The Hornet's Sting (9 page)

At that moment, Tommy knew he had to gamble. ‘Sir, before you go, what would your answer be if I told you the plane would go west?’ Telling the truth, even in such an ambiguous way, was a terrible risk.

Andersen stared at the younger man, instantly realizing that ‘west’ meant Britain. There was a tense silence. ‘Then she’s yours,’ he finally replied.

‘How much?’ Tommy asked.

‘No charge. Meet me when the races have finished.’

Andersen drove Sneum back to the farm, down a track adjacent to the main house and through one of the turnip fields to a barn. Made of corrugated tin, it had been converted into a hangar. When Andersen threw open the double doors, Tommy’s heart sank as he was confronted by the dirty, dusty old fuselage of a de Havilland Hornet Moth. The registration number—OY-DOK—was scarcely visible through the grime. The rest of the plane was nowhere to be seen. In short, the grubby wreck that lay before them was pathetic.

As he tried to hide his disappointment, Tommy was shown the wings. They had been detached before the plane was wheeled into the hangar and were now stacked neatly at the back of the building, dusty but apparently undamaged. In a big linen bag were some bolts, which might one day be used to reattach the wings and struts to the fuselage. Just as he was feeling slightly more optimistic, though, Tommy’s hopes were dashed again.

‘The tail fin didn’t fare so well in transit from Kastrup,’ explained Andersen. ‘It got a bit warped and torn, so we sent it to Aalborg for repairs. When it came back, we took it into the farm workshop. It’s still in there now, in a crate.’

Tommy tried to muster some enthusiasm. ‘I see. That’s handy.’

‘The best thing about this plane’, added Andersen, ‘is the engine. It’s still very sound. Doesn’t need much doing to it at all. That’s the beauty of her.’

Sneum processed this information in silence.

‘I did have a Klemm,’ continued the farmer, almost apologetically. ‘But I crashed the thing.’

‘What’s the maximum range for a Hornet Moth?’ asked Tommy, hoping that everything he knew about the little sports planes was wrong.

‘About six hundred kilometers, I think.’

The confirmation came like a kick in the teeth. Even if a plane were flown due west from Odense, the north-east coast of England would still be out of reach.

Then Tommy saw two huge fuel drums in the shadows at the back of the hangar. ‘Are they full?’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied Andersen. ‘Three or four planes used this field as their base before the Germans came.’

Ideas were flying through Sneum’s mind, but for now he simply shook hands with his host and confirmed that he would soon be in touch.

‘Don’t bother,’ said Andersen. ‘At least not until you’re ready to go. Fake a break-in at my workshop when you want the tail fin, but I don’t want to hear from you until you know which night you’re leaving. On that particular night, I intend to be seen by as many witnesses as I can find, as far away from here as possible. And one other thing, Nielsen: if you’re caught in my hangar in the meantime, I’ll say you’re a thief and claim I’ve never met you. I have a family to protect, you understand.’

Tommy returned to Copenhagen to seek out Kjeld Pedersen, his closest friend from Fleet Air Arm. He recalled later:

But Pedersen’s loyalty must have been stretched to the limit by Sneum’s blind faith in his latest scheme, as his dumbfounded reaction seems to suggest.

‘We’re flying to England,’ announced Tommy when he found his friend in a deserted corner of their favorite bar.

‘Are they sending a plane?’

‘No, I’ve found us one here and we’ll fly it ourselves.’

‘What sort of plane is it?’ asked Kjeld.

‘A Hornet Moth.’

Pedersen burst out laughing. ‘What? You want to fly to England in a Moth? It hasn’t got the range.’ He was right: even on a direct route from Odense they would drop into the North Sea over a hundred kilometers short of their destination.

‘I think it can be done,’ maintained Sneum. ‘We can refuel.’

‘Just land in the North Sea and take off again? It isn’t a sea-plane, you know.’

Sneum looked his friend in the eye. ‘We’ll do it in mid-air.’

Pedersen’s mouth dropped open. ‘Now I know you’re mad,’ he said.

‘Trust me,’ said Tommy. ‘I’ll have us both flying for Churchill’s RAF by midsummer.’

I
N MAY 1941 Sir Charles Hambro, chief of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, took a look at the situation in Denmark and wondered why his organization had achieved nothing tangible there since Ronald Turnbull had been sent to Stockholm. Infuriated, he sent a series of communications to Turnbull’s superiors in SOE’s Scandinavian Section. One of them read: ‘Turnbull wants jerking up. He thinks he is in the Ministry of Information. What is he doing about SO2 [sabotage] work?’

When the complaint was passed on to Turnbull, two thoughts went through his mind. He revealed later:

While there was something to be said for gaining valuable intelligence through passive observation, Turnbull was thoroughly outclassed in his favored art by a fellow Brit who was working out of the very same building. Ironically, it was his good friend Captain Henry Denham, the Naval Attaché with whom Turnbull had escaped from Copenhagen the previous year, who got wind of a vital piece of information for the Allies. And the news was every bit as important as the radar intelligence Denham hoped to gather with the help of Tommy Sneum.

On 19 May, the
Bismarck
, Hitler’s greatest warship, had suddenly made a break from the port of Gotenhafen (now Gdynia, in Poland) for the Atlantic, where Allied convoys would be at her mercy. To reach the ocean she had first to sail through Scandinavian waters, and hope that details of her movements didn’t reach the Allies in time to cause her any trouble. Denham’s extensive contacts in the Swedish Navy meant that he was the officer who gave London the first news of the
Bismarck
’s breakout. The ship was chased, crippled and eventually sunk on 27 May, at enormous human cost on both sides. For every Allied life lost, however, many more were saved by the intelligence Denham had supplied.

Danish Intelligence, an organization in which Turnbull was soon to place all his faith, had remained strangely silent on the
Bismarck
’s movements. Later, its senior officers tried to excuse their oversight with the fatuous claim that their main lookout, a lighthouse keeper, had been ill on the day the mighty ship had sailed past.

Given this failure, one might have thought that Danish Intelligence, who often seemed as close to the Germans as they were to the Allies, might have come under the microscope. If their balancing act troubled anyone in London, however, it didn’t seem to bother Turnbull, as he began to explore ways to strengthen links with the men he felt mattered most in Copenhagen.

Over in Denmark, Tommy Sneum and Kjeld Pedersen were in more of a hurry than Turnbull on the matter of delivering intelligence. Instinctively, Tommy knew the value of the secrets he had already uncovered, and he convinced his deeply sceptical colleague that a dismantled Hornet Moth was the answer to their prayers. Now they just needed to find a way to reach the hangar unnoticed, so that they could begin to patch up the machine. They took a train to Odense one Saturday afternoon, bought a gigantic parcel of sandwiches and packed them into a suitcase, along with numerous bottles of beer. In a restaurant that evening, they planned the last leg of the journey to Elseminde like a military operation.

In order to avoid detection, they took an Odense tram all the way to its terminus on the city’s outskirts and walked the last three kilometers across country towards the farm. Once in the vicinity, they waited for the cover of twilight. At 8.45 p.m., they finally managed to cross the turnip fields unnoticed and slip into the hangar. But the murky half-light that had helped them on the outside was a hindrance inside the converted barn. To use a torch or even strike a match risked unwelcome attention from German patrols, since the light might be spotted through the cracks in the hangar walls. They decided to sleep until sunrise, which would allow a more thorough inspection of the plane. Each man took a wing out of its felt wrapping and used the cover as a sleeping bag. They passed a restless, nervous night, but when dawn broke at 4.00 a.m. they were relieved to be able to begin their assessment of the aircraft.

‘The wings are in one piece—can’t see any cracks or breaks anywhere,’ whispered Sneum. ‘They should slot in nicely. The fuselage is OK, too.’

‘The wings will only stay in place if we have the right bolts,’ pointed out Pedersen, holding up the linen bag.

It soon emerged that Kjeld’s fears were well founded. The bolts in the bag obviously weren’t for the wings. They looked more likely to fit the tail fin, but that was still in the farm’s workshop. Furthermore, a detailed search of the linen bag and the rest of the hangar revealed that even some of the tail fin bolts, made of specially hardened molybdenum steel, were missing.

‘Don’t worry, we’ll get some more tail fin bolts,’ whispered Sneum, ‘when we order the new bolts for the wings.’

‘We can’t,’ warned Kjeld.

‘Why not?’

‘Molybdenum isn’t available in Denmark any more. And certainly not at short notice.’ Kjeld, who had been sceptical even before he had seen the plane and discovered the shortage of bolts, now thought they should abort the whole project before it killed them. ‘Come on, Sneum, there’s nothing to hold this plane together. I know we’re desperate, but this is suicide.’