RAF personnel attended an inauguration plague unveiling in Brussels, to commemorate and mark their eternal gratitude to the courageous Belgians of the Comet Line who risked their lives to help downed aircrew evade capture and escape the the UK during the Second World War.
Under a full autumn moon of 1942, Sergeant Bob Frost and the four other crew members of his Wellington bomber were on their way back from Essen in Germany. They had dropped a 1,800 kilo bomb on the Krupp arms factory, but had been hit by anti-aircraft fire. Over Belgium, the plane started to drop. At 16,000 feet, air gunner Frost donned his parachute and bailed out.
"I came through a cloud, it was cold and wet. I was actually livid. Only a week to go, two more missions before my tour of thirty was over. Then the ground came up and hit me."
Frost landed in a field just outside the village of Kapellen in Flemish Brabant. He was 19 years old, and alone in German-occupied Belgium. But within six weeks, thanks to the efforts of the Comet Line escape network he was back home and on leave in London.
When Frost came down in Kapellen, he had the fortune to come across the Vangilbergen family's farmhouse.
"I saw a house, and hoping an old lady would answer, I knocked at the door. My guardian angel was working overtime. Actually it was a strapping young fellow who spoke in Flemish. I answered in schoolboy German and he slammed the door in my face. Eventually, I managed to persuade him to let me in."
The Vangilbergens were the first people Frost met in occupied Belgium - the first in a long line of citizens who risked everything to help a young stranger in trouble.
"That morning the family left me in the house and went off to the village fete. I remember watching the bicycle race from my window in the attic."
They contacted members of the Comet Line. It was not hard because the escape line had agents all over Belgium looking for stranded Allied airmen. Frost was taken to Brussels where he stayed first with a stockbroker at the Brussels Bourse and then in Laeken with a widower running his own Resistance group from a house in Avenue des Pagodes.
Issued with a suit, shoes and false identity papers, he became Robert Simonis, a Belgian seaman who spoke a little German. Simonis lived in Bordeaux but had been in Brussels to visit his sick mother, which gave him an excuse to be travelling south. Via a network of around 1,000 people operating in Belgium and France, the Comet Line rolled into action as it would for hundreds of other soldiers and airmen.
Frost met Comet Line founder Andrée de Jongh in a Brussels flat and he was struck by her eyes.
"They were absolutely burning and there was an air of supreme confidence about her."
For the 19-year-old air gunner, she and her other women comrades in the Comet Line inspired adoration. It was de Jongh herself, accompanied by a Basque guide, who escorted Frost and four others to safety over the Pyrenees. She carried a rucksack filled with civilian clothes for the airmen. It was an arduous eight-hour trek in silence through the night. The airmen, who were known by members of the line as 'the children,' often found the journey hard. Frost remembered the gruelling walk, stumbling in the dark and wondering how much longer they could go on. De Jongh's stamina was clearly extraordinary.
Frost got safely back to England and re-joined the RAF. He survived the war, but the memories of the members of the Comet Line, who risked their lives to save him and his comrades, stayed with him. He visited Belgium some years ago and took the time to visit the Namur citadel, where many people were executed by firing squads.
De Jongh, herself, was arrested six months after Frost safely got home. Bad weather delayed the crossing through the Pyrenees in January 1943; under interrogation, one of the RAF airmen identified both his helpers and the Line's safe houses to the Gestapo. De Jongh spent nearly three years in prisons and concentration camps until Germany surrendered in 1945, when they emerged gravely ill and undernourished. However, many of their comrades from the Comet Line did not survive the camps.