The Hornet's Sting (54 page)
Read The Hornet's Sting Online
Authors: Mark Ryan
Tags: #World War; 1939-1945 - Secret Service - Denmark, #Sneum; Thomas, #World War II, #Political Freedom & Security, #True Crime, #World War; 1939-1945, #Underground Movements, #General, #Denmark - History - German Occupation; 1940-1945, #Spies - Denmark, #Secret Service, #World War; 1939-1945 - Underground Movements - Denkamrk, #Political Science, #Denmark, #Biography & Autobiography, #Military, #Spies, #Intelligence, #Biography, #History
Tommy Sneum died on 3 February 2007, still a few months short of his ninetieth birthday. Like all the best spies, he took some of his secrets with him. His passing wasn’t sad, because time had worn out his body. For such an active man that meant the moment had come to move on.
Tommy’s son Christian organized a fitting funeral service in Denmark, and his death notice in the Danish papers included an English line: ‘If they survive, the men who go first are rarely popular with those who wait for the wind to blow.’ That poignant observation from R.V. Jones provided one last swipe at those who had treated him shabbily in his own country. Tommy’s ashes were taken to the Sneum family’s resting place on the island of Fanoe, where his story had begun.
Over in England, the Sneum family gave me the honor and responsibility of marking Tommy’s passing in an appropriate manner. I immediately contacted St. Clement Danes, the church in the Strand, London, where Arne Helvard’s name, among those of many other fallen heroes, was already commemorated. A plaque on one of the outer walls confirmed that this was also the right place to remember Thomas Christian Sneum. It read:
St. Clement Danes
Built by the Danish community nish panth century and rebuilt by William the Conqueror.
Built again by Sir Christopher Wren in 1681, the steeple added by James Gibbs in 1719.
Gutted by German incendiary bombs leaving only the damaged walls and steeple 10 May 1941.
Adopted in 1956 by the Royal Air Force, restored by Antony Lloyd and reconsecrated in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 19 October 1958 as the central church of the Royal Air Force.
By sheer coincidence, in two days’ time the church was due to hold its Battle of Britain Commemoration Service, and RAF men of all generations would be there in strength. The Reverend Richard Lee of the RAF was most courteous, and agreed to remember Tommy in his prayers. I attended, hoping simply to hear his name read out. What followed was entirely unexpected, and some of us will be eternally grateful to the reverend for his extraordinary warmth and generosity of spirit.
In a church packed with serving RAF officers and veterans, Reverend Lee climbed into the pulpit and began his sermon. Luckily, the event was filmed, so what he said was recorded. The first part went like this:
Welcome to St. Clement Danes—central church of the Royal Air Force. It is no stranger to conflict, since it has been torn down and built up many times. The church was built first of all to reconcile the community of Denmark with the community of England, which is particularly fitting today as we remember in our prayers a man called Thomas Christian Sneum. You may never have heard of him. But he was an exceptional man. He was a pilot, he was a Dane. And when his country was invaded he escaped in an aircraft called a Hornet—which I’m told is a rather souped-up Tiger Moth, if such a thing could exist—carrying secrets about radar. He flew across the North Atlantic—the North Sea, sorry, just testing the navigators among you—he flew across the sea and halfway across of course he had to refuel. So he stepped out onto the wing with the fuel to put in the wing, and he refuelled the aircraft on his own.
At this point some of the pilots in the congregation began to look at each other quizzically. I had forgotten to mention Kjeld Pedersen when I recounted the story of the Hornet Moth flight to Reverend Lee, and of course the RAF men were now wondering how on earth Tommy could have kept the plane steady with no one at the controls, and poured fuel into the tank with no protection from the high winds. I hope this moment would have amused Tommy, though I felt a fool for not having been more thorough in my briefing. Nevertheless, Reverend Lee continued:
He flew to this country and he was hired—to put it bluntly—by MI6 and asked to go back to his country and be a spy. So he went to spy, and when he was discovered, he and another colleague walked across the frozen sea from his Danish island to Sweden.
He died on Friday and the funeral service took place yesterday. Because they knew that this service was taking place, the Danish people asked us to pray for him. A man you never knew, who did marvellous things for peace and freedom. You will never meet him, but in this church he is remembered today.
What a send-off. What a tribute. Tommy would have loved the idea of being remembered by airmen, and alw acrossith so many other pilots, at such a distinguished RAF gathering. I hoped he was listening somewhere in the clouds, as he had finally been given center stage by the British, for whom he had risked his life so many times.
It was interesting to hear Tommy Sneum described as a man ‘who did marvellous things for peace and freedom.’ I had never regarded him as a man of peace, though he was certainly a freedom-fighter. In a way he was the very embodiment of freedom. He loved life, even though his personal happiness was sometimes spoilt by bouts of bitterness over his treatment during the war, a state of mind he readily acknowledged. Tommy lived life to the full regardless, and hit extraordinary heights as he pursued and embraced that freedom. He refused to be grounded by the Danes, the Germans, the Swedes or the British. His spirit was a force of nature nothing could contain, and it allowed him to soar above and beyond the horizons of the average human being, to tease and outwit those who sought to bring him down.
Just before Christmas 2007, Christian Sneum, a commercial pilot, flew his plane and passengers to London City Airport, bringing with him some papers he had found as he went through his father’s personal effects. I was not expecting to see anything new, because Tommy had always assured me that he had shown me everything of relevance to his story.
But when I laid eyes on one particular document it rendered me speechless, and not just because it had been written on the very day I was born. Marked ‘Confidential’, it was from Major General R.E. Lloyd, CB, CBE, DSO, Director of Military Intelligence, The War Office, Whitehall, London SW1. Dated 5 January 1962, it read:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
This is to certify that:
Captain Thomas Christian SNEUM a Danish National, presently resident in Switzerland at Arosastrasse 127, Zurich 8, rendered valuable and loyal assistance to the Allied Cause during the late war.
In the early months of the war Captain SNEUM, who was at that time serving in the Royal Danish Air Force, escaped from Denmark to England, bringing with him information of the greatest value to the Air Ministry.
Captain SNEUM then volunteered to return clandestinely to Denmark in order to obtain further information. After a course of training, he parachuted back to Denmark.
Captain SNEUM fulfilled his mission with considerable energy and when he could no longer continue to operate, he made a most gallant escape from Denmark across the ice to Sweden, arriving there early in 1942. Soon afterwards he was evacuated to England.
Unfortunately, certain remarks attributed to Captain SNEUM had preceded his arrival and as these appeared to cast some doubt on his loyalty, he was interned in Brixton Prison whilst investigations were being made.
The result of these investigations was to clear Captain SNEUM completely of any imputation against his loyalty to the Allied Cause and he was accordingly released.
Thereafter Captain SNEUM served in the Danish Section of the Royal Navy and was later transferred to the Royal Norwegian Air Force, in which he served as a pilot.
It is desid to emphasize that Captain SNEUM’s detention in Brixton Prison in 1942 does not in any way reflect adversely on his conduct. On the contrary, Captain SNEUM’s courage, energy and loyalty to the Allied Cause throughout the war are now beyond question.
So there it was, proof at last that Britain had unequivocally hailed Tommy a hero, and long before that moving service in St. Clement Danes in 2007. It had taken seventeen years to paint his wartime conduct and achievements in such glowing terms. And the fact that Tommy had seen fit to secure such a reference as late as 1962 was an indication of just how long the post-war smear campaign against him had continued. The King’s Medal for Courage, awarded to him in 1948, had been tantamount to damning him with faint praise, given his remarkable exploits, and certainly hadn’t been sufficient to silence some of his critics.
Major General Richard Eyre Lloyd’s tribute seemed to reflect the wartime opinion of Otto Gregory of Air Ministry Intelligence, who had argued that Sneum deserved something closer to the Victoria Cross for his achievements. However, since the vast majority of Tommy’s heroics had not come in open combat, and since his record had subsequently been clouded by suspicion, he would never receive the ribbons or the recognition due to him.
The letter in itself constituted something special, though. And I had to smile, because Tommy had been in possession of it on the first day I met him, and yet had allowed the debate about his loyalty to continue for years. Why?
Once he had told me: ‘Always keep something in reserve, close to your chest, never use all your ammunition unless you have to.’
He had followed his own rule to the end. Now it was as though Tommy had enjoyed a last little joke with me, from beyond the grave, mocking me for having doubted him. For it seemed inconceivable that he had simply forgotten about that letter, which he knew could provide the perfect answer to any suggestions of treachery. More likely he had cultivated my suspicions for his own amusement, and ensured that I would remain intrigued. That way he knew I would return for a fresh round of verbal chess, sometimes armed with a bottle of schnapps or whisky, on other occasions bringing a new document or discovery from the English war files.
None of this stopped me from feeling guilty about some of the questions I had asked of a man I had befriended. Then I remembered one of the last things he ever said to me: ‘You have always treated me very fairly.’ Tommy had faced plenty of questions in his lifetime, so a few more hadn’t made any difference. He knew deep down that he would always have the last laugh. The extraordinary letter of support from the Director of Military Intelligence guaranteed that.
Thomas Christian Sneum, the man who had flown to freedom in a Hornet, had saved his most potent sting for the very end.
S
ome of the new information contained in this book is of considerable historical value, as reflected by the fact that the Imperial War Museum of London, England, ha
s already requested copies of author Mark Ryan’s taped interviews with Tommy Sneum for its audio collection.
The author spent many enjoyable hours talking to Sneum between February 1998 and November 2006, that le jokevisit coming just months before the spy’s death in February 2007. These interviews would often revisit ground that Ryan and Sneum had previously covered together. The consistency with which Sneum recalled events and conversations, time and again, added to the credibility of his account. Fortunately, Tommy still had a superb memory for detailed dialogue and also a natural gift for story-telling. Therefore he was able to reconstruct that dialogue, quoting both his own contribution and the words of others, with the minimum of effort.
A colourful character, he was well aware of the dramatic and sometimes humorous undertones to certain verbal exchanges in which he was involved. Again it was the consistency of his recall, when key dialogues were revisited over the years, which made his account so powerful and convinced the author of its authenticity.
The reader is reminded regularly in this notes section that Sneum is the source for the dialogues included in this book. Also, where Sneum is quoted, the reader is further reminded that those quotes come from author Mark Ryan’s many interviews with Sneum between 1998-2006. But Ryan has been careful to seek other sources of information where possible.
Parts of Tommy’s story had already been mentioned in history books, so there was never any doubt that he was a genuinely important espionage figure in World War Two. When Britain’s Security Service (MI5) confirmed to the author in writing that Sneum had indeed been a controversial wartime spy, the validity of Tommy’s claims took on a new authority.
There was also plenty more documentation available to support Tommy’s story. The author uncovered very detailed Swedish and Danish police reports relating to Sneum and his colleagues. Again these proved entirely consistent with Tommy’s claims. Similarly the National Archives in Kew, London, England, was a goldmine of information. The wartime records of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), particularly the HS2 series relating to SOE Operations in Scandinavia, were very helpful in building the picture surrounding that organisation and its petty rivalry with Tommy’s British spymasters, SIS (MI6). Sneum’s mission into Nazi-occupied territory, given this troubled political backdrop, is all the more remarkable.
The KV 6/9—38 series, released for public perusal at the National Archives in 2003, also offered fascinating source material. This transfer included Security Service Files relating to the reliability of particular agents. Geoffrey Wethered of Branch B1B of the Secret Service had set up procedures to investigate British-run agents under suspicion. The files conveyed an atmosphere bordering on paranoia. Perhaps it was a necessary paranoia, given just how many British-run agents had been captured and used against the Allies in Holland. But the tenacity of Wethered, a passionate hunter of traitors, also showed just how dangerous the doubts surrounding Tommy could have been for him.
Other notes will be provided by way of background to the main text where necessary. These should leave no doubt that we are dealing with a true story here in every way. And truth, as we all know, is often stranger than fiction. Here, then, are the page-by-page notes for The Hornet’s Sting.
