The Hornet's Sting (51 page)

‘I’ll see you this evening at seven,’ Sneum promised confidently.

Tommy explained later:

Now, at last, Tommy felt he had heard the truth; not that it made him feel any more diplomatic than usual. And the way that Gyth was sweating suggested that he still believed he was going to die.

In May 1944 Tommy decided to use his leave to go to London again, though he was seeking fun rather than revenge over the Princes or SOE. He strolled through the West End on the lookout for pretty girls, but instead bumped into a distinguished-looking Norwegian gentleman whose face he recognized instantly. It was Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, who in his younger days had been a polar explorer. Now aged fifty-four, he was Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Norwegian Air Force. A fine pilot, Riiser-Larsen was also a controversial leader who loved to do things his way, even if his methods antagonized those around him. No wonder he had already taken a shine to young Tommy Sneum, who must have seemed like a chip off the same Scandinavian block.

Tommy recalled:

Riiser-Larsen stared at Sneum in mock-disbelief, and said: ‘What the hell are you doing in that uniform?’

‘They wouldn’t allow me to fly,’ Tommy explained, ‘so I joined the navy.’

The Norwegian invited Tommy to a French restaurant he knew, so that he could hear all about it. ‘I told him: “I’ve had some trouble with SOE and SIS. They’re keeping me out.”’

When Sneum had finished his story, Riiser-Larsen sat for a moment in silence. Then he uttered seven matter-of-fact words: ‘You had better come over to us.’ Before the tears in his eyes could embarrass him any further, Sneum was given the confirmation he craved. ‘It’ll be no bother. I’m going to see to it that you fly again.’

Some busy and egotistical men might make a casual promise over a merry lunch and then forget all about it. Tommy knew that he would soon find out if Riiser-Larsen was such a person, or if his own, long-cherished dream was about to come true at last.

‘Eight days later I joined the Royal Norwegian Air Force,’ said Sneum decades later, his delight clearly eternal.

He did so by presenting himself at Kingston House in west London, which acted as the Free Norwegian Headquarters during the Second World War. Saying he was applying for transfer from the Royal Navy, he simply mentioned the name of the top man, as instructed. As if by magic, ‘Riiser-Larsen’ opened all the necessary doors.

Tommy was back. His high-powered Norwegian acquaintance had been as good as his word. But the path from Kingston House to the cockpit of a plane wouldn’t be quite so straightforward.

‘D
ID
YOU GET ANY twin-engine experience in Denmark before the war, Sneum?’ The Royal Norwegian Air Force officer was trying to be helpful, but he wasn’t about to arrange for a Dane to be trained from scratch. Not when he would have to handle the speed of a Mosquito at the end of his refresher course.

‘I have three hundred hours of twin-engine flying time,’ Tommy said boldly.

He chuckled as he remembered his outrageous boast. ‘I had never even sat in one,’ he admitted.

But the bluff won him a place at an operational training unit (OTU) for twin-engine pilots in Oxfordshire. The problem was that Sneum knew he would have to come clean to somebody sooner or later, otherwise he would risk killing himself behind the controls.

‘Once we were at the OTU, I identified a colleague who looked trustworthy and took him aside. “I’ve never been in a Mosquito or any other twin-engine plane, so you’d better show me,” I said.’

The other pilot could have reported him there and then. Tommy might have been back in the British Navy before he could blink. Instead, he was introduced to one of the Second World War’s finest aircraft.

To understand the quality of the Mosquito you only had to go back to January 1943, and listen to an old acquaintance of Tommy— the Luftwaffe chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering. An ex-pilot himself, Goering knew that the Mosquito, made of wood and built like an aerodynamic work of art, had no equal. She flew faster than a Spitfire, due to her beautifully tapered wings and 1250-horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, and was ahead of her time in terms of raw power. Goering had said: ‘It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito—I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again.’

Tommy knew what it was like to feel envy. He had been jealous of the RAF pilots who had flown against the odds to do battle with the Luftwaffe, while he was grounded by his own superiors. And he had been envious of the German pilots who had patrolled his own Danish skies during the occupation. True, Tommy had stolen six hours of death-defying glory in a Hornet Moth, but that wasn’t much for a pilot-warrior to live on during four years of conflict in the skies above him.

Now he wanted some of that speed Goering had coveted, and he was prepared to risk his life again to get it. In his own mind, the thrill that awaited him justified everything. Even the early versions of the Mosquito were the fastest operational planes of their day, darting through the air at 611 k.p.h. That made the ‘Wooden Wonder’ 30 k.p.h. quicker than a Battle of Britain Spitfire and 80 k.p.h. faster than the Hawker Hurricane. Later Mosquitoes flew at 668 k.p.h. with an 1800-kilo bomb-load. Tommy’s Hornet Moth had become paralysed by the cold in midsummer at an altitude of 1500 meters, and its range was less than 600 kilometers. The Mosquito had a ceiling of 13,500 meters, and a range of 2900 kilometers. Even Sneum wondered whether his rusty skills would be enough to handle this modern miracle of aviation.

He knew full well why he had been asked about his previous twin-engine experience: ‘They were very, very particular about who they let into the Mosquito force. The Mosquito, I knew, was a difficult plane to fly because of the high speed through the air and the high landing speed, too.’

The colleague Tommy had chosen as his confessor must have known he was taking a chance by aiding the Dane’s deception. But they climbed into the two-seater cockpit of a Mosquito together, and the more experienced man set about trying to show the novice how he might fool the instructor into believing he knew what he was doing. Nevertheless, when the time came to take off for real with his instructor, Sneum was sure the expert would realize the truth.

‘You’re a bit rusty, aren’t you?’ said the older man quickly. ‘But you’re doing OK.’

Tommy remained receptive to the demands of both plane and instructor, and his skills came rushing back to him. Adrenalin coursed through his veins, just as it had the very first time he had flown as a teenager. He was soon at one with the machine. The pilot within had clearly never left him.

‘I found that flying was fundamentally the same, no matter how many engines you have,’ he remembered with a smile.

All too soon, though, he faced the ultimate challenge of his first high-speed landing. His entire being was focused on getting it right. The tarmac rushed past as he met it, and the kiss was smooth. ‘I got lucky,’ he admitted later. ‘I was due to do two or three landings, but the first one went so well that when we came to a halt the instructor wrote on his pad: “Above average to excellent.” Then he told me: “OK, all yours, just take a navigator with you.⠝’

To all intents and purposes, Tommy had just been given the green light to fly solo. ‘I enjoyed that feeling so much when I went up again,’ he recalled. ‘And the navigator had no idea that I had never been in Mosquitoes before. He seemed to think I was an experienced twin-engine pilot.’

Four years of frustration were blown away in the wind as the Mossie scythed through the sky under Sneum’s instinctive guidance. The power of the plane and majesty of life among the summer clouds inspired him.

‘I can’t put into words what it felt like,’ he said apologetically, ‘except to say that it was like coming home.’

Tommy Sneum won a place in a Norwegian squadron within the wider structure of Coastal Command, essentially defending Britain from German attack. This reflected a compromise Riiser-Larsen had reached with the British, who were keen to avoid the risk of Tommy being shot down over enemy airspace, in case he gave away all their secrets. Ironically, he was often stationed at Leuchars in Scotland, where he had been apprehended as a perceived threat to national security only two years earlier.

‘We’d sometimes fly over the sea towards Norway in our Mosquitoes, and find the odd U-boat to attack. But skirmishes were very limited because by the time we got so far it was almost time to turn around and come back.’

On one occasion, however, while stationed in Wales, Tommy was sent on what he described as a ‘training reconnaissance flight’, though his Mosquito was armed with live ammunition.