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 raid siren started wailing. Irene remained in the tub even though she could hear in the distance the throbbing hum made by German bombers. Then she heard bombs explode. The hum became louder, but Irene was not getting out of that tub.
Suddenly, one of her apartment mates, Helen Baker, rushed into the bathroom. “You’ve got to get out because it’s on its way here, and it sounds as though we’re right in the pathway,” she said as she grabbed Irene’s hair and pulled her out of the tub. The two women crawled under a grand piano.
A bomb struck the neighbourhood about a block away. The explosion shattered every window in the apartment unit. Broken glass fell into the bathtub.
While the two women were still under the piano, an air raid warden opened the door of the apartment and shone a flashlight. “Everything all right in here?” he asked.
Yes, everything was all right. Helen had made sure of that.
Finally, in March 1944, the tunnellers had nearly finished Harry. On March 24, two hundred men quietly assembled in hut 104. They entered in small groups so that the guards would not be suspicious.
During the evening the tunnellers chipped away at the soil near the surface. They were shocked when they removed the last bit of earth and looked out. The exit shaft was several metres short of the trees.
Despite the lack of cover for the men leaving the tunnel, the escape went ahead. The prisoners improvised a method that would enable an escaper to leave the exit shaft without a guard seeing him. A man who had just come through the tunnel would hide in the woods then tug a rope to let the prisoner in the shaft know when he could safely come out.
Late in the evening, the prisoners started going down the shaft under room 23, and getting onto trolleys for the 108-metre journey through the tunnel. The men didn’t get through as swiftly as expected. Some were not familiar with the tunnel, others could not move quickly because they wore bulky clothes for the cold weather and carried packages of food. Parts of the roof collapsed a few times. The sand had to be removed before more prisoners could go through the tunnel.
Around midnight, Allied air crews inadvertently created a problem for the escapers. An air raid on Berlin prompted the camp to switch off the electricity to ensure a total black out. The lights in the tunnel went out, further delaying the movement of men.
Ogilvie went through the tunnel just before dawn. He was number seventy-six. He climbed up the shaft and then slithered over the snow to the trees where he joined Flight Lieutenant Lawrence Reavell-Carter. They were waiting for ten men to form a group that would skirt the camp before they split into groups of two. Flight Lieutenant Roy Langlois was lying on the ground near the exit, pulling the rope to signal when men could leave the tunnel.
Flight Lieutenant Michael Shand was the next man out.