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By Root 430 0

or capture. At the time of the ceremony, only three of the crew were identified—Hart, Lunn and an airman known as 1438341 Sergeant Turton. Arne had assumed the name Turton in order to protect his family and fiancée from any reprisals back home. He had been selfless to the last. It was typical of a man who had successfully spied against the Germans at Kastrup Airport, survived the treacherous ice floes between Denmark and Sweden, and stayed loyal to Tommy Sneum when the British thought their agent had been ‘turned.’

His colleagues in the hundreds of remaining bombers made sure that Germany paid dearly for the Luftwaffe’s marksmanship. The devastation caused to Krefeld that night was unmatched up to that point in the war. Forty-seven percent of the city center was obliterated as a bomb-induced fire raged out of control. A total of 5,517 houses were destroyed and 72,000 people lost their homes, as the Allies sought to break both the back of German manufacturing and the collective will of the country’s people. For 1,056 citizens of Krefeld, their lives ended as city buildings collapsed and burned in the firestorm. A further 4,550 German citizens were injured in the carnage.

If the price for Hitler’s madness was disturbingly high on the ground, the price in the sky was also considerable. During the night, forty-four Allied aircraft were lost, including nine Stirlings. These were some of the highest Bomber Command casualty figures of the entire war. In the bright moonlight, once spotted and singled out for attack, poor Helvard and many others never stood a chance.

Chapter 47

THE ACCIDENT

IN LONDON, CHRISTMAS MOELLER asked Sneum into his private office and began to shuffle uncomfortably in his seat. It was obvious something was seriously wrong. Tommy waited for the older man to speak. The politician came straight to the point: ‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard, but your friend Helvard has been shot down. I’m sorry.’

Tommy recalled feeling numb. ‘I didn’t know how to feel, apart from sad, because we didn’t know if he had survived or not. Many people were shot down, survived somehow, and turned up at the end of the war.’

In Arne’s case, though, hope slowly faded. At least he had rediscovered the supreme freedom of flight that he and Tommy had first tasted as teenagers before he met his end. Not that his fiancée Vita, waiting back in Copenhagen, would have seen it that way when she heard that all her dreams had been shattered.

Sneum felt helpless, living out his life in a tiny, claustrophobic office, desperate to make any kind of impression on the war that was passing him by. But the monotony was broken temporarily in early July 1943, when SIS suddenly awarded him £2750. They didn’t call it compensation; instead, the sum was described as ‘agent’s back-pay.’ It appeared to be a sweetener, a belated attempt to buy back Sneum’s loyalty after a year’s freedom had been denied him. Perhaps they felt he would be less dangerous if they managed to make him feel that he was still on their side.

The sum was a fortune for any young man to have in his pocket. Was it some sort of trap, Sneum wondered, to induce him to behave so erratically that he had to be silenced for ever? He didn’t really care if it was. Temporarily rich in an exciting city, he was determined to spend his new-found riches in style.

On the first Friday night after he received the money, Sneum took an old girlfriend called Rosy, the manageress from the Wellington Club, to another watering hole which had become a favorite Danish haunt in the West End of London. Rosy was one of Tommy’s favorites, and there were good reasons why. He recalled: ‘She was dark-haired, not the most beautiful, but she had nice tits. She was an inch or two taller than me, but then most of them were. What made Rosy special was that she could fuck all day long, and she was the sexiest girl I had in England.’

Tommy was looking forward to a good drink and another night of passion when something suddenly distracted him in that West End pub. For there, to his amazement, he spotted Kjeld Pedersen,