By Victor Schutters
Last modified January 17, 2017.
If a review of the various tasks the Comet network had to handle may give a fair understanding of the kind of difficulties and hazards the airmen and their helpers were confronted with, the complexity of the network's history itself comes immediately in evidence when one analyses the mass of available archival documents.
The high number of participants, which one may correctly estimate as having been well over two thousand, as well as the numerous ramifications of the network, not only in Belgium but also in France, add to the extreme difficulty of attempting to write a comprehensive and factual history of Comet. Some of the few writings that have dealt with the subject give a circumstantial idea of the network's functioning but, regrettably, they do not reflect the activities nor the role played by all intervening parties.
The research work preparatory to the elaboration of the hundreds of evaders' pages on this website has helped to better document all those activities and to strike a much more credible and realistic balance. By retracing as best we can the story of those who have been helped by Comet, other "helpers" have been and will be discovered in the frame of our continuing research so, hopefully, all will ultimately be credited on this site with the notoriety they rightly deserve.
At the present stage of our research, the following figures may be confirmed as to the number of people taken in charge by Comet at one moment or another during their evasion :
287 Allied servicemen crossed the Pyrénées into Spain, 11 of which members of the Army (6 Scotsmen, 4 British and 1 Russian), 1 French fusilier marin and 275 airmen : 12 Australians, 1 Belgian, 1 Byelorussian, 1 Frenchman, 1 Norwegian, 3 New-Zealanders, 10 Poles, 1 South American, 105 Britons, 1 Ukrainian, 108 Americans and 31 airmen who served in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) some of which were American volunteers who enlisted before the United States' entry into the conflict.
For a chronology of those passages, see this page.
76 civilans crossed the Pyrénées among which 57 Belgians, 12 French people, 3 Dutchmen, 2 Brits, 1 Canadian and 1 American woman. Those passages too are included in the Chronology at this page.
Some of those civilians left to join the FBGB (Forces Belges en Grande-Bretagne/Belgian Forces in Great Britain), some to rejoin the Belgian government in exile in London, still others attempting to reach the Belgian Congo. The French people were mostly secret agents returning from a mission, or airmen or even burned agents wanted by the enemy and attempting to rejoin their country's own FFL (Forces Françaises Libres/Free French Forces) also in London.
The numbers above thus represent a total of 367 persons who, thanks to Comet, managed to reach the United Kingdom via the Pyrenees. These figures do include the four children of De Greef and Morelle, taken to safety in Spain.
To that number of successful passages may be added the following figures for other evaders helped by Comet and whose evasion met with success or not :
Unfortunately, there were numerous enemy infiltrations of the network by either false airmen or through the work of people active on the occupant's side. These last, citizens of an occupied country, either volunteered or were recruited by the enemy. They were the V-Leute or V-Mann in the singular (V-Mann = Vertrauensmann = a trustee) who were the cause of a large number of arrests, as well of airmen as of their helpers.
The Geheime Feldpolizei (G. F. P.) was the executive arm of the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German Military HQ specially active in counterintelligence with its branch IIIf (Feind=enemy). The Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo), was the executive service of the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) or of the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) Those services were the ones which usually tracked down and arrested the people who had been helping evading airmen. Most of the times, the airmen were arrested together with their guides or their lodgers. They were subsequently sent to German prisoner of war camps, mostly in Germany itself but also in Poland and Austria, two countries annexed by the German Third Reich.
During World War II, the German Air Force (the Luftwaffe), managed the Stalags (Stammlager, base camp) specially destined for Allied airmen. Those special camps, called Stalag Luft, held the officers (Stalag Luft 1, Stalag Luft 3...) and the non-commissioned officers (Stalag Luft IV, Stalag Luft XVIIB...). Such camps are not to be mistaken for the Oflags (Offizier-Lager), which were camps for the internment of ground forces' officers.
As the evading airmen were usually wearing civilian clothes at the time of their arrest, the Germans had the right to consider them as spies and deal with them in any which way they decided upon. Towards the end of the war, more than a hundred evading airmen had been sent first to concentration camps (Buchenwald, for example), but on order of Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, they were later taken out of such camps to be transferred to Stalag Luft ones.
As for the members of Comet who had been arrested in Belgium, they were generally first led to the GFP at n° 6 Rue Traversière or to a Gestapo office in Brussels, the most notable of which was located at n° 453 Avenue Louise. Afterwards, often after having been subjected to torture, they were sent either to the Saint-Gilles or Forest prisons in the capital or put in solitary confinement at the Drève Sainte-Anne in Laeken, another of the city's communes. The Belgian Gendarmerie (State Police) barracks at the Avenue de la Couronne in the Brussels commune of Etterbeek was a Sondergefängnis (special prison) where the Germans detained the arrested radio operators and some other people susceptible to be of use to the occupying forces. Some of the people arrested were sent to the sadly notorious camp at Breendonk, between Brussels and Antwerp.
In France, the Gestapo was established mainly in Paris, at 11 Rue des Saussaies, while the headquarters of the SD (the intelligence branch of the Nazi Party) were at 72 Avenue Foch.
Belgium and the French Departments of the Nord and of the Pas-de-Calais which were administratively attached to the Belgien und Nordfrankreich Bereich, were under the control of a military government. In all other French Departments, on the other hand, which were under political and civilian governance, the Abwehr had a less important role to play in comparison with the SD. Once arrested in France, one was in most cases incarcerated in the prison of Fresnes, in the southern outskirts of Paris, but other prisons were in use in the rest of the country (the long since gone military prison of the Cherche-Midi at 54 Boulevard Raspail, the many prisons in the various Prefectures, etc.). As for the transit camp at Fort de Royallieu near Compiègne, it was one antechamber for deportations to Germany.
A great number of arrested Comet agents and members passed through such places before being sent to forced labour geols (Zuchthaus) or concentration camps, mainly in Germany and Poland. Some of them were liberated by Allied troops in the Spring of 1945 and repatriated often in a deplorable physical state. Sadly, a great number of them never came back.
In some cases, airmen were handed over to other evasion lines. According to circumstances, this was either for financial reasons, for lack of lodging or simply by the absence of sufficient personnel.
The Belgians responsible for Comet in France had direct contacts with other networks, among which Oaktree, Bourgogne/Burgundy, Possum… who were active exclusively on French territory.
In the first months of 1944, with the growing number of missions and of downed airmen, the massive arrests of evasion network members, the rising difficulties at guiding evaders in regions more and more subjected to controls and to more intensive raids on roads, railroads and bridges, it was decided to stop trying to get them out of occupied Belgium and France and to keep them hidden in secret camps far from inhabited areas. As those camps were created after a Belgian political intervention in London and through the efforts of two Belgian agents initially meant to work for Comet, the planning, establishment and functioning of those camps was credited to this particular network in the frame of an Operation bearing the code name Marathon.
About 156 evaders were thus sent to two camps established in the Forêt de Fréteval, in France (code Sherwood) and 93 others in the various camps organized in the Belgian Ardennes. The men were kept there until the arrival of Allied troops, in August 1944 in France, at the beginning of September in Belgium.
As for some of the airmen who had been hidden elsewhere in Belgium, the Allied Headquarters decided to credit them to Comet. After the Liberation of Brussels on 3 September 1944, public radio messages were sent over the waves to advise all lodgers in the area surrounding Brussels that their airmen were to be led or sent to the Hôtel Métropole, on the Place de Brouckère in the center of the capital, for their gathering before their return to the United Kingdom. No similar procedure had been used in Paris in August. As for the situation in the Netherlands, it was wholly different, as the major part of the country was not liberated until the following Spring.
Among the airmen liberated on Liberation Day in Bruxelles, twelve were aboard the "ghost train". Detained at Saint-Gilles prison, they did embark on 2 Septembre 1944 aboard a train towards Germany with 1500 Belgians and a few dozens of other allied airmen. Due to the intervention of the Résistance, the train will not go further than Malines/Mechelen and will come back to Brussels the next day, where all were freed.
Three airmen deceased during their evasion. Jim BURCH drawned with the Count Antoine d’Ursel during the night of 23 to 24 December 1943 while crossing the Bidassoa. Their bodies were found in Biriatou par the Germans, but to date the location of their burial is still unknown. Gerald SORENSEN was killed with Roger ABEELS, by a same German grenade, on September 3, 1944, during the fights for Enghien. They are burried together at the Ganshoren cemetery. Robert GARRETT was shot on septembre 7, 1944, at Queue-du-Bois by a member of a SS unit in retreat. He is burried in the little cemetery of Queue-du-Bois. Their evasion are narrated on their respective pages.
More than 1000 persons were thus helped by Comet at one stage or another of their evasion. It is wrong, as many writings assert, for example, that "more than 800 or 900 airmen were helped by Comet in getting back to England so they could return to combat". Of those who effectively returned to the United Kingdom before September 1944, relatively flew on combat missions again. Those who did were sent on missions over other areas and with the assurance that in case they were shot down again and would have been forced to talk, nothing harmful could happen to their former helpers.
Except for the known and definitive number of those who effectively crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, all other figures are subject to revision and additions due to our ongoing research. Nevertheless, the numbers given above are ample proof of the decisive role played by the Comet network during the war.
No precise inventory has yet been made about the number of Comet members, but a fair and realistic estimate allows us to put that figure nearing 3,000 people whose role as an agent or an auxiliary involved in the network's many activities was officially recognized. A large majority of them were Belgian nationals, but the role played by a great number of French citizens (about 400) has been warranted. The latter were officially recognized as members of a FFL network christened Comète-France after a post-war diplomatic agreement between the French and Belgian governments. Not all were ultimately officially warranted by Belgium.
Absent from official statistics are those anonymous men and women who were not members of any Résistance movement and who made possible the intervention of networks such as Comet. Not a single airman ever landed by parachute in any of Comet or any other evasion service (network) member's garden. Let's not forget all the farmers, the teachers, the doctors, the " ordinary " citizens, who often if not always were the first ones to come in contact with the airmen and who, despite the known risks, welcomed them into their homes, fed them, clothed them and got them on their way to a hopefully successful evasion. For the most part, all such brave people stayed in the shadows of official history, far from the honors and the medals. People who, unlike an undocumented number of other persons faced with the same humanitarian duty, had decided not to denounce the evaders despite the rewards offered by the Germans.
The number of death sentences, of summary executions and of deportations and internments in prisons and concentration camps following the many arrests among the Comet members were considerable. More than 155 members of Comet have paid with their lives their commitment to the cause of freedom.
Any figures that could ever be computed about the exact number of Comet helpers, whatever their role, would most probably fall short of reality. Although there was a sincere wish to recognize their efforts, the post-war attempts at computing their numbers partially failed to produce a comprehensive list. Indeed, some people who in their own way had actually participated to Comet's activity were never officially recognized, for whatever reason. In our opinion, it is highly probable if not certain that some persons, whose role compared to others who were rightly or wrongly recognized as more " productive ", have been merely ignored by those who were asked to give their advice in writing as to other persons' actions and merits. Others were enlisted into Comet, while not having in reality belonged to this network.
The governments, mainly those of the United States and of the United Kingdom, had asked for documented evidence of a person's activity in a network in order to duly reward the people who had helped their countrymen. Such administrative work was the responsibility of a relatively small number of persons, generally those who had occupied a managing or important position in the network. Practically no personal written records exist by those members who had been shot or who never came back from the death camps.
The appreciation reports, favorable or not, that the qualified people had to write depended upon many factors. There were those that had been written about persons each one personally knew from their own experience. As for the others, their redaction was dependent on verbal or written statements from other people. That bundle of documentation, reflecting the reality each informant personally deemed as complete and correct, whatever his or her position in the network, was inevitably subject to the quality of one's memory, the possession or not of concrete information, the subconscious or conscious tendency to favor or not some friend, to diminish the merits of a rival, etc. Although the vagaries of human nature were not absent from the whole affair, we do believe the majority of those records were made up in good faith and were also the subject of cross-examinations on the part of the Armed forces concerned.
After a thorough examination of all available evidence, various decisions, favorable or not, were then made as to the most "correct" retribution possible, if any. For those who were not excluded, this took the form of legal statutes, certificates, diplomas, honorific distinctions and other official tokens of gratitude, not forgetting the financial compensations in accordance with the length of deportation, the expenses for the clothing of evaders, their lodging, their transportation, the forging of papers, etc…
A classification, which might seem somewhat arbitrary, was established in the scale of those rewards. For example, it was decided - in the frame of escape and evasion - that the honorific ranks taken into account had to be based mainly on the number of airmen helped, with relatively less importance given to the nature of the help given. See the text under Récompenses-Awards where insight is given on the matter.
It is undeniable, and highly understandable with human nature being what it is, that errors and shortcomings were present in the whole procedure as is always the case when merits have to be recognized. Taking into account, on the one hand, the necessarily secret nature of the wartime contacts between the various players and the essential need to stay as anonymous as possible and, on the other hand, the reality of certain rising post-war political and ideological tensions, it is undeniable that all those elements had an inevitable influence, negative or positive, on those decisions. In some cases, relatively rare it seems, such and such might have been favorably appreciated without any substantiated evidence having been provided as to his or her effective activity in the network at one moment or another. In other cases, some of those about whom we are now able to prove the veracity of their involvement, were simply and solely ignored for reasons that we will just define as indefinable.
It is important to add also that the "purification" trials of those who had been accused of having collaborated with the enemy went on until about 1950, as this helps to explain the added difficulty at verifying the real activities of those involved.
It must be stressed also that the absence of any "official" recognition for some deserving helpers was simply due to the fact that they never presented any request for recognition nor claimed any honor. This happened either through modesty or ignorance - or simply because said persons had disappeared in some German camp and their family had no possibility to put forward any proof of their activities in helping one or more evaders. Such people's names and the role, however modest, they played are thus absent from the nomenclature generally available in publications or in some archive reports. We have found such names in other archives hitherto never fully and comprehensively analyzed or that had simply been ignored (their names will be included in the list of Comet membres/helpers).
This enhances still more the contrast with the degree of notoriety of the high achievements, indisputable in our minds also, ascribed to more "recognized" great figures of the Comet network and about which the sources available to the public are to be found in abundance. Some of these sources (books, articles, various documents) devoted to Comet and its history, a very complicated subject as we wrote in the preamble, do not always reflect certain aspects of the historical facts, insofar as anyone could ever attain historical " Truth ". There exist certain tenacious legends, more often than not spread nowadays over the Internet and which often are simplistic and historically erroneous summaries, repeating over and over again the same stereotypes which the great majority of their readers tend to consider as " the " sole and complete facts of what had been, in all its complexity, the Comet network. Far from our thoughts to pose as holding the whole truth about Comet and its role in the global effort. We are working here, in all modesty but with determination, to get as close as possible to the facts and to put into frame, in all its aspects, the most faithful possible depiction of the generous ideals that Comet embodied.