The Hornet's Sting (12 page)

The entire scene belonged in some kind of slapstick comedy. But this was deadly serious, and the pilots’ lives were in danger like never before.

I
T WAS NOW 11.30 p.m. and the situation was critical. Both men tried to stay positive. The plywood hadn’t cracked and they didn’t think the lost canvas at the front of one wing would be enough in itself to bring down the plane. Tommy and Kjeld looked up at the heavens; there was no moon, which at least offered hope that they wouldn’t be spotted immediately and blasted out of the sky by a German artillery unit. Overall, however, the weather wasn’t going to offer them the protection they desired. Sneum worried about the lack of low cloud cover. The ceiling came between fifteen hundred and seventeen hundred meters, so there would be no hiding place in the first vital minutes after take-off. It would take some time to reach the ceiling, and they didn’t know what they might face before they did.

‘Sneum, tell me straight.’ Pedersen was just three months older than Tommy, and just a little more concerned about their predicament. ‘Can we make it?’

‘Fuck off,’ replied Tommy. ‘Of course we’ll make it.’

‘Seriously,’ persisted Kjeld, looking his friend directly in the eye. ‘What are our chances?’

‘Fifty-fifty,’ answered Tommy, and watched Pedersen’s face drain a little. ‘No, sixty-forty we’ll make it,’ he added for encouragement. But his attempt at optimism was no longer convincing or infectious.

Neither pilot had flown for more than a year, not since the Nazis had invaded and grounded all Danish planes on 9 April 1940. Tommy hadn’t forgotten the roar of the German bombers over Avnoe early that morning, the surge of adrenalin as his adjutant opened sealed orders from King Christian and confirmed that Denmark’s sovereign territory was to be defended at all costs. He remembered the frantic sprint to his Hawker Nimrod fighter biplane, and the confusion when mechanics tried to block his path. He recalled the sheer frustration of being told that both the King and the Prime Minister had just announced their change of heart in a radio broadcast, and that Naval HQ in Copenhagen had confirmed the new order to offer no resistance. He had still tried to clamber into his Nimrod, and only gave up when a mechanic told him they had already put all the planes out of action. The shame of that night had never left him. Everything he had done since had been geared towards this moment, when he would beat the ban and fly again.

Pedersen must have known how his friend was feeling, because he too had been a pilot in Fleet Air Arm. But that didn’t mean he was so desperate to remember how it felt to fly that he was ready to sacrifice his life for the privilege. This feeble-looking Hornet Moth was a far cry from a Hawker Nimrod. Besides, no one had ever attempted to fly a single-engine aircraft from Denmark to Britain. Pedersen, at least, knew his limitations. ‘I’m not going to fly her,’ he insisted. ‘You must do it.’

‘That pleases me,’ replied Sneum with a smile. ‘You’re not a very good pilot.’

They had intended to wait for a night train to run along a nearby embankment and drown out the noise of the plane’s engine. But with all the upheaval of getting the plane out of the hangar they had missed their intended locomotive. They expected another train at midnight, so all was not lost; and anyway, Sneum was determined to press ahead even if that one didn’t come. He climbed into the cockpit through the port door and checked their luggage one last time. Behind him were several five-litre and ten-litre cans of petrol and the long tube with a funnel attached to one end. Folded neatly were spare shirts and smart naval uniforms for each man. The biscuits and the grape soda sat next to an axe. The broom handle with the two-meter-long white towel nailed to the end had been carefully placed to one side. And nestling innocently among these items were the two cases containing priceless undeveloped cine and still film of the German radar installation on Fanoe. Tucked away equally safely was the detailed report they had just compiled on the military bases where Danish troops were prepared to rise up against the German invaders on a signal from Churchill. To whet the appetites of the British further, Tommy and Kjeld had carefully documented key ports and ship movements around the Danish coast, to guide the bombing of German targets in their country.

By Sneum’s own admission, he hadn’t been quite so thorough in obtaining a detailed map of their destination: ‘Our only map of England was one we had torn from an atlas.’

Britain seemed a far-away place; and it felt like an eternity before they heard the midnight train—just a faint, regular rattle in the distance at first. Gradually it grew louder as the locomotive ate up more track and spewed out more steam. Here at last was the cover they craved. No one would hear a little sports plane above the thunderous roar of the train.

‘Contact!’ yelled Sneum.

Kjeld gave one mighty downward heave on the propeller and ducked clear as the engine burst noisily to life, with the blades soon scything at the air under their own power. The buzz was beautiful, like a promise of freedom, and adrenalin surged through the pilots’ bodies.

As the Hornet Moth began to roll through the turnip fields for the first time in ars, clouds of dust flew up in all directions and effectively blinded Tommy in the cockpit. They had a few hundred meters of rough terrain to negotiate before they reached the smoother designated take-off field. During these risky moments, Pedersen ran alongside to act as guide: Sneum could still see his friend, even if he couldn’t see what was directly in front of him. Later Tommy recalled: ‘He had a crazy look on his face, his revolver was cocked and he was ready to shoot anyone who dared to interfere. He had told me that he would kill as many Germans as he could with his pistol and the rest with his bare hands.’ Pedersen pointed and waved so that Sneum could steer the machine through tiny breaks in the ditches between fields. Steadily they headed towards the grassy field that sloped down in a northerly direction and would act as their natural runway.

As Tommy swung the plane into position, Pedersen jumped aboard and tried to take his seat, positioned to the right and fractionally behind his partner’s. But the makeshift flagpole had complicated matters by rolling across Kjeld’s allocated place, where it now lay jammed. Pedersen had no time to release it gently, so he wrenched it upwards with all his strength. The broomstick and towel shot straight through the cockpit’s plexiglas roof, ripping a sizeable hole above their heads. Sneum admitted later: ‘I swore at him when he did that. On top of everything else, it meant we would have a cold draught whistling down our necks for as long as we were in the plane.’

Guiltily, Kjeld pulled in the flag of peace and laid it to one side. Knowing there was no time for further recriminations, Sneum coaxed more life out of the engine and sent the flimsy plane hurtling forward. Both men knew this was the point of no return. Happily, the field seemed surprisingly smooth. Tommy feared that one bump might diminish precious speed, but he was able to use the incline of the hill to achieve a furious pace before pulling the joystick towards himself.

There was just one problem—the plane wouldn’t take off. Even with the help of the slope, the amount of fuel she was carrying made her just too heavy. The Moth flirted with the air for no more than a few seconds before thumping stubbornly back down to earth. They should have been climbing steeply by now, because pylons and high-voltage cables lay straight ahead; and a hundred meters further on was the ten-meter-high embankment that carried the railway track through the next field. The situation was critical. Even if the temperamental Moth belatedly decided to fly, it no longer seemed possible to make it over the cables. However, it was also too late to abort the take-off. And as if all that were not enough to deal with, Tommy noticed a disturbing development to the left, where another train was snaking its way over the embankment. Even if they could somehow negotiate the cables that stretched like tripwires between the pylons, the formidable wall beyond them had effectively just grown even higher.

Suddenly there was a fresh sensation of weightlessness. The Hornet hovered a foot or two above the grass for five seconds before dropping again, as if exhausted by her effort. By this stage, they were already over halfway down the hill. Time and space were running out fast, and humiliation beckoned: to be shot down over the North Sea was one thing; to crash after fifty meters was quite another.

Then, finally, the Moth took to the air and stayed there. But the prospect of death by electrocution instantly tempered the pilots’ elation. With clearing the power cables no longer an option, both men realized their lives now depended upon staying low enough to duck under them instead. Sneum remembered: ‘Io go down, keep the engine running full speed and try not to climb.’ He had to perform the stunt at about 100 kilometers per hour, or 55 knots. For Sneum to attempt to achieve that speed without gaining altitude seemed like mission impossible. He was a good pilot, but this sort of aerobatics might demand more skill than even he possessed. The cables were perilously close now, hanging little more than twenty meters above the field. Sneum held his nerve and braced himself, while Pedersen hardly dared look. Just above them, the wires flashed past like cheese-cutters. The anxious pilots waited for what seemed like the inevitable collision. To their amazement, none came.

Now, though, the embankment and train rose before them. And going under them was not an option. As Tommy hauled back on the joystick, Pedersen gestured frantically, his palms turned to the sky, his arms flapping. ‘Up! Up!’ he screamed. Something stung the Hornet Moth into action. Up she reared, banking steeply to port, until the embankment was almost scaled. But while Tommy tried to work his magic, he saw that the train was about to crush the plane’s left wing. The wing tip was level with the top of the engine, which was hurtling towards them. The next few seconds would decide their fate. Sneum caught sight of the train driver and his fireman, seemingly both hypnotized as the Hornet Moth flew towards them. ‘They were looking as though we had just fallen down from the moon,’ Tommy said later. Those on the train ducked as if to avoid decapitation, but in an instant they were left again to their own world, with their heads and bodies still happily connected. Tommy had cleared them with no more than five or six meters to spare. The plane was still in one piece and so were the pilots. Now there was just the small matter of what the Third Reich might throw at them before they reached the North Sea.

T
OMMY CHECKED THE accuracy of the plane’s compass against the railway track, which he knew ran directly from east to west. Something was wrong; the instrument was a full thirty degrees wide of the mark. Sneum checked again but the compass was still thirty degrees out. At least there was no variation in its lack of accuracy. Therefore, if he compensated by thirty degrees each time, Tommy was confident he could still plot their course effectively. Unfortunately, however, their problems weren’t confined to the compass.

‘How is she flying, Sneum?’ Pedersen had to shout to make himself heard above the racket of the engine. The answer he received wasn’t encouraging.

‘The left wing feels twice as heavy as the right, everything is out of alignment, the nose pulls down and she seems to have a life of her own.’

Kjeld looked even more afraid than before. ‘Christ, can we make it?’

‘Of course we’ll make it.’

They flew across the island of Fyn and came out over the Lille Belt Channel near the town of Assens. There, Pedersen looked down on the starboard side and spotted the interrupted flash of a light. The Germans were sending up a message in Morse code. ‘Identify yourselves,’ it read.

The Danish duo looked at each other and decided to ignore it. Seconds later, over Bogoe, a tiny island between Jutland, they looked down again and saw a light moving on a straight course across the water. It was a worrying sight for the pilots. With their request ignored, it seemed the Germans had sent up one of their naval aircraft to investigate.

Sneum and Pedersen thrust their white flag back up through the pierced cockpit roof, but otherwise they felt helpless. The Hornet Moth lacked the power to outrun the enemy. All they could do was train their eyes on the ominous light below, and await their fate. Gradually, however, the light grew fainter, until finally it disappeared. For a while, Tommy and Kjeld were ecstatic.