A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The secret army’s risks, taken to save London, were closely held secrets. An anonymous Polish partisan experimented with signal equipment to check the report that some rockets could be diverted off course by radio signals on an assigned wave length. He confirmed that they could by doing it, landing the V-1 in the River Bug. He worked in an attic above a German Luftwaffe billet. An engineer inside the German military construction organization copied plans of a launching ramp. Agents secured speed and range figures that instructed RAF interceptors, enabling the pilots to work out a technique for tipping the unmanned V-1s by sliding a wing under one of the rocket stabilizers and gently lifting it into a steep descending turn. The larger V-2s dropped almost vertically out of the sky from a great height. There was one final answer to them—mass bombing raids against their bases and launch ramps. The raids were executed by American and British fliers utilizing the detailed information accumulated over a long period by Europe’s guerrilla forces.

  “So many different agencies and fighting units had a hand at the kill, each thought itself responsible for ending the threat,” said Stephenson. “It was Allied armies crossing the Rhine that finally stopped the launchings.

  “As to why the V weapons never fatally hurt us—one reason was that German double agents were fed false information on where the rockets fell. The Double Cross, or Twenty Committee, gradually moved the targets into the countryside by reporting a false position for each explosion through German intelligence channels under British control.

  “Later came the accusation of ‘playing God.’ ”

  The miracle was that the rockets had only conventional warheads. Roosevelt received from INTREPID in late 1944 the studies made of the Vengeance weapons. The Germans had plans to launch bombers and rockets against American targets. BSC recovered plans to modify a U-boat to fire rockets into New York and to dispatch Focke-Wulf Condor aircraft on one-way bombing runs over the American eastern seaboard. Their scientists understood the theory of atomic bombs. If the Third Reich had survived, if Hitler had been replaced by an equally ruthless but less exhausted Führer, the new era of push-button warfare might have opened and closed with the destruction of Western civilization.

  Nobody understood this better than the President. In the following April, he prepared a speech for delivery on Jefferson Day. A copy reached Stephenson, and he added his sad penciled comment in the margin: “A great speech, by the greatest President, never delivered—”

  President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, on the brink of opening debate on the great moral issues that arose with the swift growth of all the weapons of secrecy. These issues haunted INTREPID. The uncontrolled release of atomic reaction was seen as being no less dangerous than the explosive force of individuals trained in new methods of terror through sabotage and assassination.

  Roosevelt had intended to expose openly to the world “the danger that politicians will accept as inevitable the destruction of innocent people to achieve their goals and that scientists will concentrate on the means and ignore the ends of their research.”

  One symbol of the new power and responsibility awesomely placed in the hands of men was Bohr’s heavy-water cyclotron left behind in Denmark.

  The moral issues of such soul-searing concern to Roosevelt and Stephenson were dramatically exemplified in microcosm only three weeks before the President’s death. By an irony of fate, Denmark again was the locale. This blazing event, hardly noticed by the rest of the world, its secret purpose known only to a few, became symbolic of the grim dilemma so perpetually to plague those who faced the making of deadly decisions. It was the RAF raid on Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen.

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  “A cruel time comes,” said Niels Bohr to Stephenson, “when to save a nation’s deepest values, we have to disobey the state.”

  Disobedience was forced on the Danes from the day Bohr vanished. They had been advised by their king to continue their daily routine when the Nazis invaded in 1940. If good citizens obeyed the law, they would keep both government and monarchy. Then the government found it could no longer submit to the Third Reich’s imperial decrees. Thousands of Danes were rounded up by the Gestapo. The violence resolved conflicts of conscience. It had become necessary to disobey the state. The cruel time had come. It reached a peak of agony when Danish agents were obliged to request the destruction of Gestapo headquarters at the risk of killing chieftains of the secret army and hundreds of innocent children.

  Bohr came to New York in November 1943 with more than atomic secrets locked in his head. He told BSC how the Gestapo operated behind a façade of “correct” German administrators and therefore confused the people. The German overlords identified with King Christian, who commanded the loyalty and devotion of his subjects. The King cooperated in the hope of preventing tragedy, unaware for a long time that many Danes who did actively resist Nazi pressures were taken to Aarhus University in Jutland, away from public view, to be tortured and killed. Bohr, aware now that this double-headed German administration had slowly undermined the nation’s independence, helped to fill in the details of Nazi headquarters so that mock-ups could be built at Camp X for the training of guerrillas.

  Bohr pleaded only for the preservation of his labs, and the Van de Graaff machine in which he had used heavy water in accelerating deuterons. He knew the Danish secret army had mined the labs, but he feared that blowing them up would confirm the view of those Germans who claimed that his atomic experiments were of practical value.

  A curious controversy raged between scientists already involved in the Manhattan Project and those still in Copenhagen under Nazi control. Should the labs be destroyed? The argument was conducted through secret channels, in coded messages carried by couriers. Finally, a signal was sent to Copenhagen:

  DO NOT-REPEAT NOT-ACTIVATE THE DEMOLITION CHARGES.

  The cyclotron was left unharmed. To sabotage it would alert Hitler to the significance of Bohr’s work.

  A more painful decision now had to be made. The Gestapo had captured Danish agents who knew of Denmark’s secret army and its plans for industrial sabotage and the armed diversion of German forces in the path of an Allied invasion. The prisoners knew the importance of Bohr’s work. It had been summarized in the manuscript lost during the escape of other scientists. The papers contained information that, properly interpreted, would help the German atomic project. Their importance, not apparent to German field police if they should stumble upon them, might be betrayed by prisoners under questioning. And Baker Street always had to assume that prisoners would talk—in the end.

  The prisoners did not have suicide pills. They were local guerrilla chiefs with five regional headquarters who had been taking orders through neutral Stockholm from London. They were imprisoned in Gestapo headquarters in the heart of Copenhagen. Skillfully manipulated, they could help the Germans continue exploiting a country torn between self-preservation and outright rebellion. Those of Denmark’s leaders under King Christian X who had obeyed enemy orders were condemned by the British Foreign Office. “Denmark is neither an ally nor even a belligerent but a nation accepting German dictates,” wrote a diplomatic adviser. Churchill rebuked the man: “Danish administrators obviously have a first duty to their own people, when their conquerors are prepared to take hostages or punish whole communities in retaliation for disobedience. Taking orders is not the same as collaboration but the borderline between the two activities can never be clear.”

  This was the agony shared by public servants in all the conquered territories when the Germans governed through local dignitaries. A mayor might be told to provide workers for German industry. He was not required to ask questions. A minister might be told to round up Jews. What happened to them might be, or might not be, his affair. A king could preside over the execution of his own people, believing he was protecting them.

  Denmark was technically a neutral country under German occupation, but with King and Cabinet still in nominal control. Beside them was the double-headed monster: th
e “correct” governors from Berlin and the jack-booted SS silent in the shadows. There was the King. So long as he remained in position, loyal Danes were uncertain about helping the secret army. Christian was well aware of the borderline between submission and active help for the Nazi overlords. When pushed to the point of defiance, the old monarch understood what terrible consequences might flow from a self-indulgent display of anger. “It might satisfy his ego but it could cost lives” was the way Sven Truelsen had expressed it to Stephenson. “In this kind of warfare, the hardest role is that of the prominent figure who must risk having his actions misunderstood.”

  After the Allied invasion of Europe, King Christian faced the dreadful reality that if his people did not revolt against Nazi control, they would be slowly destroyed by the Germans becoming more desperate in defense. He sent word through Truelsen to Baker Street: “We have the German armies under a magnifying glass. We know the order of battle down to the last platoon. We know what German warships use which harbors and what guns they carry. We know the airfields, how many planes, which sort. . . . We have also lost our best leaders who are now in Gestapo cells.”

  Truelsen turned up one day in London in his customary manner, casual and without warning. A raid had been conducted against a concentration camp and the RAF air crews were celebrating the release of Danish agents through the breached walls. “The party was in full swing,” Stephenson recalled. “Suddenly this unassuming civilian walked in, fresh from a very different scene. It was Truelsen.”

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry, who directed special air operations, said: “He asked me to knock out a reinforced concrete building in the center of Copenhagen. Considering the risks he’d taken to get to the party, I had to listen. Even so, the scheme sounded crazy.”

  The legendary Dane sought out the young RAF commander because his pilots had already disemboweled Gestapo headquarters in Jutland to release the prisoners held there. What Truelsen proposed now raised the hair on well-mannered heads in the British Air Ministry.

  “Truelsen wanted a group of bombers to rupture the foundations of the Shell building in Copenhagen so that some forty Danish secret army chiefs in the top floor could escape,” said Stephenson. “Gestapo files in the bottom part of the building had to be destroyed before interrogation began upstairs. The War Cabinet said it couldn’t be done. I said the Americans had new radar equipment that OSS might get us. Even so, the target was at extreme range for Mosquitos carrying the special bombs required. Pilots would have to fly flat on the sea to get under German radar and then sweep into Copenhagen’s streets at very high speed, weaving below the rooftops to get one-shot strikes. . . . Everyone turned thumbs down. Then Air Marshal Sir Basil Embry listened to the other side of the story. If the raid did not take place, Gestapo records, which had just been assembled, would be painstakingly examined along with the Danish resistance leaders, and it was a matter of time before the secret army was mopped up in one big German operation. So long as Danish patriots could undertake guerrilla operations, the Germans would be obliged to keep 200,000 troops in the country. If the Germans smashed the Danish resistance, those troops would be released for use against American forces. Sir Basil got the okay by telling Churchill privately that he would go with the raiders under an assumed name. So the operational order came down from on high.”

  Ted Sismore, an ace pathfinder for these tricky low-level raids, was selected to solve the navigational problems. He said to Truelsen: “It would be rather nice if someone could take a photograph of the damn building from the sea approach.” Two weeks later Truelsen turned up in his office. “He had the very picture I wanted. Gone back, stolen a boat to photograph from the right angle, then scampered out again. The perfect target photograph, just as we would see it, sweeping in at wave-top level.”

  Old tourist postcards and travel brochures were dug up and a large model made of Copenhagen. Ted Sismore planned the route. “We set the model so all crews could look at it by crouching beside the table. They got the picture of the city as it would come up, very suddenly—terribly fast.”

  There were arguments about the size of the force. The tactical leader of the operation, Group Captain Robert Bateson, figured six Mosquitos would do nicely. “The more aircraft, the less controllable they are.”

  Embry insisted on at least eighteen aircraft. “Once you’re committed to an operation, you can’t make a mistake and go back. The second time, the Germans are ready and waiting.” Already the Gestapo had imprisoned more Danes in the sixth floor of the Shell building. A founding member of the Freedom Council, political chief of anti-Nazi operations, Dr. Mogens Fog, was held there. Another prisoner was Professor Brandt Rehberg, a scientific colleague of Bohr.

  Could the raid on Shell House be justified when the lives of such men were at risk? There was a convent school adjoining it, crowded with children. Even if the Mosquitos hit the target, and even if none crashed into nearby streets, the RAF analysts estimated some Danish civilian lives must be lost.

  What did Bohr think? Could he suggest the kind of decision that his old colleague Professor Rehberg would make? The questions were put to Bohr by Stephenson, who reported that Rehberg would likely consider the gamble worthwhile. But it would be wise to send a man into Denmark to make the fateful decision.

  Ole Lippmann was the man most qualified, already a veteran at twenty-eight. “I had been away six months,” he said later. “The Gestapo had accomplished a lot in my absence. I slipped back into Copenhagen and began calling members of our circuits. In every case, the Gestapo was at the other end of the phone. I took a train to Deer Park and went for a long walk. The situation was familiar. The time before, we tried to smuggle suicide L-pills to our comrades in the interrogation cells as a favour to them. I thought, well, if L-pills were regarded as a favour then, why not bombs now? There were three-dozen secret-army leaders in the Shell attic. I thought I knew how each must regard the prospect of further torture. They would do what their predecessors had done: appeal for death.

  “I walked around Shell House again. The houses on either side, the school across the road, all would be hit. But irrespective of this, irrespective of my friends sitting up there behind bars, I concluded we must ask for the raid.”

  The decision was received by Basil Embry with horror. “But I said I’d carry it out if Lippmann said so.”

  Eighteen Mosquitos were diverted from the European battle fronts. “They and the crews could be spared for forty-eight hours, no more,” said the leader of the raid, Bob Bateson. “The first briefing came the morning after the Mosquitos were transferred to a Special Duties field in Norfolk. Truelsen from Denmark was there. I wanted my crews to comprehend the problem in human terms. This wasn’t just a question of destroying Shell House. There were people in there who must be helped to escape.”

  Thirty-six young airmen watched the Dane with veiled curiosity. Sven Truelsen was something outside their experience. Secret wars were fought unseen, except when flying crews were required for special duties, about which they were told only as much as seemed necessary. Seldom did they glimpse a member of the European underground. Many suspected it did not exist. They disliked operations that produced no visible results but involved abnormal risks. Sitting on muddy fields behind enemy lines, they waited for ghostly figures who never spoke and sometimes failed to materialize. Hovering low over lakes that shimmered in the treacherous light of a full moon, they endured heavy ground fire to drop anonymous foreigners and mysterious bundles into limbo. Back from these exhausting and lonely flights, they had nothing to report and no tangible proof that their patience and skill hurt anyone but themselves. Here, at last, was a man speaking from the shadows, soon to return to a nether world that seemed at times mythological.

  “I told them if the hostages were not killed in the raid, they were going to die slowly and more terribly anyway,” said Truelsen. “I said if the hostages could escape, their value was enormous. And if the Gestapo files were destroyed, it meant there would be
a secret army in Denmark that still evaded German detection.”

  Shortly before dawn on March 21, 1945, the Mosquitos took off across the English coast. They carried eleven-second-delay bombs. That meant eleven seconds’ grace for each aircraft to get out of its own bomb blast, and a similar span of time between each attack. The first wave carried incendiaries, and so did the third, to make a bonfire of the wrecked building. In half a gale blowing across the North Sea, they flew just above the wave tops. “The pilots had trouble holding on course,” said Sismore, master navigator for the raid. “I had difficulty holding the map, and I certainly couldn’t calculate with pad and pencil. The windscreens were covered in salt from the sea and this was a serious hazard because in Mosquitos you had to navigate a great deal by visual checks.”