PAUL BRICKHILL SAILED out of Sydney’s heads to return to England on 14 May 1949 aboard the 14,000-tonne SS Largs Bay. Launched in 1921, she had been a troopship during the war. Returned to her owners, the ship had been refitted during 1948–49 and was once again sailing the Sydney–Southampton route via the Suez Canal as a combined passenger and cargo vessel. Half the size of handsome liners such as the Orontes and Strathaird, which had sailed out of Sydney Harbour in April, England-bound, the Largs Bay’s attraction was the economy of its fares. The day would come when Brickhill would deeply regret choosing this ship and this sailing.
Unlike larger liners on the England route, which routinely carried a thousand-plus passengers each, the Largs Bay had just 164 passengers aboard. It made for a more intimate voyage, with passengers soon mixing as if the ship were a private club. Among the tourist-class passengers strutted a striking, pencil-slim twenty-year-old girl with boyishly short dark hair and hazel eyes. Margaret Olive Slater hailed from Richmond on the Hawkesbury River, to the near west of Sydney. When younger, she had given herself the French-sounding name of Margot. Now, Margot Slater was travelling to England on holiday with her sister Jeanette, two years her junior.
Within hours of the ship clearing Sydney Heads, Paul Brickhill had spotted Margot and made her acquaintance. They were soon deep in conversation. Margot told Brickhill that she had been born at Narrabri in northern New South Wales, growing up in Richmond. Her mother, Olive, was a country girl, her father, Edric, an importer, making a name for himself in his spare time as a nature photographer. After attending Parramatta High and Homebush High, Margot had been an art student at East Sydney Technical College for two years, and enjoyed painting. Margot was two inches taller than Brickhill, taller still in high heels. Despite this, and the fact that Brickhill was twelve years her senior, she was attracted to the cheeky yet worldly journalist who’d worked in London and New York and told her he was going to London to become a successful author. Brickhill’s nervous stutter dissolved away in her company. Affectionately, he was soon calling her Maggie.
Margot told Brickhill that she had sailed to England two years earlier, on a trip with her mother, also visiting Germany’s British zone to see elder sister Beth, who lived there with her husband, British Army chaplain Thomas Yates. Brickhill told Margot about his writing projects, mentioning that he’d turned down the 617 Squadron history after receiving a negative reaction from Australian publishers. Margot suggested he not be so hasty, feeling that British publishers must surely be interested in the subject. She urged him to approach the RAF when he reached the UK and tell them he had reconsidered. Brickhill would later credit Margot with convincing him to revisit the book that was to become The Dam Busters.166
Brickhill was impressed by Margot’s interest in him, and his work. In the past, his stammer and shyness had meant he’d rarely shared his dreams and aspirations with anyone other than boyhood friend Peter Finch. Margot was a great sounding board, and he looked forward to relaxing in the young woman’s company each evening. By day, he worked. Having brought his trusty typewriter along, he used the four weeks at sea to commence rewriting his mass escape chapters from Escape to Danger to create the beginnings of The Great Escape. By the time the Largs Bay docked at Southampton on 14 June, Brickhill had the foundations of an 80,000-word book. Meanwhile, the chemistry between writer and art student was obvious. As they departed the ship, Brickhill and Margot agreed to keep in touch.
While Margot and her sister set off on a trip around Britain, Brickhill immediately resumed work. Staying at a cheap London hotel, he met with David Higham and John Pudney to plan the course necessary to bring The Great Escape to fruition. Pudney made several recommendations. This book should have the feel of a novel. Eric Williams had novelised his Wooden Horse escape, even changing his name and those of his fellow escapees, which helped boost readership. Brickhill was determined to stick to the facts and to retain the real names of the men involved; anything less would be an insult to the memory of his mates the Fifty, to whom he would dedicate the book. Nonetheless, he was open to making the book read like a novel.
Brickhill would write the book in newspaper style, using short sentences, short paragraphs and short chapters. He and Pudney agreed the book could do without an index, a stamp of nonfiction likely to discourage fiction readers. Escape to Danger had been almost devoid of conversation, but, with snappy dialogue a staple of popular fiction, in The Great Escape Brickhill would include conversations as they’d occurred, taken from his memory and the memories of other participants. And he would use his writer’s licence to insert occasional witty asides.
Pudney talked him into discarding unfamiliar terms and abbreviations that would be a barrier to readership. In Escape to Danger, Brickhill had frequently referred to POWs as kriegies. This term was now obliterated from the narrative. So influential would Brickhill’s book become, ‘kriegies’ would disappear from the popular POW escape lexicon despite being commonly used by prisoners. Brickhill also omitted reference to the depressed NI individuals he’d mentioned in Escape to Danger, and the many men who didn’t cooperate in escape activities. He likewise failed to mention homosexuality. Fellow Stalag Luft 3 inmate and author Robert Kee, in his 1947 book A Crowd Is Not Company, had said there were known homosexual couples in camp, while one or two homosexuals preyed on handsome young new arrivals. None of this, Brickhill decided, contributed to the heroic escape narrative.
Two other important editorial decisions were made by Brickhill, one prompted by insecurity, the other by modesty. As in Escape to Danger, he wouldn’t mention that he was Australian, fearing that British critics would not take his tale of RAF prisoners seriously if perceived to be coming from the pen of a ‘colonial’. Rather than irritate that sore, Brickhill stepped over the matter of nationality, and let it be assumed by Brits that, as a former RAF fighter pilot, he was ‘one of them’.
Then there was the matter of his modesty. Like his grandfather James Brickhill, he was ‘unobtrusive and retiring’. Like his father, George, he was ‘quiet’ and ‘unostentatious’. While, in the years to come, Brickhill would use the press to advantage, his self-publicising would invariably be about selling books, not selling himself. As he had in Escape to Danger, he would refrain from making all but the most passing reference to his own part in The Great Escape. Only a dozen years on would he add a foreword to the American edition in which he mentioned his role: ‘Of my part in the show – little enough to say. I am a sort of Boswell, not a hero. I was a cog in the machine, boss of the gang of “stooges” guarding the forgers.’167
On the ship coming over from Australia he’d had time to think about the focus of the book. The journalist in him told him to go for ‘the guts’ of the story, the inherent drama he’d always sought when reporting for the Sun. His story needed a central figure, a hub around which all the other characters and events revolved. It was obvious to Brickhill that this central figure was Big X, Roger Bushell. Without Bushell’s relentless drive, autocratic control and fiendish creativity, the mass escape would probably not have happened.
Brickhill would open his book with Bushell, and thereafter use him as the glue that held the story together. He would be honest about Bushell’s off-putting qualities, but would inevitably, if unconsciously, paint Bushell as the epic hero: one man against a murderous regime, the underdog struggling against impossible odds. Inevitably, too, the other escapees would bask in Bushell’s Herculean glow and take on heroic qualities of their own.
Then there was the structure of the book. The long, detailed preparations for the mass escape and its tragic culmination formed two parts of a gripping three-act drama. The third act remained unwritten. Precisely what had happened to each of the Fifty? And what had happened to those responsible for their deaths, from the Nazi hierarchy who ordered the executions down to the grubby Gestapo gunmen who’d carried them out? Brickhill learned that the RAF’s Special Investigations Branch had conducted an extensive hunt for the murderers in 1945–46. That criminal investigation had been carried out by a team of fifteen investigators led by Wing Commander Wilfred ‘Freddie’ Bowes, a Scotland Yard detective before the war. For a resonating denouement, Brickhill knew he would have to delve deep into official records released in 1948 and pick through that SIB investigation.
Despite his focus on The Great Escape, he hadn’t forgotten about the 617 Squadron history. As soon as he’d arrived in London, with Margot Slater’s advice fresh in his mind he’d written to the RAF’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, who’d been responsible for 617 Squadron during the war, to say he was prepared to ‘have a go’ at the squadron history after all.168 The response was immediate. To Brickhill’s relief, John Nerney had yet to find a writer for the project, and the Australian received the blessing of Her Majesty’s Government to tackle it.
Plus, John Pudney was keen to secure the book for Evans Brothers, having recommended Brickhill for the project in the first place. To Pudney’s mind, it was the ideal title to follow The Great Escape and capitalise on its success. But Brickhill would have to produce a draft manuscript; Pudney’s superiors wouldn’t buy the 617 Squadron book on the basis of a proposal. And first, Brickhill had to write The Great Escape. He would end up working on both books at once.
Brickhill embarked on a tried and true journalistic approach to each book, interviewing as many surviving witnesses as possible to get their perspective on the people and events involved. For The Great Escape, tunnel king Wally Floody and security chief George Harsh topped his list for interview. Floody was back in Canada, and Harsh was living in New York City. Making contact with the pair, Brickhill arranged to go to North America to meet with them. Knowing that the Largs Bay was sailing on from Southampton to Halifax, Nova Scotia on 27 June, he hurriedly booked a ticket.
Before he left London, he put his head in the door of his old employers. Upon landing in North America, because he had no fixed address in England, he would give his address as the Associated Newspapers office at 85 Fleet Street. Thirteen rushed days after arriving in England, he set sail for Canada aboard the same ship that had brought him from Australia. He received a warm welcome from Floody, who Brickhill thought still looked like a consumptive. There was an equally effusive welcome from Harsh. Both men were able to fill him in on conversations they’d had with Roger Bushell and other key players in the real-life drama they’d all shared leading up to the breakout.
While Brickhill was in New York, he caught up with his US agent Mike Watkins, giving him as much material as he could on The Great Escape. Based on this, Watkins was able to interest US publishers Norton & Co, and a contract was soon forthcoming. Now Brickhill would be a published author in the massive and influential United States market, a dream come true for any non-American author. The book would be released in the summer of 1950 in Britain and as part of Norton’s ‘fall’ catalogue in North America. Brimming with confidence, and with a suitcase full of notes from his conversations with Floody and Harsh, Brickhill returned to London to get to work.
Renting a small flat in Westminster, he set his typewriter on a table and wrote day and night. But something was nagging at him. He needed to go back to Germany again, to revisit the site of Stalag Luft 3. While in Germany, he could make the trip doubly worthwhile by also going to the Ruhr Valley, to visit the dams attacked by 617 Squadron.
The Moehne and Sorpe dams, breached by the RAF in 1943, had been fully repaired within five months of the raid. Their lakes were again full, and there were few signs of the anti-aircraft gun installations that had topped and flanked the Moehne dam – the smaller Sorpe dam had been undefended. Looking down from the top of Moehne dam’s massive, gently curving structure, Brickhill could see that the valley below was littered with twisted, rusting girders and lumps of concrete that had once formed part of the dam’s wall. Formerly picturesque and productive fields flanking the river lay churned and ugly. ‘The earth still looks as though a giant’s rake had scoured it,’ he noted.169
Going three kilometres downriver, he arrived at the ruined village of Himmelpforten. Ironically, Brickhill would discover, the village’s name meant ‘Gates of Heaven’. Locals told him that, after the dam had been ruptured by the RAF in the early hours of 17 May 1943, the village was engulfed by floodwaters. Himmelpforten’s pastor, sixty-two-year-old Joseph Berkenkopf, had long predicted that the British would one day bomb the dam, and told his parishioners that in that event he would ring the bell of his church, the Porta Coeli, a former thirteenth-century monastery, to warn villagers to escape to higher ground.
On the night of the raid, Berkenkopf had done just that. Awakened after midnight by the detonation of the first of four ‘bouncing bombs’ lobbed against the dam by the Lancasters of 617 Squadron, the pastor had dashed to his belltower. The villagers, mostly women and children, were warned by the tolling bell and had fled to the hilltops. But Pastor Berkenkopf was still ringing his bell when a wall of water twelve metres high swept him and his historic church away.
Locals told Brickhill that the pastor’s body had never been found. They had located the church’s chalice, christening font, crucifix, and a few of its stones strewn as far as ninety kilometres down the valley. When Brickhill visited, the people of Himmelpforten had just finished building a new church, the St Bernardus, using remnants from the destroyed monastery, a kilometre from the site of the original. Inside, Brickhill found an inscription in Latin on the newly raised altar: The wreckage of the church of Himmelpforten, destroyed by flood in 1943, served six years later to build this new altar and this new church. Brickhill was struck by the ‘restrained and unmalicious’ nature of the inscription; no mention of war or the bombing raid, no blame cast the way of Britain, its air force or its airmen.170 To this day, locals simply refer to the raid as the ‘Moehne Catastrophe’.
Leaving behind the sad little German village, Brickhill travelled on to Berlin, still a city in ruins. This was just several months after the end of the Berlin Airlift, an eleven-month operation by the British, American, Canadian and Australian air forces to supply West Berlin by air after the Soviets closed off all land access. Although the communists had backed down, tensions were still high between Moscow and the West. Yet Brickhill succeeded in travelling to Sagan and visiting the site of Stalag Luft 3. Brickhill would say he was able to ‘fossick once more around the scene of the crime’.171 The bones of the camp remained. Otherwise, there was now little to see in Sagan Forest, but much to remember.
From his cramped London flat, Brickhill continued to track down and interview escape survivors he’d previously been unable to talk to – men like Wings Day, Johnny Dodge and Dutch home-runner Bob van der Stock. Throwing them probing questions, he pieced together the internal narrative of The Great Escape from his recollections and theirs. He received copies of letters that Roger Bushell had sent from Stalag Luft 3, provided by Bushell’s mother in South Africa and Mac McGowan, adjutant of his own 92 Squadron when Bushell was CO. With relish, Brickhill waded through the thousand pages of documents released by the British Government the previous year which covered the doggedly thorough and grimly elucidating British investigation into the murders of the Fifty.
He discovered that, on the morning of Sunday, 26 March 1944, twenty-six hours after the break had been discovered at Stalag Luft 3, the first report of the mass escape had reached Adolf Hitler, who was then at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria. Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, SS chief Heinrich Himmler and General Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff of the OKW, Germany’s Army High Command, were also at Berchtesgaden that weekend. Flying into a rage, Hitler had summoned the trio to an immediate conference, ordering that no record be kept of what was said at the meeting. From later testimony at the Nuremburg war trials, it had become clear that Hitler ordered every single escapee shot when they were recaptured.
As tactfully as he could, Goering had argued against this, suggesting that shooting all escapees could not be disguised as anything but murder. Besides, he said, the Allies might reciprocate with harsh reprisals against German prisoners in their hands. Hitler had relented; but only marginally. More than half the escapees were to be shot on recapture, he ordered, with the excuse to the Swiss Government, the ‘Protecting Power’, that they had been shot while attempting to escape from custody after recapture. The documents also revealed that General Arthur Nebe was the one who’d physically chosen the names of the fifty men to be shot. As Brickhill now knew, Nebe had not lived long after this. Implicated in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, he’d been executed by his own side.
And, as Brickhill discovered with some satisfaction, as a result of the British investigations, a number of former Gestapo officers had been arrested, tried and convicted for their parts in murders of the Fifty. Thirteen Germans had been hanged. Even Gestapo men who’d driven the vehicles carrying the men to their deaths had received ten years imprisonment. A number of culprits would continue to be sought; the last trial in Germany involving the murder of the Fifty would take place in 1968.
As he read the file, Brickhill learned how, where and when Bushell and the others were caught, interrogated by the Kripo, and handed over to the Gestapo. They hadn’t been executed en masse. Often in groups of two, all were being driven back towards Sagan and Stalag Luft 3 by different routes when cars carrying them stopped in the dead of night to allow the prisoners to stretch their legs. As they stood with their backs to their Gestapo escorts, each member of the Fifty had been shot in the back of the head, at close range, by pistol. Several, including Bushell, had needed a second bullet to finish them off.
Brickhill’s travel and living costs were eating into his reserves. Anxiety over money, combined with the crushing pressure he was putting himself under by working on two books at once, sent him to a London psychiatrist, a Dr Mason, who helped him prioritise. First priority, generate income. Second, focus on The Great Escape and tackle the 617 Squadron book later. As much as he hated returning to journalism, even briefly, in August Brickhill did a deal with London’s Daily Express to write a series of features. These had similar themes: famous bankers who’d made enormous fortunes by financing war. ‘The Masters of Money’, featuring the likes of J. Pierpont Morgan, Lord Inchcape and Sir Basil Zaharoff, ran in the Daily Express over September-October. A follow-up series, ‘The Money Men’, appeared over October-November. Retaining the foreign rights, Brickhill sold ‘The Masters of Money’ to the loyal Port Pirie Recorder, to Sydney’s Sunday Herald and to the Brisbane Courier-Mail. Even Victoria’s Shepparton Advertiser bought it.
By Christmas 1949, Margot Slater and her sister Jeanette had taken a flat in northwest London’s Swiss Cottage area. Teaming up with Pat Torr and Ruth Steele, two girlfriends from Richmond back home, the girls were playing tourist. And Margot was enjoying the attentions of shipboard suitor Paul Brickhill, who began seeing her regularly. Surrounded by four attractive girls, drinking champagne and eating heartily, this would be the best Christmas that Brickhill had experienced in a decade.
When 1950 arrived, Brickhill the author would arrive. And all his dreams, and his nightmares, would become reality.