When, to his annoyance and frustration, Associated Newspapers turned his article down, Brickhill decided to try other Australian publications. From London, he wrote to leading papers across the nation. His first success was in Port Pirie with the Recorder, which his father had once run. It’s probable that George Brickhill used his contacts there to recommend his son’s article – four of the senior editorial staff who’d been working at the paper when George left in 1927 would still be there as late as 1953.
The Recorder ran the story as a feature article that August of 1945. The Sydney Morning Herald, from a rival stable to that of Brickhill’s own paper the Sydney Sun, published the article in September, under the headline ‘Thrilling Story of the Stalag III Tunnel Escape, by Flight-Lieut P C J Brickhill, RAAF’, no doubt causing gnashing of teeth among Brickhill’s bosses across town. The Herald also used several Ley Kenyon drawings with the article. In Darwin that same month, the Army News ran the article. Brisbane’s Courier-Mail and Adelaide’s News would serialise it in December. The News would also publish another of Brickhill’s Escape to Danger stories in December, the tale of how Joe Herman was blown out of a Halifax bomber at 17,000 feet without a parachute, and survived to tell Brickhill the story.
Once he’d put his signature to the Faber & Faber contract, and received a cheque with his share of the advance, Brickhill was keen to find expert advice on how to preserve as much of his book royalties as possible, avoiding Britain’s punishingly high rates of personal income tax – the top marginal rate was then 97.5 per cent. He found his accountant, Arthur D. Fincham, of chartered accountancy firm Fincham, Vallance and Co, at Clements Inn in the Strand, just a few minutes’ walk from both his Fleet Street office and David Higham’s office in Bedford Street.
Fincham advised Brickhill to set up a private company and direct all his writing income into that. To offset tax, the company could make claims for substantial expenses incurred in the earning of that income. Plus, if Brickhill generated large sums from his writing, his company would also be able to buy property, even purchase him a car, avoiding personal tax. Brickhill would indeed set up a private company, Brickhill Publications Limited, into which he would divert his book income. After the publication of Escape to Danger, he would send Arthur Fincham an autographed first edition, accompanied by a note: ‘With enormous thanks for advice that was literally worth its weight in gold.’133
Brickhill would also team up with Life magazine correspondent and regular Reader’s Digest contributor Allan Michie to write an article about the Stalag Luft 3 mass escape, ‘Tunnel to Freedom’, which would be published by the Digest under both their names in 1946. Meanwhile, knuckling down to the journalistic grind for Associated Newspapers, Brickhill fought with his anxieties and reaccustomed himself to confined spaces as his first assignments kept him in London.
By late 1945, his Sydney editor was keen for him to go to Germany and report on the situation there. And the RAF was happy to find him a place on a transport flight going to Berlin. This would entail going back to the country where he had been a prisoner. And to get there, he would have to fly again. Both prospects must have sent shivers down Brickhill’s spine. Somehow, he would have to conquer his fears.
15.
The Man Who Came Back
THE C-47 DAKOTA transport aircraft eased down out of the clouds and began its landing approach. Below, Brickhill could see green fields sliding beneath the Dakota’s wing. Those German fields were pockmarked with ugly black bomb craters. It was Saturday, 15 December 1945, and Christmas was just ten days away. The war had only been over for seven months, and in Germany its scars had barely begun to heal. With his official ID papers as a correspondent for Australia’s Associated Newspapers in his pocket, Flight Lieutenant Brickhill was returning to Germany for the first time since his flight out in May.
Describing himself as ‘The man who came back’, he would soon write, in an article for the Australian press: ‘Once I hungrily dreamed, “If only I weren’t a wretched prisoner of the Nazis; if only the positions were reversed.” My dream has come true.’134 It was a weird feeling, coming back like this, so soon after all that had occurred while he was a prisoner. It was not at all what he had expected, or imagined.
Before they’d lifted off from a London airfield, Brickhill had told the Dakota’s balding Canadian navigator that he’d been a prisoner at Stalag Luft 3. Now the Canadian leaned over, nudged him and pointed down. ‘There you are,’ he said with a grin. ‘You’re back here, in Sausage Land.’135
Brickhill nodded. ‘Heaven knows I never intended to return among the Germans,’ he yelled in reply over the noise of the aircraft’s engines. ‘They shot fifty of my friends for escaping, and would have shot me too, if I’d drawn an early ticket for the escape tunnel. So I didn’t exactly acquire a love for them.’136
Brickhill had kept up a front for the crew of the Dakota, pretending nonchalance as he fought his flying demons. Only the white knuckles as he gripped his seat betrayed the newfound terror of flying that rose in the breast of this once-confident fighter pilot. Meanwhile, part of Brickhill’s statement to the Canadian was an exaggeration; in fact, an outright fib. Brickhill knew that even if he had drawn one of the first seventy-six escape ‘tickets’ he could not have been among the recaptured escapees who were executed, after Roger Bushell had taken him off the list as a result of his claustrophobia. Brickhill’s pride had been savaged by that decision. In these early months following the war, his pride, and his ego, would not permit him to reveal that he had been sidelined because of a weakness, because of a flaw in his character.
There was also another factor in play. In banishing him from the escape list, Bushell had saved him from the executioners. Brickhill was feeling guilty, for surviving when his friends did not. It was the same sort of guilt suffered by countless survivors of the war, men and women who’d seen friends and family die beside them and lived to wonder, to the point of distraction, why Fate had spared them.
The Dakota was soon touching down at RAF Gatow, a British airfield in western Berlin that had formerly been a Luftwaffe base. Between 1936 and October 1944 it had been home to a German aircrew training school. Then, with the transfer of all flying instructors to front-line units in a final and ultimately futile attempt to keep Germany’s depleted air force in the air, the Gatow airfield had served as a paratroop training facility. After Berlin’s main airport, Tempelhof, had fallen to the advancing Russians on 26 April, Gatow had held out as the Nazi capital’s last remaining airfield for another three days. The centre of Berlin had fallen to the Russian Army on 2 May. With the city’s carve-up by the conquering Allied powers following war’s end, Gatow had come within the British zone, and the Royal Air Force had turned it into an operational RAF airfield.
Taxiing towards the Nazi-era brick administration buildings, the Dakota came to a stop and its two engines died. The door opened. Brickhill jumped down, then took his bags from a Dakota crewman. Hardly had he set the bags on the tarmac than a young German wearing a Wehrmacht forage cap, minus its Nazi insignia, came dashing towards him. The former German soldier picked up Brickhill’s bags, bowed to him, then trotted along beside him, guiding him to the airfield’s control tower, seeming almost frantic in his desire to please the Australian officer. Inside the building, Brickhill found what he described as ‘a bevy of attractive frauleins in diaphanous dresses and silk stockings’, all offering him welcoming teacakes. This was certainly a surprise. He hadn’t seen silk stockings or diaphanous dresses on waitresses in London.137
An RAF car and driver were provided, and Brickhill was driven towards the city centre over frosty roads. Ahead lay the ravaged skyline of one of World War Two’s most bombed cities. Close to 6500 acres of Berlin had been levelled by Allied bombing, with most of the damage done in 1944 and early 1945. This compared to 600 acres of London destroyed by German bombing during the war. Forty-three of the seventy German cities attacked by RAF Bomber Command had more than half their surface area devastat
ed.138 Nazi Germany had certainly reaped the whirlwind. One quarter of Berlin’s population had been either killed or relocated, but three million people still lived in the ruins. Brickhill had tramped to within seventy-five kilometres of Berlin on the first of the horror marches earlier in the year, but had never visited the city before now.
It was late afternoon when his driver took him down the broad Kurfürstendamm, or Ku’damm as Germans nicknamed the avenue. The driver explained that before the war this boulevard had been filled with upmarket stores and cafes and lined with plane trees. Back then, the Ku’damm had been Berlin’s most fashionable street for shopping and meeting for coffee, the Champs Élysées of the German capital. Now, Brickhill reckoned, the bombed-out thoroughfare ‘resembled the ugly smile of an old beggar showing a mouthful of broken and blackened teeth’.139
He was deposited at the pressmen’s hotel, a largely intact downtown hotel frequented by visiting journalists. After Brickhill had checked in, a bowing, pink-faced German porter took charge of his bags. In the space of four minutes the porter called him ‘Sir’ almost as many times as he’d been called ‘Sir’ during four years in the Air Force. Whenever Brickhill later passed the porter, the man would produce his jerky bow, and the ‘Sir’ would pop out, ‘like a chronic hiccup’, as Brickhill described it.140
At the hotel, Brickhill was met by a British Army officer delegated to look after him, and together they adjourned to the hotel’s dining room for dinner. Brickhill, who had resumed his heavy smoking habit since returning to Britain, noticed that, as soon as he or another diner stubbed out a cigarette in an ashtray, a hawkeyed waiter would swoop, removing the ashtray and returning it shiny clean. This happened so frequently that Brickhill asked his companion why the waiters were so intent on emptying the ashtrays.
The Briton laughed gently at the question. ‘So would you, too,’ he replied. ‘For each table that a waiter serves he is paid a retainer of about 200 marks (£5) a week by a black marketeer to hand over all the cigarette butts diners leave.’
Only now did it dawn on Brickhill that the remaining shreds of tobacco were removed from the butts to go into the making of new cigarettes, on an industrial scale.
‘The black marketeer sells the tobacco at a fat profit,’ Brickhill’s host continued, ‘as cigarettes cost seven marks each.’ This was more than an entire pack of cigarettes cost in Britain.141
Following dinner, Brickhill was to see some of the German black marketeers enriched by such dealings. The British officer took him back to the Kurfürstendamm and one of the few undamaged buildings on the once-grand avenue. This was the Royal Club, a nightclub. Outside, it was austere. Inside, it was a revelation of pink and pale blue rooms resplendent in rococo gilt. After depositing their greatcoats at the cloakroom, the pair toured the premises. Power restrictions meant that lighting was provided by candles. The low yellow light from candelabra added to the atmosphere, at once both sordid and seductive.
In the main room there was a small dance floor, and a large bar being propped up by Berlin’s new elite, the black-market barons – ‘rolling in money, plump, impeccably dressed,’ Brickhill was to observe.142 One drink cost the equivalent of fifteen shillings – outrageous by British standards. But the black marketeers were happily paying. At tables, smartly dressed German women were dining on sardines, from tins, garnished with dry bread. One wall was decorated with lurid murals of naked women. Lounging in front of the murals was a shapely blonde. Going up to her, Brickhill asked if she spoke English.
‘Yes, I speak English,’ she replied in a deep, throaty voice. Telling him her name was Gertrude, she asked what he was doing in Berlin.
He told her he was writing about Germany for the foreign press.
‘I hope you will grow to like us and our country,’ she responded. ‘We are not bad people.’
Brickhill’s eyebrows raised.
‘You think I am a Nazi?’ she said defensively. ‘I am not! No! No!’ She sounded almost persuasive. ‘Few of us Germans were Nazis, but we couldn’t fight them. They held power. The cruel brutes murdered anyone who would not bow to them.’
Brickhill’s mind went back to 1944, and the guard at Stalag Luft 3 who had said to him, ‘To be Germans we must be Nazis.’
Gertrude’s conversation had moved on. ‘I am always hungry. I live for the day I can get a real meal again. Life is still very bad.’143
Brickhill half-smiled to himself. Gertrude didn’t look too starved to him. Pasty-faced, perhaps, but she was, if anything, a little plump. He could tell her about always being hungry. Food had been all he’d thought about for much of his time as a prisoner of Gertude’s countrymen. Changing the subject, Brickhill asked Gertrude for her opinion of the war trials of German leaders beginning that month at Nuremberg. To his amazement, she professed never to have heard about them. Nor could she comprehend why there would be such a thing as war trials. Disconcerted by her reaction, Brickhill went to bid her goodnight.
Reaching out and taking his arm, Gertrude lowered her voice. In Brickhill’s words, she then let him know ‘the considerable extent of her immoral amenability’. For a packet of twenty cigarettes, she would go to bed with him. Reckoning her price distinctly ambitious, he declined the proposition.
As Brickhill and his British companion took their leave of the Royal Club, staff smiled and bowed, and again Brickhill found himself being addressed as ‘Sir’. But as he waited at the cloakroom for his coat, his eyes flicked to a mirror by the door. In it he saw the same German staff who, moments before, had been bowing and scraping to him. Now, behind his back, they were scowling sourly at him.144
That night he slept in a luxurious hotel bed, in sharp contrast to the uncomfortable places he’d slept when last in Germany. And before he dropped off to sleep, Brickhill mused that, quite probably, his former prison camp guards were now enduring hard beds on the wrong side of POW camp wire. He was a little surprised by his reaction to the thought of their plights being reversed. He would write: ‘I am not so maliciously glad as I thought I might be. But I’m not sorry, either.’145
Over the coming weeks, Brickhill would rattle off a succession of articles for Associated Newspapers in Australia, using his shiny new portable typewriter. In one, written under the headline ‘How the Germans Have Changed’, he would write of his return to Germany, of the ex-soldier at Gatow who’d been so frantic to please him, of the ever-bowing, pink-faced porter, and of his encounter with prostitute Gertrude at the Royal Club.
In the days immediately following his return, he went back out into the shattered streets, scouring the British, French and American sectors of Berlin for more stories, and in search of Nazi documents that would tell him more about the fates of Roger Bushell and the other forty-nine Stalag Luft 3 escapees shot by their captors. For Brickhill was more convinced than ever that all fifty could not have been shot while trying to escape. At least some should have been wounded, surviving to be returned to captivity. And he could not imagine all fifty attempting to flee anew once they were caught. Some, he knew, had been half-hearted about their chances of escaping back to Britain. They had taken part in the escape merely to cause the Germans headaches, and would surely have settled for being sent back to Stalag Luft 3 once caught, would never have tried to make a fresh run for it. The whole story was all too fishy for Brickhill. The journalist in him, and the suspicious ex-kriegie in him, both wanted to know the truth.
He reasoned that there should be a wealth of documents in the city’s Soviet Zone, which encompassed the Reich Chancellery, the Reich Air Ministry and other important former Nazi government buildings. Unfortunately, the Soviet Zone was off limits to foreign servicemen and journalists. Learning that the British were lobbying the Soviets to permit a party of British journalists to enter the Soviet sector, Brickhill put his name down to join the party, representing Associated Newspapers, and continued the quest for news material.
On 22 December, having heard that medical authorities in Berlin feared devastating health
problems for the city that winter, he found his way to the office of a senior British Army medical officer. That officer was not very sanguine about the chances of Berlin’s population surviving the winter without massive fatalities.
‘So far, the battle is going better than we feared,’ said the medical officer solemnly. ‘The people will not starve to death this winter. Enough food has been assured to keep them alive, though not much more than that. They will be wretchedly hungry and cold, but not beyond human endurance, unless they are old and weak.’ Gazing out the window of his office to a blackened, ravaged city landscape, he added, ‘The great enemy is an influenza epidemic.’146
The medical authorities feared an outbreak similar to the Spanish influenza epidemic that had killed millions across the globe in the wake of the end of the First World War. Berlin had already suffered outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid fever, without overwhelming numbers of fatalities. Yet many among the population were living in highly unhygienic situations, crammed into cellars and bombed-out houses, with little or no running water or heat. The doctor told Brickhill that Berlin could become pivotal to a global influenza epidemic. If Spanish flu reached the city from the east, it could not be contained there, would spread fast and sweep the world.
‘Give us a good hard frost and we will get them through,’ said the medico. ‘A few might die of cold, but that is better than a million dying in an epidemic. We have our fingers crossed.’147
Feeling heartily depressed, and not a little alarmed, Brickhill left the doctor and went in search of a typical Berlin family, one likely to take the brunt of the doctor’s feared epidemic. He was interested to see what sort of Christmas they, and most Berliners, could expect. In a crumbling back-alley hovel he found a Frau Gades and her six young children living in two miserable rooms without power. The children were bright, a little grubby, and clad in understandably shabby clothes. Herr Gades had been missing since April, and was presumed dead. Since then, Frau Gades had been keeping her brood alive with whatever food she could scrounge.
The Hero Maker Page 15
