The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [114]
The firepower about to sail to Norway was considerable. Squadrons of Hotchkiss tanks, snatched from the French during the lightning advance on Paris in 1940, were at the forefront of the shipment. Knud, Tommy’s doppelgänger, detailed the precise number of tanks involved, as well as the individual names and types of the ships that would transport the armoury and men. Sneum’s vigilant cousin even knew the calibre of the guns and the number of troops for whom bedding on the vessels had been prepared. Despite Lunding’s bleak warning, escape from Denmark was no longer Tommy’s immediate priority.
He contacted Duus Hansen and asked the trusted radio engineer if it was possible to transmit to England that same evening from Skodsborg. However, the weather forecast suggested to Duus Hansen that their best chance of success would be from the island of Fyn, the following day. They travelled separately, with each man showing sufficient nerve to play his part in cordial exchanges with German officers along the way. When they reached their destination, they transmitted as planned in double-quick time. Duus Hansen was helped by the fact that Sneum knew the appropriate coded letters and numbers for every type of German vessel, from battleships to U-boats. His previous summer’s homework in England had paid off handsomely. The British received the intelligence, and Sneum learned later that they bombed and partially destroyed the German convoy before it reached Oslo.
Tommy’s last safe-house in Denmark was the apartment of a longtime resistance sympathizer called Arne Helvard, who had also been a colleague in Fleet Air Arm. ‘We’d known each other even before that,’ revealed Tommy later. ‘We had been at a technical college together.’ It was while at polytechnic in Copenhagen in 1934-5 that Arne and Tommy had first discovered the thrill of flying. They trained on gliders, as many would-be aviators did in those days. Tommy recalled: ‘We flew a glider called a Stamer Lippisch, a big German monster, but with the help of a motorwinch we could gain a height of thirty to forty meters. On a good day, we got down safely without incident.’ The rush of the wind as it whistled past the cockpit was a wonderful substitute for the growl of a powerful engine, and flying soon became an addiction for both men.
Arne was more than two years older than Tommy, who was still a few weeks short of his twenty-fifth birthday when they shared the safe-house. Helvard had a receding hairline and acne, proving that some afflictions arrive before their time while others linger longer than they should. But Arne’s cheeky demeanour won him plenty of friends, and he had one other precious attribute. Tommy explained:
He was one of those annoying bastards who can drink ten pints a night and hardly put on any weight at all. He was a character. When everyone else was enjoying a party, for example, Arne would suddenly come up with a deep piece of philosophy to wrong-foot us. But on serious occasions he could be flippant—he loved going against the flow.
One day, for example, the commanding officer at Avnoe air base, Erik Rasmussen, noticed that Helvard was looking unhealthy, so he must have been drinking even more than ten pints a night at that point. Rasmussen told him he needed some physical training to tone him up. Helvard said, ‘My right arm’s getting plenty, sir. It spends all night lifting heavy glasses of beer. And my left arm does plenty of bending and stretching when I smoke my cigarettes.’
Fortunately for Arne, his superiors liked him, despite his cheek, partly because they knew what a plucky individual he was when it came to the crunch. In 1939, as a coastguard and a flight lieutenant in the Reserve, he won a medal for bravery. Somewhat awkwardly, given what happened soon after, that medal was awarded by the Germans. Arne had come to the rescue of German sailors whose ship had struck a mine. A life was a life, and it was Arne’s duty