Escape and evasion lines (World War II)

The routes used by the Pat, Comet, and Shelburne escape lines to smuggle airmen out of occupied Europe.

Escape and evasion lines in World War II helped people escape European countries occupied by Nazi Germany. The focus of most escape lines in Western Europe was assisting British and American airmen shot down over occupied Europe to evade capture and escape to neutral Spain or Sweden from where they could return to the United Kingdom. A distinction is sometimes made between "escapers" (soldiers and airmen who had been captured by the Germans and escaped) and "evaders" (soldiers and airmen in enemy territory who evaded capture). Most of those helped by escape lines were evaders.

Some escape and evasion lines such as the Shelbourne or Burgundy Lines were created by the Allies specifically to assist their soldiers and airmen stranded in German-occupied territory. Others were the product of a combination of allied military personnel and local citizens in occupied territory, such as the Pat O'Leary Line. Some escape lines were created and operated by civilians as grass-roots efforts to help people fleeing the Nazis, such as Comet, Dutch-Paris, Service EVA or the Smit-van der Heijden line. They did not restrict themselves to helping military personnel but also helped compromised spies, resisters, men evading the forced labor drafts, civilians who wanted to join the governments-in-exile in London, and Jews.[1][2]

About 7,000 airmen and soldiers, mostly British and American, were helped to evade German capture in Western Europe and successfully returned to the United Kingdom during World War II.[3] Many of the escape lines were financed in whole or part by MI9 of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), and other Allied organizations. "Participation in the escape networks was arguably the most dangerous form of resistance work in occupied Europe... The most perilous job of all was handled mostly by young women, many of them still in their teens, who escorted the servicemen hundreds of miles across enemy territory to Spain."[4]

  1. ^ Koreman, Megan (2018), The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe, New York: Oxford University Press
  2. ^ Gildea, Robert and Ismee Tames, eds. (2020), Fighters Across Frontiers: Transnational Resistance in Europe, 1936-1948, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 90-108
  3. ^ Foot, M.R.D. and Langley, J.M. (1979), MI9 Escape and Evasion, 1939-1945, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, Appendix I
  4. ^ Olson, Lynn (2017), Last Hope Island, New York: Random House, p. 289.