ON a six-foot map of the world the kingdom of Denmark can be covered by an ordinary postage stamp. Although over a million Danes live in the Copenhagen-Frederiksberg area, practically no places exist in Denmark from which a dwelling cannot be seen. But to arm the Danish Resistance, the Special Operations Executive in Baker Street planned to parachute weapons, explosives and other equipment into the postage-stamp country. Even before Sneum’s flight, Ebbe Munck, a Copenhagen journalist, had set up a liaison office in Stockholm that would be the major link between the Danish Resistance and S.O.E. By early 1943 Munck’s friends in Denmark had reception groups ready. At first mostly North Jutland peasants, they waited on the lonely heaths, signalled the low-flying aircraft with electric torches, gathered the few tons of material that cascaded to them on twenty-foot parachutes, then spirited these things away—all before the local German occupation troops, who often could also hear the aircraft, arrived. A very dangerous business, its early history was tragic.
One of the first groups was led by Marius Fiil, a small, beak-nosed, fifty-year-old Jutland innkeeper whose entire family, and a few of their neighbours in their little village of Hvidsten, received the drops. Fiil smuggled away the material himself in his farm cart under loads of antiques bought to decorate his inn. Mindless of security, he hid the contraband in a barn just across the road from his inn, and he also allowed Danish agents parachuted by the British to stay in his house for a few days, and, although it was risky, many of these agents returned to visit him.
When peat diggers found some of the containers and parachutes in a bog near Hvidsten, the Germans located Fiil’s dropping-point, and for the next few months the innkeeper’s only Resistance work was to help the escape of Allied airmen who had crashed in Denmark. But when the British decided to resume operations near Hvidsten, Fiil suggested to the local Resistance leader, Flemming Juncker, that a site even nearer Hvidsten be used. Juncker, a landowner, thought this dangerous, but Fiil was insistent; before, he said, he had had to carry the containers too far.
But after several successful receptions, German military police arrested Marius Fiil, his two young daughters, the husband of the older girl, and Fiil’s son. Six of the neighbours who had helped Fiil were also caught, but the tenth man in the Hvidsten Group escaped. The Fiil sisters were sent to a concentration camp, and, in late June 1944, the nine men were executed. Other groups were by then active in North Jutland, on Sealand, and in other parts of Denmark, and other tragedies occurred, but the Danes still fearlessly awaited the air drops, despite frequent German ambushes.
On Sealand, the Copenhagen journalist who was one of Denmark’s first full-time Resistance men, Stig Jensen, arranged air drop receptions. In Jutland, after Juncker had to flee to England, a young customs inspector named Anton Jensen—after the war he legally adopted his cover name of ‘Toldstrup’—was chief organizer. When they were convinced of the Danish Resistance’s potential, the British were eager to make as many drops as possible, and both Jensens—not relatives—began regularly to arrange the impossible.
When, for example, the British were using eight dropping-points in Jutland but wanted the locations of forty additional possible ones, each to be eight hundred metres long and isolated from view, Toldstrup snorted, ‘There aren’t forty places like that in all Denmark!’ But a week later he sent Baker Street a list of suitable North Jutland sites. True, they were not all isolated, but all were eventually used safely—and instead of forty places, Toldstrup had suggested fifty.
Stig Jensen, once given a last-minute order to provide a reception site south of Copenhagen, realized he had no place that could be used, for his best dropping area had been raided by the Germans a few days earlier. Relying on his sense of humour and his ability to out-think the Germans, Jensen asked for the parachutage to be made on the only point he knew where the Nazis would not expect anything to be dropped. The containers were successfully received—at the exact spot where the Germans had earlier staged their raid.
Ten small villages are on the island of Samsø, south-east of Aarhus, but the total German occupation force there was only eight men. Well fed and not bothered by the islanders, these Germans were having a very pacific war. Why not, Toldstrup suggested to S.O.E., make air drops on Samsø? The containers came, and the Germans did not—or pretended they did not—notice what was happening. However, the waters around the island were mined, and getting contraband to the Jutland mainland on the Aathus-Samsø coaster was so much of a nuisance that the island’s dropping point was discontinued. Several air drops were aimed at other small Danish islands, but transport was again always a problem. Worse, the containers frequently fell into the sea and had to be retrieved in the daytime.
If German troops or local farmers appeared near the dropping-points, the reception groups would not flash their Morse code letter to the aeroplanes, and the aircraft would return to Britain. But sometimes the drops were received under strange conditions. At their very first reception, men of a new group formed by Toldstrup heard the roar of an aircraft and pointed their torch up to give the ‘Ready’ signal. They then saw the black silhouettes of the parachutes and soon began to gather up the containers. While they were still doing this, they heard another aircraft engine, and again they flashed a signal. Again more containers dropped toward them. A third aircraft flew over, and the men in the reception group again signalled. Still more containers came down.
By that time the Resistance men found they had three times as many containers as they were prepared to handle. The second two aircraft were supposed to have made their drops elsewhere. The reception group had not finished getting all the things away before dawn, and they decided to leave most of the containers piled near a tiny village and come back for them in the evening.
At dusk they found the entire village had gathered where the containers were hidden, trying to decide what these strange objects were. The Resistance men pleaded with the villagers to go away, but the people would not leave. A horse and cart were brought to take away the containers, and all the villagers trooped after it—as if it were a funeral procession. However, all of the curious peasants were loyal Danes, and the Germans never got to hear of this episode.
Stig Jensen’s men had a more harrowing experience on New Year’s Eve, 1944. After receiving a last-minute wireless instruction from England to be ready at a dropping-point, Jensen marshalled his men. The aeroplane swooped low and Jensen saw the parachutes blossom, but something went wrong and one of the containers burst open before it hit the ground, scattering its contents all over a freshly ploughed field. While some of the men gathered up the unbroken con tainers, the other men began wading around in the cold mud. Sten guns, hand grenades and ammunition were everywhere. The men did not finish their work until daybreak, and when they had taken away everything they could find, they suddenly realized that three parachutes were missing. Searching for those in the daytime would be too risky, so they decided to go to bed.
Later that morning a farmer near the dropping-point picked up his telephone. ‘I want to speak to the German commander,’ he told the operator. ‘There are several para chutes in front of my house, and I don’t like it at all.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the operator told him, ‘but the line is out of order. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.
When the man had hung up, the operator called another number, her own house, and woke up her husband, who was one of the men Stig Jensen had ordered to wade through the field to collect the material from the burst container.
Soon Jensen arrived at the farmer’s house. In a tree he saw the three missing parachutes, their containers swinging beneath them. The farmer came outside while the Resistance men were cutting down the parachutes. Jensen covered him with his pistol and ordered him to help. Using the farmer’s telephone, the journalist then called for a lorry.
‘M-m-may I,’ the frightened farmer asked, ‘have one of the parachutes?’
Jensen grinned. ‘Of course you may,’ and added, ‘But remember, if the Germans catch you with it, they’ll shoot you; and if you tell the Germans about it, then we’ll shoot you!’
After the Resistance men had driven away, the farmer rushed into his house, picked up his telephone, and told the operator, ‘You don’t have to call the Germans for me. I was mistaken. That matter has been taken care of.’
Another time an aircraft looking for its dropping-area in southern Sealand saw lights on the ground, and the pilot signalled his crew to push out the containers. The parachutes fell toward the lights, but the men below were very surprised, for the pilot had missed his dropping-area and had loosed twenty-four containers on a railway goods yard. The men with the lights had been German troops shunting trains.
Once a young boy in a Jutland village was out on an errand after dark, and when he heard a low-flying aircraft, he pointed his torch at the sky and flashed it on and off. Suddenly the boy saw parachutes, and containers began plummeting all around him. Toldstrup’s men, at a dropping-point not far from the village, soon were told what had happened and sped towards the town. However, the Germans had also already been alerted to the drop, and they in their turn hurried to the area. Unfortunately, the latter party won the race by a few minutes, and only one of the containers could be retrieved.
In Sealand, Stig Jensen’s men once went out for a reception on a winter night in 1944, and when they heard an aeroplane fly near, Jensen flashed his signal. Instead of containers coming down, tracer bullets began to rain around the Resistance men. By mistake Jensen had signalled a Luftwaffe fighter on patrol.
The Danes on the ground took cover in a drainage ditch, and a few minutes later the British aircraft arrived and had to enter into a dogfight over the dropping area. Waist-deep in water, Jensen’s reception group peered up at the aerial battle above them. The British aeroplane burst into flames, and its crew and the Danish parachutist it carried had to bale out. Jensen was later able to get the officers from the aircraft to safety, but the non-commissioned men were taken by the Germans. The Danish parachutist spent the night hid den in a haystack, and made his way to Copenhagen in the morning.
Most of the receptions were more successful, however, and the much bigger problem was carrying away the containers. Here, Danish ingenuity again proved itself. Sometimes doctors’ cars were used because they could travel about freely. In North Jutland a hearse cruised back and forth across the countryside at night, its flowers and wreaths concealing loads of airdropped goods. But such means of transport were risky, because the Danes who saw them were likely either to gossip about them or to be caught by the Germans and made to talk. For a long time Toldstrup’s men carried away explosives under a large load of logs in a lorry, but this disguise was eventually penetrated by a German road patrol. A final answer had to be found to the transport problem—and eventually one of Toldstrup’s men worked out the perfect solution.
The Resistance men bought a large removals van, and travelling from auction to auction, purchased several dozen pieces of old furniture. With their explosives and weapons in the front part of the van, the furniture would be packed tightly at the back. If the doors were opened by curious Germans, some of the furniture would tumble to the road. The Germans stopped this van many times but could never be bothered to take out enough of the chairs and tables to find the hidden contraband.
Almost from the first, men sometimes came down with the containers; S.O.E.-trained agents, Danes who were to be the cadre of the entire Danish Resistance. Each of them carried a poison he was to swallow if the Germans caught him and tried to torture him into yielding information, and each was worth a 20,000-kroner reward to Danes who disclosed his where-abouts to the Nazis. Except for these two facts, the agents had little in common. Some were weak characters who had taken on the job because a commission and the pay of a British Army officer went with it. Some were opportunists who squandered the large sums of money they had been entrusted to deliver to Resistance workers forced underground. One of these agents went on a drinking spree in Copenhagen and told chance acquaintances about his secret work. He was having so much fun in the occupied city that he would not obey an S.O.E. order to go to Sweden—and he had to be liquidated.
On the day of Copenhagen’s liberation one of the first parachutists who had been received by the Hvidsten Group strutted the streets of the capital in a British officer’s uniform. He had earlier been captured by the Germans and later released. It is known that he was threatened with torture, but was never actually tortured. He never tried to take his own life. In addition to the Hvidsten Group, it is believed that he gave the Germans the names of at least seventy Resistance people.
Another man received by the Fiils was a nineteen-year-old who brought poison tablets with him instead of a phial of liquid because, he told his hosts, he was afraid broken glass would cut his tongue. His tablets were effective; captured, he used them to take his life.
A few of the agents had lived so long outside Denmark that they at first had trouble remaining inconspicuous. Too many were peasant types, completely unable to command authority over the underground volunteers they were supposed to lead. Some were either brave or highly honourable or resourceful—but few showed all these qualities until later in the war when the Danes were able to send men back to Britain to be trained and returned to Denmark. Yet despite the anti pathy so many Danes in England at first felt towards irregular fighting at home, some of the first agents were excellent men.
In the summer of 1943 one of these parachutists landed in Jutland with some strange equipment built into a suitcase not much larger than a portable typewriter. It was something the Danes had never seen before, and the parachutist showed them how to use it. He did not explain its precise purpose, but the Danes soon guessed. Known as a Eureka station, it was a battery-powered wireless receiver and transmitter. Eventually eleven more similar pieces of equipment were parachuted into Jutland, and later four larger Eureka stations were also dropped there.
The British sent Toldstrup precise orders about where to set up the Eurekas and when to work them. Switching on the instruments, their operators would listen on earphones until they heard a steady buzzing. Then they would begin tapping out a single letter in Morse code—whichever letter the British specified. Until the buzz in their earphones died away, the operators sent out the same letter again and again. The smaller sets were moved from place to place to avoid detection by the Germans, but the four larger stations were fixed permanently in church steeples along the west coast of Jutland. The Eurekas were beacons that helped Allied aircraft pick their way toward dropping-areas, but they were being used as more than just an aid to the Danish Resistance. During the last year of the war, when large-scale air raids were being made on Germany, British and American bombers had to fly back and forth over Denmark, although the Germans had many active anti-aircraft stations there. Without knowing it at the time, the Danish Resistance helped make bombardment of the Reich a little less hazardous for the Allied airmen.
All the Eureka stations were equipped with high explosive charges that could be detonated to destroy them if they were captured, but the operators Toldstrup put in charge of the sets did their job well, and none was ever discovered.
More air-dropped goods were lost to the Germans in raids on storage places than were lost in faulty drops or in transit. One of the strangest storage systems was employed by a North Jutland blacksmith. His neighbours all knew he was a Resistance man—such things could not be kept secret in Jutland’s smaller, more remote villages—but he had his own technique for keeping down loose talk. If he learned that someone had mentioned his activities, he would take them aside, prop one foot on a chair, draw up his trouser leg, and reveal the pistol he always carried strapped to his calf. ‘Have you been talking?’ he would ask.
‘No, no!’ the worried villager would protest.
Unstrapping his pistol, the blacksmith would then point it at his neighbour. ‘Tell the truth or I’ll kill you!’
‘Well, yes, I suppose I have said a little.’
‘Next time you talk, I won’t show this to you. I’ll use it!’
His neighbours all became close-mouthed, and the smith kept the air-dropped things openly on the shelves of his shop.
‘If somebody came in for plastic explosive,’ he later explained, ‘I didn’t want him to go off with nuts and bolts, so I marked the packages “plastic explosive”.’
After the invasion of France the air drops to Denmark increased; many containers that had been earmarked for the Maquis began to find their way to Denmark instead. The first containers that had been dropped into North Jutland while Flemming Juncker was still in command there often held cigarettes and other small gifts for the people who risked their lives to receive the contraband, but Juncker had sent radio messages to England that such kindnesses might inadvertently betray the Resistance. Cigarettes began to appear again in the containers towards the end of the war. But they were not likely to be noticed by the Germans, for they were black, French-type cigarettes—and the Danes hated them.
Early in 1945 the Royal Air Force decided to experiment with a new dropping technique in Jutland, and Toldstrup was asked to provide very strange dropping points that would not require men to await the aeroplanes. Several such operations were carried out. The containers were plummeted into the sea where they sank and anchored themselves at the bottom along uninhabited parts of the Jutland coast. The only trace was a small marker buoy bobbing on the surface. The day after these drops, Resistance men went out in small boats and jerked on the buoys, releasing a mechanism attached to the anchors. The containers would bob to the surface and could be taken away safely—as long as no one observed the boats. No such drops were made elsewhere in Europe, and Told-strup suggested to the British that the operations would be even more perfect if the buoys were made to look like small sea birds. But the war ended before this idea could be tried.
During the last days of the war drops were so prevalent in Jutland that Toldstrup had not forty or fifty but more than three hundred dropping sites in operation, and on the night the Germans in Denmark capitulated, ninety-three drops were to have been made in that part of the country.
Stig Jensen also planned his most ambitious reception for a night in May 1945. He had arranged to have eighteen goods waggons drawn to a siding in South Sealand. Next to the railway line was the dropping area, and the R.A.F. was going to throw down enough containers to fill the entire train. Every detail of the operation was carefully worked out. It was only called off because it was scheduled for a night nearly a week after British troops took over Copenhagen.