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Clip description
Machines of No. 1 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps, take off from their desert base at El Mejdel in Palestine, in February 1918. Their flight is filmed from the air by Captain Frank Hurley, flying in the observer’s seat, with Captain Ross Smith as the pilot.
Curator’s notes
This footage is typical of Frank Hurley’s ingenuity and determination to get the shots he wanted. His work as a commercial postcard photographer in Sydney before the war taught him that conventional angles sold no postcards. He claimed to have set his camera and tripod up on railway tracks in Sydney to get a shot of an oncoming train, leaping off at the last second. That ingenuity is seen here in the way he experimented and co-opted technical assistance from the AFC pilots and ground crew to get these shots of an Australian squadron in the air. He was almost certainly not the first, since Hubert Wilkins had been flying and filming as a newsreel photographer since 1912 in London (see clip one), but he may have been the first to do it in the Middle East campaign. He planned the shots with some care, as his diary makes clear.
He came from Rafa on 13 February 1918 to El Mejdel, the AFC’s base from December 1917 to 25 April 1918. ‘Arranged a programme with Major Williams [Commanding Officer of No. 1 Squadron, AFC] for taking a series of photographs of the 67th A Flying Squadron [sic], from the ground and air.’ (The 67th was the British designation for No. 1 Squadron AFC, until January 1918, when they accepted Australian requests for the Australian numbers to be recognised). ‘I anticipate the results will be the most spectacular I am likely to take here and will repay all the time and trouble I can bestow.’ On 14 February, he recounts the first day of filming, going with the aeroplanes on a flight to Jaffa and then Beersheba. ‘I secured a number of pictures of the formation.’ These were probably still photographs, because he then writes, ‘I intend securing my cinema to the machine and taking film therefrom. With this object I made experiments to ascertain the points of minimum vibration and have decided to clamp the machine across the gun lockpit [sic], insulating it by means of flat rubber sponges under compression.’
Next morning he examined the excavations of a ‘magnificent mosaic’ unearthed by fighting near the aerodrome (this mosaic was eventually sent back to Australia and is on permanent display at the Australian War Memorial). Just before lunch, a Martinsyde machine landed in flames and burned on the aerodrome. Hurley filmed its demise with both cine camera and still camera. This machine is shown intact in this film, being wheeled from its hangar, which must mean that he filmed it in the days before, either on 13 February or more likely the 14th. A still photograph of that Martinsyde survives and can be seen on page 104 of One Airman’s War, the diaries of air mechanic Joe Bull, who served in No. 1 AFC from 1916 to 1919 (1997, Banner Books, ISBN 1875593160), although Bull’s diary says it happened on 16 February, not the 15th. Curiously, the moving footage of this burning aircraft was not included in this film, which may have been a matter of censorship, as all film and pictures had to pass through a military censor. It might also be that the film was damaged or lost later, because the Australian War Records Service, which was responsible for collecting material for the Australian War Museum, did have the right to keep photographs for historical purposes even if they were not suitable for release. The AWM holds a photograph (B00005) that shows a crashed Bristol fighter at Mejdel in March 1918 – probably taken by Hurley.
Hurley records:
During the afternoon, ten machines loaded with bombs took off from the aerodrome and flew so as to just pass over the top of the camera, the effect was extremely impressive. I went up with Captain Smith’s Bristol Fighter (a 190 HP machine) and doing over 90 miles per hour, we rapidly came up with the formation. We went down nearly to Beersheba, our machine circling round the flat whilst I took cinema at 7000 feet. We looked down onto the banks of cumulus and through the fleeting openings down onto the old Turkish trenches. Capt. Addison did a series of manoeuvres looping, diving and rolling etc. which showed the admirable control of the pilot with modern machines.
The next day, which he records as 16 February, Hurley had a new fitting made to absorb more of the vibration of the Bristol Fighter. Major Williams arranged a flight so he could test it. Ross Smith and Hurley took off at 9.30 am and this is probably the footage we see here, of the aerodrome fading rapidly away beneath us, a remarkable piece of filming because it so beautifully captures the thrill of flying in an open cockpit aeroplane. Hurley found this experience very intoxicating. ‘Oh the exhilaration of that upward climb,’ he writes. ‘We are crossing the hills of Judea at 90 miles per hour and yet from our great height we appear stationary. Away on the horizon lays a dark streak which is rapidly enlarging. It is the Dead Sea … I am powerless and utterly incapable of describing the wild and tremendous grandeur of the view now stretched before us. We are over enemy territory, and they are firing at us with their “archies” – wretched shooting to which we pay no attention. One is too absorbed in contemplating, and in fact, intoxicated by the mighty works of nature to heed the vile endeavours of the Turkish rabble to shoot us down.’
Hurley continues in this rapturous fashion for some time, as Smith flies over the Jordan Valley, the Jericho–Jerusalem road and Jerusalem itself, where the light was too bad to film. They then climbed to 17,000 or 18,000 feet where, despite the extreme cold, he took ‘some wonderful film’ above the clouds, landing back at the hangars at 2 pm, just in time to see Major Richard Williams ‘reviewing his squadron’. Given that a Bristol Fighter with a 190-horsepower Rolls Royce engine could only fly a little over three hours, it is not necessary to believe everything that Hurley wrote here about the duration of the flight, but there’s no doubting the effect it had on him. That evening, he gave a lecture to 200 men about his experiences in Antarctica. This is confirmed by Joe Bull’s diary, who also confirms the route of that day’s flight with Ross Smith.
In clip three, it is likely we see footage of all three days of Hurley’s visit – and possibly material from a later visit on 25 February, when he went out in a Bristol Fighter to take moving pictures of bombs exploding (Joe Bull, p 104). The mystery is what happened to all this footage, because it’s certainly not all in this compilation. There is no bombing footage nor the burning Martinsyde mentioned earlier. What survives is still extremely historic footage of Australia’s first flying squadrons.
In that regard, it is interesting to trace some history of the individual machines in this clip, one in particular. The first machine we see, whizzing past the camera from right to left on take-off, is a Bristol Fighter, serial number A7194. This machine is painted in a distinctive design, with a dark green top of the fuselage, in a diagonal pattern. There are several photographs of this machine, one of which is reproduced in Joe Bull’s book, on page 96. This shows A7194, with Joe Bull and another mechanic, Corporal Albert Luxton, in the observer’s seat, with Lt Hudson Fysh and Lt Paul McGinness standing beside it. Fysh and McGinness were the founders of Qantas airways a few years later. They both flew in No. 1 Squadron AFC in the desert campaign. The photograph suggests they flew at some time in this machine, with Fysh as the observer (he didn’t get his pilot’s wings till just after the war).
Both men became aces in No. 1 AFC, McGinness with a claim of seven enemy aircraft, Fysh with five. A7194 joined the squadron on 11 January 1918, and Bull and Luxton were assigned as its mechanical crew. Bull was a rigger, which meant that he was responsible for looking after the wings, struts, bracing wires and fuselage. Several different pilots flew the machine, one of whom was Lt LM Potts. He was piloting this machine on 17 January, with Lt F Hancock as observer, when they spotted two formations of enemy aircraft south of Nablus. Potts dived on the rear-most German plane and fired 30 rounds, watching it ‘turn on its back and go down out of control’, according to FM Cutlack in Volume VIII of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918 (1941). Joe Bull’s diary makes clear that this was a personal matter. ‘Potts says he is even with them now, meaning that he has made them pay for the loss of his brother, Lieutenant J Potts.’ J Potts had been killed in a mid-air collision on 4 January 1918, two weeks earlier.
The scenes of machines in the air include both Bristol Fighters and Martinsydes, but most of the ones we see at close quarters are Martinsydes. Towards the end of this clip, one of the pilots in a Martinsyde (flying right to left on the screen) waves at Hurley from his cockpit, just before Captain Smith takes his plane very close under this other machine – so close that we can see bombs lined up under the fuselage.
The AWM holds a picture of Hurley and Smith in the Bristol Fighter, showing the cameras fastened to the gunner’s cockpit (P03137.010).
