The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [36]
Chapter 10
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
TOMMY CHECKED THE accuracy of the plane’s compass against the railway track, which he knew ran directly from east to west. Something was wrong; the instrument was a full thirty degrees wide of the mark. Sneum checked again but the compass was still thirty degrees out. At least there was no variation in its lack of accuracy. Therefore, if he compensated by thirty degrees each time, Tommy was confident he could still plot their course effectively. Unfortunately, however, their problems weren’t confined to the compass.
‘How is she flying, Sneum?’ Pedersen had to shout to make himself heard above the racket of the engine. The answer he received wasn’t encouraging.
‘The left wing feels twice as heavy as the right, everything is out of alignment, the nose pulls down and she seems to have a life of her own.’
Kjeld looked even more afraid than before. ‘Christ, can we make it?’
‘Of course we’ll make it.’
They flew across the island of Fyn and came out over the Lille Belt Channel near the town of Assens. There, Pedersen looked down on the starboard side and spotted the interrupted flash of a light. The Germans were sending up a message in Morse code. ‘Identify yourselves,’ it read.
The Danish duo looked at each other and decided to ignore it. Seconds later, over Bogoe, a tiny island between Fyn and Jutland, they looked down again and saw a light moving on a straight course across the water. It was a worrying sight for the pilots. With their request ignored, it seemed the Germans had sent up one of their naval aircraft to investigate.
Sneum and Pedersen thrust their white flag back up through the pierced cockpit roof, but otherwise they felt helpless. The Hornet Moth lacked the power to outrun the enemy. All they could do was train their eyes on the ominous light below, and await their fate. Gradually, however, the light grew fainter, until finally it disappeared. For a while, Tommy and Kjeld were ecstatic.
They had reached an altitude of 1750 meters by the time they began to cross Jutland. Above the town of Haderslev they ran into thick cloud. Now Sneum relied on his Reid and Sigriet blind-flying instruments—compass, altimeter, speed dial and fuel gauge—as he maintained 1900-2000 rotations per minute and checked the oil pressure. It was time now to try to confuse Hitler’s forces with a new tactic. A plane heading due west across Denmark in the direction of the North Sea and England would automatically arouse suspicion. The Germans would have it firmly tracked on radar at the Fanoe installation, and no one knew better than Sneum how devastating that new technology could be. But perhaps there was a way to throw them off the scent.
Tommy explained: ‘We started to zigzag to prevent the radar from knowing which direction we were going. That’s why they thought it was a German aircraft. How the hell could it be anything but a friendly aircraft, flying like that?’ By feigning this aimlessness, Tommy hoped to look like a German pilot on a drunken jaunt, or a raw trainee being given his first taste of night instruction. It would still look suspicious, but even if the Nazis thought some defiant Dane was breaking the flight ban, they would read no specific intent into his seemingly random course, and might assume they were witnessing nothing more than a foolhardy protest against the occupation. As Tommy weaved one way then the other, their overall westbound course might have appeared to be no more than a casual coincidence. There was nothing casual about the atmosphere inside the cockpit, though. Cloud condensation and the freezing night air seeped through the hole in the cockpit roof. Then Pedersen became nauseous, his sickness probably aggravated by all the twisting and turning. Soon he vomited.