A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare

FOUR A Plague on your Children

THE HISTORY OF chemical and biological warfare has thrown up some strange stories, but few are as bizarre as those which surround a small island off the north-west coast of Scotland. It lies in its own well-protected bay, close to the fishing village of Aultbea – an outcrop of rock, well-covered with heather, three hundred feet high, one and a half miles long and a mile wide.

It takes about twenty minutes to reach by fishing boat from Aultbea. As you draw closer it’s possible to make out the shapes of hundreds of sea birds nesting on its craggy shore-line. Their calls are the only sounds which break the silence. Once upon a time the island is said to have supported eleven families. Today, the only sign of human habitation is the ruin of a crofter’s cottage.

This utterly abandoned island is Gruinard. Thanks to a series of secret wartime experiments – the full depths of which are still classified – no one is allowed to live, or even land here.

In 1942, the hillsides around Aultbea bristled with military activity. It was here that the Russian convoys used to form up, prior to making the dangerous and gruelling run to Murmansk. It was a restricted area. There were military checkpoints on the roads. The local population – mainly crofters and fishermen – had to carry special passes. They grew used to the sight of uniforms, and avoided asking questions. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the summer of 1942, few paid any attention to the arrival in Gruinard Bay of a new military contingent. In a sheltered spot, just half a mile from Gruinard, on the mainland on the farthest side of the bay, they pitched camp. A couple of Nissen huts were built. Lorries arrived carrying fuel and food and cases of scientific instruments. Finally, the soldiers – perhaps twenty-five in all, commanded by a Captain Dalby of the Royal Artillery – were joined by a party of nine civilians. They carried with them, and handled with great care, a set of large glass flasks, which were taken straight into one of the huts.

The new arrivals seemed distinctly ill at ease in these primitive surroundings. A photograph, taken at the time, shows a group of them standing stiffly in front of the camp. One of them, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets, is Dr David Henderson, a brilliant bacteriologist and a leading member of the Lister Institute. To his left stands Donald Woods, a long way now from his usual location in the unit for bacterial chemistry at London’s Middlesex Hospital. Next to him is another leading bacteriologist, W. R. Lane. Standing closest to the camera, arms akimbo and with a pipe clamped (as usual) between his teeth is the most scientifically renowned, and in many ways most significant member of the party – Graham Sutton, normally in charge of all experimental work at Porton Down.

Their leader does not appear in the photograph. Dr Paul Fildes, at that time in his early sixties, was arguably Britain’s foremost bacteriologist: a Fellow of the Royal Society, founder of the British Journal of Experimental Pathology and editor of the great nine-volume System of Bacteriology published by the Medical Research Council in 1931.

The presence of these famous scientists at Gruinard Bay in the summer of 1942 was a closely guarded secret. They had been given orders by the Highest Authority – a euphemism for the Prime Minister – to investigate the practicability of a biological bomb. Supervised directly by a secret Whitehall committee chaired by a member of the War Cabinet, Lord Hankey, the tests this little group conducted on Gruinard were the beginnings of a massive research project, costing millions of pounds and employing thousands of people, which would ultimately give the Allies a weapon with a destructive power equivalent to the atomic bomb.

Its first victims were to be sheep. Porton’s agents had scoured the local hillsides, paying the crofters good prices for their highland sheep. Around thirty were collected and set to graze in a field close to the scientists’ base camp. As the date for the experiment approached, they were herded into a landing craft and ferried across the half mile stretch of water to Gruinard.

In one of the Nissen huts, Dr Henderson prepared the weapon itself. It was a 25 lb chemical bomb, eighteen inches high and six inches in diameter; normally it contained mustard gas. To help him prime it, Henderson called in the Porton team’s young explosives expert, Major Allan Younger. Neither man wore a gas mask, as Henderson uncorked one of the flasks. ‘I was asked to hold the bomb,’ recalled Younger, ‘whilst he poured this mixture in. It turned out to be a brown, thick gruel, and with great trepidation I held on to the thing making sure I wouldn’t spill it, as he poured this thick stuff in.’¹

The ‘thick stuff’ was a slurry of concentrated anthrax spores.

After the bomb had been filled, it, too, was ferried across to Gruinard. With it went Sutton, Henderson and Younger. Each man was now clad from head to foot, in a rubberized suit, gas mask, high rubber boots and thick gloves. The anthrax weapon was placed on a small mound of earth. Around it, tethered in concentric circles, were the sheep. An explosive charge was carefully attached to the bomb and a fuse laid. While the sheep grazed unconcernedly, the scientists retreated to a safe distance down wind.

Anthrax had long been considered the most practicable filling for a biological weapon. A decade earlier, Aldous Huxley had predicted a war involving anthrax bombs. Even before that, in 1925, Winston Churchill wrote of ‘pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast… Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies only but whole districts – such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing.’²

Anthrax is an acutely infectious and deadly disease. In nature it generally occurs in cattle or sheep, but it can be equally fatal to man. If contaminated meat is accidentally handled it can produce coal-black malignant skin ulcers which lead to blood poisoning. Inhaled it is even more fatal. The tiniest of doses can produce, in a matter of hours, a choking cough, difficulty in breathing, and a high fever; in nine cases out of ten, death will follow soon after. It was this latter form of the disease which most interested Porton.

Its other advantage as a weapon was its exceptional toughness. Left for two hours at a temperature of 20º centigrade, the bacteria of anthrax turn into spores – virtually indestructible organisms which can lie dormant for years, waiting to infect any living tissue with which they may come into contact. The technique for cultivating the spores, once mastered, could be harnessed for massproduction. At Porton the anthrax was prepared in metal containers resembling milk churns.³ Henderson’s development of a kind of refined vacuum cleaner which could then suck the spores off the cultures where they had been grown was the breakthrough which enabled the Gruinard test to take place. The ‘harvested’ anthrax had been filled into flasks and driven north to Scotland. Now the scientists had to wait to see whether the weapon would work in practice as well as it promised to in theory.

The bomb exploded. Billions of spores formed an invisible cloud which wafted over the sheep and gradually dispersed over the testing site and the sea. Then silence returned once more to Gruinard. At the end of the test, the scientists made their way to a nearby beach where each was stripped to his underpants by an army sergeant (who burnt the contaminated suits) and given a thorough shower. They then gathered their everyday clothes and were rowed back to the camp.

A day later, the sheep began to die. The pile of carcasses grew steadily throughout the week – proof that biological warfare was no longer merely a Brave New World fantasy: it could be made a reality. The Gruinard tests proved that germs could be produced, transported, loaded into munitions and exploded over target areas without necessarily destroying the fragile living organisms which spread the infection.

In further tests that year, and in the summer of 1943, more bombs were exploded. The climax came when a Wellington bomber made a low-level run over the island and neatly deposited the world’s first biological payload in the target area. ‘The bombs exploded,’ remembers Younger, ‘with a sharp crack, quite unlike the “crump” of high explosive.’⁴ At the end of each round of tests the sheep were dragged to the edge of some nearby cliffs and flung over. Younger dug a trench, filled it with 1,000 lb of explosives, and brought the hilltop crashing down on the carcasses.

There was little regard for safety. At the end of one year’s experiments, Younger was entrusted with the job of transporting the flasks of anthrax from Gruinard to Porton for winter storage – a journey of six hundred miles. He was given an eight hundredweight van, a driver, a road map and instructions to avoid major highways and at all costs not to stop if confronted by suspicious circumstances.

Further south, Younger was less cautious. When his driver suggested they stop for the night he agreed. They chose the large industrial city of Leeds. Younger headed for the central police station and handed over the van and its cargo to the bemused station sergeant for safekeeping. ‘I told him it was a top secret war material and had to be guarded overnight. He didn’t ask any questions.’⁶ Relieved of their responsibility, Younger and his driver went off in search of the nearest pub, while the world’s first biological bomb lay in the back of a van in the centre of one of England’s most densely populated towns. Fortunately for Younger there was no air raid on the centre of Leeds that night.

Younger’s final visit to Gruinard was equally eventful. There was an outbreak of anthrax on the Scottish mainland when a dead sheep floated across to the mainland in a heavy storm. Younger now believes that he used too high a charge of explosives and that one infected carcass was thrown clear by the force of the blast that brought down the clifftop. A government scientist was installed at a hotel in Aultbea to handle compensation claims.

The anthrax outbreak, and the possibility of a security leak, sent a collective shudder down the spines of the members of the Bacteriological Warfare Committee in London. Younger and Fildes immediately took off from Porton in a Beaufort torpedo bomber to fly to Gruinard. It developed an oil leak half way and crash landed in a ploughed field near Liverpool. The two men were taken to hospital, but the only injuries suffered were some cuts to Dr Fildes’s hand, which he sustained from a bottle of whiskey he was drinking as the plane skidded across the ground. They completed the remained of the journey by train and car.

Once on Gruinard, they donned protective suits and decided to try to rid the island of contamination by burning off the heather, which in some parts of the island was chest-high. Gruinard went up like tinder. One of Younger’s most vivid wartime memories is of overlooking Gruinard Bay from a hotel on the mainland that evening, and watching as ‘a line of fire ate its way up the side of the island’. The huge cloud of dense black smoke, heavily contaminated with anthrax, drifted out over the sea, while the fires made a spectacular display in the gloomy northern night.

Fildes’s apocalyptic attempt to rid Gruinard of contamination was a failure. The charred island was sealed off. For many years, warning signs ringed its beaches at 400 yard intervals:

In the 1980s Porton’s scientists made regular pilgrimages back to Gruinard in the hope that one day they might be able to re-open it to the public. It was an exercise in good public relations Porton was desperately keen to perform: ‘Anthrax Island’, as it was popularly known, was a reminder of a past the scientists would prefer to play down. As Rex Watson, the Director of Porton Down, put it in an interview in 1981: ‘The attraction of anthrax when it was used was that it was thought to be sufficiently resistant an organism to withstand being dispersed by a munition… I don’t think at that time perhaps they understood as much as we do now about its persistence over very long periods.’⁷ Watson said he ‘would expect there to be an area of contamination for the next tens, perhaps even hundreds of years.’ (It was not until 1986 that the island was finally cleaned up, and only then after an extensive programme of work. Topsoil was removed in sealed containers. Subsoil was soaked in 280 tonnes of formaldehyde diluted in 2,000 tonnes of seawater. A flock of sheep was allowed to graze for several years, and subjected to regular monitoring. Finally, in 1990, nearly half a century after the original experiments, an intrepid junior defence minister landed on the island accompanied by journalists, to prove the area was safe.)

The wartime testing of anthrax did not end with the burning of Gruinard. The final experiment on the island – in which the bomber dropped the anthrax bomb – was a failure; the bomb fell into what proved to be marshy ground, making it impossible to measure the spread of the spores. This experiment was subsequently repeated on a beach in Wales. In March 1982 this new test site was named as Penclawdd in Gower.⁸

Gruinard is the most startling reminder of the power of biological weapons, and of the high priority which their development was given in the 1940s. The exact nature and extent of that wartime programme remained for half a century one of the last great secrets of the Second World War. Only in the last few years, with the release of some vital official documents, and an increased willingness on the part of some of the participants to reveal at least a little of their work, has it been possible to piece together the outline of the story.

Mankind has practised primitive forms of biological warfare for thousands of years: the poisoning of enemy wells with the bodies of dead soldiers and animals in order to spread disease is a practice as old as war itself. In the fourteenth century the Crimean town of Kaffa was captured when the besieging Tartar army catapulted the bodies of plague victims into the city; the Russians are said to have used similar techniques against the Swedes in the eighteenth century. The British used blankets infected with smallpox in an attempt to wipe out whole tribes of North American Indians.

There were a number of allegations of germ warfare during the First World War. The great strides in medical knowledge of the previously fifty years enabled individual types of bacteria to be identified and isolated. The Germans were accused of having innoculated horses and mules with glanders (a highly infectious animal disease), cattle with anthrax, and German spies were caught supposedly trying to spread plague bacteria in Russia in 1915 and 1916. These were not necessarily just propaganda stories. A top secret American report described accounts of German biological warfare sabotage as ‘confirmed and undoubted’.⁹ General Foulkes paid a visit to the Lister Institute in 1915 when he was casting around for means of retaliating against the German chlorine attacks, but quickly dismissed germ warfare as a practicable possibility. The nations of Europe had difficulty enough in fighting off the natural ravages of disease without deliberately introducing it onto the battlefield.

Nevertheless, by 1925 it was considered sufficiently feasible for the prohibition of ‘bacteriological methods of warfare’ to be included within the scope of the Geneva Protocol. No nation at this time is recorded as having had a biological weapon, or even a single laboratory researching into the possibility of developing one. But the search for a new gas to replace mustard inevitably edged scientists towards the consideration of the possibility that the next generation of ‘indiscriminate’ weapons might be biological rather than chemical. At the same time, the development of mass-immunisation techniques offered the chance of overcoming the major disadvantage of using disease as a weapon: the ‘boomerang’ effect on your own troops and civilian population. ‘CBW’ – military jargon for Chemical and Biological Warfare – gradually began to enter the vocabulary of war. It was natural that the two types of weapon should be lumped together: they were ‘unconventional’, relied upon highly sophisticated scientific and medical skills, were abhorrent to the majority of the population, and had to be developed in conditions of great secrecy.

Paradoxically it was the Geneva Protocol’s ban on biological warfare that led to the start of the biological arms race. In 1932, a Japanese army major, Shiro Ishii, returned home from a European tour convinced that biological weapons were an effective means of fighting a war: with flawless logic he concluded that they must be, otherwise the statesmen at Geneva would not have gone to the trouble of banning them. Major Ishii’s conviction became an obsession. A small, thin, bespectacled man in his early forties, his outwardly scholarly appearance belied a powerful personality. ‘This individual,’ the Americans decided in 1946, ‘was the compelling force behind the scenes throughout the whole period of Japanese investigation into the field of biological warfare.’¹⁰

Despite receiving little official encouragement, by 1935 Ishii had persuaded the Japanese authorities to let him set up a germ warfare research centre at the Harbin Military Hospital. Bombs were designed and tested and cultures of germs prepared and evaluated. In the same year, the Japanese military police, the Kempai, arrested five Russian ‘spies’ in the Kwangtung region of China. All were said to be carrying glass bottles and ampoules containing biological agents – dysentery, cholera and anthrax – for sabotage missions. After the war, Ishii claimed that the Russian attacks were successful: according to the Kempai, 6,000 Japanese soldiers died of cholera in the Shanghai area, while 2,000 of the army’s horses were killed by anthrax.

True or not, the allegations spurred the Japanese War Ministry into taking a far keener interest in biological warfare. In 1937, with his work at the Harbin Military Hospital yielding promising results, Ishii was given permission to build the world’s first major biological warfare installation.

The site chosen was near a small village called Pingfan, about forty miles south of Harbin, close to the South Manchuria Railroad. By 1939 when it was almost completed, Ishii was a general. The Pingfan Institute, as it was known, had a garrison of 3,000 scientists, technicians and soldiers, and was completely self-supporting. The Institute raised its own vegetables and livestock; it had a flock of 50,000 hens. Within its closely guarded wall was a school and a hospital, and a separate compound for plague research. An attached air base provided lavish transport facilities for the senior scientists as well as aircraft for field trials. ‘Perhaps no better indication of the magnitude of the Pingfan project,’ wrote American Intelligence after the war

For offensive use, Pingfan opened a Pandora’s Box of disease: typhus, typhoid, anthrax, cholera, plague (the ancient Black Death), salmonella, tetanus, botulism, brucellosis, gas gangrene, smallpox, tick encephalitis, tuberculosis, tularemia and glanders. The bacteria were grown in vast numbers in aluminium tanks designed by Ishii. Each strain had its own ‘growing time’, at the end of which it was ‘harvested’ by being scraped from the surface of the tank with a small metal rake (Ishii demonstrated the technique to the Americans a few months after the end of the war). Diseases of the intestine, like dysentery and typhoid, were harvested after a growth period of twenty-four hours; plague, anthrax and glanders took forty-eight hours; anaerobes (bacteria which can live without oxygen), a week.

In August 1945, with the Russian army only a few miles away, the Pingfan Institute was destroyed: every piece of machinery systematically smashed to bits, every scrap of incriminating paper burned. There are therefore no records of just how much biological agent was made at Pingfan. Colonel Tomosada Masuda, head of ‘Section Three’ at Pingfan, claimed after the war to have ‘no figures on this’. The quantities were almost certainly huge. His American interrogators calculated that for each set of bomb experiments, 900 tanks were used, each yielding a harvest of 40 grammes of bacterial scrapings.¹² In 1949 Russian investigators put the productive capacity of Pingfan at eight tons of bacteria a month.[2]

Like the British a year later, Masuda quickly came to the conclusion that anthrax was the most practical bomb filling. Its spores were found to live for three months in Pingfan’s carefully prepared suspensions. This compared with a mere three days for cholera, and a week for dysentery and plague.

The Japanese spent at least seven years trying to perfect an anthrax bomb. Over 2,000 ‘Uji’ bombs were filled with anthrax and tested experimentally. It was a substantial programme: the Uji bomb was one of nine types of aircraft bomb which had been tested at Pingfan by 1940. The deadliest munition developed was the ‘Ha’ bomb, designed to shatter into thousands of pieces of shrapnel, spreading the anthrax spores to murderously good effect. A single scratch wound from a piece of contaminated shrapnel was estimated to cause illness and death in 90 per cent of its victims. The standard Japanese heavy bomber could carry twelve Ha bombs.

In two years, in addition to thousands of guinea pigs and mice, at least 500 sheep and 200 horses were killed in biological tests. By 1939, over 4,000 bombs had been produced. Other weapons tested included shells, aerial sprays and sabotage devices for poisoning wells.

As in every chemical and biological warfare installation throughout the world there were stringent safety precautions. All workers wore a completely rubberized anti-plague suit, together with a respirator, surgical gloves and rubber boots. After every experimental trial they were required to strip completely ‘and bathe themselves in 2 per cent creosol or mercuric chloride’.¹³ All enlisted men received extra rations of food; officers were given danger pay of an extra 60 yen ($25) a month.

But there were accidents and deaths. At least twenty men a year working in the laboratories contracted infections from the material they handled. In 1937, two died from severe cases of glanders. In 1944 there were two deaths from plague. Anthrax was a constant source of danger. Masuda recalled the example of two soldiers:

At Pingfan the Japanese also devoted considerable time to perfecting sabotage techniques. Scientists devised one particularly unpleasant poison for contaminating foodstuffs: christened ‘fungu toxin’, it was made of an extract from the livers of blow fish. Masuda himself supervised experiments in the poisoning of water supplies using cholera, typhoid and dysentery in over a thousand wells in Manchuria. Evidence later collected by the Russians suggested that the Japanese also cultivated the plague-infested flea as a biological weapon. Pingfan was said to be capable of producing 500 million fleas a year. In 1941 these were tested by being dropped in porcelain aircraft bombs; later the Japanese carried out successful experiments in spraying the fleas from high altitudes.

Like the Nazis with their nerve gas programme, the Japanese struggled to restrict the secret of the Pingfan project to the tightest possible circle. Each scientist laboured in his own particular field and was refused access to other areas. Despite the large capital investment in Pingfan – it cost between six and twelve million yen (up to $5 million) a year to run – even the Emperor allegedly was not informed of the existence of the germ warfare programme: ‘Biological warfare,’ Ishii told the Americans in 1946, ‘is inhumane and advocating such a method of warfare would defile the virtue and benevolence of the Emperor.’

Radiating out from Pingfan were eighteen other biological warfare out-stations, each staffed by around 300 people; many were on mainland China. ‘Ishii,’ wrote the Americans, ‘developed a biological warfare organisation that at its height extended from Harbin to the Dutch East Indies and from the island of Hokkaido to the Celibes.’¹⁵ The whole programme was administered by an organisation called Boeki Kyusuibu, whose innocuous title is translated as ‘Anti-Epidemic Water Supply Unit’.

When the war ended and the Americans began to piece together the scale of the Japanese germ warfare project, Ishii headed the list of scientists they wished to interrogate. It took U.S. Intelligence almost five months to locate him, living in seclusion at his country home and suffering from chronic dysentery – an unpleasant legacy of his career in germ warfare. He was taken to Tokyo and interrogated for a month.

At the end of that time he was still denying any knowledge of what the Americans suspected was the criminal aspect of his work: the use of human guinea pigs in biological warfare experiments. It was to be almost two years before the full story emerged; the US Government promptly suppressed the facts for the next quarter of a century. (The story of the immunity from prosecution granted to Ishii, and the subsequent cover-up is told in Chapter Seven.)

Pathological material and specimens from five hundred human victims were turned over to the Americans. The number of people actually experimented upon was far higher, and almost certainly ran into four figures.

The Japanese infected prisoners – mostly Chinese, but possibly including American, British and Australian POWs – with the full range of diseases under study at Pingfan. Ishii admitted feeding five prisoners with a two-day old culture of botulism; another twenty were injected with brucellosis. Bombs designed to produce gas gangrene were exploded next to tethered prisoners – an experiment confirmed by a witness at the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial two years later:

There were similar experiments with anthrax bombs. Victims were injected with tetanus, smallpox, plague and glanders, as well as being exposed to aerosol clouds of disease in gas chambers. The infections were not always allowed to run their full course: victims would be killed with massive doses of morphine, and then dissected to check the progress of the disease up to the point of death. Of the human remains studied by the Americans in 1947, anthrax accounted for 31 deaths, cholera 50, dysentery 12, glanders 20, mustard gas i6, tetanus 14, plague 106, salmonella 11, tuberculosis 41, typhoid 22, typhus 9.[3]

Concurrent with these human experiments, there is strong – almost conclusive – evidence to suggest that the Japanese were also waging actual biological warfare in China.

On 4 October 1940, according to the Chinese Ambassador in London, a Japanese plane visited the town of Chuhsien in the province of Chekiang. ‘After circling over the city for a short while it scattered rice and wheat grains mixed with fleas over the western section of the city’,¹⁶ and the resulting plague epidemic killed twenty-one townspeople. Three weeks later ‘Japanese planes raided Ningpo and scattered a considerable quantity of wheat grains over the port city.’ Ninety-nine people were killed by plague.¹⁷

In another attack on Kinghwa, three Japanese planes

Traces of plague bacteria were found. Finally there were another 600 cases of plague in three other Chinese provinces which the Chinese ascribed to an ‘inhuman act of our enemy’. The detail certainly suggests that the incidents were more than mere propaganda stories. Whether they were isolated events or part of a systematic biological attack on China is unknown.

In July 1942 the Chinese allegations were passed on to Winston Churchill. Two days later he had them placed on the agenda of the Pacific War Council.

The growing alarm in London and Washington that the Japanese were on the verge of initiating biological warfare gave an added urgency to the first anthrax bomb tests on Gruinard that summer. Up to then the Allied germ warfare effort had lagged significantly behind the Japanese, but from 1942 onwards the Anglo-American biological programme began to vie with the Manhattan Project for top development priority.

The British biological warfare project was born on 12 February 1934 at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff. For two years, a Disarmament Conference in Geneva had been discussing means of finally ridding the world of chemical weapons. Germ warfare had also been included, and in view of this, Sir Maurice Hankey told the Service Chiefs, he ‘was wondering whether it might not be right to consider the possibilities and potentialities of this form of war’.²⁰ The Chiefs of Staff agreed, and authorized Hankey to put out discreet and ‘very secret’ feelers to the Medical Research Council to see if they would help. Like the Japanese, the British were prompted to begin work on germ weapons as a result of a peace initiative aimed at banning them.

For Hankey it was the beginning of a long term involvement with biological weapons. At the age of fifty-seven this doyen of civil service mandarins was cast as the unlikely counterpart to General Shiro Ishii: just as the Japanese owed their venture into the field of biological warfare to Ishii, Britain owed hers to Hankey. He was entirely suited, both in character and position, to the task. ‘Short, spare of figure… a dedication dietician, almost a non-smoker and teetotaller, he lived, and enjoyed, a spartan existence,’ recalled a subordinate. He had ‘little or no sense of humour’ and was ‘too intense and taut to be a social success, and had no “small talk”’.²¹ In 1934 he was a uniquely powerful Whitehall official, Secretary to both the Cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), ‘a man whose advice, over a period of 25 years, no Prime Minister or Service Chief could afford to disregard in matters of Defence.’²² His career and temperament are neatly summed up in the four word title Stephen Roskill chose for his official biography: Hankey: Man of Secrets.

Amid the prevailing policy of appeasement in the 1930s, Hankey at first made little progress. Edward Mellanby, the secretary of the Medical Research Council, refused to have anything to do with a project which used advances in medicine for destructive purposes. Hankey had more success with Paul Fildes, the pugnacious head of the MRC’s Bacteriological Metabolic Unit, who agreed to take up a watching brief on the subject. In September 1936 Hankey proposed to the Committee of Imperial Defence that ‘an expert official body’ should be set up to ‘report upon the practicability of the introduction of bacteriological warfare and to make recommendations as to the counter-measures’.²³ In October the CID approved, and Hankey became Chairman of the newly-created Microbiological Warfare Committee.

In March 1937 the Committee submitted its first report, specifically on plague, anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease. Though they concluded that ‘for the time being… the practical difficulties of introducing bacteria into this country on a large scale were such as to render an attempt unlikely’ they urged that stocks of serum be built up to meet any potential threat.²⁴ From 1937 to 1940, Britain began to stockpile vaccines, fungicides and insecticides against biological attack.

In April 1938 the Committee produced a second report, and in June Hankey circulated ‘Proposals for an Emergency Bacteriological Service to operate in War’: the emphasis was on defence, the tone still low-key. It was only in the following year, with the outbreak of war, that the tempo began to quicken. An emergency Public Health Laboratory was set up; linked to the normal laboratory services it covered the whole of the country. Its primary function was to investigate suspicious outbreaks of disease, and to act as the distributing centre for the stocks of vaccine and sera.

In September 1939, Hankey – now with a seat in the House of Lords – was brought into the War Cabinet as Minister Without Portfolio. His influence over Neville Chamberlain had never been greater, and to Hankey the Prime Minister ‘confided’ the job of Britain’s biological warfare overlord with the proviso, recalled Hankey, ‘not to authorise any preparations for the offensive use of bacteria without his approval’.²⁵ But within a matter of days – as the Wehrmacht smashed through Poland’s defences and Hitler at Danzig warned of his ‘secret weapons’ – the brief changed. The Chiefs of Staff met on 25 September and heard from Sir Cyril Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff, that attention had been drawn

A sabotage attack by enemy agents using bacteria was ‘not impossible in the very near future’. The matter was referred to the War Cabinet and within a few days Hankey had been ordered to step up research into germ warfare.

Whatever the ‘spirit’ in which the work was conducted, Britain now began researching in earnest into offensive biological weapons.

A new and highly secret laboratory was established at Porton Down in 1940. It was, one of its early members has recently said, ‘a primitive affair – little more than an old wooden army hut’. The tiny biological warfare team, never more than a few dozen strong, was presided over by Paul Fildes. He was detached from the Medical Research Council, which was ‘reluctant to associate itself with even defensive work on what was regarded as a morally indefensible perversion of medical knowledge’,²⁸ and ‘by an informal compromise’ placed on the staff of Porton. Throughout his life Fildes had no qualms about his work. The Times, in its curiously unsympathetic obituary of him in 1971, described him as ‘by nature and upbringing conservative in outlook’ and ‘a little vain’ about his achievements:

In 1940 he was fifty-eight and a confirmed bachelor. Allan Younger, the young explosives expert who accompanied him to Gruinard in 1942, recalls him as small in stature, with a powerful sense of purpose and a passionate belief in the work he was doing.

He gathered around him men with a similar determination. The eminent British biologist Lord Stamp, for example, joined the team in 1941; earlier, in April of that year he had succeeded to the family title when his father, mother and brother were all killed in the Blitz. ‘I felt useless where I was, at the Public Health Laboratory,’ he remembers today, ‘and I was determined to pay back the Germans for what they did, and to see that our country was not left defenceless as London was when my family was killed.’³⁰

All Fildes’ team were convinced – and repeatedly reminded in briefings – that they were in a desperate race against the Nazis. In November 1939, the government scientist R. V. Jones – in a memorandum after Hitler’s Danzig boast – put ‘bacterial warfare’ first, ‘new gases’ second, and long-range rockets only fifth on his list of German secret weapons ‘which must be considered seriously’.³¹ According to British Intelligence ‘…the Germans and Russians appear to have carried out considerable research on bacteriological methods of attack. Spraying of the virus of foot and mouth disease, dispersal of anthrax spores, and pollution of water supplies by enemy agents are specifically mentioned.’³²

In 1940–41 these fears were greatly increased by the threat of invasion. Hankey and the Bacteriological Warfare Committee actually went so far as to recommend the compulsory pasteurization of milk and the chlorination of all supplies of drinking water. Only after the Ministry of Food pointed out the massive cost and administrative difficulties involved were the schemes dropped.³³ Later in the war, the Allies feared that the Germans planned to use the V-weapons to deliver biological agents into the heart of London: the Canadians sent the British 250,000 doses of an antidote to botulinus toxin, the most feared of biological weapons. ‘When the V-1 attack was launched in June, 1944,’ recalled a Canadian general, Brock Chisholm in 1957, ‘and the first flying bomb went off with a big bang, showing that it only contained normal high explosives, the general staffs all heaved an immense sigh of relief’.³⁴ 117,500 British, American and Canadian troops were issued with self-inoculating syringes to protect them against biological attack during the Normandy landings.³⁵

In fact in this, as in so many of its evaluations of German chemical and biological warfare, Allied intelligence was hopelessly wrong. According to evidence presented at Nuremburg, the German decision to investigate biological warfare was not taken until a secret conference of the Wehrmacht High Command in July 1943:

The German biological warfare programme was literally years behind that of the Allies. Work centred on the Military Medical Academy at Posen, under the supervision of a Professor Blome. Experiments were carried out on concentration camp inmates at Natzweiler, Dachau and at Buchenwald, where prisoners were deliberately covered with typhus-infected lice.

Horrific though the experiments were, the Nazi biological project itself never got very far. There is no evidence to suggest that in two years’ work at Posen the Nazis ever managed to produce a feasible weapon. In March 1945 the Military Academy was evacuated in the face of the oncoming Red Army, and Blome attempted to have the whole site destroyed in a Stuka attack. All he salvaged were some plague cultures, which in the event proved unusable: the Russians were already on German soil, and the Germans themselves – none of whom had been inoculated – would have suffered as much as the enemy.

At the end of the war, the Soviet Union pressed for the death penalty for one of the Nuremburg defendants, Hans Fritzsche, on the grounds that he had first suggested the possibility of germ warfare to the German High Command. For Britain and America this was potentially embarrassing. By 1945 they were aware that they had invested vastly more time and effort in producing these ‘forbidden weapons’ than the Nazis. They insisted – to the irritation of the Russians – that Fritzsche be acquitted. To avoid tarnishing their wartime honour, all American, British and Canadian records on their wartime biological weapons programmes remained in the ‘Most Secret’ category; the British closed their archives to historians until the end of the twentieth century.³⁷

Since the war, Britain has categorically stated that she has never possessed any biological weapons. As recently as 1980, at the Review Conference of the Convention on Biological and Toxin Weapons, the British delegation firmly stated: ‘The United Kingdom has never possessed and has not acquired microbial or other biological agents and toxins in quantities which could be employed for weapon purposes.’³⁸ On at least two other occasions in 1980 – on 5 March and 11 March – the same assurance was repeated.

The United Kingdom’s declaration is hard to reconcile with the facts.

Although the bulk of the official records remained closed, even a department as efficient at ‘weeding’ out embarrassing secrets from the public archives as the Ministry of Defence lets the odd paper slip through. Documents now show that it was the British who mass-manufactured the West’s – probably the world’s – first biological weapon.

The breakthrough was made by Dr Fildes and his team after a series of open air experiments at Porton in the autumn of 1941. The information went first to a seven-man ‘Sub-Committee’ (of whose records there is today no trace) consisting of Air Vice-Marshal Peck and representatives from the Army, the Medical Research Council, the Agricultural Research Council, Porton, the Lister Institute and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. The Sub-Committee’s composition suggests that at this stage British interest was confined largely to anticrop and livestock weapons, and this is further confirmed by a ‘Most Secret’ memorandum to Winston Churchill from Lord Hankey, dated 6 December 1941:³⁹ ‘Most of the work,’ he wrote, ‘has related to diseases of animals and is continuing.’ After three paragraphs giving the background to his involvement in germ warfare, Hankey went on:

‘I ask for permission to authorise the preparatory measures mentioned in paragraphs 5 and 6 above,’ concluded Hankey, ‘as an essential preparation for possible retaliation.’

Churchill received Hankey’s memo on Sunday, 7 December – the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Two weeks later he flew to the USA for the first Washington Conference leaving the whole subject in the hands of the Chiefs of Staff. On 2 January 1942 the Defence Committee met in Churchill’s absence and discussed biological warfare. The minutes are a model of official discretion: ‘Lord Hankey was authorised to take such measures as he might from time to time deem appropriate to enable us without undue delay to retaliate in the event of resort by the enemy to the offensive use of bacteria.’ However, the Defence Committee ruled, there were conditions: ‘There must be no operational resort to this method of warfare for purposes of retaliation, or otherwise, [authors’ italics] without the express approval of the War Cabinet or Defence Committee.’ In addition, Hankey was to make sure that the stockpiling of biological weapons ‘would not recoil upon ourselves or our Allies’ or ‘lead to an appreciable diversion of scientific or industrial effort’. The Defence Committee also directed that ‘all possible precautions must be taken to avoid publicity on the subject’.⁴⁰

In the event the British did not produce two million anthrax-filled cattle cakes, but five million.⁴¹

The scale of the project was considerable. To have been capable of filling five million cakes, Porton must have been producing anthrax on a large scale. Half a dozen filling machines were installed, operated by female munition workers. The cakes were not the large blocks commonly used today, resembling instead large pellets. Each had a small hole bored into it which was filled with anthrax spores and then sealed; they were all stored at Porton.

It was by any standards a crude weapon. It appealed to Fildes’s sense of humour, and one of his favourite jokes was to picture the RAF strewing millions of cakes over the moonlit German countryside, with thousands of them ending up in gardens and streets and ‘rattling on the Burgomeister’s roof’.

Bizarre though the project was, it would probably have caused widespread damage if it had been used against Germany. In addition to the serious food shortages which an anthrax outbreak would have caused, there would also have been human casualties. Cutaneous anthrax, which produces skin ulcers and can lead to septicaemia, is caught by handling contaminated animals. Intestinal anthrax results from eating contaminated meat and is fatal in 80 per cent of cases. British policy on biological weapons had moved a long way since Chamberlain had initially ‘confided’ it to Hankey. It was to move much further.

According to his own account, Paul Fildes made his most spectacular contribution to the Second World War on 27 May 1942 on a street corner in Prague in Czechoslovakia.

Ever since the establishment of the biological warfare wing at Porton, Fildes had been working on ‘BTX’ – the botulinal toxins, recently described in a World Health Organization report as ‘being among the most toxic substances known to man’.⁴² BTX, more commonly known as botulism, generally appears as a particularly virulent form of food poisoning, with an average mortality rate of 60 per cent. Although there is no official confirmation, by 1941 it appears that Fildes had succeeded in turning BTX into a weapon; the British code-named it ‘X’.

Chemical and biological weapons have long been favourite tools of spies: the ties between Porton, Camp Detrick in America, and the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Office of Strategic Services were extremely strong (see Chapter Nine). Both Polish and Russian partisans used biological weapons in sabotage operations against the Germans.⁴³ In December 1942, for example, the Gestapo discovered a germ warfare arsenal in a four-roomed Warsaw house used by the Polish underground. They reported to Himmler the discovery of ‘three flasks of typhus bacilli, seventeen sealed rubber tubes presumably containing bacteria, and one fountain pen with instructions for use for spreading bacteria.’ 20 lbs of arsenic had also passed through the house.⁴⁴ A few days later, Himmler showed Hitler a captured NKVD order instructing the Russian partisans to use arsenic to poison German troops.⁴⁵ The raid on the Warsaw house apparently failed to prevent the Poles from continuing to use germ weapons. The Combined Chiefs of Staff learned from the Polish Liaison Officer in Washington, Colonel Mitkiewicz, that in the first four months of 1943, 426 Germans had been poisoned by the Polish underground; that seventy-seven ‘poisoned parcels’ had been sent to Germany; and that ‘a few hundred’ Nazis had been assassinated by means of ‘typhoid fever microbes and typhoid fever lice’.⁴⁶

Against this background it is therefore not surprising that the British Secret Intelligence Service should have turned to Fildes to help when, in October 1941, they began to plan Operation Anthropoid. Its object: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

It was an almost suicidal mission for those who undertook it, but one which the British regarded as of overriding importance. Heydrich had already acquired a fearsome reputation as the ruthless head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi security service, through which he ran the counter-intelligence operation against British agents in occupied Europe. He was said to be Hitler’s personal choice as the man to succeed him as Führer, and in September he appointed him Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia.

Heydrich was remarkably successful in his new job. By means of the stick and the carrot he turned the Protectorate, with its extensive arms industries, into an important component in the German war economy: with the stick he broke the back of the resistance movement, terrorizing its supporters and eliminating its leaders; with the carrot he enticed the Czech workers into greater productivity by increasing their rations and shortening their working hours. As General Frantisek Moravec, head of Czech Intelligence in London, put it, the autumn of 1941 ‘was a triumph for Heydrich: the armament industry hummed, a bumper crop was harvested and, with the elimination of the heroes of the resistance, peace and prosperity reigned in Bohemia and Moravia.’⁴⁷ The British Secret Service, in conjunction with the SOE and the Czech exiles in London decided to have Heydrich killed.

At ten o’clock on the night of 29 December 1941, a four-engined Halifax bomber took off from Tempsford aerodrome. To help it make the long, hazardous flight over occupied Europe, the RAF laid on a diversionary bombing raid to draw off German radar and fighter squadrons. Four and a half hours after take-off, seven Czechs, in semi-moonlight, parachuted into the snow-covered hills near the small Bohemian town of Lidice.

The men had all been trained at Cholmondely Castle in Cheshire and in an SOE Special Training School in Scotland. With them they carried British arms, wireless and cipher equipment. Two weapons in particular were handled with extra care. They were British No. 73 Hand Anti-tank grenades. Normally these were 9½ inches long and weighed 4 lb. The grenades the Czechs carried were special conversions, consisting of the top third of the grenade, with adhesive tape thickly binding the open end. The grenades each weighed just over 1 lb. It now seems likely that they had been personally prepared by Fildes at Porton, and each contained a lethal filling of X.

The ‘Anthropoids’, led by Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, went to earth with the help of the Czech underground for five months, building up a detailed picture of Heydrich’s movements. Astonishingly for so high a Nazi leader he rarely travelled with an armed escort. On 23 May 1942, by a stroke of great good fortune, the Anthropoids learned where Heydrich would be in four days’ time. At 9.30 am on the morning of the 27th they took up positions on a hairpin bend near the Troja Bridge in a suburb of Prague on the busy route to Heydrichs’ fortress HQ at Hradcany Castle. Precise details of what followed differ, but in all there were probably six assassins: four men armed with sub-machine guns and grenades, one with a mirror to flash a signal when Heydrich’s car rounded the bend, and Rela Fafek, Gabcik’s girlfriend, who was to drive a car ahead of Heydrich: if he was coming along unescorted she would wear a hat.

At 10.31, complete with hat, she drove round the corner. Seconds later came the mirror signal. Gabcik strode into the middle of the road and aimed his sub-machine gun at the bend. Heydrich’s open-topped green Mercedes came sailing round the corner, but as Gabcik tried to open fire his gun jammed. As the car slowed, Heydrich shouted at his chauffeur to put his foot on the accelerator, but the driver, a last-minute replacement, kept slamming on the brakes. It was at this point that Kubis hurled one of Fildes’s grenades.

Heydrich had just risen to his feet in the now-stationary car when the grenade exploded with a force powerful enough to shatter all the windows in a passing tram. Although it missed the Mercedes, the blast tore off the door. Splinters from the grenade embedded themselves in Heydrich’s body. Like ‘the central figure in a scene out of any Western’⁴⁸ Heydrich leapt into the road, then suddenly dropped his revolver. Clutching his right hip he staggered backwards and collapsed. The gunmen escaped.

Heydrich, in considerable pain and bleeding from his back, was driven, fully conscious, in a commandeered van to the nearby Bulovka Hospital. The doctor on duty in the surgery department was Vladimir Snajdr.

Heydrich’s sudden collapse – from apparently only minor injuries to coma and subsequent death – may have baffled the doctors, but in retrospect matches completely the symptomatology of BTX poisoning. After an initial period of calm, lasting perhaps for a day or so, the victim lapses into a progressive paralysis which fails to respond to treatment. As X went to work on Heydrich’s central nervous system, the doctors could only stand by helplessly as their famous patient succumbed to the classic symptoms of poisoning by BTX:

The patient generally either dies or recovers within seven days. A week after the ambush, on 4 June 1942, Heydrich died. Dr Snajdr recalled that the official diagnosis of the cause of Heydrich’s death was septicaemia.

Heydrich’s coffin was borne in state in a black-crêped train into Berlin, escorted by Adolf Hitler’s SS guard. The Führer laid a wreath on the grave of ‘the man with the iron heart’. ‘The German intelligence service,’ one historian has written, ‘would never really recover from the murder of Heydrich.’⁵²

Even so, the mission failed in one of its most vital objectives: to awaken Czech resistance to the Nazi regime. The Germans launched a period of terror. The entire town of Lidice was razed in reprisals: its male population shot, its women and children carried away in trucks. 10,000 Czechs were arrested. The Anthropoids were hunted down and eventually trapped in the crypt of a Greek Orthodox Church in Prague. Kubis and Gabcik were both killed. Yet, wrote General Moravec, one of the planners of the mission, ‘our hope that the Czech people would react to the German pressure with counter-pressure did not materialise. Indeed that had been our problem throughout the war and we were never able to solve it.’⁵³ On the day that Heydrich died ‘fifty thousand Czech workers demonstrated against the British-inspired act in Prague.’⁵⁴

Why would the British have sanctioned the use of a biological weapon? Partly they must have wanted to ensure that the assassination of Heydrich, once embarked upon, would be almost certain to succeed: what they knew of X must have convinced them that it was the perfect fail-safe weapon. Certainly there would have been few moral qualms. Those in MI 6 who plotted the killing probably felt that making Heydrich the first victim of a poisoned weapon was a fitting end for so despised an enemy. And it was, also, an opportunity for Fildes to see whether X really would work as a weapon.

There is no written evidence of Fildes’s involvement in Heydrich’s death. The relevant official files are still closed. When asked to comment, Porton Down could only reply that they had no record of this incident; if Fildes was involved, they added, they thought it highly unlikely that any record would have been made.⁵⁵ We have therefore only the circumstantial evidence which points to the use of a biological weapon – and the claims of Fildes himself.

The secret of X in Heydrich’s murder might have died with the Anthropoids themselves had it not been for Fildes. The Times was right when it spoke of a streak of vanity in his character: he made a point of telling a number of colleagues what he had done. Two senior scientists involved in Allied germ warfare have privately confirmed that Fildes told them he ‘had a hand’ in the death of Heydrich. To a young American biologist, Alvin Pappenheimer – later Professor of Microbiology at Harvard – Fildes was even more melodramatic. Heydrich’s murder, he told Pappenheimer, ‘was the first notch on my pistol’.⁵⁶

The development of X and its use in Operation Anthropoid was little more than an adventurous interlude in the routine of Fildes’s work. The centre of the British germ warfare programme was still anthrax, and how best it could be turned into a weapon of mass-destruction. Tests continued at Porton throughout the spring of 1942, and it was in that summer that Fildes and his team first went up to Gruinard Island in northern Scotland to test the prototype anthrax bomb.

Other biological warfare work continued in Canada. In 1941 a former Superintendent of Porton together with three scientists travelled to Canada to advise on the setting up of a joint gas and germ weapons testing area. The site chosen was at Suffield in Alberta – a vast, bleak tract of prairie between Medicine Hat and Calgary. The cost of opening up and running Suffield was shared by the British and Canadians.

The work of the two countries was to be transformed by the entry into the war of the United States. Ever since the mid-1930s American intelligence had been aware of the growing world interest in biological warfare. In 1940 the US Health and Medical Committee of the Council for National Defense began to consider ‘the offensive and defensive potential of biological warfare’. In August 1941 a ‘Special Assignments Branch’ was formed at Edgewood Arsenal to pursue researches further: in November, with the attack on Pearl Harbor less than a month away, the War Department formed the WBC Committee headed by Dr Jewett of the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate the threat of germ warfare. Its report, still classified fifty years later, eventually landed on the desk of the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, in February 1942. It spelt out clearly that America stood in serious danger of biological attack. Stimson felt obliged to act, and on 29 April 1942 he wrote to President Roosevelt outlining the committee’s findings:

Two weeks after receiving Stimson’s letter, on 15 May, Roosevelt gave his approval to the creation of a biological warfare research organization. The following month, Stimson appointed George W. Merck as Director of the War Research Service.

Like Britain, the US feared that enemy agents would use biological weapons in sabotage operations. The scientists at Edgewood Arsenal told their opposite numbers at Porton in a secret meeting of their worry that botulism, for example,

From 1942 onwards the British and the Americans pooled their resources on biological warfare in much the same way as they did on the atomic bomb. In the spring of 1942, for example, an American liaison officer arrived at Porton Down. American officers attended the trials on Gruinard and even made a film of the successful experiment. (The film is still held in Porton’s archives.)

The war-strained British economy could probably never have withstood the massive investment in raw materials and scientific skill that a full-scale biological weapons programme would have entailed. The American economy could. Between 1942 and March 1945 the US invested over $40,000,000 in plant and equipment. Almost 4,000 people were eventually employed in biological warfare research, testing and production.

Lord Stamp, who had an American wife he had not seen for three years, was chosen by Fildes as Britain’s representative on germ warfare in the United States. Stamp entered Canada and visited scientists working on biological weapons at Ottawa and Kingston before travelling south and crossing into the US in March 1943. He went straight to the National Academy of Science in Washington, avoiding the normal channels of scientific liaison, and joined ‘the inner circle of bacteriological warfare’. For the next two years he had a unique opportunity to move across wartime America, travelling between the numerous university laboratories at work on germ weapons, and the four great American centres of biological warfare production: the parent research and pilot plant at Camp Detrick in Maryland (known as ‘The Health Farm’); the Field Testing Station at Horn Island, Pascagoula, Mississippi; the large-scale production plant at Vigo, near Terre Haute, Indiana; and the Field Testing Station at Granite Peak near Dugway in Utah.

Churchill was fond of quoting the words of Edward Grey, a former British Foreign Secretary, who once described the United States as a ‘gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’ So it was with biological weapons. In October 1943, the cloud chamber project was begun at Camp Detrick, in which small laboratory animals had concentrations of biological agent passed over them. For the first time a mass of data began to be obtained about the spread of disease by inhalation: as one expert has pointed out, ‘at this time in history, it was not yet widely accepted that the airborne transmission of pathogens was an important factor in the spread of natural disease.’⁵⁹

Like the Gruinard tests, the cloud chamber project proved that a biological bomb or aerosol was perfectly feasible. Among the potential agents studied at Camp Detrick were anthrax, glanders, brucellosis, tularemia, meliodosis, plague, typhus, psittacosis, yellow fever, encephalitis and various forms of rickettsial disease; fowl pest and rinder-pest were among the animal viruses studied; various rice, potato and cereal blights were also investigated.⁶⁰ Large-scale freeze-drying methods were pioneered in order to dispense with the less easily stored forms of liquid suspensions. At one point there is said to have been a flourishing Entomological Warfare Department, producing Colorado Beetles, fleas and other insects for use as possible weapons.

America provided the money and resources; Britain helped provide the brains. One of the best examples of this partnership in action is the little-known story of the development of anti-crop warfare: the destruction of the enemy’s food supply by either chemical or biological agents.

In 1940 researchers at Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), discovered a number of substances ‘showing powerful growth retarding properties’.⁶¹ Extensive aerial spray tests were carried out over the east of England, and eventually two chemicals were chosen as anti-crop agents. One, codenamed ‘1313’ acted against cereal crops like wheat, oats, barley and rye; the other, ‘1414’, destroyed sugar beet and root crops. They laid waste everything they touched. ‘i lb per acre of either substance would result in almost complete destruction of the vulnerable crops under ideal conditions,’ reported the scientists.

‘In 1941,’ according to a highly secret Cabinet paper written after the war, ‘their use by aerial distribution over Germany was envisaged. The size of such an operation was, however, in terms of our resources at that time rather formidable and for this reason and because of the early extension of the war into the corn growing areas of South Eastern Europe, active development was discontinued.’⁶² Churchill turned the scheme down because it would have taken the RAF 7,000 sorties ‘all made within a month, to reduce the German home-produced supplies of food by one-sixth’.⁶³ The British chemical industry was under such strain that it would have taken three years, until 1945, to build up sufficient stocks to enable operations to be launched against Germany.

Two years later the merits of 1313 and 1414 were re-examined by Sir John Anderson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister responsible for anti-crop warfare. By this time the Americans were also at work on similar compounds; ‘but,’ wrote Anderson to Churchill in March 1944, ‘so far as we know, they do not realise that they can destroy crops, such as clover and sugar beet (with 1414) under ordinary farming conditions’. Nor did they appreciate ‘that laboratory trials indicate that 1313 has some action on rice’. Anderson recommended that ICI hand their factory designs and flowsheets over to the Americans to enable them to use anti-crop warfare against the Japanese. British research, meanwhile, should continue. In an ominous aside, which foreshadowed the American ‘defoliation’ of Vietnam by twenty years, he suggested that ‘these substances may have a part to play later on, in connection with arrangements for keeping world peace’.⁶⁴

Churchill agreed. In April 1944 Britain turned over all her technology to the United States. The following year she went one stage further and allowed the Americans to use Porton’s tropical research stations in Australia and India for large-scale testing.

A top secret paper prepared for the Joint Technical Warfare Committee in November 1945 on ‘Crop Destruction’ reveals how far the American programme eventually progressed. ‘In addition to the substances already examined (in the UK) approximately 800 chemical substances have been examined in America’. The weapons eventually produced by pooling the two countries’ work were code-named ‘LN’ – LN8, LN14, LN32 and LN33. LN32 was the only agent produced in Britain; later, in very low concentrations, it was marketed as a weedkiller. One low-flying aircraft loaded with LN could destroy six acres of crops. A large cluster bomb was developed which burst at a height of 3,000 feet and rained down a concentration of 5 lbs of agent per acre. Within twelve hours all the contaminated crops would be utterly destroyed. With 20,000 tons of LN8 the Americans reckoned they could destroy the entire Japanese rice crop; 10,000 tons of LN33 would destroy the corn crop; 1,000 tons of LN32 would destroy all roots.

By 1945 the Americans also had a range of biological anti-crop agents which they were capable of mass-producing: exotic-sounding fungi like Sclerotium rolfsii (Agent C) which rots the stems of tobacco plants, soya beans and sugar beets, sweet potatoes and cotton; Phytophtera infestans (Mort) de Bary (Agent L O) which causes ‘late blight’ in potatoes; Piricularia oryzae (Agent IE) a fungus which attacks rice; and Helminthosporium oryzae van Brede de Haan (Agent E), the cause of ‘seedling blight’ and ‘brown spot’ on young rice plants.⁶⁶

In little over a year, incorporating British discoveries, the Americans were in a position to launch a potentially catastrophic attack on their enemies’ food supplies. On a couple of occasions the US may have employed some sort of anti-crop agent. In Germany in the autumn of 1944 there was a widespread plague of Colorado Beetles so severe that Schrader, the inventor of nerve gas, was pulled off war work and put on a project to find an insecticide to save Germany’s potato crop. From the dock at Nuremburg Göring accused the Allies of deliberately dropping the insects over Germany. In 1945, the Japanese rice harvests were stricken with blight after attacks from American aircraft, and they were forced to design an ingenious scheme of plot rotation to salvage something of their crops.

The idea of bringing a country to its knees by inducing wholesale starvation was not original. The British, for example, had used a naval blockade against the Germans in the First World War with just such an intention. But, as the authors of the post-war paper pointed out, here was a weapon ‘which would be more speedy than blockade and less repugnant than the atomic bomb’. They also foresaw ‘…their possible use for the purposes of internal security within the Empire, e.g. for the destruction of food supplies of dissident tribes in order to control an area…’⁶⁷

Britain did indeed employ anti-crop weapons in Malaya soon after the war, but as the Empire dissolved, the opportunities for the British to use them declined. In the post-war world, the use of anticrop agents as a weapon of world policing would fall increasingly to America rather than the United Kingdom. The story of the Anglo-American biological programme is part of the wider picture of an enfeebled and failing imperial power reluctantly giving way to a rising one: anti-crop agents were one of the tools of the job Britain bequeathed to America.

In the winter of 1943, a year and a half after the first sheep had died on Gruinard, the Allies began to manufacture a biological bomb. It weighed 4 lbs and was filled with anthrax spores which were given the code-name ‘N’. Its design was largely British, its manufacture exclusively American.

At the time, N was probably the greatest Allied secret weapon of the war after the atomic bomb. All documents connected with it carried the highest security classification: ‘Top Secret: Guard’ (which the Americans jokingly translated as ‘Destroy Before Reading’). In February 1944, when Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific advisor, wrote the Prime Minister an account of N, the official typist left blanks in the typescript which Cherwell went through and filled in by hand.

From its small beginnings in a wooden hut at Porton, the biological warfare programme – only four years old – now promised to produce the most potent weapon of mass-killing yet devised. N obviously carried enormous implications for the future of the war, and Churchill immediately invoked security procedures similar to those which surrounded the Manhattan Project. Instead of raising the subject with the full Defence Committee, the Prime Minister initialled Cherwell’s minute and passed it on to his trusted liaison officer, General Ismay, instructing him to keep it ‘in a locked box’ and to raise it personally with the three Chiefs of Staff.

One day later, on the morning of 28 February, Ismay read Cherwell’s paper to a secret session of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. ‘They feel’, he told Churchill that afternoon, ‘that Hitler would not hesitate to indulge in this form of warfare if he thought that it would pay him to do so, and that the only deterrent would be our power to retaliate. The Chiefs of Staff accordingly agree with Lord Cherwell that we cannot afford not to have N bombs in our armoury.’⁶⁹

Lord Hankey had by now left the chairmanship of the Bacteriological Warfare Committee (although he would return to it after the war). In his place was Ernest Brown, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. On 8 March, after what he described as ‘the most secret consultations with my military advisors’, Churchill ordered Brown to place an order with the Americans for half a million anthrax bombs: ‘Pray let me know when they will be available. We should regard it as a first instalment.’

It was clearly galling for the Prime Minister to see what had once been a British project swamped by the larger American one. Yet there was no alternative. In May Brown wrote back to tell him that a full-scale biological programme was simply beyond the scope of the British economy:

Britain would have to take whatever the Americans chose to give her.

In May 1944 an initial batch of 5,000 anthrax-filled bombs came off the experimental production line at Camp Detrick. In July the first full-scale production is believed to have started at a factory whose precise location has not been disclosed. It had a capacity for producing 50,000 Porton ‘Type F’ 4 lb bombs a month, and its entire production was turned over to the British. This would mean, estimated Brown, ‘that up to a quarter of a million bombs should be made and filled on our behalf by the end of the year.’⁷² The bombs were to be shipped to Britain for storage in case they were needed quickly for ‘operational use’ in the European theatre. It was a project with obvious hazards. ‘Consideration,’ wrote Brown to Churchill, ‘is being given to the questions of what information as to the contents of the bombs should be given to transport authorities; what instructions should be given to those who will have to handle the bombs; and also what information should be given to certain categories of Intelligence Officers and to the Medical Services.’⁷³

The main centre for the production of the Americans’ biological bombs was at Vigo in Indiana. Built at a cost of $8,000,000 it employed around 500 people. The disease organisms were designed to be cultivated over a four-day cycle in twelve 20,000 gallon tanks, harvested and then filled into the Americans’ own modified version of the Porton ‘Type F’ bomb, the ‘E48R2’. Vigo was capable of producing over 500,000 anthrax bombs a month,⁷⁴ or 250,000 bombs filled with botulinus toxin. ‘Both of these agents,’ wrote one US expert, ‘store well and could be stockpiled on a large scale.’ The raw materials required for a month’s output at Vigo were 300,000 lb of glucose or cerelose, 625,000 lb of corn steep liquor, 1,000,000 lb of yeast, 50,000 lb of casein, 20,000 lb of peptone and 190,000 lb of phosphates. The Vigo plant was highly dangerous to operate and although it was ready to go into production early in 1945 it was never actually used. At the end of the war the factory was leased to an industrial concern for the production of antibiotics. It could, however, have been put back into production in an emergency within three months, although ‘only with great hazard to the operators’.⁷⁵

Biological warfare as envisaged during the war would have had one simple aim: to wipe out such a huge proportion of the enemy’s population that his whole war machine would cease to function. Accordingly, as Paul Fildes put it in a top secret memo after the war, N was ‘designed for strategic bombing’.⁷⁶ Individual 4 lb anthrax ‘bomblets’ were loaded – 106 at a time – into 500 lb cluster bombs designed to burst in mid-air and scatter the spores over as wide an area as possible.

A contingency plan to use N against Germany was drawn up by the British during the war. Rough calculations based on ‘results from actual field trials and experiments on monkeys’ suggested that if six major German cities – the ones selected were Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Wilhelmshafen and Aachen – were simultaneously attacked by a heavy bomber force carrying 40,000 500-lb bombs, ‘50 per cent of the inhabitants who were exposed to the cloud of anthrax might be killed by inhalation, while many more might die through subsequent contamination of the skin’.

It would have taken the Americans eight months to have built up the stock of four and a quarter million 4-lb bombs necessary to mount the attack; 2,700 heavy bombers would have been used in the operation. The death toll in Germany would have been around three million.

We cannot be sure when this plan was drawn up. As one of the target cities – Aachen – fell to the Allies in October 1944 it is reasonable to assume that it was composed before then, possibly in the summer of 1944. We now know that if the war had gone badly for the Allies N might well have been used.

The development of biological weapons was accelerating as the war ended. Attempts were made to develop a method of spraying anthrax from aircraft. Anti-personnel mines were designed. ‘The mines,’ according to Fildes, ‘would contain preformed pellets coated with some suitable biological agent.’⁷⁸ Looking ahead, he foresaw a role for germ weapons in the rocket age.

According to another British expert, Brigadier Owen Wansbrough-Jones, in evidence to a top secret sub-committee of the Chiefs of Staff shortly after the end of the war, anthrax ‘was 300,000 times more toxic than phosgene’. He predicted that germ weapons would be a hundred times more efficient within ten years.⁷⁹ In confirmation of his view, in December 1945, Dr Henderson, Fildes’ deputy, reported ‘that as a result of continued research the potency of N has been stepped up to the order of ten times. In Dr Fildes’ judgement this confirms his statement that continued research by good men may produce important improvements.’⁸⁰

Judged by today’s standards, anthrax is a crude weapon. It not only destroys populations wholesale, it renders the cities in which they live uninhabitable for generations. The conquerors would inherit little more than a poisoned desert. According to the Director of Porton Down, speaking in 1981, if anthrax had been used against Berlin in the war, the city would still have been contaminated almost forty years later.⁸¹

Near the end of the war, the Americans, aware of N’s limitations, went on to develop ‘US’, a weapon designed to spread brucellosis. Like mustard gas, brucellosis has the attraction of a low mortality rate (around 2 per cent) but at the same time a tremendous capacity to inflict casualties. It causes ‘chills and undulating fever, headache, loss of appetite, mental depression, extreme exhaustion, aching joints and sweating’.⁸² In severe cases, it can put a man out of action for a year. It is also highly infectious: whereas only 200 workers were claimed by the Americans to have been affected by their work on anthrax during the war, virtually everyone associated with the brucellosis programme is said to have felt its effects for a time. The bomb-load required to attack a city was found to be less than one-tenth that of anthrax; the target itself would be contaminated for only a matter of days. By 1945, according to Fildes, US was ‘in an advanced stage of development’.⁸³ As the war ended, the stocks of anthrax-filled cattle cake stored at Porton Down since 1942 were incinerated.⁸⁴ From its crude beginning, the Allied biological warfare programme had, in three years, reached a position in which it was being considered in the same breath as the atomic bomb. In his evidence to the Chiefs of Staff Technical Warfare Committee in December 1945, Wansbrough-Jones described the two types of warfare as ‘complementary’ and suggested that in future germ weapons might be used ‘in minor wars on which it was not worth using atom bombs; or major ones in which they were being barred’. The development of brucellosis in particular offered a role for germ warfare in the future.

There was no longer any talk of a weapon which had been acquired ‘solely for defensive purposes’. By the end of the war, the programme to develop germ warfare had picked up a momentum of its own: work went on long after it was obvious that Hitler and the Japanese were in no position to mount such an attack. The result was a hidden arsenal of anti-crop sprays, poison gas and germ weapons which the British and Americans have been at pains to play down ever since. On at least one occasion, in 1944, the British very seriously considered using them. Far from being ‘a study in restraints’ as one writer has described it,⁸⁶ the story of chemical and biological warfare in the Second World War is one of massive stockpiling, subterfuge, blundering, bluff and secret preparation. The world was spared the horrors of germ and gas warfare not by any noble desire to obey international law, but by a chapter of historical accidents.