S5 Ep4: The Duke of Kent Part Two: The Cover Up
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Can a cover-up be so thorough that the entire event gets lost in the folds of history? Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. This is part two of a two-part episode about Prince George, a.k.a. the Duke of Kent, a.k.a. the man who died in a spectacular plane crash during an apparent secret military mission in the Scottish Highlands.

If you didn't listen to last week's episode, you have some splaining to do. But also, go back and listen to that one now. Otherwise, you'll be like, who are all these jabronis and why should I care?

Honestly, I can't answer that second question for you. I can't tell you what to care or not care about, but I can tell you this is a super obscure and interesting trip into some all but forgotten history involving the British royal family, the Nazis, the British military, and the magic of a good PR team to make it all go away. ♪

To recap, Prince George, who was also for some reason the Duke of Kent, had been something of a bad boy for years, gallivanting around the British Empire and consorting with all manner of people from playwright Noel Coward, with whom he was rumored to have had a long affair, to Tallulah Bankhead and Gloria Swanson, and the American banking heiress Kiki Preston, who got him into hard drugs. He likely fathered at least one child who was swiftly given away. That's

Eventually, Georgie straightened up, got married to a princess, became a father and an upstanding member of the British military. On August 25th, 1942, George was sent on a secretive mission in a military aircraft flying from Scotland to a location north of there with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. The plane crashed in the Scottish Highlands, presumably killing all 15 souls aboard.

While family members were alerted to the tragedy, random looky-loos were busy tromping through the wreckage, gathering souvenirs. Until finally, hours after the plane went down, the site was cordoned off and people began to go, "What the hell happened here?" Late in the morning of the day after the crash, a battered young man, looking like he'd been ridden hard and put away wet, precariously jostled a garden gate and walked across the garden to the door of a small cottage.

The woman who answered the door heard him say he'd been in an airplane crash. She gave him a glass of milk and tried to bandage his burned hands before calling for the doctor and the authorities.

Flight Sergeant Andrew Jack, rear gunner, had been thrown free of the fire. In shock and having lost consciousness at first, he would tell those whom he met early on that he'd awoken to free himself from the wreckage around him and make his way to the burning hulk to look to see if anyone needed help. He found what he thought was a still-breathing Sergeant Leonard Sweet, who appeared trapped. Jack burnt his hands trying to get Sweet free, but failed.

He could do no more, he said, and wandered away, finally taking off the clothes that rubbed against his wounds, stripping down to his skivvies, and lay down and prepared to die. He slept through the night, and after hearing cars moving up to where the wreck was, he found a road and followed it until he saw the cottage. Ask me why he didn't just wait there for one of those cars to bring him to the nearest hospital? Who knows?

Once seen by the doctor and moved to the local hospital, he spoke freely about the accident to doctors, nurses, and assorted visitors. His family had been sent a second telegram with the good news, which arrived only minutes after the first that had informed them of his death. They came to Scotland three days later. Jack told his sister that the Duke had been in the pilot's seat and that he had moved him after the crash to the outer reaches to keep him away from the burning aviation fuel.

When Jack was speaking to his sister, two British officers interrupted, took him aside, and had him sign something. It was likely a copy of the Official Secrets Act, swearing him to not divulge anything about the accident. Because from that point forward, Jack ceased giving any details of it to anyone. ♪

At the government's official court of inquiry of the crash, Jack gave a straightforward account of the 30-minute flight, indicating that nothing was amiss or irregular about it. He did not speak about what he had done after he was thrown free and had regained consciousness. That's because he wasn't asked. Instead, his statement to the court was written and limited. He wasn't even in attendance. His words read more like a press statement.

Meant to establish the cause of the accident and thus who or what was responsible for it, the inquiry, by law, had a strict protocol that required the court to explore every possibility and interview all witnesses who could lend any information to help the investigation reach its conclusion. In fact, the way this inquiry was handled would become a source for all the conspiracy theories that followed.

that it began on August 28, 1942, three days after the crash and was wrapped up three days later on September 1, 1942, does not suggest to anyone that it was exhaustive. The debris field was still smoking when the inquiry began. There is little sign that a reconstruction of the event was ever undertaken on the site.

Neither were the individual intact parts that remained on the ground ever examined for signs of failure.

Author and historian M.S. Morgan seemed to think something shady had definitely gone on. An excerpt from the Flyleaf promoting his book, The Death of Prince George, Duke of Kent, 1942, A New Investigation to Find the Truth, says this, quote,

But hard evidence has been difficult to find since 1942. In fact, the Court of Inquiry report couldn't be sourced in the UK and had to be obtained from the Australian archives. Witness statements and any possible technical assessment have also disappeared and are not even contained in the Australian file.

So where are they, and why have the documents for the second worst fatal air crash up to that period of time gone missing? In addition, where is the Duke's diary and personal papers for the period? Were any plans drawn of the site and the position of the casualties? Were postmortems carried out, and by whom? End quote. All good questions. If there were no photos taken of the site, how could anyone confirm how the bodies were situated?

If there are no postmortems, that means that no one specified how each of the individual crew members died. The sole exception was the Duke's head wound, which many who visited the site had reported to the press. But what of the other crew members? How did they die? And pray tell, why did the Air Ministry, on returning their remains to their families, give explicit directions that their coffins were not to be unsealed or opened for any reason?

Maybe the injuries were just so horrible? Or maybe it was more nefarious than that. Maybe they died, as a few have suggested, in a bomb blast that was engineered by the government to get rid of this troublesome brother of a former king who had been pretty chummy with Hitler. Don't forget, after Albert had abdicated the throne to marry an American, he had tea with Hitler, and there was a picture of him giving Hitler the Nazi salute.

Of course, George was also the brother of the current king who was, at least publicly, against the Nazis. But conspiracy theorists tend to be masters of cherry-picking, only focusing on the facts that back up their narrative and discarding the ones that don't. So, for some reason, it seems Prince George may have been guilty by association just because his brother Albert was a Class A douchebag.

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Biographer Morgan, who did the most serious and most recent investigation into the cause of the 1942 crash, left no stone unturned. He petitioned through the British Freedom of Information Act to find detailed evidence about the accident.

All of them, the United Kingdom's National Archives, the RAF Museum, the RAF Air Historical Branch, the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the Defense Accident Investigation Board and the Air Accident Investigation Board, failed to provide anything that would help him. Quote, the only available documents in Britain are squadron operations record books,

So let me get this right. Nobody knows nothing. Even though documents and evidence pertaining to other crashes of a similar but less newsworthy nature still exist in the 80-year-old archives.

The swiftness of the inquiry got the attention of some at the time, especially since the Duke hadn't even been laid to rest when it began. The few court of inquiry papers found in Australia, Flight Lieutenant Frank Goyen and Pilot Officer Sidney W. Smith were both Australians, indicate that the testimony elicited from experts tended to focus on pilot error, specifically naming the pilot as Flight Lieutenant Goyen.

Before being silenced, Jack had said he'd seen Wing Commander Mosley, Goyen's boss, seated in the cockpit before he headed back to the turret. He also had spoken of Prince George being in the cockpit and dead among the other pilots when he decided to move the likely already deceased prince to greater safety. None of that was addressed. The inquiry decided Goyen, the most experienced pilot on the plane, was to blame. Open and shut.

This was wartime. Life goes on. And you know what's odd about that, besides the obvious? No one in the royal family or in the British government complained that the inquiry had been so slapdash. They hadn't even commented on the fact that the men chosen to be on this specific court of inquiry were underlings, at best, one of whom had never participated in an inquiry before. Makes you wonder...

Especially when you know that for weeks, even years, the press and other reports to government entities would maintain there were 15 bodies retrieved in the crash. At first, it was probably a mistake, because all of the preliminary notices of deaths to the king and the prime minister had assumed all 15 aboard had died. But Jack had lived. He had walked away. Even after his fate was known, the local papers still held that 15 bodies were found.

So was there an extra body dead up there that no one accounted for? If so, whose was it? Much later, Arthur Baker, a former British airman, spoke to a reporter from the Mail on Sunday newspaper shortly before his death, claiming he'd been up at the site very soon after the crash and had seen a woman's body among the dead. He verified it, he said, by unbuttoning her blouse. He was told by his superior at the time to never speak of it.

And what of the scads of foreign cash flying in the breeze? One source indicated that the kroner were Swedish and thus useless in Iceland.

What then was in Sweden? Was it some kind of ransom? Was the Duke expected to see someone, maybe in the German monarchy or military, to discuss a separate peace deal of some kind so that Russia would be Hitler's only concern and that Stalin and his communist friends who had killed the Tsar would be more easily defeated?

Would the Duke have even been the right guy for this kind of work? Could he have been co-opted by those opposed to Churchill's fight to the death policy to do this? His past life, which I regaled you with in last week's episode, made it mighty easy for people to speculate the wildest things.

In Charles Higgins' book, The Duchess of Windsor, The Secret Life, the author suggested that British intelligence, so, you know, working for Churchill, was very concerned that the Duke lacked discretion and, since the country was at war, this could not stand.

Higgum wrote that the special operations executive had the plane tampered with, thus ensuring its demise. Plausible? Well, yeah. A lot of this was a natural outgrowth of something that had happened 15 months earlier.

Rudolf Hess, an eccentric dude, was the deputy fuhrer under Hitler and, in mid-1940, had been led to believe that King George VI and the members of the British aristocracy wanted to negotiate for peace, circumventing Churchill. I don't know how he'd been led to believe this or by whom, and frankly, knowing what we know about Hess, it could have easily been voices coming out of paintings or trees or something. His grasp on reality was slippery.

For whatever reason, Hess had gotten it into his head that the Duke of Hamilton, who had a home in Scotland, was adamantly anti-Churchill. So, naturally, he decided to try to get in with the royal family through the Duke of Hamilton. On May 10th, 1941, after taking months of necessary pilot training, map reading, and practice, he added auxiliary fuel tanks to a Messerschmitt and took off toward the Scottish coast.

A tad lost, he was spotted and trailed by English pursuit planes. Low on fuel, he parachuted some 12 miles from Dungaville House, where the Duke had only recently been in residence. It got messy. Short version, Hess did get to speak to Churchill and told him that Hitler couldn't win fighting on two fronts, and the plan was for Germany to attack Russia in the coming days. Churchill locked him away in the Tower of London.

Hitler publicly and roundly disavowed Hess and his actions completely, said the man had gone completely bonkers, and then gave orders to have him shot on sight if he ever tried to set foot on German soil again.

Some historians question that, asking, of course, how Hess could have done or dared to have done this without Hitler's OK. Hess was able to spend hours away from his duties to train. Then he was able to commandeer a plane, refuel it somewhere along the way and fly virtually undetected until he was just miles off the Scottish coast.

Others note that Hitler had distanced himself from Hess, who was showing some severe signs of mental instability. How unstable? Author Norman Goda, writing in Tales from Spandau, Nazi Criminals and the Cold War, wrote that while in Scotland, Hess said he had discovered a secret force that controlled the mind of Churchill, filling him with hate and the mind of Hitler, making him make bad decisions.

Where was the Duke of Kent in all this chicanery?

A solid effort has been made by historians to find him on the day Hess parachuted into Scotland in 1941. Come to find out, he was in Scotland. However, despite copious record-keeping about the whereabouts and schedules of everybody tasked with royal duties, there is no existing diary, journal, calendar, or document in the Royal Family's archives, the Air Ministry, or the Royal Air Force that shows where he was that evening. ♪

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The missing piece of the Duke's itinerary in May 1941 could be cleared up, according to Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince and Stephen Pryor, authors of Double Standards, the Rudolph Hess cover-up. They maintain that an employee at the Duke of Hamilton's Dungable House told them that the Duke of Kent, a.k.a. Prince George, was present that night.

When the author challenged her memory by saying, actually, it was the Duke of Hamilton who'd been confirmed with the RAF in Edinburgh that night, the employee, quote, promptly replied, not the Duke of Hamilton, the Duke of Kent. Fast forward to August 1942.

Was the Duke of Kent set to retrieve Hess, who some claim could have been housed at the Duke of Portland's estate or at Loch Moore, just north of the crash site, and get him to Sweden for some kind of peace talks? All of this, of course, behind Churchill's back. But Hess was not on the plane. He would later be shipped to Nuremberg after the war to face charges of war criminality. So no, he wasn't one of the 15 dead some say they saw.

Maybe they miscounted. Maybe they counted the unconscious Andrew Jack as a goner. Maybe the Duke of Kent was involved in the 1941 Hess effort. Hell, who knows?

But you have to remember that the rest of the crew aboard that seaplane were not just subjects of the king, they were in service to their country, which was run by the duly elected prime minister, who had just spent two years moving heaven and earth to beat back the Nazis who had tried to land on their precious island. I'm not sure anyone could have thought they'd have stayed quiet if treason was on the menu. ♪

Okay, let's briefly review. Bad Boy turned devoted royal prince George, the Duke of Kent, the younger brother of the King of England, was just 39 when he met his unfortunate death while in the service of his country in the middle of the Second World War. His body was left overnight covered at Eagle's Rock, 50 yards away from the main crash site. He was taken to St. George's Chapel in Windsor, where he was initially laid in the vaults below it.

The king called for four weeks of mourning. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor did not return to England for the funeral. 26 years later, the Duke's body was removed and buried in the royal burial ground on the Frogmore Estate, directly behind Queen Victoria's mausoleum. This occurred on the eve of the funeral for his wife, who would rest eternally beside him.

So no, the royal family was not embarrassed by him, which they most certainly were of his older brother, King Edward VIII, who abdicated and then cast about for the rest of his life as a tattered regal pariah. What is clear is that the Duke of Kent's legacy—a hero, a traitor, or just a guy on a whim to play poker in Iceland—somehow got lost in history.

The tremendous haste to clean up and investigate the accident, the silencing of the witnesses, the removal of any documents from the prying eyes of the press or future historians, suggest something was amiss here. But what?

In Morgan's book, he arrives at a conclusion which seems simple but entirely plausible: that the pilot, whoever he was, was using the wrong compass, the one that set him on a course that was 13 degrees to the east of where the flight path indicated.

Once the plane was in the low cloud layer, the flight crew had no visibility and trusted their compass bearings and instruments. At some point, Lieutenant Jack had said the last words he remembered from the pilot, a voice he did not recognize by the way, were, let's go down and have a look. The rate of descent was shallow, from 2,000 to 3,000 feet to about 900 feet. The pilot could have expected to descend out of the clouds at around 1,000 feet.

That means they might never have cleared the cloud layer above the Scottish Highland floor. The airspeed appeared to have been holding firm when it hit the ground, then somersaulting with such force that the rear turret flew off and ahead of the impact point.

Morgan is particularly concerned with who was piloting this high-profile passenger to Iceland. Did the wing commander take control to show his own proficiency? Had the Duke, as a courtesy due him, taken the pilot's seat and known to detest flying in clouds, overplay his hand and overestimate his abilities? If he hated flying in clouds, why would he ask to fly? Had the pilots argued about any of it?

There is no way to know. But Morgan suspects that what is now referred to as cross-cockpit authority gradient surely contributed to the tragedy. In other words, too many cooks in the kitchen. ♪

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She said that her uncle believed an unnamed passenger on the flight was the Duke's boyfriend, and that he had no doubt that the Royal was piloting the airboat when it crashed. That Flight Lieutenant Goyen was not at the helm. Quote,

End quote.

Harris, who was 69 when she told her uncle's story, said that in 1942 he had questioned whether the flight should take off at all, given the weather. He had told her that the plane was headed to Iceland, where the Duke was to inspect Allied forces there. Interestingly, her uncle had told the family that there were actually 16 on board that day. The Duke had three in his personal entourage, he confirmed. He did not say if one was female or male.

She continued, quote, End quote.

I somehow doubt the prince was gallivanting around the RAF in makeup. Something tells me shenanigans like that wouldn't have been tolerated. But it's also hard for me to imagine a conspiracy to kill the prince, with at least 14 others as collateral damage, just because of something like that? Anyway, Jack's niece said Jack had wanted the truth to come out.

Lieutenant Andrew Jack, when asked about it publicly, held to the story he told the court of inquiry. That is, he said nothing of importance. But his wife agreed with his niece that the story of that day did not sit well with him. Lieutenant Andrew Jack drank to excess for the rest of his life. It could be he was trying to forget whatever it was he was made to keep secret all those years.

He died young in 1978 from cirrhosis of the liver, in some ways making him the final victim of that crash all those years before. When Jack died, the truth died with him. Sure, there might be hidden records or other accounts of what happened to Prince George, the Duke of Kent, to lead him to that fiery end in Scotland, but such accounts are likely buried deeper than the graves of those who died with him.

So Prince George's storied life will forever be designated to the more obscure annals of royal history, built more of rumor than of fact, and always clouded by questions and misinformation. We could speculate for eternity and never know the real story. Each time we got a little closer to the truth, a new facet to the story would present itself to set the whole thing into confusion again. And isn't that just the point?

Next time on Strange and Unexplained. What happened when an eccentric businessman from South Africa moved to America and appointed himself to a very high up position in the government? No, I'm not talking about Elon Musk. I'm talking about the emperor of San Francisco.

Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment with help from Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written by Amy Wilson and me, Daisy Egan, with research by Amy Wilson. Sound design and engineering by Jeff Devine. Music by Epidemic and Blue Dot Sessions. If you have an idea for an episode, head to our website, strangeandunexplainedpod.com and fill out the contact form. I will write back.

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