The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [159]
Tommy was back. His high-powered Norwegian acquaintance had been as good as his word. But the path from Kingston House to the cockpit of a plane wouldn’t be quite so straightforward.
Chapter 49
COMING HOME
‘DID YOU GET ANY twin-engine experience in Denmark before the war, Sneum?’ The Royal Norwegian Air Force officer was trying to be helpful, but he wasn’t about to arrange for a Dane to be trained from scratch. Not when he would have to handle the speed of a Mosquito at the end of his refresher course.
‘I have three hundred hours of twin-engine flying time,’ Tommy said boldly.
He chuckled as he remembered his outrageous boast. ‘I had never even sat in one,’ he admitted.
But the bluff won him a place at an operational training unit (OTU) for twin-engine pilots in Oxfordshire. The problem was that Sneum knew he would have to come clean to somebody sooner or later, otherwise he would risk killing himself behind the controls.
‘Once we were at the OTU, I identified a colleague who looked trustworthy and took him aside. “I’ve never been in a Mosquito or any other twin-engine plane, so you’d better show me,” I said.’
The other pilot could have reported him there and then. Tommy might have been back in the British Navy before he could blink. Instead, he was introduced to one of the Second World War’s finest aircraft.
To understand the quality of the Mosquito you only had to go back to January 1943, and listen to an old acquaintance of Tommy— the Luftwaffe chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. An ex-pilot himself, Goering knew that the Mosquito, made of wood and built like an aerodynamic work of art, had no equal. She flew faster than a Spitfire, due to her beautifully tapered wings and 1250-horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, and was ahead of her time in terms of raw power. Goering had said: ‘It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito—I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again.’
Tommy knew what it was like to feel envy. He had been jealous of the RAF pilots who had flown against the odds to do battle with the Luftwaffe, while he was grounded by his own superiors. And he had been envious of the German pilots who had patrolled his own Danish skies during the occupation. True, Tommy had stolen six hours of death-defying glory in a Hornet Moth, but that wasn’t much for a pilot-warrior to live on during four years of conflict in the skies above him.
Now he wanted some of that speed Goering had coveted, and he was prepared to risk his life again to get it. In his own mind, the thrill that awaited him justified everything. Even the early versions of the Mosquito were the fastest operational planes of their day, darting through the air at 611 k.p.h. That made the ‘Wooden Wonder’ 30 k.p.h. quicker than a Battle of Britain Spitfire and 80 k.p.h. faster than the Hawker Hurricane. Later Mosquitoes flew at 668 k.p.h. with an 1800-kilo bomb-load. Tommy’s Hornet Moth had become paralysed by the cold in midsummer at an altitude of 1500 meters, and its range was less than 600 kilometers. The Mosquito had a ceiling of 13,500 meters, and a range of 2900 kilometers. Even Sneum wondered whether his rusty skills would be enough to handle this modern miracle of aviation.
He knew full well why he had been asked about his previous twin-engine experience: ‘They were very, very particular about who they let into the Mosquito force. The Mosquito, I knew, was a difficult plane to fly because of the high speed through the air and the high landing speed, too.’
The colleague Tommy had chosen as his confessor must have known he was taking a chance by aiding the Dane’s deception. But they climbed into the two-seater