The Black Sheep Who Turned Good

My Great Uncle, Flemming, woke up one morning to find his life had turned up side down. He was the black sheep of the family and had therefore been sent off to Africa to make something of himself. The morning he had woken up to was the morning that most Danes had woken up to a gun against their heads. Denmark had been occupied overnight. It was that rapid. By the time that Denmark had woken up, Germany had gobbled up Denmark and was already onto Norway. It wasn’t until 1943 that Denmark declared war against Germany.

It would, I think, be fair to say that Flemming was incensed. He managed to get hold of the Danish Embassy in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia (the country he was in). He volunteered his services for the ‘Free Danish Forces’ — only to be told that as Denmark was not at war with Germany, their occupier, there were no ‘Free Danish Forces’. Not to be deterred, he volunteered his services to the British Embassy, only to be told that he was a citizen of a neutral country and therefore could not be recruited.

Eventually, he was recruited by a British government department, SOE - the Special Operations Executive. He was allocated a passage aboard a ship, which was torpedoed before it got to him. He therefore got on board another ship and ended up in England and sent, as a possible illegal alien and spy, to the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in Wandsworth. This was an MI6 run recruitment/internment camp and MI6 proceeded to attempt to recruit him. This caused a ‘bun fight’ between MI6 and SOE, considered a lesser organisation by MI6 who didn’t like SOE’s mandate to ‘set Europe a blaze’ as MI6’s agents like to operate in peace and quiet so as to get on with their job of gathering intelligence about the enemy. MI6 and SOE eventually came to an agreement whereby Flemming worked for SOE and SOE provided any intelligence MI6 required, the only country in Europe where they managed to work out this arrangement.

Having been promoted from Private to Major (officially in the Royal West Kent Regiment) in six months, been parachuted into Denmark, smuggled out of Denmark, flown from Sweden to England in the bomb bay of a Mosquito, dropped back into Denmark, been the target of a man hunt by 50 Gestapo agents, helped to arrange the entry of Denmark into the war on the Allied side, organised the destruction of every railway link in Jutland during the vital month of June ’44 and been, at the end of the war, convicted of embezzlement - Flemming was granted a Royal pardon after his long needed and deserved holiday in liberated Italy.

During his time in Denmark Flemming had gained a wife and lost a mother in law, sent to a concentration camp in an attempt to lever his future wife into giving him up - her brother survived the camp. He was also unable to contact his sister or mother and tell them that he was in the country, for fear of them inadvertently betraying him. Flemming and his wife, my Great Aunt Inkie, otherwise known as Verinka de Wichfeld Muus (officially a Captain in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, but really a 'radio operator' rather than an 'agent' in SOE) were childless and we became amongst their closest relations. After the war Flemming wrote of his experiences in 'the Spark and the Flame'.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.