The Hero Maker Read online

  A new day brought a new approach. His chief interrogating officer brought Brickhill’s battledress and other clothes to his cell and laid them out on the bed. The battledress had been cleaned and pressed, the rents in the back, made when Brickhill was wounded over the desert, sewn up. The captain even presented him with a long, flowing, military greatcoat and a scarf. It would still be wintry where he was going, he was told. At that time, newly captured RAF prisoners were being given the greatcoats of Polish officers, probably from a stockpile created by the Russians after massacring 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940, and seized by the Germans when they invaded Russia the following year.

  Once the prisoner had dressed, his interrogator took him to an office. Opening a filing cabinet, the captain took out a file with the prisoner’s name on it. The captain proceeded to astonish him by reading aloud accurate details of his military career, from pilot training to war service, even talking about the exploits of men in his squadron. Dropping the folder back into its drawer, the captain closed the drawer with a bang.

  ‘Name, rank and number?’ he exclaimed, with practised disdain. ‘Bah! Who needs it?’73

  The captain was trying to get the prisoner to relax his guard. A more gullible prisoner might reason that if the Germans knew so much about him, he needn’t worry about giving away information they already knew, and subsequently reveal more than he should. Brickhill found his captors soon being very chummy indeed. In his last days at Dulag Luft, he was informed that the pilot who’d shot him down was going to pay him a visit, as a friendly gesture between fellow knights of the air.

  At Dulag Luft, RAF navigator and future Stalag Luft 3 escapee and author Eric Williams met a Luftwaffe oberleutnant who claimed to be the Junkers 88 night-fighter pilot who’d shot down his Wellington bomber. Williams became convinced the man was an intelligence officer, or, at the very least, was working with the interrogators.74 Brickhill was less suspicious. In North Africa, several German pilots shot down by 92 Squadron had been taken to meet the men who’d downed them. Brickhill’s generosity of spirit would show itself when, years later, he said he felt no bitterness towards the man who’d shot him down. ‘There were no hard feelings. It was done without anger. There was just a job to be done.’ Besides, Brickhill felt he’d been careless in allowing himself to be jumped by an unseen opponent over the Tunisian desert.75

  As it turned out, Brickhill was moved from Dulag Luft before the projected pilot’s visit took place. That pilot and Brickhill never met. Brickhill would have been disappointed, if not horrified, to learn that he’d been the victim of an Italian, ‘Eyties’ being considered inferior pilots to those of the RAF. Worse, an Italian flying an aircraft rated the technical inferior of the Spitfire.

  Brickhill spent just a week at Dulag Luft. Other downed Allied airmen, especially bomber aircrew with knowledge of radar developments, could spend up to thirty days under interrogation. On 2 April, with a group of other RAF prisoners, Brickhill was discharged into the hands of Luftwaffe men armed with MP40s, or, as he habitually called all submachine guns, ‘Tommy-guns’, after the American Thompson submachine gun. Under the watchful eye of their escort, the prisoners transferred to the local railway station and were loaded into a third-class European day coach with hard wooden seats. They, and their guards, set off on an arduous two-day rail journey east, dodging Allied air raids, to German Silesia, and the camp that Brickhill would one day immortalise. The most formative period of his career was about to begin.

  8.

  Welcome to Stalag Luft 3

  ALONG THE TREE-LINED road the 400 metres from Sagan station tramped a group of sullen Allied airmen in ragged formation. Around them marched their guards, alert German Air Force men armed with the neat MP40 submachine gun. In the middle of the group, swathed in a greatcoat and scarf against the sharp spring cold, trod Paul Brickhill. Almost all his companions were bomber aircrew, and most were several years younger than the Australian. It was 4 April 1943, and the captives were being herded towards Stalag Luft 3, a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Allied flyers in Silesia, 150 kilometres southeast of Berlin.

  In front of them, the vista of close-packed fir trees opened up to reveal a large clearing in Sagan Forest containing a camp sprawling behind barbed-wire fences. Dotted along the outer fence were guard towers, each containing a sentry with a heavy machinegun and searchlight. The new arrivals were marched to a gate on the northwest corner of North Compound. Fourth and latest of the camp’s compounds, it had only been open for business for three days. Here, at the North Compound gate, Brickhill and his companions came to a halt, waiting as an attractive German girl in Luftwaffe uniform passed out through the gate from the Vorlager – literally, the ‘fore camp’ – which contained the Luftwaffe administration area immediately inside the compound gate.

  As Brickhill was to learn, female Luftwaffe personnel were among 100 censors working in the nearby Kommandantur, the camp command centre, under intelligence officer Hauptmann Günther von Massow, censoring the mail of all Stalag Luft 3 prisoners. Men of the new batch of captives were beginning to shuffle through the open outer gate, but Brickhill had turned to watch the well-formed censor bicycle away. Suddenly, with a grunt, he felt the business end of an MP40 being jabbed into his ribs.

  ‘If you are ever found with a German girl,’ threatened the Luftwaffe man at the other end of the submachine gun, having apparently read the Australian’s thoughts, ‘you will pay for it with your life.’76

  Looking over his shoulder, Brickhill saw the guard’s finger resting close to his trigger. With another shove of the MP40, Brickhill stumbled forward and through the gate to join his travelling companions. Inside the Vorlager, to his left Brickhill could see a low guardhouse. To his right there was a distant coal dump and, closer, what appeared to be a compound hospital and another administration building, a grey concrete structure with bars on the windows. The latter was the solitary confinement block, or ‘Cooler’ as both prisoners and guards called it, where prisoners were sent to cool off for weeks at a time after breaking camp regulations or attempting escape. Ahead stood another three-metre wall of barbed wire, and, beyond it, North Compound itself.

  One by one, the new prisoners had their photographs taken, standing in the open with their backs to the guardhouse wall. Brickhill posed with an expression that mixed a scowl with an amused tug at the left corner of the mouth. He was weighed, coming in at 72 kilograms in boots and heavy garments. His minute details were recorded by efficient English-speaking Luftwaffe clerks. Height. Hair colour. Eye colour. Date of birth. Pre-war occupation. For his religion, Brickhill gave Church of England, but after the wartime horrors he’d witnessed he was no longer a believer. Asked for details of next of kin, Brickhill gave his father George’s name and Greenwich Point address.

  A guard roughly pressed the Australian’s index finger into an ink pad before applying the print to a Personalkarte, the record card devoted to Brickhill that would sit in camp files for the rest of his incarceration. Each prisoner was issued with a new dog tag, replacing their own, which had been removed after capture. The new metal, oblong neck tag was stamped with the word Kriegsgefangener – prisoner of war – and a number. From now on, these men were ‘kriegies’, as English-speaking prisoners of the Germans called themselves, and they were entering ‘kriegiedom’.77

  Marched to the inner gateway, the new arrivals were admitted to their new home. Taking little notice of the latest arrivals, hundreds of Allied airmen in bits and pieces of often-threadbare uniform strolled around ‘the circuit’, a walking track inside the wire, hands in pockets, in small groups. Many looked far from military, with stubbly beards and shaggy hair. Others had shaved their heads shiny bald. Not a few were hollow-eyed. A lot of these men had been prisoners for more than three years.

  The double gate was shut and locked. The Germans were now on the outside, prisoners on the inside. Several RAF officers came to meet Brickhill’s group. The new men were divided up and instructed to
follow the welcoming committee, in turn, to various accommodation blocks in the camp. Brickhill was taken to 103 Block. Like the other fifteen blocks, it was a long single-storey wooden building divided into fifteen rooms each capable of housing eight men in four double bunks, plus three two-man rooms for senior officers.

  Accommodation blocks had a washroom with concrete floor, a toilet and a basic kitchen with a two-plate coal-burning stove. Apart from the bunks, furnishings in the bunk rooms were basic: a bare wooden table surrounded by eight chairs and stools, wooden lockers and a small coal-burning stove set on tiles in the corner. A bunk in one of these rooms was assigned to Brickhill. The room was devoid of occupants when the welcoming committee brought him in. Here, he was grilled in private, to establish that he was who he said he was.

  ‘This is just routine, old boy,’ said one of the welcoming committee once the questioning had ended satisfactorily. ‘We have to make sure the Hun isn’t trying to put a “plant” in here on us.’78

  The Germans were known to try to infiltrate spies into POW camps posing as prisoners, to obtain information. One such spy discovered in the Russian compound had been strung up by the genuine prisoners, who told the Germans he’d committed suicide. Having passed the test, Brickhill was welcomed into the camp community. Shortly, he was told, he would be taken to be officially greeted by the Senior British Officer, or SBO, Group Captain Herbert Massey. The welcoming committee departed, and before long Brickhill’s roommates began wandering back in, to look him over.

  Brickhill quickly befriended a fellow Australian in 103, a prisoner who’d been ‘in the bag’ twelve months by this time. Albert ‘Al’ Hake was his name, and his voice wafted from a northern room in the block as he sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and strummed a guitar provided by the International Red Cross. Handsome, a little taller than Brickhill, and stockier, Al Hake had thick dark hair and remarkably bushy eyebrows. He and Brickhill had a lot in common. Both were from Sydney, were the same age, had been members of the RAAF Reserve before enlisting, had ended up Spitfire pilots attached to the RAF, and had both been shot down flying Spits – in Hake’s case, over France in 1942 after a tussle with five Focke-Wulf 190s.

  Hake had enlisted in the RAAF at Sydney just two days before Brickhill signed up. Their paths hadn’t crossed back then. While Brickhill trained as a pilot at Narrandera and in Canada, Hake had done all his pilot training in Wagga Wagga, and once he’d gained his ‘wings’ he’d been sent direct to Britain. Just a month after Brickhill commenced his training at the RAF’s 53 Operational Training Unit at Llandow in South Wales, Hake arrived to also train in Spitfires. They’d passed each other in corridors and on the tarmac at Llandow without becoming friends, but now, in Stalag Luft 3, the two Aussies quickly became good chums.

  Brickhill was soon taken to meet Group Captain Massey in a two-bed end room. The tall, slender, forty-eight-year-old SBO was crippled by a foot injured on multiple occasions, the last time when he’d bailed out over the Ruhr. Regularly in and out of the compound hospital, Massey spent the rest of the time with his foot up or hobbling painfully about with the aid of a stick. As North Compound’s SBO, he dealt directly with the Luftwaffe’s camp commandant, who was of similar rank.

  After Brickhill came to attention before Massey, who sat behind the small table serving as his desk, the SBO proceeded to have an amiable chat with the Australian about camp life and the German regulations that governed it. Once the formalities were over, Massey informed Brickhill that Squadron Leader Roger Bushell would also want a word with him over the next day or two. Intriguingly, the SBO didn’t say what the meeting with Bushell would be about.

  Once Massey dismissed him, Brickhill went for a wander around the ‘circuit’, to take in his new surroundings. The warning wire, a barrier of low strands set ten metres in from the initial fence, could be easily stepped over. But, do so without permission, and you could be shot by one of the ‘goons’, or guards, stationed in the ‘goon boxes’, the towers standing every fifty metres outside the fences. Around the camp perimeter ran a pair of high wire fences two metres apart. Brickhill, a man with an eye for detail, counted an average of twenty rusty strands of barbed wire to each fence. Coils of barbed wire filled the gap between the two fences. From the outer fence to the close-packed trees that surrounded the camp and sealed it off from the outside world there was an open space – a hundred feet wide, in Brickhill’s estimation.

  Inside the compound, apart from the accommodation blocks there was a kitchen, used primarily to boil water and potatoes, and a parade ground. Covered with dry grey earth and dotted with tree stumps, this open space was where prisoners had to assemble twice a day in five ranks, in all weathers, to be counted by their guards. The Germans called this parade Appell. The Appell ground also served as the prisoners’ recreation area. Within a few months a wooden theatre would be thrown up on its northern edge by prisoners. In addition, there was a large square pool in the middle of the compound, its water to be used in case of fire. This bleak camp, ‘innocent of luxury’ as Brickhill was to put it, was now his home; a desolate, Godforsaken place in his opinion.79

  The day following his arrival, Brickhill responded to a summons to 110 Block. Roger Bushell was waiting for him. The Australian knew of Bushell, a thirty-two-year-old South African-born Brit who’d gone to school in England and been a barrister in London before the war. When Bushell was shot down in May 1940, he’d been commanding officer of Brickhill’s last squadron, Number 92, although that had been some time before Brickhill joined the unit. Brickhill was impressed by Bushell when he met him, and a little intimidated. ‘He was a big tempestuous man,’ he was to say, ‘with broad shoulders and the most chilling pale blue eyes I ever saw.’ Bushell had injured his right eye in a skiing accident before the war, and that eye drooped a little, giving him a slightly sinister appearance.80

  Behind his closed door, Bushell informed the newcomer that he was ‘Big X’, chief of ‘the X Organisation’, the camp’s secret escape committee. And Bushell told Brickhill that every inmate of the compound was expected to participate in a mass escape plan first conceived the previous Christmas and which, since North Compound’s inmates had only been transferred here three days before Brickhill’s arrival, was just now coming together. When Brickhill expressed a desire to be involved, Bushell asked him what special skills he possessed. What, for example, had been his pre-war occupation?

  ‘Journalist, with the Sydney Sun,’ Brickhill replied.

  Bushell wasn’t overly impressed. He was looking for specialised skills: men who could dig tunnels, produce escape equipment, tailor escape clothes, or forge German documents. Still, because Brickhill was trained in shorthand, he could join the team rostered onto listening, via headphones, to the BBC News, on a secret camp radio nicknamed the ‘Canary’. That radio had originally been smuggled into the camp in a soccer ball, by a Brit captured at Dunkirk in 1940. The job of the shorthand boys was to note down every word of the nightly news bulletins. The following day, war news would be quietly spread through the compound by word of mouth.

  Brickhill went away from his first meeting with Big X excited by the possibility of being a part of a big breakout. Little did he or Bushell know that his journalistic talents, while of small value to the X Organisation, would eventually help the Australian shape some aspects of the history of World War Two, and make both Brickhill and Bushell famous.

  9.

  The Tunnel Game

  SAGAN WOULD BECOME the Polish town of Zagan in the post-war redrawing of European borders. Paul Brickhill estimated that, when he arrived there, the town had a population of 25,000. Northeast of Dresden and west of Breslau – today’s Wroclaw – Sagan was an important rail junction. German trains heading to and from the Russian front passed through here. From his Stalag Luft 3 bed in North Compound’s 103 Block, shivering beneath two blankets on a thin mattress stuffed with wood shavings, Brickhill could nightly hear the wheeze and puff of shunting locomotives, and the clang of buffer hitti
ng buffer, as freight trains were marshalled in the Sagan yards.

  Stalag Luft 3 was run by the Luftwaffe, which provided all the officers, guards and administrative staff – 1200 men and women by late 1944.81 The German Air Minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, had told one Stalag Luft 3 inmate in a meeting following the man’s capture in 1940 that his policy was to look after Air Force prisoners well.82 Compared to the way the Japanese looked after prisoners of war generally, and the way the Germans looked after Russian prisoners specifically – the Soviets were not signatories to the Geneva Convention on the rights of prisoners of war, so their men were not protected by its provisions – the prisoners at Stalag Luft 3 were cared for relatively well, at least up until the closing stages of the war.

  As Brickhill settled into life as a kriegie, he learned camp etiquette. Apart from the SBO, everyone referred to each other by first name or nickname. Food etiquette was all-important. The Germans daily issued each prisoner with a small hunk of black bread, from which three or four thin slices were made to stretch over three meals. Plus, either a few potatoes or a cup of sauerkraut. Once a week, a small ration of sausage was handed out, together with a tablespoon of jam made from sugar beet and a tablespoon of margarine per man.

  Once a week, too, welcome Red Cross food parcels from home were distributed, one for each prisoner. The Australian and New Zealand parcels were popular, for, in addition to bully beef, powdered milk, raisins or prunes, sugar, tea or coffee, a chocolate bar and a pack of cigarettes, they contained a tin of prized Australasian butter. Roughly every three weeks, minced horsemeat was made available by the Luftwaffe, and occasionally, too, a few vegetables, a little barley, and soup bones. Under rules established by the prisoners themselves, all food went into a community fund, with the eight men per room cooking and eating their shared rations together.