History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: Andrée De Jongh and the Comet Line

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June 1940, the outskirts of Paris, two women who had fled the German invasion shortly before were making their way back to the city.

They came across a man sheltering in a tavern.

He was a pilot.

He had tried to reach Dunkirk to join the British evacuation of France, but had been unable to get through German lines.

He would be in great danger if he was found by German soldiers, and anyone who helped him would be too.

He wanted to get south beyond the German advance to escape, but he told the women he needed help and civilian clothes.

So they put him in the boot of their car, drove him up to Paris and managed to smuggle him into their flat and then wondered what on earth they they were going to do.

They called on a friend.

Who had a friend, who had a friend, and gradually organised a very impromptu escape line to get this man into southern France.

They put the pilot back in the boot of their car again and smuggled him south.

But he did make it back safely.

Similar acts of resistance were happening all across Europe.

Networks of ordinary people, often informal and improvised, cooperating to rescue and transport stranded servicemen back to safety.

These were the escape lines.

When asked what motivated her to take this enormous personal risk, one organiser said, was it a taste for danger that drove us on?

There was plenty of that.

But what was at the heart of it?

A malicious delight in irritating the occupier?

That was part of it, it, of course, but only a little.

Above all, it was the joy, the thrill of feeling useful, the camaraderie of battle, and the exaltation of this unforeseen conflict in which all our weapons were born of love.

The largest escape line would be conceived, designed and operated by a 24-year-old Belgian woman.

André de Jong ran the Comet Line.

It crossed 800 miles of Nazi-occupied territory stretching from Belgium to Spain.

It would save the lives of hundreds of stranded airmen.

I'm Helena Boncarter and for BBC Radio 4 this is history's secret heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance and courage

from World War II.

André de Jong and the Comet Line.

On the 10th of May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded Belgium.

British forces rushed to help the small Belgian army.

The weight of the German assault was just too heavy.

Halek Kohainski is the author of Resistance, the Underground War in Europe.

And so the British and Belgians faced being trapped and made a rush back for the coast.

The Germans pushed through thick forests in the Ardennes to divide the Allied armies.

With large numbers of civilians on the move as well, it was chaos.

The Belgians and British retreating towards the coast and the French having to rush troops further south.

You had many people fleeing the German advance.

There was a time when there were about eight million civilians making the trip south.

André de Jong, known as Didet, had been working as a poster designer in the town of Malmede.

Her heroine was the British nurse, Edith Cavell.

During the First World War, Cavell had worked in Brussels for the Red Cross.

She helped wounded soldiers to hide and spirited them out of occupied Belgium to the neutral Netherlands.

It was a complex operation.

Papers were forged, new identities created.

With Cavell's help, around 200 soldiers escaped.

And she was executed by the Germans and was seen as a symbol of resistance.

Inspired by Cavell, at the outbreak of war, de Jong went to Brussels to train as a nurse.

Working in the hospitals, nursing the British wounded and indeed the Belgian civilians, and trying to ignore the German presence.

On the 28th of May 1940, Belgium's King Leopold III announced that his nation was seeking an armistice with Germany.

That same day, the British began to evacuate their troops from Dunkirk in northern France.

No one expected France to fall because the French had the most powerful army in Europe.

By July though, France had fallen.

The Germans controlled the north of the country and the Atlantic coast.

In the south, they allowed a French government to form in the town of Vichy, as long as it worked in close collaboration with them.

In the Red Cross hospital in Brussels, de Jong looked after wounded British servicemen and helped to send their letters home.

As the initial shock of the occupation wore off, though, the first signs of resistance emerged.

You'll get three women walking, wearing red, white, and blue, marking the French national colours.

There was a lot of symbolism, walking in colours on national days.

It was a simple way of just saying, you know, yes, you are bosses now, but

you won't be forever.

There was one young Belgian boy who decided that he would paint a large V-sign on the marketplace in front of the German Commentar.

The Germans had to close off the whole area until enough scrubbing had been done to get the whitewash out of the cobbles.

British troops who had been unable to get out of Dunkirk were marched through the streets of Brussels on their way to prisoner of war camps in Germany.

Some Belgians were desperate to help these captured men.

Sometimes people would just spot one to one side and just literally just grab him by the arm and pull him into an alleyway and hide him.

It would be a very impromptu act and often the person who did that then had no idea what they're going to do next.

De Jong soon began her own resistance.

She helped injured soldiers hide in safe houses.

The first thing the Allied servicemen needed was civilian clothing.

De Jong travelled around Brussels, gathering clothes from friends.

Next, she helped arrange false documents.

They had to be escorted somewhere to have the photograph taken for the identity papers.

And of course, you can't take men to the same photographer because he's going to know what's going on.

So it was a need to become organized very quickly.

In early 1941, de Jong, along with her schoolmaster father Frédéric, put together a network of people who were willing to hide and feed Allied servicemen.

Supplying soldiers with new identities was the first step and not easy.

Yet the next was far more difficult.

How would these men escape Belgium?

Travelling overland, de Jong would have to send them south all the way across France and into Spain.

Though Spain was ideologically aligned with the Germans, it was still officially neutral.

From there, they could get back to Britain by ship or plane.

For help, de Jong turned to two colleagues, Henri de Bliqui and his cousin Arnaud Depe.

All three began to contact friends, people who might shelter soldiers on the route or provide food.

They needed volunteers who would hold their nerve and hold their tongues.

It is very much that feeling, you know.

It was to say, my country may be defeated, but I as an individual am not defeated.

Almost immediately, De Bliki was arrested.

They knew these dangers, but still they carried on.

Working now as a duo, de Jong and Depe collected 10 Allied soldiers from safe houses in Brussels.

With astonishing resourcefulness and cunning, de Jong escorted all of them from Brussels to the south of France.

It was a journey of 500 miles.

As the group reached the high slopes of the Pyrenees, on the border between France and Spain, they looked down at the land below.

De Jong could barely believe they had pulled it off.

Dede told them, you're now in Spain, make your own way down.

And those soldiers were caught by the Spanish police and sent to the Spanish concentration camp at Miranda.

Following this disaster Depe contacted Basque smugglers.

Another time they would help take the soldiers down into Spanish territory avoiding the authorities.

In August 1941 de Jong and Depe each tried separate routes.

De Jong travelled on foot over the Pyrenees.

It was very arduous and certainly took several days.

Boots would have to be exchanged for espedrils, which had a better grip on rocks.

Depe chose a route which was shorter and faster, but he and all the soldiers he was leading were captured.

He ended up later being executed.

De Jong turned to the British.

MI9 was a section of the War Office set up specifically to advise servicemen on how how to evade capture and to provide them with escape kits to help them stay free.

In August 1941, de Jong was in Bilbao in northern Spain.

She went to the British Consulate where she met a man called Donald Darling.

Officially, Darling was a diplomat.

Unofficially, he worked for the Secret Intelligence Service.

She announced that she had just come from Brussels across the whole length of of France and across the Pyrenees.

With her, she said, were two Belgians who wished to join the Allied forces and a Scottish soldier.

Well, Darling did not believe her.

To Darling, de Jong looked so young that he thought she could not possibly have made it across hundreds of miles of enemy terrain.

And especially not have crossed the mountains.

Yet not only was she offering three smuggled soldiers to the Allies, she was offering to do it all again.

And again.

She said that she would make this trip regularly, bringing Allied airmen who were now often parachuting out of crippled bombers over Belgium.

De Jong wanted only to be reimbursed for her expenses.

She was determined that her escape line should remain independent and did not want any contact with or support from the British.

All she wanted was for them to collect Allied servicemen at the end of their journey.

The British point of view was: she's probably a German plant.

Don't give her any information that you have.

Let's see whether she can deliver.

Darling tried to persuade de Jong to let British agents control the line.

She refused.

Even putting their concerns for individual servicemen's welfare aside, though, the British had a strong incentive to agree.

Back in Britain, there was a serious shortage of qualified airmen.

After three weeks of deliberation, the British agreed to de Jong's terms.

De Jong called her new enterprise Le Réseaux Comet,

the Comet Line.

Its members adopted codenames.

De Jong told one group of soldiers, My name is Henri,

but I would like you to call me by my codename, D D,

which means little mother.

From here on, I will be your little mother, and you will be my little children.

It will be my job to get my children to Spain and freedom.

After all the problems on the trial runs, De Jong now ran a high-security operation.

To prevent signals from being intercepted, no radios were used.

She organized volunteers who provided food and shelter into small cells so they didn't know the other connections in the line.

In the event of capture, they would be unable to give them up to the authorities.

She recruited a huge number of volunteers along the line.

About 3,000 people helped out, most of them women.

The 30th of May 1942.

Australian pilot Reginald Collins was on his first mission for the Royal Air Force, flying a Wellington bomber over Germany.

The plane got caught in searchlights and was shot and they lost an engine.

Mary Hockaday is Collins' daughter.

Collins parachuted out of the bomber and landed in a forest.

He spent the night there, then at dawn began to move.

He was going down this road and

not only were the tanks coming up, but there was a German patrol that was coming up as well.

And he thought the best way to do this was to bluff it out.

Collins turned his flying jacket inside out, kept his head down and walked right past the Germans.

When he got round the corner of that road, his legs went to jelly.

He could hardly walk.

Collins had no food.

The only water he could find to drink was from the puddles on the road.

He hid in a hedge and wondered what on earth he should do next.

That same night, wireless operator Robert Hawesley took off in a Manchester bomber on his 30th flight.

His crew dropped their bombs over Cologne, but their plane came under fire and was hit.

He too parachuted out.

He landed in some marshy field and he he

actually had the escape kit, which was a little box with a silk map and food tablets and various other little bits and pieces.

Erika Hawsley is his daughter.

Robert Hawsley had no idea where he had landed.

He walked across this road and he saw this young woman coming.

So he thought, oh, well, I'll just throw out Heil Hitler.

And this girl looked at him and shot off.

So he thought, uh-uh.

Horsley realized he must not be in Germany, but Belgium.

He approached a house.

Knocked on the door, was pulled in quickly, and gave him some food and coffee and gave him a beret because my father was six foot tall, very blue eyes, blonde hair.

He looked very Germanic.

They said, Well, they might think that you're a deserter.

These two men continued their separate journeys, assisted by priests, farmers, children, and even Belgian policemen.

They were staying in this apartment near the Gestapo headquarters.

They had to go and get their photos taken.

Going around the streets, they were seeing Germans, obviously, everywhere, and having to be terribly careful.

Once he had acquired forged travel and identity papers, a young volunteer arrived to take Horsley by train to Paris.

Crossing Paris, Horsley walked through the crowds, past Gestapo officers.

He approached a cafe where a young woman was waiting.

She was André de Jong.

Dede.

They sat down and they had this meal.

They were then taken by Dede to a basement apartment and told,

just stay here.

We don't know how long for, but just stay here and don't make a sound in the day.

Scotty Brazzel, another pilot who was shot down in Holland around this time, recalled his first encounter with De Jong in an interview with the BBC years later.

When did you first meet Diddy herself?

I met Didi in Paris.

This particular young lady was meeting a few of us off the train that day from Brussels, where we'd been coming down.

What did she look like at that time?

Well, she still to me looked a young, beautiful girl, and somebody happened to say, what a beauty.

Who was this?

Now, when you first met her, you didn't realize that she was the person who'd set up this organization.

I had no idea whatsoever.

Did she leave any particular impression on you of authority or?

She always had that little something whereby you could say, well, I'm safe.

I'm with someone like that.

There was no fear with her or anything else.

At the railway station, de Jong and the servicemen had to be exceptionally careful.

Stations were closely watched by the Nazi authorities.

De Jong told Collins and Horsley to walk at a distance from each other.

They must not smile or speak to anyone.

You know, if you think about it, British airmen and American airmen were often taller than the average Belgian or French peasant.

And so they had to be taught how to walk, that you need to slouch, you do not put your hands in your pockets, you don't carry your pack over both shoulders as they were used to doing, but over one.

And you have to look sullen and plod along and don't chew gum.

If the servicemen were captured they would be sent to prisoner of war camps.

If Comet line guides were captured they would be shot or sent to a concentration camp.

All you needed was one collaborator to say I think that man's American and there could be widespread arrests.

On the train De Jong gave the airmen German magazines to discourage people from talking to them.

But you can't do anything about an airman who falls asleep and before opening his eyes speaks English.

They were also conspicuous.

Not only was Robert Hawesley tall, blonde and blue-eyed, but he was wearing an ill-fitting suit given to him by a Jewish tailor.

But of course my father being six foot tall and he was rather short and rotund.

So the trousers were obviously far too short and of course the sleeves were too short.

He looked rather ridiculous.

De Jong and the airmen continued south, taking trains and buses between farmhouses, hiding from Nazi patrols.

When they walked, de Jong or one of our guides would go ahead, with the airmen following at a discreet distance behind.

If they heard footsteps or a car approaching, they would dive into ditches.

They covered up to 40 kilometers a day on foot.

Every part of this journey was dangerous, but crossing the Pyrenees was the most physically grueling.

To make sure everything was ready on the Spanish side, de Jong would first go over the mountains alone to check the British were standing by.

She would then come all the way back to accompany the airmen.

The stamina of the woman is, you know,

it's breathtaking, actually.

Ahead of them were narrow paths, slippery rocks, fog and snow.

De Jong enlisted smugglers to help them cross.

Florentino, the guide, used to drink cheap, cheap red wine and obviously lots of garlic.

And my father said to Day Day, you know,

how are we going to be able to follow him in the night, you know, when it's pitch black?

And she said, oh, you just follow the smell.

So they followed the smell of Florentino.

Collins and Horsley and their groups were delivered safely.

to British agents in Spain.

The British whisked them away to the tiny British territory of Gibraltar on the southern tip of Spain, from where they could go by ship back to Britain itself.

The Comet Line had saved their lives.

The 19th of November 1942, Brussels.

A Belgian couple heard a knock on their front door.

They went to open it.

Standing there was a guide and two American airmen dressed as Belgian workmen.

The Belgian couple had hidden several servicemen in their home before.

They knew something wasn't right.

The usual arrangement was for their daughter to collect airmen from the foot of some steps of a nearby church.

Nevertheless, they took the men in.

Their daughter went to the church to check what was happening with her contact there.

And in her absence, the Gestapo came.

The daughter's contact sent someone to see what was happening.

He was shot and killed by the Gestapo.

One of the guides who came to collect the airmen the next morning was caught and she was sent to concentration camp.

The Germans discovered enough information to arrest 100 people attached to the comet line.

They would execute 11 of them.

And for quite a few months, there was no contact between Brussels and Paris.

De Jong escaped arrest, but she was frantically trying to work out what had gone wrong.

She recruited new volunteers and worked to reassure the old ones they were safe.

Running an escape line is an immensely challenging business because you are asking a lot of people to hold their nerve.

And so some people in the end would just say, look, I can't do this anymore.

January 1943, Arunie, on the Spanish border of the south of France.

After the disaster in Brussels, the Comet Line was finally running.

De Jong was hiding out in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Bad weather meant crossing was impossible.

For now, a farmhouse was home to her and to the servicemen she was guiding.

This would be her 33rd journey.

In the distance, she heard the whirr of an engine.

The door burst open.

Ten gendarmes barged into the kitchen.

As she was taken to jail in Bayonne, de Jong wondered who had informed on her.

They were betrayed probably by a farmhand

who André had already met before and didn't trust.

Hoping to spare the lives of others, de Jong admitted to the German authorities that she was in charge of the Comet Line.

But quite simply, they didn't believe her.

Once again, older men could not believe that such a young woman could do what de Jong had done.

The Germans had a clear idea that people in the resistance were people like themselves, soldiers.

So to have this young woman claiming leadership of a line that was plaguing them just seemed offensive to McKisma.

De Jong was interrogated 19 times by German military intelligence and twice by the Gestapo.

She was tortured.

She never gave up a single name of any of her volunteers.

She was taken from prison in Paris to Ravensbruck concentration camp.

The Comet line had been broken by de Jong's arrest.

Six months later, her father, Frédéric de Jong, was arrested too.

Despite the arrest of the de Jongs, there were by then enough volunteers involved that the line could be rebuilt.

It would continue to rescue servicemen despite all the efforts of the Nazi authorities.

Around 700 helpers on the Comet line were arrested by the Germans, of which we know that 290 were executed or died in prison or concentration camps.

The Comet Line delivered its last group of servicemen to Spain in June 1944.

Over the course of the war, more than 800 people had been saved.

De Jong personally escorted 118 men across the Pyrenees.

In 1945, Allied forces swept across Germany, liberating concentration camps as they went.

De Jong was ill and emaciated, but she survived her internment.

Her father, Frédéric, did not.

She later found out that he'd been executed by firing squad at Mont Valerians in March 1944.

After liberation, when her story was made public, de Jong was widely celebrated.

The British awarded her the George Medal.

The Americans gave her the Medal of Freedom.

I think she was a very modest woman who didn't really want

all the kudos that she got after the war.

De Jong went back to work and finished her nursing studies.

She would spend 28 years in the Belgian Congo, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Senegal working with people suffering from Hansen's disease, then known as leprosy.

While she was in Addis Ababa in 1974, she was interviewed by the BBC.

How many of the more than 100 men that you saved in the war have kept in touch with you?

A lot, especially British people.

A lot certainly, oh, I should say, 50.

50 certainly.

De Jong died in October 2007 at the age of 90.

Every October, Erika Horsley and Mary Hockaday, whose fathers were the 18th and 26th men to pass down the Comet Line, meet other veterans' families in Brussels to commemorate the work of André de Jong.

My father absolutely thought the world of her.

And when I was born, I was given the name André as well.

I'll put it this way, I said to my father one day, Oh dad, you're such a hero.

And he said, no, love, I'm not a hero.

I'm not the hero.

The hero are the people who helped me.

Next time on History Secret Heroes, when Emily Anderson, a shy musicologist from Galway, passed away in 1962, many of the mourners at her funeral were in for a surprise.

And none of them knew that she'd lived this dual life, that she'd lived this double life, one of which was in the public domain, and the second she never ever spoke of to anybody.

They had no idea that she was Britain's top female codebreaker.

The enigmatic Emily Anderson.

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