BELGIAN GIRL’S MEDAL

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24801, 15 February 1946, Page 5

BELGIAN GIRL’S MEDAL

Saviour of Many Airmen

AWARD RECEIVED FROM KING (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 5.5 p.m.) LONDON, Feb. 13. ■ A curly-haired, pretty Belgian girl, Mlle. Andree de Jongh, aged 25 drove to Buckingham Palace to-day and received from His Majesty the award of the George Medal, “for outstanding gallantry and tenacious devotion to the Allied cause.” The citation revealed a remarkable story of Mlle de Jongh’s planning and leadership of u naer-cover organisation known as tne - Comet Line,” which was the saviour of many Allied servicemen stranded m German-occupied Europe The citation said: “From 1941 until her arrest in January, 1943, she organised the dispatch of these servicemen from Belgium to the Pyrenees. The work was not a haphazard undertaking out was a masterpiece of careful planning She crossed the Pyrenees in all weathers—midwinter snow and ice and summer heat and rain.” The citation recounts how Mlle, de *Fongh swam the Somme 20 times on one trip, helping non-swimmers across the river, constantly evaded frontier patrols, and refused to abandon her self-imposed task, although her arrest appeared imminent every day. Once when the Gestapo appeared at her front door she escaped through the garden. She was finally arrested on the Spanish frontier on January 13. 1943, and sent to a concentration camp. The Air Ministry has presented Mlle, at Jongh with a mounted clock from a bomber inscribed: "In token of the deep and lasting gratitude of the Royal Air Force.”

The Secretary of State for Air (Lord Stansgate) said Mlle, de Jongh’s efforts were “almost unsurpassed in mankind’s history.”