Police photo of railroad freight car targeted by the Churchill Club
Though the Wehrmacht’s hobnailed boots echoed through Aalborg’s streets, though a blue cloud of gasoline and oil from German transport wagons hung over the city, though Eigil’s sister insisted that detectives were but a breath away from the Churchill Club—it was still spring. The air had warmed, and the days were long and bright at last. The oldest Cathedral School students were just a few days from graduation. Helge, Eigil, Knud, and the Professor would be moving into high school at last—if they could pass their finals. The young saboteurs kept up their resistance work even as they crammed for exams. Classmates had no clue what was going on. Instructors constantly reminded students that they were growing in experience and responsibility. The instructors had no idea how right they were—at least for a few of them.
A bright spot was that the Churchill Club suddenly acquired three important new allies, thanks to Uffe Darket. Every few evenings Uffe rode his bike downtown to attend meetings of a model-airplane-building hobby club. One night as he carved his parts and glued them together, Uffe fell into conversation with another plane builder named Alf Houlberg. Alf, his brother Kaj, and their friend Knud Hornbo were in their early twenties, factory workers from the nearby town of Brønderslev. They all were devoted to model airplanes.
They kept chatting as they worked, until, after a time, Uffe took a chance and revealed his activities with the Churchill Club to Alf. Far from being shocked, Alf replied that the three of them shared Uffe’s disgust with the Danish authorities in this crisis. In fact, they had just stolen six mortar grenades from the railway station near their factory. Problem was, they couldn’t figure out how to make the bloody things work. Would the Churchill Club be able to use them?
KNUD PEDERSEN: My brother brought the mortar rounds to the monastery in two heavy cases Uffe had given him. He was carrying them very carefully. The only thing I had ever heard about mortar grenades was that they exploded on contact. I told Jens to set them down on the bed gently. He accidentally nicked the bedpost with one of them, and our hearts about stopped. We lifted the lids. Inside each box were three objects that looked like iron bowling pins with wire caps smeared with fat. As usual, we didn’t know how to operate them. And as always, there was no one to teach us.
Jens and the Professor immediately started to tinker with them in the Professor’s lab above Jens’s room. Their first idea was to take one of the grenades apart on a table and empty the explosive powder from it. But when they got the parts all spread out, they found that there was no powder inside. It was puzzling: the only thing we could figure was that Alf and his mates must have stolen practice grenades: dummies, not live munitions. The Professor and Jens resumed experimenting with the grenade components, inspecting them, combining them, turning them over and over, trying to make something happen. Then at the bottom of the grenade they found something interesting: a thin metal disc of seven or eight centimeters, held in place by a set of screws. Something about that disc just looked flammable.
A match to the disc lit the Professor’s lab up like seven suns! They were yelling bloody murder, and the rest of us came running in with water. It took at least a minute to extinguish the flames. Through the heavy smoke the two great scientists were grinning like the triumphant fools they were.
The two kept working. They came to realize that the discs themselves were made of highly flammable magnesium. All they had to do was light one with a match and they had a compact firebomb. I don’t know how we lived through those tests: Jens and the Professor were world champions in near-suicidal experiments with explosives, but this time they figured out how to control the materials. At last the Professor had made a weapon that worked.
It was a big step, for grenades brought powerful dreams within reach. Now we could stage raids of our own.
We set aside two grenades for our ultimate mission: destroying the German vehicles that lined the streets of Budolfi Square outside my window. At last we had the force to make it happen—well, maybe not exactly like my fantasy, where I came racing into the square with guns blazing and caught sight of Grethe in the tower, but at least the Nazi-fighting heart of it. Now we had the firepower to mount a serious assault.
But first a field test.
When darkness fell on the evening of May 2, 1942, five of us biked to the Aalborg rail yards, a hub of Nazi activity in Aalborg. It was a city of boxcars, lined up in rusted strings. Some containers were filled with ore from Norway and Sweden. Others were loaded with machine parts and components. Still others contained materials for the rapidly expanding Aalborg airport. The yard, lit with floodlights, screeched with the clamor of groaning engines and banging doors and wheels scraping on iron rails. Tonight’s mission was to use our new grenades to ignite boxcars and destroy their contents. We had high hopes.
A chain-link fence patrolled by two armed guards kept the public away from the rail yard. A footpath ran in front of the fence. One of us would remain on the path as a sentry, chatting with the guards if necessary, clanging an alarm on a metal fence post if something went wrong. The others would cut a hole in the fence and enter the yard. Alf and Uffe would take positions beneath boxcars, each with a pistol trained on a guard. I and one other would go to work on the freight cars with the grenades.
As we crept toward the fence we met a problem we hadn’t counted on. A pair of lovers had positioned themselves at one end of the path and were furiously making out. How could we flush them out without explaining why we wanted them to leave? We moved up close and stared, eyes wide, mimicking them. With middle fingers raised in farewell, they left for a more private place.
We cut the fence and took our positions. Uffe slid underneath a boxcar and aimed his pistol at a guard. Another Clubber and I set to work picking out a likely boxcar to ignite. We walked to the middle of a train, figuring it would be harder for Germans to extract a flaming boxcar from the middle than to just uncouple one at the front or back.
The first rusty old iron door screamed when I pulled it back. My eyes adjusted, and yes! It was full of airplane wings! Better still, there were paper drawings showing how to attach the wings to the fuselage of a plane. It was a jackpot target of tremendous value to the Nazis.
I bunched up a pile of wing-assembly instructions and gingerly placed a grenade disc atop the pyre. Crouching in the doorway, I lit a match and tossed it backward onto the pile of paper. The flames ignited the disk quicker than I anticipated, and the explosion of fire hit me in midflight as I leaped from the boxcar. Flames were already consuming the paper and wings when I landed on the ground. My partner did the same to the next boxcar, and we ran crouching toward the fence. I whistled that the operation was complete, and we all squirmed back through the hole we’d cut in the fence.
Just about that time, Børge came huffing in from Nibe on his bicycle, hours after his failed offensive. He was just in time to admire our work. We all backed into the darkness and watched events play out. Sirens began to scream throughout the city. Then German officers rushed past us toward the rail yard. There was a wild arm-waving discussion between the arriving Danish firemen and the German officers. At first the Danes refused to go into the area because they feared some of those boxcars contained live ammunition. The Germans, hands on pistols, insisted.
Danish firemen started rolling out their hoses, but they moved very slowly, sometimes standing on the hoses once water began to flow. Brandishing their pistols, the Germans shouted at them to move, but it was obvious that the firemen were stalling to let the fire take hold and damage the Third Reich’s treasure. This moment was significant to us: Danish authorities—the firemen—were standing up to German orders. For the first time in a long while we felt a stirring of pride in our countrymen.
It was our biggest success so far, the destruction of a major German asset. This was the closest we had come yet to a military-style action, one in which we were well armed and had a deployment strategy. It was satisfying to stand there seeing flames lick the night and to witness the discomfort it caused the scrambling Germans. But if we had known what was about to come, we would not have been standing around admiring our work.
We would already have been in motion.