The Abominable: A Novel

30.

In the second week of May in 1941—with America still seven months away from Pearl Harbor and our entering the war that had been going on in Europe for the better part of two years—I was climbing in the Grand Tetons with an American physician-climber friend, Charlie, and his newlywed wife, Dorcas (our joint campsite at Jenny Lake was Charlie and Dorcas’s honeymoon suite), when I read that Rudolf Hess, the so-called Deputy Führer and second most powerful man in Germany’s new Third Reich after Hitler (and also the beetle-browed silent man who’d been at our dining table at the Bierhall in Munich, sitting next to SS Sturmbannführer Bruno Sigl), had stolen a German Air Force plane and flown to England, bailing out over Scotland.

The facts in the newspaper were sketchy and seemed to make no sense.

Hess’s Messerschmitt Bf 110D had been specially rigged out with long-distance drop tanks, but he’d flown alone. Picked up by British radar and with Spitfires and other fighter aircraft vectored to intercept him, Hess had flown very low—evading the radar and eluding his pursuers—but had seemed to be flying an illogical course over Scotland: low over Kilmarnock, climbing up and over the Firth of Clyde, then banking inland again, ending up over Fenwick Moor. British interception radar—still top-secret apparatus at that point—then reported that the solo fighter had crashed somewhere south of Glasgow, but not before Rudolf Hess had parachuted from the plane, coming down in the village of Eaglesham, where he injured his ankle on landing.

Hess was taken into custody and thrown into some British prison and that’s all we learned about his strange flight to England that spring of 1941.

After Pearl Harbor, my climber friend Charlie enlisted to become an Army Air Force doctor. Being 38 years old, and having no special skills other than lots of travel and some mountain climbing under my belt, I ended up being rejected by several branches of the service but finally accepted into a very ad hoc American intelligence group with the alphabet soup name of OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. There I was taught Greek and eventually parachuted onto Greek islands with names like Cephalonia, Thassos, Kos, Spetses, and—my favorite—Hydra. There my modest job was to help organize and arm the partisans and to create as much mischief for the German occupiers as we could.

I’m ashamed to say that “creating mischief” mostly consisted of laying ambushes for German generals or other high-level officers and assassinating them. I’m both ashamed and proud to say that I became rather good at that job.

So it was in the OSS during the war that I stumbled upon more information, still classified then (as it still is now), about Rudolf Hess’s seemingly insane 1941 solo flight to England.

When he was first questioned by officers of the Royal Observer Corps in Giffnock after his capture near Eaglesham, Hess insisted that he had a “secret and vital message from the Führer, Adolf Hitler,” but that he—Hess—would only speak to the Duke of Hamilton.

Hess was taken to the Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where he did indeed get a private audience with the Duke of Hamilton. Immediately after that conversation, the duke was flown by the RAF to Kidlington near Oxford, then driven to London, where he met secretly with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Ditchley Park.

Remember that this was during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain. The British Army had been soundly defeated during its retreat to Dunkirk and was literally driven into the sea, leaving most of its heavy weapons and far too many dead Brits on the beaches behind it. With France totally defeated and occupied by early summer of 1940, Germany gathered more than 2,400 barges to bring German troops and panzer divisions across the Channel. The battle plan called for hundreds of thousands of German soldiers to invade England, with Fallschirmjägern—paratroopers—landing near Brighton and Dover just hours before destroyer- and Luftwaffe-protected barges and specialized landing craft were to be launched from Boulogne to Eastbourne, Calais to Folkestone, Cherbourg to Lyme Regis, Le Havre to Ventnor and Brighton, and Dunkirk and Ostend to Ramsgate.

But, it was whispered, Winston Churchill had sent some private ultimatum to Adolf Hitler that spring through the former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated so that he could marry the American divorcée Mrs. Simpson. By 1940 the ex-king was being called the Duke of Windsor, and he and the ever-sulking duchess lived in the Bahamas—and I knew through the OSS that English intelligence services and Churchill’s government so distrusted the couple’s pro-Nazi tendencies that they hadn’t allowed them to stay in France or Spain right before the war broke out. It was understood by all intelligence agencies (including our various American agencies) that, even stowed away in the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor and his circle of friends and official retinue were lousy with German intelligence agents from half a dozen Nazi services and departments.

The rumor I heard in 1943—on the island of Thesprotia, where we were busy targeting Italian, Bulgarian, and German officers for assassination, as well as rubbing out the Cham Albanians and the Greek National Socialist Party (the Elliniko Ethniko Sosialistiko Komma), who were aiding and abetting the occupiers—was that Churchill had sent evidence to Hitler, via the Dupes of Windsor in the Bahamas, that His Majesty’s Government had some very incriminating and embarrassing photographs of young Adolf, but were willing to refrain from publishing them to the world in exchange for the Führer’s simply calling off the imminent and otherwise inevitable invasion of England.

According to my OSS link—who’d just finished a tour in London, Cuba, and the Bahamas, and who knew everyone involved in this elaborate operation (including, he said, the American writer Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, who, while playing spy himself, had stumbled upon some of the negotiations and was under close scrutiny by the FBI, OSS, and U.S. Naval Intelligence)—Hitler had been so panicked by this threat that he’d secretly dispatched his Deputy Führer and ultimate lackey, Rudolf Hess, to England on this secret and definitely one-way trip. Hitler’s offer, reported my OSS control officer, was simple: no publication of the photos (whatever they might contain), no invasion of England.

No one was sure exactly how Churchill’s acceptance of those terms was transmitted to Berlin—not through the Duke or Duchess of Windsor in the Bahamas this time, was all my friend and OSS boss knew—but transmitted it was. Late that summer, Unternehmen Seelöwe, Operation Sea Lion—with all of Hitler’s elaborate and fully ramped-up plans and logistics and new weapons for the invasion of England by sea and air—was canceled. The official explanation from His Majesty’s Government was that the Germans had backed down after Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe had failed to crush the British air defenses, even though German air superiority over the Channel was very close to being established and destruction of RAF aerodromes was almost complete when Hitler gave the stand-down order. Thus the Battle of Britain in the air, and not the existence of seven incriminating photographs from 1921 along with seven negatives delivered from Austria by way of China, Tibet, and India, has always been given the credit for saving England from German invasion.

In the cave in the mountains of my little Greek island in 1943, I smiled and I wept a little and I lifted my cup of Basbayannis Plomari Ouzo—an anise-flavored drink that I usually despised—in honor of thirty brave Sherpas, a certain brave and very young Austrian Jew named Kurt Meyer, Lord Percival Bromley, Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort, Dr. Sushant Rabindranath Pasang, Richard Davis Deacon, and Jean-Claude Clairoux, four of whom had been the best friends I had ever had or ever would have.