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 be
en 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.
17.
Enter the Author and Wife
IN HIS NEW York City apartment, George Harsh sat gazing absently out the window. At his office several days earlier he’d received a package in the mail from Paul Brickhill in London – the manuscript to Brickhill’s The Great Escape, neatly typed by the author on loose pages. Brickhill was asking for his colleague’s comments, suggestions and corrections. Harsh took the manuscript home, and after dinner he and his new wife, Eleanor, had begun reading. Harsh would read a page, then pass it to her to read. She would pile completed pages on the floor between them. All through the night, as if possessed by some strange power, they read without pause. With the sun rising over Manhattan, Eleanor Harsh laid the last page atop the pile, and looked over to her husband. He continued to stare out at the city beyond their window. But she knew his mind wasn’t in New York; it was in Sagan.
‘Whew!’ exclaimed Eleanor, lying back, physically and emotionally exhausted. ‘Did all this really happen?’
‘Yeah,’ George murmured. ‘It really happened.’172
Harsh soon sent the manuscript back to Brickhill, with his congratulations and his thanks. ‘This book,’ he would say, ‘is the story of achievement against impossible odds.’173 George seems not to have suggested any corrections, even when Brickhill wrote – after a quip by the American – that Harsh had been shot down over Berlin. He had actually been downed over Cologne. This was a minor detail in what Harsh considered a masterwork and a fine tribute to mutual friends. Brickhill subsequently sent the manuscript out to all the men he’d talked to in the course of researching the book. Armed with their comments, he did a final polish. On the agreed delivery date, he handed in the completed draft to David Higham, who passed it onto John Pudney at Evans Brothers. Basic corrections suggested by Pudney would follow, and then, months later, the galley proofs would come from the printer.
With all his books, Brickhill would correct and polish proofs up to the moment the book went to print. After his training at the Sun, he was obsessed with detail, and obsessed with getting the details right. Writing about how the tunnellers constructed Harry’s air-conditioning system, he made a point of describing it step by step, almost as if writing a guide for would-be escapees. If more than one person was present for a particular conversation, he’d quizzed all parties about exactly what words had been used, chopping out troubling phrases or recollections that were not supported by the testimony of more than one man. With The Great Escape delivered, Brickhill had time to catch his breath before diving into detailed research for the 617 Squadron book.
Of late, his relationship with Margot Slater had blossomed into a full-scale romance. Margot was running out of money and talking about going back to Australia – Brickhill would say he ended up helping pay the rent on her NW3 flat, to keep her in London.174 Finally, in the spring, he popped the question. On 22 April, thirty-three-year-old Brickhill and twenty-one-year-old Margot were married at St Michael’s Church of England, Chester Square, Pimlico by Father Geoffrey Gray. It was a small affair. Margot’s sister Jeanette was her bridesmaid, while Max Kempe, a journalist friend, was Brickhill’s best man.
Brickhill had moved into a larger flat by this time, in a large pre-war brick block at 21 Cale Street in Chelsea. Whenever he walked into the city from Chelsea, he would pass a posh hotel in Sloane Street, the Cadogan, a handsome Queen Anne pile with a top-hat-wearing doorman out front. He booked his new bride and himself into the Cad
ogan for a three-day honeymoon; all he could afford. Brickhill’s bank balance was sinking, and he was now living almost entirely on his great expectations. As for the honeymoon, it was not a great success. Margot would much later accuse Brickhill of declaring, at the end of their three-day tryst, that he’d made a huge mistake marrying her. Brickhill would deny this, and Margot would counter that, if he didn’t voice the sentiment, she’d felt sure he was thinking it.175
Nonetheless, Mr and Mrs Brickhill set up home in the Chelsea flat, and Brickhill threw himself back into the research for the 617 Squadron book, again using the flat as his office. As Margot quickly discovered, Brickhill was still just as ‘obsessional’ as he’d been as a schoolboy. Working late into the night, he demanded absolute quiet. Plus, with many of the people he needed to interview only available at weekends, he was often away on Saturdays and Sundays. Margot was left to entertain herself with Jeanette and hometown friends Pat and Ruth – ‘The Richmond biddies’, Brickhill called them collectively.176 Margot quickly became bored. As she would tell an Australian reporter three years later, she ‘tired of sitting in their Chelsea flat and being told to keep quiet while her husband pounded on a typewriter’.177
Brickhill, for his part, quickly learned that his young wife had no proclivity for or interest in housework, and cooked infrequently. Exasperated by Margot’s lack of domesticity, he gave her a list of household tasks to accomplish when he was away, only to come home to find few, if any, done. Brickhill blamed Margot’s lack of domestic skills on a spoiling mother. Meanwhile, independent Margot wouldn’t be told what to do by anyone. Their flat quickly became a battleground. She told him to get a housekeeper, he told her to get a job. Margot registered with a modelling agency and started winning freelance modelling assignments, and Brickhill hired a housekeeper. For the rest of their married life, Brickhill would employ domestic help for Margot.
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