Shortly two sergeants from a secret signals unit nearby arrived at the cottage. They too had heard Hess’s plane overhead and seen him descending by parachute. One, Daniel McBride, began questioning Hess, who again asked to be taken to Dungavel House; he was, he said, a friend of the Duke of Hamilton and had an important message for him.73 At this point Alan Starling heard another plane overhead, and going outside saw it was a Boulton Paul Defiant74 – evidently the plane that had been sent up from RAF Ayr to intercept the intruder.
It is extraordinary, and possibly significant, that in addition to signing ‘Alfred Horn’ on a scrap of paper McBride produced and again fetching out the photographs of Ilse and young Buz from his pocket to show him, Hess gave McBride the Iron Cross he had won in the First World War.75 Perhaps he wanted him to show it to Hamilton as proof of his arrival. Whatever the reason, a bond seems to have formed between them. After the war McBride sent Hess Christmas cards every year, corresponded with Ilse and Wolf Rüdiger Hess and joined their campaign to free Hess from Spandau jail. It appears he believed Hess had been unfairly treated and it seems reasonable to ascribe this to what he had learned at his signals unit that night, for two years after the war, while working in the Far East, he wrote an article for the Hong Kong Telegraph stating ‘with confidence’ that high-ranking government officials were aware of Hess’s coming.76
As noted earlier, Bevin had learned he was coming and had informed Churchill;77 and it is claimed, although without documentary proof, that both the Air Ministry and RAF Fighter Command had been informed that Hess had taken off in an Me 110 and was heading northwards.78 Knowledge of his mission in the highest quarters is surely the key to the otherwise baffling inaction of RAF intelligence officers from nearby bases that night. Although Hess told everyone he met, including Home Guard, RAF and ROC officers, that he wanted to talk to the Duke of Hamilton and had an important message for him, although the two nearest RAF bases, Ayr and Abbotsinch, were informed of this and Hamilton at RAF Turnhouse was rung at least four times and told that the German pilot had something important to tell him, no intelligence officer was sent to interview Hess until the following morning.
The official reports of the units involved are telling: thus at 00.36 on the 11th, almost an hour and a half after the first reports of the crashed plane, Clyde Sub-Area heard from the unit originally detailed to escort the enemy pilot into detention, ‘airman injured, thought to be serious, wanting to talk.’79 This was passed to the duty officer at Glasgow Area Command, Captain A.G. White:
… as the man had asked for the Duke of Hamilton I thought he might be a profitable subject for immediate interrogation by the RAF Interrogation Officer … I accordingly rang TURNHOUSE aerodrome. I got through at once and asked for Ft. Lt. Benson [RAF Interrogation Officer]. I was told that Ft. Lt. Benson was not available but that I was speaking to Ops ‘B’ Turnhouse and that the Duty Pilot was actually speaking. I narrated the same story to him and was informed that they had the story already both from the Observer Corps and from Ayr Aerodrome. He added that Ft. Lt. Benson had already been informed of the story and that he would leave for Glasgow at 08.30 hs. the following morning.
I told the Duty Pilot that it seems to me that this was not an ordinary case and again enquired if Ft. Lt. Benson was aware of the whole facts. The Duty Pilot replied that I had told him nothing new.80
This response from Turnhouse was contrary to normal procedure. Standing orders required enemy airmen to be interrogated as soon as possible, when they might still be in shock and sufficiently disorientated to give something away. The sequence of contacts for enemy airmen was laid down in instructions as ‘unit making capture – RAF Interrogation Officer – Command Cage’.81 Captain White had done his best in this regard. Turnhouse had rebuffed him. Reviewing the case later, Colonel R. Firebrace of Scottish Area Intelligence commented:
If it is true that the RAF authorities were informed before 0100/11 that an important prisoner was anxious to make a statement to them, their laxity is most unfortunate as the prisoner might have had urgent operational information to divulge. It can only be assumed that the decision to do nothing until the morning was taken by Wing Commander the Duke of Hamilton and that in consequence Flt/Lt Benson could not go post haste to the spot as he should normally have done.82
Glasgow Area Headquarters, Scottish Command, took up the question of the interrogation officer’s late arrival to interview the prisoner, but if a report was ever issued, it has not been released.83
* * *
After his remarkable flight and providential landing, the hospitable reception in the farm cottage and his expectation that McBride might take him or his message for Hamilton to Dungavel, Hess experienced only helpless frustration. A group from the local Home Guard with other men collected on the way burst into the cottage led by a lieutenant in civilian clothes who had evidently been drinking and was brandishing a large First World War Webley pistol. Hess, who assumed he was a civil official, asked to be taken to Hamilton at Dungavel. Instead the lieutenant marched him outside, as Hess described it later for Ilse, ‘pushing his gigantic revolver into my back, his tense finger on the trigger as he stumbled, belching merrily and continuously.’84
He was bundled into a car and driven a few miles to a Girl Guides hut in the next village of Busby, which served as headquarters for ‘C’ Company, 3rd Battalion Renfrewshire Home Guard. Ordered into a side room by the pistol-waving lieutenant, he lay down on the bare floor in a yoga relaxation position he often practised. It was a quarter to midnight,85 almost six hours since he had taken off from Augsburg, and he was weary. His spirits were revived when ‘a really nice little Tommy’86 offered him a bottle of milk he had brought for his own night watch.
After a wait due to jammed telephone lines he was driven to battalion headquarters in a Scout hut about a mile up the road in Giffnock, arriving at fourteen minutes past midnight.87 Again he asked to see Hamilton; again, it seemed to him, his request fell on deaf ears – but the message was being passed up the command chain, often embellished. The RAF had been informed, and it was about this time that Captain White at Glasgow Area Command was told that the prisoner had called to see the Duke of Hamilton, whom he (the prisoner) knew very well.88 Another report suggested the prisoner was so seriously injured he might not last the night.89 White, as noted, rang RAF Turnhouse to alert the intelligence officer, Flight Lieutenant Benson.
Meanwhile two police officers arrived at the Giffnock Scout hut and assisted in searching Hess, placing everything found in his pockets on a small table and itemising it in a list.90 According to James Leasor’s pioneer study of Hess’s mission, the contents included an envelope addressed to the Duke of Hamilton, a hypodermic syringe, a small, flat box of homeopathic drugs, a gold watch, the Leica camera he had borrowed from Ilse, photographs of himself and his son and Ilse and his son, and the visiting cards of Professor Karl Haushofer and Albrecht Haushofer, the latter sewn inside his uniform jacket.91 To this list must be added ten 100 Reichsmark notes, a small electric torch and a safety razor blade, reported in later investigations,92 and also the maps he had strapped to his thighs. However, it is not known exactly what he had with him because the inventory drawn up at Giffnock and another made as he was transferred between different units that night are missing from the reports to which they were originally attached.93
The absence of both inventories cannot be coincidence. They have been removed from the file, and it is hard to think of any reason other than that they bore testimony to a letter from Hess to Hamilton – as described by Leasor – for this too is missing from the open files. Since Hess is known from a variety of sources to have written one or more letters to Hamilton, rendered into good English by Ernst Bohle, and the letter or letters have never come to light, it is evidently the content rather than the existence of a letter that had to be suppressed.
Other arrivals at the Scout hut included a group captain from RAF Abbotsinch; a wing c
ommander and a squadron leader from RAF Ayr; an RAF intelligence officer whose base was not recorded, and who seems to have taken no part in interrogating Hess;94 the assistant group observer from Glasgow ROC Centre, Major Graham Donald, together with a young pilot home on leave, named Malcolm, whom Donald had met while viewing the wreckage of Hess’s plane;95 and a Pole named Roman Battaglia who worked at the Polish Consulate in Glasgow and was called in by the police as a German speaker to help with the interrogation of the prisoner.96 Asked later about his interrogation, Battaglia gave a scathing account of conditions in the Scout hut:
of the 15 or 20 persons present [Home Guards and others] there seemed to be no official interrogator … he [Battaglia] was asked to put questions from all corners of the room, some of which he considered offensive and which he refused to ask. No accurate record … was made of the interrogation, and people wandered round the room inspecting the prisoner and his belongings at their leisure.97
Despite this, Battaglia said, Hess remained completely calm throughout, only occasionally showing slight distress by leaning forward and sinking his head in his hands. Asked why he had come, Hess said once again that he had a message for the Duke of Hamilton.
‘What is this message about?’
‘It is in the highest interest of the British Air Force.’ Hess refused to say more.98
At one point, Major Donald of the ROC took up the questioning. Hess told him he had landed deliberately with ‘a vital secret message for the Duke of Hamilton’, and showing him Dungavel House marked on his map, said he hoped he was close to it.99 Donald had spent some time in Munich during the 1920s and as he scrutinised the prisoner he thought he recognised him. Hess recounted the incident afterwards in a letter to Ilse:
A Major among them [RAF officers] stared at me for a long time and then said suddenly in faultless German that I looked exactly like Rudolf Hess … I replied innocently it was no news to me that I looked like Hess – a fact which had embarrassed me often enough.100
Donald then produced a sheaf of small aircraft identification cards, selected one showing an Me 110 and asked Hess to sign his name. He obliged, writing, ‘Alfred Horn 10.5.1941’. Donald was nevertheless confident he was looking at Hess, claiming afterwards that he had tried to convince the others around him, but only provoked shouts of incredulous laughter. This is not mentioned in either Battaglia’s or Hess’s accounts, and the Home Guard battalion commander took the suggestion sufficiently seriously to ask the prisoner for identification. Hess had already been searched but managed to produce from the breast pocket of his tunic an envelope addressed to Hauptmann Alfred Horn with a Munich postmark. This seemed to settle it. Nevertheless, the battalion commander recognised that this was no ordinary pilot, ‘particularly as it was obvious that his uniform was new and of particularly good quality, and had not seen service.’101
Donald returned to his ROC Centre at about 2.00 a.m. by his own account, immediately rang RAF Turnhouse and told the duty officer to advise the Wing Commander (Hamilton) that the German pilot had an important message for him, and that he was none other than Rudolf Hess.102 This is no doubt true, since Donald stated his conviction of the airman’s real identity in his official report written later the same day, the 11th,103 long before the country at large learned of the Deputy Führer’s arrival in Scotland.
It was two hours from Hess’s arrival at the Scout hut before a military unit arrived to escort him to Maryhill Barracks, Paisley,104 where he was to be detained for the night. The reasons for the long wait are probably connected with the late hour and busy telephone lines. A senior Home Guard officer, Major Barrie, drove Hess, with his possessions and the lieutenant and two men of the escort, to Maryhill Barracks, arriving at 2.30 a.m. No preparations had been made. They found the duty officer sitting up in bed in pyjamas. After persuading him to dress, Barrie drove Hess to the barracks hospital where the medical officer attended to his ankle and provided a sleeping draught, which Hess had requested. An empty room was found, a bed moved in and Hess was left to sleep under guard.105
Returning to the duty officer, Barrie handed over Hess’s personal possessions ‘and obtained the accompanying receipt’106 – no longer attached to his report in The National Archives. It was by then after 4.00 a.m. Before leaving, Barrie heard the duty officer take a call from Area Command to say that the intelligence officer would not see the prisoner until 09.00, ‘which, in my opinion, Barrie wrote, ‘was too late as it gave the prisoner time to collect himself and make up some story.’107
‘ARE YOU REALLY HESS?’
On the morning of 10 May, it will be recalled, Hamilton had written to Group Captain D.L. Blackford of Air Intelligence agreeing to regard the proposal to send him to Lisbon to contact Albrecht Haushofer as in abeyance.108 That afternoon he had flown a Hurricane to RAF Drem and practised a dogfight with his second in command over the Firth of Forth.109 This does not appear in the ORB of No. 603 Squadron, but non-operational flights were not necessarily recorded.
That evening, as Hess’s Me 110 was plotted in over the coast and across the country as ‘Raid 42J’, Hamilton was on duty at the controller’s desk in the operations room at RAF Turnhouse. He rejected the ROC identification of an Me 110 because, as he put it in his subsequent report for Churchill, ‘this fighter type of aircraft had only once before been seen as far north as Northumberland (on August 15), and without extra fuel tanks could not make return flight.’110
A young Wren named Nancy Mary Goodall on the naval liaison desk in the ops. room that night remembers the incident. Her father, Squadron Leader W. Geoffrey Moore, was Deputy Commandant of the Scottish Command of the ROC and when the ROC identification was dismissed she felt the honour of the Corps at stake and asked why the plane could not be an Me 110. ‘Because it wouldn’t have enough fuel to get home,’ was the reply, as if to a child.111
The ROC reports were also disbelieved at Fighter Command headquarters, Bentley Priory, and for the same reason. It was assumed instead that the plane was a Dornier 17 light bomber,112 which also had twin engines and tail fins, and the plot of Raid 42J was passed to No. 13 Group headquarters, from thence to sector operations rooms, including Turnhouse, as hostile. So it is a question, as noted earlier, why Hamilton treated the aircraft as unidentified and refused permission for anti-aircraft fire or air-raid warnings when it entered the Clyde area controlled by Turnhouse.
Some time after learning the plane had crashed, Hamilton handed over to the night duty officer and went to bed in his house near the base. Later he was recalled to the operations room to take a message about the German pilot. Nancy Goodall remembers this as being about half an hour to an hour after the report of the plane crashing, and recalls the general amazement: ‘The Duke took the call from the telephone on the Controller’s desk, and appeared to be wearing his uniform over his pyjamas. He looked a very worried man.’113 She retains a distinct image of him ‘standing up, hunched over the phone, holding it in his shoulder, and looking extremely horrified’. Everyone remarked on his evident worry. The word went around that he had been called to speak to the German pilot.
Hamilton had at least four calls about the German pilot that night, from the ROC, from the controller at RAF Ayr who had been notified by the local police, from Captain White at Area Command and finally from Major Donald, by his reckoning at about 2.00 a.m., to tell him that the prisoner was Rudolf Hess. It remains unclear which of these calls Nancy Goodall witnessed.
Years later Hamilton’s wife, then the Dowager Duchess, remembered him being called from his bed twice by messages about the German pilot.114 That Nancy Goodall remembered only one occasion may be because she had gone off duty by the time of the second call, or alternatively because the second call was a message passed to him in his house by the duty controller.
Nancy Goodall’s watch probably ended at midnight; she cannot be certain, but afterwards she had a twenty-minute drive to her father’s rented house at Cramond, ne
ar Turnhouse, and it was dark when she arrived. Her father was up and she told him about the German pilot who had asked to speak to the CO. He said he was going to breach confidence; swearing her to absolute secrecy, he told her that the pilot was Rudolf Hess.115
If her watch ended at midnight, as the details of her recollection suggest, this would have been about 00.30 on the 11th, long before Donald had recognised Hess and made his call to Hamilton. But even if it was later and Donald had also phoned Nancy’s father, why should he have spoken to her of ‘breaching confidence’ on the unsupported word of one of his Observer Corps officers?
According to the Duchess’s recollection, when Hamilton was woken for the second time ‘in the middle of the night’, he said to her, ‘I’ll have to go, it’s to do with the crashed plane.’ He left and she did not see him again until about four o’clock that afternoon.116
It is less than 50 miles from RAF Turnhouse to Maryhill Barracks in Paisley, where Hess was taken that morning at about 2.30. If Hamilton and his intelligence officer, Flight Lieutenant Benson, had driven straight there after the last call from Donald at about 2.00 a.m. they would have arrived before Major Barrie and the military escort had left. The roads would have been empty of traffic. Yet Major Barrie heard the duty officer taking a call to say that the interrogating officer would arrive at 9.00 a.m.117
It is impossible to know how Hamilton and Benson spent their time between about 2.00 a.m. and 9.00 a.m. when they were due to arrive at Maryhill – or 10.00 a.m. when by Hamilton’s account they did arrive. On top of the mystery of why Hamilton did not send Benson immediately to interrogate this prisoner who wanted to talk, this is a further mystery.
Hess, Hitler and Churchill Page 23
