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Dictionary coverage of 'get cracking'

J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) reports that "get cracking" came into U.S. English from the UK during the 1940s:

get cracking to get busy; get going. {This phr[ase] came into U.S. speech through contact with British armed forces during WWII.}

Lighter's first citation for the phrase is from Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1936), as "Get cracking, begin work."

It appears to have caught on as a naturalized phrase fairly quickly, however, since it appears in Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, first edition (1960):

cracking, get Start; start moving; begin working; begin to exert oneself. Often in the phrase let's get cracking.

The entry for "get cracking" in the original edition of Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1936) is actually a bit more detailed than Lighter's citation suggests:

get cracking. To begin work : Royal Air Force : from ca. 1925. I.e. cracking on speed.

Earlier in the same dictionary, Partridge has this entry for cracking as an adjective:

cracking, adj. Very fast ; exceedingly vigorous (-- 1880) : slightly ob[solete, in 1936]

By the fifth edition (1961) of the dictionary, however, Partridge had evidently rethought the place of "get cracking" in the larger scheme of similar phrases and had adopted the entry that ghoppe reports in a different answer here, with the suggestion that it might have its origin in "whip-cracking at the mustering of cattle."

Early Google Books matches

Google Search results generally support Partridge's1936 reading of the phrase. The earliest relevant matches are from 1938, and one of them is RAF-specific. From Popular Flying, volume 6, issue 9 (1938) [combined snippets]:

We've got a new vocabulary in Black Bourton, the vocabulary of the R.A.F. Nice things are "wizard"; nasty people are "ropey types," and a reckless man is "split." One is "browned off" when one is rather depressed; the ground is the "deck" and the sky is the "ceiling"; dull-witted people are "drips," and when in a hurry we ask each other to get "cracking." This strange lingo is, of course, subject to changes and ex-R.A.F. men of several years ago would find themselves hopelessly dated by the expressions they use.

There is, however, one outlying instance of "got cracking"—or more precisely "got cracking away"—that might be significant as well. From Bertram Milford, In the Whirl of the Rising (1904), a novel seemingly set in Rhodesia during the Second Matabele War, of 1896–1897:

"You must have had the very devil of a scrap, Peters." one of these [horsemen from Green's Scouts, a relieving force] was saying. "We could hear you banging away from the time you began, and pushed our gees for all they'd carry; for we reckoned all that shooting meant a big thing and no bally skirmish. ... They [the Matabele forces] didn't know we were there till we got cracking away right in their faces, or mostly backs. Magtig! Didn't they skip. ..."

Here it seems pretty clear that "got cracking away" means "started firing our guns." Is this usage connected to the later World War II use of "get cracking"? It's difficult to say. If there is a connection, the literal slang term for gunfire would have to have transmuted into a more figurative sense of getting started. Still, both usages have a strong tie to military usage, and a connection is not impossible.

Conclusion

No reference work has convincingly tracked "get cracking" to its original lair. The term does seem to be of UK English origin, but whether it originated in the RAF in 1925, or in Rhodesia in the late 1890s, or in some bucolic setting to the sound of bullwhips bring cattle into order for transportation or migration remains unclear.

OED 1 defines it as “U.S. A yard or garden-patch about the door of a house” and offers the following citations:

c. 1764 in T. D. Woolsey in Hist. Disc. [...] The Freshmen ... are forbidden to wear their hats ... in the front door-yard of the President’s or Professor’s house. 1854 Lowell Cambr (Mass.) 30 Yrs. Ago [...] The flowers which decked his little door-yard.  1878 Emerson in N. Amer. Rev. [...] We send to England for shrubs, which grow as well in our own door-yards and cow-pastures.  1913 R. Frost Boy’s Will 9 How drifts are piled, Dooryards and roads ungraded. 1941 T. S. Eliot Dry Salvages [...] The rank ailanthus of the April dooryard.

I note that all of these except the Eliot are from Yankee sources; and although Eliot was born and raised in St. Louis, his parents were New Englanders.

However, probably the most famous use of the word is Walt Whitman’s elegy on Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the the Door-yard Bloom’d—and Whitman lived his whole life on Long Island and in Camden, New Jersey, except for a brief period during and immediately after the Civil War.

EDIT:
A posting on rootweb.com, Some Old Houses in Readfield, Maine, describes the evolution of Maine architecture and provides detail about the origin of “door yard call”:

Over time [...] men could find time to make additions and improvements to the log cabins — sometimes the original cabin became an outbuilding, and a finer house was built. Sometimes the original cabin was enveloped, and a century later the unsuspecting eye would never have guessed that a log cabin was nestled inside a lovely Victorian structure. In the mid 19th century it became common in Maine to build a summer kitchen, shed and barn onto the house (usually a cape cod style house) creating a “big house, little house, back house, barn” effect. This architectural style caught on about the time of the mass exodus west, and at the beginning of the agricultural decline in Maine, thus our extended farm buildings are rarely seen in the rest of the USA. The disadvantage was, of course, threat of fire which would destroy the whole farm, and the smells and flies that went with an attached barn. Some of the advantages were easy accessibility to the barn, animals, food storage areas, milk room and sleigh in the winter; protection from the winter winds both outside and in, added warmth for the animals; and last but not least an indoor trek to the privy at the back of the barn or shed. If you mention a door yard in another part of the country chances are they will not know what you are referring to. With the extended farm buildings there were three yards: the front yard by the parlor where special guests were greeted, the barn yard where the men did their farm chores, and the door yard by the shed or summer kitchen where women did laundry, planted and tended their kitchen garden and did other woman's work. Sometimes we still hear the term “door yard call”, and now you know the origin — you wouldn't want to disturb someone for any length of time while they were working so you just stop for a moment on your way by for a quick hello in the yard — you made a “door yard call” .