[BITList] Gallantry

[John Feltham]

Here is the true story of how the Red Baron was shot down by two 
Australians, taken from a book I am currently pitching.

BTW, if you believe this, I have a nice bridge for sale in London:-)

Crooked Mick goes to war

Crooked Mick was quite old when World War I broke out, so he had to dye 
his hair in order to join up. He tried to join the Light Horse, but he 
kept on breaking the horses he was given, and the army wouldn't let him 
bring in his own horse. He even broke a few heavy horses that they let 
him try.

So they sent him off to the infantry, where he was one of the first 
ashore when the Australian and New Zealand forces were sent to invade 
Gallipoli in the Dardanelles. Mick set to work digging trenches and 
tunnelling under the enemy's trenches, but unfortunately, he was being 
given orders by an English officer who wasn't very bright.

"Dig there", the Pommy would say, pointing at the ground, and Mick would 
take off in a tunnel going down into the ground, never stopping to 
question the order he was given. You can still see some of these 
tunnels: they went under the enemy lines and usually came out on the 
opposite shore of the peninsula. One of the Australian officers saw this 
and said they could go through and come up on the Turks from behind, but 
the Poms said that would be unsporting.

After a while, Mick realised that his tunnelling wasn't achieving 
anything, so he began doing things that his mates suggested to him. He 
started something really useful for the war effort — throwing dead 
donkeys with devastating accuracy at the Turkish officers, in their 
bunkers, half a mile behind the front trenches.

The result was that the Turkish soldiers were told to stop shooting at 
Simpson and his donkeys, because every dead donkey was being used to 
wipe out some of their top brass. After that, it was only those Turks 
who hated officers who fired at Simpson's donkeys. If anything, we got 
even more dead donkeys after that, because those Turks were no fools. 
It's just a pity they didn't have any good donkey-throwers on their 
side, because the war might have ended a lot sooner.

Mick dug most of the trenches for our blokes, and chucked all his spoil 
into the Turks' trenches for good luck, which got the Turks really 
upset, and then he got introduced to jam tin bombs. That got the Turks 
really upset, because Mick could throw further than they could, and he 
used all his cricketing skills to drop them into a trench every time. 
These were just jam tins with a fuse, the explosive out of twenty rifle 
cartridges, and any old scrap iron or rocks that came to hand.

He might've won the war for us, if he'd been allowed, but the Poms 
messed it all up. The Turks brought in this big field piece, just to try 
and get Mick, and Mick and his mates had no ammo left, as they'd used it 
all to make jam tin bombs. All they had was a pile of lead bullets from 
cartridges. So Mick opened fire with those, against the field gun. Of 
course, you can't shoot bits of lead without the stuff that goes bang, 
and that was all used up in the bombs. That wasn't a problem, though, 
because Mick wasn't shooting the bullets, he was throwing them.

Now you might say that still wouldn't do much against a field gun, but 
that's if you fight fair, as the Poms call it. Mick was belting the 
bullets down the barrel of that field gun so hard, they wedged at the 
far end. Made a sort of blockage so the next time the Turks fired the 
gun, it jammed the round in the barrel and blew up. Our blokes thought 
it was a great joke, and started collecting more lead so Mick could 
block up the other guns. That was when the Poms bought into it.

Some Pommy brass hat said it was unsporting, because the guns were 
sitting targets. Anyhow, one of our blokes decked him, and Mick said 
he'd better stop then and there, or some of our blokes'd get into 
trouble. So he did a few other things, but people started asking 
questions, and Mick went back to digging tunnels again.

One of Mick's tunnels got filled with explosives. There was this 
Australian scientist bloke called Henry Cruciform, who'd made a 
top-secret explosive out of eucalyptus oil. It was called nitrogum, and 
they put barrels and barrels of this nitrogum into Mick's tunnel, and 
backfilled the hole with rocks and stuff. Then they lit a long fuse, 
went a long way back and ducked down.

The idea was that the explosion would cave in the Turkish trenches, but 
it had gone way too deep into solid rock. Instead of collapsing the 
trenches, it blew back out and all of the rocks that were packed into 
the hole got blasted off in the direction of France. Now there are lots 
of people who claim they shot down the Red Baron, but if you check the 
official histories, you will see that he got shot down just an hour 
after they blasted Mick's tunnel.

What's more, if you look at the available pictures of the Red Baron's 
plane, and examine the wreckage carefully, you can see jagged tears 
going down through the plane from above: it was Mick's tunnel, powered 
by nitrogum, that really shot the Red Baron down.

Mick's war came to an end when he was told to drive another tunnel back 
to the landing beach, so the Anzacs could carry food and ammunition up 
in safety. Just as he was about to break through the rock at the beach 
end, he tapped into a spring, and got soaking wet, which washed the dye 
out of his hair, and he stepped out into the sun with all the dye 
running out of his rapidly whitening hair.

The brass hats were embarrassed, and they had him sent back home so they 
could avoid admitting that an old man had been winning the war for them. 
They used the feeble excuse that he'd been eating the rations for a 
whole company — which shows how bad their accounting was, because Mick 
used to eat that much before he sat down to breakfast. So in the end, 
Crooked Mick spent the rest of the war helping this Henry Cruciform 
bloke, the one who invented the nitrogum, and who was now working on 
advanced forms of psychological warfare.

But that came after he got back to Australia. On the way home, Mick just 
wouldn't give up fighting. First there was a German torpedo that came 
heading for the hospital ship he was travelling on, as they were sailing 
across the Indian Ocean. Anyhow, Mick saw this torpedo coming and dived 
into the water to stop it. He was a bit weakened as he was only getting 
rations for five men, and he was pushed backwards by the torpedo, 
towards the ship.

I forgot to mention that Mick's dog had been with him, right through the 
Gallipoli campaign, and had personally captured twenty Turks before the 
Poms interfered. They reckoned it was unsporting to point your dog at 
the enemy trenches and say "Fetch!". Anyhow, Mick's dog was there, and 
he jumped in to help, and between them, they flipped the torpedo over, 
just as it was about to hit the ship, and it went back to the German 
submarine, sinking it.

Well Mick was hauled back on deck, and his dog too, and the officers 
said they'd pretend they hadn't seen the dog, and Mick might even get a 
medal for his brave deed, but he shouldn't go diving in the water any 
more. The next day, though, there was another torpedo.

Mick knew that he had to obey orders, so this time, he picked up a 
lifeboat, and threw it at the torpedo, which destroyed it. He was about 
to wipe out the submarine with a second smaller life boat, but he was 
told to stop, that the boats might be important, and the submarine got away.

The day after, it was back again, following the ship with just its 
periscope showing, so Mick went down to the engine room and borrowed a 
few spare bits of ironmongery and chucked them at the periscope. He 
missed the first two throws (as I said, he wasn't getting enough to eat, 
and this proves it), but the third shot was with a fly wheel that had a 
crack in it, and he threw it like a discus.

The fly wheel skipped over the surface and ripped off the periscope, 
which left a big hole that flooded the submarine and forcing it to the 
surface, where it was captured by the frigate that was convoying them. 
Mick was treated like a hero, and given a free run of the galley, which 
is what they call a kitchen on a ship.

They were close to Fremantle in Western Australia when another submarine 
tried to have a go at sinking them, and strictly against orders, Mick 
dived in once more, swam over and pulled faces down the periscope, which 
made them surface to see what was wrong, and then he threw all of the 
crew overboard, ripped four plates off the hull to sink the submarine, 
and swam back to his ship, leaving the frigate to collect the prisoners.

He might have got away with disobeying orders, but the ship was still 
going full ahead when he caught up with her, and his head came in 
contact with the ship's screw, which shattered, leaving the ship 
stranded off the coast with no form of propulsion.

"There'll be no more going into the galley for you, you one-man galley 
plunderer!" bristled the captain, who had just realised that not only 
were they stranded, but Mick had eaten just about all the food. Anyhow, 
Mick just grinned, and said "galley" was the answer—not the kitchen sort 
of galley, but the type used in the olden days, a sort of big dinghy 
with lots and lots of oars.

He went down to the engine room, kicked one of the riveted steel plates 
off each of the ship's sides, and used two oars, made from lengths of 
steel rail that the ship was carrying as deck cargo, and the steel 
plates, to row the ship in against the tide. So in the end, the captain 
agreed to let bygones be bygones, and they hushed the whole matter up, 
so Mick wouldn't get into trouble for disobeying orders. That's why you 
won't read about it in the history books.
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