by Lynne Olson
At MI9, Neave and Langley provided funds and radio communications to those involved in running the escape lines. They also furnished liaison officers to escort evaders out of Spain and back to England. Yet throughout the war, the two young men were never given the resources to adequately supply and protect the thousands of operatives who worked under their auspices. Considered a sideshow by Dansey and other MI6 higher-ups, their tiny agency was always short of funds, so much so that it occasionally had to rely on financial gifts from a sympathetic British businessman to keep it in operation.
Of the many frustrations that Langley and Neave experienced, none was as painful as their inability to provide as much help as they thought necessary for Dédée de Jongh’s burgeoning network.
—
DE JONGH’S MISSION TO save Allied soldiers had begun in the chaotic days after the 1940 German invasion of Belgium. When her father, a schoolmaster in Brussels, told her that King Leopold had surrendered to the Germans after only eighteen days of fighting, he began to weep. “I’d never seen my father cry before—never,” she later said. “I was in despair and, at the same time, enraged. I said to my father, ‘You are wrong to cry. You’ll see what we do to them.’ ”
With the passion that earned her the nickname “the little cyclone,” she immediately set out to do what she could to thwart the enemy. A commercial artist by profession, she had been working as a nurse for Allied troops wounded in the fighting in Belgium. After recruiting a group of friends and acquaintances to harbor escapees, she began to smuggle injured British soldiers out of the German-controlled hospitals in and around Brussels and into safe houses she had arranged.
Andrée de Jongh
The crew she enlisted to form the Comet line, as it came to be known, was, in one historian’s words, “a cross-section of all that was young, lively, and freedom-loving in Brussels.” Its members came from a wide variety of backgrounds and occupations, ranging from students to aristocrats to garage mechanics. What they had in common, besides their youth (few were over twenty-five), was their hatred of the Germans and their affection for de Jongh. As was true of other escape lines, the majority of Comet line workers—couriers, guides, and operators of safe houses—were women.
While Langley and Neave admired the group’s joie de vivre and courage, as exemplified by its leader, they were frustrated by Comet’s refusal to allow MI9 to have any say in its operation. “The last decision always rested with the men and women in the field, as from the outset Dédée had made it clear that she would brook no interference from outside,” Langley wrote. “The line was Belgian, would be run by Belgians and any help would be gratefully received; but payment of money was simply reimbursement of expenses and in no way gave us the right to issue orders.”
Again and again, de Jongh turned down MI9’s offer to send a wireless operator to Brussels so she could communicate directly with London rather than relying solely on periodic meetings with British liaison officers in Spain. With a radio connection, she would have been able to alert MI9 immediately in case of trouble, and the agency could let her know about possible traitors and German agents posing as helpers or Allied airmen.
De Jongh’s repeated refusal to accept a radio and operator was “always a very sore point” that “nearly drove me frantic,” Langley said. In retrospect, however, her unwillingness to forgo such assistance might not have been such a bad thing, considering the disasters that plagued the wireless operators sent by London to the Netherlands and France.
Though Langley never stopped worrying about de Jongh, he had to admit that this young amateur knew what she was doing. Within months, she had put together a far-flung line that started in Brussels and snaked its way south through France to the Pyrenees. It worked like an assembly line: downed airmen were taken to the closest safe house, which was usually in a village or on a farm, then were transported to collection points in Brussels and Paris. From there small groups of evaders were escorted hundreds of miles by Comet line workers to a chain of safe houses in the foothills of the Pyrenees. From that point, Spanish guides—many of them German-hating Basques—escorted them over the mountains to Spain.
De Jongh was involved in every aspect of the operation. She organized the safe houses, worked with photographers and forgers to produce false Belgian and French identity papers, and personally guided dozens of airmen to the Spanish frontier and over the Pyrenees. Affectionately referring to her British and American charges as “parcels,” she was known as the “postmistress”; her real identity was kept a closely guarded secret.
Concealing these young men was an extremely difficult task. As one British intelligence officer observed, “It is not an easy matter to hide…a foreigner in your midst, especially when it happens to be a red-haired Scotsman or a gum-chewing American from the Middle West.” Finding clothes to fit Americans, who often were a head taller than Britons or other Europeans, was a particular problem. So was finding enough food, at a time when food was increasingly scarce for everyone. Coming from a country that had scant experience with the privations and dangers of war, many American evaders had a hard time understanding why they were given so little to eat while on the run; Britons, whose nation had been strictly rationed since 1940, were less demanding. British airmen were also generally calmer and more disciplined than their American counterparts, who were more independent and outgoing—and sometimes less willing to accept de Jongh’s demand that every order they were given had to be obeyed without question.
Before setting out on their perilous journeys, Comet line workers did their best to teach their charges how to blend in while in public. In one memorable case, a bowlegged Texan was instructed in the fine art of walking like a European. Since most of the evaders spoke neither French nor Flemish, they were ordered to keep quiet at all times in public settings. U.S. airmen were told to keep their hands out of their pockets—a particularly American trait—and coached on the way Europeans use silverware when eating, keeping their fork in their left hand rather than shifting it back and forth during a meal. Both Britons and Americans were instructed never to smoke cigarettes produced in their own countries—the smoke had an odor significantly different from that of European cigarettes—and never to be seen with a bar of chocolate, which was impossible to find in occupied nations during the war. As the evaders were repeatedly told, the slightest mistake could draw the attention of one of the many French, Belgian, and German security officials who patrolled buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation.
During their time together, it was not uncommon for Comet line operatives and the servicemen in their care to develop close if fleeting relationships. “I loved them like they were my brothers, my children even,” de Jongh said. “We would have done anything for them, even giving up our lives.” For their part, the airmen were intensely moved by the selflessness and courage of those who rescued them. “I fell in love with them totally, absolutely,” said Bob Frost, a British sergeant who, at age nineteen, was escorted by de Jongh to Spain in the autumn of 1942. Many years after the war, Frost declared, “I have nothing but the utmost respect for the people who worked in the Comet line. They knew the price if they were caught. It was heroism beyond anything I can tell you.”
When Airey Neave questioned returning airmen about their escape experiences, he recalled, their eyes filled with tears when talking about de Jongh and her associates. “They were afraid for her,” Neave said. “So were all those who knew the terrible risks she ran, including Jimmy and me.”
For Comet, as for other escape lines, the threat of discovery was ever present, arrests were uncommonly frequent, and casualties were heavy. If captured, Allied servicemen were sent to German prisoner-of-war camps, where Geneva Convention rules applied. When escape line members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, and/or execution. James Langley once estimated that, for each serviceman spirited back to England, at least one “Belgian, Dutch, or French helper gave his or her life.”
&nb
sp; Well aware of the Gestapo’s determination to smash Comet, Neave and Langley urged de Jongh and her father, who worked closely with her, to come to England before it was too late. But, as always, she “kept to her own rules,” refusing even to consider the thought of leaving. “To the last,” Neave recalled, “she made her own decisions.”
—
THE LARGER AN ESCAPE line grew, the more vulnerable it became. Checking out the backgrounds of the hundreds of people who worked on the lines or who used them to get back to England was a virtual impossibility. Not surprisingly, then, the Gestapo and Luftwaffe secret police had considerable success in infiltrating the lines with agents impersonating Allied fliers. Equipped with documents and dog tags recovered from killed or captured airmen, most of the agents were German nationals who had lived in Britain or the United States for long periods and spoke fluent English.
The Germans were also aided by French, Belgian, and English collaborators who joined the lines as workers. The Pat O’Leary line, run by one of the leading escape organizations in France, was betrayed to the Gestapo by Harold Cole, a British Army sergeant who earlier had been captured by the Germans and persuaded to turn traitor. Because of Cole, Albert Guérisse and the operation’s other founders were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and the line was destroyed.
As for the Comet line, its workers, too, had suffered repeated arrests since its creation, although its founder led somewhat of a charmed existence, managing to elude the Nazis for more than eighteen months. Then in early January 1943, de Jongh set off with three American pilots on her eighteenth trip to Spain. A heavy snowstorm caught them just before they crossed the Pyrenees, and they were forced to seek shelter for the night at a safe house in the foothills. The next morning, the Gestapo, acting on a tip from a local farmworker, burst into the house and arrested all the occupants.
Allied evaders were repeatedly warned that, if captured, they were not to reveal the identities and locations of those who had hidden or otherwise helped them. Their only obligation, they were told, was to give their name, rank, and serial number, just as if they had been captured in combat. But the extreme stress of Gestapo interrogation proved too much for some, including one of the pilots caught with de Jongh, who disclosed the names of his guides and the owners of the safe houses who had sheltered him.
While the three pilots were sent to a POW camp, Dédée de Jongh disappeared without a trace—one of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in occupied Europe who, under a decree from Hitler, vanished into the “night and fog” of Nazi concentration camps.
A few weeks later, the Gestapo again struck hard at Comet, this time arresting nearly one hundred of its operatives in Brussels and elsewhere in Belgium. Among the few who managed to escape was a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Peggy van Lier, a close friend and associate of de Jongh’s. Although interrogated by Gestapo agents, she persuaded them that she was not involved with Comet. Fearing she would be picked up again, friends spirited her to Gibraltar, where she was sent by plane to London. There, Jimmy Langley was waiting to greet her. He was instantly smitten by the red-haired, blue-eyed Belgian, falling in love with her, he later told friends, the moment she stepped off the plane. The two were married the following year, had five children, and lived contentedly together in Suffolk for the rest of their lives.
Lier was lucky to get out when she did. Just a few months after she arrived in London, Comet was hit again, this time because of a French collaborator working for the Gestapo in Paris. De Jongh’s father, who was the head of Comet in the French capital, was rounded up, along with her sister and dozens of other associates. Most of them, including de Jongh’s father and sister, were executed.
“It seemed incredible that Comet could survive, but survive it did,” Langley noted. Despite the calamitous loss of its founder and so many other key members, the network was able to rebuild itself, enlisting the help of new couriers and guides, setting up more safe houses, and maintaining the flow of Allied servicemen back to England.
Although it would suffer additional losses, the line would continue its rescue operations until Belgium was liberated in the fall of 1944. In the three years of Comet’s existence, its workers sent back more than 800 servicemen, most of whom soon returned to active duty. Of that number, 118 were escorted to Spain by de Jongh herself.
—
ALTHOUGH THEY WERE THE largest and best-known escape lines, the Comet and Pat O’Leary organizations had no monopoly on such work in northwestern Europe. Dozens of other, smaller groups operated there, and most of them, like Comet, were organized and managed by women. The founder of France’s Marie-Claire line, however, was in a class by herself.
Airey Neave called Mary Lindell, Comtesse de Milleville, “one of the most colorful agents in the history of MI9.” That description hardly does her justice. An elegant, imperious, outspoken woman with a passion for adventure, Lindell gave fits to the Gestapo and Claude Dansey alike. “Pour une femme, Marie-Claire est un grand homme” (“For a woman, Marie-Claire is a great man”), proclaimed a Catholic priest who helped her in her work.
Neave and Langley first learned of Lindell on July 27, 1942, when the British consulate in Barcelona informed them that an Englishwoman had just arrived in Spain from France and wanted MI9 to send her back as the organizer of a new escape line. A week later, she arrived at Langley’s flat in London for an interview with him and Neave. Clad in a French Red Cross uniform emblazoned with several rows of French and British decorations, the fortyish Lindell “looked much younger than her age,” recalled Neave, who greeted her at the door. “Despite her gruff manner, she was still beautiful.” As he showed her into the flat, he realized immediately that “she was used to getting her own way….Her tone was peremptory and English in every inflection. I might as well have been the butler answering the door.”
Mary Lindell with a former French resistance fighter after the war.
Lindell, who came from a wealthy family in Surrey, would have readily agreed with Neave’s description of her as an amalgam of “fearlessness, independence, and not a little arrogance.” In fact, that’s how she described herself. “My godfather died and left me quite a nice little lot of money, so I was really quite independent,” she later said. “That, I suppose, is why I’m arrogant and independent now, because from fifteen onwards I never knew what money was. It just was there.”
After the outbreak of World War I, the nineteen-year-old Lindell traveled to France and volunteered for the French Red Cross. For the next four years, she tended Allied wounded in forward dressing stations and field hospitals, often accompanying medics to the front lines, just a few feet from the German trenches, to treat injured soldiers. Known as the “bébé anglais,” she was awarded the Croix de Guerre for gallantry under fire.
After the war, she married a French aristocrat whom she had nursed when he was wounded, and, as the Comtesse de Milleville, had three children and became a major figure in Parisian society. When France fell in 1940, Lindell also became a one-woman escape line. She hid British officers in her flat, then drove them across the Vichy frontier and on to Marseille to deliver them to what later became the Pat O’Leary line. She obtained the necessary permits and gasoline coupons for her trips from German officials by claiming that she needed them for her Red Cross work. Later, she would note that the German military “simply loved titled people, especially in uniform, with lots of medals and ribbons.”
The Gestapo in Paris, however, were not quite so dazzled. Suspicious about the constant flow of people into and out of her flat, they arrested her in January 1941. At the end of her trial, Lindell received an extremely lenient sentence of nine months of solitary confinement in a Paris prison. “I found this completely ridiculous,” she recalled, “so I remarked to the [German] court, ‘Just sufficient time for me to have a baby with Adolf.’ ” Her lawyer and translator nearly fainted. When the judge demanded to know what she had said, her lawyer jumped up before the translator could respond and excla
imed, “The accused said that in the circumstances, she considers the sentence fair.”
After serving her sentence, Lindell was released. Although determined to continue her escape-line activities, she knew she could not do so in Paris. She decided to escape to England to seek training and other assistance to enable her to work in another part of France.
Neither Neave nor Langley was enthusiastic about the prospect. Both were adamantly opposed to the idea of sending anyone back to occupied Europe who was known to the enemy; doing so, Langley said, would “endanger her own life and those of others.” He and Neave also thought of Lindell as a loose cannon and found her difficult. What particularly annoyed them, according to Langley, was that she preferred “to use a battle-axe rather than the more usual feminine charm when dealing with difficult males.” After their first meeting with Lindell, Langley turned to Neave and declared, “I’ve nothing to say at the moment except that I want a very large whisky and soda.”
Determined to get her way, Lindell refused to listen to MI9’s objections, saying she would continue to raise hell until she was allowed to return to France. In desperation, Neave and Langley turned for help to Claude Dansey, who agreed to tell her she could not go back. For once in his life, however, Dansey encountered someone as hard-nosed and tough as he. When he pointed out that he was only trying to save her life, Lindell retorted that the only thing he was interested in saving was his own reputation. Emerging from his meeting with Lindell, Dansey told Langley, “Spare no effort to get her to France as soon as it is humanly possible.”
After two months of training, she was sent back in October 1942 to create a new escape network in southwestern France, near Limoges. When he escorted her to the airfield, Airey Neave discovered that others had a far different opinion of Lindell than he and his colleagues in London did. As she was introduced to the young RAF pilot who was to fly her across the Channel, he took both of her hands in his and said, “I just wanted to say thank you for going over there….All the boys have tremendous admiration for what you are doing.”