The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [16]
Sneum was beaten to the British Legation in Stockholm by a young man he knew only vaguely, but one whose arrival would have serious repercussions for his war. Ronald Turnbull was a charming young Scot who was busily establishing a field headquarters for the Special Operations Executive’s Danish Section in the Swedish capital. The SOE, created with the personal approval of Winston Churchill, was tasked with setting Nazi-occupied Europe ablaze with the fires of resistance. Anyone who had known Turnbull just five years earlier would have been surprised by his appointment. As a Cambridge University student in the 1930s, he had sent fan mail to Hitler, declaring himself to be a keen supporter of all things German. ‘I wrote to Hitler and I’ve got a letter from him somewhere,’ he said later. ‘In the early days I thought Hitler was a great man, which turned out not to be the case. I was vice-president of the Anglo-German Association at Cambridge. We wanted to get closer to the Germans, particularly their youth.’
Before long the scales fell from Turnbull’s eyes and his opinion of what was happening in Germany changed. When he left university he stood as a Liberal candidate for Bethnal Green and then worked as a journalist on the London Evening Standard. He was under no illusions about Hitler’s intentions by the time Neville Chamberlain returned from a meeting with the Fuhrer in September 1938. The Prime Minister claimed triumphantly that he had secured ‘peace in our time’ for Britain. Turnbull knew the truth: ‘I felt sick when Chamberlain waved that white paper,’ he said. ‘I knew what was coming.’
But even the perceptive Ronnie, who by 1940 was a press attaché at the British Legation in Copenhagen, was taken aback when the Germans invaded Denmark on 9 April. He was celebrating his engagement to Maria Thereza do Rio Branco, daughter of the Brazilian Ambassador, when the Nazis rolled in. He escaped thanks to his diplomatic immunity, but some of the British journalists with whom he had liaised in the Danish capital were trapped.
Though Ronnie didn’t exactly cover himself in glory during those frightening, chaotic days, his affinity with Denmark was remembered in Britain’s corridors of power, and he had also broadcast anti-German propaganda to Denmark from the BBC in London. Thereza made her way to England soon after her husband had arrived, and they had been married for two months when SOE came calling in July. Turnbull accepted the organization’s offer enthusiastically, but then realized that just to reach his new office would present a serious challenge.
Due to the extreme dangers of travelling from Britain to Sweden by air in the winter of 1940-1, Turnbull was sent on an extraordinary, roundabout route to Stockholm. Ronnie and Thereza, who was by now pregnant, were accompanied by his secretary, Pamela Tower. They sailed to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, then went north, reaching Istanbul before the Turnbulls’ son Michael was born. As soon as mother and baby were strong enough to continue, they headed overland to Moscow, via Tiflis, Baku and Rostov. Once in the Russian capital they boarded yet another train, this time to Leningrad, and from there travelled to Finland. Eventually, in February 1941, the exhausted Turnbulls reached Stockholm by ship. They had left Liverpool more than two months earlier.
This epic journey drew only derision from Lord Haw-Haw, Hitler’s infamous propagandist William Joyce, who announced on Berlin radio: ‘The British must really be in a sad condition if they have to send a fellow from the Foreign Office halfway around the world to get to Stockholm.’
The resistance organization that the ‘fellow from the Foreign Office’ had been sent to run—SOE Denmark—would eventually become a thorn in the side of Tommy Sneum. But he couldn’t have known that as he started to make his way to the very building in which Turnbull was now based.