Great Danes

The article, “Sweden’s role in Nazi defeat of Norway is laid bare” (6 June) rightly recommends Espen Eidum’s book Blodspåret (Blood Tracks), based, as it is, on meticulous research.

However, there is another side to the story. I spent the war in Sweden because my father, Fettesian Ronald Bruce Turnbull, was posted there by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to work out of the British Legation in Stockholm. From 1940 Norway had become the responsibility of Malcolm Munthe and my father (who arrived in Stockholm in 1941) would cover Denmark.

The neutrality of Sweden did not prevent important achievements such as the transfer of the atom scientist Niels Bohr from Denmark through Sweden to Dyce near Aberdeen and so to London and California, or the retrieval of the details of a German flying bomb which the Danish Resistance obtained from the crash site on the Danish island of Bjornholm.

In No Small Achievement (2002) Professor Knud JV Jespersen comprehensively traces the role of SOE and the Danish Resistance in which the presence of SOE in Sweden was crucial.

Michael T R B Turnbull

Orchard Court

Longniddry, East Lothian