Spring came. On May 2, 1945, a British armoured unit liberated Ogilvie and the prisoners who were with him. For Keith Ogilvie, the war was over. Six days later, the war was over for everyone in Europe.
In Their Finest Hour, Churchill says the figure given to him of 183 German planes shot down on September 15, 1940, was inflated. After the war he learned that the real number was fifty-six, less than a third of the original estimate. Nevertheless, this toll was too high for the Luftwaffe, which concluded that it could not defeat the RAF at that time.
When the Allied troops moved into Germany, Irene’s position at the RCAF enabled her to see what had occurred in that country during the war. She printed photos taken by RCAF photographers at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in northwest Germany. The photos showed cremation ovens and piles of bodies thrown into pits.
After he returned to England, Ogilvie recuperated in a hospital in Gloucester. He wrote to Irene and suggested they get together. When he called her office in London, her supervisor told him she was on vacation beside Lake Windermere, in the Lake District in northwest England. The supervisor also gave him her address.
Ogilvie went to the lake, and found her room. Wearing his full uniform, he knocked on her door. Irene Lockwood was not only stunned that he had found her, but she was delighted to see that he looked so well and had recovered from his ordeals as a prisoner of war.
Ogilvie applied to transfer from the RAF to the Royal Canadian Air Force. This time, the RCAF accepted his application, even though he still did not have a university degree. It could hardly deny that he had gained a considerable amount of experience.
Before he left England, Ogilvie filed a report with MI9, the British intelligence service, about his escape from Stalag Luft III. It described how he got out of the tunnel and watched the German guard walk toward the exit shaft. It also described his experience with the Gestapo in the Gorlitz prison.
He sailed for Canada in July 1945, on the ocean liner Stratheden. Back in Canada, Ogilvie worked with the RCAF’s welcoming committee that met members of the air force returning from England on ships that docked at Montreal, Halifax, and New York.
Irene sailed home to Canada on the Queen Elizabeth on February 15, 1946. She had a cold, rough voyage.
Five days later, when the ship docked in New York, she heard her name on the public address system: “Will Irene Lockwood please report to the purser’s office.”
She feared something was wrong. Perhaps a member of her family was ill or had died. When she got to the purser’s office, she was amazed. Keith Ogilvie stood before her. As a member of the welcoming committee, he knew when Irene would return and he arranged to go to New York to welcome her.
Most passengers on the ship were not allowed to go ashore, but Irene left the ship with her special escort. They both enjoyed seeing New York, particularly a show by comedian Danny Kaye. Irene then took a train to Montreal.
Within a few months of returning to Canada, Irene became engaged to Ogilvie. They got married that summer.
Ogilvie, the career officer, remained in the air force and became a squadron leader. He retired in 1963.
As Anthony Eden had promised, the British government sought the Germans who murdered the fifty officers. After the war, the Royal Air Force investigated the deaths and laid charges against Gestapo agents. In his book The Longest Tunnel, Alan Burgess sums up the results of the investigation: twenty-one members of the Gestapo were executed, eleven committed suicide, seventeen received long prison terms, and a few were acquitted. Six had been killed in air raids at the end of the war.
In 2000, the British archives released a previously classified document that showed that the decision to execute the fifty escapers was made at the highest level; Adolf Hitler had participated in the decision. He had hoped that executing the prisoners would set an example that would discourage other prisoners from escaping.
In 1963, the mass escape at Stalag Luft III was turned into the movie, The Great Escape. Ogilvie enjoyed the film as a Hollywood production, but he thought many scenes did not portray what really happened. No one, for example, escaped on a motorcycle like Captain Hilts, the character portrayed by American actor Steve McQueen.
Although the characters are composites of real prisoners, one scene resembles the incident in which Ogilvie removed a guard’s wallet. In the movie, Flight Lieutenant Hendley, played by James Garner, takes a wallet from Werner, a guard. Werner later tells Hendley that he has lost his wallet, and fears he could be sent to the Russian front. Hendley offers to find the wallet but only if Werner gives him a camera.
The stone wall of Victoria Station that the Dornier bomber scraped remains chipped to this day. The chipping is visible about a metre above the ground, at the entrance of what is now a pub called The Iron Duke.
After the war, Ray Holmes, the pilot whose Hurricane struck the Dornier bomber, resumed his career in journalism in Liverpool. He died in 2005.
Ogilvie never claimed to be the only pilot who fired at the Dornier. He thought as many as six other pilots may have attacked it. However, as the years flew by, Ogilvie’s encounter with the German bomber near Buckingham Palace became legendary. One magazine story contained a photo of the palace with the words “Saved by a Canadian” — a claim Ogilvie never made. An article in the Ottawa Citizen on May 28, 1998, quotes Tony Little, a friend of Ogilvie’s, as saying Ogilvie gave up trying to clarify what he really did.
Keith Ogilvie and his wife, Irene, at a reception in London to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain in 1990.
What is not a legend is that Ogilvie met the current occupant of the palace. Queen Elizabeth talked to him on September 15, 1990, at a ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain.
Irene Ogilvie, who will be ninety-one in 2010, lives in a retirement home in Ottawa. She still remembers the photos she printed of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. When she hears younger people denying the Holocaust, she feels like telling them that she saw evidence of atrocities.
The German doctors’ opinion that Ogilvie’s arm would heal properly turned out to be correct. He had full use of his arm, even when he golfed. Ogilvie’s son, Keith Ogilvie Jr., however, thinks that the cold winters at Stalag