Part 1 of 2
FOUR: A Plague on your ChildrenThe noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eighth Arrondissement, the explosion of anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag.
-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
The history of chemical and biological warfare has thrown up some strange stories, but few are as bizarre as those which surround a small island off the north-west coast of Scotland. It lies in its own well-protected bay, close to the fishing village of Aultbea - an outcrop of rock, well-covered with heather, three hundred feet high, one and a half miles long and a mile wide.
It takes about twenty minutes to reach by fishing boat from Aultbea. As you draw closer it's possible to make out the shapes of hundreds of sea birds nesting on its craggy shore-line. Their calls are the only sounds which break the silence. Once upon a time the island is said to have supported eleven families. Today, the only sign of human habitation is the ruin of a crofter's cottage.
This utterly abandoned island is Gruinard. Thanks to a series of secret wartime experiments - the full details of which are still classified - no one is allowed to live, or even land here.
In 1942, the hillsides around Aultbea bristled with military activity. It was here that the Russian convoys used to form up, prior to making the dangerous and terrifying run to Murmansk. It was a restricted area. There were military checkpoints on the roads. The local population - mainly crofters and fishermen - had to carry special passes. They grew used to the sight of uniforms, and avoided asking questions. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the summer of 1942, few paid any attention to the arrival in Gruinard Bay of a new military contingent. In a sheltered spot, just half a mile from Gruinard, on the mainland on the farthest side of the bay, they pitched camp. A couple of Nissen huts were built. Lorries arrived carrying fuel and food and cases of scientific instruments. Finally, the soldiers - perhaps twenty-five in all, commanded by Captain Dalby of the Royal Artillery - were joined by a party of nine civilians. They carried with them, and handled with great care, a set of large glass flasks, which were taken straight into one of the huts.
The new arrivals seemed distinctly ill at ease in these primitive surroundings. A photograph, taken at the time, shows a group cf them standing stiffly in front of the camp. One of them, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, is Dr David Henderson, a brilliant bacteriologist and a leading member of the Lister Institute. To his left stands Donald Woods, a long way now from his usual location in the unit for bacterial chemistry at London's Middlesex Hospital. Next to him is another leading bacteriologist, W. R. Lane. Standing closest to the camera, arms akimbo and with a pipe clamped (as usual) between his teeth is the most scientifically renowned, and in many ways most significant member of the party - Graham Sutton, normally in charge of all experimental work at Porton Down.
Their leader does not appear in the photograph. Dr Paul Fildes, at that time in his early sixties, was arguably Britain's top bacteriologist: a Fellow of the Royal Society, founder of the British Journal of Experimental Pathology and editor of the great nine-volume System of Bacteriology published by the Medical Research Council in 1931.
The presence of these famous scientists at Gruinard Bay in the summer of 1942 was a closely guarded secret. They had been given orders by the Highest Authority - a euphemism for the Prime Minister - to investigate the practicability of a biological bomb. Supervised directly by a top secret Whitehall committee chaired by a member of the War Cabinet, Lord Hankey, the tests this little group conducted on Gruinard were the beginnings of a massive research project, costing millions of pounds and employing thousands of people, which would ultimately give the Allies a weapon with a destructive power equivalent to the atomic bomb.
Its first victims were to be sheep. Porton's agents had scoured the local hillsides, paying the crofters good prices for their highland sheep. Around thirty were collected and set to graze in a field close to the scientists' base camp. As the date for the experiment approached, they were herded into a landing craft and ferried across the half mile stretch of water to Gruinard.
In one of the Nissen huts, Dr Henderson prepared the weapon itself. It was a 25 lb chemical bomb, eighteen inches high and six inches in diameter; normally it contained mustard gas. To help him prime it, Henderson called in the Porton team's young explosives expert, Major Allan Younger. Neither man wore a gas mask, as Henderson uncorked one of the flasks. 'I was asked to hold the bomb,' recalled Younger, 'whilst he poured this mixture in. It turned out to be a brown, thick gruel, and with great trepidation I held on to the thing making sure I wouldn't spill it, as he poured this thick stuff in.' [1]
The 'thick stuff' was a slurry of concentrated anthrax spores.
After the bomb had been filled, it, too, was ferried across to Gruinard. With it went Sutton, Henderson and Younger. Each man was now clad like some science fiction monster, in a rubberized suit, gas mask, high rubber boots and thick gloves. The anthrax weapon was placed on a small mound of earth. Around it, tethered in concentric circles, were the sheep. An explosive charge was carefully attached to the bomb and a fuse laid. While the sheep grazed unconcernedly, the scientists retreated to a safe distance down wind.
Anthrax had long been considered the most practicable filling for a biological weapon. A decade earlier, Aldous Huxley had predicted a war involving anthrax bombs. Even before that, in 1925, Winston Churchill wrote of 'pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast ... Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts - such are the lines alone which military science is remorselessly advancing.' [2]
Anthrax is an acutely infectious and deadly disease. In nature it generally occurs in cattle or sheep, but it can be equally deadly to man. If contaminated meat is accidentally handled it can produce coal-black malignant skin ulcers which lead to blood poisoning. Inhaled it is even more deadly. The tiniest of doses can produce, in a matter of hours, a choking cough, difficulty in breathing, and a high fever; in nine cases out of ten, death will follow soon after. It was this latter form of the disease which most interested Porton.
Its other advantage as a weapon was its exceptional toughness. Left for two hours at a temperature of 20° centigrade, the bacteria of anthrax turn into spores - virtually indestructible organisms which can lie dormant for years, waiting to infect any living tissue with which they may come into contact. The technique for cultivating the spores, once mastered, could be harnessed for mass-production. At Porton the anthrax was prepared in metal containers resembling milk churns. [3] Henderson's development of a kind of refined vacuum cleaner which could then suck the spores off the cultures where they had been grown was the breakthrough which enabled the Gruinard test to take place. The 'harvested' anthrax had been filled into flasks and driven north to Scotland. Now the scientists had to wait to see whether the weapon would work in practice as well as it promised to in theory.
The bomb exploded. Billions of spores formed an invisible cloud which wafted over the terrified sheep and gradually dispersed over the testing site and the sea. Then silence returned once more to Gruinard. At the end of the test, the scientists made their way to a nearby beach where each was stripped to his underpants by an army sergeant (who burnt the contaminated suits) and given a thorough shower. They then gathered their everyday clothes and were rowed back to the camp.
A day later, the sheep began to die. The pile of carcasses grew steadily throughout the week. They were incontrovertible proof that biological warfare was no longer just a nightmare science-fiction fantasy: it could be made a reality. The Gruinard tests proved that germs could be produced, transported, loaded into munitions and exploded over target areas without necessarily destroying the fragile living organisms which spread the infection.
In further tests that year, and in the summer of 1943, more bombs were exploded. The climax came when a Wellington bomber made a low-level run over the island and neatly deposited the world's first biological payload in the target area. 'The bombs exploded,' remembers Younger, 'with a sharp crack, quite unlike the "crump" of high explosive.' [4] At the end of each round of tests the sheep were dragged to the edge of some nearby cliffs and flung over. Younger dug a trench, filled it with 1,000 lb of explosives, and brought the hilltop crashing down on the carcasses.
There was little regard for safety. At the end of one year's experiments, Younger was entrusted with the job of transporting the flasks of anthrax from Gruinard to Porton for winter storage - a journey of six hundred miles. He was given an eight hundredweight van, a driver, a road map and instructions to avoid major highways and at all costs not to stop if confronted by suspicious circumstances.
In southern Scotland, we drove around a corner and found a woman lying apparently dead on our side of the road just ahead of us. She'd probably been run over. It was a tremendous moral dilemma, but I felt I couldn't afford to stop. I knew just how dangerous this stuff was, and that it was top secret. It was my responsibility to ensure that things didn't go wrong. That's why I passed by. Ever since, I have had it on my conscience. [5]
Further south, Younger was less cautious. When his driver suggested they stop for the night he agreed. They chose the large industrial city of Leeds. Younger headed for the central police station and handed over the van and its cargo to the bemused station sergeant for safekeeping. 'I told him it was a top secret war material and had to be guarded overnight. He didn't ask any questions.' [6] Relieved of their responsibility, Younger and his driver went off in search of the nearest pub, while the world's first biological bomb lay in the back of a van in the centre of one of England's most densely populated towns. Fortunately for Younger there was no air raid on the centre of Leeds that night.
Younger's final visit to Gruinard was equally eventful. There was an outbreak of anthrax on the Scottish mainland when a dead sheep floated across to the mainland in a heavy storm. Younger now believes that he used too high a charge of explosives and that one infected carcass was thrown clear by the force of the blast that brought down the clifftop. A government scientist was installed at a hotel in Aultbea to handle compensation claims.
The anthrax outbreak, and the possibility of a security leak, sent a collective shudder running down the spines of the members of the Bacteriological Warfare Committee in London. Younger and Fildes immediately took off from Porton in a Beaufort torpedo bomber to fly to Gruinard. It developed an oil leak half way and crash landed in a ploughed field near Liverpool. The two men were taken to hospital, but the only injuries suffered were some cuts to Dr Fildes's hand, which he sustained from a bottle of whiskey he was drinking from as the plane skidded across the ground. They completed the remainder of the journey by train and car.
Once on Gruinard, they donned protective suits and decided to try to rid the island of contamination by burning off the heather, which in some parts of the island was chest-high. Gruinard went up like tinder. One of Younger's most vivid wartime memories is of overlooking Gruinard Bay from a hotel on the mainland that evening, and watching as 'a line of fire ate its way up the side of the island'. The huge cloud of dense black smoke, heavily contaminated with anthrax, drifted out over the sea, while the fires made a spectacular display in the gloomy northern night.
Fildes's apocalyptic attempt to rid Gruinard of contamination was a failure. The charred island was sealed off. Today dramatic warning signs still ring its beaches at 400 yard intervals:
GRUINARD ISLAND
THIS ISLAND IS
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
UNDER EXPERIMENT
THE GROUND IS CONTAMINATED
WITH ANTHRAX AND DANGEROUS
LANDING IS PROHIBITED
Porton's scientists make regular pilgrimages back to Gruinard in the hope that one day they may be able to re-open it to the public. It is an exercise in good public relations Porton would desperately like to perform: 'Anthrax Island', as it is popularly known, is a grave embarrassment, a reminder of a past the scientists would prefer to play down.
For Fildes's successors at Porton Down, the problem is now beginning to look insoluble. As Rex Watson, the present Director of Porton Down, put it in an interview in 1981: 'The attraction of anthrax when it was used was that it was thought to be sufficiently resistant an organism to withstand being dispersed by a munition ... I don't think at that time perhaps they understood as much as we do now about its persistence over very long periods.' [7] Porton 'would expect there to be an area of contamination for the next tens, perhaps even hundreds of years.' Until that area is clear, Gruinard will remain closed to the public. At the moment, to be sure of being safe, the Porton men who go back still have to wear protective suits and take a seven and a half month course of injections. 'I doubt,' added Dr Watson, 'that we would do such an experiment now if we had to in those conditions.'
Schemes to render Gruinard safe have included plans to remove thousands of tons of top soil, and even to encase it in concrete. In the meantime the island has reverted to nature. The heather which Fildes and Younger burnt off has now returned and is six feet deep in places. Rabbits are said to have turned black as genetic changes have rendered them immune to the anthrax spores, now estimated to lie buried nearly a foot underground.
The wartime testing of anthrax did not end with the burning of Gruinard. The final experiment on the island - in which the bomber dropped the anthrax bomb - was a failure; the bomb fell into what proved to be marshy ground, making it impossible to measure the spread of the spores. This experiment was subsequently repeated on a beach in Wales. The precise location of this test site is still classified. [8]
Gruinard is the most startling reminder of the power of biological weapons, and of the high priority which their development was given in the 1940s. The exact nature and extent of that wartime programme remains one of the last great secrets of the Second World War. Now, with the recent release of some vital official documents, and the increased willingness of some of the participants to reveal at least a little of their work, that secret can at last begin to be told.
Mankind has practised primitive forms of biological warfare for thousands of years: the poisoning of enemy wells with the bodies of dead soldiers and animals in order to spread disease is a practice as old as war itself. In the fourteenth century the Crimean town of Kaffa was captured when the besieging Tartar army catapulted the bodies of plague victims into the city; the Russians are said to have used similar techniques against the Swedes in the eighteenth century. The British used blankets infected with smallpox in an attempt to wipe out whole tribes of North American Indians.
There were a number of allegations of germ warfare during the First World War. The great strides in medical knowledge of the previous fifty years enabled individual types of bacteria to be identified and isolated. The Germans were accused of having innoculated horses and mules with glanders (a highly infectious animal disease), cattle with anthrax, and German spies were caught supposedly trying to spread plague bacteria in Russia in 1915 and 1916. These were not necessarily just propaganda stories. A top secret American report describes accounts of German biological warfare sabotage as 'confirmed and undoubted'. [9] Foulkes paid a visit to the Lister Institute in 1915 when he was casting around for means of retaliating against the German chlorine attacks, but quickly dismissed germ warfare as a practicable possibility. The nations of Europe had difficulty enough in fighting off the natural ravages of disease without deliberately introducing it onto the battlefield.
Nevertheless, by 1925 it was considered sufficiently feasible for the prohibition of 'bacteriological methods of warfare' to be included within the scope of the Geneva Protocol. No nation at this time is recorded as having had a biological weapon, or even a single laboratory researching into the possibility of developing one. But the search for a new gas to replace mustard inevitably edged scientists towards the consideration of the possibility that the next generation of 'indiscriminate' weapons might be biological rather than chemical. At the same time, the development of mass-immunisation techniques offered the chance of overcoming the major disadvantage of using disease as a weapon: the 'boomerang' effect on your own troops and civilian population. 'CBW' - military jargon for Chemical and Biological Warfare - gradually began to enter the vocabulary of war. It was natural that the two types of weapon should be lumped together: they were 'unconventional', relied upon highly sophisticated scientific and medical skills, were abhorrent to the majority of the population, and had to be developed in conditions of great secrecy.
Ironically it was the Geneva Protocol's ban on biological warfare that led to the start of the biological arms race. In 1932, a Japanese army major, Shiro Ishii, returned home from a European tour convinced that biological weapons were an effective means of fighting a war: with flawless logic he concluded that they must be, otherwise the statesmen at Geneva would not have gone to the trouble of banning them. Major Ishii's conviction became an obsession. A small, thin, bespectacled man in his early forties - his outwardly scholarly appearance belied a powerful personality. 'This individual,' wrote the Americans in 1946 'was the compelling force behind the scenes throughout the whole period of Japanese investigation into the field of biological warfare.' [10]
Despite receiving little official encouragement, by 1935 Ishii had persuaded the Japanese authorities to let him set up a germ warfare research centre at the Harbin Military Hospital. Bombs were designed and tested and cultures of germs prepared and evaluated. In the same year, the Japanese military police, the Kempai, arrested five Russian 'spies' in the Kwangtung region of China. All were said to be carrying glass bottles and ampoules containing biological agents - dysentery, cholera and anthrax - for sabotage missions. After the war, Ishii claimed that the Russian attacks were successful: according to the Kempai, 6,000 Japanese soldiers died of cholera in the Shanghai area, while 2,000 of the army's horses were killed by anthrax.
True or not, the allegations spurred the Japanese War Ministry into taking a far keener interest in biological warfare. In 1937, with his work at the Harbin Military Hospital yielding promising results, Ishii was given permission to build the world's first major biological warfare installation.
The site chosen was near a small village called Pingfan, about forty miles south of Harbin, close to the South Manchuria Railroad. By 1939 when it was almost completed, Ishii was a general. The Pingfan Institute, as it was known, had a garrison of 3,000 scientists, technicians and soldiers, and was completely self-supporting. The Institute raised its own vegetables and livestock; it had a flock of 50,000 hens. Within its closely guarded walls was a school and a hospital, and a separate compound for plague research. An attached air base provided lavish transport facilities for the senior scientists as well as aircraft for field trials. 'Perhaps no better indication of the magnitude of the Pingfan project', wrote American Intelligence after the war
can be gained than consideration of the fact that in addition to various offensive activities, the vaccine production capacity of the plant was of the order of twenty million doses annually. Furthermore, the spectrum of vaccines ranged from typhoid to typhus. [11]
For offensive use, Pingfan opened a Pandora's Box of disease: typhus, typhoid, anthrax, cholera, plague (the ancient Black Death), salmonella, tetanus, botulism, brucellosis, gas gangrene, smallpox, tick encephalitis, tuberculosis, tularemia and glanders. The bacteria were grown in vast numbers in aluminum tanks designed by Ishii. Each strain had its own 'growing time', at the end of which it was 'harvested' by being scraped from the surface of the tank with a small metal rake (Ishii demonstrated the technique to the Americans a few months after the end of the war). Diseases of the intestine, like dysentery and typhoid, were harvested after a growth period of twenty-four hours; plague, anthrax and glanders took forty-eight hours; anaerobes (bacteria which can live without oxygen), a week.
In August 1945, with the Russian army only a few miles away, the Pingfan Institute was destroyed: every piece of machinery systematically smashed to bits, every scrap of incriminating paper burned. There are therefore no records of just how much biological agent was made at Pingfan. Colonel Tomosada Masuda, head of 'Section Three' at Pingfan, claimed after the war to have 'no figures on this'. The quantities were almost certainly huge. His American interrogators calculated that for each set of bomb experiments, 900 tanks were used, each yielding a harvest of 40 grammes of bacterial scrapings. [12] In 1949 Russian investigators put the productive capacity of Pingfan at eight tons of bacteria a month. [*]
Like the British a year later, Masuda quickly came to the conclusion that anthrax was the most practical bomb filling. Its spores were found to live for three months in Pingfan's carefully prepared suspensions. This compared with a mere three days for cholera, and a week for dysentery and plague.
The Japanese spent at least seven years trying to perfect an anthrax bomb. Over 2,000 'Uji' bombs were filled with anthrax and tested experimentally. It was a substantial programme: the Uji bomb was one of nine types of aircraft bomb which had been tested at Pingfan by 1940. The deadliest munition developed was the 'Ha' bomb, designed to shatter into thousands of pieces of shrapnel, spreading the anthrax spores to murderously good effect. A single scratch wound from a piece of contaminated shrapnel was estimated to cause illness and death in 90 per cent of its victims. The standard Japanese heavy bomber could carry twelve Ha bombs.
In just two years, in addition to thousands of guinea pigs and mice, at least 500 sheep and 200 horses were killed in biological tests. By 1939, over 4,000 bombs had been produced. Other weapons tested included shells, aerial sprays and sabotage devices for poisoning wells.
As in every chemical and biological warfare installation throughout the world there were stringent safety precautions. All workers wore a completely rubberized anti-plague suit, together with a respirator, surgical gloves and rubber boots. After every experimental trial they were required to strip completely 'and bathe themselves in 2 per cent creosol or mercuric chloride'. [13] All enlisted men received extra rations of food; officers were given danger pay of an extra 60 yen ($25) a month.
But there were accidents and deaths. At least twenty men a year working in the laboratories contracted infections from the material they handled. In 1937, two died from severe cases of glanders. In 1944 there were two deaths from plague. Anthrax was a constant source of danger. Masuda recalled the example of two soldiers:
... one of the two individuals had been ordered to cut the grass at the experimental site a day after an anthrax trial. He contracted pneumonic anthrax and passed away after a short course of the disease. The second fatality was the first soldier's room mate and he died from anthrax septicemia, the result of contact infection. [14]
At Pingfan the Japanese also devoted considerable time to perfecting sabotage techniques. Scientists devised one particularly unpleasant poison for contaminating foodstuffs: christened 'fungu toxin', it was made of an extract from the livers of blow fish. Masuda himself supervised experiments in the poisoning of water supplies using cholera, typhoid and dysentery in over a thousand wells in Manchuria. Evidence later collected by the Russians suggested that the Japanese also cultivated the plague-infected flea as a biological weapon. Pingfan was said to be capable of producing 500 million fleas a year. In 1941 these were tested by being dropped in porcelain aircraft bombs; later the Japanese carried out successful experiments in spraying the fleas from high altitudes.
Like the Nazis with their nerve gas programme, the Japanese struggled to restrict the secret of the Pingfan project to the tightest possible circle. Each scientist laboured in his own particular field and was refused access to other areas. Despite the large capital investment in Pingfan - it cost between six and twelve million yen (up to $5 million) a year to run - even the Emperor was not informed of the existence of the germ warfare programme: 'Biological warfare,' Ishii told the Americans in 1946, 'is inhumane and advocating such a method of warfare would defile the virtue and benevolence of the Emperor.'
Radiating out from Pingfan were eighteen other biological warfare out-stations, each staffed by around 300 people; many were on mainland China. 'Ishii,' wrote the Americans, 'developed a biological warfare organisation that at its height extended from Harbin to the Dutch East Indies and from the island of Hokkaido to the Celibes.' [15] The whole programme was administered by an organisation called Boeki Kyusuibu, whose innocuous title is translated as 'Anti-Epidemic Water Supply Unit'.
When the war ended and the Americans began to piece together the scale of the Japanese germ warfare project, Ishii topped the list of scientists they wished to interrogate. It took U.S. Intelligence almost five months to locate him, living in seclusion at his country home and suffering from chronic dysentery - an unpleasant legacy of his career in germ warfare. He was taken to Tokyo and grilled solidly for a month.
At the end of that time he was still denying any knowledge of what the Americans suspected was the criminal aspect of his work: the use of human guinea pigs in biological warfare experiments. It was to be almost two years before the full story emerged; the US Government promptly suppressed the facts for the next quarter of a century. (The story of the immunity from prosecution granted to Ishii, and the subsequent cover-up is told in Chapter Seven.)
Pathological material and specimens from five hundred human victims were turned over to the Americans. The number of people actually experimented upon was far higher, and almost certainly ran into four figures.
The Japanese infected prisoners - mostly Chinese, but possibly including American, British and Australian POWs - with the full range of diseases under study at Pingfan. Ishii admitted feeding five prisoners with a two-day old culture of botulism; another twenty were injected with brucellosis. Bombs designed to produce gas gangrene were exploded next to tethered prisoners - an experiment confirmed by a witness at the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial two years later:
In January 1945 ... I saw experiments in inducing gas gangrene, conducted under the direction of the Chief of the 2nd Division, Colonel Ikari, and researcher Futaki. Ten prisoners ... were tied facing stakes, five to ten metres apart ... The prisoners' heads were covered with metal helmets, and their bodies with screens ... only the naked buttocks being exposed. At about 100 metres away a fragmentation bomb was exploded by electricity ... All ten men were wounded ... and sent back to the prison ... I later asked Ikari and researcher Futaki what the results had been. They told me that all ten men had ... died of gas gangrene.
There were similar experiments with anthrax bombs. Victims were injected with tetanus, smallpox, plague and glanders, as well as being exposed to aerosol clouds of disease in gas chambers. The infections were not always allowed to run their full course: victims would be killed with massive doses of morphine, and then dissected to check the progress of the disease up to the point of death. Of the human remains studied by the Americans in 1947, anthrax accounted for 31 deaths, cholera 50, dysentery 12, glanders 20, mustard gas 16, tetanus 14, plague 106, salmonella II, tuberculosis 41, typhoid 22, typhus 9. [*]
Concurrent with these human experiments, there is strong - almost conclusive - evidence to suggest that the Japanese were also waging actual biological warfare in China.
On 4 October 1940, according to the Chinese Ambassador in London, a Japanese plane visited the town of Chuhsien in the province of Chekiang. 'After circling over the city for a short while it scattered rice and wheat grains mixed with fleas over the western section of the city', [16] and the resulting plague epidemic killed twenty-one townspeople. Three weeks later 'Japanese planes raided Ningpo and scattered a considerable quantity of wheat grains over the port city'. Ninety-nine people were killed by plague. [17]
On November 4th 1941 at about 5 am a lone enemy plane appeared over Changteh in Hunan Province, flying very low, the morning being rather misty. Instead of bombs, wheat and rice grains, pieces of paper, cotton wadding and some unidentified particles were dropped. There were many eyewitnesses, including Mrs E. J. Bannon, Superintendent of the local Presbyterian hospital, and other foreign residents in Changteh. After the 'all clear' signal had been sounded at 5 pm, some of these strange gifts from the enemy were collected and sent by the police to the local Presbyterian hospital for examination which revealed the presence of micro-organisms reported to resemble P. pestis (plague bacteria). On November 11th, seven days later, the first clinical case of plague came to notice, then followed by five more cases within the same month, two cases in December, and the last to date on January 13th 1942 ... Changteh had never been, as far as is known, afflicted by plague. [18]
In another attack on Kinghwa, three Japanese planes
... dropped a large quantity of small granules, about the size of shrimp eggs. These strange objects were collected and examined in a local hospital. The granules were more or less round, about 1 mm in diameter, of whitish-yellow tinge, somewhat translucent with a certain amount of glistening reflection from the surface. When brought into contact with a drop of water on a glass slide, the granule began to swell to about twice its original size. In a small amount of water in a test tube, with some agitation it would break up into whitish flakes and later form a milky suspension. [19]
Traces of plague bacteria were found. Finally there were another 600 cases of plague in three other Chinese provinces which the Chinese ascribed to an 'inhuman act of our enemy'. The detail certainly suggests that the incidents were more than mere propaganda stories. Whether they were isolated events or part of a systematic biological attack on China is unknown.
In July 1942 the Chinese allegations were passed on to Winston Churchill. Two days later he had them placed on the agenda of the Pacific War Council.
The growing alarm in London and Washington that the Japanese were on the verge of initiating biological warfare gave an added urgency to the first anthrax bomb tests on Gruinard that summer. Up to then the Allied germ warfare effort had lagged significantly behind the Japanese, but from 1942 onwards the Anglo-American biological programme began to vie with the Manhattan Project for top development priority.
The British biological warfare project was born on 12 February 1934 at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff. For two years, a Disarmament Conference in Geneva had been discussing means of finally ridding the world of chemical weapons. Germ warfare had also been included, and in view of this, Sir Maurice Hankey told the Service Chiefs, he 'was wondering whether it might not be right to consider the possibilities and potentialities of this form of war'. [20] The Chiefs of Staff agreed, and authorized Hankey to put out discreet and 'very secret' feelers to the Medical Research Council to see if they would help. Like the Japanese, the British were prompted to begin work on germ weapons as a result of a peace initiative aimed at banning them.
For Hankey it was the beginning of a long involvement with biological weapons. At the age of fifty-seven this doyen of civil service mandarins was cast as the unlikely counterpart to General Shiro Ishii: just as the Japanese owed their venture into the field of biological warfare to Ishii, Britain owed hers to Hankey. He was entirely suited, both in character and position, to the task. 'Short, spare of figure ... a dedicated dietician, almost a non-smoker and teetotaller, he lived, and enjoyed, a spartan existence,' recalled a subordinate. He had 'little or no sense of humour' and was 'too intense and taut to be a social success, and had no "small talk"'. [21] In 1934 he was a uniquely powerful Whitehall official, Secretary to both the Cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defence, 'a man whose advice, over a period of 25 years, no Prime Minister or Service Chief could afford to disregard in matters of Defence.' [22] His career and temperament are neatly summed up in the four word title Stephen Roskill chose for his official biography: Hankey: Man of Secrets.
Amid the prevailing policy of appeasement in the 1930s, Hankey at first made little progress. Edward Mellanby, the secretary of the Medical Research Council, refused to have anything to do with a project which used advances in medicine for destructive purposes. Hankey had more success with Paul Fildes, the pugnacious head of the MRC's Bacteriological Metabolic Unit, who agreed to take up a watching brief on the subject. In September 1936 Hankey proposed to the Committee of Imperial Defence that 'an expert official body' should be set up to 'report upon the practicability of the introduction of bacteriological warfare and to make recommendations as to the counter-measures', [23] In October the CID approved, and Hankey became Chairman of the newly-created Microbiological Warfare Committee.
In March 1937 the Committee submitted its first report, specifically on plague, anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease. Though they concluded that 'for the time being ... the practical difficulties of introducing bacteria into this country on a large scale were such as to render an attempt unlikely' they urged that stocks of serum be built up to meet any potential threat. [24] From 1937 to 1940, Britain began to stockpile vaccines, fungicides and insecticides against biological attack.
In April 1938 the Committee produced a second report, and in June Hankey circulated 'Proposals for an Emergency Bacteriological Service to operate in War': the emphasis was on defence, the tone still low-key. It was only in the following year, with the outbreak of war, that the tempo began to quicken. An emergency Public Health Laboratory was set up; linked to the normal laboratory services it covered the whole of the country. Its primary function was to investigate suspicious outbreaks of disease, and to act as the distributing centre for the stocks of vaccine and sera.
In September 1939, Hankey - now with a seat in the House of Lords - was brought into the War Cabinet as Minister Without Portfolio. His influence over Neville Chamberlain had never been greater, and to Hankey the Prime Minister 'confided' the job of Britain's biological warfare overlord with the proviso, recalled Hankey, 'not to authorise any preparations for the offensive use of bacteria without his approval'. [25] But within a matter of days - as the Wehrmacht smashed through Poland's defences and Hitler at Danzig warned of his 'secret weapons' - the brief changed. The Chiefs of Staff met on 25 September and heard from Sir Cyril Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff, that attention had been drawn
to a form of attack which cannot be regarded as beyond the bounds of possibility - namely, the deliberate and indiscriminate dropping of bacteria with the object of spreading disease. The fact that the German Government have notified us of their intention to observe the Geneva Protocol is, of course, no reason to imagine that they will in fact observe those provisions a moment longer than is necessary. [26]
A sabotage attack by enemy agents using bacteria was 'not impossible in the very near future'. The matter was referred to the War Cabinet and within a few days Hankey had been ordered to step up research into germ warfare.
Towards the end of September [wrote Hankey in 1941] Mr. Chamberlain gave his approval to a proposal that I should authorise experimental work in order to discover what are the possibilities of infection being transmitted by various forms of micro-organisms through the air, so as to give us greater knowledge as to how to protect ourselves against such methods. The work was to be conducted in this spirit and not with a view to resort to such methods ourselves. [27]
Whatever the 'spirit' in which the work was conducted, Britain now began researching in earnest into offensive biological weapons.
A new and highly secret laboratory was established at Porton Down in 1940. It was, one of its early members has recently said, 'a primitive affair -little more than an old wooden army hut'. The tiny biological warfare team, never more than a few dozen strong, was presided over by Paul Fildes. He was detached from the Medical Research Council, which was 'reluctant to associate itself with even defensive work on what was regarded as a morally indefensible perversion of medical knowledge', [28] and 'by an informal compromise' placed on the staff of Porton. Throughout his life Fildes had no qualms about his work. The Times, in its curiously unsympathetic obituary of him in 1971, described him as 'by nature and upbringing conservative in outlook' and 'a little vain' about his achievements:
Some found him difficult; to most he was reserved and rather uncompromising in manner, with a quiet, ruminative way of speaking that never varied, even in anger or when, as sometimes happened, he was being devastatingly rude. Those who got to know him had for him a lasting, if occasionally rueful, affection ... [29]
In 1940 he was fifty-eight and a confirmed bachelor. Allan Younger, the young explosives expert who accompanied him to Gruinard in 1942, recalls him as small in stature, with a powerful sense of purpose and a passionate belief in the work he was doing.
He gathered around him men with a similar determination. The eminent British biologist Lord Stamp, for example, joined the team in 1941: earlier, in April of that year he succeeded to the family title when his father, mother and brother were all killed in the Blitz. 'I felt useless where I was, at the Public Health Laboratory,' he remembers today, 'and I was determined to pay back the Germans for what they did, and to see that our country was not left defenceless as London was when my family was killed.' [30]
All Fildes' team were convinced - and repeatedly reminded in briefings - that they were in a desperate race against the Nazis. In November 1939, R. V. Jones - in a memorandum after Hitler's Danzig boast - put 'bacterial warfare' first, 'new gases' second and long-range rockets only fifth on his list of German secret weapons 'which must be considered seriously'. [31]According to British Intelligence ' ... the Germans and Russians appear to have carried out considerable research on bacteriological methods of attack. Spraying of the virus of foot and mouth disease, dispersal of anthrax spores, and pollution of water supplies by enemy agents are specifically mentioned.' [32]
In 1940-41 these fears were greatly increased by the threat of invasion. Hankey and the Bacteriological Warfare Committee actually went so far as to recommend the compulsory pasteurization of milk and the chlorination of all supplies of drinking water. Only after the Ministry of Food pointed out the massive cost and administrative difficulties involved were the schemes dropped. [33] Later in the war, the Allies feared that the Germans planned to use the V-weapons to deliver biological agents into the heart of London: the Canadians sent the British 235,000 doses of an antidote to botulinus toxin, the most feared of biological weapons. 'When the V-I attack was launched in June, 1944,' recalled a Canadian general, Brock Chisolm in 1957, 'and the first flying bomb went off with a big bang, showing that it only contained normal high explosives, the general staffs all heaved an immense sigh of relief.' [34] 117,500 British, American and Canadian troops were issued with self-inoculating syringes to protect them against biological attack during the Normandy landings. [35]
In fact in this, as in so many of its evaluations of German chemical and biological warfare, Allied intelligence was hopelessly wrong. According to evidence presented at Nuremburg, the German decision to investigate biological warfare was not taken until a secret conference of the Wehrmacht High Command in July 1943:
It was decided that an institute should be created for the production of bacterial cultures on a large scale, and the carrying out of scientific experiments to examine the possibilities of using bacteria. The institute was also to be used for experimenting with pests which could be used against domestic animals and crops, and which were to be made available if they were found practicable ... aircraft were to be used for spraying tests with bacteria emulsion, and insects harmful to plants, such as beetles were experimented with ... [36]
The German biological warfare programme was literally years behind that of the Allies. Work centred on the Military Medical Academy at Posen, under the supervision of a Professor Blome. Experiments were carried out on concentration camp inmates at Natzweiler, Dachau and at Buchenwald, where prisoners were deliberately covered with typhus-infected lice.
Horrific though the experiments were, the Nazi biological project itself never got very far. There is no evidence to suggest that in two years' work at Posen the Nazis ever managed to produce a feasible weapon. In March 1945 the Military Academy was evacuated in the face of the oncoming Red Army, and Blome attempted to have the whole site destroyed in a Stuka attack. All he salvaged were some plague cultures, which in the event proved unusable: the Russians were already on German soil, and the Germans themselves - none of whom had been inoculated - would have suffered as much as the enemy.
At the end of the war, the Soviet Union pressed for the death penalty for one of the Nuremburg defendants, Hans Fritzsche, on the grounds that he had first suggested the possibility of germ warfare to the German High Command. For Britain and America it was an acutely embarrassing moment. By 1945 they were aware that they had invested vastly more time and effort in producing these 'forbidden weapons' than the Nazis. They insisted - to the fury of the Russians - that Fritzsche be acquitted. To avoid tarnishing their wartime honour, all American, British and Canadian records on their wartime biological weapons programmes remained in the 'Most Secret' category; the British closed their archives to historians until the end of the twentieth century. [37]
Since the war, Britain has categorically stated that she has never possessed any biological weapons. As recently as 1980, at the Review Conference of the Convention on Biological and Toxin Weapons, the British delegation firmly stated: 'The United Kingdom has never possessed and has not acquired microbial or other biological agents and toxins in quantities which could be employed for weapon purposes.' [38] On at least two other occasions in 1980 - on 5 March and 11 March - the same assurance was repeated.
The United Kingdom's declaration is hard to reconcile with the facts.