The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [12]
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