The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club

For the Danes, bicycles are a common item that come to represent resistance.“Our bicycles were our weapons” (21), Knud says, comparing them to RAF’s planes and John Wayne’s horse. The boys pride themselves on their “fast and daring” (22) riding and rely on their bicycles for striking quickly on their sabotage missions. For the RAF and Churchill Clubs, which consist of untrained teenagers, bicycles represent the most advanced equipment available to them at the outset of their sabotage work. Bicycles are also significant as a widely available sabotage tool in Denmark, where much of the population uses bikes for transportation. Indeed, Hoose writes: “The RAF Club may have been the first saboteurs in Denmark to strike from bicycles, but they were far from the last” (22). Bicycle-based sabotage increased in Denmark until Hitler ordered the confiscation of unsold bicycles in 1944.

The Churchill club graduates from vandalism, wire-cutting, and petty arson to stealing of weapons. Knud first steals a pistol, then a rifle and a machine gun. Eventually, the boys store up a large cache of guns, grenades, and bayonets. Each successive acquisition represents a big step for the club, granting its members a sense of legitimacy. The weapons eventually indict the boys in court after they are arrested, as they make the club seem more threatening than a group of childish pranksters. They also, however, repeatedly highlight the boys’ inexperience and innocence. As the cache of weapons grows, the boys are forced to consider using them to kill. They not only do not know how to operate them, they also cannot yet bring themselves to take a life, and instead imagine handing them over to their British liberators. As it is, the stolen guns serve a mostly symbolic purpose for them.