Welcome to today’s post about empowering heroines of World War II. Today I’m going to share a bit about the heroics of one tiny, petite young woman of age twenty-four who didn’t even look twenty – Andree de Jongh – Code Names – Dedee and Postman.
Andree de Jongh was born in WWI, Schaerbeek, Belgium. De Jongh was studying to become a nurse. In 1940 she moved to Brussels and joined the Red Cross voluntarily and got involved with rescuing and hiding allied airmen. In total,776 stranded allied airmen were rescued through her creation of the ‘Comet Line’. This was the route she traveled over twenty-four times, 800 kilometres each way back and forth, to guide stranded allied airmen out of Brussels, taking them through the Pyrenees to Bilboa Spain’s British consulate. When De Jongh made her first journey through to Spain, the British almost didn’t believe this tiny woman led the allies to them, they were convinced it was a German plot! Interesting the route went to Spain, considering Spain pretended to be neutral in the war but kept a covert allegiance to Germany and Italy.
De Jongh’s team were also referred to as the ‘DDD’s’ because their surnames all began with the letter ‘D’, hence, the code name Dedee. De Jongh was known as a real firecracker. In fact, her father named her ‘little cyclone’ when she was just a little girl.
These missions took place because every soldier was crucially needed to fight the Nazis, so if uninjured, the soldiers were sent back to war. The first mission was the only one that wasn’t 100% foolproof. The soldiers were led safely to Spain, but not taken directly to the consulate, which caused several airmen re-arrested when caught trying to get to Bilboa. From 1941 through 1943, De Jongh had made twenty-four trips back and forth. British MI6 and MI9 got involved with the program and sponsored it.
There were 3000 volunteers for these missions, 70% being women. At the end of the war approximately 290 of those volunteers were captured and/or killed. The Comet Line route wasn’t an easy one. It began in Brussels to Paris by train, cross the Sommes at Corbie, Paris to Bordeaux to Bayonnne or St. Jean de Luz by overnight express. Bayonne to Urrugnu by bike or foot to the Pyrenees – an eight hour trek overnight of twenty-five kilometres climbing six hundred-foot mountains, in all weather. The dangers were weather, terrain – and worse, the traitors and betrayers.
De Jongh was caught and interrogated and the Germans refused to believe such a pretty and tiny young woman could possibly be capable of such journeys, so instead of killing her, they sent her to a concentration camp in January 1943, first to Ravensbruck, then to Mauthausen, and there she remained until Liberation Day. When the war ended, she was freed by the allies, weight under eighty pounds and dying from Tuberculosis. But she didn’t die!
After the war, De Jongh was invited to receive the George Medal at Buckingham Palace, in 1946. She also received numerous other medals from many allied countries who fought the war, such as the Medal of Freedom, the French Legion d’honneur, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, and a few more. In 1985, the king of Belgium made her a Countess. De Jongh completed her nursing degree then moved to Africa to help the leper communities. She died in Brussels at the age of ninety on October 13th, 2007.
Below is a video with more details how this incredulous woman became a heroine of WWII.
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