The Hornet's Sting (52 page)

Tommy Sneum had always tried to do things his way, and that continued right up to May 1945:

Tommy celebrated VE Day, 8 May, in London with Lars and his old girlfriend Rosy:

Having tried and failed to arrange for Sneum to lead his squadron of Mosquitoes to Copenhagen as the first Allied planes into Kastrup Airport, later that summer R.V. Jones gave him a familiar job—taking photos of German radar installations. It wasn’t quite the climax to his war that Tommy had foreseen: ‘I had volunteered for a squadron going to the Far East but the bloody Japs gave up,’ he pointed out. ‘At the time, people thought it was a bloody good idea to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later many people thought differently.’

The atomic potential that so few had dared to imagine back in 1941, when Emmy Valentin and Sneum had debated the meaning of a German officer’s careless boast, had finally been realized in August 1945. Not even Niels Bohr, the father of theoretical nuclear physics, had believed that the atom bomb would actually be made and used in anger.

With Tommy’s active service over, there was a sense of coming full circle when he was given a letter of authorization from R.V. Jones in September 1945. It read: ‘Sneum has been loaned to us to assist in the task of photographing a number of radar sites. The photographs are required for the official history of the battle against the German night-fighter force. Sneum is particularly qualified for this work as he distinguished himself doing similar work for us during the German occupation.’

Inevitably, Fanoe was one of those sites. The British had never totally destroyed the Freya installation, though simply knowing it was there and how it worked had saved the lives of countless Allied pilots. The island’s biggest hero arrived unannounced, and took the opportunity to surprise his parents. ‘I crept into the house while they were sleeping and woke them up. They hadn’t seen me for years and there were tears of joy all round,’ Tommy remembered.

The reunion with Else and Marianne was less happy: ‘Marianne didn’t know I was her daddy because Else didn’t want that. Else was playing the piano in a bar in Copenhagen. She had a new boyfriend and a new life. She was scared Marianne would get attached to me. I didn’t feel I knew either of them any more. Although, unfortunately for Marianne, I could see she looked a bit like me.’

Kjeld Pedersen, Tommy’s co-pilot in the Hornet Moth, also survived the war. After his wild weekend on the town with Tommy and Rosy, he returned to North Africa and continued to risk his life there until 28 January 1944. By March, he was back in England with 234 Squadron, then based at RAF Cottishall, Norfolk. In April, he was posted to 1 Squadron and began to fly Spitfires. He advanced across Europe with the squadron in the last year of the war, emerging unscathed. ‘Oh yes, and he shagged Else after the war,’ revealed Sneum casually. ‘He also became a very good pilot in the end.’

The relationship with Else seemed more surprising. ‘Yes,’ repeated Tommy. ‘Kjeld and Else got together for a while. My best friend and my ex-wife! Can you imagine? She certainly had her revenge for the way I treated her. But you know, it’s funny, I didn’t mind abut Else and Kjeld. I probably deserved it. And besides, he asked my permission first!’

Furthermore, Else had been true to Sneum when it mattered, when his survival had depended on her ability to resist the pressure of the Danish police. And in truth, after their epic Hornet Moth flight together, Kjeld meant much more to Tommy than his wife did.

‘Kjeld and I remained friends for life,’ Tommy said proudly. ‘He became quite a big noise in the Danish RAF, a lieutenant colonel, but we stayed as close as ever because we had the same interests. As we grew older we used to swap books, because we were both very well read. He had a wonderful sense of humour, Kjeld. He died in 1982, and that hit me harder than anything.’

The white towel and broomstick that Kjeld had thrust through the plexiglas roof of the Hornet Moth on that midsummer’s night in Odense in 1941 remained on a wall at RAF Acklington for as long as the air base existed. The British flyers liked to stare at the filthy towel—two meters long when Tommy and Kjeld took off from Elseminde, but only ten centimeters by the time they landed at Bullock Hall Farm over six hours later. The RAF boys stationed in the north-east of England often thought of what those Danish pilots must have been through while that towel was being ripped to shreds. Any newcomer who spotted it would ask for an explanation. So the Acklington pilots had the perfect excuse to tell their favorite tale time and again.

T
HE BRITISH SECRET S
ERVICE, for whom Tommy had risked his life, were not overly appreciative in the aftermath of the war. It was 1948 before anyone in British officialdom decided that he was worthy of some small recognition for his efforts. On 19 April of that year, R. Dunbar of the Foreign Office wrote to Alec Randall, the British Ambassador in Copenhagen, with the following news:

Tommy’s view of the British hardly improved when he realized that they couldn’t even present him with the medal he had been awarded. It was the following January before the Treaty Department of the Foreign Office saw fit to send Sneum’s medal to Copenhagen, along with fifty-two others. There was another familiar name on the list of Danish recipients of the KMC that year: Birgit Valentin. Partly thanks to Tommy, she had survived the war without being compromised by the Nazis. It was a credit to her that she had been judged by the British to have been as courageous as Sneum himself, for her contribution to the Allied effort in Nazi-occupied territory.

However, the romance between the two was not rekindled at the medal ceremony, even though Tommy was officially single again by then, and still only thirty-one. Deep down, Sneum felt that his original exploits, in gathering Freya radar intelligence, had alone warranted a far higher recognition of his bravery. Much as he liked Birgit, he didn’t see her as his equal when it came to spying. Yet now she was deemed by the British to possess the same warrior spirit as he did. Right or wrong, that assessment seemed faintly absurd in his eyes.

Sneum knew that the British had never been fully convinced of his loyalty, even though they readily acknowledged the contributions of many of the resistance figures with whom he had worked. Emmy Valentin received an MBE, as did Lorens Arne Duus Hansen. Much more controversially for Sneum, so did Hans Lunding, his chief detractor among the Princes of Danish Intelligence. Lunding was arrested by the Germans in August 1943, as they tried to quell widespread unrest in Denmark. He later claimed to have been close to execution when saved by the Allies’ advance across Europe. Sneum’s brother-in-law, Niels-Richard Bertelsen, was arrested in the same clampdown in Denmark. He endured the horrors of a German concentration camp before finding his way home at the end of the war, his face yellow with hepatitis.

There was no such ordeal for Ronald Turnbull, who continued to operate from the safety of Sweden while others put their lives on the line across the Oeresund in Denmark. Although that relative comfort was sometimes disturbed by the necessity of taking dangerous flights to Britain and back, those risks were hardly in the same league as Tommy’s. Even so, Ronnie received an OBE.

Sneum never received the medal he deserved, and recalled: ‘R.V. Jones told me that I must have had some enemies high up. Otherwise I would have been more highly decorated.’

In another snub, he had hoped to be promoted by Denmark’s Fleet Air Arm when he returned home for good after the war. Instead, he was told that if he wanted to rejoin, he would have to start at the lowly rank he had been given before 1940. Since others had failed to fight and been promoted in his absence, Tommy was understandably disgusted and walked away.

R.V. Jones wrote later:

It was actually some time before Tommy moved to Switzerland. He remained in the Royal Norwegian Air Force until 1947 after being slighted by the Danish equivalent. Then he returned to England, where he dabbled in sales, public relations and advertising, while getting his adrenalin fix by taking courses in fire-fighting and rescue. His love for flying would never die, and later he delivered planes to their base airports for British and Scandinavian aircraft manufacturers. Soon he was a different kind of agent—for the British aircraft industry and various Danish firms—but the adrenalin rush was missing. So he became managing director of an air-charter and air-ambulance company in Denmark, often demonstrating his own death-defying piloting skills to help save the lives of others.

There were more thrills when he spent ten months in Turkey during 1951 as a construction supervisor and then test pilot for a Turkish state aircraft factory in Ankara, before returning to Denmark. There, he hit the headlines for the wrong reasons when, in 1955, Else had him thrown into jail in a dispute over maintenance payments for Marianne. Tommy, who had divorced his wife years earlier, took his punishment on the chin and came out smiling for the cameras on the day of his release.

‘Everybody put me in prison,’ he joked. ‘The Swedes, the British, even the Danes. But each time I came out, I grew more important.’

He celebrated his freedom by moving to the city he called ‘the most beautiful in the world’, Rome, and dividing his time between the capital and another Italian paradise, Lake Como. ‘I had met my second wife, Aida, who was simply lovely. We spent two very happy years of marriage moving between Rome and Como, where her father had a big business.’ There is a marvellous photograph of the couple in an Italian restaurant (see picture section, p. 3), looking as happy as any lovers ever have, living la dolce vita. Behind the scenes, Sneum was working on the idea of an international air-ambulance service in cooperation with the Red Cross and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Sadly for Tommy and Aida, the magic of their romance didn’t last, although Sneum was soon immersed in his next professional challenge.

Stig Jensen, the Danish resistance hero, had offered Tommy a position in his press, publishing and advertising firm. ‘But I didn’t like working in an office,’ Tommy confirmed, unsurprisingly. He was also tiring of the mixed reception he still received in his own country. In 1961 all this persuaded him to pack his bags and leave for Switzerland. He would be based there for the next forty-five years.