Great Escapes (4 page)

From the start of the war, the allied troops in France were almost entirely made up of soldiers. But by August 1941, the RAF were beginning their bombing campaign on the industrial areas of north-west Germany and the first of the RAF aircrews who had either baled out or crash-landed after being shot up, were being picked up by the Resistance. The number of allied troops requiring help was increasing. In addition to this, German Intelligence was becoming increasingly active and was beginning to penetrate the organisations. The GFP (
Geheime Feldpolizei
), the plain-clothes section of the German military police, concentrated a large part of their efforts in this quarter.

Then in December 1941, when the United States was thrust into the war, the number of bombing raids by B-17 bombers increased dramatically and so did the number of airmen shot down. The number of airmen requiring assistance was growing daily. It was during this period that a 25-year-old Belgian nurse by the name of Andrée de Jongh, codenamed Dedée, one of the main founders and leaders of the Comète Line, came to the attention of the allies. Together with some of her friends, she took to hiding allied airmen and arranging help for them through the Belgian Resistance.

One of her first triumphs was when she and her friend Arnold Deppe took a British soldier, Private Jim Cromer, through France and over the Pyrenees, the natural border with Spain. Arnold Deppe had already carried out a dummy run travelling by train through Paris and Bayonne, and then walking and climbing over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Together with two other Belgians, who wanted to join the organisation as couriers, Dedée and Arnold Deppe guided Jim Cromer over the Pyrenean Mountains to the British Consulate in Bilbao. The Consul, amazed at seeing the slight figure of Dedée, asked how the organisation was being funded, and she informed him that it was through the generosity of a few rich Belgians. He told her that he would contact the British Embassy in Madrid and attempt to secure additional funding for her. This would be based on 6,000 Belgian francs per person and 1,200 pesetas for the mountain guides. This was to be the first of many such trips and the rescuing of dozens of allied airmen and soldiers.

Together with her father, Frédéric de Jongh, Dedée set up a chain of safe houses along the route. Among these safe houses was one owned by Madame Elvire de Greef (codenamed ‘Tante Go’) who had left Brussels when the Germans invaded, and moved to the town of Anglet close to the border of Spain. It was with Tante Go that servicemen were rested before starting on the last leg of the journey.

Back in London there was a certain amount of scepticism about the young girl running the Comète escape line. A number of people thought that she might have been a ‘plant’ by the Gestapo in order to infiltrate the Resistance organisations that they knew were being developed. But when three of the men she had guided through Belgium, Vichy France and over the Pyrenean Mountains into Spain were questioned on their return to England, they could not speak highly enough of her incomparable firmness, resolution and courage. With that kind of endorsement
MI
9 felt that they had no other option than to fund the escape line – which they did.

On her return to the Consul’s office in Bilbao, Dedée met Michael Cresswell, an
MI
9 officer from the British Embassy in Madrid, and was told of the decision. She was delighted, but emphasised that although London was funding the Line, the overall control would be hers and that London was not to interfere. Cresswell agreed and told her that every time she crossed over into Spain and reported to the Consul in Bilbao, he would give her what money she required and any other items she may have requested.

Over the next two years Dedée travelled along the escape line taking scores of allied airmen with her. Together with Basque guides, notably Florentino Goikoetxea, they escorted the weary, frightened and sometimes injured men over the mountains into the relative safety of Spain. Dedée then returned to Brussels to start all over again.

On one trip, Dedée returned to Brussels to discover that her friend Arnold Deppe had been arrested whilst boarding a train in Brussels with a party of allied airmen. It appeared that a Belgian officer who had been arrested some months earlier attempting to escape using the Comète Line had been tortured and persuaded to talk. In addition to giving up Deppe, he had also given the GFP (
Geheime Feldpolizei
) an accurate description of Dedée. The Gestapo had also questioned Dedée’s father, but he managed to persuade them he had had no idea of his daughter’s whereabouts or her activities. He was just a simple schoolteacher. Fortunately they never searched his schoolroom otherwise they would have found a hoard of forged identity cards and ration cards in one of the desks.

It was quite obvious that Dedée could no longer operate in Brussels, so she moved to Paris. In Brussels the Germans were making arrest after arrest as the Brussels section of the Comète Line crumbled. In one incident, Tante Go, with Dedée in Paris, returned to Brussels to collect two British soldiers. The journey through Belgium was uneventful, but at the border crossing with Vichy France, one of the British soldiers presented his forged papers to the French official together with his British Army identity card. Without batting an eyelid, the official glanced at all the documents and handed them back without a word. It is not known whether or not the official saw the identity card or simply chose to ignore it.

In Valenciennes, Dedée joined the group and they crossed over the Somme River in a boat owned by a woman known only by the name Nenette. The river was the unofficial crossing point for the
Zone Interdite
(Forbidden Zone) and once across the group boarded the train for Paris. There the group changed trains and went on to Bayonne and from there to the town of Anglet where the Basque guide Florentino Goikoetxea was waiting.

Florentino Goikoetxea was Dedée’s first choice of guide; she had used another Basque by the name of Donato, but he had proved to be unreliable. Although he only spoke Euskera, the Basque language, his knowledge of the mountains was second to none. His strength and stamina was another of his many assets and although he had a fondness for alcohol, as many an allied escapee discovered when he provided refreshments for them halfway across the Pyrenees, he proved to be the most reliable.

The escape line’s priority was to help allied airmen escape and this was becoming so successful that Herman Goering ordered Luftwaffe Intelligence to destroy the Line. Pressure was now being exerted by all the German Intelligence sections and a large number of arrests were made.

In Brussels, the role that Dedée had vacated was taken over by a Belgian aristocrat by the name of Jean Greindl. Codenamed ‘Nemo’, Greindl ran a Red Cross section that looked after destitute children and set up the headquarters for the escape line on the premises. From that moment on, all escapees were referred to as
Les Enfants.

In order to continue the Line he also set up ‘clearing houses’ in various areas such as Ghent, Liege, Namur and Hasselt, where allied airmen could be brought before being put into the escape line. Whilst in these houses, they could be interrogated by the Resistance to make sure they were not Gestapo infiltrators.

With the pressure being intensified to discover those who were running the escape lines, Airey Neave, who had escaped from Colditz and was now working in
MI
9, tried to persuade Dedée and her father Frédéric to leave Paris and come to London, but they refused.

Among those who worked with Dedée in Paris was Kattalin Aguirre, also known as Kattalin Lamothe. She worked as a cleaner in a hotel that billeted German officers and it was here that she picked up snippets of information that proved helpful to the Resistance. Gaining the trust and respect of the Germans, she used this to her advantage and smuggled parts of radio equipment whilst working for Resistance groups in the area. She was also a key figure at the Paris end of the Comète Line, which passed escaping allied airmen from Paris through to the Bayonne area in the south and then on to the Pyrenees.

The journeys from Paris to the Pyrenees were becoming more and more hazardous, as the Germans and Spanish border guards increased their patrols and vigilance. On three separate occasions Dedée and Florentino came under fire from both the German and Spanish. It was only Florentino’s expert knowledge of the mountains and the smuggler trails that helped them get away.

Such was the spirit that Dedée inspired in others, that when Jean Greindl approached her to say that more than 100 people in Brussels had been arrested in two days and he felt it was too dangerous to go on, she managed to persuade him that he was necessary and vital to the escape line, and so he continued. Then disaster struck. Dedée was about to take three airmen over the Pyrenees when the weather closed in making it too dangerous for even Florentino to cross over. It was decided to shelter in a farmhouse close to the foothills where a lady known as Frantxia, who owned the farmhouse, sheltered and helped to prepare the escapees for the arduous journey over the mountains.

It was while waiting in the farmhouse that
gendarmes,
accompanied by German soldiers, raided the house and arrested them all after a tip-off by a renegade Basque guide by the name of Donato who had once worked for Frantxia. They demanded to know where the other one was, obviously referring to Florentino, and as Donato was the only person who could have known who was in the house, they all knew it had been him who had betrayed them. Florentino had left just hours before and so was able to escape. Imprisoned first at the French-administered Château-Neuf prison in Bayonne, Dedée was questioned by the French. She told them that she was a French girl local to the area showing them her forged papers. Despite her excellent French it soon became obvious that she was lying and the Germans insisted that she be transferred to the notorious Fresnes prison just outside Paris. At first she denied everything, then admitted to just being a courier for the Resistance, but when she realised that they had information that would eventually lead to her father, she decided to admit to everything.

Dedée was handed over to the Gestapo for interrogation but after some hours of interrogation, in which she told them a mixture of truth and lies, they refused to believe that such a young girl was capable of organising and running the Comète Line. She was being interrogated alternately by the Gestapo and Luftwaffe Intelligence. Luck then played a part when Luftwaffe Intelligence, who had always been at odds with the Gestapo, insisted on moving her to Germany for further interrogation. Over the next few weeks she was moved to prisons in Essen, Zweibrucken and Westphalia before being placed in a concentration camp. Somehow she got lost within the concentration camp system, whether by design or by accident, but she survived the war at Ravensbrück and was able to give evidence against collaborators.

Dedée’s father, Frédéric de Jongh, was arrested when a Belgian by the name of Jacques Desoubris, a Gestapo double agent who also called himself Jean Masson and Pierre Boulain, had infiltrated the Comète Line and had set a trap using escaping airmen. After his interrogation by the Gestapo, Frédéric de Jongh was taken to Mont Valérien prison and executed by firing squad.

A man by the name of Camille Spiquel, a member of the Belgian Resistance, had introduced Masson to Frédéric de Jongh. He had taken the word of others but no one checked his background. Had they done this they would have discovered that the Belgian Police wanted him for a variety of offences. Masson managed to destroy the organisation run be Spiquel soon after joining the Comète Line.

The arrests of Dedée and Frédéric de Jongh seemed to open the floodgates for arrests. Among those arrested was Jean Greindl who was interrogated by the Gestapo, and then condemned to death when they were unable to make him talk. Sent to one of the Gestapo’s barracks to await execution, he was killed during an air raid when allied bombers decimated the barracks, also killing a large number of Gestapo officers.

With the Comète Line seemingly in tatters, Madame Elvire de Greef, (Tante Go) took over the running of the escape line until Baron Jean-Francois Nothcomb (Franco), a Belgian Army officer who had been operating in Paris, took control. Elvire de Greef’s husband, Fernand de Greef, worked as an interpreter in the German
Kommandanteur’s
office in Anglet, and so was able to obtain copies of identity cards and travel documents. A number of attempts were made to try and get Dedée out of gaol but none were successful.

Madame de Greef was also arrested at the same time as Jean Greindl, but she ‘persuaded’ the German authorities that arresting her would only reveal their extensive dealings with local black marketeers, and that was an offence that meant either a court martial or a posting to the Eastern Front. She was released.

With Dedée in prison, another young Belgian woman stepped into her shoes, Micheline Dumon (Michou). Michou had joined the Resistance after leaving nursing school just after the beginning of the war. Within months of joining, her parents and elder sister, Nadine, had been arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the St Gilles prison in Belgium. Michou was a petite, dark-haired young girl who looked about twelve years old, but was in fact twenty-two years old and a fully-trained nurse. She had contacted Dedée and offered her services to the Comète Line and was soon in charge of organising safe houses, arranging for forged identity cards to be made and escorting airmen to the French border.

Her training as a nurse became extremely useful when allied airmen, who had been wounded or were ill, were delivered into her care. Her position became extremely risky and after one incident, when she escaped from the Germans by a matter of minutes, it was decided to give her a new identity as a sixteen-year-old student.

One American pilot by the name of Bob Grimes had reason to be thankful for her attention. He had been shot down whilst on a bombing raid in his B-17 and had suffered a serious leg wound. It was thanks to Michou’s nursing skills that he never lost the leg. When he had recovered, she was instrumental in helping him to escape through France and into Spain.