Brickhill never seriously considered dumping the papers. Something checked him when the impulse to rid himself of their weight came over him. To Brickhill, that would be like abandoning a child he’d fathered. He could shave his growing beard later, and could scrounge food. But he couldn’t recreate, with the needed accuracy, the stories his comrades had shared with him in camp. This was material not even Brickhill, with his excellent memory for detail, could recreate with complete accuracy without the notes. Twice, he fell in the snow, but he didn’t abandon the papers as he struggled back to his feet.112
Knowing that if he didn’t get up he’d be shot by guards, each time he fell a determination to survive and tell his story drove him to find reserves of strength he didn’t know he possessed, and he resumed the slow, painful march, still with his precious notes hidden in his bedroll. He would estimate that during the march seventy-five men from Stalag Luft 3 collapsed and died from exhaustion or were shot. He pushed on, huddling with comrades during their night stops in barns, an abandoned cinema, even in a working bottle factory.
Coming down a steep hill to Spremberg, the North Compound column was steered to a railway siding where two trains of boxcars awaited. The column was divided and loaded aboard. One group went north, to Luckenwalde and crowded Stalag 3-A. The train carrying Brickhill’s group rattled northwest for two days. Forty men were crammed into each boxcar with their kit, giving Brickhill and his comrades just enough room to sit but not enough to lie down to sleep. During the journey, the men in Brickhill’s boxcar were given no food. A sip of water was doled out after thirty-six hours, taken from the locomotive’s water tank.
Through Brunswick, Magdeburg and Hanover the train rattled. Brickhill reckoned that he and others around him lost an average of fourteen kilograms in weight during the journey. Most couldn’t afford to lose that much, and many haggard, hungry, frozen men looked like skeletons as unloading began at Tarmstedt Ost at 5.30 pm on 2 February. They were north of Bremen, not far from the North Sea coast. Another march lay ahead, of just a kilometre this time, to Westertimke. There, they were halted outside a former naval POW camp, Marlag-Milag Nord, which had been condemned as unfit for habitation.
In teeming rain, lined up in ranks outside the camp, the thousands of prisoners had to wait to be searched before being allowed to enter the camp and take shelter in empty huts. Many men collapsed before their turn came, and had to be carried in once searched. Brickhill stood for seven hours before he was called forward. Others had to wait as long as eight hours. Staggering to the camp gate, Brickhill wearily raised his arms to allow a guard to search his pockets. The guard then pointed to the bedroll slung around his neck.
‘What do you have in there?’ the German demanded.
A feeling of dread came over Brickhill. Would his precious manuscript be wrenched from him? Summoning up a grin, he replied, in a desperate bid to bluff his way by, ‘I’ve got a tommy-gun in there.’
The German laughed. And waved him through.113
In overcrowded huts devoid of furniture or cooking facilities, and with very little food and no medical attention provided by their guards, the Stalag Luft 3 men waited at the Marlag-Milag camp through February and March for the war to end. Sleeping on the floor, Brickhill was grateful for his bedroll. As for food, he and others stretched their Red Cross rations. On 10 April, with Allied forces crossing the Rhine, the men at Westertimke felt sure that deliverance was at hand. But the Germans were determined not to free them. That day, to the horror of the exhausted prisoners, their guards herded them from the camp to begin another march, north this time, away from advancing friendly forces.
For three weeks, the Germans kept the kriegies on the march, towards the Elbe River. Now they spent the night in fields. The weather had improved. No longer was there snow or ice on the ground. Just the same, the prisoners had to struggle for space on the roads with German troops and refugees. Passing through one town, Brickhill found himself shoved off the pavement by surly local police. Footpaths were reserved for Germans. Other policemen attacked RAF kriegies around Brickhill, bashing them with rifle butts and kicking them when they fell.
‘Bandits! Gangsters! Murderers!’ raged the policemen.114
The Germans weren’t the only ones the prisoners had to be wary of. As the weather fined up, Allied aircraft were free to prowl the hazy blue skies. They proved a danger to friend and foe alike. More than once, columns of tramping POWs were strafed by rocket-firing RAF Typhoons which mistook them for German troops. To the disgust of their friends, thirty prisoners were killed by friendly fire. It was a stupid and wasteful end for men who had endured so much and were so close to freedom.115
Food was supplemented by bartering. German civilians in areas they passed through traded eggs and bread for Red Cross coffee retained by prisoners – Germans hadn’t tasted real coffee in years. On one occasion, POWs plundered a vast quantity of potatoes from a farm. Meanwhile, their guards were still under orders to shoot anyone who fell out of line, and Brickhill saw two RAF men shot and killed when they could go no further. Brickhill only learned later that the guards had orders to shoot all prisoners if the column failed to reach the Elbe by a specific date. They were still short of the Elbe by the date in question, but the Luftwaffe men were not SS or Gestapo, and they chose to ignore the shoot-to-kill order.
On the last day of April, Brickhill and his colleagues were sheltering in barns near Lubeck when they heard artillery booming in the distance. The British Army was crossing the Elbe. On trudged the prisoners. On 2 May, they were on the march when, around 11.45 that morning, they heard firing down the road behind them. Presently, two tanks emerged from trees and rumbled towards the column, which had stopped as prisoners and guards alike wondered whether the tanks were British or German. Looking around him, Brickhill could see his colleagues become incredibly tense. Were they about to win their freedom at last, or was this a false alarm? Hatches in the front tank opened, and the heads of two British tank men popped up.
‘We ran up to them screaming at the top of our voices,’ Brickhill later said.116
Free men again, they had to wait another six days before being taken to a landing ground where Lancaster bombers were coming and going. Courtesy of their own service, the RAF, the former POWs were given a one-way ticket, back to England.
14.
A Friendly Interrogation
FOR ITS LAST operation of the war, the RAF’s 2nd Tactical Air Force collected and repatriated thousands of POWs from Germany. Packed aboard a Lancaster bomber with other ex-prisoners, Paul Brickhill was one of thousands flown out of Germany by the RAF on 8 May, the day the war ended – Victory in Europe Day, or VE Day, as it became known. Brickhill and other freed RAF kriegies including his Sydney Sun colleague John Ulm were flown to RAF Waddington, a bomber base seven kilometres south of Lincoln, in Lincolnshire.
For many returning former aircrew, flying over the white cliffs of Dover for the first time in years proved an emotional experience. Aboard one Lancaster, Ulm was invited up to the cockpit to see the cliffs as his bomber overflew them. The sight filled his heart with joy. Brickhill had no such fond experience. Apparently, this flight, only his second since being shot down – the first being the 1943 flight to Naples from Tunis – proved so nerve-racking for Brickhill that he cringed in terror. This once-fine pilot seems to have vowed then and there to never fly again if he could help it.
At Waddington, the ex-prisoners, unshaven, stinking dirty with long hair and unkempt uniforms, were ushered from their planes towards a line of young WAAFs, members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, waiting outside a barrack building. But the women were not there just to welcome them.
‘Hang on, you lot!’ exclaimed a senior WAAF as the men went to bypass them.117
The kriegies stopped in their tracks as the women instructed them to open their shirts, and then their trousers. With giggles from the girls and red faces among returnees, the WAAFs applied generous amounts of delousing powder to each man. Then it was inside the
barracks for a steaming hot cup of tea.
Brickhill and his Australian colleagues were ordered to report to the RAAF’s 11th Personnel Dispatch and Reception Centre (11PDRC), at Brighton. When they asked how they would get there, they were handed railway ‘chits’, travel vouchers, and told to make their own way. They set off for Brighton that same day.
From a series of trains, passing down through central England, through London and south to the coast, Brickhill surveyed the outside world feeling oddly detached. London still looked a city at war. Damage from German bombs and indiscriminate V1 and V2 rockets was widespread. Parks and public buildings were bereft of their iron railings, which had been melted down to make munitions. Sandbagged walls stood outside the entrances to stations, government buildings and air-raid shelters. Few private vehicles drove the streets. Uniformed personnel were still everywhere. Long lines of civilians clutching ration coupons still trailed from grocers, bakers, butchers and clothing stores – rationing would continue in Britain for another nine years. As Brickhill would learn, in Australia rationing had never been as severe as in Britain, and would end much sooner.
At Brighton, the Grand and the Metropole, two of the town’s premier waterfront hotels, had been taken over by the RAAF and RNZAF. There, the RAAF’s 11PDRC prepared Australian airmen for the return to Australia. The Grand, to become notorious for the 1984 IRA bombing aimed at Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet, which killed five, injured many more, and demolished part of the building, was in 1945 set aside for Aussie and Kiwi non-commissioned ranks. The Metropole, which today is used for layovers by aircrew from several airlines, was then reserved for the exclusive use of RAAF and RNZAF officers.
Brickhill joined the crowd of Australian and New Zealand officers at the Metropole, where he was allocated a hotel room and informed that he was to take his time readjusting to life as a free man. Two days later, RAAF Overseas HQ in London would report to RAAF HQ in Melbourne that Brickhill was among scores of RAAF POWs liberated by Allied forces to that point and now being processed at Brighton. Among others on the 10 May list were Jack Donald, the pilot who’d felt he was only in the RAAF to make up the numbers, and Peter Kingsford Smith, one of three nephews of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith who’d become flyers.
As Brickhill arrived in the town that evening of 8 May, the street lights came on in Brighton for the first time since 1939, as they did across Britain. Aussie and Kiwi hospital patients, pulling themselves from their beds, danced in their pyjamas in Brighton’s main street with their nurses, celebrating the official end of the war in Europe. Brickhill was in no state to dance in the streets. It was enough just to find a soft bed in a warm, dry room.
The Australian ex-prisoners were informed that the RAAF would eventually want ‘a chat’ with them about their time as POWs. But not before they reacclimatised to the real world. A medical check-up was first on the agenda. The ex-prisoners were provided with new uniforms and shaving kit, slept in comfortable beds between clean sheets, and were fed the most wholesome meals that rationing would allow. They were also provided with in-house entertainment, with the bar opening most evenings from 5.00, and a band playing in the hotel ballroom. The airmen could wander the town, get a haircut, take in the fresh seaside air and the weak spring sunshine, could see movies at local cinemas and eat out at restaurants and cafes as they spent several weeks reassimilating.
At 3.30 on the afternoon of 12 May, four days into his son’s Brighton stay, George Brickhill received a telegram at Greenwich Point in Sydney. With relief, George read wife Dot a message from the RAAF:
PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON FLIGHT LIEUTENANT PAUL CHESTER JEROME BRICKHILL HAS BEEN LIBERATED BY THE ALLIED ARMIES AND IS NOW SAFE IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.118
While, at home, his parents were overjoyed to know that he was safe, at Brighton, Brickhill was struggling with his freedom. He was like a budgerigar freed from its cage: lost, uncertain, easily spooked. Subsequent indications would suggest that Brickhill slept fitfully, if at all, during these early weeks back in England. He would later confess that crowds and confined spaces so terrified him at this time that he couldn’t even pluck up the courage to board a bus on his own.119
Brickhill’s journalist friend Conrad Norton had no such problem. Norton, being non-military, had immediately returned to ‘civvy street’, and was keen for them to pull their notes together into book form and find a publisher. For the time being, Brickhill avoided revisiting their paperwork, and revisiting his black days as a prisoner. After ten days at Brighton, he was granted twenty-eight days’ special leave, unofficially known as POW Leave.
Taking the train to London, and lugging the Stalag Luft 3 notes in his kitbag, Brickhill reported to RAAF Overseas Headquarters at Kodak House in the Kingsway. There, he was given a pile of mail and telegrams that had accumulated for him. Next, he went to Fleet Street, the heart of the London newspaper trade, to visit the UK office of his old Sydney employer, Associated Newspapers. There, he found that the Sydney Sun was keen to re-engage him, as a special European correspondent, based in London. Booking into a hotel a comfortable walk from Fleet Street, and with a borrowed typewriter, he tried to apply himself to answering correspondence.
After writing to his family, telling them where he was and what he was doing, he addressed other correspondents. One of the telegrams awaiting him had been from Del Fox, who’d expressed her delight at the news of his release – his name had been published in the Sydney press along with those of other Sydneysiders released from German captivity. Brickhill’s feelings towards Del had mellowed while he’d been in the bag, and the letter he typed to her on 27 May lacked the affection of old. He confessed that being back in civilisation again was overwhelming. ‘One can’t grasp it at first, but can only absorb little bits here and there.’ The impact, he said, was a little terrifying. ‘However, here I am, and on leave. Believe it or not, also sober.’120
He complained to Del that he would have to spend his leave working, trying to finish a book that he and Conrad Norton had begun while prisoners. But he was not looking forward to the task. ‘It’s a damn nuisance,’ he told Del. He added that, as the Sun wanted him to work for them in London, he expected to remain in Britain a while longer. He observed that more than four years had passed since he’d left Australia; it seemed longer to him. But he was in no hurry to return. ‘One of these days I’ll probably land back in Sydney.’ Almost dismissively, he signed off: ‘So much to do, and so many more letters to write. Bungho – be seeing you.’121 Del must have been crushed by the lack of warmth and the casual sign-off. But she would not dismiss Paul from her heart.
It seems that Brickhill’s off-handedness with Del Fox resulted from the fact that old flame Mary Callanan had re-entered his life. It’s likely there had also been a telegram from Mary among the pile waiting for him once he returned to England, expressing pleasure at the news of his release – just as Del had done. Because, when Brickhill wrote home to friends, he asked for news of Mary. One friend would write back urging Brickhill to dismiss Mary Callanan from his mind, suggesting she was not ‘a good sort’. She had, he wrote, ‘consorted’ with American servicemen in Sydney while Brickhill had been a POW. Tens of thousands of Yankee soldiers, sailors and airmen had spent time in Australia during the war, on the way to or from the Pacific theatre and on leave. They had famously been ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’. Although Brickhill was disappointed by this report, he wouldn’t soon forget the girl who got away.122
As his leave slipped by, Brickhill found excuses not to get to work on the book project, until, with two-and-a-half weeks of free time left, he finally unravelled the grubby notes. He spent all of the next seventeen days working almost without pause, typing up the stories at a frantic pace, editing as he went. By far the longest of the tales was his account of the mass escape from Stalag Luft 3 in 1944. Brickhill would salt the escape’s lead-up through early chapters before devoting the last third of the book entirely to the escape. As he pulled these
notes together, he found that the fine memory for detail he’d developed at the Sun had not deserted him; recollections of his two years in Germany came flooding back.
At the same time, he was approached by RAAF Public Relations. Knowing that he was in London and working on the manuscript with Norton, the RAAF urged him to speak on a BBC program about the mass escape from Stalag Luft 3. That escape had been front-page news in Britain and Australia in 1944. The House of Commons was first advised of it by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on 19 May, after the British Government had been informed by the neutral Swiss Government, the ‘Protecting Power’ in relation to POWs. SBO Wing Commander Massey, following his repatriation, had been debriefed by MI9, and he’d provided the government with the inside story of the mass break. Standing up in the Commons on 23 June to update the House on the escape, Eden revealed that fifty escapees had been shot by the Germans. ‘It was cold-blooded butchery,’ Eden added, ‘and we are resolved that the foul criminals shall be tracked down.’123
Brickhill would have been reluctant to revisit the episode. Apart from the troubling memories that this was likely to conjure, there was the possibility that, in his nervy state, his stutter might re-emerge on air to embarrass him. But his superiors probably put the case that the BBC broadcast would be good for the morale of Australian and New Zealand troops still fighting in the Pacific – it would be aired by the BBC’s Pacific Service in a regular program called Anzacs Calling. Knowing that his family in Australia would be able to hear his voice for the first time in years, Brickhill agreed, briefly setting aside his writing.
The broadcast would be styled a ‘talk’, with Brickhill reading from his own prepared notes, which were first cleared by a pair of censors at Britain’s Air Ministry. The talk’s BBC producer was Elizabeth Davy. Always comfortable in the company of women, Brickhill seemed to be put at relative ease by her involvement, and his stutter did not trouble him unduly.
The Hero Maker Page 13
