Wilkins the unseen Anzac who shot the Red Baron's fall to earth

While the debate over who felled the Red Baron may never be settled to everybody's satisfaction, the Australian War Memorial is now confident it knows who shot Baron Manfred Von Richthofen's​ plane when it fell to earth in France on April 22, 1918.

After almost a century of being credited as the work of an "unknown Australian official photographer" the picture is now believed to have been taken by George Hubert Wilkins, a larger than life figure who also achieved fame as a polar explorer and pioneering aviator.

Author Jeff Maynard, who has spent years researching Wilkins' life, calls the photographer "the unseen Anzac" for his ability to disappear from history despite having documented so much of it.

Wilkins, who ran away to join a travelling picture show when he was just a boy and spent three years stranded in the Arctic with Vihjalmur Stefansson's expedition during the early years of World War I, went on to become the first person to fly in Antarctica in 1928 and to try to reach the North Pole by submarine in 1931.

His vessel, an ex-US navy submarine rechristened "Nautilus" in an apparent homage to Captain Nemo's ride, broke down and the expedition was abandoned .

Before all of this Wilkins had spent the last eight months of World War I working with official historian Charles Bean on the Western Front as a photographer.

Mr Maynard, whose biography, appropriately called The Unseen Anzac, is based on materials which ended up in America where the adventurer spent the latter part of his life, said some of Wilkins' work had been wrongly attributed to Frank Hurley. Other iconic images, such as the Baron von Richthofen picture, were never attributed to an individual at all.

When Wilkins' hand annotated copy of The Photographic Record of the War, a book that had been sent to him by Bean in the early 1920s, fell into Mr Maynard's hands a few years ago much that was previously confused became clear.