Fellow followers of this great thread, it has slipped to page two of the Military Forum which will not please Danny at all! While he remains incommunicado, awaiting the Kiss of Life to his beloved laptop, I suggest that we might contemplate the aviation "What If's" of WW2, though I will gladly defer to any other better suggestions in order to keep the ball rolling. So it is with a certain amount of diffidence that I offer my great preoccupation with those dangerous years and ask, what the hell was the Deputy Fuhrer of Germany doing bailing out of a long range Bf110 over Eaglesham Moor on the night of 10th May 1941?
Wiki suggests that he was intending a landing at the airstrip of Dungavel House, home of the Duke of Hamilton then serving as an RAF Wing Commander at RAF Turnhouse, and where he was on duty that night. Other sources suggest that the airstrip was lit for some 15 minutes and that there was a party of senior officers there, including some Poles, who rapidly dispersed when their expected visitor failed to land.
Hess was captured, identified himself as Hauptman Alfred Horn and asked to speak to Hamilton. No record of that interview is known of. Hamilton himself reported personally to Churchill who simply said "Hess or no Hess, I'm off to see the Marx Brothers" at a film screening. Hitler seemed unsurprised when informed of Hess's flight but quickly switched to plan B and disowned his action as that of a madman. Stalin saw it as proof that the British were part of the anti Soviet machinations that culminated in Operation Barbarossa. Certainly lead figures in the British establishment were pro Nazi and fervently anti Communist, including the ex-King. Was Hamilton, a pre-war aviator of some note having overflown Mt Everest in a Westland PV-3 in 1933, a part of that clique? He probably met Hess when visiting Germany for the 1936 Olympic Games as the guest of Hermann Goering, though always denied it.
After the war Hess was tried along with the other Nazi elite at Nurnberg. The Soviets wanted him hung, in the event he served 40 years in Spandau prison, where he died as the result of "the only horizontal ligature ever recorded in a suicide" by someone who suspected that he was murdered.
The "what if" is to my mind if he had successfully landed at Dungavel, what was then to happen....?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-765607.html