In my last post I mentioned the legendary Comet Escape Line. It’s legendary because the men and women of Comet achieved the remarkable feat of rescuing hundreds of Allied servicemen from the Nazis. But it is also more literarily legendary as a story. It’s a legend in itself because it is the best known of the escape lines. But much of what is told about Comet is more legend than fact.
Comet has been a legend since the liberation of western Europe in 1944. In fact, when a Dutch-Paris resister, whom we’ll call Micheline, returned from the concentration camps in 1945 she wrote down on her official paperwork that she had belonged to Comet. When the authorities asked the leaders of Comet to verify this woman’s participation they said, quite rightly, that they could not. Micheline’s request for medical aid etc was denied. It took a considerable amount of paperwork and telephone calls on the part of the leaders of Dutch-Paris to get the clerical error fixed so that Micheline could get the help to which she was entitled.

Why did she say she was part of Comet? What probably happened was that she didn’t know the name of her resistance network because they always called themselves “the organization.” So she asked someone who said: “oh, you helped Allied aviators as part of an escape line that went through Paris? You must have been in Comet.” And she wrote down “Comet.”
Why did this unknown person assume that Micheline must have been in Comet? It was undoubtedly the best known of the escape lines, possibly the only one known at the time. That was because Comet was the work of and always under the leadership and control of Belgian civilians, but it was funded by the British and most of the people they helped were Allied servicemen. In fact, Comet began as a way to get British soldiers who had been left behind at Dunkirk and taken shelter with Belgian families back to England. After the first soldiers whom they took to Spain were arrested by Franco’s police, the leaders of Comet made a point of passing their charges directly to British officials in Spain.

So Comet was known in the outside world from its beginning in 1941. It also had a certain glamour as a network of courageous civilians risking everything to help the RAF and USAAF. And the British and American militaries were actively grateful to civilians who helped their men. So at the liberation, Comet was already known to the Allies, who were happy to publicize its accomplishments.

That’s how the legend of Comet as THE civilian escape line for aviators began. It was fostered for decades after the war by archival laws. Until recently it was almost impossible for historians to gain access to any documents about the resistance. But it was possible to find out about the escape lines run specifically for allied aviators by British and American special operations (SOE and OSS), and it was possible to talk to the allied aviators themselves. So books in English about escape lines and general wartime derring-do generally use the same examples of the SOE lines (Shelbourne et al) and Comet.

Separately, the Allied aviators who were rescued by civilians have been tremendously generous over the years about recognizing the people who helped them during the war. They created associations of evading airmen who went out of their way to visit and assist their helpers. Similarly, the Comet Line itself created a sort of veterans association. These associations have both contributed to and tried to counteract the legends about Comet.

The legend of Comet as THE aviator escape line is so strong that the son of an American aviator who was rescued by Dutch-Paris told me in very strong and not especially polite terms that his father was rescued by Comet. The fact that I had his father’s official escape and evasion report from 1944 in front of me and that report very clearly identified his route through Dutch-Paris, meant nothing to this man. He felt he belonged to the Comet family, and nothing would change his mind about it.