The Hero Maker

by Stephen Dando-Collins

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.

  7.

  In the Bag

  OBERURSEL, JUST OUTSIDE Frankfurt, was home to Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe’s central receiving and interrogation depot for captured Allied airmen. In 1943, with RAAF and USAAF bombing raids into the Reich intensifying, and the number of bombers being brought down consequently increasing, Dulag Luft was a very busy place. From here, after questioning, prisoners would be dispatched to various prisoner-of-war camps to wait out the war. On 25 March, Brickhill arrived at Dulag Luft by train from Naples.

  The RAF routinely lectured its aircrew on what to expect in the event they fell into enemy hands, so Brickhill had a fair idea what he was in for. The Luftwaffe’s reception process for new prisoner arrivals at Dulag Luft tended to follow a pattern. First, Brickhill was given a hot shower, after which a medical attendant changed the prisoner’s dressings. His clothes were taken away – to be X-rayed, one RAF prisoner was told.72 Then, to soften him up for questioning, he spent several days in solitary confinement, naked, in a wooden cell.

  The cell’s only furniture consisted of a cot and an ablutions bucket. Twice a day, a silent guard would pass in a bowl of cabbage soup and a chunk of black bread, and replace the bucket. Brickhill’s clothes and few possessions were meanwhile examined minutely by his captors. Everything from the maker’s label on his uniform to the content of a prisoner’s pockets was noted: train-ticket stubs, cinema tickets, personal photographs in wallets. No clue to the life he’d led up until his capture was overlooked by the thorough Germans.

  On 27 March, as Brickhill was languishing naked in a cell at Dulag Luft, in Sydney his parents were preparing for a week’s holiday in early April, at the Jervis Bay Hotel at Huskisson on the New South W
ales south coast. That afternoon, a telegram boy knocked on their door. For the past few months, George and Dot had been once more renting a house at Greenwich Point, this time from engineer James Robertson. They were back in George Street, at number 41, a cute two-storey gabled abode in the heart of Paul’s teenage stomping ground. With several sons in the military, it was with trepidation that George opened a telegram from the government, to learn that Paul was missing in action.

  Despite the concerning news, or perhaps because of it, George convinced Dot that they should still go on their holiday, and he cabled the RAAF to tell them where he would be between 5 and 12 April, in case there was more news of Paul while they were away.

  In late March, a Luftwaffe captain, an intelligence officer, came to pay Paul Brickhill a visit in his Dulag Luft cell. Sitting on the end of the cot, the captain lit a cigarette and chatted away in excellent English. One of the approaches used by Dulag Luft intelligence officers to gain prisoners’ confidence was to tell new arrivals that they secretly believed that Germany was going to lose the war, and as a consequence had sent their family to safety in South America. They would go on to say that Russia was the common enemy of the German people and the British people, and this made Germans and Britishers allies. When this failed to elicit anything other than name, rank and serial number from the prisoner, the interrogation moved to a new stage.

  The following day, a guard unexpectedly came and marched Brickhill, still entirely nude, down an echoing corridor, through an office occupied by German girls pounding away at typewriters, and into a large meeting room. The prisoner was made to stand at attention in front of a panel of six Luftwaffe officers sitting at a long table. From behind him, a female stenographer slipped into the room and took a seat, pencil and pad at the ready. For the next hour, the officers threw questions at the naked prisoner, about his squadron, his wing, the Spitfire, about attitudes to the war among his squadron comrades. The following day, this was repeated. When the prisoner revealed nothing under questioning, he was returned to his cell, again via the room full of women.