AS soon as all the planes were in the air, Embry led them into a deep dive, and maintaining tight formation, they descended to about fifteen feet above the surf. Gale-force wind lashed at the North Sea, throwing up high salty spume that drenched the aircraft. Salt condensed on their windscreens—and there was no way to wipe it off.
To bomb Shell House before the Gestapo went to lunch, they must sneak all the way to Copenhagen, for if the German radar noticed them coming the attack would fail. Luftwaffe fighters would try to fend them off; or anti-aircraft batteries would slam them out of the sky. Only if they remained at fifteen feet, the sea blurring grey beneath them, would they not register bright pips on the German radar screens. Aerial counter-attacks against such low-flying planes would be virtually impossible.
The pilots and navigators in the Mosquitoes craned forward in their seats, for now the salt coated their windscreens solidly, and only a narrow slot across the screens’ bottoms—no more than an inch and a half high—remained transparent. It was the blindest of blind flying, but they dared not climb.
And in the middle of chilly, windy Copenhagen, beneath a dun overcast sky, morning routine at Shell House was beginning normally. Several S.S. guards went to the attic to fetch Lyst Hansen, a loyal Danish police officer, who was to be taken that morning from Shell House to Vester Prison for immediate transfer to Frøslev Concentration Camp. Through the ventilation holes in their cell doors, Professor Brandt Rehberg and several of the other prisoners saw Lyst Hansen led away.
When they reached the street, the policeman’s S.S. guards looked around. ‘Damn it!’ one of them said. ‘We’ve missed the car.’ So the Dane was marched back up to his cell and locked away. He sprawled on the cot and opened a book.
On the fourth floor, in one of the Gestapo offices, a department head from the Danish Labour Ministry, a Mr. Høirup, was allowed to have a conversation with a Danish prisoner.
Out over the North Sea, the attackers now neared the south Jutland coast, and together they rose to a hundred and fifty feet. Jutland slipped quickly beneath them, then the grey water of the Little Belt, the green farms on the island of Funnen, the Great Belt’s grey water, and finally green land once more. They had reached south Sealand.
Air Vice-Marshal Embry no longer gave the instructions, for, as planned, the aircraft were now to take their lead from Group-Captain Bob Bateson, whose Mosquito would be the first one in the first bomber wave to strike—if they got as far as the target.
In Copenhagen, a loud wail interrupted the morning. Air-raid sirens had gone off. The Germans had ordered them, but the city merely went on about its business, for everybody knew that this was just a routine morning test. Soon the sirens faded.
Sismore changed course to north-east until they were between Roskilde and Copenhagen, directly west of the capital. The eighteen Mosquito bombers now divided into three ranks of six each, and, over a lake, they formed a sort of three-spoked wheel in the air. After one lazy-looking rotation, the first six aircraft peeled off; and squinting through the small clear portion of his windscreen, Sismore could see the highway, Roskildevej, the road to Frederiksberg and then in to that cancerous building in the heart of crowded Copenhagen. Five more Mosquitoes were aligned on Sismore’s right, close together, moving in for a starboard attack. At one hundred and fifty feet they flew onward at more than three hundred and fifty miles an hour, the earth rushing in flashes beneath them. Sismore watched carefully, giving Bateson the route, patiently taking them toward Shell House.
Several S.S. guards had brought Poul Borking, a Danish Army captain, down from the attic prison to the fifth floor, to a Gestapo officer named Wiese who sat at a desk, his back to the window. Through that window, over the German’s shoulder, Borking could see the broad lake, and beyond, the silhouettes of Frederiksberg’s blocks of flats. Both guards remained in the room, their backs also to the window. Wiese rose, went to the door, and departed, leaving Borking with the S.S. guards.
At almost that same moment, several German soldiers marched two Danish civilians, Taaning and Drescher, into an office on the ground floor. Both were suspected of Resistance activity. ‘Now,’ one of their guards ordered, ‘let’s have your identity cards.’
At that moment there were thirty-two prisoners and four Danish informers in the attic.
Sismore guided Bateson along a railway main line, then over a vast goods yard. As they passed Frederiksberg, the navigator saw the blur of a multi-coloured theatre marquee just below. Ahead—the lake.
Captain Borking saw three flat specks emerge over Frederiks berg’s rooftops. The specks turned and grew, and Borking could see what they were. His first impulse was to yell a warning at his guards, for both now sat opposite him, facing into the room. Thinking better of it, the captain moved his hands slowly outwards, palms up, under the edge of the desk, his eyes on the aircraft.
Upstairs, the prisoners in the attic now heard the oncoming roar. Perhaps they could guess what it was, but what could they do?
‘Easy, now, easy—’ Sismore said. And then, as the green and brown stripes he had been looking for appeared across the lake, he pointed and shouted excitedly, ‘That building—there!’
Now Bateson took over, eased his control forward, pointing his bomber’s nose at the pavement in front of the building.
At that moment Borking tensed his muscles, rose, and tipped the desk forward—into the laps of the amazed Germans. Then, not hesitating, Borking ran out into the hall, hearing the two Nazis yell after him.
Bateson let his bombs go, felt the lightened aircraft lift. Then he tugged back the stick and wheeled away. The other five planes in that first wave had also skipped their high explosives into the bottom of Shell House. Those first two dozen bombs hit at about twenty minutes past eleven, and the whole building trembled. Mustang fighters flitted near by, spattering German anti-aircraft emplacements on the pink tile rooftops.
Captain Borking ran along the fifth-floor hall to the stair case at the right-hand side of the building. Excitedly his guards shouted after him, but Borking did not stop. He was at the third floor when, eleven seconds after they hit, the first bombs detonated.
As the first wave of Mosquitoes had let go their bombs, the Germans with Taaning and Drescher dropped the Danes’ identity cards on a table, and, forgetting their prisoners, ran in panic toward the cellar. The two Danes headed for the outside doorway, but Taaning stopped and turned. ‘Might need these!’ he shouted, snatching up the identity cards. He and Drescher then fled from the building. The bombs had gone off, and already all the guards outside on the pavement lay dead, and the German car park across the way was a rubble heap. It was easy to keep on running. It was the only thing to do.
The prisoners in the attic, hearing the chatter of the Mustangs’ machine guns and the shrill of the bombs, punched at their cell doors. Deep in Shell House, when the first missiles detonated, another shiver ran through the building, and the whole attic seemed to sway. In the tight cell block the plaster from the walls and ceiling flaked down, and dust clouds formed. Now the prisoners picked up their stools and began beating frantically at the plywood doors.
Out in front of Shell House some recently built air-raid shelters were pocked by shrapnel. Several bombs had gone into the German guardroom at the south-west corner of the building and exploded. Another that detonated in the cellar killed all the Danish Nazi translators. Two other bombs with long-delay fuzes were buried in the courtyard in the centre of the building.
Now—really too late—the air-raid sirens wailed, but they were engulfed by the tidal roar of the second bomber wave—but only five aircraft this time, for, over the Frederiksberg goods yard, the pilot of the second wave’s leading Mosquito had been too low. His wing brushed a tall railway pylon. Out of control, he crashed into a building, and at the instant of impact his ton of bombs exploded and his petrol tanks were ablaze.
In the office of Politiken, in the Town Hall Square, reporter Carl Næsh-Hendriksen was pulling on an ambulance man’s uniform. He would have to run out and give help—and, at the same time, try to get a story, not for his employers, the legal Politiken, but for the news service he fed, Informatíon. First he would bicycle to the scene of the crashed bomber; Shell House, still under attack, would have to wait.
As the Labour Ministry official, Høirup, on his way from his interview with the Danish prisoner, reached the fourth floor, the first bombs had detonated. Høirup kept on down the stairs, but at the first floor he felt the building begin sinking from beneath him, and he was plunged into a dark room.
Captain Borking was only as far down as the third floor when the first bombs exploded. The staircase windows flew into slivers everywhere, and the officer nearly stumbled over a Wehrmacht soldier sitting dazedly against a wall. ‘It’s too late to run!’ the German mumbled.
‘Not yet!’ Borking replied, and kept going. On the next landing sprawled another German soldier, blood spurting from his severed jugular vein. Borking kept on. By the time he reached the ground floor, he could feel intense heat from within the building.
Up in the attic the prisoners yelled. One bomb had sliced away the left wing of the prison block, and at least five cells were no longer there. Unable to force open his cell door with his fists, policeman Lyst Hansen hurled his stool at it. Almost too easily, he found he could get out. A middle-aged German in S.S. uniform, glassy-eyed, faced Lyst Hansen in the corridor. ‘Give me the keys! Let me have the keys to the cells !’ Lyst Hansen ordered.
The German seemed not to hear. Lyst Hansen’s voice was partially drowned by the explosion of more bombs. Then the German muttered, ‘Everything’s going to end! Everything’s going to end!’
Again Lyst Hansen shouted. ‘The keys, man! The keys!’ Slowly the German reached into his pocket, extracted something, and feebly held it out. A pair of scissors!
Lyst Hansen ran up to the guard, reached into his pockets, and found the large ring of keys.
One of the Mosquito bombers from the second wave now heeled eastward away from Shell House to drop a bomb on Dagmarhus, the other Nazi building, in the Town Hall Square. The plane had to skim over the German rooftop anti-aircraft emplacements, but the dazed guncrews had not yet uncovered their weapons, and, almost on the tail of the Mosquito, a Mustang dived to fire its six wing guns at the Germans on the roof.
One lone Luftwaffe fighter now approached Shell House, but its pilot, seeing the air so full of the wheeling British aircraft—and apparently not wanting to risk being a hero—turned and fled, foolishly triggering his guns to send a useless spray of bullets over the centre of Copenhagen. Still no real anti-aircraft fire had been flung at the British planes.
Captain Borking reached the bottom of the stairs and ran out into the yard. The barbed-wire concertinas the Germans had uncoiled in front of Shell House had been torn threadbare by the first bomb, and Borking could run away from the building easily.
The third wave of bombers now approached while, in the attic, Lyst Hansen ran from cell to cell, unlocking doors and flinging them open. He was surprised to find anyone alive in the cell at the corner of the shattered west corridor, for a bomb had taken away one wall and half the floor, and the cell was a narrow shelf. Part of the roof was gone, and through the gap the policeman could see the aeroplanes. He opened seventeen cells. The last was that of Aage Schoch, a newspaper editor. ‘Come now,’ Lyst Hansen said calmly, ‘it’s time to go, Schoch.’
The men freed by the policeman ran toward the stairs at the back of the building—the only one untouched. Maybe they could still get out.
Høirup, of the Labour Ministry, made his way into a room in the basement where he passed two German soldiers, one already dead and the other badly wounded. Høirup did not pause, and at the end of the hall he found a locked door, its glass panels shattered. He got through it.
As Hans Heister stepped into the corridor, he saw two other prisoners, Ove Kampmann and Professor Brant Rehberg. ‘We can’t leave before they’re all out,’ one of them remarked calmly to the other.
But, for the moment, the attic was quiet; everyone seemed to have departed. Heister turned to retrieve a Bible from his cell; back in the hallway he saw one more prisoner, dazed and blinking, standing in a cell doorway. ‘And now,’ Kamp mann said, patiently leading the man, ‘this way.’
As quickly as they could, the prisoners from the attic rushed down the stairs. Almost all of them reached the street, but three, including Poul Sørensen, a member of the Danish Parliament, and Paul Bruun, a businessman, were trapped in the cell block. Chased by the fire, they somehow managed to get through a window and began climbing down the outside of the building. However, they could only get down as far as the fourth floor. It was impossible to keep on going. On the lower floors of Shell House, despite the fact that no incendiary bombs had been used, flames churned through the destroyed Gestapo records, and the building was becoming an inferno. The three men clinging to the outside of Shell House looked down. On the pavement was a one-storey barracks. ‘Maybe we can land on the roof—’
‘It’s risky, but we can’t stay here.’
Hardly hesitating, all three men let go of their holds on the building.
Only one of the Danish informers in the attic had survived the attack to escape, and he was now fleeing with some of his compatriots he had betrayed.
Finally the Germans were shooting at the Allied aircraft—from the Nürnberg, tied in the harbour. Her guns brought down two Mosquitoes and one of the Mustangs.
As the third wave of aircraft roared toward Frederiksberg, the last of the Danes had fled the attic. Seeing the billowing smoke from the second-wave Mosquito that had crashed, noticing its flames jetting up through that smoke, the airmen in the last wave mistakenly thought that this was their target, and they loosed their bombs into buildings below them in Frederiksberg.
The bombing was now over, and all the planes that were not shot down had been able to get clear of the city. Several made light attacks on German camps north of Copenhagen before turning away toward Britain. Just over four minutes had passed since Sismore had first seen Shell House.
Lyst Hansen, Dr. Fog, and Aage Schoch had managed to get into the courtyard behind Shell House. Seeing a passage-way that led toward the street at the east side of the building, they ran through, under the only part of the Gestapo head quarters still relatively untouched.
In seconds, the whole of Shell House was a roaring fire, and much of the top of it had crumbled. Nothing was left of the cell block.
On the street, Lyst Hansen had seen no people, although from somewhere there was shooting. No time to waste looking around. He, Fog, and Schock had run until they reached the corner, and then hid behind the Technological Institute, adjacent to Shell House. A moment later a bomb had ripped through the roof. Their breath sucked out of them for a minute, the three men ran off in different directions, brushing dust from their clothes as they went.
When the bombing had started, several groups of Germans had been approaching Shell House, some in a big motor-car, and the rest on motor-cycles. These vehicles, empty, but with their engines still running, remained unattended outside the smoking building. Several of the escaped prisoners ran to them and drove off as more German soldiers, newly arrived, opened fire on them.
Næsh-Hendriksen arrived at Shell House to see Danes snatching up German weapons scattered all over the pavement in front of the burning building. One young man took a sub-machine gun under each arm and got away. No ammunition was strewn on the pavement, but from somewhere deep in the Shell House basement a magazine made a continuous loud popping as small-arms ammunition burned there.
Someone rushed up to help Poul Sørensen, whose legs had been broken in the leap. He had fallen on the barracks roof, slid to the pavement, and was still alive. Bruun was even more badly hurt. He had missed the one-storey barracks and landed in a barbed wire concertina on the pavement, and later one of his legs had to be amputated. The third man, taken with the other two to the German Military Hospital, died there after some hours. A fourth man, finding himself alone in the attic after the others had departed, could reach neither the stairs nor an outside window. Finally he had clambered out on to the roof, then jumped from there into the courtyard—and was killed by the fall.
Out over Samsø, between Sealand and Jutland, another of the Mosquito bombers was brought down by anti-aircraft fire. One of its crew was a Norwegian, a former Resistance man in his homeland, before he fled to Britain and trained with the R.A.F.
Captain Borking had rushed into an air-raid shelter, but seeing one of his German guards cowering in it, he ran off to another safe place. He was fairly far from Shell House when he heard the all-clear sound, and he climbed on a tram and rode away.
In Copenhagen, after some time, the two fires were put out. Shell House was gone, and the Gestapo records that might have trapped thousands of Danes were ruined. Two days after the raid, learning that five large safes were supposedly buried under the rubble, Holger Danske men took a lorry to the scene of the bombing. They were able to get the safes away to a moor, and to open them. Three were empty, but one con tained a list of Danish Nazis that would be useful after the war. The fifth safe held only a German admiral’s uniform. All the Husquarna machine-guns were lost to the Gestapo. Several hundred Nazis were killed, although many of the most impor tant ones had been saved by a peculiar coincidence. Half an hour before the planes arrived, the top Gestapo men in Copen hagen gathered in a cemetery for the funeral of one of their colleagues who had died a few days before.
The Resistance managed to get as many of Shell House’s loyal Danish survivors to Sweden as possible, and even the Danish informer who had escaped from the attic was taken across the Sound—by mistake. Of the prisoners in the attic, only six, including Admiral Hammerich and Captain Ahnfeldt Mollerup, the last man to be incarcerated, were dead. Twenty-seven had escaped.
But ‘Operation Shell House’, one of the most precarious low-level attacks of the war, although it achieved everything it set out to do, was an unhappy success. Four Mosquitoes and two Mustangs—ten airmen, altogether—had been lost. But there was a much worse catastrophe, for the Frederiksberg buildings that had been hit by the crashed Mosquito and then bombed by error was the Jeanne d’Arc School. Its casualties included some Catholic nuns and eighty-three children—just over a hundred people, altogether. Yet in crowded Copen hagen the necessity of the action was understood, and when Embry’s airmen visited the city a week after the liberation, they were welcomed as heroes.