The Hornet's Sting (5 page)

Tommy enjoyed his first major affair as a fifteen-year-old on Fanoe, when a married woman twice his age taught him everything else he needed to know about the opposite sex. ‘That created quite a scandal,’ he recalled. ‘My father found out by reading a note she had left for me at our family home, and he wanted to give me a good thrashing. For the first time I resisted, and told him not to raise his hand to me again.’

The amorous Tommy already considered himself to be a man. As the years went by, he was flattered to be told on more than one occasion that he reminded girls of the tough and charismatic film star Humphrey Bogart. Tommy’s military uniform did him no harm either in his pursuit of the opposite sex. Indeed, he remembered: ‘Else and I met in a tailor’s, and she was originally fascinated by my naval cadet’s uniform. She was very complimentary and I suppose I was a bit flattered by the attention.’ But what had attracted him to Else? ‘She had a lot of nice girlfriends,’ he said mischievously. And when asked to describe his wife’s personality, Tommy replied rather uncharitably: ‘She didn’t have one.’ That wasn’t true, of course, but Tommy could never forgive or forget that he had been forced to marry the wrong woman too young.

With so many other women in the world, Else was always going to have a hard time holding on to her man. ‘I like all girls, they are lovely and charming,’ Tommy explained simply. However, he loved the idea of making a difference in the war even more than he loved women. So when Else found herself alone in bed again one night during the late summer of 1940, it wasn’t because of a love rival. Her husband was creeping between sand dunes and pine trees, not in and out of the bedrooms of beautiful women. He had eyes only for the mysterious installation on his native island of Fanoe.

In the darkness, Tommy spotted the rectangular outline of one of the strange devices and heard the faint drone of a plane’s engine somewhere overhead. He thought it sounded like a German sea-plane, though he couldn’t see it. Suddenly, the entire piece of machinery ahead of him began to swivel, as if it were following the aircraft. Then something even more extraordinary happened: ‘They switched on the searchlight and the beam hit the silver-coloured Junker immediately.’ The light’s aim was so precise that Tommy knew he hadn’t witnessed a chance event. There had been no random scanning of the darkness for the origin of the sound: the searchlight had known exactly where to point. For that to have happened, the plane must have been spotted by something far more powerful and sophisticated than the naked eye or binoculars. The precision left Tommy temporarily awestruck. ‘It was that demonstration which made me certain we were dealing with some kind of early-warning system. I was convinced that they now had the capability to plot the position of a ship or plane using radio waves.’

Sneum was well aware that this could be disastrous for the Allied war effort. Since a nearby lighthouse offered a reference point for British planes crossing the North Sea to bomb potential targets in Germany, innumerable aircraft could fall into the trap before the Allies realized what was happening. Tommy had to find a way to warn the British of the dangers that awaited their unsuspecting pilots. Fortunately, he had an ally who could help him achieve this.

Kaj Oxlund, who was friends with both Tommy and Else, had already begun to smuggle reports on the basic logistics of the German occupation across to neutral Sweden. At thirty-five years old, he was a thickset individual with neat brown hair and a reassuring smile. Tommy was convinced he could trust him. After all, it had been Kaj, an anti-aircraft battery gunner at the time, who had warned Tommy in a phone call to Avnoe air base on April 7 that the Nazi invasion was imminent. Tommy explained: ‘We were already close friends by then, and I had often stayed with him in Copenhagen. He left me a message to call him, and when I did he told me what was going to happen. He was getting the sort of highquality information from Army Intelligence that we didn’t get in the navy. Kaj told me: “I’m sure they’re coming. We’re prepared.”’

In reality, neither man could have done much more than die, since there had been little chance of Danish forces surviving the Nazi onslaught if they had resisted. Now all the enjoyable weekends they had spent as a foursome with Else and Kaj’s wife Tulle seemed a world away, along with the exhilarating sense of freedom both men had felt while riding powerful Frederiksborg stallions around the perimeter of Tommy’s airfield. Sneum retained fond memories of those carefree days before the war: ‘Oxlund liked shooting, riding, the country life, just as I did. He had a classy wife and we liked each other too. Else and Tulle got on well together and we spent some lovely weekends that way.’

Between April 7 and 9 1940, however, Kaj and Tommy became resigned to the fact that they would probably never see their women again. Their grim assumption soon proved unfounded, though: while the trustworthy Oxlund’s intelligence had been accurate, Denmark’s King Christian decided to spare his forces from inevitable slaughter by ordering no resistance to the invasion. Even so, life would never be the same again for either man. Their stubborn and increasingly complicated struggle against the occupation was only just beginning.

In the aftermath of the invasion Oxlund left the army to go into business, a move which made him the best possible courier for Sneum’s precious intelligence. As a genuine businessman, he had a perfect excuse to travel; and as a former military man he had the nerve to carry incriminating evidence without arousing suspicion. Tommy therefore compiled a preliminary report to go with his sketches of the Fanoe installation, put them into a dossier and gave it to Kaj, who took a ferry across the Oeresund to Sweden and posted a thick envelope to the British Legation in Stockholm. It contained the first news from Denmark of the early-warning technology that would soon be known as ‘radar.’

In case the British required more detail, Tommy intended to pay them a visit in person before long. Through autumn and midwinter, however, increased patrols and thick ice frustrated his efforts to escape the Nazi occupation of Denmark by boat. His disappointment was shared by two friends who were equally desperate to reach Britain, Kjeld Pedersen and Christian Michael Rottboell. Taller and better looking, Pedersen had been Tommy’s best friend in the Danish Navy’s Fleet Air Arm before the occupation grounded both men. ‘We trusted each other completely,’ Sneum would later say. And by late 1940 they shared a new dream—to fly aerial combat missions for Britain’s Royal Air Force. Meanwhile, Rottboell, a confident young aristocrat, was an aircraft mechanic and staunch supporter of the resistance. He was determined to reach England so that he could fight the Nazis, and his family had noticed a change in his demeanour whenever they were together in their magnificent castle at Boerglum Cloisters. Suspecting his intentions and realizing there was little he could do to stop him, Rottboell’s father confronted Sneum when he visited one day. ‘Look, I know what you are getting my son into,’ he said. Before Tommy could answer, Mr Rottboell added, ‘Just promise to keep an eye on Christian Michael for me as best you can.’ Tommy looked the older man in the eye and said that he would. Now, though, it appeared that Rottboell’s father had no immediate reason to worry, because they seemed to be going nowhere.

In early 1941, however, Tommy Sneum became obsessed with a novel plan which, if executed successfully, would allow him to write his name in history.

T
HE FOCAL POINT for Tommy’s new assault on the Nazis was no longer the daunting installation on Fanoe but a swanky hotel in the center of the Danish capital. And his ambitious—some would say crazy—assassination plot was linked to his enduring love for a woman who fascinated him like no other. Talking about the origins of his plan, he explained:

But why aim only for a lowly army officer? Tommy began to dream of assassinating a top Nazi official. If he was in the right place at the right time, and given sufficient warning of such a visit to central Copenhagen, it certainly seemed feasible. He said later:

The challenge was to think of a way to avoid capture after making the attempt, since such a fate would mean a terrible death for Sneum and any associates who could be linked to the hit. ‘The problem was that if you used a pistol or rifle, the Germans would soon see where the shot had come from, and I wasn’t prepared to risk getting Oda into such serious trouble. She would have been tortured, and I couldn’t have that. Oda was one of the very few girls that I ever really loved. I probably loved her more than she ever realized.’

It seems that Tommy’s desperation to impress Oda may have gone hand in hand with his desire to play a more active part in the war, a potentially explosive combination in a man who hated rejection or defeat of any kind. He revealed later: