Writer, born in Sydney, New South Wales, SE Australia. He studied at Sydney University, and worked in journalism before serving with the Royal Australian Air Force during World War 2. Shot down in North Africa, he was for two years a prisoner-of-war in Stalag Luft III, Germany; he described his escape from the camp in The Great Escape (1951). He became the most successful non-fiction writer of the post-war period, with The Dam Busters (1951), Escape or Die (1952), and Reach for the Sky (1954).
Paul Chester Jerome Brickhill (December 20, 1916 – April 23, 1991) was an Australian writer, whose World War II books were turned into popular movies.
Educated at North Sydney Boys High School, before World War II, Brickhill worked as a journalist. He subsequently documented the escape in The Great Escape (New York: Norton, 1950).
Three books by Brickhill were made into movies:
Reach for the Sky, based on Reach for the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader, Legless Ace of the Battle of Britain. The Dam Busters, based on The Dam Busters, and Operation Chastise, the destruction of dams in the Ruhr valley by RAF No. The Great Escape, recounting the events of the 1944 escape from the German prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III.
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