The fifty-seven-year-old Danish physicist had been smuggled out of Copenhagen aboard a motor launch on the night of September 29, 1943. Arriving safely on the Swedish coast, he was taken to Stockholm—where German agents plotted his assassination. On October 5, British airmen sent to his rescue helped Bohr into the bomb bay of an unmarked British Mosquito bomber. When the plywood aircraft approached an altitude of 20,000 feet, the pilot instructed Bohr to don the oxygen mask built into his leather helmet. But Bohr failed to hear the instructions—he later said the helmet was too small for his
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