THE BROTHERS BRICKHILL survived the North Atlantic crossing and went their separate ways. As Russ went north to Scarpa Flow, Paul headed south to Bournemouth in Hampshire on England’s south coast. Paul’s destination was the RAF’s Number 3 Personnel Dispatch and Reception Centre (3PDRC), where he would await posting to a fighter training school. Quarters for newly minted airmen flooding in from around the Dominions were in Bournemouth’s many seaside hotels, and after early-morning parade and rollcall Brickhill was free to do whatever he pleased.
During this period he found his way to Torquay in Devon; 3PDRC had an annexe there. In Torquay he made a new friend, Matron F. M. Rimmer, who ran the Cripples Home and Industrial School for Girls, which had been transferred from London in 1940 to avoid German bombing. Matron Rimmer was a single motherly older woman.
In the second week of October, Brickhill received a posting to the RAF’s 53 Operational Training Unit, located at Llandow in the Vale of Glamorgan, twenty-four kilometres west of Cardiff in South Wales. There, in grim wintry temperatures and soaking Welsh rain, Brickhill joined a select band of Britons and men from the Dominions on Course Number 10, learning to master the legendary Supermarine Spitfire. But first, he had to go up in a Miles Master trainer to prove to his instructors, mostly 1940–41 Battle of Britain veterans who were often younger than Brickhill, that he could fly like an eagle.
With a few flights in the Miles under their belts, trainees progressed to the star of the show, the Spit. The aircraft they trained in were Mark I Spitfires, ‘clapped out’ superseded models that had flown during the Battle of Britain, slower and less well armed than the Mark Vb currently in operational use. But that didn’t matter to Brickhill and his colleagues. Flying a Spitfire of any type was a joy. The first thing Brickhill had to become accustomed to was the claustrophobic smallness of the Spitfire’s cockpit. Once the hood was closed, it was like sitting in a coffin. Johnnie Johnson, who would end the war as the RAF’s top-scoring fighter ace, was so uncomfortable in the cockpit the first few times he flew a Spitfire he had to leave the hood open throughout.
In the Spitfire, pilots certainly felt like captains of the clouds. They revelled in the gut-throbbing power of the V-12 Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, with the power of a thousand horses dragging them through the heavens. They savoured the serenity of flying alone in bright sunshine above oppressive grey clouds at 20,000 feet; the responsiveness of the controls; the joyous agility of the 2.5 tonne machine as they threw it about the sky.
Roald Dahl, who later, like Brickhill, became famous as an author, flew RAF Spitfires. At the time that Brickhill was training in Britain, Dahl was flying ops in North Africa. According to Dahl, a good Spitfire pilot ‘flew his aircraft not with his hands but with the tips of his fingers, and the Spitfire was not a Spitfire but a part of his own body … For the body of the Spitfire was the body of the pilot, and there was no difference between the one and the other.’57
Every moment in the cockpit of a Spit was a delight to natural flyers like Brickhill. At the same time, instructors made the rookies, many no more than nineteen years of age, aware of the responsibility being handed to them. The Spitfire cost the equivalent of several suburban houses. Woe betide the pilot who lost a Spit through negligent or irresponsible flying. But, despite his conscientiousness, Pilot Officer Brickhill still possessed an Australian tearaway streak. Soon supremely confident in a Spit, he buzzed a Bournemouth pub at treetop height to impress RAAF colleagues below. His stunt was reported, resulting in Brickhill being hauled before his superiors, charged with ‘low and dangerous flying’.58 He escaped with a reprimand.
Brickhill learned fighter tactics from his instructors. He also learned the RAF lingo. An aircraft was a ‘kite’, or a ‘crate’. ‘Gen’ was information. ‘Recce’ was reconnaissance. ‘R/T’ was radio transmitter. Ground crew were ‘erks’. An air battle was a ‘scrap’. A successful outcome was a ‘good show’, an unsuccessful outcome a ‘bad show’. Anything really good was ‘wizard’. To attack by surprise from above, out of cloud or with the sun behind, was to ‘bounce’ the opposition. A low-flying attack, or a stunt like Brickhill’s at Bournemouth, was a ‘beat up’. A flying accident was a ‘prang’. A difficult situation, especially in a dogfight, was a ‘sticky’ one. If someone was killed while flying, they’d ‘gone for a burton’, or ‘bought it’, or ‘got the chop’. A captured airman was ‘in the bag’. To exaggerate, or talk a complete load of bull, was to ‘shoot a line’, while the perpetrator of such a crime was a ‘line-shooter’. This lingo would stay in Brickhill’s vocabulary for the rest of his life.
Come January 1942, after spending his first Christmas away from home and putting in forty-two hours in Spitfires, Pilot Officer Brickhill was declared ready to fly in combat. On 16 January, he received a posting to an operational Spitfire squadron, Number 74. Known as Tiger Squadron, it had made a name for itself in the Battle of Britain. Before Brickhill left Llandow, the students and instructors of 53 OTU’s Course 10 gathered for a group photograph. For the picture, while the majority of his colleagues stood behind him, Brickhill sat on his rump on the ground in the front row. It was a typical position for Brickhill, repeated throughout his life – to the forefront, yet keeping his head down.
With a week’s leave pass, he headed for London to see the sights before joining his unit on 23 January at Long Kesh, Maze, in Northern Ireland – which, decades later, would become infamous as the location of a British prison housing IRA prisoners during ‘the Troubles’. While in London, Brickhill went for a fitting for a new uniform at Gieves Ltd in Old Bond Street. Today, as Gieves and Hawkes, the store occupies number one Savile Row.
Going back to 1775, this bespoke and military tailoring firm had made the uniforms of a young Winston Churchill, the Duke of Wellington and Captain, later Admiral, William Bligh – famous for the mutiny on the Bounty and less well known as the only British governor in Australia deposed in a military coup. The tunic worn by Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar had been made by Gieves; it was pierced by the French sharpshooter’s round that killed him. Brickhill, always a dapper dresser, couldn’t resist the temptation to have a uniform made to measure by such famed tailors – damn the cost, in cash and clothing coupons! Made from the finest wool, the tunic of Brickhill’s Gieves Ltd uniform would be lined with satin.
On joining 74 Squadron at Long Kesh, Brickhill upgraded to the Mark Vb Spitfire, in which, over the next six weeks, he clocked up another twenty training hours. Much faster than the Mark I he’d trained in, and armed with four machineguns and a formidable 20mm cannon in each wing, the Vb was a significant improvement. Yet, for all its features, the Spitfire then lagged behind the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt Bf 109F, which was faster. The Spitfire could turn more tightly, but as Johnnie Johnson was to remark, you couldn’t turn forever.59
To survive in a dogfight, a Spitfire pilot had to find other ways of outflying and outfoxing his German opponents. A keen eye and lightning reflexes were the best attributes for any fighter pilot. But, even though they were ostensibly part of a team, Brickhill reckoned that all successful fighter pilots were individualists. Now an RAF Spitfire pilot, Brickhill could put on the airs and graces that went with his qualifications – the swagger, the unofficial right to wear the top button of his uniform jacket undone and to wear a silk scarf, or, in winter, a rollneck pullover with his uniform.
When late March arrived, Brickhill had yet to fly in combat. By that time, 74 Squadron was busy packing up to go out to the Middle East to join the Desert Air Force in the fight against General Erwin Rommel, the ‘Desert Fox’, and his Afrika Korps. Before they left Britain, the men of 74 Squadron were granted a week’s leave. Brickhill had been in touch with brother Russ in Scotland, who arranged to get leave at the same time so they could meet up. Paul set off from Long Kesh on 31 March, and the pair reunited in London.
It turned out that Russ was quite envious of Paul. Bored with naval station life at icy Scapa Flow, Russ wanted to be where the action was, as he imagined Paul was shortly going to be. Russ told his little brother that after he’d requested a transfer to the army for active duty, and been rejected, he’d applied for a transfer to the RAF. Three times. And on each occasion, he’d been knocked back by the aircrew medical board, because of his thumb. Trying a fourth time, he had been accepted by the Air Force, only for the Royal Navy to counter with an offer to send him home to Australia as a liaison officer with the Australian military. But that wasn’t what he wanted at all. He’d rejected that, and was still determined to join Paul in the RAF.
‘Good luck,’ said the younger Brickhill as they firmly shook hands on parting, and Russell in turn wished him luck in North Africa.60
In the middle of 1942, 74 Squadron sailed from England for the Middle East aboard a Mediterranean convoy. Now it was the younger Brickhill’s time to be frustrated, as, once he landed in Palestine in July, the prospect of action seemed to slip further and further away. The ship carrying 74 Squadron’s cherished Spitfires had been sunk by the Germans as it crossed the Mediterranean.
With no means with which to fight, the squadron was transferred to Tehran, capital of Iran, where, after several weeks, it was given a handful of Hawker Hurricane IIb fighters, and sent to North Africa’s Western Desert. Rapidly retraining on the Hurricane, 74’s best pilots managed to get in some flying time escorting sea convoys and strafing German-occupied Crete. But there was no opportunity for Brickhill to fly. In August, Tiger Squadron finally received replacement Spitfire Vb and Vc aircraft, but by this time Brickhill had applied for a transfer. While a new home was found for him, he was sent to the RAF’s 22 Personnel Transit Centre at Almaza, just outside Cairo.
From Almaza, on 28 August, Brickhill was posted to Number 145 Squadron as a replacement. But Number 145 also had many more pilots than it had planes after a disastrous summer. Out in the desert, Rommel’s German and Italian forces were driving the Allies back, and the Desert Air Force, like the British Army, was in retreat. Brickhill had no plane to fly and nothing to do. Another transfer brought a wasted week with 127 Squadron, with no flying, before he was informed he was being sent to join 274 Squadron, to fly Hurricane fighter-bombers.
This was a comedown for a Spitfire jockey, the Hurricane being considered the inferior of the Spitfire by friend and foe alike. The RAF had twice as many Hurricanes as Spitfires, and to the Hurricane fell the majority of the tough fighter assignments of the air war. Proven the inferior of the Me 109, during the Battle of Britain the Hurricane had been assigned the task of going after German bombers, leaving their Spitfire cousins to intercept German fighters and keep them off the ‘Hurri’s’ tails. Now, the demands of the desert war meant that the Hurricane was being thrown into the ground-attack role.
This meant that when Brickhill joined 274 Squadron he had to retrain, firstly learning to fly the Hurricane, and secondly learning the techniques of ground attack with bomb, shell and bullet. He spent twenty hours in Hurricanes as a result, until, by the Second Battle of El Alamein in September 1942, he was flying his first operational sorties, swooping down on German and Italian tanks, vehicles and troops, dropping bombs and strafing with his guns. For the first time he saw the enemy, close up, and killed them.
Rommel’s army was in full retreat following Second El Alamein, and 274 Squadron pursued them across Libya and Tripolitania towards Tunisia, jumping from one captured German airstrip and rough landing ground to another. This became known within Allied ranks as the Big Push. Before 274 Squadron left Alexandria for the desert chase, Brickhill received a letter from his big brother. The bad news was that Russ’ application for a transfer to the RAF had been turned down by the possessive Royal Navy. The good news was that the navy was posting him to North Africa, to manage harbour clearance operations. And, what was more, he was being sent to Alexandria. Russ arrived before Paul departed Alexandria, but neither could get leave. Hopes of a reunion in the city were dashed.
Months of desert bombing and strafing operations passed without pause until, in the second week of December, Brickhill was transferred to 244 Wing’s Number 92 Squadron, which was equipped with Spitfires. Making a name for itself flying out of Tangmere and Biggin Hill during the Battle of Britain, Number 92 was the most celebrated, top-scoring RAF fighter squadron in North Africa, and its cocky pilots were considered the ‘bad boys’ of the Desert Air Force. That this posting was a deliberate upgrade for the Australian, and a reward for meritorious flying with 274 Squadron, was confirmed a week later with his promotion to flying officer (first lieutenant), just three days shy of his twenty-sixth birthday. He arrived at 92 Squadron bearing a bottle of Scotch whisky and a cheeky grin. A beer drinker himself, Brickhill had found that a gift of a bottle of Scotch was a sure way to win friends and influence fellow officers at new squadrons.
Among the first 92 Squadron pilots Brickhill met was Flying Officer Neville Duke, one of the squadron’s aces – an RAF ‘ace’ being a fighter pilot who’d shot down five or more enemy aircraft. The USAAF also made five ‘kills’ the qualification for ace status, but allowed its pilots to include aircraft destroyed on the ground in their tally. The Luftwaffe, meanwhile, only gave its pilots Experte or ace recognition with the downing of ten enemy aircraft. Twenty-year-old ace Neville Duke was a tall, skinny-as-a rake native of Tonbridge in Kent. His facial features put some in mind of the male members of the British Royal Family. Duke’s favourite word was the well-used RAF superlative ‘wizard’, and he was particularly keen to welcome Brickhill, and his ‘wizard’ gift of Scotch – the squadron mess had been drunk dry the previous day.
Brickhill was now back in Spits, his first love, and flying with the best of the best. The heavy-smoking, hard-drinking, quick-witted Australian swiftly made friends with his two dozen fellow 92 Squadron pilots, who included several other Aussies as well as Canadians. Most Australians quickly fitted into the British squadrons. Brickhill’s former workmate at the Sydney Sun, John Ulm, was one of them. ‘I thoroughly enjoyed being on a RAF squadron,’ said Ulm, who later flew Spitfires with 145 Squadron, which, as fate would have it, would then be commanded by Neville Duke. What Ulm liked most was the cosmopolitan mix of nationalities populating the Spitfire squadrons: fellow Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Americans, South Africans and Britons.61 In the desert, too, Desert Air Force officers and non-commissioned ranks ate in the same mess, a breaking down of British class structure which suited Brickhill and fellow egalitarian Australians.
By this time, back in Australia, Brickhill’s father, George, was continuing to scratch a living as Sydney correspondent of the Newcastle Sun, and Paul knew that his parents were still struggling financially. He also knew that his father was too proud to take handouts directly. So Brickhill wrote home and told his parents that he was arranging for the difference between his old pilot officer’s pay and his new salary as a flying officer to be sent to his mother each payday.
Brickhill spent his second lonely Christmas away from home, this time at a bleak tented base in the desert. Beer, spirits, cigarettes and rations were in short supply. Water for washing clothes was almost non-existent. When he’d first arrived in the desert, Brickhill had been repelled by the sight and smell of ‘dirty Arabs’. Now, with his clothes filthy and his aroma rich, he felt he was ‘no longer entitled to haughty scorn’ of the locals. No one in the squadron minded how he looked or smelled. They were all in the same dirty boat, and took their situation in good spirits. Brickhill would write home, ‘The desert isn’t so bad, and we have a fair bit of fun in one way and another.’62
In early January, 92 Squadron relocated to a landing ground near Hamrat in Tripolitania. The squadron was engaged in almost daily battles with the German and Italian air forces, several of whose pilots were well-known aces. The new year’s battles started out even on 8 January with 92 Squadron bagging two Me 109s but with two of their Spitfires being shot down, one piloted by an Australian, Geoffrey Rose. The next day the score was one loss for each side, and once again the squadron’s commanding officer was writing a condolence letter to a bereaved family. On 10 January, high-flying pilots from the squadron excitedly reported they were able to see enemy-occupied Tripoli, the Libyan capital, in the distance.
The next day, a Monday, the squadron was on standby from the moment the sun rose. After a morning sweep of the desert and a quick bite of lunch back at base, Brickhill took off as wingman to Neville Duke to intercept two enemy aircraft reported to be active in Libya’s Tamet area. As wingman, it was Brickhill’s job to protect his leader. Past wingmen had failed to adequately protect Duke, who’d been shot down twice during his short career, parachuting to safety each time. While the leader did the attacking, the wingman was supposed to stick to his number one like glue, all the time keeping a lookout for the enemy. Sometimes the wingman would get in a burst at the foe, but often came home without firing his guns.
Near Tamet, Brickhill and Duke spotted two Me 109s way below them. Duke immediately dived to the attack, and Brickhill followed him down. But Duke’s dive was too steep, and he nearly passed out from lack of oxygen. By the time Duke had cleared his head and levelled out, with Brickhill dutifully close behind, the pair of Messerschmitts had disappeared. After the evening meal, Duke went up again, with another pilot as his wingman this time. Encountering five Italian Macchi 202s coming in from the sea, Duke shot down two of them. It happened to be Duke’s twenty-first birthday that day. As his squadron comrades remarked as glasses were raised in the mess that night, it was a hell of a way to celebrate a twenty-first.
Duke’s latest two ‘kills’ brought his aerial victories to twelve. Flying Officer Brickhill, meanwhile, had yet to notch up a single kill. In all the months he’d been flying, Brickhill had not shot down a single enemy plane. The best he could manage was damage to a single Me 109, which had succeeded in escaping. Another Australian fighter pilot flying in North Africa, Flight Lieutenant Jack Donald of the RAAF’s Number 3 Squadron, was to observe that many pilots during the war were there merely to make up the numbers while the few real killers among them did the dirty work. Donald, who would be shot down and taken prisoner, ranked himself among those making up the numbers.63 Brickhill seems to have been in the same category, acknowledging that, as good a pilot as he had become, he was not the RAF’s best shot.
Blinding sandstorms frequently grounded 92 Squadron over the next ten days, but on 21 January the unit moved to Wadi Surri, from where, in a sweep over Tripoli, it shot down three Stuka Ju-87 dive-bombers. Looking down on the Libyan capital during this mission, Brickhill was hoping to soon make close acquaintance with the city. Later that day, Neville Duke was appointed leader of A flight, one of 92 Squadron’s two flights of six aircraft.
After dinner, to celebrate his appointment, Duke adjourned to the trailer of 242 Wing’s commanding officer, Wing Commander William Darwen. They were joined by 92’s CO, Squadron Leader John Morgan, and three Australians with the squadron, Brickhill among them. According to Duke, they all proceeded to get ‘legless’.64 The British 8th Army fought its way into Tripoli on 23 January, and two days later Number 92’s Squadron Leader Morgan was the first Allied pilot to land in the city.
‘Liberated’ Tripoli beer and Italian Chianti found their way into the dry 92 Squadron mess, to the delight of Flight Lieutenant Duke and Flying Officer Brickhill, who hadn’t seen liquor in the weeks since the party to celebrate Duke’s promotion. Brickhill got stuck into the Chianti. He would write home that it was good while it lasted, ‘But, oh, the ginormous hangover!!!’65 The few gallons of Chianti were swiftly liquidated by thirsty pilots, but in their opinion the staple Italian wine was no match for English beer or Scotch whisky.
The weather closed in as January ebbed away. With no flying possible, Brickhill and several other pilots from Number 92 drove into Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, 200 kilometres from Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast. Under Italian government since 1911, Misrata had recently been wrung from Axis control. For Brickhill, this proved an entertaining day. Some Italian colonists still living in the town treated the RAF pilots nervously, while others ingratiated themselves. Native residents happily bartered. ‘Arabs will sell their souls for tea,’ Brickhill observed. In exchange for several handfuls of tea, the pilots came away from Misrata with 160 eggs and a large sack of greens, the first vegetables Brickhill had seen in three months.66
On 28 January, with rain pelting his tent, and suffering from a cold, Brickhill had time to catch up with mail that had remained unanswered over the last few hectic and sometimes uncertain weeks. One of his letters home, on Australian Comforts Fund notepaper, was in answer to an unexpected missive from one-time love interest Del Fox. Feeling lonely and a bit sorry for himself, he was uncharacteristically affectionate, calling Del ‘my pet’ and signing off this letter, ‘Yours, with a big kiss.’
His previous correspondence to Del had ended much more formally. It seems that their relationship had cooled several years before because of Del’s dislike of Brickhill’s penchant for getting drunk when they went out. He wrote now that he was confident that Del would be ‘pitilessly amused to hear that such essentials as beer and spirits’ had become matters ‘of fond memory only’.
He told Del that his war was sometimes quite good fun, but could also be horribly frightening. He confessed that he had only recently escaped being shot down. ‘I should have been clobbered cold one day through my own utter dimwittedness, but the Jerry was as rotten a shot as I am, so I’m still here – and hoping to stay.’ As he wrote, he became nostalgic. He missed England, he told Del, and would give anything to go back there, even though the country was cold and wet. ‘The sheer beauty of the countryside grabs you by the throat and shakes your heart up into your mouth.’
And he’d fallen in love with English pubs, which he’d found warm, friendly and comforting. He preferred them to the ‘cheap, repetitive personality of the chrome, tile and new bricks’ of Australian pubs. Yet, he was homesick for Australia and keen to help defend his homeland from the Japanese threat. ‘I wish to Hell I was back there, but blokes like us here can’t get home for love nor money. I guess it’s the same war anyway.’67
February was a hellish month for flying. Storms lashed and shredded the squadron’s tents, soaking everyone and everything inside. The atrocious weather kept the air forces of both sides on the ground, and Brickhill had his CO authorise seven days’ special leave so he could go back to Alexandria to catch up with his brother. On the last day of February he hitched a ride with a Beaufighter flying to Cairo, and from there he sent a telegram to Russ in Alexandria, urging him to come to Cairo to meet up.
The following day, Brickhill received a message from Russ’ secretary – an hour before Paul’s telegram arrived, Russ had left Alexandria for Cairo, bound for Tripoli. Brickhill tried to track his brother down in Cairo, but had no luck. Despondently, he decided he would have to return to his squadron in Tripolitania. Picking up a telephone, he called RAF Transport Command to book a place on an aircraft heading in that direction.
‘Didn’t we fix your passage a few minutes ago?’ said an RAF clerk on the other end of the line.
‘No, you couldn’t have,’ Brickhill responded.
‘Did you say your name was Brickhill?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ He spelled it out for the clerk.
‘Well, I booked a Brickhill a few minutes ago. It’s an unusual name, and I was wondering …’
‘Hell’s bells! That’s my brother. Well, I’m damned! Have you got his address? Well I’m damned!’
Suggesting he not shout quite so loudly down the line, the clerk asked him to wait, and after a pause came back with the information that Lieutenant Russell Brickhill was staying at Cairo’s Victoria Hotel. Thanking the clerk, Brickhill rushed off to locate his brother. Crossing the lobby of the Victoria Hotel a little later, he walked right into an astonished Russ, who was coming out of the dining room. Once again, fate had brought them together in the most unlikely of ways. They spent the rest of the evening together in the bar.68
Both had heard from home that their nineteen-year-old brother Clive had followed Lloyd and Paul into the RAAF, enlisting the previous December. The Air Force would dash Clive’s hopes of emulating Paul and Lloyd as a pilot. Because he’d worked as an optical instrument maker, he became an Air Force mechanic. Clive’s fine eye for detail would later see him become a meteorological assistant. He would end the war in Darwin, a corporal.
When Russ left for Tripoli early the next morning, Brickhill stayed on in Cairo an extra day waiting for a flight, and then he too flew to Tripoli, where the brothers again got together. On 6 March, Brickhill rejoined his squadron. He arrived to mixed news. The previous day, four of 92 Squadron’s Spitfires had mixed it with seven Messerschmitts, and had come off the worst, with two Spitfires being downed by Luftwaffe ace Hauptmann (Captain) Heinz Bar, for no loss to the Germans. These kills had brought Bar’s total to a daunting 166. Bar would survive the war, racking up 220 kills. Yet, he was not the Luftwaffe’s top-scoring ace. That title would go to Erich Hartmann, who would amass a staggering 352 aerial victories, making him by far the top air ace on either side. A number of other Luftwaffe pilots would notch up more than 100 kills. This put the score of top British ace Johnnie Johnson, of thirty-four kills, well in the shade.
One of the two 92 Squadron pilots brought down by Bar in this 5 March scrap was Pilot Officer Bernard ‘Happy’ McMahon. A Canadian from Ottawa, McMahon had laughed his way through life and had been highly popular with his comrades. The good news was that in Brickhill’s absence Neville Duke had added to his total, which now stood at seventeen kills. Young Duke, whose nickname was ‘Hawkeye’ because he was frequently the first to spot the enemy, also had a growing tally of decorations. Before long, the total number of aircraft downed by the squadron as a whole since the war began reached 250.
In the mess two days after his return from leave, Brickhill heard concerned pilots tell of encountering the Luftwaffe’s Focke-Wulf 190 fighter for the first time. They’d been dismayed when the Fw 190s drew away from them with ease at 14,000 feet, with the Focke-Wulf’s BMW engines outperforming the Spitfires’ Rolls-Royce power plants. On Saturday the 13th, the squadron relocated to a landing ground at Bou Grara – the pilots called it simply Grara. This was a desolate landing strip on a salt flat by the sea, and far from ideal; aircraft sank into the salt in places. But the breeze off the Mediterranean was cooling and healthy.
Late that same day it was announced that Number 92 would soon be re-equipped with the new and improved Mark IX Spitfire. Pilots would be progressively sent to Algiers in coming weeks to collect them. There were cheers all round, for the Mark IX was reputedly 110 kilometres an hour faster than the Vb at 30,000 feet, and would put the pilots of Number 92 on a more equal footing with the formidable Fw 190.
On 16 March, Brickhill watched as a Pathé Gazette cameraman shot footage of ace Neville Duke and his Spit for a newsreel to be shown in cinemas across Britain and the Empire, glorifying his exploits. In the mess that night, Brickhill and others ribbed Duke and asked him what all the fuss had been about.
An embarrassed Duke tried to shrug it off, claiming he’d talked a load of bull for the Pathé man’s benefit. ‘I put on the usual line shoot for a movie type who would insist on taking shots.’69
That same evening, Brickhill learned that he was rostered to fly the next day. After weeks out of the saddle, he would have a chance to get back into the air and grab a little of the glory.
On the afternoon of 17 March, Mick Bruckshaw landed back at Bou Grara without his wingman. Lodging a mission report, he told of seeing Brickhill shot down. It had not been a good day for 92 Squadron. The enemy fighter-bombers had got through, and while Hunk Humphries and another 92 Squadron pilot damaged one Me 109 in the scrap over the Mareth Line, it escaped and no enemy aircraft had been shot down. The score-line for the day’s contest was Axis 1, Number 92 Squadron 0.
At that point, neither Bruckshaw nor anyone else in the squadron had any idea whether Brickhill was alive or dead. The next day, Number 92 received a message from Eighth Army headquarters: ‘Friend says pilot safe, but not on our side.’70 The ‘friend’ was a Long Range Desert Group patrol lying, camouflaged, out in the desert near the Italian front line. Its men had seen Brickhill come down and taken prisoner by the Italians. Another Spitfire pilot with 242 Wing was downed that afternoon. It was not until that other pilot was accounted for that 92 Squadron knew that Brickhill was the one in enemy hands.
In a 21 March report to his superiors, 92 Squadron’s latest commanding officer, Squadron Leader William Harper, passed on Bruckshaw’s account of Brickhill’s downing, adding that all efforts over the past four days to trace the whereabouts of the Australian had failed, and he was accordingly being listed as ‘missing’.
The sun hadn’t long risen when, lying in an army cot in an Italian hospital in Tunis, Brickhill was astonished when one of his fellow prisoners, a Guards officer in the British Army, and a lord of the realm, what’s more, demanded marmalade for breakfast. His lordship and his demand caused considerable consternation among their excitable Italian hosts.71
Over the days immediately following his capture, Brickhill, weak from his wounds and drained emotionally after being shot down, had been shunted from one Italian field hospital to another. First it was Sfax. Then Sousse, 140 kilometres south of Tunis. Finally, he’d been sent around the Gulf of Hammamet to Tunis. The British Eighth Army’s long-expected assault on the Mareth Line began two days after Brickhill’s capture. The battle for Tunisia would rage until late May, with Tunis falling on 5 May, the day the Luftwaffe would pull its last aircraft out of North Africa. Rommel, the Afrika Korps’ commander, now promoted to field marshal by Hitler, had meanwhile been recalled to Germany for ‘consultations’ with his Fuehrer, thus preventing the humiliation of his capture. By May’s end, more than 275,000 German and Italian prisoners would be taken by the Allies. But Brickhill would be long gone by that time.
After six days in captivity, Brickhill, in boots provided by the Italians, was loaded with other prisoners into an aircraft on 23 March, to be transported to Italy. The usual Italian practice was to put Allied POWs aboard large three-engine Cant Z506B floatplanes for the transfer across the Mediterranean. Painted entirely white, the Cants had large red crosses emblazoned on wings and fuselage to identify them as ‘hospital’ aircraft. Brickhill’s plane flew him to Naples. There, he was bundled aboard a train. Destination: Germany, and a prisoner-of-war camp.