Belgium 1940
Dedee
Allied air attacks by the RAF during the beginning of World War II used flight paths that took them over the airspace of either Holland or Belgium to reach major cities of western and central Germany, and in particular, the importance of the industrial basin of the Ruhr required these countries be traveled over.
These air penetrations resulted in many casualties due to heavy air defense by the Germans, which caused many downed Allied planes in the process. As air attacks increased, there simply were not adequate numbers of fighter escorts to protect Allied bombers. That resulted in thousands of lost aircraft, many of which forced airmen to parachute into Belgian territory. The key to a successful parachute jump was in the timing. If an airman jumped from a plane too early and opened his chute too quickly, he would be floating downward for too long, giving the Germans on the ground too much time to chase them. Because airmen were not trained in jumping out of airplanes, they would tend to open their parachutes too early, out of fear that the chutes might not open at all. If airmen delayed opening their chutes for as long as possible, it gave Germans on the ground too little time to organize a landing party.
Avoiding capture by the Germans once on the ground in Belgium was the goal of every downed airman, and evading capture and eventually escaping out of Belgium required help from the locals and from the resistance forces.
Defeated by overwhelming forces on the battlefield, subdued and kept in servitude by an arrogant enemy, helping airmen was one way Belgians could show they were still in the fight. A deep sense of personal honor, and a desire to show gratitude to those risking their lives to liberate them from a hated enemy, were reasons enough to lay their own lives on the line as well.
Twenty-four years earlier, on November 30, 1916, Andree de Jongh was born in Schaerbeek, Belgium to Frederic and Alice de Jongh. Schaerbeek was a small municipality abutting Brussels, and Andree’s father was the headmaster of a school in the city.
Andree’s upbringing was fairly typical of most Belgian girls during the early 1920s, as the German occupation from World War I had long since been abandoned. During her childhood, Andree had idolized Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was shot and executed in 1915 because she had helped troops escape German-occupied Belgium into the Netherlands during World War I. From an early age until adulthood, Andree had always dreamed of also becoming a nurse one day, following in the footsteps of Cavell. In her twenties, she saw that dream come true.
In early 1940, at age twenty-four, Andree (nicknamed Dedee) moved out of her parents’ home in Brussels to Malmedy, a small city of eleven thousand people in the province of Liege. There she became a volunteer nurse for the Red Cross, ministering to Allied troops, and also did some work as a commercial artist.
When she periodically returned home to Brussels, she always had a lot to say about the new war, and the German occupation of Belgium.
“Papa, the Germans are capturing so many British soldiers and sending them to prison camps, I’m afraid many of them will not survive,” she mentioned to her father one day.
Frederic de Jongh was very sympathetic to members of the Allied troops and had himself heard of soldiers who had escaped from the beaches at Dunkirk or from other battlefields, hiding in safe houses in Brussels. There, many of the soldiers were well-taken care of, but with no way to get back home.
“Be careful, Dedee. You do remember what they did to Edith Cavell at Tir National when they executed her for being in the resistance?”
“We must do something. These soldiers don’t have many places to hide, and have no way of getting out of Belgium on their own,” she went on.
“But if they stay in one place too long, word will surely get out where they are. And you know what the Gestapo will do to those harboring British soldiers?” her father emphatically asked.
Belgium was surrounded by occupied countries and the safe houses in Brussels had no coastal escape route. So while many people were instrumental in placing some of the soldiers in safe houses and providing them with food and false papers, plans had to be made to get these soldiers through France and into Spain. Although Spain was considered a neutral country during World War II, it was evident that General Francisco Franco, the dictator of Spain, favored his relationship with the Germans who provided huge sums of money to bolster the Spanish economy. While reaching Spain was an arduous task, maneuvering through the country to reach Gibraltar in the south was certainly less dangerous than trying to evade Germans in France or Belgium. The presence of a British consulate in Spain provided a certain degree of diplomatic immunity, but an evader still needed to reach the consulate without being captured.
There were clear distinctions in Spain between an escapee and an evader. If you had been captured by the enemy and managed to escape, you were an “escapee.” If you had never been apprehended, you were an “evader.” The Franco government was obliged to return all escapees to their own governments, but evaders could be interned in Spain for the duration of the war. British and American intelligence offices had obviously instructed downed airmen to claim, if they were caught in Spain, that they were escapees, even if they had to invent an escape story. But since an airman had to convince the Spanish police, it was important to avoid capture altogether.
Despite the warning from her father, Dedee felt compelled to help. She organized a series of safe houses, gathered civilian clothes for the soldiers to wear to prevent identification, and enrolled the services of friends to create new photographs and false identity papers. To become a safe house keeper, it was preferable if you were a couple with no children or you were elderly. The nucleus of the escape organization, therefore, was made up of young women and middle-aged or elderly citizens. Sadly, the middle-aged and elderly were the ones least likely to survive the rigors of arrest and imprisonment under the decrepit conditions throughout Nazi detention camps.
On the outside, many safe houses used to shelter airmen were run by normal families going through the daily hardship of enemy occupation, minding their own business.
Dedee was fortunate enough to receive funds from wealthy Belgians who sympathized with her and the soldiers she was trying to help. And yet, to Dedee it was not enough. So in the summer of 1941, she met with two friends to set up an escape network. Her two friends were Henri DeBliqui, and his cousin, Arnold Deppe. The three became known as “the three Ds” after their names.
“Do you realize the danger you are taking by doing this?” her father asked.
“All I can see is frightened men falling from the sky in their parachutes, not knowing what lies below. They fall into farmers’ fields, in trees, on rooftops. After they hide their parachute, they don’t know where to go, who to trust, or even where they are. We must help or they will end up in a German prison camp or sent to one of their work camps,” she answered.
“I only know that if I don’t help these people, who will?” she responded. “Henri, Arnold and I will be very careful, but we’ll never be certain about the people we rely on. At some point, the Germans will find out what we’re doing and some of us will be caught. And if they don’t shoot us, we will surely end up in one of their horrible prisons. But I’m not afraid, father. If I always looked up to Edith Cavell for what she did during the first war years ago, it is time for me to do the same now.”
“You cannot do this by yourself. I’m sure DeBliqui and Deppe will help, but you will need someone who has more connections in Belgium and elsewhere, someone like me,” he said.
“No, father, it is far too dangerous for you to get involved. One of us in the family is enough.”
“I don’t expect to travel over hundreds of miles with these people at my age, but I can surely help you here in Brussels with safe places for the soldiers and getting food and false papers while you are setting up other safe places and routes to get these people to Spain.”
“If anything should happen to you, I don’t know how I could live with myself. You must promise me you’ll be so very careful, especially when I am away.”
“I promise to trust no one and to do whatever I can to help.”
As the months passed that summer in 1941, plans were being made to establish escape routes to Spain. This was to be a massive undertaking. From Brussels, a series of routes needed to be established to transport escapees and downed airmen to Paris and points south, like Bayonne and St. Jean de Luz in the Basque region of France near the Spanish border by way of Bordeaux and Dax. From there, they would need to walk over the Pyrenees Mountains to reach San Sebastian and Bilbao, Spain.
The crossing of the Pyrenees would involve a journey of two to three or four days for men who in many cases were not in good physical condition after weeks of inactivity while hiding in safe houses. The degree of difficulty depended on the season of the year, but even in good weather conditions, the need to mostly travel by night made it a difficult expedition. Much danger could be encountered attempting to cross the sometimes raging waters of the Bidassoa River as German and Spanish patrols watched the border areas.
Safe houses had to be established along the entire route and Basque smugglers were needed to take evaders deeper into Spain. Since Deppe had once worked for a film company in the Basque region before the war, he volunteered to find a route over the mountains while Dedee and her father set up arrangements in Brussels.
So much work needed to be done, and so many people would need to be involved that it was inevitable for the group to one day be infiltrated by German spies posing as downed English airmen, complete with identity information and intricate knowledge of RAF information. Such was the case with Prosper Dezitter.