Free The Hornet's Sting by Mark Ryan Page A

Hambro probably didn’t realise it had taken me so many months to reach Stockholm, and that I had only been there since February. Secondly, Hambro probably didn’t understand the situation in Denmark as well as I did. It was all very well blowing up trains and taking risks, but it was much better to forge good links with the professionals in Danish Intelligence and see what we could achieve.
     
    While there was something to be said for gaining valuable intelligence through passive observation, Turnbull was thoroughly outclassed in his favored art by a fellow Brit who was working out of the very same building. Ironically, it was his good friend Captain Henry Denham, the Naval Attaché with whom Turnbull had escaped from Copenhagen the previous year, who got wind of a vital piece of information for the Allies. And the news was every bit as important as the radar intelligence Denham hoped to gather with the help of Tommy Sneum.
    On 19 May, the Bismarck , Hitler’s greatest warship, had suddenly made a break from the port of Gotenhafen (now Gdynia, in Poland) for the Atlantic, where Allied convoys would be at her mercy. To reach the ocean she had first to sail through Scandinavian waters, and hope that details of her movements didn’t reach the Allies in time to cause her any trouble. Denham’s extensive contacts in the Swedish Navy meant that he was the officer who gave London the first news of the Bismarck ’s breakout. The ship was chased, crippled and eventually sunk on 27 May, at enormous human cost on both sides. For every Allied life lost, however, many more were saved by the intelligence Denham had supplied.
    Danish Intelligence, an organization in which Turnbull was soon to place all his faith, had remained strangely silent on the Bismarck ’s movements. Later, its senior officers tried to excuse their oversight with the fatuous claim that their main lookout, a lighthouse keeper, had been ill on the day the mighty ship had sailed past.
    Given this failure, one might have thought that Danish Intelligence, who often seemed as close to the Germans as they were to the Allies, might have come under the microscope. If their balancing act troubled anyone in London, however, it didn’t seem to bother Turnbull, as he began to explore ways to strengthen links with the men he felt mattered most in Copenhagen.

    Over in Denmark, Tommy Sneum and Kjeld Pedersen were in more of a hurry than Turnbull on the matter of delivering intelligence. Instinctively, Tommy knew the value of the secrets he had already uncovered, and he convinced his deeply sceptical colleague that a dismantled Hornet Moth was the answer to their prayers. Now they just needed to find a way to reach the hangar unnoticed, so that they could begin to patch up the machine. They took a train to Odense one Saturday afternoon, bought a gigantic parcel of sandwiches and packed them into a suitcase, along with numerous bottles of beer. In a restaurant that evening, they planned the last leg of the journey to Elseminde like a military operation.
    In order to avoid detection, they took an Odense tram all the way to its terminus on the city’s outskirts and walked the last three kilometers across country towards the farm. Once in the vicinity, they waited for the cover of twilight. At 8.45 p.m., they finally managed to cross the turnip fields unnoticed and slip into the hangar. But the murky half-light that had helped them on the outside was a hindrance inside the converted barn. To use a torch or even strike a match risked unwelcome attention from German patrols, since the light might be spotted through the cracks in the hangar walls. They decided to sleep until sunrise, which would allow a more thorough inspection of the plane. Each man took a wing out of its felt wrapping and used the cover as a sleeping bag. They passed a restless, nervous night, but when dawn broke at 4.00 a.m. they were relieved to be able to begin their assessment of the aircraft.
    ‘The wings