Our feature image shows the ill-fated Cauldron GIII aircraft piloted by Lieutenant George Pinnock Benz taking off from Nasiriyah for the return flight to Basra. Lieutenant Reilly’s aircraft can just be seen in the background.
Nearby Northcote boasts William George Vincent Williams as the first serviceman to be killed in the war, but to Ivanhoe went the distinction of the first Australian pilot to be killed in action.
George Pinnock Merz was commemorated on the Ivanhoe War Memorial and included in various Rolls of Honour published in the Heidelberg News, but his connection to Ivanhoe remains somewhat clouded.
Merz graduated in Medicine and Chemistry at the University of Melbourne in 1914, in the interim serving with the Melbourne University Rifles with whom he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in 1913. He was one of three Militia included among the first four officers to attend the first military flying course conducted in Australia (at Point Cook) from 17 August to 28 November 1914.
He was one of the two pilots dispatched as the aviation component of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force to Papua New Guinea between late November 1914 and the end of January 1915.
Shortly before his return the Government committed a Half-Flight of 45 to support Indian Army operations against the Turks operations in Mesopotamia (now Iran). Merz conducted the training for the flight at Point Cook before the force embarked on 20 April, 1915.
He died on July 30, 1915 after he and Lieutenant William Burn (Victorian-born, but serving with the New Zealand forces) left Nasariayah, Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in a Cauldron GIII aeroplane to return to Basra. They were accompanied by another Cauldron piloted by an Englishman attached to the Indian Army, Lieutenant H. L. Reilly.
Although there were no witnesses to the incident, a subsequent enquiry suggested their ‘plane was forced down by a dust storm and he and Burn were attacked and killed by Arabs (said to be of the Beni Malik tribe). Reilly was also forced down with engine failure, but was fortunate to land near a camp of Arabs friendly to the Allied cause
A search party later found the aircraft which appeared to have made a successful landing, but no sign could be found of the missing men, since regarded as the first Australian and New Zealand air casualties of the war.
He enlisted from 115 Raglan Street, Ballarat showing his father George, a doctor as next of kin – he was included on the Heidelberg News “Our Roll of Honour” in 1916 and shown as having been killed (although there was never any report of his death published).
His postal address on his Application for Commission was given as the Central Flying School (Point Cook), and his link Heidelberg he may be that he lived with an uncle, Gottlieb, in Ford Street during his time at Melbourne University; there are several references in the local newspaper to presumed nieces Chrissie and Marjorie Merz winning prizes in school and Sunday School competitions.
Link to the history of George Pinnock Merz
Link to ozsportshistory.com downloads for WW1
Merz’s Cauldron aircraft on the back of a Model-T truck after recovery
