by Martin Allen
‘What I said,’ an unrepentant Bracken retorted, ‘was that Dalton was the biggest bloodiest shit I’ve ever met!’
Churchill, Lockhart recorded, far from admonishing his faithful friend, had ‘roared with laughter’.9
Once the Messrs HHHH operation concluded, Churchill would let Bracken off the leash altogether. Hugh Dalton had much to fear from Brendan Bracken.
As the meeting at Woburn Abbey was concluding, six hundred miles to the east two German gentlemen were discussing much the same subject. Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg had arrived at Augsburg earlier that morning, courtesy of the special flight laid on for him by the Deputy-Führer, and he and Hess had held a lengthy discussion at Hess’s substantial villa on Harthauser Strasse in the suburb of Harlaching. Now, at midday, these two leading men of the Reich also sat down to a private lunch. Exactly what they discussed is not known, and no papers concerning this meeting have surfaced since the end of the war. However, Hess’s household staff noticed that something was definitely up, and were given ‘strict instructions not to disturb the men’s meal’.10
It is, however, possible to hypothesise with a fair degree of accuracy what Hess and Rosenberg discussed on that particular Saturday in May 1941. In the preceding week, Hess’s time had been almost entirely taken up with his preparations to depart for an important meeting with a British emissary close to King George VI. It will also be recalled that during the mid-1930s, contacts between Rosenberg’s Aussenpolitisches Amt and the British monarchy were conducted through the Duke of Kent as intermediary. It is therefore likely that Hess requested this last meeting with Rosenberg to ask his advice about the Duke – whether, for example, there was any particular ploy that could be employed to gain the psychological upper hand, or whether the Duke might be favourably disposed towards National Socialism. These were questions that Rosenberg would have been eminently qualified to answer. That Hess opted to conduct his talk with Rosenberg over an early lunch is also a strong indicator that he was not asking for in-depth or complicated political advice, but merely wanted some final pointers for his imminent mission to Britain.
Intriguingly, after leaving Hess, Rosenberg did not return to Augsburg for a flight back to Berlin. Instead, he ordered his driver to take him the 120 miles from Munich to Berchtesgaden, where Adolf Hitler had arrived forty-eight hours before. It is not known whether Rosenberg took a message to Hitler from Hess, or whether, concerned by Hess’s intimations that he was about to fly to Britain, he decided to consult with his Führer immediately. Rosenberg may already have been aware of the secret negotiations, for he had worked closely with Albrecht Haushofer on occasion. Thus it may be that, like Haushofer, Rosenberg had believed Ernst Bohle was the man expected by the British, and had travelled swiftly to the Berghof to warn Hitler against allowing the Deputy-Führer to place himself in such jeopardy.
Whatever the reason for Rosenberg’s journey to the Berghof that Saturday afternoon, it made not one iota of difference; nor did Hess seem to be at all bothered by the thought that Rosenberg might reveal all to the Führer. This therefore suggests that Rosenberg travelled to the Berghof with Hess’s sanction, perhaps carrying a last private communication from the Deputy-Führer before the big event took place.
Rudolf Hess appeared completely relaxed and at peace with himself after Rosenberg’s departure. Knowing he had a long flight and night ahead of him, he retired to bed for a few hours’ rest, getting up again in mid-afternoon. He then dressed quietly in a brand-new Luftwaffe uniform, and went to see his wife and small child before departing.
Hess found Ilse glancing idly through a copy of The Pilot’s Book of Everest, the Duke of Hamilton’s account of flying over the world’s highest mountain several years before. It seems unlikely to have been coincidental that she was reading this particular book on this of all days. It is possible that Hess himself had been looking at it prior to retiring for his nap, left it out, and Ilse had subsequently picked it up.
Taking the book from his wife, Hess turned to the front and read the inscription: ‘With all good wishes and the hope that out of personal friendship a real and lasting understanding may grow between our two countries.’ It was signed ‘English friends’. Flicking through to a plate of the Duke of Hamilton, Hess paused contemplatively for a few seconds before remarking to his wife, ‘He’s very good-looking …’11
Hess and Ilse then took a little light tea together, chatting about family matters and friends. Then, towards the end of their meal, Ilse asked her husband when he would be returning. It was an unpremeditated, God-tempting question, the answer to which would prove horribly inaccurate, for Hess answered: ‘I don’t know exactly – perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not, but I’ll certainly be back by Monday evening.’
‘As early as tomorrow? Or Monday?’ Ilse responded in surprise. ‘I don’t believe it – you won’t be back so quickly!’12
If everything was as Hess and Hitler imagined it to be, and the Deputy-Führer would soon be secretly in the company of a band of powerful Britons united in a peace faction, he would indeed return in just a few days.
Finally Hess looked in on his young son ‘Buzz’ to say a lighthearted goodbye, before departing for the forty-mile journey to Augsburg in the company of his Adjutant, Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Pintsch, orderly Joseph Platser, and personal detective Franz Lutz.13 Before arriving at Augsburg, the fatalist within Hess would determine he had one last task he wished to perform before setting off on his historic mission. Ordering his driver to stop the car at a roadside copse, Hess took himself off for a brief solitary walk through the trees, alone with his thoughts in the German countryside. Had he but known it, he would never again have the luxury of privacy and the right to wander his homeland. His life as a free man had less than six hours left to run.
At 5.45 p.m. exactly, Hess’s Me-110, registration VJ-OQ, thundered down the main runway at the Augsburg aerodrome, its twin Daimler-Benz supercharged engines thrusting out their full 1395 horsepower as the aircraft, heavily laden with twin drop-tanks carrying an extra four hundred gallons of fuel, struggled to lift off the ground. First the tail rose, and then as the aircraft reached the necessary speed for the wings to develop lift, the wheels of Hess’s plane lumbered off the runway. The aircraft quickly picked up speed and began climbing gently. Those below watched as the undercarriage retracted hydraulically into the engine nacelles, and the hinged doors swung shut behind them. Hess banked his aircraft onto a north-westerly heading, and prepared to switch on the sophisticated guidance systems that would zero in on a German radio beacon stationed near Den Helder on the coast of Holland,14 broadcasting at a frequency that would guide him towards the North Sea.
Enclosed within an aircraft prepared to the peak of performance, Hess knew he had a long flight ahead of him. He also knew that his powerful twin-engined fighter was totally unprotected, for its nose-mounted twin 20mm Oerlikon cannons and quadruple 7.9mm machine-guns were unarmed and packed with grease. He was about to travel across war-torn western Europe, out over the North Sea, and thence into British – enemy – airspace totally unarmed, as befitted a peace envoy who hoped to end a bitter war.
Ahead of Germany’s Deputy-Führer lav an appointment with the Duke of Kent and, he may have believed, the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Steward of the Royal Household. Had Hess expected the Duke of Hamilton to be present at this extraordinary meeting – as would be natural given the use of Dungavel House – he may have been looking forward to a conversation with the man who had flown over Everest, one flying enthusiast to another. However, in this, as in almost everything else, he was to be disappointed.
The whole of SO1’s Messrs HHHH operation seems to have been marked by a string of coincidences: Violet Roberts’ nephew being a Director of SO1; Albrecht Haushofer’s friendship with the Duke of Hamilton; the Duke of Kent–de Ropp/Rosenberg and the Duke of Buccleuch–Ernst Bohle relationships. However, if these apparent coincidences are examined on the basis that the highly accomplished men of SO1 were capable of co-ordina
ting their operation in such a manner as to make use of a variety of beneficial situations, then what at first appears coincidental may be reassembled to make a great deal more sense. Indeed, the evidence clearly reveals that the Dukes of Kent, Buccleuch and Hamilton were drawn into the operation precisely because of their past connections. It is clear that SO1 consistently introduced, developed and manipulated elements perceived as useful to Messrs HHHH. There was calculated intelligence behind these developments, and extensive use was made of past associations to further the operation’s chances of success. Another coincidence was about to occur.
As Rudolf Hess’s aircraft streaked in from the North Sea towards its destination in western Lanarkshire, it would pass over the most north-easterly corner of England, thirty miles north of Newcastle, before crossing almost immediately into the Lowlands of Scotland. That section of British airspace fell under the control of No. 13 (Fighter) Group’s headquarters at Ouston, near Newcastle upon Tyne. Some ninety miles to the north-east of Ouston, the Duke of Hamilton, in the plot room of RAF Turnhouse near Edinburgh, undoubtedly watched as a WAAF teller began to plot the lone aircraft designated ‘42J’ as it thundered in from the North Sea, crossed the coast near Cheviot, and headed inland. Two Spitfires from RAF Acklington, already on patrol out over the Farne Islands, were ordered by Ouston to engage the mysterious aircraft. A third Spitfire was then scrambled from Acklington to assist them, but none managed to make contact, and the lone Me-110, which had by now ducked under radar cover, continued unmolested on its journey to the Scottish Borders.
Whether the Duke of Hamilton had been contacted by SO1 on the arrival of Albrecht Haushofer’s letter in Britain in the autumn of 1940 is not known, although MI5 did dispatch a memorandum to the Foreign Office, dated 22 November 1940, enquiring whether there were any objections to sending the letter on to the Duke.15 After some consideration of the matter – which may well have included a referral to Lord Halifax, who was still Foreign Secretary at this time – the Foreign Office responded on 7 December that they had no objections.16 However, they commented, the Duke should receive only a copy of the letter and not the original. It can therefore be seen that Hamilton’s involvement in Messrs HHHH, albeit on the periphery, had begun as far back as the autumn of 1940.
On 26 February 1941 Hamilton received a surprise summons from a Group Captain Stammers of Air Intelligence, who requested a meeting at the Air Ministry in Whitehall. The two men duly met, and discussed the Albrecht Haushofer correspondence. On 28 March Stammers again wrote to Hamilton, this time to rebuke him for not sending him Haushofer’s letter of July 1939 (which the Duke had taken to Churchill, Halifax and Chamberlain).17 If Hamilton’s involvement had remained this minimal, it might be possible to explain away many of his actions on the night of Saturday, 10 May 1941 after the arrival of Rudolf Hess on British soil. As it was, however, his involvement in the days ahead was to be raised to a much higher level.
Bearing in mind that the Duke of Hamilton, as a Wing Commander serving with Fighter Command, was serving with the RAF in an operational capacity, he must have been surprised to receive a second telegram from Air Intelligence on 18 April, ordering him to return to Whitehall on 25 April for another meeting.18 That date would become deeply entwined within all the plotting and subterfuge now taking place to rope the Duke of Kent into SO1’s machinations.
Having flown down to London from RAF Turnhouse, the Duke of Hamilton found himself ushered into a meeting at the Air Ministry in Whitehall with Group Captain Blackford of RAF Intelligence and Major ‘Tar’ Robertson of MI5’s double-cross organisation, known as 20 (or XX) Committee.
20 Committee was a highly dangerous organ of Intelligence, particularly if one was an Axis agent, and exercised few scruples in its task of achieving ultimate victory over Germany. It had the responsibility of turning captured Axis spies into double-agents, and its operating parameters were both very simple and utterly ruthless. If the captured enemy agent co-operated, then he or she survived; if the agent did not co-operate, he or she very quickly had an appointment with an executioner’s bullet or the gallows. 20 Committee was not an organisation to be trifled with, and ‘Tar’ Robertson’s involvement in this affair was a very serious development indeed.
This does not mean that 20 Committee was involved in SOl’s plot to undermine Hitler and Hess, but it does indicate that the Messrs HHHH operation, first bandied about in the summer of 1940 as a loose concept for a deception campaign, now ran up the chain of command not only from the experts in subterfuge and political warfare at SO1 to Rex Leeper, Anthony Eden and on to Churchill, but downward from Churchill, through his Air Minister Archibald Sinclair (hence his presence at Ditchley Park on 10–11 May 1941) to a selected few in Air Intelligence and also to the top man at MI5’s 20 Committee, Major ‘Tar’ Robinson. Add to this the fact that the operation had grown to encompass real-life actors on the stage of deception – eminent marionettes such as Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Halifax, the Duke of Kent and now it seemed the Duke of Hamilton as well – many of whom were pretending to be members of a peace faction poised to oust Churchill from his premiership, and it is clear the scope and range of the operation was very considerable indeed.
The Duke of Hamilton’s 25 April meeting at the Air Ministry indicated that SO1 had now called upon the services of ‘Tar’ Robertson, for the Duke, to his great discomfort, was asked by Blackford and Robertson if he would be prepared to travel to Portugal for a secret meeting in Lisbon with his old friend Albrecht Haushofer. This request, little more than a fortnight before Rudolf Hess came winging his way across the North Sea, must have emanated from the very heart of SO1’s Messrs HHHH operation.
To Blackford and Robertson’s surprise they found the Duke distinctly unenthusiastic. His response to their exciting proposal was that he would go, but only ‘If I am ordered to.’
‘We don’t like to order people to do these sort of jobs,’ the Intelligence men replied in an effort to be reasonable. ‘We like volunteers.’19
However, the Duke of Hamilton was not about to be hustled into such a mission. His loose association with SO1 and their use of his home at Dungavel House was one thing, but to become a pawn in British Intelligence’s game of high intrigue was quite another. Several days later, having sought the counsel of his old and trusted friend Lord Eustace Percy (who also just happened to be an old acquaintance of Albrecht Haushofer), the Duke responded to Group Captain Blackford. Lord Percy had advised that Hamilton should agree to participate only if ordered to do so, and that was the stance Hamilton adopted. He would consent to go to Portugal, he announced, but only after discussions with the Ambassador to Lisbon and Sir Alexander Cadogan.
There are distinct echoes here of the terms under which the Duke of Kent had agreed to participate in SO1’s project, insisting that he too be briefed by either Eden or Cadogan. Reconciled to this annoying ducal caution, Group Captain Blackford wrote to Hamilton on Saturday, 3 May, saying that he understood his position, and that he had discussed the matter with Air Commodore Boyle, the head of Air Intelligence. It appears, however, that by the weekend preceding the German emissary’s arrival something must have changed, for Blackford’s eagerness to dispatch the Duke of Hamilton to Lisbon for surreptitious talks with Albrecht Haushofer had suddenly cooled. He wrote to the Duke that Boyle ‘agrees with you that this might not be the right time to open up a discussion, the nature of which may be misinterpreted’.20
These matters may have passed through the Duke of Hamilton’s mind as he watched WAAF tellers plotting the course of enemy raid 42J across the large multi-coloured map of northern Britain at 10.30 p.m. on Saturday, 10 May 1941. In his pre-war days as a flying enthusiast, the Duke had ordered an airstrip to be constructed in the grounds of Dungavel House, near what had formerly been the ducal hunt’s kennels. These had been converted into an office and maintenance buildings capable of housing several aircraft. With the coming of war the airstrip had been uprated for occasional use by the Air Training Corps, and by the
late spring of 1940 Dungavel had become an emergency landing strip for aircraft unable to reach their own bases due to damage or mechanical failure. In consequence of this new role the runway had been uprated for night use by the fitting of landing lights.
As the plot of raid 42J progressed before the eyes of those in the Operations Room at RAF Turnhouse, certain men already gathered at Dungavel House, Woburn Abbey and Ditchley Park must have been contemplating their own roles in the extremely complicated affair that had developed from Leeper’s first approach to Churchill the previous August to set in motion a deception on a hitherto unpractised scale. If it worked, Hitler would feel confident enough to turn on Russia, and it would be only a matter of time before the haemorrhaging of whole armies into the endless Russian expanse would prove the Nazis’ undoing. If it failed, Britain might well cease to exist. The next twenty-four hours could be among the most important (albeit forever kept secret) of the war, a day that would see Britain securing her survival until the two big players – Russia and the United States – could be sucked into the fray.
The only complication – and it was to be a devastating one – was that everyone was expecting the approaching German aircraft to be carrying the head of the Auslandsorganisation, Gauleiter Ernst Bohle.
Seated in his Messerschmitt’s noisy cockpit, Rudolf Hess would have had little time to ponder the events of the past ten months. He may have had the luxury of contemplative thought during his almost three-hour flight over the North Sea, where he had adopted a holding pattern from 8.52 to 9.52 p.m. awaiting dusk to make his approach; but as he had neared the east coast of Britain, he would have had to give his full concentration to flying at nearly four hundred mph in the dark, at heights of only fifty to a hundred feet. This would have been a hair-raising challenge for the most accomplished and highly trained flier, and Hess was a middle-aged politician with a passion for flying, not an operational Luftwaffe pilot. He may have had an almost new aircraft tuned to the peak of performance, a far superior machine to what most Luftwaffe pilots could ever hope to get their hands on, but Hess’s flight was extraordinarily difficult, and flying at low altitude in the dark it would have taxed any pilot’s skills to ensure that he did not plough into one of the many hills the Me-110 was negotiating at breakneck speed.