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He had never mentioned any possible problem with the door: he thought the plane would just go through like the Klemm had. It wouldn’t. We couldn’t get it out. The plane jammed in the doorway.’

It’s easy to imagine the horror the men must have felt, after all their hard work, to discover that the plane was trapped inside its makeshift hangar. Tommy and Kjeld couldn’t remove the wings from the fuselage again; there simply wasn’t enough time. A rising sense of panic threatened to overwhelm them. Sneum recalled:

We worked with axes on the sides of the hangar door, and soon had to take off our life jackets because we were sweating so much. Each barn door was composed of two halves, one designed to fold upwards and the other to fold downwards. Fortunately the framework was made of wood. Little by little, we managed to cut the plane free; and by pulling and pushing, after about fifteen minutes, we finally got it outside, though we heard a tearing sound at the last moment.

We had taken all the cloth off the front of one of the folded wings, exposing the plywood underneath, and bent it. Together we forced the wings back into position and unfolded them, slipping the bolts into place. But we discovered that we had bent the carbonsteel bolts while forcing the plane through the barn door. We just hammered at them until they were almost at one with the parts they were meant to secure, and we hoped they would hold. We had nothing with which to measure the correct inclination of the wings.

The entire scene belonged in some kind of slapstick comedy. But this was deadly serious, and the pilots’ lives were in danger like never before.

Chapter 9

TAKE-OFF

IT WAS NOW 11.30 p.m. and the situation was critical. Both men tried to stay positive. The plywood hadn’t cracked and they didn’t think the lost canvas at the front of one wing would be enough in itself to bring down the plane. Tommy and Kjeld looked up at the heavens; there was no moon, which at least offered hope that they wouldn’t be spotted immediately and blasted out of the sky by a German artillery unit. Overall, however, the weather wasn’t going to offer them the protection they desired. Sneum worried about the lack of low cloud cover. The ceiling came between fifteen hundred and seventeen hundred meters, so there would be no hiding place in the first vital minutes after take-off. It would take some time to reach the ceiling, and they didn’t know what they might face before they did.

‘Sneum, tell me straight.’ Pedersen was just three months older than Tommy, and just a little more concerned about their predicament. ‘Can we make it?’

‘Fuck off,’ replied Tommy. ‘Of course we’ll make it.’

‘Seriously,’ persisted Kjeld, looking his friend directly in the eye. ‘What are our chances?’

‘Fifty-fifty,’ answered Tommy, and watched Pedersen’s face drain a little. ‘No, sixty-forty we’ll make it,’ he added for encouragement. But his attempt at optimism was no longer convincing or infectious.

Neither pilot had flown for more than a year, not since the Nazis had invaded and grounded all Danish planes on 9 April 1940. Tommy hadn’t forgotten the roar of the German bombers over Avnoe early that morning, the surge of adrenalin as his adjutant opened sealed orders from King Christian and confirmed that Denmark’s sovereign territory was to be defended at all costs. He remembered the frantic sprint to his Hawker Nimrod fighter biplane, and the confusion when mechanics tried to block his path. He recalled the sheer frustration of being told that both the King and the Prime Minister had just announced their change of heart in a radio broadcast, and that Naval HQ in Copenhagen had confirmed the new order to offer no resistance. He had still tried to clamber into his Nimrod, and only gave up when a mechanic told him they had already put all the planes out of action. The shame of that night had never left him. Everything he had done since had been geared towards this moment, when he would beat the ban and