Most Popular Books by Paul Brickhill

An account of the escape of almost one hundred British prisoners of war from a German prison camp in 1944.

In 1931, at the age of 21, Douglas Bader was the golden boy of the RAF. Excelling in everything he did he represented the Royal Air Force in aerobatics displays, played rugby for Harlequins, and was tipped to be the next England fly half. But one afternoon in December all his ambitions came to an abrupt end when he crashed his plane doing a particularly difficult and illegal aerobatic trick. His injuries were so bad that surgeons were forced to amputate both his legs to save his life. Douglas Bader did not fly again until the outbreak of the Second World War, when his undoubted skill in the air was enough to convince a desperate air force to give him his own squadron. The rest of his story is the stuff of legend. Flying Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain he led his squadron to kill after kill, keeping them all going with his unstoppable banter. Shot down in occupied France, his German captors had to confiscate his tin legs in order to stop him trying to escape. Bader faced it all, disability, leadership and capture, with the same charm, charisma and determination that was an inspiration to all around him.

Extraordinary times. Extraordinary courage. Here, from the bestselling author of The Great Escape, are eight true and startling escape stories from the Second World War. The heroism of the servicemen who dared to defy their captors in this volume is matched only by that of the underground movements and ordinary civilians who helped the escapees in these stories of daring, invention and doggedness against the odds. From the account of the Spitfire pilot left for dead by an execution squad in Sicily to the story of the air gunner forced to blag his way across the Baltic, every one is an unputdownable classic. ‘As long as there are prisons men will try to escape from them; and as long as there is an RAF it will bring to the problems of escape the qualities of high resource, pure cussedness and that indefinable, damnably annoying refusal to lie down when dead, of which all the stories in this book are such excellent - and, I think, such exciting - examples.’ H.E. Bates

Tells the true World War II story of how the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron carried out a raid on three of the most important dams in Germany.

Paris, 1961, Robert Mackay, a tourist, saunters up to the bar of a Left Bank care, orders a drink, eyes a pretty girl ... A shot is fired, then two more. A man falls dead next to Mackay.