Monument Albert Guérisse - Saint-Hubert

General doctor Albert Guérisse (°5 April 1911 - +26 March 1989) was a Resistance fighter. His pseudonym was Pat O'Leary, as indicated by the commemorative plaque on rue de la Fontaine in Saint-Hubert. He led a breakout line bearing his name during World War II, which covered France and southern Belgium and carried more than 650 downed airmen back to England. He is the most decorated Belgian of the Second World War.

Guérisse, whose family belonged to Saint-Hubert, obtained his doctorate in medicine at the Free University of Brussels. He was a military doctor, assigned to the 1st Regiment of Lancers at Spa, when war broke out on May 10, 1940. After the eighteen-day campaign, decided to continue the fight, he joined the beaches of Dunkirk and arrived in England from where he was sent back to France. He managed to reach Gibraltar where he embarked on a French ship (the “Rhine”) which was looking for a crew to join the Royal Navy. He arrived in England where he became an officer of the Royal Navy on this boat, renamed HMS Fidelity, under a false identity of French Canadian and the assumed name of Patrick O'Leary (it was the name of a Canadian friend during his studies). He was trained as a secret agent by the Naval Intelligence Service and took part in secret operations in the Mediterranean, among other things, dropping off or picking up agents on the French coast. In early March 1941, a mission went wrong and Guérisse was arrested. He ends up in an internment camp not far from Marseille. He manages to escape and joins in Marseilles an escape line initiated by a Scottish officer Ian Garrow. In October 1941, Garrow was arrested and O'Leary - Guérisse became the head of the organization which would bring back to England more than 650 airmen shot down over Belgium and France.

On March 2, 1943, Guérisse was himself arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Marseille. Despite interrogations and torture, the Germans never succeeded in discovering his true identity. He remained the British officer, Pat O'Leary, French Canadian, no doubt also because even his closest aides in the network were always unaware that he was a Belgian medical officer. Decreed “Nacht und Nebel”, destined to disappear in the night and the fog, he was first deported to Mauthausen, then to Natzweiler and finally in September 1944 to Dachau. On April 29, 1945, when the camp was liberated by the American army, O'Leary - Guérisse was the president of the international clandestine prisoners' committee, which welcomed the Allied troops and organized life in the camp during the first weeks that followed. the Liberation.

After the war, decorated with the George Cross - the highest British honorary distinction, which he is the only foreigner to have been honored with - Guérisse resumes his activities as a military doctor, assigned to the military hospital in Brussels then back in his regiment of 1st Lancers at Spa.

In 1951, he volunteered for the UN Volunteer Corps for Korea. He directed the medical service there for fifteen months. He will distinguish himself by going to search in the enemy lines and under the bullets for a wounded soldier.

Back in Belgium, Guérisse was assigned to the 1st Army Corps stationed in Germany. In 1964, he was promoted to General-Major and headed the medical service of the Belgian army until 1970.

In 1981, he was proposed to hereditary nobility with the personal title of knight. He will not, however, take possession of the letters patent. On March 20, 1989, six days before his death, he was elevated to the personal title of count, having adopted as his motto: Honores non quaero, fidelis sum. Loosely translated, this means: Not interested in tributes, I remain loyal.

Willem Vandenameele