The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [163]
There was no such ordeal for Ronald Turnbull, who continued to operate from the safety of Sweden while others put their lives on the line across the Oeresund in Denmark. Although that relative comfort was sometimes disturbed by the necessity of taking dangerous flights to Britain and back, those risks were hardly in the same league as Tommy’s. Even so, Ronnie received an OBE.
Sneum never received the medal he deserved, and recalled: ‘R.V. Jones told me that I must have had some enemies high up. Otherwise I would have been more highly decorated.’
In another snub, he had hoped to be promoted by Denmark’s Fleet Air Arm when he returned home for good after the war. Instead, he was told that if he wanted to rejoin, he would have to start at the lowly rank he had been given before 1940. Since others had failed to fight and been promoted in his absence, Tommy was understandably disgusted and walked away.
R.V. Jones wrote later:
It might be thought that after all this Sneum would have become the national hero that he deserved to be. But he found himself coldshouldered by those in control of Denmark at the end of the war, perhaps for this very reason. Some of them had been equivocal so long as Germany was in the ascendant, and their patriotic record would bear no comparison with that of Sneum, who had committed himself to resistance as soon as the Germans invaded Denmark. It would have endangered their positions if Sneum came back, and they were able to make play of his imprisonment in Brixton; he ultimately left Denmark to live in Switzerland. If they survive, the men who go first are rarely popular with those who wait for the wind to blow.
It was actually some time before Tommy moved to Switzerland. He remained in the Royal Norwegian Air Force until 1947 after being slighted by the Danish equivalent. Then he returned to England, where he dabbled in sales, public relations and advertising, while getting his adrenalin fix by taking courses in fire-fighting and rescue. His love for flying would never die, and later he delivered planes to their base airports for British and Scandinavian aircraft manufacturers. Soon he was a different kind of agent—for the British aircraft industry and various Danish firms—but the adrenalin rush was missing. So he became managing director of an air-charter and air-ambulance company in Denmark, often demonstrating his own death-defying piloting skills to help save the lives of others.
There were more thrills when he spent ten months in Turkey during 1951 as a construction supervisor and then test pilot for a Turkish state aircraft factory in Ankara, before returning to Denmark. There, he hit the headlines for the wrong reasons when, in 1955, Else had him thrown into jail in a dispute over maintenance payments for Marianne. Tommy, who had divorced his wife years earlier, took his punishment on the chin and came out smiling for the cameras on the day of his release.
‘Everybody put me in prison,’ he joked. ‘The Swedes, the British, even the Danes. But each time I came out, I grew more important.’
He celebrated his freedom by moving to the city he called ‘the most beautiful in the world’, Rome, and dividing his time between the capital and another Italian paradise, Lake Como. ‘I had met my second wife, Aida, who was simply lovely. We spent two very happy years of marriage moving between Rome and Como, where her father had a big business.’ There is a marvellous photograph of the couple in an Italian restaurant (see picture section, p. 3), looking as happy as any lovers ever have, living la dolce vita. Behind the scenes, Sneum was working on the idea of an international air-ambulance service in cooperation with the Red Cross and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Sadly for Tommy and Aida, the magic of their romance didn’t last, although Sneum was soon immersed in his next professional challenge.
Stig Jensen, the Danish resistance hero, had offered Tommy a position in