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 devastated.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.
When Brickhill asked what sort of Christmas the Gades children could expect, their mother told him that she would be digging into her supply of potatoes to make the children potato and barley soup, plus bread spread with the luxury of a little ersatz honey or jam. Normally the family’s daily ration was a few potatoes, some dry bread with a hint of margarine, and for ten days a month, a little meat. Vegetables were unheard of. On being asked by Brickhill if the children would be receiving Christmas gifts, Frau Gades showed him two pathetic rag dolls she’d made for her daughters, three-year-old Brigide and seven-year-old Lise. Her four sons would not be receiving presents. The boys were stoically resigned to the fact.
When Brickhill asked the children whether they believed in Father Christmas, all shook their heads. Frau Gades said that Christmas Day would, for her family, be much like any other winter’s day in 1945. After their meal, the children would play in their rubble-strewn street until around 4.30, when the sun went down, and then clamber into their beds to keep warm. With luck, the authorities might give the family a hoped-for gift of candles. Otherwise, Christmas night would be long and dark for Frau Gades and her children.148
Returning to his warm hotel, and after a good dinner, Brickhill sat down at his typewriter to write about the Gades family, feeling a little less embittered towards all Germans than he had a few days before.
Christmas Day, 1945. A Tuesday. Before Brickhill enjoyed a relatively lavish Christmas dinner at his hotel, he had a driver take him around the city to see how Berliners were celebrating their first Christmas after twelve years of Nazi rule. Few people ventured into the streets. Those who did seemed to Brickhill to be in a daze. A number walked lethargically into the path of his car, jumping back as if in slow motion when the driver tooted them.
As he was being driven through the poorer districts, Brickhill opened his window. Eerily, he didn’t hear a thing. No traffic noise, no singing, no laughing children. Millions of Berliners were cloistered indoors, huddled, shivering in the winter cold and downing their meagre Christmas fare. In wealthier suburbs, he did hear the occasional sounds of revelry. Black-market food and booze had obviously found their way here. At one point he got out to walk, hoping to find an English speaker among these Berliners who could afford contraband luxuries. A woman walking along the broken pavement told him her name was Dolly Angels, and that she was a doctor of philosophy. He asked her if she was fearful of the threat of a major epidemic striking the city.
‘I think such fears are exaggerated,’ said Dr Dolly, nonplussed.
He asked her what she thought of the Nazis.
‘They were not too bad,’ she said, betraying lingering National Socialist sympathies.
What were her thoughts on the Nuremburg trials?
‘Grossly exaggerated,’ she said dismissively. At least she was aware of the trials, unlike Gertrude the nightclub girl and other Berliners Brickhill had spoken to. But the doctor of philosophy seemed to have ceased to care about anything other than the exacting business of maintaining life from one day to the next.149
Dr Dolly went on her way, and Brickhill returned to the car, resuming his trawl of the city. In the Bülowstrasse, he saw an old man slip and fall to the frosty pavement. Too weak to regain his feet, the old man lay there, working his arms and legs uselessly, reminding Brickhill of an overturned beetle. Other pedestrians walked on by as if he didn’t exist. Instructing his driver to stop, Brickhill jumped out and went to the old man’s aid. Helping the German to his feet, he steadied him as he wiped blood from his nose.
What had the old boy done during the war? Been an air-raid warden, perhaps? He was too old to have served in the military. In all probability he had fought in the First World War. Pulling a chocolate bar from his greatcoat pocket, Brickhill broke off a large chunk. The old man accepted the chocolate, stuffing it all into his mouth at once. Brickhill looked at passers-by. They were glassy-eyed, indifferent. Feasting on the Australian’s chocolate, the old man stumbled away.150
Continuing to cable articles to Sydney, Brickhill lingered in Berlin, hopeful of receiving permission to enter the Soviet Zone. He knew that people enjoyed reading about other people, and was always looking for what the American press called ‘human interest’ stories. Once 1946 rolled around, in the first week of January he stumbled on a rich source of stories, an office in Military Government House in Berlin’s British Zone with an intriguing role and a very interesting female operative. To this office came applications from Berliners claiming British citizenship and seeking to escape war-ravaged Germany. With Australians then still officially British citizens, Brickhill was intent on documenting the stories of applicants hoping to settle in Australia.
Assessing these applications was the British Army’s Paddy Rose, a Suffolk girl of mixed Anglo-Irish parentage. ‘She is one of the most ruthlessly efficient, likeable characters I’ve ever met,’ Brickhill would write. Pert, pragmatic Paddy showed a typical application to Brickhill, from seventy-three-year-old Rudolph Laver. After migrating to Australia as a young man, Laver had returned to Germany in 1899. During both world wars he’d produced electrical equipment for Germany. In his application he wrote that ‘my constitution is weak’, and that his wife suffered from ‘child failure’ and ‘overdosisses of morphium’ (sic). Paddy had turned down his application.151
At least Herr Laver could speak English, if imperfectly. Many applicants could no longer speak or write English, and frequently they were consigned to the ‘Rejected’ pile, along with those whose names appeared on what was called the ‘Renegades list’ – British citizens living in Germany or occupied Europe known to have supported the Nazis.
‘I get the same stories every day,’ Paddy told Brickhill, ‘and they’re nearly all lies. I’m getting so I can smell this pure Aryan blood a mile away. They all claim to be of such loyal British stock, but most of them have been sitting on the fence during the war and are sorry that the Nazis lost. Had the Germans won they’d have been rabid Germans. They thought they had it all lined up so they couldn’t lose.’152
But Paddy had been briefly shaken a few days earlier when a woman claiming to be a duchess appeared in her office. Aged around fifty, she had given her name as Lilli von Kent. She’d demanded special and immediate treatment, failing which her husband the duke would not be pleased. But she astonished Paddy by proceeding to list the names of thirty illegitimate children she’d borne all over Europe. Deciding that Lilli was more prostitute than aristocrat, Paddy sent her for immediate attention – from a doctor.
Those applicants who seemed to have a genuine right to repatriation to Australia were invited in for personal interviews with Paddy. Among them was Mrs A. Pianos, who’d been born in Sydney to Australian parents and in the 1930s married an Englishman. In September 1939, when war was declared, she was visiting Germany, and found herself trapped there. Paddy was likely to give her favourable consideration. A number of other Australian-born women who’d married German men and survived the war in Germany would also receive the nod.
Brickhill used his charm to wheedle the address from Paddy of a woman who’d passed muster and received approval to return to Australia. Vera Hoffman had been born in Tanunda, South Australia to a German immigrant family involved in grape growing. She had married and had a son, Dirk, but lost her first husband when Dirk was very young. In 1930 she’d married a German, Herr Boeckmann, and Vera and Dirk had moved with him to Germany. Herr Boeckmann had survived the war and was still living with his wife and stepson in Berlin. While mother and son would soon be leaving for Australia, Vera’s husband hadn’t received permission to migrate, and would be remaining in Berlin. When Brickhill tracked down Vera, he found a woman who was painfully thin and weak as a result of the food shortage. She was only now recovering from illness with the help of fortnightly Red Cross food parcels from England.
‘Recently, after a couple of weeks in bed,’ Vera told Brickhill, ‘I fainted at suddenly seeing in my mirror how thin I had become.’ She assured Brickhill that she’d had nothing to do with Nazis. ‘Throughout the war I dropped all friends showing Nazi tendencies and lived very quietly.’ Since the German capitulation eight months before, Vera had been teaching English to eager Germans, and had more prospective students than she could handle. She had also written an English textbook for German readers, which would soon be published in Berlin.153
Brickhill was able to meet Vera’s son, seventeen-year-old Dirk, an intelligent blond-haired youth who spoke good English and was looking forward to going to Australia.
‘For democratic freedom?’ Brickhill asked.
‘Not so much,’ Dirk confessed. ‘For eating grapes, which I have tasted only once.’154
Vera told Brickhill that she had kept up her morale during the war with a chain letter that had circulated since 1942 around Australian-born women living in Hamburg, Coblenz, Danzig, Vienna, Paris and Berlin. Her correspondents were Leonie Miller, Muriel Mudge, noted Kalgoorlie-born contralto Lorna Sydney, who had married an Austrian baron, and, most surprising of all, Margaret Murdoch, niece of Sir Keith Murdoch and cousin of Rupert Murdoch. The Australian women had called this chain letter hopping around Nazi Europe their ‘kangaroo’.
Wishing Vera and Dirk every success with their new life in Australia, Brickhill retired to his hotel to write up several articles. He had completed one about Paddy Rose and her work when he received a message to say that a party of British journalists had been approved by the Russian military to shortly enter their sector, and he had been included. Generously handing his notes about Vera and Dirk to fellow Australian journalist Keith Bean, who would file an article about the pair under his own name but with an acknowledgement to Brickhill as his source, Brickhill prepared to be in that first British press party to enter the Soviet Zone. At last he might have the chance to view Nazi documents which could reveal the true fate of the Fifty.
Beyond the bullet-scarred pillars of the Brandenburg Gate, the Soviet Zone in eastern Berlin was just as bleak and war-torn as the sectors controlled by other Allied powers. The first thing that Brickhill noticed as he and other journalists in the press party were taken into the Soviet Zone was that the Russian military drove much more quickly than the British, French or Americans did in their sectors. Heaven help any Berliner who walked into the path of a Russian vehicle. The driver would happily run him or her down, or so it seemed.
One of the first places the journalists were taken to in the Soviet Zone was the Jewish Relief Committee’s transit camp, which was occupied by 1700 Jewish refugees from Poland. Jews had been arriving in the British Zone with stories of intimidation by Polish partisans, who’d allegedly given Jews two options: pay up and leave the country within twenty-four hours, or be shot on the spot. Speaking with Jewish refugees, Brickhill found no one who could corroborate that rumour. While the British journalists were in the Russian sector, the Jewish camp emptied overnight. It turned out that the Russian military had suddenly warned Jewish refugees that within two days they would be taken to camps close to the Polish border. Some fleeing Jews turned up in the British and French sectors. Others evaded Russian troops to reach the Americans in southern Germany.155
Meanwhile, Brickhill’s quest for information about the fates of the Fifty hit a brick wall. The Russians were keeping a firm grip on captured German records and weren’t sharing them with anyone.
Across the room from Brickhill sat Hermann Goering. What an odd feeling, seeing the infamous Reich Marshal in the flesh. It was early February, and Brickhill was in Nuremberg, Bavaria, to cover the war trials being held at the Palace of Justice by the International Military Tribunal. Here, the Australian would apply his forensic eye for detail, mood and character to the men in the dock, and their judges.
In January, Brickhill’s six-month leave without pay had ended, and he’d reported back to 11PDRC. Brickhill was enjoying his press work, and was coming to terms with the demons that had gripped him when first he’d been released from captivity. He was in no hurry to return to Australia. With his leave without pay extended as ‘emergency leave’ until his discharge from the RAAF in April, he preferred to remain in England for the publication of Escape to Danger, and to cover the big stories of the day. And the Nuremburg trials were the world’s biggest news story at that time.
Nuremberg had been deliberately chosen by the victorious Allies for the trials of surviving National Socialist leaders because the city had been the spiritual home of the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s, the place where they’d held their massive party rallies. Now, Nazi political and military leaders were in the large, two-level dock, being called to account for their crimes, and Brickhill was in the press gallery alongside the world’s leading newspaper correspondents, to observe and report.
Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels had all suicided. But Goering, Hitler’s former number two, was alive and well and taking pride of place among the defendants in the crowded courtroom. For the first time, Brickhill laid eyes on the man whose air force he’d fought, whose Luftwaffe men had held him captive, and who’d personally played a leading role in the fates of the seventy-three Stalag Luft 3 escapees in 1944. The once-ostentatious Goering still wore the pearl grey Reich Marshal’s uniform he’d designed for himself. The brass buttons remained, but not the once-numerous decorations or eagle and swastika emblem. Brickhill noted a red scarf around Goering’s neck. And, in the winter chill that gripped the vast barn of a courtroom, he had an American army blanket wrapped around his ‘Falstaffian’ middle.
‘Goering still has an aura of cruel strength as he continually gestures and poses,’ Brickhill wrote.156 Yet the Reich Marshal didn’t come across as a politician, or a military leader. There was something ‘rascally’ about Goering. He put Brickhill in mind of a pirate.157 Goering had been a key figure in the rise of the Nazi Party, creating the SS, overseeing the murder of political opponents, even administering the German economy at one point. The fact that an increasingly insane Hitler had ordered Goering’s arrest by the SS in the dying days of the war in no way mitigated the war-crimes charges the Reich Marshal faced.
Another man in the dock, former German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, had also fallen out of favour with Hitler towards the end of the war, but that would not save him from Allied retribution either. ‘The bags under Von Ribbentrop’s eyes seem to be getting heavier,’ Brickhill observed. ‘He is a very worried and frightened man as he follows the trial closely and constantly scribbles notes to his lawyer.’158
For the previous few days, Brickhill had been closely watching two of the accused in particular. Red-faced Hjalmar Schacht, one-time finance minister under Hitler, a man Brickhill described as possessing a face like ‘an over-ripe tomato with an expression of wounded dignity’. And handsome forty-year-old Albert Speer, the former Nazi armaments minister, who, in Brickhill’s opinion, was looking heavy and gloomy. Schacht and Speer had been in a huddle for two days, and none of the other defendants had spoken a word to them in that time.
‘They’re getting ready to spill the beans,’ another journalist assured Brickhill. The Australian’s next report for readers Down Under would be headlined: ‘Nazi Leaders Plotting To Rat on Mates.’
Once the trial wrapped up for the day and Brickhill was leaving the massive court building, he noticed that machineguns had been installed along hundreds of metres of rambling corridors. Out front, a Sherman tank stood by the wrought-iron gates. For the past few days, a rumour had been circulating that Nazi sympathisers were planning to raid the Palace of Justice and free Goering and his co-defendants. The American military, who had charge of the security of the building and the trials, weren’t taking any chances.
Yet in the street, something resembling normal city life was playing out, with vehicles and pedestrians passing without anyone giving a second glance to the court building. ‘From the outside,’ Brickhill would comment, ‘you wouldn’t think that a trial – the greatest in the world – was in progress, has been for three months. Even inside the court the proceedings go their quiet and almost prosaic way.’ 159
The rumoured bid to rescue the Nazi leaders failed to eventuate. Apart from Goering, none of the men in the dock was widely popular with Germans, and most friends of the military men on trial were now either dead or themselves under indictment.
In March, Brickhill was on assignment in Austria and Hungary for Associated Newspapers. From Budapest, he reported on the political and economic situation in former Nazi ally Hungary. Tongue-in-cheek, he told readers back home, ‘Budapest shows you can survive on £40,000 a week,’ as he described out-of-control inflation and widespread starvation in a country where ‘Millionaires go hungry’.160
He also saw the political writing on the wall. ‘They whisper in Central and Eastern Europe that Stalin made two mistakes – he showed the Red Army to Europe, and Europe to the Red Army.’ Despite obvious dislike of communism among the majority of Hungarians he encountered, Brickhill perceived that the Red minority held sway, and predicted, presciently, that under the threat of the Red Army the entire Eastern Bloc would before long become governed by the communists.161
Returning to England for his official discharge from the RAAF on 8 April, Brickhill prepared for a new posting – US correspondent for Associated Newspapers, based in New York City. His parents were keen for him to return home, but the temptation of a new adventure was too great. On 7 May, he boarded the Ile de France at Southampton to sail to New York via Halifax, Nova Scotia, revisiting that Canadian port city for the first time since his departure from there in 1941.
Manhattan proved a revelation, but putting together general news stories and features about American life became humdrum. While Brickhill professed to be totally disinterested in politics, the power that came with money proved a recurring theme in his articles, and one of his American features was about corrupt American politicians. Influenced by writers around him, Brickhill displayed the breezy, unfettered and insightful writing style that would later make his books so readable. About Huey Long, Governor of Louisiana in the 1930s, he wrote: ‘Huey started as a poor farmer’s boy, began to peddle books, gulped down a law course in seven months, and climbed on the political bandwagon. Before you could say “Chiseller”, he was a bread and circuses demagogue, sitting in the Governor’s chair and proclaiming, “I am the Constitution in Louisiana.”’162
Brickhill quickly made several female friends in Associated Newspapers’ New York office, including Pat Dunne, a married woman. Very early on, too, he found himself a New York literary agent to hawk Escape to Danger to American publishers. Mike Watkins at the Ann Watkins Agency on Park Avenue became his agent. The Watkins agency handled several British authors, among them Roald Dahl. Like Brickhill, Dahl had been shot down and wounded in North Africa, but unlike Brickhill he hadn’t fallen into enemy hands. From 1942, Dahl had been based in Washington DC as assistant British air attaché and an intelligence officer, ending the war a wing commander. Watkins would fail to interest American publishers in Escape to Danger, but he would become a valuable future ally.
Late in the year, Brickhill received a despairing letter from his parents in Sydney. Their rented house at 41 George Street at Greenwich Point was being sold from under them. George, who was still working as Sydney correspondent for the Newcastle Sun, was approaching retirement age, and he and Dot couldn’t bear the thought of upping and moving yet again, leaving the little house by the water they loved. Paul made a momentous decision. From New York, he put in a bid for the George Street house. That bid was accepted. Pooling his advance for Escape to Danger and his saved RAAF back pay, Brickhill put down a deposit, and via the Manhattan branch of an Australian bank, arranged a mortgage.
By early 1947, the sale was settled, and Paul Brickhill was the proud owner of 41 George Street. He would always be responsible for the mortgage payments, ensuring there was never again financial pressure on George and Dot. To make his parents’ occupancy official, he charged them an annual peppercorn rent of a pound or two, and he vowed that never again would they have to worry about losing the roof over their heads. It was a promise he would not break.
By this time, too, Escape to Danger had been published in England in hardback. Receiving encouraging if restrained reviews, even making it into the London Review of Books, it sold out the modest first print run. To cash in on Christmas book sales, Faber & Faber released a new edition on 1 December. But the book wasn’t a runaway bestseller by any means. Brickhill would have to keep his day job. The lack of spectacular success as an author, the paucity of friends in the US and the drudgery of his reporting work all combined to sap his spirits. In the second half of 1947, Brickhill succumbed to homesickness. He hadn’t seen his parents in more than six years, and had yet to see the house he’d bought for them. After he asked Associated Newspapers for a transfer back to Australia, he was offered a subeditor’s position with his old paper, the Sydney Sun.
Come December, Brickhill had arrived back in Australia for a tearful reunion with parents and siblings, and his first Christmas at home since 1940. All his brothers had survived the war. Russell had married, returned to the University of Sydney to become officer of works, a post he would hold for decades, and had bought a house in Greenwich Point not far from their parents. Geoff had also married. Lloyd was flying for Australian National Airways. Clive had settled in Toowoomba, Queensland and was working as a laboratory assistant. Brickhill moved in with his parents in his Greenwich Point house, and in the first week of January 1948 began work once more at the Elizabeth Street offices of the Sun. One of the first people he passed in the corridor was John Ulm, who was back at the paper as a reporter. The pair’s paths had come full circle. Their tale of coincidence had one more chapter to play out – Ulm would end up living at Greenwich Point.
Prowling Sydney’s bookshops in his spare time, Brickhill was soon broken-hearted. Nowhere could he find a copy of Escape to Danger on sale. When he asked Faber & Faber’s local agents the reason, they responded that paper shortages meant that very few copies had been shipped to Australia. Determined that his work, and the story of the mass escape from Stalag Luft 3, would not go unrecognised, Brickhill contacted former Sun journalist and Department of Information executive Lionel ‘Wiggy’ Wigmore. He’d heard that Wigmore would be putting together a history of Australia’s involvement in World War Two, and wanted to bring to his attention the important information his book contained. Wigmore put him in touch with his editor, and Escape to Danger would be duly added to the masses of source material for that work.
Brickhill was now back in the Australian sunshine, and back with his family. But he found the work as a subeditor stultifying. It was ‘a bloody misery’ of a job, he would later say.163 He’d known, when he’d enlisted in the RAAF seven years before, that slogging away as a press hack was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his days. And, from across the world, England, and one particular Englishman, began tugging at him. During 1948, David Higham wrote to tell Brickhill that he’d been contacted by John Pudney.
Pudney, an erudite man who’d gone to school with W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, was an editor, short-story writer, novelist and noted poet – his wartime ode to British airmen, ‘For Johnny’, became celebrated. At this time Pudney was an editor with London’s News Review, but he’d worked for the BBC as a writer-producer before the war and was trying to get into the fledgling television business as a producer. As Pudney told Higham, he was a fan of Brickhill and Norton’s Escape to Danger, and was keen to turn its content into a series for BBC TV.
Conrad Norton was back in South Africa, where, this same year, he had a new nonfiction book published, Opportunity in South Africa. From the southern corners of the globe, both he and Brickhill enthusiastically told Higham to give Pudney permission to pursue the televising of their book, in their minds picturing their work on the revolutionary small screen. Pudney’s concept was, however, an ambitious idea for the time. BBC TV was then only broadcasting to the London metropolitan area, and the budget for the sort of program Pudney had in mind was well in excess of what the ‘Beeb’ could afford. Yet unbeknownst to Brickhill, the Pudney association would before long change his life.
In February 1949, Brickhill received an approach from John Nerney, head of the Air Historical Branch at Britain’s Air Ministry. Nerney wondered whether Brickhill would be interested in writing the history of the RAF’s 617 Squadron, which gained wartime fame for Operation Chastise, a raid against the Ruhr Valley dams, after which the unit had garnered the swashbuckling title of ‘the Dam Busters’.
Nerney had initially approached Leonard Cheshire VC, commanding officer of 617 Squadron following the dams raid, to write the squadron’s history. But Cheshire had turned him down, citing other work commitments and health issues – he was running a hospice for the dying which he’d set up in an old Hampshire house left him by an aunt. In declining the offer, Cheshire had recommended former 617 Squadron intelligence officer McGowan Cradon in his place. Cradon’s commitment to such a task was questioned by the RAF; he’d been considered too interested in buzzing about in Lancasters during the war and unfocused on his desk role.
As Brickhill would only learn several years later, Nerney had then spoken with John Pudney, who’d promptly recommended Brickhill. Although an Australian, Brickhill had been an officer and pilot with the RAF, and was a well credentialled writer, having worked as a journalist in London and New York. The Air Ministry would do all it could to facilitate his research, but Nerney’s offer entailed only a small honorarium, and there was no guarantee of publication beyond a government-produced edition. There was also a significant hurdle – to research the squadron, its men and its missions, Brickhill would have to base himself in the UK.
Despite the drawbacks, Brickhill jumped at the offer, seeing this as an opportunity to dump his boring day job and set the foundations for becoming a full-time author – if he could interest a publisher in the book. And it would get him back to England. To satisfy British Air Ministry requirements, he applied to the RAAF for written confirmation that he’d been a serving officer attached to the RAF. But how, he wondered, could he afford to get back to England, especially as he had to keep up mortgage payments on his parents’ home?
It occurred to him that if he could interest an Australian publisher in a commercial Australasian edition of the book, he could generate an advance that would pay his fare, while retaining the potentially much more lucrative UK rights. Touting a Dam Busters book proposal around Australian publishing houses, he pointed out that a number of Australians had served with 617 Squadron and taken part in the dams raid. To his disgust, not a single Sydney publisher saw any merit in the idea. As Brickhill told Brisbane Courier-Mail journalist Roy Connolly, they all turned down his proposal, advising that it was ‘unsuitable for publication’. Unable to see how he could afford to get to England, Brickhill unhappily declined Nerney’s offer.164
Then, in March, just as Brickhill received the paperwork he’d requested from the RAAF confirming his commission, war service and service medals, agent David Higham again made contact. John Pudney was proving to be Brickhill’s guardian angel. Having just joined London publishers Evans Brothers as an editor, he was looking for new books, and had approached Higham with a proposal that Brickhill write an extended version of the Stalag Luft 3 mass escape covered in Escape to Danger, to be entitled The Great Escape. The commercially canny Pudney knew that Eric Williams’ novelised Stalag Luft 3 escape adventure The Wooden Horse had sold very well for William Collins and Sons, and he also knew that a film version was in the works, for release in 1950. To Pudney’s mind, The Great Escape book could ride on the back of the success of the Wooden Horse movie.
Brickhill was thrilled. He hadn’t been happy with the job he’d done on Escape to Danger. Years later, he would confess, ‘It bore all the marks of haste.’165 Not only would Pudney’s offer allow him to do justice to the mass escape story and its participants, it could give him the wherewithal to get back to England and get down to work as an author. Cabling Higham with his agreement to write The Great Escape, he pushed for a swift contract and a publisher’s advance large enough to get him to England. If need be, once in London, he could turn to freelance journalism to boost his income.
In April, once Higham had agreed contract terms with Evans Brothers, Brickhill threw in his job at the Sun and prepared to sail to the UK. In the end, it wasn’t until May that all was finalised. Brickhill was the second-last passenger to book a tourist-class passage to Southampton aboard the next sailing of the SS Largs Bay. Brickhill was on his way, to England, and to the top of the writing profession. Years later, when he sailed back into Sydney Harbour, he would return as one of the most successful authors in the world.