When Margot implored Brickhill to take her out, or to bring people home, he took her to the cinema, to see the movie version of Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse. It wouldn’t have been Margot’s idea of a fun film, but to Brickhill this tale set in the camp where he’d been a prisoner was personal. He learned that the film version of The Wooden Horse was shot on Lüneburg Heath in northwest Germany, not at the actual site of Stalag Luft 3. The producers had canvassed the idea of shooting at Sagan, but Soviet authorities had refused permission.
Brickhill saw familiar faces in minor roles in The Wooden Horse; most noticeably, his childhood friend Peter Finch, playing the part of an Australian patient in Stalag Luft 3’s East Compound hospital. The pair had lost contact, and unbeknownst to Brickhill, Finch had arrived in England from Sydney in 1948. Bent on realising his dream of acting success, Finch was steadily building his career on stage and in film. The other familiar face on screen was that of Briton Dan Cunningham, playing a prisoner helping the three escapees. Cunningham, who, like Finch, was striving to build an acting career, had actually been a Stalag Luft 3 prisoner. Ironically, he’d been one of the players in the compound’s theatre who’d shown no interest in escaping.
Knowing that the sooner he delivered the 617 Squadron manuscript the sooner he would secure an Evans Brothers contract and a new advance to prop up his flagging finances, Brickhill ignored his new wife’s pleas to spend more time with her, and pushed on with the project. Gripped with anxiety, he worried about money, and worried about how he would tackle this new book. This would be a very different project from the last. At least this book’s title had been written for him, by history. When the British press exuberantly reported the dams raid in 1943, it had dubbed the squadron ‘the dam-busters’. Shortly after, 617 Squadron, which had been formed especially to make the dams raid, officially adopted the title the Dam Busters, along with the motto of ‘After me, the deluge’. So, The Dam Busters it would be.
That was the easy part. In writing The Great Escape, Brickhill had been describing people and events he knew. But he wasn’t intimate with anything or anyone related to 617 Squadron. His research involved wading through reams of official documents and private papers, plus months of face-to-face interviews. John Nerney put him in touch with people who could help. One was Harry Humphries, adjutant of 617 Squadron through most of the war, who’d kept a set of squadron diaries.
Humphries would later reveal he was initially reluctant to let Brickhill see these diaries. He didn’t say why. Perhaps it was because Brickhill was an Australian fighter type, or maybe Humphries harboured plans to write his own 617 Squadron book. Humphries revealed that he ‘was later persuaded to make them available’ to Brickhill by Nerney. He would also later grumble that Brickhill used the diaries ‘without acknowledgment’.178 Yet Brickhill interviewed Humphries, and the adjutant would feature considerably, and favourably, in Brickhill’s subsequent narrative.
Once again, Brickhill went looking for the ‘guts of the story’. Having undertaken to write a history of the squadron, he was obliged to describe all its operations throughout the war, not just the dams raid – 617 had subsequently carried out a number of special raids through 1943–45. What he needed was a common factor, a core to the story. Above all, he needed a Roger Bushell, an heroic figure battling against long odds.
Initially, that heroic figure appeared to be Guy Gibson, who’d been awarded a Victoria Cross for leading the dams raid. Gibson had arrived at the new 617 Squadron a handsome twenty-five-year-old wing commander who’d had the Distinguished Service Order and Distinguished Flying Cross pinned to his chest by King George VI. Gibson had subsequently been killed, in 1944, flying a Mosquito fighter-bomber – according to a 2011 revelation, shot down in error by Bernard McCormack, tail gunner of a British Lancaster.179 Pushed by the RAF in 1943, Gibson had written a patriotic memoir, Enemy Coast Ahead. This was good reference for Brickhill, but only the last two chapters referred to 617 Squadron, and Gibson had left 617 following the dams raid. At best, Gibson’s involvement in the squadron’s story would end halfway through Brickhill’s book.
Following Gibson, the squadron had a number of charismatic commanding officers including an easy-going Australian from Sydney, Harold ‘Micky’ Martin, who’d played a leading role in the dams raid. Martin’s successor was Leonard Cheshire, a charitable Englishman who won a VC for his later work with the squadron. But all these changes in heroic lead were not helpful to an author seeking continuity of narrative. Changing lead actors multiple times wouldn’t work in a movie, and it wouldn’t make for a bestselling book.
As he dug deeper and further, Brickhill struck gold. The so-called ‘bouncing bombs’ used by 617 on the dams raid had been invented by an obscure and eccentric defence scientist, Barnes Wallis. For security reasons, the British Government hadn’t permitted Wallis’ name to be made public during the war. Consequently, Guy Gibson, in Enemy Coast Ahead, had referred to Wallis as ‘Jeff’. This was a little joke on Gibson’s part. During the bomb’s test drops, Wallis had worked closely with Vickers-Armstrong test pilot Mutt Summers. ‘Mutt and Jeff’ was a widely syndicated American newspaper strip cartoon which even made it to stage and screen. In his book, Gibson had Mutt and ‘Jeff’ collaborating on development of the bouncing bomb. Gibson may have even been aware that Jeff the cartoon character had originally been an insane asylum inmate; Wallis was certainly considered crazy by some government officials.
Researching Wallis’ involvement, Brickhill found that the massive ‘Grand Slam’ and ‘Tallboy’ bombs dropped by 617 Squadron later in the war had also been developed by Wallis. Here was the continuity, and the hero, that Brickhill was looking for. Now, five years after the war, the Government wouldn’t prevent Brickhill from revealing Wallis’ name and wartime role. So, after receiving an invitation from Wallis to visit him, in the summer of 1950 Brickhill headed down to Surrey, to Wallis’ farmhouse home. This was White Hills House, at Effingham, just to the southwest of London.180
The author received a warm welcome from the man he described as ‘the white-haired patriarch, pink-faced, gentle and abstracted’.181 On his drawing board, the inventor enthusiastically showed Brickhill his design for a new aircraft, a swing-wing bomber. In the event, Wallis’ design would be turned down by the British Government, only to be taken up by the Americans and the French. On this same drawing board, Wallis had designed his bouncing bomb.
During the war, the same security restrictions that had prevented the press and Guy Gibson from naming Barnes Wallis had also stopped them revealing the exact nature of this bomb. Those security restrictions remained in force in 1950, in case the Cold War developed into a hot war and the weapon had to be employed against Russian dams at some time in the future, preventing Brickhill from describing it accurately. In reality, the bouncing bomb was a very large depth charge, not unlike the kind used at sea against submarines. The revolutionary aspect of Wallis’ dam-busting theory had been the low-level, skidding delivery to the dam face, after which the bombs sank, to explode many metres below the surface, right beside the dam.
As Wallis described his process of invention to the author, he explained how he had met and overcome numerous infuriating bureaucratic obstacles during the development of this unique weapon, only to have to overcome many frustrating technical problems, right up to the day of 617 Squadron’s 1943 dams mission. Brickhill came away from their meeting knowing he had the makings of an interesting narrative, and a central figure; a driven man who’d overcome great odds to succeed.
In addition, like The Great Escape, the story would have the element of tragedy. Of the nineteen Avro Lancaster bombers that had taken off to bomb the Ruhr dams from very low level, eight had been brought down. Fifty-three airmen from a number of countries aboard those downed bombers were killed, with just three surviving to become POWs. And very few of the aircrew who started out with 617, which became known in RAF ranks as a ‘suicide squadron’, lived to see war’s end. Most of the men who did su
rvive were saved by appointments to administrative jobs.
Close to half the squadron destroyed on their very first operation represented a heavy loss, one that weighed heavily on Barnes Wallis’ conscience after the dams raid. Because two of four target dams had been breached, and because the press had trumpeted it as a triumph which would alter the course of the war (it didn’t), those losses had been glossed over by government and media. Brickhill would be honest in his account of the human cost, but, in focusing on Wallis’ struggles with bureaucrats and bombs, his narrative would divert the attention of readers from that cost.
Brickhill went on to interview a number of key former 617 Squadron personnel, men such as Micky Martin and Leonard Cheshire, who were happy to talk to a fellow pilot about issues personal and professional. ‘They were too modest to talk about themselves,’ Brickhill would later say about these men, ‘so I got them to tell me about the others. And vice versa.’182
During these interviews, Brickhill learned of a connection he’d almost had with 617 Squadron in 1944. That December, Cheshire had planned a special Christmas present for the inmates of Stalag Luft 3. He’d been determined to lead 617 on a mission to parachute food to the RAF prisoners. Cheshire was only talked out of the drops when it was pointed out that when the prisoners rushed to the drops, German machine-gunners in goon towers could think the packages contained weapons for an uprising, and would have opened up, mowing down hundreds of POWs. Brickhill, having always been at the forefront of everything, would probably have been one of them. Cheshire had almost been the cause of Brickhill’s premature death.
While quite deliberately failing to point out that he was Australian, Brickhill would make sure that the Australians on the squadron got their fair dues in his narrative. In addition, among the photographs from the Air Ministry and Imperial War Museum he collected to include in the book, he chose one that showed a group of 617’s Aussies: Micky Martin, ‘Spam’ Spafford, Dave Shannon, Les Knight, Bob Hay, Lance Howard, Bob Kellow and Jack Leggo.
Probably to the surprise of John Nerney at the Air Ministry, the book that Brickhill wrote would begin with mission mastermind Barnes Wallis, just as The Great Escape began with escape mastermind Roger Bushell. It would not be until the fourth chapter that Guy Gibson and 617 Squadron took the stage. Wallis’ story would continue to be threaded in and out of the narrative and hold it together through all the later episodes in the squadron’s history following the dams raid. Nerney would approve.
From the US in the middle of the year came good news from Brickhill’s literary agent Mike Watkins. A Los Angeles production company was interested in doing a sixty-minute television drama version of The Great Escape, to be aired on NBC. The production company was Showcase Productions, headed by Fred Coe. Only two years older than Brickhill, Coe was producing NBC’s successful Philco-Goodyear TV Playhouse, with each drama in the ‘anthology’ series a one-off, standalone production.
The deal being offered by Coe gave Showcase Productions the option to also later make The Great Escape as a feature film. Agent Watkins would specify a standard ten-year reversion clause in the contract which meant that, should Coe fail to exercise his right to go ahead with a movie within ten years of signing, the feature film rights to The Great Escape would revert to Brickhill, unencumbered and free of cost. The money on offer for the TV drama rights was not huge, but as a marketing exercise it would put the book in front of millions of Americans. Coe was talking about airing the production the following January. Excited by the immediacy of production and the future possibilities it offered, and seduced by the fact that his work would be appearing on American TV, Brickhill agreed.
From August 1950, with The Great Escape hitting bookstores, press reviews came thick and fast. Brickhill, sensitive to both constructive and destructive criticism, read every review. They were glowing. ‘Written as a really gripping, illuminating story should be,’ said the Times Literary Supplement. ‘The high-water mark of all active prisoner-of-war books,’ declared the Telegraph. ‘One of the most unputdownable stories of the war,’ said the Observer. ‘Mr Brickhill tells it very well indeed,’ wrote the reviewer in the New Statesman. ‘Has an exciting quality whose cream I mustn’t take off,’ said Country Life’s reviewer. ‘It moves at a breathless pace,’ said the Scotsman in Edinburgh.
It was the reviewer for the Listener who recognised another aspect to Brickhill’s book. It wasn’t the scale of the escape alone that set the work apart from other stories, he said, it was the quality of the writing. ‘For there is present all through it, as well as in its outcome, the authentic strain of tragedy.’183 In framing his book as a tale of glorious failure, Brickhill had unwittingly written a tragedy which touched sympathetic chords with his audience.
Reviews of The Great Escape in America over the following months were equally laudatory, and perceptive. ‘It is much too mettlesome a story for fiction,’ said New York’s influential Herald Tribune. ‘It happens to be the truth. Brickhill tells it with a patient anger that has its own eloquence.’184 ‘For sheer suspense, puts the fictioneers to shame,’ wrote the Boston Globe. ‘Puts the average war book so far in the shadow it’s not even funny,’ waxed the Dallas Times-Herald. ‘Tense, thrilling, fabulous,’ said the Philadelphia Inquirer. ‘Will hold you spellbound,’ declared the Boston Herald.185
In Sydney, Del Fox clipped an article about the reception for The Great Escape from a local newspaper and filed it in her Paul Brickhill collection. Before long aware that her former flame had married, it was the last item about Brickhill that Del would retain.
In the English autumn, The Great Escape’s good reviews and rocketing sales brought sudden notoriety to Brickhill, not the least among the Australian expat community in London. Urged by Margot, Brickhill begrudgingly set aside his Dam Busters manuscript every few weeks so they could host parties in their small Chelsea flat.
It was mostly fellow Australian writers that Brickhill attracted. One was Jon Cleary, a reporter with the Australia News and Information Bureau in Fleet Street for the previous two years. Apart from a shared Sydney journalistic background, Brickhill and Cleary had a lot in common. Of a similar age, they were the same height, blue-eyed and had a passion for fast cars and motor racing. Both had met their future wives onboard ship while sailing to England. And, like Brickhill’s parents, Cleary’s mother and father had been wiped out by the Great Depression. As a consequence, like Brickhill, Cleary loathed debt. In 1947, Cleary’s first novel You Can’t See ’Round Corners had been published. It hadn’t been successful enough for him to give up his day job, but, like Brickhill, Cleary dreamed of worldwide success as an author. It was a dream both would achieve before long. Although Cleary would transfer to New York shortly after this, he would return the following year and become a regular at Brickhill ‘do’s’, with the pair becoming long-term mates.
Another new Australian literary friend in London was Ian Bevan, a London book editor of note, who introduced Brickhill to Russell Braddon. Five years Brickhill’s junior, Braddon had written The Naked Island, a novel based on his years as a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma Railway, which became a multi-million seller as well as a stage play and film. Both Braddon and Bevan had flats at Dolphin Square in Chelsea. This massive Thames-side apartment complex with central heating and a swimming pool was then, as it is now, considered rather fashionable.
Bevan introduced Brickhill to other literary Australians in London, among them journalist and nonfiction writer Chester Wilmot and biographer and military historian Alan Moorehead. In October, another Dolphin Square resident sent the Brickhills an invitation to a party in his flat – Peter Finch – whose star was, like Brickhill’s, on the rise. Apart from his growing film career, Finch was taking the West End stage by storm.
October 18 was the opening night for Orson Welles’ production of Othello at the St James Theatre, with Finch playing Iago to Welles’ Othello. That night, the party in Finch’s ninth-floor Dolphin Square flat was in full swing by the time F
inch and his wife, Tamara, themselves arrived, late, following curtain calls at the St James. Brickhill and Margot were there. Looking across the crowded room, Brickhill spotted his boyhood friend, champagne glass in hand.
Seeing Brickhill at the same instant, Finch, smirking, slowly raised his glass to him. ‘Success! Success!’ he called above the hubbub.
Breaking into a smile, Brickhill raised his glass in a return salute. ‘Success! Success!’ he called back.186
Brickhill reflected on their shared teenage dream. Finch was on the London stage, but not as a result of an urgent call from across the seas. And Brickhill hadn’t flown him there in his own plane. Finch had brought himself to England and fought his way up through the acting ranks, while Brickhill was a pilot who was now afraid of flying. The pair would restart their friendship, although the bond would never again be as strong as it had been in their youth.
Margot wasn’t happy. Between promotion for The Great Escape and continuing work on The Dam Busters, Brickhill was labouring around the clock and had little time for his wife. They agreed she should get away for a break on her own. Eve Norton, a mutual friend living in Dublin, invited Margot to come and stay, and, in November, Brickhill farewelled his wife as she set off for the Irish capital. Grateful for peace and quiet, he went back to work on The Dam Busters. Within a week of Margot going to Ireland, Brickhill received a telephone call from Eve. She told him that Margot had suffered a nervous breakdown under her roof. Dropping everything, Brickhill rushed to Dublin.
The doctor attending Margot told Brickhill that his wife was suffering from hysteria and hallucinations, and recommended she receive psychiatric help. When Brickhill brought Margot back to London in December, he put her under the care of Dr Mason, the same psychiatrist who’d helped him the previous year. Margot would see Mason for the next six months.187 While now treating Margot with kid gloves, Brickhill still had to complete his book, and without delay. Like all publishers, Faber & Faber paid its authors royalties every six months. With a royalty cheque for The Great Escape still a long way off, Brickhill needed the advance that would come with delivery of The Dam Busters.
The Hero Maker Page 19