How the Comète Line Came About
When King Leopold of Belgium was forced to capitulate, Andrée De Jongh was a young 24 year old girl living with her parents and sister in the Schaerbeck district of Brussels.
She had trained as a nurse but at the time was working as a commercial artist for the Sofina Company of Brussels. Baron Jacques Donny was director of the same company and had learnt of the escaping British soldiers plight and was helping to finance their shelter in safe houses in and around the Brussels area. Incensed at the defeat of her country Andrée volunteered to help nurse theses escaping British evaders. This worked fine for a while but as grateful as the men were, what they really wanted was to get home to Britain, be reunited with their families and help defend there country from the massing German forces that threatened to invade Britain at anytime, these were joined by many Belgian men who wished to continue the battle against the Germans by adding their ranks to those of the British.
Working as a film technician for the same company, Arnold Deppe was also involved in caring for the British evaders and had once lived in the Bayonne area of France. Together these three set about the task of seeing if it might be possible to get the evaders home by sending them south to neutral Spain, as any cross-Channel escape was out of the question due to masses of German troops stationed along the coast and an exclusion zone the Germans had imposed for its length.
A contact of Deppe gave him the address of a Madame Elvire DeGreef a Belgian from the Brussels suburb of Etterbeek who was living with her family in the small town of Anglet between Biarritz and Bayonne. Deppe’s contact thought that she might be willing to help in an attempt to get the British men home.
Arnold Deppe then made the journey south and after taking to Madame Elvire DeGreef returned to Brussels knowing that there was a will amongst the people he had met to construct an evasion line that would stretch from the Belgian capital, through France and over the Pyrenees to Spain and the Comète Line was born.
She had trained as a nurse but at the time was working as a commercial artist for the Sofina Company of Brussels. Baron Jacques Donny was director of the same company and had learnt of the escaping British soldiers plight and was helping to finance their shelter in safe houses in and around the Brussels area. Incensed at the defeat of her country Andrée volunteered to help nurse theses escaping British evaders. This worked fine for a while but as grateful as the men were, what they really wanted was to get home to Britain, be reunited with their families and help defend there country from the massing German forces that threatened to invade Britain at anytime, these were joined by many Belgian men who wished to continue the battle against the Germans by adding their ranks to those of the British.
Working as a film technician for the same company, Arnold Deppe was also involved in caring for the British evaders and had once lived in the Bayonne area of France. Together these three set about the task of seeing if it might be possible to get the evaders home by sending them south to neutral Spain, as any cross-Channel escape was out of the question due to masses of German troops stationed along the coast and an exclusion zone the Germans had imposed for its length.
A contact of Deppe gave him the address of a Madame Elvire DeGreef a Belgian from the Brussels suburb of Etterbeek who was living with her family in the small town of Anglet between Biarritz and Bayonne. Deppe’s contact thought that she might be willing to help in an attempt to get the British men home.
Arnold Deppe then made the journey south and after taking to Madame Elvire DeGreef returned to Brussels knowing that there was a will amongst the people he had met to construct an evasion line that would stretch from the Belgian capital, through France and over the Pyrenees to Spain and the Comète Line was born.
posted by Phil at 10:29 pm
2 Comments:
it's amazing so many people have done so much for freedom and we know so little about them
I wondered if you could share where the information came from that Arnold Deppe worked for SOFINA please.
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