War stories
Evidence that the Royal Air Force colluded with their German enemies in the most secret air mission of the Second World War has been discovered in the Czech Republic.
The personal log books of some of the 87 Czechoslovak fighter pilots who escaped the 1939 German occupation of their country to fly RAF planes in the Battle of Britain were hidden behind the Iron Curtain for over forty years.
Two of the pilots who survived the war, Sgt Vaclav ‘Felix’ Bauman and Sgt Leopold ‘Polda’ Srom, have left personal log books recording a flight in the early evening of May 10, 1941, when they were scrambled in a pair of Hurricanes to attack a single German plane over Southern Scotland. Just as they were closing in for the kill, with a Messerchmitt Bf110 fighter-bomber trapped in their gunsights, RAF Fighter Command inexplicably called off their attack. Both pilots remained convinced for the rest of their lives that they were pulled off this certain ‘kill’ to allow Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, to land unharmed in Scotland on his famous but still unexplained peace flight to Britain, six weeks before the Germans invaded Russia.
Yet outside the pilots’ log books there exists no official record of their mission. In post-war Communist Czechoslovakia, many ex-RAF pilots were picked by the STB secret police and jailed or drafted down the mines. Stories of their exploits could not be published. But Felix and Polda outlived the Communists regime and although Polda was killed in a civilian plane crash in the 1980s, both men were able to give interviews to the Prague military archivist, Jiri Rajlich, before they died. They told him they were a second away from killing Rudolf Hess over Scotland.
Their story was confirmed this year by a wartime RAF mechanic who was on their 245 Squadron base at Aldergrove in Northern Ireland when the two Czechs were scrambled in a pair of Hurricanes late on May 10, 1941. Entirely unprompted, the former mechanic remembered them as ‘the two guys who could have shot down Rudolf Hess – if they hadn’t been recalled.’
A very big RAF secret
The Czech researcher Jiri Rajlich’s paperback Stihaci Pilot [Fighter Pilot], published in Prague, has blown the gaff on a very big RAF secret. Based closely on the pilots’ log books and their interviews, Rajlich’s book describes how the pair were scrambled from Northern Ireland, ordered to climb to eight thousand feet and vectored to intercept a very fast twin-engined German plane forty miles away over Scottish waters.
The fact that the pilots’ logs differ from the official RAF version of Hess’s flight was spotted in 1998 by the Czech book translator, Pavel Kruta, who remembers, ‘As I was translating into Czech a recent book by the British surgeon Hugh Thomas on the Hess Mystery, I realised that Bauman and Srom and their log books had contradicted the official story.’
The Czech pilots said they were closing in, one on each side of the doomed Messerschmitt Bf110, when they were unexpectedly radioed to break off the attack by their remote controller, ‘Castle’, who had been vectoring them into an interception.
In Rajlich’s book, Bauman recounted, in English, the radio traffic he could still remember from the last seconds of his attack:
‘Hallo Felix. Castle calling. Stop action and return. Confirm.’
‘This is perhaps not possible.’
‘Felix, return. I repeat. Stop action and return. Confirm.’
‘Hallo Castle. Felix answering. He is just in shooting range…’
‘Sorry Felix, old boy. It is not possible. You must return. Now.’
‘I don’t bloody know. Then why did we chase him?’
Felix’s question has not yet been answered.
His Squadron Leader, J.W.C. Simpson, DFC and bar, appears to have demanded an explanation from Fighter Command that would satisfy the two angry Czechs when they landed back at Aldergrove. When they touched down, Bauman remembered the Squadron Leader telling him:
‘I rang Group and I requested an explanation of that… ehm, unusual procedure. I was told that during your pursuit you crossed the border of our sector. You were therefore recalled. Our neighbours should have taken over but when the German suddenly changed his altitude, they lost him. I admit that it’s very strange, but that’s what they really told me.’
According to Rajlich’s book:
‘The excitement reached its peak when, after dark, a liaison Avro Anson landed with several strange RAF officers on board. They immediately summoned both Czech sergeants. The sergeants were separately subjected to intensive interrogation. The officers asked for impossible details and urged both pilots to recall the German plane’s markings and in particular whether they saw both a pilot and a gunner on the plane. The Czechs couldn’t help much and “Polda” lost his patience with the officers, but buttoned his lip when he noticed their coolness and high rank.’
Speculation raged for a couple of days until a copy of the Glasgow Daily Record landed in the 245 Squadron mess, carrying the headline RUDOLF HESS IN GLASGOW – OFFICIAL. The ‘Hess plane’, far outside the normal range of a Bf110, had been seconds from incineration at the hands of Polda and Felix, well before its final crash in fields near Paisley.
Within a month, Squadron Leader Simpson had been replaced at 245 Squadron by an improbably-named successor – Squadron Leader W. F. B. Blackadder – and the Aldergrove station records appear simultaneously ‘sanitised’.
Bauman was posted ‘missing’ in June 1942, shot down by a FW190 in a raid on Le Havre. He survived, but with wounds so serious that the Germans repatriated him via Sweden in 1944. At the end of the war Polda, with eight Battle of Britain kills, and the wounded Felix, disappeared behind the Iron Curtain for 40 years. Bauman died in 1989 but left his log book with his daughter.
Sanitisation
RAF records in the Public Record Office, recently examined by the British military historian Tony Marczan, show that Srom and Bauman were serving with 245 at Aldergrove in May 1941. After comparing the PRO records with Bauman’s log, Marczan said,
‘The 245 squadron ops record for May 10 does not record a scramble late in the day by Bauman and Srom. And according to 245’s May ’41 summary of pilot hours, Srom did not fly on May 10.
The Aldergrove station summaries also record, punctiliously, a number of flying visits by VIPs, including a visit by the notorious appeaser, Lord Londonderry, but they do not show an RAF Anson arriving that night with senior officers aboard, as recounted by Bauman and Srom.
I am alarmed that the squadron summaries do not match the apparently meticulous log book of Felix Bauman, which was countersigned by his commanding officer.’
From his home in Clacton, Essex, former Leading Aircraftsman David ‘Mac’ McCormack answered an advertisement for 245 Squadron veterans, which had been placed by Tony Marczan in the RAF Associations’s newspaper Air Mail. Without knowing the purpose of the investigation, ‘Mac’ MacCormack, who was a mechanic with 245 Squadron in 1941, telephoned Marczan. As soon as Marczan mentioned a scramble by two Czech pilots on 10 May 1941, ‘Mac’ quickly said, ‘I know what you’re on about. They’re the two guys that could have shot down Rudolf Hess, if they hadn’t been recalled.’
In February 1999, he said,
‘I remember the incident well. I must have been in the crew room or a radio truck when the two aircaft from “B” Flight were scrambled. The next thing we heard was Jerry was coming over from Scotland and then we heard he’d turned back. Our pilots were recalled, when they could have shot him down. It was a couple of days before we found out who was in the plane. I’ve often wondered if they sent ours up to head him back after he’d overshot Scotland. That’s where he was heading, towards the Duke of Hamilton who was at Turnhouse, in charge of all our fighters in Scotland.’
Polda and Felix were not the only Battle of Britain fighter pilots to have flown unrecorded patrols during Hess’s long flight from Southern Germany. As soon as the Czechs had peeled away, two Spitfires from the crack 602 City of Glasgow Squadron were scrambled from their base in Scotland. ‘Pedro’ Hanbury and the New Zealand ace, ‘Al’ Deere, were vectored in to shoot down the German intruder. In his autobiography, Deere said the pair of 602 Spitfires got close to the Bf110, without making contact.
But 602’s official historian, Douglas McRoberts says the records of 602, just like the official records of 245 Squadron, show no record of pilots scrambling after the Hess plane. Even though the personal log books of Deere and Hanbury record a chase after a lone intruder late on May 10, the official records of 602 and those at their base airfields of Prestwick and Heathfield show no scramble by Deere and Hanbury. Again, base records disagree with the personal log books of pilots. In an interview with McRoberts for a 1984 BBC documentary, Al Deere talked about the scramble, by referring to his log book and suggesting the reason he failed to kill the 110 was that the German pilot had probably glimpsed the two Spitfires and dived into cloud. Like the Czech pilots, it was two days before 602 discovered they had missed what Deere described later as ‘probably the most prized fighter pilot target of the entire war’.
In an interview for Dutch television, McRoberts says he thinks an official document ‘weeder’ wiped all records of the 602 scramble. He says Deere was amazed to learn there was no longer any official record of his memorable mission.
In the official RAF report to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the air force claimed that only one Defiant, a slow night fighter, got near the Bf110, before the fast intruder, logged as ‘Raid 42’, broke away for its final turn back into Scotland. Mysteriously, the official station records do not even agree with the RAF report to Churchill, since they record the Defiant’s flight that night as a ‘routine patrol’ with nothing unusual to report.
Enter Hauptman Horn
The German pilot who emerged from the wreck of the Bf110 gave his name as Hauptmann Alfred Horn. Faced by a Scottish farm labourer, he asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, who had been in the control room at RAF Turnhouse, commanding all RAF fighter defences in Southern Scotland, when the Bf110 had crossed the Northumberland coast. The man the pilot asked to see was the man charged with intercepting German intruders into Scotland.
In his 1991 biography, Hess: Flight for the Fuhrer, author Peter Padfield noted that the Duke had been piloting a Hurricane out over the Firth of Forth on the afternoon of May 10. Padfield discovered that this flight, too, had not been recorded at RAF Turnhouse.
By next day, when he met the Duke, the pilot had revealed his identity as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, severely embarrassing the Duke and the British government. Things looked so suspicious that the Duke of Hamilton later in the war got RAF permission to sue the Communist Daily Worker newspaper for suggesting he was part of a pro-Nazi peace plot. MI6, who had in 1940 intercepted a letter to the Duke of Hamilton, sent from Berlin via Lisbon, had exonerated the Duke of being implicated in peace plotting.
At a 1941 dinner in the Kremlin, Stalin was asked by Nikita Khruschev, his eventual successor, what had been behind the Hess Flight. Stalin asked Khruschev to give his own view first and when Khrushchev suggested the flight had been part of an attempted deal between German Nazis and a secret British peace party, Stalin agreed. But Winston Churchill refused to deal with the man called Hess and sent the pilot straight to the Tower of London.
Hitler ranted when he was told about the Hess flight, although some historians, noting that Hitler was up at the exceptionally early time for him of 07h 30 that morning and dressed in full uniform, have suggested he knew of Hess’s astonishing flight plan and was faking his paroxysms of rage.
The doppelganger
Other historians, led by the British bullet wound surgeon Hugh Thomas, claim that Churchill suspected, or secretly knew, that the strange rambling man who had trudged from the wreck of the Bf110 in Scotland was not in fact Hess, but a ‘double’, substituted by the SS after the murder of Hess. This theory draws some support from the discovery of yet another flight blotted from RAF records in the month of May 1941.
Ten days after the Hess plane crashed in Scotland, a German Ju88 bomber briefly landed, with full RAF approval, at a British airfield. The Junkers was ‘torched in’ to make an arranged night landing on an RAF base near Lincoln and allow the German crew to drop a package on the runway before flying back unmolested to their base in occupied Denmark. Airmen Schmitt and Rosenberger, two anti-Nazis who were in the crew of the Ju88 that night, defected to Britain a year later and delivered a secret German night-fighter to the RAF. Speaking apparently freely after the war they said they still had no idea what had been in the parcel they dropped on the runway.
A new TV documentary, being directed by the Dutch film-maker Karel Hille, ‘Rudolf Hess: The Appalling Truth’, is believed to link the delivery of the parcel to the release one day later of the ‘prisoner known as Rudolf Hess’ from the Tower of London, on Churchill’s orders. This film reveals that German pilots were scrambled that night to shoot down the Deputy Fuhrer but, like the RAF, they were not trying very hard.
A Luftwaffe view
As one of the world’s most successful fighter pilots, Lt. Gen. ‘Dolfo’ Galland survived the Second World War against all odds and became the first commander of the post-war Federal German air force. He had fought in biplanes in the Spanish Civil War and in 1945 led attacks on American high-level bombers in the revolutionary Me 262 jet fighter. In his last TV interview, a few months before his death, he said:
‘That afternoon I was rung up by Goering who was staying near Berlin. I remember the order from him verbatim: “Scramble immediately with your whole squadron.”
And I replied to him, “We haven’t any intruders.”
He repeated, “You are not going to intercept intruders. You must intercept an outward flight. The Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess has gone mad and is on his way to England in a Messerschmitt 110.”
I replied to Goering, “In twenty minutes we’ll be in late twilight. There will be hardly be visibility for spotting one single 110 with Hess on board. At this time of the day there will lots of Messerchmitt night fighters in the air, on radio-tuning flights, calibrating and co-ordinating their radio sets. It will be dangerous for me to say a 110 has to be shot down, one of our own night fighters, a 110 night fighter entering your sector.”
To that, Goering said, “Find a way to do it. The order stands.”
I then rang my three commanders… one after another and said, “Let’s just send out a pair.” That means fly off two planes and make a 15 minute flight in the area of their airfields and then let them land again. This is exactly what happened… After the flight, I had telephoned Goering again and said, “The squadron has landed, it’s dark. As expected we could not achieve our mission.”
Goering replied, “It really doesn’t matter. We already know that Hess has taken another route that doesn’t pass through your sector.”
I then thanked him for that and I thought about it. My first thought was that Goering always wanted to please Hitler with the measures that he had taken. He’d been particularly keen to use my squadron. I was well known to Hitler. He knew my squadron and he had even visited us at Christmas. My squadron counted as one of the best over the Channel and he had put this squadron up to catch Hess and that was practically everything that could have been done. He wanted therefore to justify himself, by the measures he’d taken.
“In any case”, he said, “It’s not really important any more. The matter has been hushed up. Hess has taken another route.”
And then the conversation closed.
I am also of this opinion, in spite of a great deal of reading about this business and in spite of a great deal of suspicion, I always come back to the same view, that although we cannot prove it, the probability is high that Hitler and Goering knew nothing in advance about this escape flight. The flight path, which he actually took would have been normally beyond the range of that plane – and Hess was no test pilot!’