The reality, as Foley knew, was altogether more complex. The Ministry of Defence had received the awaited American report in June that year (a month or so before the Kielce went up so serendipitously). Recently opened files in the National Archives reveal that the Ministry of Defence had also worked hard to win over the Americans, leaving them in no doubt that all the responsible British authorities considered it better to leave the ship where it was. They had argued this forcefully at a meeting with American army experts in 1966, and the civil servant in charge of the Ministry’s Shore Division (Navy) had even written to the Americans with a series of leading questions that pointed unmistakably towards the British conclusion that vigilant inaction was the safest course.14 Despite this pre-emptive strike from British officials, the American “boffins” had insisted in going off in quite the wrong direction. Their report insisted that it was still “entirely feasible to salvage the remaining cargo, provided qualified personnel are used and adequate equipment is available”.15 Recommending that the bombs be salvaged and dumped at sea in water of five hundred fathoms or more, they also declared themselves confident that the operation could be successfully accomplished — by British contract workers approved by the Ministry of Defence.
This put a big cat among the pigeons at the Ministry of Defence. Two British explosives experts whose views had been cited by the Americans in support of their conclusions were promptly instructed to produce letters stating unambiguously that the bombs were simply too dangerous and the condition of their fuses too unknowable to justify any attempt at removal. It then fell to Mr J.E.D. Street, the head of the Ministry of Defence’s Shore Division (Navy) to draft and justify the British response rejecting the American proposal. In a “loose Minute” dated 27 October 1967, he insisted that the Americans “know a lot less than we do”.16 Reiterating that all consulted explosives experts warned of the danger of interfering with the bombs, which the Americans like the British were unable to detail precisely, Mr Street emphasised that recovery of the bombs would be “an enormous and expensive task”. He also claimed to have detected yet more encouraging thickening in the “blanket of silt” with which his predecessors had sought to muffle the concerns of sceptical politicians and fearful residents alike, asserting that the bombs had been rendered less dangerous by “increased siltration” since 1964, when a survey had suggested that an explosion would only break windows and crack already weak walls in Sheerness. Aware of high levels of “public awareness” about the issue in Sheerness and elsewhere, and also the concern of various MPs from both sides of the Thames Estuary, Street recommended that news of the government’s rejection of the American suggestion should be slipped through as a written answer to a supplementary question, and not announced in a ministerial speech to the Commons where a debate might “give probably unjustified prominence to the potential risks”.
While the Americans accepted the Ministry of Defence’s decision, this is more than can be said for the nation’s amateur visionaries. In 1971, the Board of Trade, by this time under Edward Heath’s Conservative government, was still having to brush off letters from private citizens offering their own steampunk schemes for the removal of the wreck.17 Mr Persad from Selly Oak, wanted to enclose the thing in a vast steel dome riveted (not welded) to the seabed with a hole left in the top, and then to blow it up once and for all. H.N. Brunby of Doncaster thought it would be better to isolate and freeze the Richard Montgomery before using floating cranes to raise both the wreck and its unpredictable cargo out of the water in solid blocks of ice.
Pearl Ace, a Panama-registered Vehicles Carrier, passing the Richard Montgomery, 2017.
Yet there were also pleas of a less technical nature. In October 1971, suspicions that high wind and tides were causing movement in the disintegrating Richard Montgomery drew new notes of alarm from concerned figures in Sheerness. Three of the town’s ministers — Baptist, Church of England and Congregationalist — came together to write about the “upsurge of anxiety” being felt about the hazardous wreck “so close to the beaches of Sheerness”.18 They cited many causes for increased alarm — the recent movement of the broken hull, such as it may have been, the increase of shipping in the Thames and Medway Channels, and the prospect of a new airport on Maplin Sands, across the estuary at Foulness, plans for which had been formally accepted by the government in April 1971 and which threatened to introduce a flight path that would bring low-flying planes directly over the wreck. The three ministers pleaded that, even if the bomb ship remained too dangerous to remove, something surely had to be done to reduce the “equally real risk” the wreck posed for the people of Sheerness. Looking back into the days of national service, they declared that “some of us can remember using sandbags etc. to muffle the explosive power of anti-personnel mines, etc.”, and urged that “modern technology and experience” should now be applied to the search for a “marine equivalent”. The Chairman of the Governors at St George’s Church of England Middle School in Sheerness was also worried. He wrote to the Seretary of State for Education and Science, Margaret Thatcher, explaining that the families and children of the town had “grave cause to fear”, and pleading that she should encourage the responsible departments of government to give more serious attention to the possibility of “rendering the effects of the blast less devastating” for the town and its children.19
By the time Johnson arrived in Sheerness, the Richard Montgomery was well-established as a generator of wild estuarial narratives of helplessness and official abandonment. Files now accessible at the National Archives reveal that the upriver authorities were by no means as idle as they seemed to downriver communities. The latter may not have been kept informed but, at the beginning of the Seventies, engineers at the government’s Hydraulic Research Institute at Wallingford really had been commissioned to survey the possibility of constructing a barrier around the wreck, in order to protect it from collisions. Their investigation, which reported in January 1971, revealed that “turbulent eddies” had caused extensive scouring at the ends of the separated halves of the hull, raising the fear that bomb-filled parts of the ship might drop dangerously into the hole opened beneath them.20 The idea of sinking blockships as protective measures around the wreck was discounted as both dangerous and useless — since they would sink into the unstable bank and probably also slide out towards the Medway shipping channel. It was considered safer to produce a “rubble dam”, but this had its dangers too. Almost incidentally, the Hydraulic Research Institute’s investigators noted that the forward half of the wreck had now itself split into two, raising the likelihood that bombs were already sliding out of the holds.
By November 1971, Edward Heath’s government had given up on the idea of building any variety of protective wall.21 That announcement prompted another flurry of alarmist press attention, and more public concern following an edition of the BBC television news programme Nationwide, which, on 1 March 1972, interviewed fishermen from Leigh-on-Sea, on the Essex side of the estuary: they spoke of having trawled up a bomb — or, as an official may have suspected, an old First World War shell — and claimed that many bombs were now scattered around the wreck.22 The pressure was mounting on the upriver authorities whose strategy seemed to some critics to consist only of postponing the problem, together with the responsibility for deciding over it, into a bureaucratic version of Doomsday, i.e. a looming disaster that may, with any luck, not happen on the present incumbent’s watch.
Documents in no longer closed files reveal that, following a meeting with the Department of Trade and Industry in March 1972 the explosives experts at the Ministry of Technology’s Explosives Research and Development Establishment (ERDE) at Waltham Abbey were charged with forming a working party to look into the possibility of conducting an “experimental” explosion in order to establish the “hazards” posed by the Richard Montgomery.23 In his paper for the meeting, ERDE’s researcher, S.J. Hawkins, admitted that his own initial enthusiasm for simply blowing up the wreck had been impractical, t
hanks partly to the necessity of evacuating not just Sheerness and the Isle of Grain on the southern shore of the estuary, but also Southend and Shoeburyness to the north. This would, he declared, be a very expensive operation, and the explosion would no doubt also be followed by innumerable compensation claims for damage and loss of earnings. In justifying his change of mind, he drew on the Atomic Weapons and Research Establishment’s report (No. 0-36/72) on “The Kielce Explosion”. He also cited his own earlier “technical memo No. 11”, printed by ERDE in 1970 under the title “Effects of Detonation in the Wreck of SS Richard Montgomery off Sheerness”.
In the latter investigation, Hawkins had sought to predict what would happen if the 1,400 tons of TNT on the Richard Montgomery exploded at low tide, with thirty-seven feet of water above the charge. Careful to confine himself to scientific forces — air blast, underwater shock, seismic vibration, ejection of water, tidal waves — rather than human consequences, this expert in “sonic bangs” anticipated that an explosion would produce a water column a thousand feet wide rising nine thousand feet from the sea. It would sculpt a crater of some five thousand cubic metres out of the sea bed, while perhaps also, as the Hydraulic Research Station had suggested, opening a north-south channel through the Sheerness Middle Sand and having other “deleterious” effects on the Medway shipping channel, while scattering unexploded bombs far and wide too. The impact would be worst for Sheerness and for ships in the Medway Channel, but not at all good for any planes that happened to be approaching or taking off from Southend Airport.
Having demonstrated that deliberate detonation was not a sensible option, the ERDE working party, which convened again on 29 November 1973, was asked to consider the possibility of salvaging the wreck with the help of a “dry dock” that might, so the Department of the Environment’s Marine Engineering Division had tentatively suggested, be constructed around it. The latter idea was to surround the wreck with an encircling dam. Built at a safe distance of two hundred feet, this would create a tide-proof “lagoon” from which the water might then be removed a foot or two at a time. The revealed cargo would be hosed down, treated chemically to remove rust accretions and barnacles, and then carefully removed. The operation would be repeated until the cargo was cleared, after which the ship itself would be cut up and lifted in pieces.
In his briefing paper, Hawkins assesses every aspect of this delicate operation. He gathers everything that is known about the cargo — using American information to establish exactly what bombs and fuses are involved. He allows for the discrepancy between the original loading manifest and the record of bombs removed during the salvage operation of August/September 1944, and takes into account that there may be some materials left in holds previously declared empty. He then plots every action necessary to the successful completion of this delicate operation — building the dam, getting access to the site, dealing with the dangerous fuses: both those already screwed into the M1A1 cluster fragmentation bombs and the separate AN-M103 detonators intended for the larger TNT-filled bombs but packed individually in waterproof metal cans and then stored in batches in wooden cases.
It would, Hawkins reckoned, be technically possible to construct such a “dry dock” and then to lower the water level gradually, so that the silt could be gently hosed off the top layer of bombs before proceeding further. Some cutting may be necessary to get access to the holds, but mechanical force had to be avoided in examining the fuses for copper azide. There were ways of doing this for the M1A1 fuses in the cluster fragmentation bombs, but the others might have to be left in their wooden cases and detonated once the rest of the ship had been cleared. Having outlined every step of the manoeuvre, Hawkins concluded that safe recovery was “a definite possibility”. He admitted, however, that it would be hugely expensive with the dam alone costing a possible sum of £5 million. Perhaps that, rather than just the caution of bomb-shy politicians, was the reason why it was never attempted. That is how things stood when Uwe Johnson moved to Sheerness and saw the masts of the Richard Montgomery poking up from the seabed outside his window. Like unemployment, poverty and the flow of Hürlimann lager in the Napier Tavern, the Doomsday shuffle was set to continue.
32. BECOMING UNFATHOMABLE: THE BOMB SHIP AS “MURKY REALITY”
Perhaps, during his very first days in Sheerness, Johnson really did mistake “that thing” for a peculiar English fishing apparatus. Had he done so, however, the illusion was dispelled much sooner than might be deduced from his essay “An Unfathomable Ship”. Within days of moving in, Johnson was using the apocalyptic wreck outside his window to add a punch to his friends’ doubts about his new home. Early in December 1974, he wrote to Rudolf Augstein, the founder and head of Der Spiegel, insisting on the attractions he might expect to encounter on a visit: “Two and a half miles from the shore there is a munitions ship that sank in April 1945 [sic], which no salvage company dares to attempt; if it goes up, it’ll knock more than ten feet off the buildings and they will hardly be able to rescue the inhabitants from their upstairs windows with rowing boats. Are there not a few words one could waste on this ship? There are. But you should see it for yourself”.1
The East German writer Günter Kunert, who met up with the Johnsons at 26 Marine Parade a month or so after that letter was written, noted the apparent pride with which Johnson took this little party up to a higher floor to show them the “sinister panorama” that could be seen from the front bedroom:
… a monotonous expanse of water furnished with a tanker or freighter far out by the horizon, as though to give the eye something to rest on. In the middle of the reflected verticals, a buoy marking where an American munitions ship went down in 1945 [sic], which, as Japanese divers have only recently confirmed, cannot be salvaged. If it were to explode, all Sheerness would go up. And yet no one had informed the buyer of this house, Herr Uwe Johnson from Berlin-Friedenau, of this fact before purchase. And yet he, for his part, told me about it with such satisfaction, almost pleasure, as though his purchase price had obtained him the right, which he could legally exercise in case of emergency, to a catastrophe.2
Johnson wrote the first version of “An Unfathomable Ship” at the request of the West German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who was preparing a collection of essays to be published as Suhrkamp’s thousandth volume in 1979. Aware that the ideas and attitudes that had shaped West Germany through the post-war years were increasingly challenged by new realities, Habermas judged it timely to devote the book to an investigation of “the spiritual situation of the age”. The phrase was taken from the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, who had used it as the title of an influential tract published in 1931, in which he had set out to review the condition of life in the years before Hitler’s final rise to power and to analyse the adequacy, or otherwise, of Enlightenment values of reason and reflection to those seeking fully to understand and guide people under the new circumstance (the English translation was published as Man in the Modern Age3).
Johnson was among the fifty or so “critics, writers and social scientists” who received a letter from Habermas invited them to contribute to Observations on “the Spiritual Situation of the Age”.4 Dated 15 June 1978, the commissioning letter reminded readers of Jasper’s essay and suggested that the West German left was again at a moment of transition, indicated by the emergence of terrorism on the far-left and also by the state’s draconian response to this new threat. The post-war past that was now threatened with disintegration had been shaped and informed by Suhrkamp Editions, which had gone into action as a literary house, publishing Adorno, Benjamin, Beckett, Brecht, Frisch, Grass, and Johnson himself before opening up to a wider and more international list of theorists, historians and commentators. Suhrkamp’s endeavour had been “resolutely” affiliated with the idea of Enlightenment, humanism, bourgeois radical thought, and with “the aesthetic and political avant-garde of the nineteenth century”. It was also, Habermas added, an expression of a post-war era in which the slogan “the spir
it belongs on the left” had seemed closer to truth than before or since. With the rise of the “New Right”, however, “All this is now over”.
Habermas used his letter to encourage contributors to choose their own way of addressing the proposed subject. Their engagement with Jasper’s work might be as tight or as loose as they wished and they were certainly not expected to mimic Jaspers by writing “in the language of haut bourgeois cultural criticism, and with the pathos of a nation’s instructor”. They should, however, heed one consideration that was surely not “obsolete” about Jasper’s approach, namely, the “duty of intellectuals” to react to “movements, developmental tendencies, dangers, and critical moments”. It was still, Habermas stated, “the task of intellectuals to make conscious a murky reality”. Johnson’s entire work may have shared in that aim as it applied to twentieth-century Germany but his contribution to this particular volume also fits another of Habermas’s indications: “Perhaps you will take your theme merely from some singular phenomenon, an observation, or a symptomatic expression…” Johnson wrote the words “Richard Montgomery” on his copy of Habermas’s letter of invitation, and set to work making his own sense of the bomb ship in an article that has been described as “his only serious piece on England”.5
In a letter accompanying his contribution and dated 8 January 1979, he admitted that he may have been too free with the “lee-way” Habermas had offered his authors, and that he would understand if his piece was considered too far “off-topic” to be included. Habermas did indeed at first decline Johnson’s essay as having very little connection to “our complicated fatherland”. Keen, nevertheless, that the collection should include something from Johnson, whom he recalls having met “quite a few times” at Siegfried Unseld’s home in Frankfurt and also at Hannah Arendt’s apartment in New York,6 the political philosopher asked for something else. By then, Johnson was busy writing the “Lectures on Poetics” (“that is a stony field for me”7) he would deliver at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and he declined the request. Johnson then revised his essay, which could certainly not be accused of avoiding “murky reality”, and submitted the more recent version to Merkur, a “Journal of European Thought”, which published it in 1979.8 Habermas, however, held to his insistence that Surhkamp’s thousandth publication really could not be published without something by Johnson, so the initially rejected earlier version was included as the closing item of the collection.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 56