Comet Line
The Comet Line was a Resistance organization in occupied Belgium and France in the Second World War. The Comet Line helped Allied soldiers and airmen shot down over occupied Belgium evade capture by Germans and return to Great Britain. The Comet Line began in Brussels where the airmen were fed, clothed, given false identity papers, and hidden in attics, cellars, and people's homes. A network of volunteers then escorted them south through occupied France into neutral Spain and home via British-controlled Gibraltar. The motto of the Comet Line was "Pugna Quin Percutias", which means "fight without arms", as the organization did not undertake armed or violent resistance to the German occupation.
The Comet Line was the largest of several escape networks in occupied Europe. In three years, the Comet Line helped 776 people, mostly British and American airmen, escape to Spain or evade capture in Belgium and France. An estimated 3,000 civilians, mostly Belgians and French, assisted the Comet Line. They are usually called "helpers". Seven hundred helpers were arrested by the Germans and 290 were executed or died in prison or concentration camps. The Comet Line maintained its operational independence, but received financial assistance from MI9, a British intelligence agency dedicated to the rescue of Allied prisoners of war and service members from behind enemy lines.
For the Allies, the rescue of downed airmen by the Comet and other escape lines had a practical as well as a humanitarian objective. Training new and replacement air crews was expensive and time-consuming. Rescuing airmen downed in occupied Europe and returning them to duty was a priority. Andrée de Jongh, a 24-year-old Belgian woman, was the first leader of the Comet Line. She was imprisoned by the Germans in 1943, but survived the war. Subsequent leaders were also imprisoned, executed, or killed in the course of their work getting airmen to Spain. Young women, including teenagers, played important roles in the Comet Line. Sixty-five to 70 percent of Comet Line helpers were women.
Creation
In 1941, an increasing number of British and allied aircraft were being shot down in Nazi-occupied Europe. Most downed airmen were killed or taken prisoner but some evaded capture and were sheltered by allied sympathizers and an emerging resistance movement to German rule. In Belgium, Andrée de Jongh age 24, Arnold Deppé age 32, and Jacques Donny age 47, created what became known as the Comet Line to help Allied airmen escape and return to the United Kingdom. All three founders worked for the Société Financière de Transport et d'Entreprises Industrielles. In June 1941, Deppé travelled from Belgium to southwestern France, where he had once lived, to look for the means to smuggle Allied soldiers, shot-down airmen, and other people vulnerable to capture by the Germans out of Belgium. Deppé made contact with the de Greef family in Anglet, near the Spanish border and arranged for their help in getting people across the border. Elvire De Greef, known as Tante Go, and members of her family became stalwarts of the Comet Line.In July 1941, De Jongh and Deppé, assisted by the de Greefs, attempted their first crossing of the Spanish border with 10 Belgian men and a Belgian female secret agent named Frederique Dupuich. After they crossed the border, de Jongh and Deppé left their charges to fend for themselves and returned to Belgium. The Belgians were arrested by Spanish police and three Belgian soldiers among them were turned over to the Germans in France. The others were jailed briefly and fined. From this experience, de Jongh and Deppé realized that they must accompany their charges secretly all the way to the British Consulate in Bilbao and obtain British assistance.
In August, Deppé and de Jongh escorted another group of people, de Jongh taking a longer, more rural, and safer route with three men, including Private James Cromar of the Gordon Highlanders, 51st Division and Deppé taking a shorter, more dangerous route with six men. An informer betrayed Deppé and he and his group were arrested by the Germans. Deppé was imprisoned for the remainder of the war. De Jongh arrived safely at the de Greefs' house and crossed into Spain with a Basque smuggler as a guide. De Jongh and her three charges arrived at the British Consulate in Bilbao. She persuaded the British government to pay the Comet Line's expenses for transporting Allied soldiers and airmen from Belgium to Spain but declined all other assistance and guidance offered by the British. MI9, under the control of the ex-infantry Major Norman Crockatt and Lieutenant James Langley, who had been repatriated after losing his left arm in the rearguard at Dunkirk in 1940, approved financial assistance for the Comet Line.
Other than financial assistance, De Jongh was adamant in retaining the independence of the Comet Line from the British and the Belgian government in exile in Great Britain. She said that the Belgian and British attempts to control the Comet Line "were given by people who were not aware of the situation, and did not understand the spirit that drove the team, nor the...situation under which the work was being done". Langley of MI9 commented that the Comet Line's "intransigence and failure to make use of some of the help we offered them...nearly drove me frantic". Until 1943, the Comet Line denied the offer of the British to supply it with radios and radio operators to facilitate vetting of shot-down Allied airmen and communication. The rationale was that resistance groups were often broken up by the Germans because a radio had been captured. De Jongh declined to communicate via radio, but rather used couriers to deliver and receive messages to and from British diplomats in Spain. It was not until June 1943, after numerous arrests and a growing backlog of airmen to be removed, that the Comet Line gave its reluctant permission for an MI9 agent, Jacques Legrelle, to work in Paris with them. Legrelle proved to be compatible with the overworked leadership of the Comet Line.
Removals
The arrest of Arnold Deppé in August 1941 introduced a note of caution into the Comet Line. Andrée de Jongh decided that Belgium was unsafe for her and moved to Paris. Initially, her father, Frederic, the headmaster of a primary school, took over the operation in Belgium. His job was to rescue shot-down airmen, install them in safe houses, provide them with false identity documents, European clothing, training in European mannerisms and an escort who would accompany them to Paris or all the way to Spain. Andrée de Jongh was the most frequent escort; she escorted one group of three airmen in October 1941, another group of three in November, and two groups totaling 11 men in December 1941. That level of activity continued in 1942. MI9 officer Airey Neave described Andrée de Jongh as "one of our greatest agents". De Jongh made 24 round trips across the Pyrenees, escorting 118 airmen. Other persons who frequently escorted shot-down airmen across the border included Alfred Edward Johnson, an English handyman living with the de Greefs.The Comet line used Basques, often smugglers accustomed to crossing the French–Spanish border surreptitiously, to guide airmen across the dangerous border which was guarded by French and Spanish police and German soldiers. The favorite guide was Florentino Goikoetxea who was wanted by the French and the Spanish police. The German police, both military and security, intensified efforts to shut down the escape organizations moving airmen as Allied bombing of Europe and Germany increased.
The Comet Line had three nerve centers: Brussels, Paris and southwestern France. With the Germans closing in on the Comet Line in Belgium, De Jongh's father, Frederick, fled to Paris on April 30, 1942, to join his daughter. He took over management of the Paris center. Three leaders of the Comet Line in Belgium were arrested six days after his flight. Picking up the pieces, the Comet Line leader in Belgium then became Jean Greindl, 36 years old, the director of a charity called the "Swedish Canteen". Nemo organized a system for collecting the ever-increasing number of airmen throughout Belgium and preparing them for escape. Escorts under Nemo's direction accompanied airmen from Brussels to Paris. Nemo's principal escort to Paris for airmen until her arrest in the summer of 1942 was Andrée Dumon, 19 years old. "Nadine" survived the war in German concentration camps and described her experiences in her book Je Ne Vous Ai Pas Oubliés.
When airmen arrived in Paris, the de Jonghs took over, providing them with safe houses and false documents and with an escort, usually Andrée de Jongh, who took them to southwestern France by train. In Bayonne or Saint-Jean-de-Luz the airmen were met, usually by Elvire de Greef or her teenage daughter, Janine. From there, the airmen, a Basque guide and their escort would journey over the Pyrenees to Spain, initially by bicycle and then on foot. In San Sebastián, Spain, a car from the British consulate would meet the airmen and drive them to Madrid and onward to Gibraltar. Donald Darling met and interrogated the escapees when they arrived in Gibraltar and arranged for their transport to Britain, usually by airplane. While the airmen proceeded onward, de Jongh met in San Sebastián with British diplomat Michael Creswell,, who gave her money for the Comet Line's expenses and messages to take back to France. After the arrests of Andrée and Frederick de Jongh, Jean-François Nothomb became the leader, based in Paris, of the Comet Line.
In spring 1944, with the Allied invasion of France looming, the Comet Line, in consultation with MI9, decided to stop removals and instead gather airmen into forest camps where they could await the arrival of the Allied armies. American Virginia d'Albert-Lake and her French husband Philippe assisted in gathering airmen in the Fréteval forest in Operation Marathon. The final escapees were mostly Comet Line members running from last-minute German purges. Elvire De Greef and her two children crossed the border into Spain on June 6, 1944. The final operation of the Comet Line was on September 28, 1944, when De Greef, back in liberated France, accompanied four Allied airmen on a flight from Biarritz to England.
Young people, especially young women, working for the Comet Line often dressed, behaved, and carried false identity cards that described them as students and stated their age as several years younger than they actually were. The theory was that young women were less likely to be regarded with suspicion by the Germans. For example, one of Andrée de Jongh's false identity cards gave her the name "Denise Lacroix" and listed her birthdate as 7 July 1924, almost eight years younger than she was.