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personally. He had met Goering and even acted as a translator for him a couple of years earlier, when Hitler’s trusted ally had visited Avnoe, the Danish air base where Sneum was stationed. Later in life, Tommy observed: ‘Goering looked like a fat, stupid bastard—flabby. But he had already proved himself to be a man—one of the best fighter pilots in the First World War. He had downed a lot of Allied planes in that war, and I admired him at the time. Personally, I don’t think he was ever a Nazi at heart. By the time we finished touring the air base, he was calling me by my name, addressing me as “Flight Lieutenant Sneum.”’

It hadn’t been easy to resist the temptation to fly again, particularly after an officer on Goering’s staff had taken Tommy on a tour of airfields on both sides of the border between Denmark and Germany. The German’s persuasive, probing manner led Tommy to believe he might be an intelligence officer. Nevertheless, he was impressed by the respect he was shown, something entirely absent in the treatment he had recently suffered at the hands of his own military superiors. (Danish Fleet Air Arm had even threatened to arrest him after he had distributed naval food supplies among local households without permission in the confused hours immediately after the invasion. But Sneum hadn’t seen any point in leaving those supplies where they were, just waiting for the Germans to seize them, and he didn’t see why he should continue to take orders from men he now regarded as cowards.)

As he was courted by the invaders, Tommy reflected bitterly that at least the Germans were true fighters, like himself. To be among fellow warriors in the skies above Europe would be appealing. From another perspective, he also considered that signing up with the Luftwaffe would give him the opportunity to learn a great deal about the German war machine, valuable intelligence that could be passed on to the Allies. Looking back, Tommy reasoned:

I wanted to know as much as possible about the way the Germans built people up, so I thought seriously about accepting Goering’s invitation. But then I got afraid. Even at that point I saw my future in England. Who would have believed that my intentions were genuine? If I had gone to London and said: ‘I’ve just spent six months in the German Air Force and now I want to join you,’ who would have welcomed me? No one. They would just have thought I was a bloody spy. So I sent a nice reply to Goering, thanking him for his offer, but explaining that I didn’t think I could accept.

However, the fear of being a bystander throughout the war was strong in these emotive times. Still hungry for action of some kind, Sneum fed his natural addiction to danger by edging ever closer to the new Fanoe installation, and in particular the strange rectangular shapes by the sea, with their mesh frames and mysterious rods protruding like antennae. The mystery behind their precise function had begun to consume him, with his curiosity only sharpened by an equal determination among the Germans to protect their secrets. For months, local traffic had been diverted so that no islanders could come close to the new giants on their doorstep.

But Tommy knew this island better than the back of his hand. He was also intelligent—‘My IQ is 164,’ he later claimed. And, crucially, he had sufficient imagination to grasp the enormous military potential of scientific innovation. As he edged ever closer to the facility, he could see that each giant structure was constructed around a searchlight. The metal grids were built on huge cubic bases, with the two connected by long levers which offered horizontal and vertical mobility. He suspected he was looking at some kind of early-warning system, and if he was right the consequences would be grave indeed. Any British bombers hoping in the future to attack the Nazis at Esbjerg, or pass unnoticed over this strategic coast on their way to targets in Germany, would be blasted out of the sky.

But before he could contact the British to sound the alarm, Tommy felt that he needed to be sure of his