The Hornet's Sting Read Online Free PDF

forgive or forget that he had been forced to marry the wrong woman too young.

    With so many other women in the world, Else was always going to have a hard time holding on to her man. ‘I like all girls, they are lovely and charming,’ Tommy explained simply. However, he loved the idea of making a difference in the war even more than he loved women. So when Else found herself alone in bed again one night during the late summer of 1940, it wasn’t because of a love rival. Her husband was creeping between sand dunes and pine trees, not in and out of the bedrooms of beautiful women. He had eyes only for the mysterious installation on his native island of Fanoe.
    In the darkness, Tommy spotted the rectangular outline of one of the strange devices and heard the faint drone of a plane’s engine somewhere overhead. He thought it sounded like a German sea-plane, though he couldn’t see it. Suddenly, the entire piece of machinery ahead of him began to swivel, as if it were following the aircraft. Then something even more extraordinary happened: ‘They switched on the searchlight and the beam hit the silver-coloured Junker immediately.’ The light’s aim was so precise that Tommy knew he hadn’t witnessed a chance event. There had been no random scanning of the darkness for the origin of the sound: the searchlight had known exactly where to point. For that to have happened, the plane must have been spotted by something far more powerful and sophisticated than the naked eye or binoculars. The precision left Tommy temporarily awestruck. ‘It was that demonstration which made me certain we were dealing with some kind of early-warning system. I was convinced that they now had the capability to plot the position of a ship or plane using radio waves.’
    Sneum was well aware that this could be disastrous for the Allied war effort. Since a nearby lighthouse offered a reference point for British planes crossing the North Sea to bomb potential targets in Germany, innumerable aircraft could fall into the trap before the Allies realized what was happening. Tommy had to find a way to warn the British of the dangers that awaited their unsuspecting pilots. Fortunately, he had an ally who could help him achieve this.
    Kaj Oxlund, who was friends with both Tommy and Else, had already begun to smuggle reports on the basic logistics of the German occupation across to neutral Sweden. At thirty-five years old, he was a thickset individual with neat brown hair and a reassuring smile. Tommy was convinced he could trust him. After all, it had been Kaj, an anti-aircraft battery gunner at the time, who had warned Tommy in a phone call to Avnoe air base on April 7 that the Nazi invasion was imminent. Tommy explained: ‘We were already close friends by then, and I had often stayed with him in Copenhagen. He left me a message to call him, and when I did he told me what was going to happen. He was getting the sort of highquality information from Army Intelligence that we didn’t get in the navy. Kaj told me: “I’m sure they’re coming. We’re prepared.”’
    In reality, neither man could have done much more than die, since there had been little chance of Danish forces surviving the Nazi onslaught if they had resisted. Now all the enjoyable weekends they had spent as a foursome with Else and Kaj’s wife Tulle seemed a world away, along with the exhilarating sense of freedom both men had felt while riding powerful Frederiksborg stallions around the perimeter of Tommy’s airfield. Sneum retained fond memories of those carefree days before the war: ‘Oxlund liked shooting, riding, the country life, just as I did. He had a classy wife and we liked each other too. Else and Tulle got on well together and we spent some lovely weekends that way.’
    Between April 7 and 9 1940, however, Kaj and Tommy became resigned to the fact that they would probably never see their women again. Their grim assumption soon proved unfounded, though: while the trustworthy