Air Disaster Canberra: The Plane Crash That Destroyed a Government

Prologue

It was exactly twenty years to the day after Canberra’s worst disaster that Robert Menzies, by then Australia’s longest serving prime minister, rose to speak. This normally unflappable leader was deeply emotional as he recalled the deaths of three of his closest colleagues.

They had been about to land when their Hudson bomber, the A16-97, crashed into a ridge near Canberra aerodrome – the impact point being 1.5 kilometres northwest of what is now the Pialligo Avenue and Sutton Road intersection. The granite memorial Menzies unveiled in 1960 had fixed to it a metal plaque that revealed the full extent of the disaster. It read:

THIS MEMORIAL CAIRN HAS BEEN ERECTED TO HONOUR THE MEMORY OF

BRIGADIER THE HONOURABLE GEOFFREY AUSTIN STREET MC, ED

Minister of State for the Army: Minister of State for Repatriation

THE HONOURABLE SIR HENRY SOMER GULLETT KCMG

Vice-President of the Executive Council

THE HONOURABLE JAMES VALENTINE FAIRBAIRN

Minister of State for Air: Minister of State for Civil Aviation

GENERAL SIR CYRIL BRUDENELL BINGHAM WHITE KCB, KCMG, KCVO, DSO

Chief of the General Staff

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL FRANCIS THORNTHWAITE DSO, MC

FLIGHT LIEUTENANT ROBERT EDWARD HITCHCOCK, RAAF

PILOT OFFICER RICHARD FREDERICK WIESENER, RAAF

CORPORAL JOHN FREDERICK PALMER, RAAF

AIRCRAFTMAN CLASS 1 CHARLES JOSEPH CROSDALE, RAAF

AND

MR RICHARD EDWIN ELFORD

Private Secretary to the Minister for Air

WHO WHILE SERVING THEIR COUNTRY

LOST THEIR LIVES ON THIS SPOT

IN AN AIRCRAFT ACCIDENT ON 13th AUGUST 1940

At that time, Australia had been at war for almost a year. And in the ghastly inferno that had followed the crash, the nation had lost its key war leaders. Over the next twelve months, it became clear that the passing of Street, Gullett and Fairbairn had destabilised Robert Menzies’ wartime government; and as a direct but delayed consequence, John Curtin became prime minister in October 1941.

This is the story of the crash of the A16-97, its possible causes, the later inquiries and perhaps most controversially of all, whether Air Minister Fairbairn rather than the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) pilot, Bob Hitchcock, had been at the controls. But it is also the story of those of Australia’s World War I generation who had survived the slaughter of that war to become post-war political leaders – men like Street, Gullett and Fairbairn who had fought and lived, and men like Menzies and Curtin who had not fought at all.

During the 1920s and 1930s, as Menzies accelerated towards the prime ministership, Street, Gullett and Fairbairn helped him to obtain credibility with many ex-servicemen. However, their deaths triggered a hung Parliament, where Gallipoli veteran, Arthur Coles, held the balance of power. About a year after winning Gullett’s old seat, Coles crossed the floor. This is his story too.

Part I

The political rise of the Anzac generation

Temora Aviation Museum’s Hudson bomber, the A16-112.

Photograph by Daniel Cox/Studiocox

1

Nose first

As Dudley Lalor drove along the Canberra-Queanbeyan road towards the Molonglo River Bridge, a massive aircraft suddenly loomed in front of his car – just 200 feet above the ground. ‘I had an absolutely clear view of the plane’, Lalor said, ‘which was flying towards me’. It was just before 11.00 a.m. on 13 August 1940 and Lalor was on his way to Canberra aerodrome where he worked as a building contractor. Sensing the danger, Lalor shouted out. Later, he told the local police what happened next:

[The pilot] banked to his left causing the left side wing to go down. The plane then turned completely over sideways and hit the ground. I saw the plane hit… in the same position as though it were landing. I did not hear any explosion but immediately it hit the ground it was enveloped in flames.

After speeding to a point as close as he could drive to the crash site, Lalor jumped out of his car and sprinted up a small hill towards the impact zone. As he neared the summit, he heard an explosion and saw ‘another burst of flames’. Then an air force truck arrived and Lalor was immediately ordered to leave.¹

Apart from Lalor, there were other eyewitnesses nearby who saw the same thing from different viewpoints. Standing outside the Queanbeyan goods shed, Darcy Vest first noticed the plane flying at normal height and speed. The motors were running perfectly. Then the pilot ‘throttled them back’, Vest said. As a result, he continued, the plane lost height much more rapidly than was usual when approaching the aerodrome from that direction. The machine next turned left towards the goods shed before turning left again, Vest’s police statement continued:

The plane seemed to turn very sharply, and it was then that it seemed to be out of control. It flew in a zigzag manner and also in a see-saw manner, rapidly losing height, and then all of a sudden it nosedived to earth and instantly burst into flames.²

Further away, at the Canberra aerodrome, a number of air force personnel had been watching too. ‘For a short time, approximately five seconds’, Flight Sergeant Smith told police, ‘I saw his port wing drop as if doing a side slip to lose height before landing. The machine then did a complete roll, turning completely over… with its nose pointing towards the ground’. After that, Smith lost sight of the aircraft as it passed behind a small ridge, before crashing into the Queanbeyan side.³

Immediately a cry went up at the aerodrome: ‘Ambulance Fire Tender Lockheed nosed in!’ To the sound of alarms going off everywhere, Flying Officer Wilson scrambled aboard a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) ambulance, which was already picking up speed. After racing down the Canberra-Queanbeyan road, the driver turned into Cameron’s paddock and bounced up hill over rough ground towards a billowing plume of oily flame. Upon arrival at the ghastly scene, Wilson noted the time. It was 11.03 a.m. He was the first rescuer there. By this stage, the fuselage had nearly finished burning, although the plane’s port wing and nose were still enveloped in fierce flames. Other rescuers soon joined Wilson, including Flight Sergeant Smith, who had grabbed a fire extinguisher out of the ambulance. To no effect, he played it on the fire. After donning an asbestos helmet and gloves, Pilot Officer Winter was the first to enter the still burning wreckage but there was nothing he could do; those aboard were all dead.⁴

The remains of the plane appeared to be in an upright position. Most of it was a mass of molten metal, the prevailing breeze having driven the fire forward and to the left. However, its twin engines and propellers were still recognisable, as was the starboard wing. The starboard tail fin was undamaged. It had remained attached to the rear of the fuselage, which was still above the ground, held there by a small, undamaged landing wheel. But because the port side tail fin had been burnt out, what was left of the rear of the plane pointed at a forty-five degree angle towards the sky. Although the fuselage had been gutted, enough of it remained in place to show that the main cabin had been destroyed by fire – not impact damage. However, the cockpit, which had hit first, was a tangled mass of wreckage.⁵

Wilson was horrified to see ten bodies, all hideously burned. According to his account, one was slightly to the left of the rear fuselage, two side by side near the centre cabin and another slightly behind the port wing. Three more were bunched over that wing with another slightly forward, adjacent to the cockpit. Inside what was left of the nose, were the remains of the final two. But Canberra fireman William Moloney recalled things differently. While he agreed with Wilson that one body was near the tail, he counted ‘three…in the nose of the plane’ with the remaining six ‘in pairs on the coiled springs of the burnt seats’.⁶

This grainy newspaper photograph of the burnt-out A16-97 suggests that the Hudson landed upright and largely intact. The starboard side of the tail and starboard wing remain largely undamaged, while the engine cowlings and propellers are clearly identifiable. According to witnesses, fire took hold after the fuselage and fuel tanks were ruptured by a large log. (Courier Mail, 15 August 1940)

Corroborating Moloney’s version was another Canberra fireman, Tom Hynes, who had stepped over what he thought was a smouldering log. Quickly realising that it was a body, something about it led him to conclude that ‘the wrong person was flying the aircraft’. Apart from the positioning of the bodies, rescuers soon began speculating over the plane’s final moments. The consensus seemed to be that in the last seconds of flight, whoever was at the controls had managed to right the plane and had attempted to land it on the only piece of cleared ground available. But the machine hit a large log lying in the middle of the clearing. As The Canberra Times put it the following morning:

The pilot had pancaked the big plane and, but for the log, the occupants might have survived. As it was, the log apparently ripped off the undercarriage, the lower part of the wings and the petrol tanks. The machine was [then] enveloped in flames.⁷

When each body was removed, Wilson attempted identification. But as he said, ‘none was in any way recognisable’. A fleet of ambulances then ferried the bodies to the Canberra morgue. As he had continued to survey the scene, Wilson noticed part of an officer’s blue shirt with black collar, bearing the inked-on initials ‘R. E. H.’, together with some coins and a partly burnt hairbrush. So orders were given to note and collect all such items. The finds included watches, scissors, keys and buttons. But four things stood out – two gold passes marked respectively ‘Electorate of Flinders’ and ‘Electorate of Corangamite’ together with two badges, each in the form of a crossed sword with baton. The worst fears of all those air force personnel who had been awaiting the arrival of this special plane were rapidly being confirmed.⁸

At the Canberra morgue, identification continued to be a challenge. Even nine months later, the solicitors for Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Thornthwaite’s estate wrote: ‘an official certificate of his death will not satisfy… [the NSW probate officer]. He wants some evidence that… Thornthwaite actually entered the plane’. A senior air force officer, Group Captain Douglas Wilson, had had the difficult task of identifying the four air crew at the morgue. Aircraftman Joseph Crosdale and Corporal John Palmer were singled out from the others by the remains of their uniforms and then from each other; the ‘least burnt and least mutilated’ body had to be that of Crosdale, Wilson concluded, because his post had been at the rear of the plane. The ‘younger of the two’ remaining bodies was then said to be that of Pilot Officer Richard Wiesener because he was twenty-nine compared to Flight Lieutenant Robert Hitchcock who was thirty-eight.⁹

The private secretary to the minister for the army, Percy Hayter, was brought in to identify the other six bodies. Lieutenant-Colonel Thornthwaite was singled out by a portion of uniform, and young Dick Elford by his general appearance and build. The minister for the army, Brigadier Geoffrey Street, was identified by his gold signet ring; the air minister, James Fairbairn, by an old war wound to his right arm; and the chief of the general staff, Sir Cyril Brudenell Bingham White, by part of his general’s insignia – a sword crossed with a baton – which was embedded in his body. The identity of the other cabinet minister was confirmed by a gold cigarette case inscribed ‘Sir Henry Gullett’.¹⁰

These identifications confirmed what everybody already knew – that the leaders of Australia’s war effort, with the exception of Prime Minister Robert Menzies, were all dead.

2

Some had fought

Geoffrey Street, Brudenell White, Henry Gullett and James Fairbairn had all seen active service during World War I.

The day after Australia declared war on Germany in August 1914, Street, then a twenty-year-old law student from Sydney’s eastern suburbs, had volunteered. A sporting all-rounder at Sydney Grammar, Street had a passion for cricket. ‘A very fine slow bowler’, the school magazine said. ‘As a bat he is a good stone-waller; might be much smarter in the field.’ This, combined with his application to soldiering at school and university, soon saw him become the youngest officer in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).¹

As a member of the First Division’s First Battalion, Street had landed at Gallipoli shortly after sunrise on 25 April 1915. By late morning, he was in the thick of a see-sawing fight with the Turks for Baby 700, a tactically important hill that dominated Monash Valley. Although wounded on that fateful day, Street remained in the fray for the next four days, earning himself a mention in C.E.W. Bean’s Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. Later, in June, Street led a small raiding party to tackle a Turkish machine gun. Guided by a trusted scout, the little group crawled through a tunnel to get close to the enemy’s trench. After climbing out of the opening, as Bean later wrote, ‘they were actually putting their legs over the parapet… when they perceived in it a number of dark [Turkish] forms looking up at them’. Their attempt at surprise having failed, Street and his heavily outnumbered party hastily withdrew. Also present at the battle of Lone Pine in August, Street described coming under artillery attack. ‘75mm shells are bursting over my dug out’, he wrote. ‘One end of it has just been blown in. It gave me quite a start.’²

Promoted to staff captain in the 14th Brigade, Street saw action at Fromelles on 19 July 1916, the first major battle to be fought by Australian troops on the Western Front. Although Street’s brigade managed to capture parts of the German trenches, the overall result was a disaster for the 5th Australian Division, which suffered 5533 casualties. When Street was again promoted, this time to staff major, one of his former school chums, a mere private, noted dismissively: ‘I saw him the other day gaily decked out in his gaudy badges of rank’.³

If Street felt any sense of self-satisfaction with his new status, it was shattered when he was transferred to the predominantly Victorian 15th Brigade commanded by Brigadier General H.E. (Pompey) Elliott. Mentally unstable, Elliott was, nevertheless, Australia’s most renowned fighting general, and he resented the silvertail Street. ‘He was a wealthy man’, Elliott said, ‘and could not sleep in anything rougher than silk pyjamas’. Elliott also railed against the younger man’s habit of playing bridge when, so Elliott alleged, he should have been attending to staff work. According to Elliott, Street made a terrible error during the battle of Hamel in 1918 by ordering a retreat ‘in broad daylight over narrow pontoon bridges almost in full view of the enemy’. A ‘massacre’ had only been averted, Elliott claimed, when Street’s mistake was discovered at the last minute.⁴

Bridge was not Street’s only diversion. Writing from France in late July 1918, he described cricket preparations. ‘We select a field with… few bumps and holes in it… and then make a pitch by… levelling off the surface and… putting hessian over it all… The ball comes off at rather unexpected angles’. Although none of this would have impressed Elliott, Street remained in the fight, taking part in the assault on the Hindenburg Line in September. In the thick of the action on the 18th, Street sustained a gunshot wound to his wrist and was evacuated to England. Just seven weeks later, the war came to an end.⁵

While the mercurial Pompey Elliott had a jaundiced view of Street, this was probably due to the fact that the young man, still just twenty-four, had been imposed on Elliott by his superiors. Elliott’s pick for brigade major, Jack Scanlan, had been supplanted by this ‘social butterfly’ from Sydney. Others, including Australia’s youngest lieutenant-general, Brudenell White, thought very differently. In 1917 Street had been awarded the military cross for the ‘great capability’ he had shown in his front-line staff work on the Somme and later, at Bullecourt. Street’s citation conveys a better sense of the man than Elliott’s diatribes – like the prefect he had been at school, Street was a competent supervisor of those below, and an obedient servant of those above.⁶

As an active chief of staff to successive commanders of Australian forces, it is likely that White first came to know of Street’s soldierly qualities during the desperate fighting for Baby 700 on 25 April 1915. Thereafter their paths crossed many times, most notably on the Western Front, when the battle of the Somme was at its bloody worst. Almost eighteen years older than Street, White, a Queensland bank clerk, had volunteered for the Boer War in South Africa, seeing active service during 1902 as a junior officer in the Commonwealth Horse. Having found his true vocation, White was selected for Staff College in England and did well enough to be recommended for an appointment on the general staff.⁷

Recalled to Australia in 1911, Major White was appointed director of military operations in the Commonwealth’s tiny armed forces. One of his principal tasks was to draft plans for a combined Australian and New Zealand division. Following Brigadier-General Joseph Gordon’s retirement on 26 July 1914, White, just thirty-eight, became acting chief of the general staff – the outbreak of World War I was just nine days away. Bean later summarised White’s abilities:

His judgment on any military question put to him is instant. He looks at it with the freshness of a quick Australian mind, and gives a straight, simple, comprehensible answer… He can give a man or an officer a solid dressing-down… [but] he is invariably considerate… There is never a necessity to mention a thing twice.⁸

Colonel White was one of the key planners of the Gallipoli landings on 25 April 1915. But he was concerned that the overall commander was taking too much for granted, and the assault went haywire when the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) were put ashore at the wrong place. Landing at about 7.30 a.m. on the 25th, White noticed a colonel cowering near the beach – a look of terror on his face. All was not well. Setting themselves up at a camp table by the side of a gully, White and his immediate superior, Major-General William Bridges, attempted to stabilise the Anzacs’ precarious foothold. With them that morning was Bridges’ aide-de-camp, Lieutenant R.G. Casey, later to be Australia’s treasurer and governor-general. Fully expecting that they might be pushed back into the sea by a Turkish counter attack, the first thing White did next morning was to button on his revolvers.⁹

However the Anzacs soon entrenched their position. And for the next seven months, they were in a stalemate with the Turks – punctuated by bloody battles like Lone Pine. Then, in November, it was decided that there should be a staged evacuation. This climaxed on 18 and 19 December 1915, when the Anzacs silently trooped towards the beach to meet their boats. All the while, White was on his field telephone clarifying the concerns of anxious officers in a quiet, unruffled voice. ‘More than any other human agency’, Bean later said, ‘White influenced the tactics by which the evacuation… was carried out’. In this, the most successful operation of the whole campaign, thousands of Anzac soldiers were evacuated from under the noses of the Turks, who remained oblivious to what was going on. By the time he left Gallipoli, White had been advanced in rank to brigadier-general.¹⁰

In France, White became chief of staff to General Birdwood, the Australian Corps commander. Both men found Pompey Elliott hard to manage, with White accusing him of ‘Napoleonic ideas’, notwithstanding that Elliott had been instrumental in defeating the final German push for victory, at the battle of Villers-Bretonneux, on Anzac Day 1918. While White remained on staff, John Monash was moved up to command a fighting division. ‘[White is] far and away the ablest soldier Australia ever turned out’, Major-General Monash said, ‘[and] a charming good fellow’. Then, in May 1918 when Birdwood was promoted to command the Fifth Army, a new commander had to be found for the Australian Corps, the contest being between White and Monash. C.E.W. Bean and the journalist Keith Murdoch lobbied furiously for White. Embarrassed, White rebuked Murdoch for his meddling and the job went to Monash, whose seniority and command of a fighting division won out.¹¹

At the same time, Elliott had hoped to be promoted to command a division and when he was rebuffed, threatened to complain to the minister for defence. White’s response was pointed:

Your whole letter, even as a private epistle, is so intemperate that any tribunal judging it would condemn you for lack of balance – even if it happened to contain the germs of genius which are supposed to be the counterpoise of eccentricity.¹²

Geoffrey Street, no doubt, would have agreed. Concealing his own disappointment at missing out on command of the corps, White consoled himself as chief of staff to the commander of Britain’s Fifth Army. Tall and pencil thin with a dominant nose and moustache to match, White looked a caricature of a British general. After serving as aide-de-camp to King George V, he ended the war with a knighthood.¹³

Two years younger than White, Henry Gullett had been raised in a log cabin in northern Victoria. Just twelve when his father died, he had had to leave school to help run the family farm. A born wordsmith and filled with a fierce ambition, Gullett was soon writing about agriculture for the Geelong Advertiser. ‘Ink was in his blood’, one colleague later said, ‘and he was a torrent of energy with a mind that grasped the intricate details of a subject in a moment’. In 1900, he became a journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald and eight years later moved to London. From there, he contributed articles to The Daily Telegraph. In 1914, he published The Opportunity in Australia, a handbook for immigrants looking to work on Australian farms. A year later, he was appointed official Australian correspondent with the Allied armies on the Western Front.¹⁴

In July 1916, Gullett enlisted as a gunner in the AIF but he was soon head-hunted by Charles Bean to be the official Australian war correspondent in Palestine. Commissioned as a junior officer, Gullett rode into battle with the Australian Light Horse and recorded their exploits in what became volume seven of The Official History. ‘Of all the volumes’, Bean later said, ‘Gullett’s was the best’. Gullett’s description of the horses themselves showcases the sparkling quality of his writing:

The horses of a light horse regiment were not uniform. They included every kind of animal; large sturdy ponies, crossbreds from draught Clydesdale mares, three-quarter thoroughbreds, and many qualified for the racing stud-books. As a consequence of such mixed breeding, they frequently offended the horse-lover’s eye by their faulty parts. But one quality they all possessed made them superior to the horses from other lands: they were all, or nearly all, got by thoroughbred sires. This quality, reflected throughout in their spirit and their stamina, was their distinguishing characteristic. During sustained operations, on very short rations of pure grain and no water over periods which extended up to seventy hours when horses of baser breeds lost their courage and then their strength, the waler, though famished and wasted, continued alert and brave and dependable. The vital spark of the thoroughbred never failed to respond. As long as these horses had the strength to stand they carried their great twenty stone [127 kg] loads jauntily and proudly.¹⁵

Immediately following the war, Gullett attended the Paris peace conference as a press liaison officer on the staff of Billy Hughes, the irascible Australian prime minister. Nicknamed ‘the little digger’ by the Anzacs, Hughes took on the American president Woodrow Wilson when he said Hughes represented just five million Australians. ‘I represent 60,000 dead’, Hughes shot back. ‘How many do you?’ With a lean, intense demeanour, the talented and ambitious Gullett was one of a small number of men able to hold his own with Hughes, that political dynamo described by Wilson as a ‘pestiferous varmint’.¹⁶

The youngest of the four, James Fairbairn, had just turned seventeen when World War I broke out. Born in England, Fairbairn was raised in rural Victoria and attended Geelong Grammar. Although naturally shy, he was an outstanding scholar and athlete. His elder brother Charles had served with the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) until he was seriously wounded in 1915. So after completing school, James decided to enlist. ‘I celebrated my eighteenth birthday by getting my pilot’s wings’, Fairbairn said, ‘and then went to England to join the RFC’. After being commissioned in July 1916, he served as an instructor, before being sent to France.¹⁷

On the Western Front, Fairbairn flew a single seater Sopwith Pup fighter. With a canvas covered wooden frame, this biplane was powered by an 80 horse power engine, giving it a maximum speed of 175 km/h. Its sting was delivered by a Vickers machine gun, synchronised to fire through the propeller. On 14 February 1917, Fairbairn was one of ten fighters escorting an equal number of reconnaissance planes over German trenches.

Thirty kilometres behind enemy lines, Fairbairn’s plane ‘suddenly began to splutter and drop revs’. As he broke away to make a run back to British lines, ‘the fun began’ as enemy fighters dived on him from all directions. Five or six times, he turned and drove them off, shooting down two in the process. By now his plane was ‘almost shot to pieces’, its canvas in rags and trailing five broken wires. As he manoeuvred to take one last shot at the enemy, his plane suddenly refused to obey him. Looking down he saw that his lateral control was broken and that he had been severely wounded in the right arm. Later he recalled:

Nothing remained for it but to descend in a vertical spiral and crash… as gently as possible. I turned a beautiful Catherine wheel on the ground and then stopped with my nose sticking into the ground and my tail in the air; by my nose of course I mean the machine’s nose and my tail the machine’s tail, though the positions of my own nose and tail were almost identical.

As enemy soldiers came running from every direction, Fairbairn’s attempts to draw his revolver were foiled by his injury. So he set fire to his plane instead, before realising that he was caught by his seat belt. Just as he was about to burn, an enemy soldier appeared and cut him loose with his clasp knife. The Germans were so impressed by the fight he had put up that they treated him to afternoon tea, including a bottle of Johnnie Walker whisky, the sight of which, he said, ‘rather staggered me’. Then it was off to hospital where his bones were wired up. During his convalescence, his captors gave him English writer Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to read and he remained in captivity for the next fourteen months. His injury did not stop him flying after the war but it was severe enough to help in the identification of his incinerated remains twenty-three years later.¹⁸

3

Others hadn’t

Although 416,809 Australians enlisted during World War I, representing almost 40 per cent of the male population between the ages of 18 and 44, Robert Gordon Menzies was not among them. Nor were any of Australia’s other World War II prime ministers – Fadden, Curtin, Forde and Chifley.

Born in the small Wimmera settlement of Jeparit in 1894, Menzies’ intense energy, high intelligence and tremendous self-assurance soon became apparent. According to his high school contemporary, Percy Joske, Menzies’ tongue ‘was derisive… and his common term of scorn for those with whom he disagreed was you’re a dag’. So ‘Dag’ became his nickname. By the time the war broke out, Menzies was a second year law student at Melbourne University, a corporal in the University Rifles and a regular contributor to the Melbourne University Magazine (MUM). One of his fellow students described him as ‘massive and dignified… a big fish in a pool depleted of males by the war’.¹ Fancying himself as a poet, Menzies looked forward to the day