Heligoland (27 page)

Seeing the red danger flags fluttering at the mastheads of those busy supply vessels carrying explosives across the Bight could only mean one thing to the Heligolandish lobster fishermen who witnessed it – Britain was intent on destroying their island. Like the rest of the islanders the fishermen had been exiled to the mainland, but so rich with sealife were the coastal waters off Heligoland that a few often ventured into the Bight to fish just offshore of their homeland – on which they were forbidden to land. A few of those fishermen still have vivid memories of what they saw and heard, and even now can readily quote a phrase they believe was used by one of the officers in charge at the time, about being intent on ‘making Heligoland only fit for inhabitation by seagulls’. They are quite right. A check through some old copies of the Paris edition of the
New York Herald Tribune
reveals that on 6 January 1947 a virtually identical form of words was clearly used by a senior naval officer (believed to have been the NIOC at Cuxhaven, Captain Skipwith): ‘When we have finished, it will be only a beautiful bird sanctuary, nothing but a pile of rocks.’ He added that the island would not completely disappear, but considered it would ‘never again be fit for human habitation’.

On the shelves of the Public Record Office at Kew there is an apparently innocuous archive file from the Air Ministry’s Meteorological Office. Hitherto unnoticed it is entitled:
Seismology, Heligoland Explosion on 18.4.47 (including explosions in Germany, Bikini, etc)
. The file was begun on 26 July 1946, just three days before Captain Skipwith’s reconnaissance team landed on the island. Contained within the file is a letter from an organisation called the Armament Research Department, based at Fort Halstead near Sevenoaks in Kent. It is a detailed reply to a later letter of 20 August 1947 from Dr William Penney, who had been checking on the accuracy of the seismic equipment used at the Kew Observatory to monitor a recent huge explosion in Europe.
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Superficially, William Penney was a simple seismologist – but he also happened to be the Chief Superintendent of Armament Research. What no one knew at the time was that he had recently taken on other responsibilities. On 30 June 1946 he was one of the two British scientists present at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific to monitor Operation ‘Crossroads’ – the detonation of an experimental atomic bomb. On 24 July another device was exploded at Bikini, except this time it was done underwater. In February 1946 American officials, having informed the inhabitants of Bikini that their idyllic homeland was needed temporarily ‘for the good of mankind to end all world wars’, unceremoniously deported them to an inferior distant atoll. Dr Penney had been the coordinator of the blast-measuring instruments at Bikini, and on his return to England wrote a confidential fourteen-volume report on the explosions and the test equipment which had monitored them.
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The decision to research and consider a British atomic bomb was taken by a small inner circle of ministers, and in early 1946 Clement Attlee, the British Prime Minister, personally persuaded the semiretired Viscount Portal of Hungerford to take the post of Controller of Production, Atomic Energy, and to assemble an appropriate team. Portal duly set up his headquarters in central London within the Ministry of Supply’s Atomic Energy Directorate, in a wired-in enclosure on the fourth floor of Shell-Mex House. Ironically, this dour building in the Strand stood on a site owned long before by the politically powerful Salisbury dynasty! From there Portal recruited his senior personnel. These included Wing Commander (later Air Vice-Marshal) John ‘Archie’ Rowlands, who would be closely involved with the ballistic design of the weapon, and William Penney, who knew more than any other British scientist about the methods used to develop the American bomb.

Uncharacteristically for a scientist, William Penney had a talent for devising brilliantly innovative administrative structures. An opportunity to put that into effect occurred as a consequence of an inner-circle Cabinet meeting on 8 January 1947 at which the momentous decision was taken to proceed with the building of a British atomic bomb which could be test-exploded before summer 1952. The select few ministers present endorsed a memo sent by Portal, but based on Penney’s ideas, describing how secrecy might best be maintained during this crucial development stage.
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The recommendation accepted was that rather than building an atomic weapon through the ordinary agencies in the Ministry of Supply it should be developed under special arrangements conducive to the utmost secrecy. Penney’s brilliant idea was that the facilities for the necessary research and development could be ‘camouflaged’ as Basic High Explosive Research – a subject for which he was actually responsible but on which no work was being done. It was agreed that just as had been done at Shell-Mex House, at Fort Halstead and Woolwich Arsenal special fenced-off enclaves should be formed within the main establishment.

The camouflage concept meant basing the work on a section within the Armaments Research Establishment, to form a cell there and subcontract bits of work to other parts of the government machine. To coordinate this subcontracted atomic bomb work, in November 1948 the High Explosives Research Operational Distribution Committee (HEROD) was established. Although in almost all respects the farming-out practice was ideal, even for the ballistics elements, there were a couple of components – the fusing system and radioactive parts of the bomb – which Penney’s High Explosive Research (HER) boffins at Fort Halstead would need to do themselves. This decision necessitated taking on many more staff, and resulted in a move in early 1950 to a disused airfield site at Aldermaston in Berkshire, which subsequently became the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE). No wonder Heligoland’s links with the development of the atomic bomb remained hidden for so long.

No nuclear bomb was ever actually exploded on Heligoland, although it is quite probable that such a fate might have been contemplated for the island, however fleetingly. It appears that in five distinct respects – seismic measuring, blast effect, ballistic shape, crew training and USAF involvement – the island was used in the development of techniques, and in the collection of data required for the eventual testing of an atomic bomb elsewhere in the world.

‘The greatest non-atomic explosion in history’ was how
The Times
described the ‘Big Bang’ which occurred on 18 April 1947. There was an eerie sense of persecution about the entire operation. It happened at noon, precisely two years after the island’s failure to surrender led to its initial devastation in an enormous RAF raid. And now the Royal Navy seemed ready to finish it off. Safely aboard HMS
Lassco
, anchored 9 miles offshore, the moment the fourth pip in the BBC’s time signal sounded Frank Woosnam pressed a firing button and detonated the 7,000 tons of munitions in the island’s labyrinth of deep tunnels.

According to the
Daily Express
, ‘From the island’s centre, like a Bikini mushroom, rose a massing cauliflower of smoke as the blast from the deepest tunnels of the fortress 180 feet down in the rock surged to the surface.’ The
New York Times
said ‘the island seemed to rise out of the sea in a spectacular red and black explosive flame. In seconds, the cloud was twice the size of the island. As these layers moved off, one could see and feel the articles of red sandstone that gave the cloud its reddish tint.’ Reporting an eyewitness from an observation plane describing the island as seeming to ‘take off into the air’, the Associated Press also claimed the blast was ‘the biggest man-made explosion since the American Navy’s atom bomb tests at Bikini’. The explosion had sent the tall Monk rock, one of the sandstone pillars carved by the seas, crashing into the waves. But when the 8,000ft column of smoke cleared it was evident that only about 14 per cent of the island’s surface had fallen into the sea. All the rest stood firm, enhancing Heligoland’s reputation for defiance.

According to the
New York Times
British newscasters to Germany were reported to have been ‘asked to play down’ coverage of the Big Bang. But some intriguing accounts did slip out, such as the
Daily Telegraph
’s showing that inexplicably, on an RAF Mosquito and a destroyer, HMS
Dunkirk
, there had been microphones to record the explosion.
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Declassified confidential guest lists done at the time, of the numerous VIPs invited to witness the event from a safe distance on Royal Navy ships, make rather curious reading because they now appear to have noticeably refrained from mentioning the names of any important scientists there. Yet stories which appeared in the
New York Times
on 18 and 19 April 1947 stated that there were present senior American boffins from the acoustics department of the United States Naval Ordinance Laboratories. That ten-strong delegation had been headed by Dr John Atanasoff and Commander Beauregard Perkins who had also – the newspaper revealed – ‘observed the Bikini explosions’. Important though they were, the absence of any mention in British official records indicates that the British government was being careful not to draw attention to them. Yet, unexpectedly, a glimmer of their presence accidentally did slip out. On 18 April 1947 the
Daily Telegraph
happened to report that on the morning prior to the Big Bang the destroyer
Nepal
had arrived from the Forth and anchored off Heligoland. Intriguingly the article also noted the ship had brought ‘a party of scientists. They have a seismograph and other apparatus with which to record the effects of the explosion.’ Seemingly arriving among that party of scientists were members of William Penney’s team. According to US Naval Intelligence records of Commonwealth warships the
Nepal
certainly existed then – it was a Royal Australian Navy destroyer stationed in British waters. That is why the Public Record Office has no incriminatory ship’s log of such a Royal Navy vessel at that time.

The explosion was so powerful that it registered on over a hundred seismographs in seismic stations in various parts of Europe – notably in Germany, France and Britain (at Kew). However, what use was that to Penney’s boffins at the HER if they could not be sure exactly what quantity of explosives produced such shock waves? The Hiroshima bomb had been equal to 12,500 tons of TNT – a yield of 12.5 kilotons. It was envisaged that the Heligoland ‘Big Bang’ explosion would be more than half of that at 7 kilotons – but it was not.

The event had long been stated by the Admiralty as being ‘the greatest demolition operation ever performed by the Royal Navy’, and officially their declared view of ‘Big Bang’ was that it had been ‘A 100% successful operation’. They even publicly announced that all members of the demolition team would be recommended for decorations. In reality, to the consternation of senior naval officers, a significant proportion of the explosives had failed to go off. This was 62 tons of the mysteriously late-arrival TNT which had stubbornly refused to explode on the Heligoland quayside. Instructed to return to the island without publicity (including radio silence) and finish the job, Woosnam’s team secretly arrived there on 22 April 1947 in an R-boat and a captured German submarine. Fresh cordex-linked charges having been laid, firing wires were led to the Red Tower. The ML 150 and the U-boat having been put to sea to ensure there were no other craft in the vicinity, that night Woosnam set off the detonation.

That so-called ‘Little Bang’ took the form of a bright flash, and because the cloud cover was low, the loud detonation report even rattled doors and windows in Cuxhaven.
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Woosnam’s superiors, who had wanted the ‘Little Bang’ explosion to be discreet, were again furious. Uninformed by him, because of the radio silence, as to when the explosion would take place, they despatched a British destroyer from Cuxhaven to investigate the bright flash. Unusually, in the absence of any official account, these events were chronicled in a file Woosnam himself deposited in the Public Record Office in March 1950. And so the story remained hidden until January 1980, when – still not having received his medal – Woosnam found an Admiralty note in the newly opened PRO file accusing him of having made ‘an error of judgement’. Indignant at being so besmirched he privately deposited a fuller chronicle, which significantly noted there had been no reprimand for any officer for the, still unexplained, despatch of the superfluous TNT to Heligoland.

The rest of the world must have assumed that once the almighty ‘Big Bang’ had been carried out there could be no need for further static explosions on the island. In fact during the summer of 1947 Penney’s HER’s interest in extracting seismic data from Heligoland became more focused. Released official papers show that on 30 May 1946 a special meeting was held at the Ministry of Works. In response to ‘the advent of the atomic bomb’, an urgent need was expressed by Sir Geoffrey Taylor, the Chairman of the Civil Defence Research Committee, to obtain seismic records by which to have a better knowledge of the propagation of blast in air-raid tunnels and other confined spaces. Taylor, a British scientist earlier assigned to the Manhattan Project, had made a name for himself as an expert in blast waves caused by high explosives. Penney was present at that meeting whose minutes show that, in terms of tunnels to be used for test explosions supervised by the Directorate of Armament Research, ‘It was agreed that the most suitable tunnels were those on Heligoland’. Inexplicably that Civil Defence Committee gathering had before it a memo by their Chief Defence Advisers hypothetically noting that: ‘If an atomic bomb equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT were exploded 100 feet below ground there would result a crater estimated to contain, initially, about ten million tons of soil.’
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Then on 22 April 1947, just three days after the ‘Big Bang’ the Committee – still including Penney – met again, this time at the Ministry of Supply, and agreed that ‘part of the tunnel system at Heligoland should be used’ in specialist trial explosions to determine the effect of shock waves.