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Read somewhere that the Danish Underground were closely tied with SOE, with "routine" air travel to Britain via very chilly trips in Mosquito bomb bays, all sorts of supply, mostly by boat by way of Sweden, etc.

The Gestapo were closing in, had picked up way too many people who knew way, way too much. The Danes held prisoner in the Shell House were smuggling out notes with pretty good detail, and some going in. Probably notes written on cigarette papers. The Danes had people inside the building besides the prisoners, naturally.

The Danes and the SOE (sorry - SOE is Special Operations Executive, a wartime bunch of truly wild folks. Men and women would parachute in, knowing that the Gestapo had turned their networks, knowing that it was the Gestapo on the ground waiting for them, to try to save their people. Routinely folks would rear guard when it was their turn, or make a diversion, or lead Gestapo pursuit astray, knowing that the result was death. Most carried cyanide pills. The really tough made the Gestapo kill them, after the Gestapo had paid the price. Hand grenades were a popular accessory. Bunch of stories from those days, but for some reason I haven't found much but fragments published. Could be they simply did not live to tell their stories.)

Anyway, the Danes and the SOE were desperate to get their people out. The first choice was a commando style attack, which couldn't be made feasible because you would have to fight upward floor to floor against a couple hundred enemies, win, and get out before the big Wehrmacht reinforcements arrived. Run your own numbers, mine say it couldn't be done. If the force was powerful enough you couldn't hide it after the raid, and extraction under fire looked very costly if possible. No SEALS in those days, remember!! All sorts of plans were planned out in the military sense, times, distances, possible enemy responses, logistics, personnel, etc., and nothing could be made to work. The prisoners, the Danes held in the Shell House, then asked for cyanide pills for each of them delivered by the same route the messages were traveling. Nobody liked this one. There were lots of the very best people brainstorming this problem, and as I recollect it was Squadron Leader Sismore, the fellow who did the perfect navigation for the raid, who came up with the answer.

The bombs were fuzed with a slight delay, enough for the bomb to go from the roof all the way to the lowest basement. The cells were on the top floor, interrogation on the fifth (good detail there, SAM, didn't know this 5th floor stuff - and the photos of the rescue work are great!) and the Gestapo records were in the basement. Worked pretty good too.

Now comes the human nature part. Sismore wanted as I recall five Mosquitos, not twenty. Sismore thought that five could get the job done nicely, and more would not increase the likelihood of success. Sismore's war record is of the highest quality and his abilities, coolness, intelligence, honor and luck were held in very high esteem by his peers. As I recollect he was twenty two years old, but don't hold me to that. Some higher up figured that if the fellow who knew what he was doing wanted five Mosquitos then twenty would be better.

My understanding that the Catholic girls school was bombed because the Shell House was obscured by flying debris from the earlier hits and the bombs went long.

Thanks, SAM, for the opportunity to tell this story. I never tire of it.

You know this dumb spell checker doesn't know the word "fuze"? Kicks back "fuse"!! Good grief!!

I found this obit I thought might be interesting for today's thread:

Leading WWII resistance figure Ole Lippmann dies
September 6 2002

One of Denmark's leading World War II resistance figures, Ole Lippmann, has died. He was 86.

Lippman, who asked the Royal Air Force to bomb the Gestapo headquarters in an air raid that ended up being the deadliest wartime operation in Denmark, died Tuesday in Copenhagen.

After receiving intelligence that the Germans were planning to arrest the leadership of the banned Freedom Council, Lippmann, as liaison between the Danish resistance and the allies, requested that the RAF attack the Gestapo headquarters in downtown Copenhagen on March 21, 1945.

The raid, which eventually thwarted the Gestapo's arrest plans, became the deadliest World War II operation in Denmark when British warplanes mistakenly bombed a school and killed 86 pupils and 13 adults.

Most of warplanes hit their target but one aircraft crashed behind the school. The following wave of planes thought the billows of smoke from the crash indicated the target and dropped their cargo of bombs on the school.

In an interview with the Berlingske Tidende newspaper, Lippman later said it was terrible to make the decision to have the Gestapo headquarters bombed because he knew civilian casualties were likely.

The school bombing "was extremely tragic" but ordering the raid was the right decision, he was quoted as saying.

The Freedom Council was founded to lead the resistance groups, which blew up factories that worked for Nazi Germany, and destroyed or damaged railway tracks, bridges, military facilities, and oil and petrol tanks. Denmark was occupied from April 9, 1940.

"He was second to none and an extremely modest man," said Frank Zorn, a fellow resistance fighter.

In the last three months of the German occupation, Lippmann was promoted to the Allies' highest ranking official in the Special Operations Executive in Denmark. It was he who welcomed the British troops led by General Harry Dewing as they arrived on May 5, 1945, a day after the Germans had surrendered.

During the first years of the occupation, Danes protested silently. Every morning, King Christian X rode on horseback through Copenhagen, returning his peoples' salutes but looking away when he met German soldiers.

But by mid-1942, illegal press and sabotage actions against the roughly 210,000 German troops began. The turning point came in August 1943, when people started staging strikes and riots across the Scandinavian nation.

The government resigned after Germans declared martial law.

Thanks for the additional info on the raid and the Danish underground.

I recall theose stories about the SOE and the Danes. The Danish may have surrendered to the Wehrmacht in a day but they never quit. The Danes didin 't roll over like some countries and turn over the Jewish population for deportation.

Here's an interesting Urban Legend.

Claim: When the Germans ordered Jews in occupied Denmark to identify themselves by wearing armbands with yellow stars during World War II, King Christian X of Denmark and non-Jewish Danes thwarted the order by donning the armbands themselves.

Status: False.

Variations:

In some versions of the legend, after the Germans announce their intention to implement the order, King Christian responds by stating that he too will wear the armband. The Germans then rescind (or never implement) the order.

A popular version of the legend has King Christian sporting an armband as he makes his daily morning horseback ride through the streets of Copenhagen, explaining to citizens that he wears the Star of David as a demonstration of the principle that all Danes are equal. The Germans then cancel the order.

In a version similar to the one above, non-Jewish Danes respond to their king's example by wearing the armband as well, thus preventing the Germans from identifying Jewish citizens and rendering the order ineffective.
Origins: The legend of Denmark's King Christian X and his wearing of the yellow star is our most stirring example of non-violent opposition to evil: ordinary citizens (following the example of a courageous leader) defy their military overlords by selflessly putting themselves in harm's way to prevent the persecution of a defenseless minority. If only more people exhibited such moral fortitude nowadays, we reason, the world would be a much better place. Perhaps if more people had exhibited such moral courage back then, we think, the Holocaust might never have happened.

Although the Danes did undertake heroic efforts to shelter their Jews and help them escape from the Nazis, there is no real-life example of the actions described by this legend. Danish citizens never wore the yellow badge, nor did King Christian ever threaten to don it himself. In fact, Danish Jews never wore the yellow badge either (except for the few who were finally deported to concentration camps), nor did German officials ever issue an order requiring Danish Jews to display it.

We will assume everyone is familiar with the systematic persecution of Jews instituted in Germany after Adolph Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and the subsequent imposition of laws requiring Jewish-owned shops to be identified as such with prominent signs; passports and ration cards held by Jews to be stamped with the letter 'J'; and Jewish concentration camp inmates to wear yellow-and-red six-pointed stars. (Surprisingly, it was not until late 1941 that the display on clothing of a yellow Star of David with the word 'Jude' printed on it by Jews was mandated by law in Germany.) Denmark entered the tragic saga on the morning of 9 April 1940, when German troops overran the country and an ultimatum was delivered: if Denmark offered no resistance, Germany would respect Danish political independence. The Danish government and monarch, with no real options, quickly capitulated, and the five-year long occupation of Denmark began.

As usual, the occupied engaged in symbolic gestures of defiance against their occupiers, such as wearing four coins tied together with red and white ribbons in their buttonholes. (Red and white are the Danish colors, and four coins totalling nine ore represented the date of the occupation, April 9.) Tales of King Christian's snubbing of Hitler and the Nazis (some true and some apocryphal) began to circulate. When Hitler sent a letter of congratulations to King Christian X on the latter's 70th birthday in September 1942, the monarch's brief response ("My best thanks") was taken as an insult by Hitler, who recalled and replaced the German ambassador in Denmark. A Swedish newspaper cartoon (possibly the origin of this legend) depicted the monarch talking with the former Danish prime minster, who asks him, "What are we going to do, Your Majesty, if Scavenius makes all the Jews wear yellow stars?" (Erik Scavenius was the Danish foreign minister who became prime minister at the insistence of the Germans after the Danish government resigned in 1943.) The king responds by asserting, "We'll all have to wear yellow stars."

Matters came to a head in Denmark during the summer of 1943 when strikes and other overt resistance activities against the Germans resulted in a demand from Hitler that the Danish government declare a state of emergency. The government refused to comply, resigning in protest, and the German commander-in-chief, Hermann von Hanneken, imposed martial law. The arrest and deportation of Danish Jews was finally ordered and carried out on 2 October 1943, but by then nearly all the Jews in Copenhagen had already been warned and gone into hiding while government officials secretly negotiated an agreement with Sweden to receive them. Only 284 of an estimated 7,000 Jews in the area were rounded up, and over the next several weeks most of them made their precarious way to Sweden on fishing boats, private vessels, and any other type of floating craft that could undertake the journey. Fewer than 500 Danish Jews were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, and nearly 90% of them survived to return to Denmark after the war. (Only these few hundred Danes who were sent to Theresienstadt were made to wear yellow stars identifying them as Jews.)

Although this legend may not be true in its specifics, it was certainly true enough in spirit. The rescue of several thousand Danish Jews was accomplished through the efforts of "thousands of policemen, government officials, physicians, and persons of all walks of life." The efforts to save Danish Jews may not have had the flair of the "yellow star" legend, and they may not have required quite so many citizens to visibly oppose an occupying army, but those who were rescued undoubtedly preferred substance to style.