Paul Brickhill Books In Order

Non fiction

The Great Escape (1950)
The Dam Busters (1952)
Escape – Or Die (1954)
Reach for the Sky (1954)

Non fiction Book Covers

Paul Brickhill Books Overview

The Great Escape

‘A tense, thrilling, fabulous tale.’ Philadelphia Inquirer They were American and British air force officers in a German prison camp. With only their bare hands and the crudest of homemade tools, they sank shafts, forged passports, faked weapons, and tailored German uniforms and civilian clothes. They developed a fantastic security system to protect themselves from German surveillance. It was a split second operation as delicate and as deadly as a time bomb. It demanded the concentrated devotion and vigilance of more than six hundred men every one of them, every minute, every hour, every day and night for more than a year. Made into the classic movie starring Steve McQueen. 16 pages of photographs.

The Dam Busters

On 17th May 1943, nearly 350 million tonnes of water crashed into the valleys of the Ruhr, when the Lancasters of 617 Squadron breached the giant Moehne and Eder Dams with colossal ‘blockbuster’ bombs. ‘The Dam Busters‘ is the story of that raid and the squadron who carried it through. It tells how they took out the V3 rocket weapon and destroyed the Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord. Again and again, the crews of 617 Squadron Bomber Command used their flying skills, their tremendous courage and Barnes Wallis’ highly accurate bombs to deal devastating blows to Na*zi Germany. This story is one of the classics of the Second World War, a massive bestseller that became a film.

Reach for the Sky

Douglas Bader was a legend in his lifetime. After losing both legs in an air crash in 1931 and being dismissed as a cripple by the Royal Air Force, he fought his way back into the cockpit of a Spitfire to become one of the great heroes of the Battle of Britain. This inspiring biography of the famous World War II fighter pilot, first published in 1954, has a following of faithful readers who come back to the book time and again to re read, share with their children and pass along to friends. Not many books have made such an impact on people’s lives. Bader’s story is so extraordinary that no one would dare invent it, and Brickhill succeeds in matching the excitement of Bader’s war deeds with the triumph of his greater battle over a severe handicap. Told he would never walk without a cane, Bader learned to dance, swim, golf, and play tennis. Told he would never fly again, he became not only one of the RAF’s top combat pilots but a squadron leader and innovator of fighter tactics that helped win the Battle of Britain. Among the thrilling incidents chronicled in the book are Bader’s first successful encounter with an enemy plane, his own shoot down, and his succession of escapes from German prisons.