Escaping over the Pyrenees twice: the story of George Watt
A downed USAAF airman makes a spectacular home-run courtesy of réseau Comète
George Watt knew Europe, or parts of it, well. In 1937 the eager young American communist had travelled to Spain to enlist in the Lincoln Battalion of the XV International Brigade, alongside some 3,000 other Americans determined to fight for the cause of the democratically elected Republic in the Spanish Civil War. ‘I felt strongly about that son of a bitch Hitler and his concentration camps’ he recalled. ‘I hated his master race crap. I felt I had to go.’ He later believed the desperate, bloody, unforgiving struggle in Spain to be a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. For much of this time as an infantryman with the Lincolns his political fervency led him to serve as the battalion’s political commissar, a role he described as ‘morale building and political education.’ On the defeat of the Republic in 1939 he and many of the American survivors of the International Brigades managed to escape across the Pyrenees to France. Eventually repatriated back to the USA, Watt travelled to Le Havre through Paris in a sealed train on 25 January 1939, under the auspices of the League of Nations. Although he had been in Paris, he later remarked, the lowered blinds and locked doors meant that he hadn’t actually seen it. The next time he saw Paris was in 1944, soon after his 30th birthday, in very different circumstances. The one common feature of both visits, however, was that on neither occasion was he welcome.
On 5 November 1943 – his 30th birthday – now a Staff Sergeant in the USAAF, Watt gathered with his crew in the briefing room at Station 136 at RAF Knettishall in Suffolk, home of the Eight Air Force’s 388th Bombardment Group. Watt was assistant flight engineer and right waist gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress, one of ten crew members who came together seven months before when they started their training at Pyote Air Base in Texas in April 1943. Flying through the heavy air battles over Munster, Wilhelmshaven, Schweinfurt and Gdynia, they were now a band of brothers, a close-knit team of veterans, each inhabiting his allotted space in their battered aircraft. By November 1943 she ‘was battle scarred’ he recalled, ‘with hundreds of flak holes, but she’d always brought us back.’ Their mission that day was a big one – the railway marshalling yards at Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr Valley. At least on this occasion they would be escorted all the way by P47 fighters carrying the new drop tanks, which gave the bombers new protection against the marauding swarms of enemy fighters that had caused such slaughter on the second Schweinfurt raid on 14 October 1943 – 60 planes (from 291) and 600 men were lost in one raid, an occasion the men called Black Thursday.
After the hours of preparation, Flak Suit joined hundreds of other aircraft as they made their slow climb to 29,000 feet before heading across the channel towards their target. The trip was largely uneventful until they saw Gelsenkirchen up ahead, and they entered the flak storm. ‘The flak was so thick you could walk on it’ said Watt. ‘We could barely see the other ships in our formation. Our giant Fort rocked and shook like a cork as the flak ripped into our plane. Our ears were bursting from the concussion.’ Then, suddenly, flames appeared from Number One engine, and the plane suddenly dropped 2,000 feet before levelling out. ‘Prepare to bail out’ came the order over the intercom. The pilot, 26-year old Lieutenant William Bramwell managed to keep control of the aircraft, and turned her for home. There was a good chance that the battered old bird could reach the English Channel. Escorted back by four P47 Thunderbolts, the crew felt secure from attack from the watching Focke Wulf 190s, which waited to pick off the slow, wounded aircraft with their devastating 20mm cannons.
It was high over Belgium at 20,000 feet with the English Channel in sight, the Thunderbolts waggled their wings in goodbye, forced to depart for lack of fuel. Within moments of their departure Watt, standing behind his 50-calibre machine gun in his heated suit and oxygen mask in the 55 below zero temperature of the open gun position, saw a single Focke-Wulf approaching rapidly from below. Shouting a warning to the rest of the crew, it took only moments for the enemy fighter to swing in from the side and begin firing. Lining up the approaching enemy fighter in his gun sight, the confident Watt gently pressed the firing button. He had the bastard. To his horror, nothing happened. The gun was frozen, and refused to fire. Before him he could see the rapidly approaching Focke-Wulf, cannon fire sparkling towards him in a stream of coloured death. Almost immediately the crippled Fort stood on its nose, and began its long plummet to the earth, the noise of its death agony suddenly a deafening crescendo in Watt’s ears. The pressure forced him to the floor, unable to reach out and hook on his parachute. ‘So this was it!’ he thought. This was how life ended in a falling plane. Despite the inevitability of imminent death he found himself calm, rationally considering his fate. He was going to die on his birthday! ‘Well, it’s no too bad. It will be over quickly. It’s the waiting for the end that isn’t much fun. I’ve had a good life. No regrets! I have stood up for what I have believed in, and it’s no loss to die fighting fascism. But it’s a pity I can’t say goodbye to my family.’
Then, extraordinarily, the pressure began slowly to lift, as the crippled aircraft somehow began to level out of its death dive. It seemed miraculous. He learned later that Bramwell had struggled with the control column to bring the aircraft back under control, as it fell some 12,000 feet in a matter of dizzying seconds. That the aircraft hadn’t broken up in the air was a testament to the sturdiness of the B17. The aircraft was still losing height rapidly, but the surviving crewmen now had a few moments in which to find their parachutes and bail out. Putting aside his contemplation of imminent death Watt scrambled for his parachute among the detritus on the floor and managed to hook it on before throwing himself out of the waist door. He had no idea how high they were. Managing to open his parachute, he found himself floating gently over open farmland, a wide river ahead of him, over which he could see other parachutes from the dying plane now falling. The silence and calm underneath his gently descending parachute were a stark contrast to the rushing noise and pounding fear he had just left behind. His first thoughts, even in the air, were of escape. It wasn’t the first time he had been behind enemy lines, his experience of fleeing Fascist entrapment on the Ebro River in 1938 now suddenly filling his mind.
His escape plans were interrupted by the prospect of an imminent landing in a ploughed field. Just before he reached the ground he saw what he took to be a stump, bolt upright in the middle of the field. It was a hard landing, knocking the air out of him, but he quickly recovered, stood up, and began to gather in the parachute. He looked up. The stump was there, smiling broadly, a cap on its weather-beaten farmer’s face. Watt tried to introduce himself, but neither his French or German made any impression. The man in the cap remained mute, but smiling. Then, suddenly, the field seemed to be full of laughing, noisy villagers: men, women, children of all sizes celebrating his arrival. This wasn’t good, he thought, unless they were here to spirit him away from the Germans who were sure to turn up soon. He tried to get away, but shaking hands with everyone eager to grasp that of an Allied aviator. He heard a language he didn’t recognise. Dutch? No. Ah, Flemish! But some spoke French. “When would their liberation come?” he was asked. Soon, he assured them. He asked them where he could hide, but no one proffered an answer. He quickly sensed that people were too scared to answer. Then, as he had feared, a black-uniformed man came running, panting across the field. As he drew up, it was obvious that the man wasn’t a German, but a Belgian gendarme, intent on taking Watt into custody. The group grew quiet. Urgently Watt spoke to him in his halting French, arguing that as an American he was a friend of the Belgians, and must not be handed over to the Germans. After a while, and some contributions from the growing crowd, his entreaties seemed to work, the gendarme, whose name was Leon Famaey, reluctantly turning away and walking over to Watt’s discarded parachute. Watt took this as a sign to depart, and he made his way out of the field, shooing the following crowd away from him as he tried to put as much distance from his landing place as possible. Eventually people got the message, and Watt was left to make his way, running along paths and fields. He became aware after a while that a man in a cap was running parallel with him, about two hundred yards away. From time to time the man encouraged Watt to continue running before eventually pointing him to a dry irrigation ditch, surrounded by thick scrub. Watt gratefully crawled into it, and seemed hidden to the world, at last. Sooner or later the German search party would turn up, and conduct a thorough search of the immediate landing area. Watt knew this from his escape and evasion briefings in England.
Soon afterwards the man in the cap approached Watt’s hiding place, stealthily using the natural cover of the ditch to hide himself from onlookers. He looked at the heated flying suit that Watt had taken off, and without saying anything took it away to hide. The afternoon was hot, and Watt lay back to rest. He had to think. He had a general plan to head to France, where he hoped he might fall in with an established escape line, and to help him do this he had a silk map on northern Europe in his escape kit. But how was one to find a resistance group? That was the mystery. He couldn’t very much go up to a stranger and ask ‘Where’s the underground?’ Apart from the man with the hat, no one knew of his existence, or so he thought. Poking his head above the scrub, he was struck by a comforting sight. He was surrounded on all sides by farmers patiently tending their fields, all carrying on their daily labours as though he wasn’t there. They were protecting him by means of their everyday ordinariness, their sang froid sufficient to be able to return a German’s question about the missing American with a look of surprise, and ignorance. ‘Parachutist? What parachutist?’ All seemed sympathetic to his plight, and wanted to help. But none knew how, except to feign ignorance to his pursuers.
Shortly afterwards two other men, who had been in the crowd, made their way surreptitiously towards him, pushing their way into his hiding space and sitting on the ground with him. They introduced themselves as local men, Raymond Inghels and Jan Van Eetvelder. Inghels had been a merchant seaman who have travelled many times to New York, and spoke excellent English. They told him that only minutes after he had left the field, local fascists – the Black Brigades, pro-German thugs – had arrived. “Where was the American?” they asked. People shrugged their shoulders. Others pointed in the opposite direction. As the three men talked a German light aircraft floated above the hiding place, criss-crossing the fields, obviously part of the search effort. They didn’t admit to having any contacts in any resistance groups, but both promised to return later that night with civilian clothes and take him to a place where he could catch a train to Brussels. From there they suggested he could try to make his way to France, in the hope of finding his way into the hands of an escape line. While they were talking another man, who turned out to be the stump, the farmer in whose field he had landed, also made his way into the hiding place, carrying with him a welcome sandwich. The place was getting too crowded, worried Watt. The farmer soon left, followed by Inghels and Van Eetvelder, both promising to return after dark.
On his own again, after a while Watt could hear whistles and shouts in the distance. Three German soldiers cycled down the nearby road. The Germans were clearly looking for him. Then, as darkness began to fall, yet another couple, a man and a woman, made their way to his hiding place. It was apparent that even if the Germans didn’t know where he was, many locals did. All it needed was for the Germans to put pressure on one or more local people for his hideaway to be revealed. Would he come with them for a meal? The couple asked their question in English. Could they be members of the resistance? Watt was torn. He had promised to wait for Raymond Inghels to return with clothes and a tram ticket; if he left now he might miss this opportunity. Watt had promised Raymond that he would wait, so he politely declined their offer. Then, with darkness having fully settled over the countryside another man who had been at the landing field also made his way to the hiding place. He had been tracking the German search parties he told Watt, and one was now on its way directly along the track towards him. He would be found very soon. He must get away immediately. The man was urgent, insistent even. While this was going on, the farmer with the cap returned, heard what the other man had to say, and agreed. He urged Watt to follow him: he would find him somewhere else to hide. Fighting back his desire to stay to await Raymond’s return, he was, after many entreaties, persuaded to accompany the cap-wearing farmer into the night. Reluctantly leaving his admittedly by now well-known hiding place, they crossed fields, ditches and woods, before they entered a small group of dwellings on the outskirts a town he later learned was Hamme, a farming community lying between Ghent and Antwerp. With a finger to his lips, the farmer motioned him to be silent, placing him quietly in an outside lavatory. What seemed like ages later, a young woman came out and led him into a house.
Watt was now on the first stage of a convoluted journey that would lead him through many different hands, into the care of the Comet Line, a fact which, at the time was, to him and the Belgian civilians who first looked after him, he realized not. The journey was a dangerous one, both for him but more so for his helpers, and accident – or serendipity – certainly played a part in his escape. The field in which Watt had landed was on the south side of the Durme River, opposite to where most of his surviving crew had landed, and where the Germans quickly congregated. This gave Watt a crucial half hour before the arrival of the hunting parties found the remains of his discarded silk parachute, torn to shreds for souvenirs (and underwear) by the crowd, to find refuge in a nearby wood. All the local farmers who had crowded around him on landing, however, had no idea what to do with him, or how to spirit him to a place of safety. Unknown to Watt at the time, even the policeman – Leon Famaey – whose duty it was to arrest him, was threatened with the label of ‘collaborationist’ by his own sister in the crowd if he did so, that he reluctantly turned his back on Watt to give him a chance to get away.
The couple into whose home he had now entered at 72 Sint Annastraat in Hamme – Eduard (the farmer with the cap) and Mathilde Lauwaert – were members of a clandestine anti-German group called the Belgian Volunteer League. Their primary method of resistance was distributing illegal newspapers. They were joined by Eduard’s parents, and an elderly German-speaking friend, Leon Ducolumbier, a veteran of the Great War. Resistance, even of this limited kind, was dangerous; harbouring evading ‘terror fliers’ was much more so, and would result in deportation to a concentration camp for a slow death by starvation and over-work, or a more rapid death by execution in a Gestapo prison closer to home. Even though they had never assisted an evader before, the Lauwaert’s and their circle implicitly understood these risks; indeed, as German motorcycles and trucks raced down the street outside, continuing their hunt for the missing parachutist, Ducolumbier drew his hand across his throat, to indicate what would happen if they were caught. It was Watt’s first experience of a Belgian home, one that was fiercely anti-Nazi, and it was the Lauwaert’s first meeting with a soldier of the Allies. They were, Watt discovered, very well-informed about the progress of the war. ‘How?’ he asked them. ‘The BBC’ they replied. Radio from London, explicitly prohibited by the regime on pain of death, was their precious window into the free world. They listened to London every night: it gave them hope that in their darkness the dawn would one day come.
But the group didn’t have a plan. They were as surprised to have Watt in their house as Watt was to be there. It was one of those extraordinary twists brought about by the exigencies of war. Only a few hours before Watt had been at 30,000 feet in a bomber en route to the Ruhr, and in their fields in Belgium the Lauwaerts were fighting their own, very different war. Now, they were exultant that they had managed to snatch Watt from the clutches of the Teutonic ‘superman’, despite the well-recognised risks to their own lives. On hearing that it was Watt’s birthday they brought out bread, sausage and beer to celebrate. They sat and discussed what they should do next. They agreed that it was essential to get Watt as far away as possible, during the hours of darkness, to a hiding place where he could then be helped onto a train to France. Leon Ducolumbier volunteered to look after Watt until this could be arranged: he and his wife lived in the centre of Hamme, with good access to the tram. Everyone agreed. The Lauwaerts found some old clothes for him, a dark, shiny suit, a vest, scarf and a pair of old shoes. There was no shirt, Watt noticed. When the road seemed clear, they stepped outside and began walking towards the Ducolumbier’s home, in the centre of Hamme, on Evangeliestraat. There was a heart stopping moment for Watt when a horse-drawn cart carrying three German soldiers trundled by was treated by Ducolumbier with carefree nonchalance. ‘Guten Abend’ he called to the soldiers, raising his cap. ‘Guten Abend’ they wearily replied, paying no attention to the two scruffy Belgians apparently walking along the road on their way home from the fields. A further two and a half mile walk across the fields, avoiding the roads, was undertaken under the bright moon, before they emerged into the streets of closely-packed two storey houses, and into the Ducolumbier home. To Watt’s surprise, Madame Ducolumbier was expecting them, with a table spread with bread and black sausage. Watt groaned inwardly: he had been fed non-stop by these people all evening. Politeness disallowed him to refuse, but it wasn’t long before the exhaustion of this extraordinary day overcame him, and he was shown to his bed.
The next morning, 6 November 1943, Watt awoke to find an excited Raymond Inghel by his bedside. Having missed him the previous night, Raymond had thought of the people who might harbour an evader, and knocked on the Lauwaert’s door. He had guessed correctly, and quickly agreed to help get Watt to France. Raymond would personally escort Watt to Brussels, to seek temporary shelter with his sister, Hedwige, and brother-in-law, Dr Jean Proost, a local doctor. After examining their options, Raymond determined that the only was to get Watt safely from Hamme to Brussels was if he were to accompany him. Watt protested, but eventually gave way. This was too dangerous for the Belgians, he thought, who were going out of their way to help him, putting their own lives at risk. But they would have nothing of it: they weren’t going to throw Watt to the wolves. That night Raymond and Watt left the Ducolumbier house, heading for the tram. Eduard Lauwaert joined them for the journey, leading the way. The evening street were busy with people with bicycles and on foot. A company of German soldiers came marching past. In the narrow street Watt was forced against the wall to let them through, but he felt no fear. Was he getting used to the presence of Germans? he asked himself. Then he saw the tram, and his heart raced. So far, so good. Eduard walked by and shook his hand, before disappearing into the night. Raymond climbed on. Watt waited a moment, and joined him.
That evening, at her home at 97 Rue Bonaventure in Jette, Hedwige Proost had no idea that she would receive two visitors, but as with all other Belgians with whom Watt was to come into contact, he was welcomed into their home. He noticed her fear, however, when Raymond triumphantly told his sister that Watt was an American parachutist who had landed in their village the previous day. It was ‘the first look in her eyes that I will always remember when I think of the heroism of a young doctor’s wife who was afraid’ Watt recalled, ‘yet risked her life to rescue a complete stranger.’ Later, when her husband came home, he too welcomed Watt into his home. But although Watt was now in Brussels, and some distance from where he had dropped, he was no closer to an escape line. Watt couldn’t stay in the doctor’s busy house, which doubled as his surgery, so after some consideration it was agreed that later in the afternoon Raymond would take Watt to stay with another relative. Then, the following day, Watt would make it alone for the French border. But in the meantime Dr Proost had an idea. Through his sister, he knew of a young man who be believed had connections with the resistance. He went to find out.
It was here, by pleasant accident, that Watt landed, quite literally on his feet, for Proost had unwittingly connected him to a proressional escape line, one of the most famous of the war, the Réseau Comète. Andrée de Jongh, a 25-year old Belgian nurse (known as Dédée), had created the Comet Line in 1941, with the express purpose of helping escaping and evading Allied troops keep out of the clutches of the Germans and return to Britain. She was to personally make thirty-three round trips to the western Pyrenees delivering evaders and escapers, before she was captured in January 1943. She survived Ravensbrück and Mauthausen. Airey Neave, himself a successful escaper (from Colditz) who wrote her biography– ‘Little Cyclone’ – described her as a force of nature who was ‘one of our greatest agents’. This complex operation, in which she and her helpers gathered up escapers and evaders from across the country, gave them new clothes, identification papers, food and shelter, and then escorted them by train through occupied and Vichy France to the border with Spain, supported by the British escape organisation, MI9. Together, MI9 and the American escaping organization, MIS-X, and de Jongh helped 800 Allied soldiers escape from Belgium through occupied France to Spain and Gibraltar or by sea from Brittany. Even after her arrest Réseau Comète carried on, George Watt being the latest recipient of its help.
Before long Proost returned with a young man, who Watt would soon learn was Henri Malfait. Malfait produced a typed lists of questions in English which he went through with Watt. Name, rank and serial number. Father’s name and mother’s maiden name. Mother’s birthplace and home address. Name of his squadron commander. Physical description, and a host of other questions. It was clearly a test, to ensure that Watt was genuine, and not a German stooge inserted by the Gestapo to penetrate the escape line, an increasingly worrying problem for resistants. Malfait then left the house, saying that if everything was okay he would return by eight o’clock, and take Watt away with him. This was the procedure that Watt had been briefed would take place to confirm his credentials: Malfait would use a secret transmitter to send the details back to London for confirmation of Watt’s identity. At eight o’clock he returned. All was well.[1]
Saying his farewells to Raymond and the Proosts, Watt accompanied Henri Malfait to his parent’s home, at 9 rue Tilmont, in the Jette district of Brussels, where he was to spend much of the following week. It was during this time, through conversations with Henri, that he learned much about the work of the resistance. It wasn’t until after the war that he discovered that he had been the local group’s first evader, or that two months afterwards Henri was captured by the Gestapo, savagely tortured and sent first to Fort Breendonk concentration camp before being sent to suffer within the ‘nacht und nebel’ (night and fog) of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. A devout Roman Catholic, the young Henri was a member of the scouts and the Catholic Youth Movement. His father, Octave, was an accountant and his mother, Thérèse, spent most of the day foraging for food to feed their small family. Henri’s resistance work entailed the distribution of an illegal newspaper, La Libre Belgique, together with intelligence work against the occupiers. They were on the alert for escapers and evaders, but also wary of German spies attempting to break the organisation. He told Watt that they had indeed identified a German pretending to be an evader. They were arranging to give him the questionnaire, before shooting him. Ninety percent of Belgians hated the Germans, the Malfaits told him, because they had stamped on their country’s liberties both in 1914 and in 1940, this being where the English nurse, Edith Cavell, had been executed in 1915 for hiding British and French soldiers, and guiding them out of the country to neutral Holland.
The next change to his hiding arrangements came about without warning. One of Henri’s resistance connections, Jacques De Bruyn, a tall, blond-haired man of middle years, arrived at the Malfaits on Thursday November 11, six days after Watt had bailed out of the crippled Flak Suit, to take him away.[2] After a hurried farewell with the Malfaits Watt found himself at the de Bruyns for a meal, before accompanying Madame Octavie De Bruyn in silence on a tram travelling to the opposite side of the city. If they were stopped by the police, German security services or even the Black Brigades, they would have to eschew no knowledge of each other. Watt would be on his own. But the journey was uneventful. Madame de Bruyn gently knocked on the door of 134 Avenue du Diamant, ushered him in to the small apartment, and then just as quietly disappeared. For the eight days that followed he stayed at the home of Raoul Thibault, an electrical engineer, his wife Marie-Rose and infant daughter Inès.[3] The Thibault’s were committed résistants, unlike most of the others he had encountered so far who were, apart from the remarkable Henri Malfait, accidental ones. For each of these groups of people, the act of helping an evading Allied serviceman was a dangerous escalation in their own personal acts of resistance, one which, if caught, offered the ultimate penalty for assisting their enemy’s enemy: death. After eight days, Madame Octavie De Bruyn knocked on the door and announced that he would be leaving that night, for France.
The journey by train from Brussels to Rumes, south east of Lille on the border with France, was uneventful, and took little more than an hour. When they alighted from the train Madame de Bruyn asked him to wait in the shadows, while she disappeared into the darkness, returning a few minutes later with a group of men and women. In the group he recognised the voice of one of his comrades from Flak Suit, H.C. ‘Tennessee’ Johnson, the flight engineer. They embraced. For the remainder of the journey the two men remained together, an indivisible team. Watt and Johnson were joined by two other evaders, an American and a Canadian, together with two guides, a local woman – Henriette Hanotte – and a man. After saying farewell to Madame De Bruyn who returned to the station, the group began to walk through the darkness, along deserted country roads for about an hour when they stopped at a darkened house in the middle of a wood. They were in the hamlet of Bachy, just across the border in Occupied France. Beckoned inside, they met another woman, a twelve-year old boy and a couple of men. “Welcome to Free France” they said. “You are now in the hands of the French resistance.” The home belonged to French résistants Nelly and Raymonde Hoel. The 12-year-old boy was René Bricout, the son of Maurice and Rachel Bricourt, of Bachy. Maurice was the local customs officer. “They slapped us on the back” Watt recalled, “congratulated us, and expressed their admiration. Food and wine appeared. They toasted us, and we toasted them. We drank to the death of Hitler.” Johnson described his own escape to Watt. He had landed perhaps ten kilometres from Watt to the north west, next to a farm house. The lady farmer immediately bustled him under a pile of hay in her barn. At night she returned, fed him, gave him a change of clothes and that same night was collected by members of a resistance group and cycled away to stay with a member of the group. “That’s all there was to it” he told Watt. ‘He was the luckiest son of a gun next to me’ Watt mused.
The next morning René Bricout demonstrated his courage to all when he calmly escorted the group to railway station at Cysoing, where they each climbed into separate carriages for the short journey to Lille. From there, following careful instructions from the Bricourts, they bought tickets for Paris. The train arrived uneventfully at noon where where they met another guide who escorted them all the way into the Gare du Nord. There they were handed over silently to a woman dressed all in black.[4] They followed her to the Metro and eventually to an area scattered with large apartment blocks. They entered one – 8 rue Marguerite, just off Avenue de Wagram in the 17th Arrondissement – and climbed five or six flights of stairs to an apartment on the top floor. Knocking on the door they found it opening to reveal four or five other Allied evaders inside. Watt was immediately concerned: wasn’t this too risky? There seemed to be too many people in the apartment for it to be safe. The next day, however, he and Johnson found themselves being sent to stay in a new hideout in the suburb of Vanves in the south west of the city. The large, old rambling house at 6 Park Avenue had been a former mental hospital, and now was the home of the family of the man who had established it, Dr. Pierre Habrekorn. Surrounded by eight-foot high walls, the two men had considerable freedom of movement, but the house was cold, and food – unlike Belgium – was scarce. No sooner had they arrived that their guide warned them that the Gestapo had broken an entire link in their resistance group – the Réseau Comète – in Paris. There had been many arrests. They were safe where they were, but it would take time to repair the damage and find new routes south to Spain, and new hiding places and patriots to volunteer to take the places of those who had been swept up in the German drag-net. ‘For us, the escapers, it was an inconvenience’ he recalled; ‘it delayed our departure from Paris and increased the danger. But for the resistance fighters who were arrested, it was the ultimate tragedy. I knew they faced imprisonment, torture, and possible execution. I did not personally know these people, but I could not help thinking of the Malfaits, the Thibaults, and the beautiful people in Zeele and Hamme – and the possibility they too could pay this price.’
The two men settled in for a long stay, feeling guilty about sharing the family’s meagre fare. There was never enough food to go around, and they – and the family - were always hungry, but the men couldn’t help but notice how the family always offered the men more than they were willing to accept on their own plates. Thanksgiving on Thursday 25th November 1943 was a somewhat sorry affair, but the men were thankful still for their freedom, and for the efforts that extraordinary people – seen and unseen – where making to get them home and to secure their freedom, often at the expense of their own. After about three weeks of waiting they found themselves on the move. Presented with beautifully forged identity papers and a letter of employment stating that Watt was a clerc being transferred to a town in southern France, they joined the night train to Bordeaux from Austerlitz Station on 7th December, together with a new guide and two other evaders, a Scotsman and a Polish RAF pilot whom they had met during their first night in Paris. They were carefully briefed as to what to expect, both men marvelling at the professionalism of the organization which had taken responsibility for their escape. There was a well-known checkpoint just short of Bordeaux at Langon where the train would stop for an hour while passengers’ identities were checked. They had nothing to worry unless the Gestapo inspectors engaged them in French, such was the quality of their papers. The Germans liked routine, and the men and women of Réseau Comète understood every nuance of it perfectly. The Gestapo weren’t there just to find escapers or evaders; they were there instead to assert their rights as occupiers to rule as they pleased. If miscreants of any kind were found, that was all to the good. The way to get through these examinations was to behave normally. After a painfully overnight journey standing up the entire way, Watt went through the identity check, his heart thumping. But his guide had been correct. The Gestapo officer was polite. ‘Identités. S’il vous plait’ he said on entering the carriage. Watt handed him the letter explaining that he was a clerk en route to new employment, which the man read, glancing up to look Watt in the eyes. There was a momentary pause. ‘Merci’ the officer said, and handed the papers back to him before moving on to the next person. The ordeal was over.
The men’s final stop was at the spa town of Dax in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France, where another Réseau Comète guide – Marcel Roger (codenamed ‘Max’) awaited them, with five bicycles. The first stage of their crossing of the Pyrenees was about to begin. No one in the group had any idea of the severity of the physical and mental challenge that now faced them. Having undertaken no physical exercise now for a month, the first trial was the cycle ride, at a fast pace, through a hilly 44 mile route of back roads and country lanes in the direction of the forbidding, snow-capped mountains that lay in the distance. Watt struggled to keep up, much to the chagrin of Max who warned him that he was slowing the whole group. The destination that night was Marthe Mendiara’s restaurant, the Cafe Larre, at the little town of Anglet, close to Biarritz. The weary group finally reached the inn, sitting astride a main road, in the early evening. Exhausted, they hid their bikes at the back, before being hurried upstairs by the proprietor and his wife. After washing, Watt stretched out on the bed, his aching muscles desperate for rest. He was so tired that the sound of two carloads of German soldiers turning up for a meal downstairs failed to stop him falling asleep in exhaustion, ignoring the boisterous enemy in the bar below. The next day – 10 December – the torture began again, but after a couple of hours, in the foothills of the mountains, they were able to hide their bikes at a farmhouse at Espelette, and begin the long climb to Spain, following their guide (although for security reasons, the men were not told his name), Pierre Elhorga. Their objective, he told thm, was the Basque border town of San Sebastian, some 12 miles from the French border. An 8-hour march beckoned on their first day in the mountains.
Climbing these mountains was no easy matter. He had last done so in August 1938 when he and his fellow American volunteers entered Spain on their ill-fated anti-Franco mission. It was an extraordinary feat of endurance, especially in winter, and with no preparation or appropriate clothes or footwear. Watt kept these fears to himself. He was right to be worried, as the climb across the mountains was a feat of endurance that tested each man to their limit. The journey seemed endless, and took the party four days and three nights, walking by day and resting in shelters at night. The ancient smugglers’ trails they used were steep and rocky, and never ending. The route took them through the snow-covered peaks from Larressore road to Jauriko Borda, a Spanish safe house owned by Xan Mihura. Every time they reached a summit, another one stretched out before them. In the snow, it proved an especial agony, as they were ill-equipped to travel the route even in good weather. He wrote afterwards:
The old paper-thin shoes that Eduard Lauwaert had given me in Hamme were disintegrating. When the sole of my left shoe tore loose, I tied it on with a handkerchief. But snow caked inside, and I kept tripping over it. I tore the dangling sole off the shoe and walked the rest of the way with nothing between the snow and my wet stockinged feet. Why I didn’t get frostbite, I still don’t know.
Preying on Watt’s mind was that he, an ex-soldier of the International Brigades, was re-entering Franco’s Spain. During the Civil War captured International Brigade officers were shot outright; he had no reason to believe that the fascists would be any more lenient a few years later. He therefore kept his International Brigade experience a secret to his fellow travellers. They key was to find themselves not in the hands of the Spanish police, but with MI9 staff from the British Embassy in Madrid. In this respect, although he and his fellow evaders didn’t know it, they were in the best hands, as Réseau Comète delivered each of their ‘parcels’ into the hands of MI9. On the morning of the fourth day plans worked like clockwork. Rising early from their shelter, they made an arduous descent to a main road, where they waited under cover until a car stopped nearby. They were ushered inside, the driver fixed a Union flag to the fender, and off they drove. The driver was almost certainly the remarkable Michael Creswell, officially an attaché at the British Embassy in Madrid, but actually a member of MI9 (code-named ‘Monday’), responsible for the escape routes over the Pyrenees. Creswell and his wife personally picked up many airmen and deliver them to Madrid. The group were in the Spanish capital and safe in the British embassy on 15 December and in Gibraltar two days later. On 20 December 1943, the four landed at RAF Brize Norton outside Swindon, their ordeal over. Their’s was the seventy-eighth crossing of the Pyrenees by Réseau Comète. On this particular route, guided by Marcel Roger and Pierre Elhorga, eighty-three British, Commonwealth and American airmen and six Belgian and French agents in twenty-one cross-Pyreneaan escapes between 21 September 1943 and 9 January 1944.
It had been a model crossing.
There was a sting in the tail. Unbeknown to Watt, two months after helping him to escape from Brussels, on 20 January 1944 Henri Malfait was arrested by the Gestapo, along with his chief, Jules Dricot at the De Bruyn house, 135 Rue des Confederes. He was savagely tortured for information. “They drowned me three times” he told Watt in 1984. “They put my head in the tub and kept it there till I passed out. Before each drowning they beat my shoulders with a club… The pain was so bad I couldn’t breathe. Then, when I was terribly weakened and scarcely conscious, they asked me questions; what I did, if I recognised this one or that one, and so on and so on. When I didn’t answer or gave a false answer, they did it again. They were going to do it a fourth time, but they accidently hit my head and cracked it open. There was so much blood, they were afraid to put my head in the tub again, so they began beating me on my heart. I was standing up against the wall, and they beat me till I fell.” He and Dricot were then transported to Fort Breendonk concentration camp near Antwerp. They were both keep standing in a passageway overnight with their arms raised. When he lowered his arms, he was hit on the back. Six weeks of deprivation was followed. He was sentenced to death in April 1944 but for reasons unknown to him he was transported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. He was separated from the 31-year old Jules Dricot (known as Jean Deltour), who is recorded as being shot by the SS in April 1945 after trying to escape from a train between Magdebourg and Dessau.
Further Reading
George Watt recounted his evasion story in The Comet Connection (Warner Books, 1993)
James Armstrong’s account is in Escape: An American Airman’s Escape from Hitler’s Fortress Europe (Privately printed 2000)
Material on Watt can be found in http://www.evasioncomete.org/aPrincipal.html and http://www.evasioncomete.org/fwattge.html
The files in NARA for Watt are:
· MACR 3137 crew loss report
· WIE 282 escape report.
Acknowledgements
Keith Jane
Bruce Bolinger (various websites)
[1] It was only in 1984 that Watt discovered to his astonishment that a response had not yet been received from London, and fearing that Watt was an imposter, Malfait carried a handgun in case he had to kill him.
[2] Jacques De Bruyn was captured by the Germans on 16 January 1944, in Paris. He survived the war.
[3] Marie-Rose Thibault was arrested on 22 January 1944 and died in Ravensbrück in March 1945. Inès was not deported, and survived. Marie-Rose was awarded the US Medal of Freedom.
[4] This was Mrs Fernande Onimus, a Réseau Comète ‘helper’ who lived at 84 rue des Rondeaux, in the Twentieth Arrondisement. Her nom-de-plumes included ‘Ms. Françoise’ and ‘Rosa’ but the American airmen just called her ‘The Little Lady in Black’. She helped 42 evaders/escapers between July 1943 and her arrest by the Gestapo in January 1944.