Raid 42
If the Hess peace mission to Britain in May 1941 had never happened, nobody would have dared invent it. Who would dare suppose that the Deputy Führer of the Nazi Reich would fly solo to Britain at the height of the war to parachute onto a Scottish moor with a letter for a British aristocrat? Both Hitler and Churchill claimed he was mad, and although Hess lived until his nineties before his mysterious death in Spandau prison, he never fully explained his mission.
The Hess mission has thus been fertile ground for historical novelists, and Hurley’s book is the latest contribution. It is a good spy thriller with MI5 officer Tom Moncrieff as the central character. There are lots of secret meetings with shady go-betweens in neutral capitals, ruthless inter-service rivalries (MI6 are more dangerous than the Abwehr) and the Russians are eager to scupper any Anglo-German peace deal. Tom Montcrieff has a complex love life, and we have some ‘other side of the hill’ passages about the pilot who taught Hess to fly his new long range fighter. In the end it is all an anti-climax, as it must be without altering history. Unless of course an author should dare to imagine that the mission did change history in ways we never knew.
