In the last days before the mass breakout, work reached completion all major sections of X Organization activity. Tommy Guest’s tailors put the final stitching and buttons on clothes for kriegies with low numbers and high linguistic capability about to go through “Harry” in the first wave. Al Hake’s assembly line in Hut 103 stowed as many as 250 homemade compasses in Tunnel “Dick” for safekeeping. And Des Plunkett’s team of mapmakers completed mimeographing 4,000 escape maps. One such map was distributed to designated hard-arser Keith Ogilvie.
“I was one of the great majority who (was to go) out in (air force) uniform,” Ogilvie told members of the Ashbury Journal in 1971, “creating a smokescreen to enable the chaps who were better equipped with civilian clothes and passes to get away on the trains. We had maps and our hope was to get into Czechoslovakia.”
Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie was an Ottawa-born RAF fighter pilot, who had been shot down over Lille, France, early in the war. In fact, the Germans scored propaganda points in the event when William Joyce (a.k.a. Lord Haw Haw, the British-born fascist who became the Nazis’ chief English-language broadcaster) announced Ogilvie’s capture immediately after it happened on July 4, 1941.
At Stalag Luft III, Ogilvie joined escape committee activity by lifting the wallet of a guard and rushing it to Tony Pengelly’s forgery team for examination. Ogilvie then informed the guard he’d found the wallet on the floor. Worried about the consequences of prison authorities discovering he’d lost his papers while inside the compound, the guard thanked Ogilvie profusely. Another guard had thus been tamed and vital identification papers had made their way to the forgery group for replication.
In this final week of winter in March, Ogilvie recalled his feelings about the looming escape, as “much the same feeling one would have before playing an important football game. (I) was keyed up and anxious for the show to start.”
