The Unseen Anzac: how an enigmatic explorer created Australia’s World War I photographs

By Jeff Maynard

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN QUEENSLAND HISTORY BOOK AWARD

The previously untold story of an extraordinary man and a great war photographer.

Cameras were banned at the Western Front when the Anzacs arrived in 1916, prompting correspondent Charles Bean to argue continually for Australia to have a dedicated photographer. He was eventually assigned an enigmatic polar explorer — George Hubert Wilkins.

Within weeks of arriving at the front, Wilkins’ exploits were legendary. He did what no photographer had previously dared to do. He went ‘over the top’ with the troops and ran forward to photograph the actual fighting. He led soldiers into battle, captured German prisoners, was wounded repeatedly, and was twice awarded the Military Cross — all while he refused to carry a gun and armed himself only with a bulky glass-plate camera.

Wilkins ultimately produced the most detailed and accurate collection of World War I photographs in the world, which is now held at the Australian War Memorial. After the war, Wilkins returned to exploring and, during the next 40 years, his life became shrouded in secrecy. His work at the Western Front was forgotten, and others claimed credit for his photographs.

Throughout his life, Wilkins wrote detailed diaries and letters, but when he died in 1958 these documents were locked away. Jeff Maynard follows a trail of myth and misinformation to locate Wilkins’ lost records and to reveal the remarkable, true story of Australia’s greatest war photographer.

PRAISE FOR JEFF MAYNARD

‘[A] thrilling, wonderfully researched book. Every Australian should read it. Almost every page leaves you astonished.’ The Saturday Age

‘[This] understated, well-honed biography reveals the maverick, eternally restless Wilkins as a man who refused to define his life through war alone.’ The Saturday Paper

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781925307153

Jeff Maynard

Jeff Maynard is an author and documentary maker. His books include Niagara’s Gold, Divers in Time, and Wings of Ice. He is a former editor of Australian Motorcycle News, and retains a keen interest in classic motorcycles. He is a member of the Explorers Club and is on the board of the Historical Diving Society. Jeff continues to research Sir Hubert Wilkins and locate his records and artefacts in Australia, Europe, and the USA. Jeff lives in Melbourne with his wife, Zoe, and their family.

Book preview

THE UNSEEN UNZAC

Jeff Maynard is an author and documentary maker. His books include Niagara’s Gold, Divers in Time, and Wings of Ice. He is a former editor of Australian Motorcycle News, and retains a keen interest in classic motorcycles. He is also a member of the Explorers Club, and is on the board of the Historical Diving Society. Jeff continues to research Sir Hubert Wilkins and locate his records and artefacts in Australia, Europe, and the USA. Jeff lives in Melbourne with his wife, Zoe, and their family.

To Herbert Clifford (Cliff) Kadow

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

First published by Scribe 2015

Copyright © Jeff Maynard 2015

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Maynard, Jeff, author.

The Unseen Anzac: how an enigmatic polar explorer created Australia’s World War I photographs / Jeff Maynard.

9781925106787 (hardback)

9781925307153 (e-book)

1. Wilkins, G. H. (George Hubert) Sir, 1888-1958. 2. Australian War Memorial–Photograph collections. 3. War photographers–Australia–Biography. 4. World War, 1914-1918–Pictorial works. 5. War photography–Australia–History.

940.40994

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.co.uk

CONTENTS

*

Author’s Note

Foreword by Dr Brendan Nelson, Australian War Memorial

Introduction: The Soul of Our Nation

Maps

PART I October 1888–August 1917

1. The Flickering Film

2. You and Your Camera are Cursed

3. One Gigantic Holiday

4. A Little World of Our Own

5. The Nearness of the Creator

6. The World’s Affairs

PART II August 1917–June 1919

7. An Historical Point of View

8. Charley Bean and I

9. Dash In, Get Photographs

10. I Do Not Carry Arms for Fighting

11. The Perfume of Apple and Cherry Blossoms

12. A Garden of Eden

13. The Enemies of All Mankind

14. The Next Steps Towards Civilisation

PART III June 1919–The Present

15. The Value of Getting the History

16. Some Day Australia Will Understand

17. The Body the World Knows as Wilkins

Afterword: We Wielders of the Mechanism

Appendix: A Letter From the Front

Military Formations and Acronyms

Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgements

AUTHOR’S NOTE

*

The life of George Hubert Wilkins (later Sir Hubert) has always been surrounded by myth and secrecy, and much that has been written about him is incorrect. In an attempt to separate fiction from fact, I have avoided dramatising events and I have not invented conversations. I quote directly from original sources whenever possible; often I have had to rely on what people wrote about Wilkins. Information about his time at the Western Front can be gleaned from the diaries of Australia’s official World War I historian, Charles Bean. The diaries and notebooks of Bean are held at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, and can be read online via the memorial’s website. Many of the notebooks do not have page numbers, so, when I reference them, I have put ‘pdf’ before the page to indicate that I am working from the online version.

I also quote from private collections of Wilkins’ letters and manuscripts held by Dr David Larson and Michael Ross in the United States. I appreciate that these collections are not available to the public, so, for some of my contentious claims, readers will need to trust my word. Both Ross and Larson have requested I keep their personal details confidential.

Volume XII of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 was published in 1923. This volume is sub-titled Photographic Record of the War, and contains 753 photographs. The majority of the photographs from the Western Front are credited to an ‘Australian Official Photographer’.* I discovered Wilkins’ personal copy of this volume in Michael Ross’s collection, in which Wilkins had pencilled his initials in the corner of the photographs that he took. For brevity, when I reference this book I simply call it Wilkins Volume XII. (Michael Ross has since donated this book to the Australian War Memorial.)

[* In the Official History, photographs are credited to an ‘Australian Official Photographer’, while elsewhere they are usually credited to an ‘Unknown Australian Official Photographer’.]

The Australian War Memorial has over 6,000 official photographs of the Anzacs at the Western Front. They are numbered and usually prefixed with the letter ‘E’. Most of the official photographs can be viewed online, so I regularly direct the reader to examples I write about in the text.* The diaries of Frank Hurley can be read online from the website of the National Library of Australia.

[* About 40 per cent of the E-series photographs were taken after the Armistice.]

With the exception of the final one, Wilkins wrote all the quotations I have inserted at the beginning of each chapter. They are taken from his correspondence, speeches, or books. The final quotation was, supposedly, received telepathically by Harold Sherman, eight months after Wilkins’ death.

Finally, for readers unfamiliar with military formations and acronyms, a brief overview is given before the index.

FOREWORD

Dr Brendan Nelson

Director, Australian War Memorial

*

By any standard, the life of George Hubert Wilkins was an extraordinary one. From humble beginnings in rural South Australia, Wilkins became a renowned photographer and cinematographer, aviator, war correspondent, scientist, author, and, above all else, polar explorer. Wilkins Sound, the Wilkins Ice Shelf, and the Wilkins Coast in Antarctica were all named in his honour. He won awards from a number of international geographic societies, including the Royal Geographic Society’s Patron’s Medal and the Samuel Finley Breese Morse Medal of the American Geographical Society. He was knighted in June 1928. Celebrated in his lifetime, he is regrettably little remembered in Australia today. Yet Wilkins was truly one of the great adventurers of the 20th century.

Wilkins’ greatest passion was for polar exploration. He first experienced the Arctic in 1913, when he joined Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition. The expedition was not a success. Wilkins was with Stefansson when his brigantine, the Karluk, had to be abandoned in the pack ice. Wilkins remained undaunted, and covered thousands of miles in the Arctic by foot over the next three years. In fact, Wilkins conducted expeditions to both polar regions over and over in his lifetime. He was with the legendary Ernest Shackleton in 1921–22 on Shackleton’s last expedition to Antarctica, and made another six expeditions there between 1928 and 1939. But Wilkins was perhaps most familiar with the Arctic, which he visited every year for the 16 years before his death.

In his lifetime, Wilkins compiled a stunning list of ‘firsts’. Combining his love of flying with his love of polar exploration, he became the first man to conduct aerial explorations of the Antarctic, and indeed became the first man to fly over the Antarctic continent. Although not the first to fly over the North Pole, he was the first to fly over the Arctic Ocean, earning his knighthood in the process. He later became consumed with the idea that it would be possible to take a submarine beneath the Arctic pack ice, although this idea was ridiculed at the time. The American submarine he leased to attempt it was plagued with problems and did not reach the North Pole, but Wilkins nevertheless succeeded in piloting the partially disabled machine under the ice in 1931, becoming the first man to do so.

Wilkins’ love of adventure extended far beyond his polar exploration, although the fame he achieved from his icy adventures opened doors for him. In 1919, he was the navigator in an aircraft competing for £10,000, which the Australian government offered for the first all-Australian crew to fly from England to Australia. The enterprise was sadly abandoned in Crete after the plane crash-landed, terminally damaging its port engine. Four years later, Wilkins was contracted by the British Museum to conduct a comprehensive survey of northern Australia, which took him two-and-a-half years. He was a passenger on the Graf Zeppelin on its around-the-world voyage in 1929 and, in 1935, he and his wife were guests on the Hindenburg for the zeppelin’s maiden voyage to America.

But it is perhaps in his role as war photographer and correspondent in the First World War that Wilkins left his greatest legacy for Australia as a nation. Wilkins had first experienced war as a special correspondent for the Gaumont Film Company during the Turkish–Bulgarian war of 1912. This experience formulated his approach to recording war, which he applied to his work in the First World War. Giving his trade or calling as ‘explorer’, Wilkins enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in May 1917, after returning from the Canadian Arctic Expedition. Originally commissioned into the Flying Corps, he failed as a pilot because of partial colour blindness. Instead, he was appointed official photographer to the Australian Imperial Force, and would serve in that capacity to the end of the war.

Wilkins’ approach to war photography was to get as close to the action as possible. He was wounded twice in 1917: a gunshot fractured his tibia mid-year, and a few months later he was shot in the thigh and foot. He remained undaunted. He often had to pass through artillery barrages to obtain the best photographs, and regularly had his equipment broken by shell blasts. Yet he continued to try to obtain the best record of war he could. On one occasion, he was blown off some duckboards by an explosion, but after treatment for wounds went back to work. For his work with the Australians in late 1917 he was awarded the Military Cross. He was later awarded a Bar to his Military Cross in 1918, when he went over the top with attacking troops of the Australian Corps at least six times and was in the front line at some point every day between 8 August and 3 October. On one occasion, as he was advancing, he found some American infantry under German fire. He worked his way to their position under machine-gun fire himself and took command of the Americans who had lost their officer, directing operations until they could be relieved. Australia’s official war historian, Charles Bean, wrote that ‘Captain Wilkins has probably been in the fighting more constantly than any other officer in the Corps’, and yet all through this period Wilkins produced some of the most enduring images of Australians in the Great War.

Wilkins’ service to the Australian memory of the war did not end in 1918. The following year he accompanied Bean’s party to the Gallipoli Peninsula, where he recorded the battlefield for a nation in mourning. He was then involved in editing the 12th volume of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918: the photographic record. He tried to enlist again for the Second World War, but was turned down by both Australia and Britain because of his age. Again undaunted, he applied to the American army, and served by training men in Arctic survival skills. He continued as a consultant to the US army for many years after the war ended.

In 1958, Hubert Wilkins died suddenly in his hotel room in Framingham, Massachusetts. In him, Australia lost a grand adventurer from an era that had passed. Eight months before his death, Wilkins appeared on What’s My Line?, the American television game-show in which contestants tried to guess the identity of a special guest. Wilkins could not hide his enjoyment, and his eyes sparkled as contestants tried to guess who he was. Asked if he was a scientist, he modestly answered, ‘Depends on who’s making the judgment’. But scientist he was. From his beginnings as a farmer’s son with a partial education in music and engineering, Wilkins became a geographer, climatologist, botanist, and even an ornithologist. From a runaway who travelled Australia showing motion pictures in makeshift cinemas in rural towns, he became a photographer and cinematographer who created some of the most compelling and important visual records of the twentieth century.

George Hubert Wilkins is an Australian to honour and remember. The Unseen Anzac does justice to this man and his life, where to do so is such a difficult task.

Introduction

THE SOUL OF OUR NATION

*

Cameras were banned at the Western Front during World War I, and carrying any sort of camera could result in immediate arrest and a court-martial. The British General Headquarters (GHQ) did not want the public to see images of the enormous human slaughter that was taking place, lest the inevitable outcry slow the steady stream of young men who were needed to fill the trenches and charge the deadly German machine-guns. Instead, GHQ appointed official photographers to take pictures for public consumption. Consequently, when soldiers were depicted, they were usually happily smoking cigarettes, marching in well-ordered lines, or looking eager to get into battle. It was all propaganda. Still, even those photographs had to be approved by the official censor before they could leave France.

From the time the Australians arrived in Europe in 1916 and fought their first battles (at Fromelles and Pozières), Australia’s war correspondent, Charles Bean, wanted a photographic record of the Anzacs in action. Bean had been allowed to carry a camera at Gallipoli, but that had been a sideshow compared to the scale of the fighting taking place in France and Belgium. Bean asked permission to take photographs at the Western Front, but was denied. Fortunately, he was not a person to give up easily. He pestered GHQ until they finally agreed to lend him British official photographers for short periods, but Bean complained that they were not available for long enough and that they were reluctant to go anywhere near the real fighting. Eventually, after the main battles of 1916 had been fought, Bean was assigned a British photographer, Herbert Baldwin, for his exclusive use. Baldwin followed the energetic Bean about, photographing the Australians during the winter of 1916–17; but by the time the serious fighting of 1917 (the Battles of Bullecourt) got underway, Baldwin’s health had deteriorated, and he was hospitalised. Bean complained again that the opportunity to record the Australians in the war had been lost.

Finally, in August 1917, Bean’s persistence paid off. He was assigned two official photographers for his exclusive use. They were James Francis (Frank) Hurley and George Hubert Wilkins. Both were experienced photographers, both were Australians, and both, coincidently, had recently returned from polar expeditions.

Six weeks after arriving in France, Hurley resigned in a huff because he thought it impossible to get close enough to the action to take dramatic photographs and wanted, instead, to stage them. He was talked out of resigning and allowed to produce six ‘faked’ pictures if he also photographed an accurate record of the conditions. Hurley complained bitterly, and, a few weeks later, after repeated arguments with Bean, went to Palestine to photograph the fighting there. He never returned to the war in France.

Wilkins stayed at the Western Front, and went on to produce the most remarkable collection of World War I photographs in the world. He did what no photographer had previously dared to do. He went ‘over the top’ with the troops and ran forward to photograph the actual fighting. In the course of his work he led soldiers into battle, was wounded repeatedly, captured German prisoners, and became the only Australian official photographer, from any war, to receive a combat decoration. In fact, he was awarded the Military Cross twice and was twice Mentioned in Despatches. During the war he refused to carry a gun. Instead, he armed himself with a bulky glass-plate still camera or cumbersome motion-picture camera. An example of the conditions under which Wilkins often worked is summarised in a paragraph he wrote in his usual modest fashion:

The fighting thereabouts was pretty hot. During a burst of enemy machine-gun fire a man on one side of me was riddled with bullets. The man on the other side received one bullet. It killed him outright. Six bullets scored my chest, two went through my right arm and one clipped the tip of my chin. Still I was able to carry on. I had to abandon my camera and help stop a bomb attack. Later it seemed necessary to get a picture of the enemy trench. I recovered my camera — one that needed a tripod, especially as the light was bad, but before I could get the picture the tripod legs were shot away. I set the camera on my knee and the enemy, I believe, seeing me make the second attempt did not then try to shoot me. In fact they shouted and waved to me as I slithered back to my own trench. ¹

Within weeks of arriving in France, Wilkins’ exploits were legendary. Both the British and the Canadians wanted him to work for them, but Wilkins stayed loyal to Bean’s vision of a complete and truthful photographic record of the Australians in the war.

After the Armistice, Bean spent two decades writing and editing the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 so that the work, courage, and sacrifice of every battalion could be studied, remembered, and honoured. Bean didn’t embellish and he didn’t write in glowing prose. He preferred to record the facts accurately and in detail. The result of Bean’s work and vision is the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. In 2013, the director of the memorial, Dr Brendan Nelson, wrote, ‘The Australian War Memorial represents all that is precious to Australia. In my view it represents the soul of our nation’. ²

Within that ‘soul’ is a collection of images that have become part of the Australian consciousness: images of dazed soldiers walking along duckboards through the devastated Chateau Wood; Anzacs skylarking by climbing down the barrel of the massive Chuignes Gun; Diggers in a French village where they’d cheekily erected a street sign saying ‘Roo de Kanga’; men slumped beside the Menin Road, with their slouch hats covering their faces while they snatch a few minutes rest; and, so often, Anzacs in trenches — tired, bloody, hungry, knee deep in mud, and surrounded by bodies, yet always staring back at the camera with a resolve to push on.

Australia’s official collection of World War I photographs is a national treasure. The man largely responsible for those photographs is George Hubert Wilkins, a polar explorer whose life, even today, remains a mystery.

I began researching Wilkins in 1998 after he had been dead for 40 years. Nevertheless, I was fortunate because there were many people still living who had known him and were able tell me about him. Often their descriptions were so much at odds that I wondered if they were talking about the same person. At other times their descriptions were so fantastic that I thought they were joking.

Jim Waldron, a former US Navy pilot, who had been in Antarctica a year before Wilkins had died, told me that he had returned from a flight one day to find an additional bunk had been added to his quarters. The bunk consumed the space where his desk had been, and Waldron admitted he was annoyed with the intrusion. His annoyance changed to curiosity when he learnt that the bunk was for the famous polar explorer from the Heroic Age, Sir Hubert Wilkins. Waldron remembered:

I got to talk several times with Sir Hubert and he proved to be a very interesting person, however, a very strange man. He told me that he had no permanent home. He said he had so many friends around the world that having a place to live wasn’t a real problem. It seems that he went from one friend’s abode to another. As his welcome wore out in one place he switched to some other. He always seemed to be reading from a Bible-sized book and when I questioned him about it he told me that he belonged to a ‘religion’ that welcomed only a handful of members from each world throughout the universe. He considered himself to be one of the fortunate few who had been selected to belong to this extraordinary cult. He believed that the various members of this religion communicated telepathically over the vastness of space. He was more than convinced that this religion was no hoax. Of course, I didn’t challenge his beliefs. ³

Other people told me Wilkins had been a member of the Urantia Foundation and that he believed he was a ‘thought adjuster’ — a kind of messenger from another galaxy sent to Earth to raise mankind to a higher state of civilisation.

But not all the descriptions of Wilkins pushed the boundaries of credibility. Many people described a very sensible, practical individual. Wilkins had died in a cheap hotel room at Framingham, Massachusetts, where he had lived alone, off and on, for five years. His body was found on the morning of 1 December 1958. I interviewed Al Greco, the hotel owner, who was thrilled that someone had come from Australia to ask about his famous tenant. When he showed me Wilkins’ room, Greco lay on the floor and folded his hands on his chest to demonstrate how he had found the body, explaining:

He was fully dressed, lying on his back with his hands neatly folded over his chest. You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking Sir Hubert knew that he was going to die, so he got dressed and lay down on the floor, so that he didn’t mess up the bed. He was that sort of guy. ⁴

Patrick Dunne, who worked at a US Army base where Wilkins had designed polar clothing in the 1950s, told me:

The issue of polar survival was a big one for the army after World War II, because everyone was worried about Russia and, of course, we were looking towards the Arctic. Anyway, and I can’t remember exactly which year it was, but they brought all the experts together and had a conference about polar survival. Sir Hubert Wilkins was on the panel of experts and they were up on a stage, while the auditorium was filled with officers. I remember this pompous general said, ‘Tell me Sir Hubert, what would you say is the biggest problem facing our fighting men in the Arctic today?’

Sir Hubert thought about it for a moment as he walked to the lectern. He looked out at all these officers, then said slowly and deliberately, ‘I’d say the biggest problem facing our fighting men in the Arctic today is, how do they get a four-inch penis through six inches of insulation so that they can take a piss?’ ⁵

Was Wilkins an interplanetary traveller or wandering mystic? Was he a laconic, down-to-earth Australian? It seemed