Between Heaven and Hell

by Alan Rimmer

  Her 278 officers and crew had been fully briefed about the purpose of the mission. Before departing, her crew underwent special training in radiological warfare. They had been issued with protective clothing and for weeks they had trained in tight security in a huge warehouse near Devonport dockyard.

  The training consisted of putting the men through a series of obstacle courses that had been ‘mined’ with quantities of radioactive isotopes. Each man was issued with a Geiger counter, and he was required to detect and mark ‘hot spots’. All the time clouds of steam and smoke were blown across the course to simulate battlefield conditions.

  While all this was going on, HMS Diana was also being well prepared for the rigours that lay ahead. She had been fitted with powerful pump and sprinkler systems, and she bristled with air filters and scientific measuring equipment.

  Diana arrived at the Monte Bello islands on May 2nd, 1956 and took up position five miles from Trimouille Island, the main one in the group, where the tower-mounted bomb was to be exploded. There followed a series of exercises to ensure the men were ready and the ships equipment was in working order.

  One administrative record reveals it was decided not to issue film badges, used for detecting radiation exposure, to the ship’s company. This was a curious decision given the ship was soon to be enveloped in a radioactive cloud. It was even more puzzling when the same records showed that little was done to protect the crew from contamination.

  A scientist, who boarded the ship on May 3rd reported: “Originally it was intended to have the ship shut down all the time during the fall-out, but present information on the length of time they may be in the fall-out zone makes it impossible to do this. In order to open up, certain personnel have to leave the Citadel, go out into the open and return to cover.”

  The scientist thought this operation could be carried out quite safely using protective clothing. But he warned: “Complete protection of the personnel in the engine room is more difficult to arrange since it is difficult to assess the hazard involved.” It is clear from this that scientists fully expected radiation to enter parts of the ship, making the decision not to issue film badges even more incomprehensible.

  When the bomb was detonated, the entire ship’s complement was on deck to see the fireworks. About 30 of them were mere boys, cadets, aged just 15.

  John Kay was an 18-yr-old national service seaman, on board at the time. He recalled: “I was badly frightened, but not surprisingly these boy sailors were more terrified than anyone when the bomb went off. I was thrown onto my face by the force of the blast. The whole ship rocked and I knew we must be very close to the explosion. Men were groaning all around me and the young kids were crying as we scrambled round the deck. My first thought was that something had gone wrong.

  “Suddenly the battle stations were called and we a great sense of relief we scrambled down the hatches which were then tightly battened down. We stayed below for hours as the ship zigzagged to stay in the fallout. It was very hot and claustrophobic. I remember officers constantly checking instruments for radiation. At one point there was a high-pitched alarm indicating the instrument readings were too high. It was very unnerving.”

  According to other accounts, men in the engine room, even those wearing protective gear, had to be evacuated, because of high radiation counts. As the men quavered below, scientists in ‘moon suits’ moved from compartment to compartment checking radiation levels. Several areas were evacuated. Above, a deadly radioactive rain poured down onto the decks as Diana doggedly tracked the mushroom cloud.

  The second phase of the experiment began when Diana emerged from the mushroom cloud. Wash-down parties were ordered on to the decks where a thick layer of contaminated coral dust had accumulated. Mr Kay, who had been ‘volunteered’, was one of the first out of the hatches.

  He said: “We were dressed in black capes with hoods attached. I remember it was very overcast and there was an eerie purple and yellow glow in the sky. Our first job was to remove some canvas coverings from the deck. We worked in silence and it was very scary to see the other men moving about in this weird light looking like big black bats. There was dust everywhere and the sprinklers were going full blast. At one stage my hood came off and I was immediately ordered to the decontamination unit. One of the scientists put a Geiger counter to my head and it started to buzz like crazy. I spent three hours in the showers after that.”

  After several hours swabbing the decks, Diana finally returned to her mooring to await a repeat of the whole operation, this time with an even bigger bomb, in a month’s time. After that Diana was ordered to steam home, but was refused docking facilities at Fremantle near Perth because the Australians didn’t want the ‘ship of doom’ on their doorstep.

  To make matters worse many men began reporting sick. This was not uncommon on long voyages, but the sheer numbers was soon causing concern.

  Former crewman Doug Atkinson was an orderly in the sick bay. He recalled: “At first there was just a trickle of men complaining of boils and sores, not that unusual. Then more and more began to be brought down. The sick bays were soon full. Lots of men now had terrible sores and were passing blood. The medics were rushed off their feet and the officers were worried. They tried to keep spirits up, but a lot of men began to blame the bomb tests.”

  As rumours about radiation poisoning swept the destroyer, Diana, like a mediaeval plague ship, made full speed for home. Unfortunately, the Gods seem to have deserted Diana. When she reached Aden she found herself marooned for weeks because of the Suez crisis.

  In recent years strenuous efforts have been made to trace the 278 crew members on Board Diana at the time. But very few have been found despite extensive publicity in naval magazines and other publications. Most of those found reported sicknesses.

  Doug Atkinson suffered spinal disintegration and was confined to a wheelchair. He had a whole body scan at Exeter University to measure radiation in his body. Instead of an average reading of 137, his scan showed a reading of five thousand-plus. Doctors were amazed. He was told that according to the readings he should have glowed in the dark.

  Diana’s navigating officer, Lt Commander M.W. Butler died of cancer in 1975. His widow Sheila, of Liskeard, Cornwall, said: “It was a horrible death. My husband was taken from me at the age of 49. But he would never say anything against the Navy. He felt it unseemly for an officer. But he did admit to me once that there had been very little safety precautions to protect the men.”

  Margaret Rogers, a Diana widow who had remarried, said her sailor husband John Furlong, died of cancer in 1981. Mrs Rogers of Lanarkstown, Glasgow, said: “John always said he had been affected by the tests, but no-one really believed him. Only when all the publicity came out in 1983, did people finally believe him. Of course it was too late then.”

  The Diana incident has never been disputed. Government ministers who have commented on it tended to dismiss it as a one-off experiment on a fully battened down warship with all possible safety precautions in place to protect the men. But three years before Diana steamed into her nuclear fate, another experiment involving a Royal Naval ship and radioactive dust took place just 50 miles off the British coast.

  In August 1953, the frigate HMS Starling prepared to leave Portsmouth harbour for what was understood to be a routine dummy anchorage exercise. Everything appeared normal to the crew as they went about their duties. They had carried out similar exercises on many occasions and they had no reason to suspect that anything was different. No new equipment had been taken on board and the officers had not indicated that anything was out of the ordinary.

  But about an hour before Starling was due to cast off, a large grey van pulled up alongside the frigate and several men in thick overalls carried aboard a large sealed container. This excited little curiosity from the crew who believed the container was carrying more supplies. Considerable interest was aroused, however, when a large black limousine carrying a group of civilians drew up alongside. The men, dressed in
Trilbies and Macintoshes, quietly boarded the Starling which then headed into the Atlantic.

  The ship’s grapevine soon identified the mysterious civilians who were berthed with the captain and were rarely seen. It was the famous scientist Sir William Penney and his entourage. What was he doing aboard Starling? Had he brought an atom bomb on board? The men were agog with excitement.

  The ship eventually anchored about 50 miles off the North West coast of Scotland. It was a bright, sunny day and most of the crew where on deck. Able seaman Harold Brown and several others were taken to one side and told by an officer they had been assigned some special duties. They were told the ship was about to be bombarded with ‘a spot’ of radioactive dust and they would be required to wash the decks after the experiment was over.

  Recalling the incident, Mr Brown said: “It was said very matter-of-factly and we were assured there was absolutely no danger involved. Being young I wasn’t at all worried. I do remember feeling peeved because of the extra duties, but like the rest of the men I was trained not to question orders.”

  Soon the men were ordered below deck and the hatches were sealed. As they waited, the heavy rumbling sound of an aircraft flying low was heard. About 30 minutes later, Mr Brown and the other ‘volunteers’ were taken up on deck.

  They were given no special clothing to wear and Mr Brown got a soaking from the ship’s sprinkler system which was going full blast. The first thing he noticed was that the decks were covered with a peculiar red-brown dust flecked with grey. Mops and brushes were pushed into their hands and the men got to work swabbing the decks.

  Mr Brown said: “This red-brown dust was everywhere and we had to use heavy cotton-wool swabs to remove it from the rails and brass fittings. We were on deck for at least two hours trying to get rid of it all.”

  When that was over, the second phase of the experiment took place. The sealed container that had been carried aboard earlier was brought up to the deck. Inside was a mass of dust similar in texture to what had already been washed off the decks. As the men gathered curiously round, large cans of battleship grey paint known as ‘pussers’ was carefully mixed into the radioactive dust.

  Mr Brown and his mates were ordered to paint the sides of the ship and the lifeboats with the contaminated mix. Most of the men were brought up on deck for this phase of the operation.

  When Starling returned to Portsmouth she did not dock at her usual berth; she was taken to a special dock, well away from the main berths, and covered with canvas. Sprinklers and hoses were played on her for days. Oddly the ship’s log for the period was missing when researchers visited the Public Records Office at Kew to try to verify Mr Brown’s story. The Navy wouldn’t acknowledge the experiment took place.

  It goes without saying that the idea of the Navy carrying out a large scale radiation experiment just off the British coast would have caused widespread public alarm. Using young sailors to splash radioactive paint all over the decks shows a criminal disregard for their safety.

  Mr Brown was discharged from the Navy on medical grounds two years later. In 1984, he was a very sick man and knew he didn’t have much longer to live. He contacted the Ministry of Defence to ask for a pension so his wife could be looked after once he had gone. It was suggested he had made the whole matter up and was turned down flat. He died in agony some time after that. His widow Susan penned an eloquent eulogy which speaks for itself:-

  “My husband was AB Harold Brown DJX566143 RN, and very proud of it. He joined the Navy as a boy of 16. He travelled the seven seas, was attached to the Royal Indian Navy for a while and was in various campaigns including Cyprus. He has three medals for serving his country; he also has a false leg and almost six feet of plastic arteries. He suffered intravascular muscle spasms, had several strokes, skin that erupted for no reason and two heart attacks. Both his eyes had cataracts; he had spondylosis of the spine, and also had to wear a hearing aid. But in July 1953 he was a hale and hearty healthy man, not impotent as he was at 40, with a zest and vim for life. That experiment he was involved with destroyed him completely. But do they care? I think everyone knows the answer.”

  HUMAN EXPERIMENTS

  Radiation experiments on troops carried out in controlled conditions is one thing. But the secret world of nuclear weapons has an even more awful second agenda; evidence of long-standing sinister secrets buried deep in official archives that will never be opened to public consumption. Horrifying eyewitness testimonies, impossible to dismiss, tell of obscene experiments on crippled human beings plucked from asylums and psychiatric wards, and placed alongside animal test subjects near ground zero for the purposes of scientific experimentation.

  Stories began to emerge of atrocities in the Australian outback in the early 1980s during British nuclear tests. Four test participants alleged that mentally handicapped people were deliberately brought close to atomic explosions for a series of experiments.

  One of the Australian servicemen stated under oath: “The handicapped people were brought to One Tree, where one of the bombs was to be detonated in Maralinga, for the first of the Buffalo series of tests. One lot came into the rail sidings at Watson, another lot were brought in by air. They were kept in a special area off the main road. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them: the unearthly babble that mental patients make. After the test you couldn’t hear them anymore.”

  The claims made in a Royal Commission hearing couldn’t be substantiated at the time, but compelling confirmation came 16 years later, in June 2001, when a pilot confessed to an academic that he flew severely disabled people from institutions in Britain to the Australian desert.

  According to the pilot the patients were deliberately exposed to radioactive fall-out at Maralinga in the 1950s. They did not return home and are assumed to have died. The pilot related his story to Dr Robert Jackson, a respected Australian academic at Edith Cowan University in Perth. The conversation took place after Dr Jackson gave a presentation to staff during which he mentioned the allegations about radiation experiments. The man told him: “That was true. I was one of the pilots, and we didn’t fly them out again.”

  Dr Jackson closely questioned the man, who had become a disabled care worker, and had no doubt he was telling the truth. He said: “I was quite convinced. The man said there was no doubt the people were used as guinea pigs. They had multiple disabilities, both physical and mental. His story is quite credible when you consider the prevailing view at the time about mentally handicapped people. A lot of people believed they were a sub-human and deserved to be euthanized.”

  Dr Jackson said he had also heard another shocking account of handicapped people being used for experiments at the Monte Bello islands when the two A-bombs were detonated in 1956.

  At least two men with Downs’ syndrome were allegedly taken ashore with scientists and placed in a bunker near ground zero. The academic admitted he had no corroborative evidence to support these claims, but at least one independent eyewitness, under oath, recounted a disturbing incident he was involved with at the two tests, code-named Mosaic.

  Bernard Perkins was a radio operator on the scientific vessel Narvik when the second device, equivalent to eight Hiroshima bombs, was detonated. It sent a radioactive cloud over the mainland.

  Perkins was busy all day sending dispatches from air crew who flew through the mushroom cloud to collect samples. Later the ship moved closer inshore ready to pick up scientists who had been left in bunkers on the islands.

  Rumours swept the ship that the fireball from the explosion finished very close to one of the bunkers. Another rumour was that there were several “retards” with the scientists.

  Mr Perkins recalled in a statement: “I saw with my own eyes the scientists being brought back to the ship. I stood on the upper deck watching it with another man whose name I cannot now remember. A motor boat came toward us. There were two men with protective clothing on, and five or six others all of whom had blankets wrapped around them looking as though they were in shock.
They were brought to the ship’s side and came up the gangplank and had to be helped aboard. Nobody saw them again. I believe they were taken from the ship at night. To the best of my recollection they were wearing sandals, khaki shirts, stockings and shorts with no headgear.”

  Were these the “retards”, the handicapped people, Dr Jackson had been told about? Fantastic as it may seem, similar allegations began to emerge from America.

  Bob Carter was an ex-serviceman who took part in an exercise which included the explosion of a 74 kiloton atomic bomb in the Nevada desert in 1957. He described how, when moving into the ground zero area as part of manoeuvres after the explosion, he saw human test subjects handcuffed behind fenced enclosures. When he told his superiors, Carter claims he was given an unpleasant drug treatment and after a prolonged period in an isolated ward was then brought before a military panel and told to repeat his ‘bizarre’ story. By then Carter had learned to remain silent.

  Other disturbing stories were soon to follow. A news organization in Santa Fe reported interviews with three former servicemen who were present during a 1955 series of tests known as Teapot. These men were members of the 232nd Signal Support Company and had positioned themselves far forward of other troops and occupied a slit trench near ground zero. Their job was to position and bury field telephone lines to establish how battlefield communications would function in a nuclear war. The three men camped overnight but were woken at about 2am by a truck which passed their position and stopped a hundred yards ahead.

  A 19-yr-old G.I. called Jim O’Connor said that he watched as people, in civilian clothing, were placed in above ground (not dug-out), Korean War-style trenches. Later the remainder of the 232nd joined O’Connor in his trench, which was 3,500 yards from ground zero, to experience the explosion which had the destructive power of three Hiroshima bombs.