Her US Intelligence file was a testament to her resourcefulness. At least 50 times, the file records, she “outwitted the German agents by suddenly enacting a tender, tearful love scene in a streetcar or on a station platform with some airman she had only known for an hour or two. Encountering such a scene, the embarrassed German agent would pass on and ask no questions.”
The Gestapo worked out her identity, but still she evaded capture. On one occasion, her file notes, “she suddenly became suspicious of an aviator she had gone to pick up. To test him before revealing herself, she used the latest slang she had learnt from other aviators . . . his bewilderment in the face of the slang word convinced her that she was dealing with a German agent.”
She was lucky to escape capture, she said, but as George Watt, the author of The Comet Connection: Escape from Hitler’s Europe, observed, she “added to her luck with cleverness, cool-headedness, self-discipline and total dedication”. She was, in fact, arrested on one occasion, but was held for only two days. “The commandant thought I was too young [to be Dumon], so he let me go before the Gestapo came to take me.”
The “Réseau Comète”, or Comet Line, had been set up in 1941 by Andrée de Jongh, a young woman whose heroine was Edith Cavell, the nurse shot for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium during the First World War. Comet Line agents combed the country looking for airmen who had been shot down or forced to land. They would be taken from one safe house to another to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo.
The whole Dumon family became involved in the operation. Micheline and her younger sister had been raised in the Belgian Congo, where their father, Eugene, was a doctor. The family had returned to Belgium so Micheline could train as a nurse.
Eugene agreed to hide two airmen, and from then on the girls’ mother, Françoise, as well as Micheline’s sister, Andrée, whose code name was “Nadine”, became involved. “Nadine” smuggled more than 20 airmen out of Belgium, but in August 1942 she and her parents were betrayed and arrested.
The Gestapo thought they had the whole family, but by a stroke of luck Micheline was not included on their ration-stamp list and was not at home when the German agents called. She asked for permission to write to and visit her parents. “These are not your parents,” she was told. “We arrested the entire family.”
Undaunted, she offered her services to De Jongh. She helped photographers putting together false documents, organised safe houses and ferried food and clothing between them.
She went around Brussels on her bicycle, delivering messages, doling out money to the owners of safe houses and checking on the progress of operations, all the while looking and acting like a 15-year-old.
The Comet Line suffered repeated infiltrations and in January 1943 De Jongh was arrested. Dumon stepped up. Four months later two German spies posing as US pilots penetrated the organisation and there were more arrests. “It was too dangerous for me to remain in my nursing job,” Dumon recalled. “I went underground and worked full-time for the airmen.”