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He had to control a mounting sense of terror if he was going to control the plane without power. It didn’t help that they couldn’t even see the sea, because thick cloud was obscuring their view of what lay below them. Imagination ran riot as they braced themselves; family and friends flashed through their minds in snapshots. And all the time there lurked the grim realization that they had lost everything for the sake of a foolhardy flight they hadn’t needed to make.

The only faint hope now was to survive a crash-landing. But the North Sea was a deadly adversary; many others would try to cross this stretch of water during the war and fail. The currents and storms usually finished off anyone unlucky enough to fall into the sea unnoticed. Tommy also knew that once they hit the waves hypothermia would very soon take hold. Even so, he was determined to give them the best chance he could, however slim.

‘Find the life jackets,’ he screamed.

If they did manage to survive the crash-landing, they could maybe use the axe to hack off a wing and stay afloat on it long enough for a ship or another aircraft to see them.

Kjeld searched the cockpit behind him for the life jackets. ‘I can’t find them,’ he yelled.

Then they looked at each other and remembered. The life jackets were still in the turnip field, thrown off as they sweated and chopped at the frame of the barn door.

‘That wasn’t a nice moment, when we realized,’ recalled Tommy later. ‘We were both positive it spelled the end. We said goodbye and thanked each other for our friendship, which had stood the test of time, especially since the German invasion. The flight had been the toughest test of that friendship, because it is one thing to live together as pals, and another to die together.’

Although it was unlikely they would survive, Tommy tried to judge how close they were to the waves. The altimeter, the instrument that should have done that for him, simply couldn’t be trusted. At the moment, it read precisely one hundred meters. Tommy described the dilemma he faced:

I had to put on some power in order to avoid tipping over when it came to landing on the water. I thought, How can I fly blind in cloud at stalling speed so the plane hits the sea in a way that we can get out? I was frightened, but never so frightened that I didn’t know what we had to do. So I pushed the throttle right forward to try to gain a few more revolutions before stalling. Then the most wonderful thing happened. The engine started up again. But it had another couple of failures straight after that.

Hovering between life and death, Tommy knew he had to act quickly to seize this chance:

It puffed and blew a little to start with, but soon got back to its old, regular hum. There was no oil pressure, or at least the instruments showed zero. But I got the plane to climb a little, and the engine was still purring away, so I climbed a little more. The plane suddenly seemed light as a feather and rose like an angel to five hundred meters. From what I was told afterwards, ice had formed and then melted in the carburettor.

That ice had melted as the plane had dropped into warmer temperatures. ‘I could hear solid lumps of things the size of eggs coming loose and clanking against the exhaust,’ Tommy recalled. ‘That must have been chunks of ice.’

Though Tommy hadn’t realized precisely what was going on at the time, he did know that the Moth hadn’t liked the higher altitudes, so he wasn’t going to take her back up there again.

There wasn’t much time for relief, because by now the fuel was running out. Sooner rather than later, the cans in the back of the cockpit, along with the funnel and hose, were going to have to come into play. Which meant Sneum would need to perform the craziest stunt of all in order to keep them airborne. Stepping out onto a wing at a speed of one hundred and twenty knots wasn’t in any pilot’s manual. But someone was going to have to go out there, unscrew the fuel cap and get the hose into it. Tommy had already promised Kjeld that