The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  Just under ten minutes in duration, the talk, entitled ‘Tunnel Escape from Stalag Luft 3’, was put to air by the BBC on Thursday, 7 June. Brickhill ended the talk by declaring, with an attempt at levity: ‘And now I hope we’re through with tunnels for good. I’d much rather take a bus.’124 Ironically, this was the same Paul Brickhill who, so traumatised by his experiences, couldn’t pluck up the courage to board any form of public transport.

  The BBC announcer who’d introduced Brickhill ended the broadcast by noting that, in collaboration with a South African war correspondent, ‘Flight Lieutenant Brickhill is writing a book about the extraordinary escapes from death of some of his fellow prisoners.’125

  An article about the broadcast would appear in the Australian press, accompanied by a photograph of Brickhill in uniform chatting animatedly to the producer while sitting in a leather armchair. Del Fox would cut the report from a Sydney paper and lodge it in a scrapbook she was keeping about Brickhill.

  With the radio broadcast out of the way, Brickhill returned to putting the book together. As his leave ended on 19 June, he passed the completed manuscript to Conrad Norton to review, and set off for Brighton. Ordered to report back to 11PDRC, he was to be debriefed on his experiences in captivity.

  Three days after he returned to Brighton, on the morning of 22 June, Brickhill was called into a Metropole Hotel room serving as an office for an RAAF debriefing officer of 11PDRC’s Special Administrative Section. Behind a desk waited Flight Lieutenant William Wadery. On the desk sat a typewriter and piles of forms. Inviting Brickhill to take a seat, Wadery explained the purpose of the debrief – to collect information about the fate of missing airmen and the treatment received by prisoners while in enemy hands. Any information that might be used as evidence in war-crimes trials against the enemy was to be promptly passed along to a mysterious Room 255, in documents marked ‘SECRET’.

  As the pair chatted, Wadery sought to put Brickhill at ease while determining the extent of information he could provide. When Brickhill informed him that he’d been at Stalag Luft 3, had participated in the mass escape of March 1944 and the 1945 marches through Germany, his inquisitor’s level of interest went up several notches. For it soon became clear that Brickhill was one of few Australians to have been intimately involved in the escape attempt and survived to tell the story. And Brickhill was able to confirm that five Australians, including his friend Al Hake, were among the fifty recaptured escapees executed by the Gestapo.

  Slipping several copies of a form separated by carbon paper into his typewriter, Wadery began asking Brickhill a series of questions from the form, a War Crimes Questionnaire. Most questions only required affirmative or negative answers. With each response, Wadery typed ‘YES’ or ‘NO’. Brickhill affirmed that he’d experienced or been witness to: atrocities committed against POWs and civilians; killings and executions; torture, beatings and other cruelties; imprisonment under improper conditions; exposure of prisoners of war to danger of gunfire, bombing and other hazards of war; transportation of POWs under improper conditions; failure to provide POWs with proper medical care, food or quarters; and collective punishment for offences of others.

  Brickhill’s friendly inquisitor then handed the form and a fountain pen to Brickhill and asked him to spell out occasions on which he was aware his captors had murdered prisoners. Brickhill wrote down the executions of the Fifty, the shooting of an American sergeant on the wire at Sagan, as well as the shooting of a Flight Lieutenant Bryson at Westertimke and of two other officers on the march from Stalag Luft 3. He also completed a section describing the manner of his capture. He recalled being shot down over the Mareth Line, and wrote of being trapped half in, half out of his falling Spitfire. He described the wounds to back and head, and the feeling of helplessness as his parachute dragged him through the minefield to Italian lines. Quickly, he rounded out the account by saying that he had spent a week in Italian hospitals before being flown to Naples then sent to Dulag Luft by train.

  Turning the form over, Brickhill found an entire page which provided for more detailed information about potential war crimes by his captors. Brickhill didn’t want to linger in the painful past. Leaving the page blank, he put the cap back on the pen and pushed the form across the desk to Wadery. He wanted no more reminders of the dark days.

  Impatiently, short, stocky Pilot Officer John Ulm looked at his watch. For what seemed hours he’d been sitting in the Metropole Hotel corridor, awaiting his turn to be debriefed. It occurred to him that the man ahead of him must have had a lot more to tell the debriefing officer than he did. Ulm, the former Sydney Sun journalist, had been shot down in Northern Italy in early 1945, flying a Mark VIII Spitfire with the RAF’s Number 145 Squadron. He’d been strafing a German train at low level at the time, meeting determined flak that came spitting up from railway cars and burst with flaming red ferocity all around him. Ulm felt shrapnel hit his Spit, but had managed to get the fighter back up to 3000 feet, where the engine died. Turning his silent, crippled machine into a glider, he’d succeeded in putting it down in a field in a slithering belly landing. He was proud of his crashlanding; pretty perfect, as crashes go, he reckoned.

  Ulm had walked away unscathed, but was quickly made a prisoner by German troops. He’d been escorted to Germany by three Luftwaffe men toting MP40s. ‘They were alright,’ he would say of his escort. But things became a lot tougher once he joined fellow prisoners in a POW camp, and on the road during the gruelling marches in the last weeks of the war. Not that Ulm was one to complain. He felt his plight was nothing compared to that of comrades who’d been prisoners for years.126

  The door to the interview room opened, and out walked a moustachioed flight lieutenant. Ulm looked at the man with a mixture of surprise and disbelief.

  ‘Paul Brickhill?’ said Ulm, coming to his feet.

  A smile lit up Brickhill’s face, as his eyes sparkled with recognition. ‘John Ulm?’127

  They had not seen each other since Brickhill left the Sun at the end of 1940. After that, Ulm had unwittingly followed in Brickhill’s footsteps, getting a little closer to him with each step, first joining the RAAF, training as a pilot in New South Wales and Canada, being transferred to the RAF in Britain to become a Spitfire pilot, following Brickhill to 145 Squadron, then being shot down and becoming a POW in Germany. Now, their paths were joining, here in the Brighton hotel. They had not known each other well, yet the sight of a friendly face from the carefree days back at the Sun in Sydney was enough to make both men emotional. ‘We fell into each other’s arms,’ Ulm would say.128

  After briefly catching up, exchanging details of how they came to be there that day, the pair parted. They would not see each other again in England. Before long, Ulm would be on the P&O liner Stratheden heading back to Australia with other Australian servicemen. But the paths of the pair were destined to cross again.

  Most of Brickhill’s RAAF POW colleagues were going home to Australia by sea, but Brickhill had made it clear that he was in no hurry to return to Australia. The Air Force was sticking to his enlistment requirement that he continue to serve for twelve months after the cessation of hostilities. And as the war against Japan was still being waged in the Pacific, there was the possibility he would be sent there and put back in a cockpit. That possibility did not appeal to him at all. Brickhill had had his fill of the war.

  Besides, the Sun wanted to put him to work here in England, at the centre of the post-war European action. And he had a book that needed a publisher. So, he applied to the RAAF for six months leave without pay, with his erstwhile employers Associated Newspapers supporting his application. While that application was being assessed, he was granted a further fourteen days of POW leave from 5 July.

  Brickhill’s six months leave without pay was duly authorised. From the third week of July he was, in theory, a free man until January 1946. He would continue to be considered a serving airman, but that suited him fine, for a flight lieutenant might go where a civilian could
not in Europe in these days immediately following the war. Returning to London, he took a small flat in Westminster and reported for duty at the Associated Newspapers office at 85 Fleet Street. Avoiding buses, the claustrophobic London Underground railway, and any other confined space that would feed his anxieties, Brickhill walked everywhere in London. As soon as he could find the time, he went looking for a literary agent who could sell his and Norton’s manuscript to a publishing house.

  Financially, Brickhill was in a good place for the moment, with two years’ RAAF back pay in a new English bank account and a wage coming in from Associated Newspapers. But his parents’ financial devastation by the Depression had left them and him so insecure that he would always take a very careful and calculated approach to his spending. Not that he would be a cheapskate. Appreciating quality in all things, such as the clothes he wore, he would aim for the best. But only when he felt assured he could afford it, and could avoid debt.

  He found his literary agent a short stroll from Fleet Street, and not far from the RAAF’s Kingsway offices and Australia House in the Strand. This was at decade-old agency Pearn, Pollinger and Higham. In 1935, Nancy Pearn, Laurence Pollinger and David Higham had split from established literary agency Curtis Brown to go out on their own, initially working from Higham’s Fitzroy Square flat before flourishing and taking their own premises. Fifty-year-old Higham liked the potential of Brickhill’s manuscript and liked young Brickhill. Most importantly, Higham was confident he could sell this collection of war stories to a good publisher, once it had been polished. So began a relationship that would last the rest of Brickhill’s life. Brickhill would stick with Higham when remaining agency partner Laurence Pollinger set up on his own in 1958 – Nancy Pearn died in 1950. As David Higham Associates, the agency still manages Brickhill’s literary estate to this day.

  Over the succeeding months, after working for Associated Newspapers by day, Brickhill polished and expanded the book at night and over weekends. The manuscript he’d delivered to Higham was rushed and rough, and there was plenty of work to do to bring it up to the standard required by a publishing house. For one thing, introductions and explanations giving context to the stories were required.

  The authors also needed permission to use the names of men still living who appeared in the book. Brickhill had to try to track them down, via the RAF, then type letters to them in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and the United States. This involved months of work, and even then Brickhill would not be able to locate all the men involved. Where he didn’t have permission to use a name, he would use an initial for the surname – Jeff B, Ginge C, Lieutenant R, etc. Many of Brickhill’s former colleagues did respond favourably to his approaches, often volunteering more information about themselves and others.

  One aspect that became clear as Brickhill toiled on manuscript revisions was the fact that the stories were predominantly about ‘bomber types’. With the book crying out for the inclusion of another interesting story about an escape by a fighter pilot, he weighed up whether or not he should also include his own story – of his two chance meetings with brother Russ in Halifax and Alexandria followed by his near-miraculous escape from the plummeting Spitfire over the Tunisian desert. The journalist’s tenet was that the reporter was not the story, and should remain anonymous. Yet if anyone else had told him that tale, Brickhill would have included it in a heartbeat.

  Just the same, he didn’t want to be accused of setting himself up as some sort of hero. In fact, he had an aversion to using the word ‘I’ in his writing. That seemed pompous and egotistical. It was fine to identify Norton and himself as the authors of the collection, but that was where he drew the line. Still, his journalist’s nose told him that his personal escape story was worthy of inclusion. In the end he decided to use it, but disguising his identity. It occurred to him that the need to identify some of the men in the book with just an initial for their last name offered the perfect device for disguise. In including his own story, he could preserve his anonymity by identifying his surname with just the letter B.

  On reflection, Paul B still seemed too close, too easy to connect with him. For the purposes of his story, he opted to call himself Ted B. He changed nothing else, even leaving the name of his brother Russ unaltered. Those who knew him, knew his background and the fact that he had a brother named Russ, would recognise that he was writing about himself. But the rest of the world would never know. He would keep this harmless little secret for the rest of his days.129

  The last dozen of the book’s thirty-seven chapters would be devoted to Brickhill’s account of the mass escape from Stalag Luft 3. He separated them from the earlier chapters by calling this Part 2, and would precede his chronicle of the escape with an ‘In Memoriam’ page dedicated to the Fifty, listing the names of the executed men in alphabetical order.

  As he toiled his way through the escape story, he made another editorial decision. Wings Day and Roger Bushell had told him, and he’d noted down, ‘We began planning the big break about Christmas 1942.’130 This was a phrase Brickhill had used in his BBC talk, word for word. Yet Brickhill wasn’t one of those who had begun planning the break in December 1942; he would not arrive at the camp until the following April. As Brickhill put together these chapters, he wrote, ‘A few days after we moved into North Compound on April Fool’s Day, 1943, the “X” Organisation, so long planned in detail, had taken material form.’ He went on to talk about what ‘we’ did that day of the relocation to North Compound.131 Brickhill, though, had not been one of the 700 prisoners who were transferred to North Compound on 1 April. He hadn’t arrived from Dulag Luft until three days later.

  Twice placing himself in the camp earlier than he was in fact there may not have been deliberate. He was working from his notes. And, by no means physically or mentally recovered from his ordeal as a POW, he was working at a forced, frantic pace to pull the book together in a ridiculously short time. Yet the decision to give himself a false name in the story he included about himself was quite deliberate. This leads to the conclusion that, to lend authority to his role of the escape’s narrator, he was prepared to bend the truth a little, for the sake of a flowing narrative, putting himself in the camp earlier than he was. What harm, he might have asked himself, would that do?

  Higham also pointed out that the book would need maps and illustrations. A publisher could organise maps, guided by the authors. But illustrations would not be so easy. At that time, just after the war, Brickhill had no access to photographs of the camp, but he knew that one of the forgers, artist Ley Kenyon, had, at Roger Bushell’s request, sketched the workings of Harry. Kenyon had been one of the seventy-six men to break out in the Great Escape. Recaptured within a mile of the camp, he’d been among the lucky few returned alive to Stalag Luft 3. On the 1945 marches he’d been in Brickhill’s group, the one sent to Marlag-Milag. Tracking Kenyon down in England, Brickhill asked what had happened to his sketches.

  Kenyon responded that, in the rush of evacuating Stalag Luft 3 on 27–28 January, he’d been forced to leave those drawings down Dick. Worse, Kenyon had learned that the occupants of 123 block had deliberately flooded Dick as they departed, to destroy incriminating evidence which might have resulted in reprisals levied by the Germans on the men on the march. Kenyon’s drawings should have been lost, but now Brickhill had a little luck. The drawings had been located, intact, and returned to Kenyon in Britain.

  As Kenyon had learned, the Wehrmacht had moved into Stalag Luft 3 once the prisoners were marched away, using it as a forward base for several weeks until it was overrun by advancing Soviet troops. Right through this period, a number of sick RAF prisoners had remained in camp hospital. With the arrival of the Russians, those prisoners were freed. One British officer among these men knew about Dick, and took others down the abandoned tunnel for a look-see, to find that the water had seeped away. In any event, the tin containing Kenyon’s drawings had remained above the water, high and dry. Its contents were pris
tine. The officer had taken possession of the drawings and brought them back to England. Knowing that Kenyon had been their creator, he located him and passed them over.

  Not only did Kenyon offer these drawings to Brickhill for the book, he provided a number of new ones as well. He sent sketches of the wretched Stalag Luft 3 column on the march in January, of kriegies packed in a cattle car on February’s rail journey, and of the group’s arrival at Westertimke. Kenyon also produced perspective drawings of Stalag Luft 3, plus a cutaway cross-section sketch of Harry, showing the tunnel slicing beneath the camp from 104 to the forest outside, complete with diggers and air pumpers hard at work inside.

  Brickhill selected the best of Kenyon’s illustrations, bashed out thousands of original words, and compiled and edited Norton’s contribution. It would not be until later in the year that literary agent Higham found a home for Brickhill and Norton’s untitled manuscript, with leading British publishers Faber & Faber. The authors would be named as Flight Lieutenant Paul Brickhill and Conrad Norton, in that order. Faber & Faber would come up with the title Escape to Danger. ‘I’ve never thought of a title in my life,’ Brickhill would confess fourteen years later.132

  Higham also secured a modest publishers’ advance for his two new authors, and publication was set down for August 1946, a year away. This delay was dictated in part by the shortage of paper immediately after the war. It was hoped that, by the summer of 1946, sufficient paper stocks would be available for a sizable print run. Part of that print run would be shipped to the Dominions – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa – where the book should be available within a month of the UK release.

  This long delay in publication frustrated Brickhill. He and Norton had agreed that each would retain the copyright to the stories they had individually written. So he now condensed his Stalag Luft 3 mass escape story into a long newspaper article and tried to sell it to his employers, Associated Newspapers, for immediate serialisation across Australia. He saw this as good pre-release marketing for the book. There was also the fear that as the war slipped from top of mind, people would lose interest in war stories.