just before his death. Astrid waited until both her own mother and Lindbergh’s wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, had died before revealing the shattering secret. DNA tests in 2003 established beyond doubt that Lindbergh was in fact the father of her and her brothers.

And yet there was more. For, as it subsequently emerged, while having his affair with Brigitte, Lindbergh had also had a simultaneous affair with Brigitte’s sister Marietta, who bore him two sons, Vago and Christoph. But wait…it then came to light that Lindbergh had also had a third affair with a close friend of the Hesshaimer sisters, a woman by the name of Valeska, with whom he had a son and a daughter in 1959 and 1961. In the space of nine years, Lindbergh had sired seven children in Europe, in addition to his six children born in America, and had managed to keep the whole thing going by virtue of his wealth and the fact that, as far as his American wife and family knew, ‘business’ frequently took him to Europe. In 2005 the German author Rudolf Schroeck wrote a book,
Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh
, laying everything bare, including the fact that ‘ten days before he died in August 1974, Lindbergh wrote three letters from his hospital bed to his three mistresses and requested “utmost secrecy”’. It was not to be.

The
Spirit of St Louis
hangs proudly in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, just thirty-five paces—by my stride—from the Wright
Flyer I.

The world of aviation, of course, continues to expand. As I write this—from a Qantas Boeing 747-400 jet, as it happens, which will get me into London shortly, about twenty-two hours after leaving Sydney—the big news in commercial aviation is the advent of the Airbus A380 passenger airliner, capable of carrying 450 passengers around the world at a speed of 927 kilometres per hour, which is 576 miles per hour in the old money, or a staggering 85 per cent of the speed of sound at 30,000 feet. Each of those Qantas planes will bear a name from Australian aviation history, and they include Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm, Lawrence Hargrave, Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinness, Fergus McMaster, Bert Hinkler, Keith Smith, Ross Smith, Lester Brain, Norman Brearley, Scotty Allan, P.G.Taylor and Nancy-Bird Walton.

And yet the true glory days of the pilot are substantially gone.

In Australia, in 1989, when the pilots of the domestic carrier Ansett were agitating for more money, Prime Minister Bob Hawke held his ground and refused to back down. He derided their whole profession for good measure, saying that in the modern world, pilots were nothing more than ‘glorified bus drivers’. This was a harsh assessment, most particularly when pilots demonstrate their extraordinary importance in times of crisis, as most famously happened recently, when, with both engines of US Airways Airbus A320 failed due to a bird-strike, a wonderfully calm and vastly experienced pilot by the name of Chesley B. ‘Sully’ Sullenberger III managed to bring his bird down to a beautiful landing on the Hudson River and save all 155 lives on board. In the annals of aviation that pilot’s feat will long stand out as a stunning example of cool professionalism at work.

And yet, just as Charles Kingsford Smith said it would, his spirit lives on, even in the strictly regulated corporate aviation age. In January 2008, the
South China Morning Post
reported the story of an Australian pilot, Ian Wilkinson, chief pilot of Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways’ Boeing 777 fleet who—with Cathay Pacific chairman Chris Pratt and many VIP passengers on board—was piloting the Boeing 777-300ER when it took off on its maiden flight from the manufacturer’s plant in Everett, Washington. Though Wilkinson was a pilot of high standing and excellent record, something got into him on that day. Instead of simply taking ‘er up and letting the automatic pilot do the rest, flying them all the way to Hong Kong, Wilkinson suddenly turned her around and performed what was described as a ‘Top Gun-like manoeuvre’, which included swooping down to within 10 metres of the runway. After a disciplinary hearing, sadly, Wilkinson was sacked, while his co-pilot was suspended from training duties for six months.