In November 1919, a year after the Great War, four Australian servicemen made a unique and epoch-making journey home. In the open cockpit of a twin-engine Vickers Vimy bi-plane, brothers Ross and Keith Smith and mechanics Wally Shiers and Jim completed the 18,000-kilometre flight from Britain to Australia. The 28-day journey, part of a competition sponsored by the Australian government, made the Smith brothers internationally famous and marked Australia's emergence into the air age. Ross Smith's fame would be short-lived: he would be killed in an air accident less than three years later on the eve of an attempt to make the first ever circumnavigation of the world by air.

Born on a South Australian cattle station, Smith had a relatively privileged and cosmopolitan upbringing. He was, nonetheless, working in a warehouse in Adelaide in 1914, where he would have no doubt eked out a quiet and unremarkable life were it not for the war's outbreak. Enlisting in the light horse at 22 years of age, Smith survived arduous campaigns at Gallipoli and in the Sinai Desert before volunteering for the Australian Flying Corps. Smith's feats in the skies above Palestine during 1917-18 earned him a reputation as one of the great fighter pilots of the war. By the armistice he had received the Military Cross twice and the Distinguished Flying Cross three times; he was one of only three British Empire airmen to do so during the war. Smith's skill in the cockpit also saw him assigned the Middle East theatre's only twin-engine bomber during the war's final year, a machine he used to support T. E. Lawrence 'of Arabia's' campaign against the Turks in Jordan and, after the war, survey an air-route between Cairo and Calcutta.

Anzac and Aviator is the story of this extraordinary Australian and the fascinating era in which he lived, one in which aviation emerged with bewildering speed to comprehensively transform both warfare and transportation. Born a decade before powered flight and going off to war on horseback, Smith finished the conflict in command of a bomber, the weapon that would come to symbolise the totality of warfare in the twentieth century.

About the Author
Michael Molkentin is a teacher and historian with a particular interest in aviation and air power. He has worked as a tour historian on the Western Front, Gallipoli and in Korea and as a consultant for Australian television programmes such as Lost in Flanders, In their Footsteps and the History Channel's Tony Robinson's Tour of Duty. His first book, Fire in the Sky: the Australian Flying Corps in the First World War was published by Allen& Unwin in 2010. His second book, Flying the Southern Cross: Aviators Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith was published by the National Library of Australia in 2012. His third book, Australia and the War in the Air was published by Oxford University Press in October 2014 as part of its series, Centenary History of Australia and the Great War.


Book Information
ISBN 9781742379197
Author Michael Molkentin
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Allen & Unwin
Publisher Allen & Unwin
Weight(grams) 615g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 151mm * 32mm