next morning, Squadron Leader Michael Robinson phoned her. “I’m sorry to give you the news, but Keith was shot down in flames,” he said. No one saw a parachute. Robinson said Ogilvie had little chance of surviving.
Irene remembered her angry reaction when Ogilvie did not appear the previous night. She felt guilty. She wrote a letter to Ogilvie’s parents, Charles and Margaret, expressing her sorrow.
Ogilvie’s parents received a telegram on July 5 from the British Air Ministry informing them that their son was missing as a result of air operations on July 4, 1941.
Ogilvie’s parachute had opened properly, even though the other pilots in 609 Squadron had not seen it. He had landed in a field.
When he regained consciousness, he was surrounded by French citizens. They tried to help him escape, but he couldn’t move. He had been hit twice in his left arm, which was broken, and once in his shoulder. He had also lost a lot of blood.
Soon, an ambulance and German soldiers arrived. One of them spoke to Ogilvie and expressed the words he would rather not have heard: “For you, the war is over.”
The German soldiers first took Ogilvie to a hospital in Lille, and later to a hospital in Brussels, Belgium. Ogilvie spent seven months lying on a bed with his left arm in a cast that was raised above him. Maggots got into the cast, but the German doctors told him that the maggots would not harm his arm. They were right; the maggots removed dead and infected tissue, and cleaned the wound by consuming bacteria.
When Ogilvie had recovered, he went to a prison camp at Spangenberg, near Kassel, in central Germany. From there he went to Stalag Luft III, a camp run by the Luftwaffe for Allied Air Force officers. It was located at Sagan, 160 kilometres southeast of Berlin. Ogilvie lived in the camp’s north compound.
Stalag Luft III was better than most prison camps and certainly better than German concentration camps. Providing they followed the rules, the prisoners at Stalag Luft III could expect to live through the war and then go home.
After he learned that his son was missing, Charles Ogilvie went for long walks beside the Rideau Canal, which was near his home at 43 Patterson Avenue in Ottawa. He would come back insisting his son was alive.
On August 27, the Air Ministry sent the Ogilvies a telegram that confirmed what Charles Ogilvie believed. The ministry said the Red Cross had informed them that Ogilvie was alive, although a badly wounded prisoner of war. The Ogilvies then wrote to Irene Lockwood in England to convey this information to her.
The prison camp permitted Ogilvie to write letters to family and friends. He corresponded with Irene. She answered his letters, but she never imagined that she would have a permanent relationship with him.
Ogilvie served as the parcel officer for the north compound. With guards watching, he opened both Red Cross parcels and packages that the prisoners received from home. The guards wanted to make sure nothing got into the camp that the prisoners could use for subversive purposes. Ogilvie had the opposite goal. He wanted, for example, to help his fellow prisoners smuggle radio parts into the camp.
Barbed wire and machine guns kept Ogilvie and his fellow prisoners inside the camp, but wire and guns didn’t stop the men from dreaming. They wanted to be on the other side of the wire.
In early 1943, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, a prisoner who had been a lawyer before the war, started planning a mass escape through a tunnel. The prime goal was to disrupt the German war effort by forcing thousands of Germans to hunt for the escaped prisoners. The plan was code-named Operation 200 because the target was to get two hundred men out of the camp. Bushell headed the escape committee and became known as “Big X.”
The prisoners started digging three tunnels, named Tom, Dick, and Harry. When the guards discovered Tom, the prisoners used Dick for storage and concentrated on Harry, which started under a stove in room 23 of hut 104. Harry went in a northerly direction toward pine trees, which were supposed to provide cover for the men as they emerged.
Bushell and the escape committee planned every aspect of the escape, from a system to stop the security guards — known to the prisoners as ferrets — from discovering the tunnel to the production of identification papers the men would need once they were free.
Ogilvie helped the escape committee by obtaining identification papers that a guard carried in his wallet. One day, Ogilvie noticed an older guard’s wallet was partly out of his back pocket. Ogilvie removed it. He gave the wallet to another prisoner who took it to a hut in which “forgers” produced identification papers. The forgers photographed the guard’s papers and gave the wallet back to Ogilvie.
Then, pointing to the wallet, Ogilvie asked the guard if it was his. Indeed it was. Ogilvie said he found it on the floor. The guard was exceedingly grateful. He said if he lost his wallet he would be sent to the eastern front to fight the Russians. From then on, the old guard couldn’t do enough to please Ogilvie and his fellow prisoners.
The material that the prisoners used to construct the tunnel came from a variety of sources. Bed boards became the tunnel’s walls, and tin cans that had originally contained powdered milk became part of the ventilation system.
An electric wire came from an unexpected source. An electrician working on the roof of the compound’s cook house left a coil of wire on the ground. Flying Officer Gordon King from Winnipeg and another prisoner, Flying Officer Ted White from Midland, Ontario, saw it and grabbed it. They hid the coil inside their long winter coats and took it to a hut.
“Man! Could we ever use that!” said Flight Lieutenant Joe Noble, who was gathering supplies. And they did. The wire helped light the tunnel.
Flight Lieutenant Tom Lane from Austin, Manitoba, was one of the prisoners who helped provide security. As a “goon watcher,” he signalled to other prisoners if a guard was approaching hut 104. (Lane’s own ordeal is described in Chapter 17, “Eagles at War.”)
Lane also had more risky assignments. On several occasions he stood in the hallway of hut 104 while a guard drank coffee or smoked a cigarette in one of the rooms of the hut. Lane’s job was to assault the guard if he came out of the room when he might see something that would make him suspicious, but he was to make the assault appear accidental. Better that the Germans reprimanded a prisoner for his conduct than that a guard should discover the tunnel. Lane never had to demonstrate his pugilistic ability, but he was ready to confront the guards if necessary.
While the prisoners tunnelled, Irene Lockwood left the Ministry of Information to join the photographic section of the RCAF at the force’s headquarters in London. Starting as a leading aircraftwoman and later becoming a sergeant, she performed various tasks in the photo department, including making prints of airmen who received medals or died. The department would then send the photos to the hometown newspapers of the airmen.
One evening, Irene was enjoying a warm bath in her apartment building, the Challoner Mansions, in the Kensington area of London. This was a wartime luxury, which she had paid for by putting money in a water meter. Irene had no intention of leaving that bathtub for any reason.
An air
