Anzac and Aviator (Paperback)
Language: English
Published by Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2019
- Softcover
- New
Seller: Grand Eagle Retail, Bensenville, IL, U.S.A.Grand Eagle Retail
AbeBooks seller since October 12, 2005
Condition: New
£ 22.79
Quantity: 1 available
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Paperback. 'He was courageous. He was ambitious. He was skilled. He was visionary. He could be ruthless. He was someone born of a new nation. But he was of a time now long past. And yet in the language of a later generation it could be said he had the "right stuff" . . . Michael Molkentin captures [Ross Smith] brilliantly.' - Andy Thomas, NASA Astronaut (Retired) In the smouldering aftermath of the First World War a young Australian pilot and his crew prepare to attempt the inconceivable: a flight, halfway around the globe, from England to Australia. The 18,000 kilometre odyssey will take 28 days and test these men and their twin-engine biplane to the limit. It is a trans-continental feat that will change the world and bring the air age to Australia. It will also prove to be the culminating act in the extraordinary and tragically brief life of its commander, Captain Sir Ross Smith. Raised on a remote sheep station in the dying days of Australia's colonial frontier, there was little in Ross Smith's childhood that suggested a future as one of the world's great pioneering aviators. He went to war in 1914, serving with the light horse at Gallipoli and in the Sinai before volunteering for the fledgling Australian Flying Corps. In a new dimension of warfare, Ross Smith survived two gruelling years of aerial combat over Palestine to emerge as one of the most skilled and highly decorated Australian pilots of the war. In 1919 he was a pilot on the first ever mission to survey an air route from Cairo to the East Indies, before gaining international fame as the winner of the government's GBP10,000 prize for leading the first aircrew to fly from England to Australia. His attempt to exceed this by circumnavigating the world by air in 1922 would end in disaster. Drawing on the rich and extensive collection of Ross Smith's private papers, Anzac & Aviator tells, for the first time, the gripping story of a remarkable aviator, the extraordinary times in which he lived and the air race that changed the world. 'Standing with Lindbergh, Earhart and Kingsford Smith as one of the greatest pioneers of the air, Sir Ross Smith's life is brilliantly captured in this compelling biography.' - Richard Champion de Crespigny AM, bestselling author and captain of QF32 The story of extraordinary Australian, Ross Smith, who rode to war at Gallipoli on horseback and by the end of the war, was one of the most highly awarded fighter pilots. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…
Seller Inventory # 9781742379197
- Title
- Anzac and Aviator (Paperback)
- Author
- Michael Molkentin
- Publisher
- Allen & Unwin, Sydney
- Publication year
- 2019
- Condition
- new
- Binding
- Paperback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 1742379192
- ISBN 13
- 9781742379197
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.
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Grand Eagle Retail
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