The Hornet's Sting (6 page)

By now it was early 1941, and Tommy had spent many days at the central Copenhagen home of a resistance sympathizer called Jens Dahl, waiting for the phone call from one of Dahl’s contacts that might give his plan the green light. At Kastrup Airport, Arne Helvard, an old colleague from Fleet Air Arm, was monitoring the movements of top Nazis. Another ally was Tommy’s brother-in-law, Niels-Richard Bertelsen, who as a Copenhagen detective was sometimes given prior warning when senior Nazi figures were heading into the Danish capital.

In early February Bertelsen called to say that a top Nazi was about to leave Kastrup for Copenhagen, though his identity was unknown. Tommy called Oda’s apartment and for once was delighted to hear no reply. Wherever she was, she had unwittingly taken herself out of the firing line. Tommy used his set of keys to let himself in, assembled his longbow and waited for his prey. Then Oda’s phone rang. Tommy took a chance and picked up the receiver. ‘It was Bertelsen. There had been a change of plan: the leading Nazi had felt unwell and decided to fly directly to Germany. It soon became clear that the man I had been waiting for was Heinrich Himmler. In the end, they had just landed at Kastrup, refuelled and flown away.’

History shows that on 6 February 1941 Himmler did indeed land at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport on his way back from visiting SS recruits in Norway. He had no idea how close he had come to being the target of an assassination attempt. It is impossible to say whether that attempt would have succeeded, particularly given Sneum’s unusual choice of weaponry. However, it his onceivable that the course of history, and especially the fate of millions of Jews, might have been different had Himmler stuck to his schedule. The very Nazi that Tommy had most wanted to kill had nearly flown into his trap, only to escape thanks to a headache.

In 2007 Tommy’s son, Christian, asserted:

To some extent, Tommy himself was relieved that he failed to carry out the hit:

Although he later found positives in the fact that the assassination attempt had to be aborted, at the time it was deeply frustrating for Tommy. In early 1941 he felt he had lost both the girl and the chance to make a telling impact on the course of the war. But soon enough many more opportunities would arise in both spheres, and Thomas Sneum would be ready to seize them.

A
S HIMMLER FLEW AWAY to safety in that first week of February 1941, Tommy was left in Denmark, still feeling trapped. Yet he remained as determined as ever to break through the wall of ice that enveloped the Danish coast. Instead of looking west to Britain for an escape route, he turned his attentions eastwards, to neutral Sweden. Since it was much closer, Tommy knew he would have a more realistic chance of getting there. And perhaps the Swedes could provide the first stepping stone to Britain.

Sneum was beaten to the British Legation in Stockholm by a young man he knew only vaguely, but one whose arrival would have serious repercussions for his war. Ronald Turnbull was a charming young Scot who was busily establishing a field headquarters for the Special Operations Executive’s Danish Section in the Swedish capital. The SOE, created with the personal approval of Winston Churchill, was tasked with setting Nazi-occupied Europe ablaze with the fires of resistance. Anyone who had known Turnbull just five years earlier would have been surprised by his appointment. As a Cambridge University student in the 1930s, he had sent fan mail to Hitler, declaring himself to be a keen supporter of all things German. ‘I wrote to Hitler and I’ve got a letter from him somewhere,’ he said later. ‘In the early days I thought Hitler was a great man, which turned out not to be the case. I was vice-president of the Anglo-German Association at Cambridge. We wanted to get closer to the Germans, particularly their youth.’

Before long the scales fell from Turnbull’s eyes and his opinion of what was happening in Germany changed. When he left university he stood as a Liberal candidate for Bethnal Green and then worked as a journalist on the London
Evening Standard
. He was under no illusions about Hitler’s intentions by the time Neville Chamberlain returned from a meeting with the Fuhrer in September 1938. The Prime Minister claimed triumphantly that he had secured ‘peace in our time’ for Britain. Turnbull knew the truth: ‘I felt sick when Chamberlain waved that white paper,’ he said. ‘I knew what was coming.’

But even the perceptive Ronnie, who by 1940 was a press attaché at the British Legation in Copenhagen, was taken aback when the Germans invaded Denmark on 9 April. He was celebrating his engagement to Maria Thereza do Rio Branco, daughter of the Brazilian Ambassador, when the Nazis rolled in. He escaped thanks to his diplomatic immunity, but some of the British journalists with whom he had liaised in the Danish capital were trapped.

Though Ronnie didn’t exactly cover himself in glory during those frightening, chaotic days, his affinity with Denmark was remembered in Britain’s corridors of power, and he had also broadcast anti-German propaganda to Denmark from the BBC in London. Thereza made her way to England soon after her husband had arrived, and they had been married for two months when SOE came calling in July. Turnbull accepted the organization’s offer enthusiastically, but then realized that just to reach his new office would present a serious challenge.

Due to the extreme dangers of travelling from Britain to Sweden by air in the winter of 1940-1, Turnbull was sent on an extraordinary, roundabout route to Stockholm. Ronnie and Thereza, who was by now pregnant, were accompanied by his secretary, Pamela Tower. They sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, then went north, reaching Istanbul before the Turnbulls’ son Michael was born. As soon as mother and baby were strong enough to continue, they headed overland to Moscow, via Tiflis, Baku and Rostov. Once in the Russian capital they boarded yet another train, this time to Leningrad, and from there travelled to Finland. Eventually, in February 1941, the exhausted Turnbulls reached Stockholm by ship. They had left Liverpool more than two months earlier.

This epic journey drew only derision from Lord Haw-Haw, Hitler’s infamous propagandist William Joyce, who announced on Berlin radio: ‘The British must really be in a sad condition if they have to send a fellow from the Foreign Office halfway around the world to get to Stockholm.’

The resistance organization that the ‘fellow froreign Office’ had been sent to run—SOE Denmark—would eventually become a thorn in the side of Tommy Sneum. But he couldn’t have known that as he started to make his way to the very building in which Turnbull was now based.

Smarting from his failure to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi with his longbow, Sneum had finally spotted a weakness in the German ring of steel around his country. He upset his good friend Kjeld Pedersen and their resistance colleague Christian Michael Rottboell by insisting that he must use the route alone. It would be safer that way, he told them firmly, and they had to accept his decision, however reluctantly.

So, on 20 February 1941, Tommy set out for Kastrup Airport. He carried with him an update on the radar installation on Fanoe, where the Germans had been building a third tower for their early-warning system. He also had facts and figures about the Nazi occupation of Denmark and German troop movements. An hour on a civilian plane took him to Roenne Airfield on Bornholm, a Danish island within striking distance of the Swedish mainland. A couple of days later he climbed aboard a huge ferry which, aided by ice-cutters, carved a path to Ystad on the Swedish coast. The first, nervous minutes of 23 February saw him posing as a businessman in front of a yawning customs official on the quayside. Tommy dreaded a search of his belongings or clothes, but the lazy official simply stamped his passport and directed him to the night train for Stockholm. Sneum couldn’t show any signs of the exhilaration he felt. He was free of the Nazi occupation, however temporarily.

Sleep came easily on the train once the adrenalin wore off. Before dawn, making sure that he wasn’t followed as he left Stockholm train station, Tommy made his way to the Strandvagen peninsula outside the city. Soon after it opened for official business, he proudly entered the British Legation.

‘I’m Flight Lieutenant Thomas Sneum of the Danish Fleet Air Arm and I have a lot of important information,’ he announced at reception. He was led to Squadron Leader Donald Fleet, the ageing but enthusiastic Assistant Air Attaché. A smiling Fleet decided to take Sneum straight to the office of Captain Henry Denham, the Naval Attaché, who operated from the kitchen wing of the Legation.

Turnbull, who had attended some of the same Copenhagen functions as Sneum during the winter of 1939-40, was nowhere to be seen. Had Tommy renewed his acquaintance with Ronnie that day, the brave Dane’s war could have turned out very differently. Turnbull might well have taken one look at all the excellent information in Sneum’s possession and recruited him on the spot for SOE Denmark. Denham worked in close proximity to Turnbull, but answered to a different British chain of command. ‘I wasn’t employed to help the Admiralty,’ Turnbull pointed out. By the same token, Denham wasn’t employed to help SOE.

The dynamic between the two men was curious. Both had worked at Britain’s Copenhagen Legation, and they had been repatriated by the Nazis on the same sealed train. Turnbull now worked with Denham’s former secretary, Pamela Tower, but ‘She was still in love with Henry,’ Ronnie claimed. Since Turnbull’s arrival in Stockholm, Denham had offered him access to any routine naval information at his disposal, but the SOE man later said dismissively, ‘We didn’t need ordinary intelligence.’ It seemed that Denham and Turnbull shared almost everything, but when it came to the precious new secrets that Sneum had brought into the building, there would be no sharing, even though this wassecisely the sort of extraordinary intelligence Turnbull craved.

As a regular naval officer, Denham was obliged to pass any significant intelligence through the established Admiralty channels, which led through Naval Intelligence to the Secret Intelligence Service in London. Turnbull, meanwhile, had to report to his own SOE spymaster back in Britain, Commander Ralph Hollingworth. Denham wasn’t about to entrust the ‘amateurs’ at SOE with vital scientific intelligence, no matter how much he liked Turnbull on a personal level. Had Sneum’s discoveries landed on Turnbull’s desk rather than Denham’s, he too would have wanted to send them exclusively to his own organization, SOE. And the source of such valuable intelligence was to be treated in a similarly possessive fashion: Tommy was already becoming a trophy, the sort of prize that one covert British organization would jealously guard against overtures from its rival.

Naturally, Tommy didn’t know any of this. As he began his presentation, he viewed ‘the British’ as one united force lined up against the Germans. He could never have imagined that, behind the scenes, they were squaring up to each other. Starting with something simple and tangible, he told Denham that some German sea-planes had been brought out of the water in the northern Danish port of Thisted and were now arranged on the quayside like sitting ducks. Then he moved swiftly on to the more pressing issue of the installation on Fanoe, and the remarkable capacity of the rectangular devices to pick out planes in the night sky with their searchlights.