In the 1960s, the BBC set out to investigate local reports of secret and shocking World War II experiments, dangerous pollution and unexplained animal deaths on a remote island off the coast of Scotland..
“Around here they call it Death Island, the Mysterious Island, and with good reason,” reported windswept BBC reporter Fyfe Robertson in 1962, referring to a remote and desolate Scottish island in front of him: Gruinard.
“But this is not one of those spooky old tales or Highland superstitions,” he said.
“This story began in 1942. The country had been at war for three years, when suddenly a group of scientists from the War Office took over the island and began doing experiments so secret that even today, 20 years later, very few people know what happened there.
“The local population was not told anything,” the journalist said.
Robertson’s aim was to investigate stories of dangerous government experiments believed to have occurred at Gruinard.
By the time he was reporting, the UK Ministry of Defence had already declared the territory off-limits and Robertson was unable to persuade fearful locals to take him around the island for a closer look.
It was an environmental catastrophe.
The island remained dangerously polluted and was a no-go zone for nearly half a century.until one day in 1990, the British government finally declared it safe.
The truth was that Gruinard Island had been the scene of a clandestine attempt by Britain during World War II to weaponize anthrax, a deadly bacterial infection.
The exact details of what had happened there only came to light when the government declassified a film the military had shot at the time detailing the experiments in 1997.
The project, called Operation Vegetarian, began under the direction of Paul Fildes, then head of the biology department at Porton Down, a military installation in Wiltshire, England, that still exists today.
Porton Down was first established in 1916 as the War Department Experimental Station to study the effects of chemical weapons agents, which were increasingly being used as the First World War progressed.
In the 1940s, when Britain was once again at war, Porton Down was commissioned develop biological weapons that could be used against Nazi Germany with catastrophic effectsminimizing actual direct combat between soldiers.
Slaughtered sheep
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The plan was to infect linseed cakes with anthrax spores and airdrop them onto cattle pastures across Germany.
Cows would eat the cakes and contract anthrax, as would those who ate the infected meat.
Anthrax is a naturally occurring, but deadly, organism. Symptoms of infection may take a while to appear, but when they do they are horrible and can become lethal very quickly..
The proposed plan would have decimated Germany’s meat supply and led to anthrax contamination across the country, resulting in massive deaths.
But to understand how anthrax would work as a weapon in a realistic setting, researchers needed an outdoor location, away from populated areas, to test it.
In the summer of 1942, the military purchased the remote, uninhabited 522-acre Gruinard Island and banned locals from landing there.
A military team, under the supervision of scientists, then began to carry out chilling experiments.
Using cattle brought to the island as test subjects, they began a series of tests in which they released anthrax spores throughout the island’s terrain.
“The aim was to see whether anthrax would survive an explosion in the field – they didn’t know – and whether it would still be virulent afterwards,” explained Edward Spiers, emeritus professor at the University of Leeds, in the BBC documentary. The Mystery of Antrhrax Island in 2022.
“Eighty-odd sheep were tied up at various levels downwind of the probable explosion. The explosion was carried out by remote control.
“It wasn’t a huge explosion, but it produced a stream of very potent spores that were carried by the wind and caused infection and death wherever they went.”
The results were devastating.: Within a few days of exposure, the sheep began to show symptoms and quickly began to die.
Their infected bodies were autopsied and then cremated or buried under tons of rubble.
5 million cakes
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Some of these experiments were witnessed by local farmers who detected clouds of anthrax drifting over the island.
A local man, who had sold sheep to the scientific team, recalled seeing what he described as smoke falling on the animals. “I think it was all kinds of poison gas, anthrax,” he told Robertson in 1962.
The secret trials continued until 1943, when the military deemed them a success and the scientists packed up and returned to Porton Down.
As a result, Five million linseed cakes laced with anthrax were produced, but the plan was eventually abandoned. with the advance of the Allied invasion of Normandy.
The cakes were destroyed after the war.
By 1952, the United Kingdom had already developed a different weapon of mass destruction and had achieved its ambition of becoming the world’s third nuclear power.
Four years later, it ended its offensive chemical and biological weapons programs, and in 1975 it ratified the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibits all use, production or stockpiling of them.
Meanwhile, in Gruinard…
The consequences of Operation Vegetarian were catastrophic for the island..
Anthrax is a highly resistant bacterium and can persist for decades in soil, causing infection when ingested even years after an outbreak.
Military experiments made the island too dangerous for people or animals to live on; even the rainwater that fell on it and then seeped into the sea was potentially lethal.
In the months following the tests, animals on the mainland near Gruinard Bay began to die.
As Elizabeth Willis cites in her article “Pollution and Compensation,” the UK government quietly paid compensation to those affected, but claimed the deaths were due to a sick sheep that had fallen from a passing Greek ship.
A local told the BBC in 1962: “It was very obvious to us that they knew something about it, Otherwise they wouldn’t have paid as quickly as they did.”.
The military quarantined the island indefinitely and posted signs warning visitors to stay away.
In the decades following the end of World War II, attempts were made to decontaminate the site through chemical treatments and controlled burning, but these proved largely ineffective.
A series of tests conducted in 1971 showed that while anthrax spores were no longer present on the surface, they still persisted in the soil, posing a serious risk to anyone setting foot on the island.
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In 1981, an environmental group called the Dark Harvest Commandos landed on the island and took samples of soil infected with anthrax. They left a bucket of this soil outside Porton Down to highlight the deadly contamination on the island, with the aim of forcing the government to do something.
Five years later, scientists returned to try to decontaminate again.
They soaked the island in a mixture of seawater and formaldehyde, and also removed and incinerated the contaminated topsoil.
This time they were more successful. And finally, on April 24, 1990, after 48 years of quarantine, the UK government declared Gruinard Island free of anthrax.
Gruinard was not the only site where the UK carried out secret biological warfare tests, but it was the first.
The consequences of what happened there are a grim testimony both to the dangers of biological warfare and to humanity’s capacity for destruction..