The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [28]
The following Saturday, all four men travelled to Odense, carrying a rather conspicuous amount of sackcloth, and slipped into the hangar as darkness fell. They used the sackcloth to seal the cracks in the walls, and when they were sure no tell-tale light could escape, they switched on their torches to begin work in earnest.
By dawn, they had cleaned the carburettor, given the magneto the all-clear, examined the wiring and changed the oil. However, they still couldn’t start the engine—the only sure way to discover if all was well—because the sound would be heard far and wide. At least there seemed to be nothing wrong with the compression when they turned the propeller by hand, so Lindballe and Wichmann cheerfully gave the engine a clean bill of health. Whether they would have been so confident if they were destined to fly across the North Sea in the Moth is open to question.
When the carbon steel bolts were finally ready, Tommy and Kjeld began the painstaking process of reassembling the plane. Tommy admitted to his friend that a large amount of guesswork would be involved in this process. They attached the wings to the fuselage in the folding position, but as they completed this delicate task it was impossible to be sure that they had stayed faithful to the original angles and elevations. Any miscalculation, even by a few degrees, and the Moth would nosedive or flip in the slightest turbulence.
Every night for a month Tommy and Kjeld made the best of their limited materials to cobble together their fragile dream. They relied upon lashings of copper wire to fasten the ill-fitting bolts, and hoped the pressures of flight would not tear apart these makeshift bindings. The pilots regularly turned the propeller in a bid to ensure that the oil would flow freely when it mattered.
The last piece of the jigsaw was the tail fin, which still lay in a box in Poul Andersen’s workshop. Sneum followed the farmer’s instructions to the letter. ‘To keep Andersen out of it I had to break the padlock so that the Danish police and the Germans could see there was evidence of a break-in,’ he remembered. Tommy took the vital component and crept back to the barn before anyone noticed.
With the tail finally attached, the plane at least looked as though it might be capable of flight. By now, the petrol cans were ready at the Copenhagen workshops too, so the pilots began to transfer them across the country to Odense in small paper parcels. There were four zinc cans, each with a capacity of two gallons, and twelve smaller tins that could hold about one and a half gallons apiece. Once they were all safely stockpiled in the hangar, the fuel was transferred from the huge drums into the more manageable containers. Tommy and Kjeld then ensured that the fuel tank in the plane itself was full to the brim, and prepared to put the finishing touches to their plan.
But the long midsummer days had already brought fresh complications. The turnip-pickers seemed to use every last minute of light for their toil now; and one man in particular tested the pilots’ patience. Perhaps he was keen to impress the boss, or maybe he just had extra mouths to feed, but he seemed obsessed with picking as many turnips as was humanly possible. And his chosen field was the one nearest to the hangar. Often he would work a seventeen-hour day, from 5.00 a.m. to 10.00 p.m. The harder he worked, the less time the pilots had to prepare their plane. Nevertheless, they seized every opportunity to finish their job. And halfway through June they knew