Hornet Flight - Historical Background To The Novel

Historical Background To The Novel

Hornet Flight is a fictionalized retelling of actual events. Follett's website states that his inspiration for the story came from Leo Marks, a former Special Operations Executive employee, who wrote a brief account in his book, Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945 about two young Danes who found a derelict de Havilland Hornet Moth biplane, repaired it, and flew it to Britain. While that event inspired the use of two teen-aged Danes as his primary characters, the story of the photographing of the German radar station and flying the film to Britain was actually that of Thomas Christian Sneum, a flight lieutenant in the Danish Naval Air Service, who made the flight to Britain in a Hornet with the mechanic who helped him rebuild it, Keld Peterson, on 21 June 1941. Sneum was arrested as a suspected double agent before being returned to Denmark as an agent, from which he escaped again in 1942 by crossing the ice to Sweden with a fellow naval aviator.

The German radar installations causing the havoc with the British bombers are historical. The Freya radar that Harald investigates was part of the Kammhuber Line, the German night air defense system along the North Sea. The Freya radar, with a range of 100 miles, was used to detect an incoming bombers at long-distance. Then 2 modified Würzburg Riese ("Würzburg Giant") radars tracked a single British bomber and a German night fighter to bring them together. The RAF tactically countered the line by concentrating all its bombers through a single radar sector in a "bomber stream", allowing the bulk to escape interception because the system could only concentrate on one bomber at a time.

However the actual events alluded to in Hornet Flight occurred a year later than in the novel, and without connection to the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Himmelbett structure of radar installations did not become operational until late 1941. RAF bomber losses increased by 50% in the first months of 1942, but the trend was reversed with the first "thousand bomber raid" on Cologne on 30 May 1942. The concept of the bomber stream was not the result of espionage by Resistance operatives in any occupied country, but resulted from statistical analysis of British operations.

The strict Protestant community in which Harald Olufsen grew up and against which he rebels in the earlier part of the book is typical of those dominated by the religious movement known as "The Church Association for the Inner Mission in Denmark", of which West Jutland is a stronghold.