Clouds of Deceit (2 page)

In 1960, McGinley got married. He and his wife, Alice, desperately wanted a child. Both come from large families, a tradition which has been carried on by McGinley's five brothers and sisters who have twenty-four children between them. His wife's three sisters also have numerous children. But McGinley discovered he was sterile. ‘I'm 100 per cent positive it's because I was at Christmas Island,' he said. He has since found out that three other men out of the seven with whom he shared his tent have been unable to have children. Radiation is known to cause sterility.

On his return to Britain from Christmas Island, McGinley had been told not to speak to anyone about what he had seen there. It was an injunction he obeyed until November 1982, when he was told that his army pension was to be reviewed. He obtained his service medical records and discovered, to his astonishment, that they were incomplete. The blisters which appeared after the April 1958 bomb, and which were severe enough to require twelve days' treatment, were not mentioned. ‘I was disgusted to find they were not complete and might even have been tampered with,' he said. He decided to break his silence and write to a Scottish newspaper, claiming his health had been damaged by the tests. Six months later, he became chairman of the newly formed British Nuclear Tests Veterans' Association.

McGinley runs the association from his guest house at East Bay, Dunoon. He is a small, wiry man with a gentle Scottish accent. Just over two years since it was set up, the association has 1,300 members and takes up a good deal of Ken McGinley's energy. ‘I could spend twenty-four hours a day and still not have enough time,' he observed wryly. But his memories of events at Christmas Island remain undimmed and he is eager to establish
the truth of what happened not just for himself but for all the others who took part - and their widows.

‘We arrived at Christmas Island very early one morning in February 1958,' he recalled. ‘It was gorgeous. What I noticed about it first of all was the barrier reef, you saw the water breaking against it all the time. It was more or less a flat island with no vegetation other than coconuts. There wasn't much animal life, just rats and crabs, but there were lots of birds. They were funny-looking birds, we used to call them Grapple birds after the name of the Operation. After the April 28 bomb, one of my jobs was to lift them up and put them on a landing craft to be taken out to sea. Some of them were still alive but they were blind, their eyes had been burned out.'

When McGinley arrived at the island, the islanders, who originated from what were then called the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, lived in a village near to one of the military camps. ‘I couldn't say how many of them there were,' said McGinley, ‘but two or three of the men worked with us in the camp. They were very friendly people. They were taken away from the island the day before each explosion. I herded them on to the ship. They were taken below deck and shown cartoon films.'

The men were told only the day before each test when it was to take place. ‘All we were told to do was sit on the beach. They would start the countdown and then say “hold it, that was a dummy run”. They would do that three or four times. You could be sitting on that beach in one hundred degrees for two hours. Two or three guys fainted. It was very uncomfortable. We were never given protective clothing. I remember distinctly what I wore - my jungle green hat, jacket and long trousers. We were told to cover our ears with our hands when the flash appeared.

‘When the bomb went off, it was uncanny. We watched its effect on the water. It was very still and then, all of a sudden, you saw the wave coming towards you. The noise was deafening, like a thousand horses thundering towards you. The man next to me broke down and cried. A lot of men suffered from immediate diarrhoea. After each bomb, it was very noticeable on the night of the explosion that you could hardly get near the toilets. It was really, really terrible.'

Some men suffered skin burns, McGinley himself came out in blisters. There were other problems, too. ‘I did notice that some men suffered psychiatric problems,' said McGinley. ‘Some of the Fijians [a number of Fijian soldiers took part in the tests with the British] were sent home. Later in the series of tests, in September, it became even more noticeable. Men would do anything to get sent back to the UK. One of them set fire to the hospital tent. Discipline was terrible and all kinds of assaults took place quite regularly.'

Horrific though the actual tests were, McGinley's other vivid recollection is of the relentless boredom of life on Christmas Island. The men's diet consisted almost solely of canned food, with no fresh milk to be had except for what they got on occasional trips to Hawaii. The food was often thrown into the sand in disgust. ‘We didn't realize we were going to be stuck out there for a year,' McGinley recalled. ‘There was nothing to do to keep us occupied, nothing at all.'

Since he became one of the first British veterans to air his complaints publicly, McGinley has heard innumerable stories like his own from other Christmas Island veterans and those who took part in the British atom bomb tests in Australia. His mail is full of letters from veterans or their widows, some recounting their experiences for the first time, others bringing him up to date on their battles with the British government over pensions, or describing the latest developments in their illnesses. One of his most heartbreaking tasks as chairman of the association is advising the newly-bereaved widows of veterans who turn to him for advice on how to go about finding out what happened to their husbands at the tests.

In just over two years, about ninety members of the association have died. Many are relatively young men in their late forties or early fifties. Often, their widows become active members of the association in their place.

McGinley's work for the association is often harrowing, but one particular experience haunts him to this day. One evening in November 1983, he received a phone call from a man who told him starkly: ‘I'm phoning on behalf of my widow.' After this unnerving opening, the man went on to explain that he was an
RAF officer, a squadron leader who had served at Christmas Island. Knowing himself to be dying from cancer, and about to go back into hospital for yet another course of treatment, he had decided to ring the association to ask for help for his wife. ‘When I die, I want you to get those bastards,' he told McGinley. He died a month later. ‘That's the kind of thing that makes you fight on,' McGinley told me.

Colonel Peter Lowe lives in Warminster, Wiltshire. In 1957, he was sent to Maralinga, in South Australia, to watch a series of weapon tests in order to lecture troops on the effects of nuclear weapons. He is one of the many British ex-servicemen who gave evidence in 1985 to the Australian Royal Commission investigating the British nuclear tests which took place on Australian territory. In terms of class and rank, his background and experience are utterly different from Ken McGinley's, but in many other respects the two men have much in common. Both retain vivid memories of the tests, particularly of the lax attitude to safety and, like Ken McGinley, Peter Lowe believes that the tests he attended may have caused him lasting physical damage.

Lowe travelled to Sydney in 1957 on a BOAC flight via the Far East, before going on to Maralinga. There were about 200–300 other British army personnel at Maralinga at the time, including British army observers from the UK and all overseas commands - Germany, Middle and Far East, and Africa. All administrative support was provided by the Australian Army; there were also some personnel from the New Zealand army. Lowe was stationed at ‘11 Mile Camp', eleven miles away from the detonation area. It was a tented camp and, according to Lowe, conditions there were ‘fairly primitive'.

Although he had been told that his stay might be as short as three weeks, he soon realized that it would be longer because of the delay caused by waiting for the weather to be correct for detonation. While waiting for the weather to change, the troops were given a series of lectures about the hazards of radiation and the mechanics of the atom bomb. Lowe found the lectures given by Sir William Penney, the scientist in charge of the tests, to be ‘extremely interesting and well presented', but those of the
other lecturers ‘tended to be too technical to understand or were badly put across'.

Penney told them that an excess of gamma radiation would be hazardous to their health, but that the organizers would ensure that there was no such excess exposure. He said that on the day after detonation, the servicemen would go into a contaminated area with full protective clothing, including a film badge, radiation monitor and gas mask. One man in each party would have a portable Geiger counter.

As part of their preparation for the explosion, Lowe and his colleagues spent the best part of three weeks ‘digging in' a range of equipment - 25-pounder guns, machine guns and mortars – about two miles from ground zero (the point nearest the blast). They also erected field defences and radio aerials, and put out field telephones. The purpose of all this was to test the effects of the blast and heat on military equipment.

Lowe watched the first explosion from a hillside about five miles away from ground zero. The next day, he and the other troops went into the target area in groups of between six and eight. They were taken in a three-ton truck to the edge of the contaminated area, where they donned gas masks, boots and protective clothing, which they called ‘Noddy suits'. They then walked to the place where they had left the equipment before the explosion, to measure the effects of the blast on it.

As the senior officer in his group, Lowe was issued with a hand-held Geiger counter and briefly instructed as to how it worked, and how he would know when the danger level had been reached. He was told that when the needle went near the danger level, or the clicking of the counter became too fast, they should withdraw from the contaminated area at once.

‘After we left the three-ton truck, we walked towards ground zero,' he recalled. ‘I cannot estimate how close to ground zero we went. We were not walking in a straight line because each of us had our own particular interest. Mine, as a gunner, was in the equipment of the Royal Artillery which I had helped to put out. We wandered around ever closer to ground zero until the Geiger counter I was holding registered what I considered a dangerous level.

‘If the dial on the Geiger counter was a semicircle, running from 9 o'clock to 3 o'clock, and the red line was at 12 o'clock, I would estimate we withdrew after the needle had gone past 11 o'clock. The other teams withdrew at roughly the same time.' They went back to a meeting-point, from where they were taken to a decontamination camp run by the Australians.

Lowe was astonished by the insouciant attitude of the staff at the decontamination camp. ‘I remember vividly a burly Australian sergeant ripping my film badge from my lapel, taking one look at it, and throwing it into a bucket. I do not remember that the film badge had any number on it. If it did, I was certainly not present when it was issued to me by number, and the number recorded. I am equally certain that no record was made of the reading by the sergeant, and that the film badge was simply consigned to a bucket like everybody else's. We then undressed and our protective clothing was taken away. I do not know what happened to it.' The men then took a shower and, after being tested with a Geiger counter, dressed in their own clothes again.

Lowe observed the second blast from the inside of a closed down tank, which he found ‘very scary indeed'. He did not know exactly how far the tank was from ground zero, but it must have been reasonably close, since the blast moved the tank about ten feet sideways. ‘I was watching through a periscope, and the periscope went opaque straight away because of the sand-blasting effect, which ruined the optics.' Lowe was wearing ordinary military gear for this exercise, with no film badge. After a ‘decent interval' had elapsed after the blast, he was told to evacuate the tank and return by truck to 11 Mile Camp.

At the time, Peter Lowe was not aware that his exposure might have affected his health. It was not until 1969, when he was British military attaché in Washington DC, that his illness began. He seemed to have gastric problems, but all the medical tests he was given proved negative. When he returned from Washington he went to the Royal Hospital in Millbank, London. He told the doctors there that he didn't feel well, but was simply told ‘not to make a fuss'.

In 1972, when he was military adviser to the British High Commission in Canberra, he had an internal haemorrhage. The
doctor who examined him said that he had either a duodenal ulcer or cancer. Lowe's tour of duty in Australia was cut short.

In 1973, when he had returned from Australia, Lowe went to a Harley Street specialist, who confirmed that he had a duodenal ulcer. Lowe persuaded him to operate to remove it. During the course of the operation, at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers, the surgeon discovered that Lowe had a stomach tumour and immediately removed his whole stomach. Since then, Lowe has had no recurrence of his problem, but he is reviewed by the senior consultant at the Royal Marsden Hospital every six months.

The Ministry of Defence denied any liability for Lowe's trouble. It even went so far as to tell the officers' association, which was conducting Lowe's application for a pension, that he was not present at the second explosion. ‘I am absolutely certain that I was,' Lowe retorted, ‘and have a very vivid recollection of being stationed in the tank. I know that someone went sick at the last moment, and I took his place, and I believe that army records were never adjusted to take account of this.'

Colin Campbell was also sent to Maralinga. ‘I did not volunteer - they did not ask for any volunteers at my station,' he told the Royal Commission. He was posted to Australia in 1956, at the age of 21. At the time, he was a senior aircraftsman stationed at RAF Edzell, in Scotland.