The Hornet's Sting (10 page)

Tommy refused to throw in the towel. ‘We’ll find some bolts. They don’t have to be molybdenum.’

‘They do if you don’t want the bloody thing to fall apart halfway across the North Sea,’ maintained Kjeld.

Sneum didn’t see it that way. ‘Compressed carbon steel bolts may be softer but they can do the job. It’s only one flight.’

‘One bloody long flight,’ warned Pedersen. ‘She’s got to be able to withstand some pretty fearsome pressure up there.’

‘We can do it,’ insisted Sneum. ‘We’ll order everything to precise specifications. We’ve got enough mates from Fleet Air Arm to do that. Are you still in?’

Grudgingly, Pederson replied, ‘If the engineers say it can be done.’ He seemed pretty sure that they would say the exact opposite.

At 7.30 a.m. farm workers appeared in the fields around the barn, just as Tommy and Kjeld were about to leave. The pilots hid under sacks at the back of the hangar. It was a frustrating morning, but they feared discovery if they dared to move. One man slept while the other kept an eye out for any nosy laborers. Tommy took the first nap and woke mid-with a stretch and a carelessly noisy yawn. Kjeld scrambled frantically towards him, with one forefinger pressed to his lips. With the other, he pointed to the far corner of the hangar. At the base of the corrugated-tin wall, where the ground had crumbled away, a crouching man was creating a stench, and the pilots realized that the relative privacy afforded by the hangar walls meant that the area had been designated as the farm workers’ unofficial lavatory.

At lunchtime the workers left the fields at last, but locals out for a Sunday stroll had begun to pass regularly on a road just fifty meters to the north of the hangar. Tommy wondered if they would ever be able to get out without being noticed. Luckily a cornfield, with the crop already half a meter high, caressed the western wall of the hangar, and offered just enough cover if they kept low. After much uncomfortable crawling and cursing, the two men reached the road, picked themselves up and brushed themselves down. No sooner had they done so than a party of German officers appeared on horseback, just where the road forked off to nearby Sanderum. The Germans viewed the young men suspiciously, but their commander seemed reluctant to interrupt his ride. After a moment’s hesitation, which seemed like an eternity to Tommy and Kjeld, the horsemen continued on their way without demanding papers or a reason for the Danes’ presence in the area.

Relieved, Tommy and Kjeld slipped away down a country lane, only to be confronted with the sight of a newly built drill-ground for German soldiers. It was less than a kilometer from Elseminde. Privately, Tommy wondered whether this escape plan was cursed, but he assured himself that the occupiers couldn’t hold parades around the clock, no matter how disciplined they were, and therefore he and Kjeld would still have the opportunity to fly away if they chose their moment carefully.

They made it back to the capital using the skeleton Sunday transport services, and launched a search for petrol cans or drums. These containers needed to be small enough to carry without attracting suspicion, and practical enough to be used in Sneum’s outlandish plan to refuel in mid-air. No such cans seemed to exist, however, so Tommy asked a trusted workshop to make some to order, along with a hose and filters. He also specified the size and number of bolts they needed to attach the wings and the tail fin to the fuselage. While these orders were being met, Tommy and Kjeld tracked down two former Fleet Air Arm mechanics called Lindballe and Wichmann. They wanted their old colleagues to run an expert eye over the plane, check the carburettor and the magneto, and generally reassure them that the entire scheme wasn’t lunacy.

The following Saturday, all four men travelled to Odense, carrying a rather conspicuous amount of sackcloth, and slipped into the hangar as darkness fell. They used the sackcloth to seal the cracks in the walls, and when they were sure no tell-tale light could escape, they switched on their torches to begin work in earnest.

By dawn, they had cleaned the carburettor, given the magneto the all-clear, examined the wiring and changed the oil. However, they still couldn’t start the engine—the only sure way to discover if all was well—because the sound would be heard far and wide. At least there seemed to be nothing wrong with the compression when they turned the propeller by hand, so Lindballe and Wichmann cheerfully gave the engine a clean bill of health. Whether they would have been so confident if they were destined to fly across the North Sea in the Moth is open to question.

When the carbon steel bolts were finally ready, Tommy and Kjeld began the painstaking process of reassembling the plane. Tommy admitted to his friend that a large amount of guesswork would be involved in this process. They attached the wings to the fuselage in the folding position, but as they completed this delicate task it was impossible to be sure that they had stayed faithful to the original angles and elevations. Any miscalculation, even by a few degrees, and the Moth would nosedive or flip in the slightest turbulence.

Every night for a month Tommy and Kjeld made the best of their limited materials to cobble together their fragile dream. They relied upon lashings of copper wire to fasten the ill-fitting bolts, and hoped the pressures of flight would not tear apart these makeshift bindings. The pilots regularly turned the propeller in a bid to ensure that the oil would flow freely when it mattered.

The last piece of the jigsaw was the tail fin, which still lay in a box in Poul Andersen’s workshop. Sneum followed the farmer’s instructions to the letter. ‘To keep Andersen out of it I had to break the padlock so that the Danish police and the Germans could see there was evidence of a break-in,’ he remembered. Tommy took the vital component and crept back to the barn before anyone noticed.

With the tail finally attached, the plane at least looked as though it might be capable of flight. By now, the petrol cans were ready at the Copenhagen workshops too, so the pilots began to transfer them across the country to Odense in small paper parcels. There were four zinc cans, each with a capacity of two gallons, and twelve smaller tins that could hold about one and a half gallons apiece. Once they were all safely stockpiled in the hangar, the fuel was transferred from the huge drums into the more manageable containers. Tommy and Kjeld then ensured that the fuel tank in the plane itself was full to the brim, and prepared to put the finishing touches to their plan.

But the long midsummer days had already brought fresh complications. The turnip-pickers seemed to use every last minute of light for their toil now; and one man in particular tested the pilots’ patience. Perhaps he was keen to impress the boss, or maybe he just had extra mouths to feed, but he seemed obsessed with picking as many turnips as was humanly possible. And his chosen field was the one nearest to the hangar. Often he would work a seventeen-hour day, from 5.00 a.m. to 10.00 p.m. The harder he worked, the less time the pilots had to prepare their plane. Nevertheless, they seized every opportunity to finish their job. And halfway through June they knew they were ready.

Out of courtesy to their former associate, Tommy and Kjeld revealed their intentions to Christian Michael Rottboell. After such a frustrating winter of aborted escapes by sea, Rottboell had declared himself anxious to be kept informed of any plans. When told of the plane, he insisted upon coming to Odense so he could gauge their chance of success. (Although he had never been a pilot, he had some basic mechanical knowledge of planes.) Though Tommy and Kjeld didn’t particularly want to hear his opinion, they thought it best to keep him happy.

When Rottboell was brought into the hangar in the dead of night his eyes lit up, especially when he saw the size of the cockpit. ‘There’s room for a third man at the back,’ he declared. ‘I’ll show you.’

Pedersen looked stunned. ‘No, Rottboell, it’s out of the question.’

But the younger man was determined to illustrate his point. He clambered inside the cockpit and curled up in a little ball behind the two seats. ‘See?’ he said triumphantly. ‘It can be done.’

‘And where,’ asked Tommy, ‘do you suppose we’ll put the fuel?’

‘On top of me. Or around me. It doesn’t matter. There’s room.’

Sneum was losing patience. ‘Rottboell, you don’t seem to understand. The tank isn’t much more than half the size it should be for this journey. The extra fuel is going to fill every inch of the cockpit not already taken up by Pedersen and me.’

Rottboell wouldn’t give up. ‘But we’re a trio. That’s how we planned the escape by boat.’ The silence with which his comments were greeted only made him more desperate. ‘I thought we were going to stick together. Don’t leave me behind, for Christ’s sake.’

Tommy could see the hurt in Christian Michael’s eyes. ‘Listen,’ he explained, ‘I made your father a promise that I would do my best to look after you. Believe me, if we try this with three people, we’ll crash. Or never even get off the ground.’

Rottboell turned away, hardly able to hide his anger and frustration. Tommy recalled later: ‘Rottboell was furious that he couldn’t go with us in the plane but he was too well bred to cause a scene. He thought there was room in the back, but he didn’t understand the weight problem. I told him to stay put until I could find a way to pick him up, along with the others who wanted to come to England.’

Determined to arrive in England with fully updated intelligence in addition to the precious radar installation film, Sneum and Pedersen decided to make a final sweep of their contacts around Denmark. Kjeld toured Jutland, while Tommy covered Zealand and Copenhagen. What they discovered was encouraging. The batteries and garrisons at Holbaek, Roskilde and Naestved had all been left intact, despite the Nazi occupation. Hundreds of men deemed harmless by the Nazis had secretly hidden thousands of rounds of ammunition in readiness to support the Allies if and when a liberating invasion came. After the capitulation of April 1940, the British had doubted the will of the Danish armed forces to fight the Nazis, but Sneum and Pedersen now felt they had evidence that the reality might be rather different. Danish servicemen were just waiting for the signal from London to mount a massive diversion in support of an Allied landing force.

Although Tommy and Kjeld were taking a risk in compiling this report, there were pleasures to be had too. Tommy, in particular, enjoyed the sexual freedom such assignments afforded him, and continued to tell himself that his behavior was in the interests of good security. ‘I thought that the more fun I had, the less suspicious I would appear to the locals,’ he later claimed with a smile. Whatever the validity of this argument, he certainly had plenty of fun on the tour. And he wasn’t caught.

The take-off area near Odense, however, had recently become more dangerous. To keep his troops on their toes, the local German commander had ordered that manoeuvres should take place in the fields near the hangar on the night of 20 June. On 18 June, blissfully ignorant of this development after their tour of the country, Pedersen and Sneum agreed a precise moment for their dramatic escape by air—midnight in tdays’ time.

Tommy and Kjeld were on a collision course with the Third Reich.