Blog – 75 years col du portet d’aspet

Seventy-five years ago next week, on February 5, 1944, 30 men – 10 downed American aviators, three British aviators, an Australian, one Belgium civilians and 11 Dutch Engelandvaarders rendezvoused in a meadow outside of a hamlet high in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Their two French guides led them through a tiny village and into the mountains. There was already three feet of snow. Within hours a blizzard struck with heavy snow and vicious winds.

None of the men had adequate boots or winter gear and most of them had been traveling for the past several days and nights. It was dark but they couldn’t use any lights because they might attract the notice of the German patrols in the area. All the men were struggling. One of the aviators broke down but two of his colleagues carried him. The Dutchmen helped each other. They took shelter in a hut but were too cold and wet to sleep. The next morning dawned clear and beautiful. The guides decided that if the men weren’t sleeping they might as well move on. They had eight miles up and down mountainsides to go before they reached Spain.

The Germans, however, had already found them. The evaders filed out of the hut to discover that they were surrounded by a German border patrol on skis. The surprising part of the story is that half of the men managed to escape by running back up the mountainside. Two of them struck out on their own, with mixed results. The rest stayed with a Dutch-Paris guide and eventually made it to Spain a few weeks later.

The Germans took all the men they captured to the prison in Foix and questioned them all, not necessarily politely. The aviators eventually ended up in the POW camps. The Dutchmen were deported to concentration camps where they all died except for one man who escaped by jumping out of a truck. He made it to Spain.

It’s hard to know what sort of consequences followed the questioning of the captives, if any. Aviators who made it to Spain in the following weeks claimed that the Germans there had a map with fairly accurate representations of one of the Dutch-Paris routes on it. Yes, Spain was neutral, but German police operated openly on the Spanish side of the border. In fact, the Dutchman who jumped out of the truck was alarmed to see the German officer who arrested him in France on February 6 busily chatting up aviators in a bar in Spain in March. The Germans may have been able to piece together the route simply by buying drinks for trusting Americans. Or they may have beaten it out of the men they captured. Or purchased it from a local with a grudge. Or maybe all three. Whatever German police on the Spanish border had managed to find out about Dutch-Paris, however, didn’t matter for very long because events in Paris were about to shut down the aviator escape line.