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Tommy celebrated VE Day, 8 May, in London with Lars and his old girlfriend Rosy:

They had grounded us in case we got drunk and crashed the planes. We took a tube to Green Park and spivs were selling flags for pounds. They must have made a fortune. We weren’t allowed to pay for any drinks because of our uniforms and it was amazing I was still standing by the end of the night. I went back to Rosy’s for a while—to change my shirt, you understand—and then we came out again because the party was still going.

Having tried and failed to arrange for Sneum to lead his squadron of Mosquitoes to Copenhagen as the first Allied planes into Kastrup Airport, later that summer R.V. Jones gave him a familiar job—taking photos of German radar installations. It wasn’t quite the climax to his war that Tommy had foreseen: ‘I had volunteered for a squadron going to the Far East but the bloody Japs gave up,’ he pointed out. ‘At the time, people thought it was a bloody good idea to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but later many people thought differently.’

The atomic potential that so few had dared to imagine back in 1941, when Emmy Valentin and Sneum had debated the meaning of a German officer’s careless boast, had finally been realized in August 1945. Not even Niels Bohr, the father of theoretical nuclear physics, had believed that the atom bomb would actually be made and used in anger.

With Tommy’s active service over, there was a sense of coming full circle when he was given a letter of authorization from R.V. Jones in September 1945. It read: ‘Sneum has been loaned to us to assist in the task of photographing a number of radar sites. The photographs are required for the official history of the battle against the German night-fighter force. Sneum is particularly qualified for this work as he distinguished himself doing similar work for us during the German occupation.’

Inevitably, Fanoe was one of those sites. The British had never totally destroyed the Freya installation, though simply knowing it was there and how it worked had saved the lives of countless Allied pilots. The island’s biggest hero arrived unannounced, and took the opportunity to surprise his parents. ‘I crept into the house while they were sleeping and woke them up. They hadn’t seen me for years and there were tears of joy all round,’ Tommy remembered.

The reunion with Else and Marianne was less happy: ‘Marianne didn’t know I was her daddy because Else didn’t want that. Else was playing the piano in a bar in Copenhagen. She had a new boyfriend and a new life. She was scared Marianne would get attached to me. I didn’t feel I knew either of them any more. Although, unfortunately for Marianne, I could see she looked a bit like me.’

Kjeld Pedersen, Tommy’s co-pilot in the Hornet Moth, also survived the war. After his wild weekend on the town with Tommy and Rosy, he returned to North Africa and continued to risk his life there until 28 January 1944. By March, he was back in England with 234 Squadron, then based at RAF Cottishall, Norfolk. In April, he was posted to 1 Squadron and began to fly Spitfires. He advanced across Europe with the squadron in the last year of the war, emerging unscathed. ‘Oh yes, and he shagged Else after the war,’ revealed Sneum casually. ‘He also became a very good pilot in the end.’

The relationship with Else seemed more surprising. ‘Yes,’ repeated Tommy. ‘Kjeld and Else got together for a while. My best friend and my ex-wife! Can you imagine? She certainly had her revenge for the way I treated her. But you know, it’s funny, I didn’t mind about Else and Kjeld. I probably deserved it. And besides, he asked my permission first!’

Furthermore, Else had been true to Sneum when it mattered, when his survival had depended on her ability to resist the pressure of the Danish police. And in truth, after their epic Hornet Moth flight together, Kjeld meant much more to Tommy than his wife did.

‘Kjeld and I remained friends for life,’ Tommy said proudly. ‘He became quite a big noise in the Danish RAF, a lieutenant colonel, but we