Comet line

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A volunteer of the French resistance interior force (FFI) in 1944.

The Comet line (Le Reseau Comète) was a WWII evasion route formed in Europe in May 1940 with the aim of helping Allied soldiers and airmen return to Britain. The escape line started in Brussels, where the men were fed, clothed and given false identity papers, before being hidden in attics and cellars of private houses. A network of over 1,000 people guided the airmen and soldiers south through occupied France into neutral Spain and home via British-controlled Gibraltar. A typical route would have been from Brussels or Lille to Paris and then via Tours, Bordeaux, Bayonne over the Pyrenees to San Sebastian in Spain. From here the evaders would travel to Bilbao, then Madrid and Gibraltar.

There were three other main evasion routes for allied evaders. The "Pat" line (named after the founder Pat O'Leary) ran from Paris to either Toulouse via Limoges and then over the Pyrenees via Esterri d'Aneu to Barcelona. Another route of the "Pat" line ran from Paris to Dijon, Lyons, Avignon to Marseilles, then onto Nimes, Perpignan and Barcelona. From Barcelona the evaders were transported to Gibraltar. Another route from Paris (the Shelburne line) ran to Rennes and then onto St Brieuc in Brittany where men were shipped back to Dartmouth in Britain.

The Comet line movement was created by a young Belgian woman who joined the Belgian resistance and resolved to fight back against the German occupation of her country. Andrée de Jongh (nicknamed "Dédée") was 24 in 1940, and lived in Brussels. She was the younger daughter of Frédéric de Jongh, a headmaster and Alice Decarpentrie. Edith Cavell, a British nurse shot in the Tir National in Schaerbeek in 1915 for assisting troops to escape from occupied Belgium to the neutral Netherlands, was a heroine in her youth.

In August 1941, Andrée de Jongh appeared in the British consulate in Bilbao with a British soldier, James Cromar from Aberdeen, and two Belgian volunteers, Merchiers and Sterckmans, having travelled by train through Paris to Bayonne, and then on foot over the Pyrenees. She requested support for her escape network, (later named the Comet line) from the British military intelligence which was granted by MI9, (British Military Intelligence Section 9), under the control of an ex-infantry major, Norman Crockatt and escaped Colditz castle POW lieutenant Airey Neave.

With assistance from MI9 she helped around 400 Allied soldiers to escape from Belgium, through occupied France to the British consulate in Madrid and on to Gibraltar. Andrée accompanied 118 of them herself. Airey Neave described her as "one of our greatest agents"^[1]

Later Neave organised regular gun boat runs from Dartmouth, Devon, to cross the channel in order to run agents and supplies to the French resistance in Brittany, and to return escaped POWs and evaders back to Britain.

The Comet Line members and the families who sheltered them took great risks, with Andrée De Jongh personally escorting 118 airmen over the Pyrenees mountains to freedom herself.

After November 1942 the escape lines became much more dangerous when southern France was occupied by the Germans and the whole of France was under Nazi rule. Many members of the Comet line were betrayed by one of their own members, Harold Cole, an ex-British soldier who had defected to the Germans. Hundreds were arrested by the Gestapo or SS and after weeks of interrogation and torture at places such as Fresnes Prison in Paris were either executed or labelled Nacht und Nebel (NN) prisoners. These NN prisoners were deported to German prisons and many later to concentration camps such as Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Buchenwald concentration camp, Schloss Hartheim, Flossenbürg concentration camp or the infamous Hartheim Castle,^[2]

Prisoners sent to these camps included Andrée de Jongh, Elsie Marechal (Belgian Resistance), Nadine Dumon (Belgian Resistance), Mary Lindell (Comtesse de Milleville) and Virginia d'Albert-Lake (American).

The authors of the official history of MI9, give total figures of 2,373 for all British and Commonwealth servicemen and 2,700 Americans who escaped back to Britain during WWII. The RAF Escaping Society estimated that there were 14,000 helpers officially recognised in 1945.^[3]