Heligoland (29 page)

Codenamed Project ‘Emulsion’, a 1,000lb streamlined bomb was the simple evolutionary link by which the Tallboy was recognisably developed into the casing for Britain’s atomic bomb. A secret report on ‘Emulsion’ acknowledged this as early as May 1948: ‘The bomb shape chosen was similar to Tallboy, which experience had shown to behave well ballistically from medium altitude and a 1,000lb size was used for convenience in trials. The first step in the stabilisation of bombs at transonic and supersonic speeds was made by choosing the Tallboy shape of body and fitting five different types of tail to it. It was found that a fine spin 1.4 x bomb diameter was adequate to stabilise this bomb at the speeds reached with release at 35,000 feet and 350 mph.’
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Emulsion was initially tested in the United States at the USAF’s Aberdeen proving ground at Atomic City, Idaho. Then, in 1949, the trial drops were focused on at the Orfordness bombing range on the Suffolk coast. Orfordness – where Penney’s AWRE had established another of their characteristic enclaves – was serviced by a secret RAE airfield nearby, called Martlesham Heath. Struggling along with a special flight of four fatigued bombers (two Lincolns and two Mosquitos), the RAE were required to complete the series of Emulsion drop tests for the AWRE. However, because of unserviceable aircraft and inclement weather, during the winter of 1949/50 they fell behind schedule. Martlesham’s declassified operations record book discloses that in May pressure was increased by the delivery of unarmed prototypes of the Blue Danube: ‘A new task has been added, and the particular stores have been received and dropping has commenced. For this purpose a specially modified Lincoln has been received.’
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The number of sorties flown leapt in May, and the next month reached 33. Indeed, by June 1950 Penney and his scientists at Fort Halstead had put together a mock-up of the as yet untested British atomic bomb, codenamed ‘Blue Danube’, for members of the HEROD Committee to inspect. Was it at this crucial time that Martlesham’s secret AWRE flight bombed Heligoland?

Inexplicably it was then that a specialist metal recovery programme, from early 1950 to early 1951, was instigated for the island. Every fortnight teams of metal collectors were to land on Heligoland to gather strategically valuable scrap. Somewhat intriguingly its codename was Operation ‘Top Hat’ – the confidential name used on the mainland to identify key physicists working for the occupying Allies.
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To this day Heligoland fishermen who happened to witness the postwar test bombings insist that the heavy bombs dropped had mostly concrete centre sections. This is not surprising because the use of concrete would have enabled the HER scientists to experiment cheaply and easily with various shapes. The fin and tail were presumably made of distinctively shiny blue chrome molybdenum steel.

In the postwar years the British government never publicly revealed just how vital Heligoland was considered to be by a small miscellaneous group of influential officials. On 2 February 1950 the Chiefs of Staff Committee sent a paper to the Cabinet’s Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, which at the time was considering the future of Heligoland. In no uncertain terms the Chiefs insisted: ‘We consider it possible that if bombing-range facilities of the type provided in Heligoland were withdrawn the USAF might reconsider the basing of bombers in this country in peacetime.’ Heligoland clearly represented a valuable card to play in the crucial game of keeping the United States involved in Europe. Only when NATO was formed in April 1949 was there a binding commitment from the United States to help defend Western Europe against a possible threat from the East.
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The USAF’s Strategic Air Command deployment in Britain of B-29A Superfortresses, which had an A-bomb carrying capacity, began in July 1948 in response to the Berlin Crisis. Until bombing ranges for the B-29As were opened in Iceland and West Africa they mostly practised their nuclear targeting skills with conventional weapons against Heligoland, where in September 1948 they jointly participated in Exercise ‘Dagger’ with the RAF. To keep the strength of the SAC’s presence in Britain obscure, various USAF B-29A squadrons were rotated on three-month tours of duty; while the UK airfields from which they operated were made to seem to be still entirely RAF bases.

This is evident from a paper issued by the Chiefs of Staff on 2 February 1950, which twice refers, very clearly, to the range having been used by both the RAF and the USAF since 1946, and later mentions its being ‘also in continual use by the USAF bombers based in this country’. Whether or not those American B-29A bombers were sometimes carrying practice atomic bombs is not clear. The island’s location and shape provided the USAF and the RAF with an invaluable training venue. As the Chiefs of Staff had stated to ministers on 2 February 1950:

Map 8
Exercise ‘Bullseye’: five years after the Second World War, Heligoland was still being heavily pounded by the RAF. On 1–2 June 1950 it was test bombed by 88 Lancasters and Mosquitos in Exercise ‘Bullseye’. Pleas from the exiled islanders to be allowed to return to their homeland were rejected; and the British High Commissioner in Germany threatened demonstrators with imprisonment. (
Public Record office
)

In addition to bombing runs by a few isolated aircraft dropping experimental weapons, mass raids were carried out by bombers. Codenamed ‘Bullseye’, these began on 5 April 1946 with an attack by pathfinding Mosquitos and 44 Lancasters carrying 1,000lb bombs. The event was believed to have been the first RAF mass training exercise since the war ended. A similar ‘Bullseye’ bombing of Heligoland occurred on 2 June 1950.
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Although each of the 49 Lincolns involved was ordered to take vertical pictures of the bomb releases and impacts none of those photographs is now known to exist.

The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had been warned in a top secret note sent by the Defence Research Policy Committee that ‘If the atomic bomb is to be effective and economically used, the accuracy with which it is dropped must be of the high order achieved in the last stages of the last war.’ New navigation devices would have to be developed, and presumably tested, to achieve maximum precision. ‘The effort on these allied problems of navigation and accurate bombing is wholly insufficient and we are falling behind our target dates.’ The need for precision bombing skills to be kept at the highest pitch by means of practice – both for conventional and atomic bombs – was affirmed at a special meeting of the secret HEROD Committee, held specifically to discuss crew training on 16 November 1951. According to the minutes of that meeting: ‘It was agreed that practice bombs were essential for the training of the Air and Group crews who would be responsible for the delivery of atomic bombs.’ Heligoland was uniquely placed in this regard, as was admitted in the Chief of Staff’s 2 February 1950 briefing paper: ‘Heligoland is the
only
suitable site within a reasonable distance of Great Britain; no British islands are suitable.’

By March 1950, the RAF was starting to take delivery of seventy B-29A bombers loaned from America. Although, because of the restrictive McMahon Act, those B-29A Washingtons were prevented from being fitted with A-bomb racks, in all other respects they were identical to the SAC’s own Superfortresses. Each of the eight RAF squadrons which operated the B-29A Washingtons practised their precision bombing techniques at the Heligoland range, sometimes in joint exercises with the USAF. Seemingly for some time prior to the introduction of the Canberra bombers – and then the Valiants in 1955 – it was on such Washington flights that future V-bomber aircrews were trained.

Whatever hopes Britain might have had of using Heligoland as a site for an atomic bomb test would have been finally dashed in the autumn of 1951 by a seemingly chance remark in an obscure telegram sent by the British Embassy in Washington to the Cabinet Office in London. The telegram concerned the United States’ huge inland nuclear weapons test site in Nevada, and stated that ‘One of the earliest Nevada explosions of only 1 kiloton had caused considerable window damage at 75 miles.’ This apparently freak accident doubtless had a profound effect on any thoughts Penney and his team might have had of carrying out an atomic test on Heligoland. The Nevada accident appears to have been caused by detonating the atomic bomb too close to the mountains, which had the effect of greatly exaggerating the blast and widening the area affected by an enormous distance. Penney, who was an expert in blast and seismological effects, must have been reminded of the huge explosion caused on Heligoland on 15 October 1944 when the Aphrodite bomber crashed in the Unterland, wrecking the Biological Institute there and demolishing 24,600 sq. yards of domestic property. In a report written on 29 November 1944, D.G. Christopherson of the Armament Department of the Ministry of Home Security noted that the scale of the blast damage appeared to have been influenced by the shock waves bouncing off the cliff. This was neatly illustrated with a bull’s-eye target diagram.
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It seemed likely that if an atomic bomb were tested in the shallow water off Sandy Island, shock waves would bounce off the cliffs of Heligoland and cause structural damage to buildings at Cuxhaven, just 30 miles across the Bight at the mouth of the Elbe, and perhaps even affect other towns and villages along the German North Sea coast. This put an end to the possibility of Heligoland being used for an atomic bomb test.

The obvious alternative was to use Eniwetok Range, the United States’ testing ground – from where inhabitants had recently been exiled – in the Marshall Islands. Unfortunately, the timing for seeking permission to use that could hardly have been worse. As early as November 1945 Attlee and President Truman had signed the Washington Agreement to allow full and effective cooperation in atomic bomb development. Under the terms of this Dr Penney was involved with America’s A-bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. But in August 1946 the United States Congress had passed the McMahon Act prohibiting the passing of classified atomic information to
any
foreign country – including Britain. Even so, at a working level some exchanges of data did continue to take place between America and Britain. Pressure on Dr Penney to get Britain’s atomic bomb completed was further increased in August 1949 when the Soviet Union carried out its first atomic bomb test. Then in January 1950 disaster struck. Klaus Fuchs, the Imperial College traitor and the only other senior British scientist at the Bikini Atoll tests (where he helped to plan blast experiments against decommissioned warships), was arrested at Harwell, accused of passing secret information about Britain’s atomic bomb programme to the Russians before 1949.

The huge breach of trust caused by the discovery of Fuchs’ treachery meant that all Anglo-American technical cooperation on the bomb was abruptly halted, hence the additional difficulty in finding a suitable test site to replace Heligoland. On 3 June 1950 Attlee received a grim top secret memo from his officials: ‘As you know, from your recent talk with the US Secretary of State [Dean Acheson], the prospects of our getting an atomic energy agreement with the Americans are bleak. Meanwhile the Ministry of Supply will shortly be reaching the point when they must know whether or not they can count on using the American testing ground at Eniwetok.’ In the face of this uncertainty, the HEROD team urgently began to search for a venue for testing Britain’s bomb.

It is usually assumed that somehow or other the idea of testing the atomic bomb on the Australian island of Monte Bello just appeared. But other sites were considered. This is evident from a secret telegram Attlee sent to the Australian Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies on 15 September 1950, in which he spoke about the problems of obtaining the use of Eniwetok: ‘Meanwhile it is clearly advisable’, wrote Attlee, ‘if only as a precaution, to consider possible alternative sites in British Commonwealth territory.’ The curious wording of this sentence is ambiguous: did he mean ‘
a
British Commonwealth territory’ or several Commonwealth ‘territories’? It seems that the plural was intended because Attlee continued: ‘One possible site which has been suggested by our experts is the Monte Bello Islands.’ The use of the phrase ‘One possible site’ is crucial because it indicates that there were other sites under consideration. Indeed, on 8 September 1949 Air Marshal William Elliot, recommending that an interdepartmental committee be established on the subject, prepared a list of possible areas for test sites, namely: Australia; Botswana (E. Kalahari); Canada (Eastern); Namibia (near Walvis Bay) and Gobabis (W. Kalahari); Rhodesia; and Somaliland (near Berber).
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A report by the Chief of Staff under the heading ‘Testing of UK Atomic Weapon’, apparently naming these and other possible sites, was sent to the Chiefs of Staff and the inner circle of ministers on 31 August 1950. Was British-controlled Heligoland one such site? File AE (M)(50)9, which contains written proof of that discussion, was unwittingly made available to the Public Record Office in 1985. Apparently the Cabinet Office then attempted a cover-up. On 17 July 1990 an official from the Prime Minister’s office at 10 Downing Street, which was then occupied by Margaret Thatcher, purposely went to that nuclear testing file and removed pages which presumably mentioned Heligoland, leaving several incriminating hand-written notes declaring: ‘This file has been removed and destroyed.’ Coincidentally perhaps, the archive destruction began just a fortnight before the 100th anniversary of the Heligoland swap.