Born in Semaphore in 1892, Ross Smith was educated at Queen's School in North Adelaide, and for a couple of years at Warriston School in his parents' native Scotland. He spent a good part of his early life on a massive property in South Australia's north-east, near the rail line connecting Port Pirie with Broken Hill.
When war broke out, Ross abandoned his storemans job at Harris Scarfe to enlist with the Light Horse and sailed for Egypt on the first of the convoys to leave South Australia in October 1914. He was not among those sent to Gallipoli for the landing on 25 April the following year, but from Egypt he followed the course of the battle and could barely wait to join it.
In October 1916 Ross Smith took the life-changing step of joining the Australian Flying Corps. Trained and deployed for six months as an observer, Smith then made the transition to the role of pilot. By the end of the war Smith was one of the most respected and experienced of airmen, having clocked up some 600 hours as a pilot.
Peter Monteath, a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, teaches History in the School of International Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide. His recent books include POW: Australian prisoners of war in Hitler's Reich, Red Professor: The Cold War life of Fred Rose (with Valerie Munt), Interned: Torrens Island 1914-1915 (with Mandy Paul and Rebecca Martin), and the edited collection Germans: Travellers, settlers and their descendants in South Australia.
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'Smith's narrative of the flight's near-disasters and triumphant successes is, in parts, a remarkably vivid read … The pictures are well-chosen and clearly reproduced, giving a good sense of the aeroplane, its crew, and the conditions encountered along the way … The introduction by Peter Monteath efficiently sketches out the context of the Vimy flight for general readers, giving backgrounds of its crew and their competitors, and explaining the genesis of the race itself.' - Brett Holman, Honest History