The Hornet's Sting_ The Amazing Untold Story of World War II Spy Thomas Sneum - Mark Ryan [62]
Tommy had been a hard individual ever since he was first encouraged to stick up for himself at the age of five. He had attended the school in Nordby where his father was headmaster. As if this wasn’t tricky enough for Tommy socially, he began his education at least a year earlier than the other local boys in his class. At six or seven, his classmates were much bigger, and ready to pick on him because of his family name. Tommy admitted: ‘At first I tried to run, and fortunately I was usually fast enough to get away. But I knew that sooner or later I would have to make a stand.’ Since his father was essentially a pacifist, it was Sneum’s grandfather, a gnarled old sailor called Thomas Sonnichsen Hansen, who helped him find the courage to fight the bullies. The advice was simple: ‘Never give in to anyone,’ Sonnichsen Hansen warned little Tommy. ‘Ever.’
Tommy, who adored his grandfather, wanted to please him, but the next time he was bullied he lost his nerve and ran away again. He recalled: ‘I felt so ashamed that I had let my grandfather down, because I loved him very much. So I found out where this bully played after school, and then I went there, attacked him with a stick and beat him almost to a pulp.’
From those crude beginnings, he had learned other ways to hurt people and defend himself, and built a fearsome reputation for someone of his modest build. He had boxed in the Danish Navy and fought like a tiger when pushed, as Kjeld Pedersen could testify. So Tommy thought he knew enough to get the better of most adversaries already, but the SIS hand-to-hand combat course gave his self-defense a new dimension. He was familiar with some of the throws and moves from his naval training, including the correct hold and procedure for snapping a man’s neck. But the MI6 instructors opened up a new world of pressure points and seemingly effortless moves which could incapacitate or kill an opponent.
Once, when Tommy had imbibed perhaps a little too much schnapps, he told the author: ‘There is a gap between the cranium and the jawbone, behind each ear lobe. I was taught how to exploit those pressure points with a firm push of the thumbs. I’ll show you if you like.’ It was the second time he had offered to kill me, and for the second time I politely declined. Anyone who met Thomas Sneum knew immediately that he was not a man to be crossed. He had possessed a ruthless streak since childhood, for instance learning at the age of ten a particularly shocking way to kill ducks: ‘You can wring a duck’s neck, but it takes quite a lot of energy, and isn’t a very efficient way to kill. A quick bite into the duck’s skull did the job with the minimum of fuss. With practice, you can crush the skull with your teeth without getting anything in your mouth at all.’
The education Tommy received on the MI6 course seemed to be no more than an extension of the principles of killing he had learned as a boy: namely, attack the weak point with maximum force and a minimum exertion of energy. Armed with his new arsenal of lethal British tips, he knew would be able to dispatch any adversary quickly and silently back in Denmark.
Even so, Sneum’s chances of survival as a spy in Nazi-occupied Europe would depend heavily on the calibre of the man chosen to go with him. Given that MI6 had told Tommy there wasn’t enough time to get his Morse code fully up to speed, it took them what seemed like an age to come up with the ‘expert’ who was supposed to send his messages for him. In his military report of his summer in England, Sneum wrote: ‘It looked as though it was even harder than they had thought