“Nuclear Tests are Good for You”
“Nuclear Tests are Good for You”
“The bomb has left the aircraft. Face away from ground zero, press the heel of your hands into your eye sockets and wait for the blast”.
The hoarse voice of the announcer crackled over the tannoy. We waited – and some of us shivered.
The twenty-eighth of April had started like any other that month. Reveille at some unearthly hour – was it 3 o’clock? - We were too dozed to tell. Despite being on the equator in mid Pacific, it was still cold, dark, ominous.
Breakfast from the camp’s canteen was a no-no. Who in hell’s name wants to eat slimy, half cooked eggs at three in the morning! - especially after countless cans of Tennants beer in the NAAFI the night before.
Still, I’m way before my time. Let’s go back four months – to Southampton docks and the troopship Dunera, a 12,000 ton unstabilised roller, if ever there was one.
Maddox and I had volunteered. Had we? Were we not encouraged, cajoled, press-ganged, even into leaving a cosy camp at Long Marston, near Stratford-on-Avon, for the ‘honour’ of being part of Great Britain’s 73 Christmas Island Squadron?
For what? To be irradiated with nuclear fallout so that many of us ‘volunteers’ would die prematurely of cancers, would father (if some of us could still raise an erection – for some lads now can’t) children whose own kids, years later, would be born malformed.
But that comes later too.
Go back to boarding that boat with our kitbags filled with OGs issued by automaton storekeepers at Ripon Barracks. Let the wives and girlfriends' wave and the band of the Royal Marines play us out of the harbour and into the English Channel that eve of the new year 1958.
That first night far below deck was to live with me forever. New Year’s Eve, damn it, and we were sailing for the Atlantic at the start of a six-week voyage to God’s forgotten rock of an island 1200 miles south of Hawaii.
Army lads – we weren’t just Army we were Royal Engineers and bloody proud to be so – are a mixed bunch. I hadn’t known Maddox for long, simply met up with him at Ripon as we ‘volunteers’ gathered at the Yorkshire holding camp.
He seemed quite cultured. Slight of appearance, almost feline – but later would dispel any notion of being unmanly. Just the reverse.
Midnight and 1958 crept in to Dunera’s bowels without hardly an ‘all night best, mate’. Too many hearts were tuned in, not to the dispassionate drone wishing us Happy New Year over the intercom, but to the lovers, sweethearts and mothers we’d left behind.
And then Maddox started singing. His voice was thin, almost feminine, and high as a choirboy. He stood there, one arm on the upright of his hammock, steadying himself from the roll of the ship as she ploughed her way down channel towards the mouth of Biscay.
He, too, was a Geordie – though his accent belied it – and from his mouth, from deep inside him came the haunting melody and gut-crunching words of The Waters of Tyne.
You didn’t have to be from Tyneside to touch the moment, to stop all you were doing, to listen and feel the lump in your throat rising so that any second it might choke your breath away.
I didn’t dare cry but my tears are welling up even as I remember the poignancy.
When Maddox’s voice finally tailed off, no-one uttered a word whilst minutes passed silently. OK we were young and could hardly be said to be really mature, but for grown men to nearly weep that night deep inside the tomb of a vessel will be forever branded onto our souls.
…..................................
Dunera lurched heavily from port to starboard, back to port and back again to starboard as she ledged closer and closer to the frightening, fifty-foot Biscay waves. It was more than Corporal Skinner could bear.
Skinner was what the Army calls ‘an old lag.’ Certainly 30ish, probably much older. A full corporal, a two striper, he had the dubious honour of being duty Guard Commander, in charge of six of us whose misfortune it was to guard the 500 men (and women) on the ship that night.
Guard! Guard from what, for Heaven’s sake?! What possible harm could befall us – other than tearing muscles by reeching sickness from the bowels of our seasick stomachs?
“For what, for God’s sake Corporal”, I bemoaned, “we’re in the middle of the English Channel!”
It was no use grumbling, of course. We had sone the same thirteen months earlier, guarding wretched refugees at Aldershot camp after the Hungarian Uprising. What in Hell’s use was a bullet in the breech when all those poor buggers wanted was food and shelter?
But the anonymous “boffins” who give the orders move in strange ways – as we were later to find out, very much to our cost.
By the time Dunera had crested the worst of Biscay, Corporal Skinner was no longer Guard Commander. The poor wretch had given up the upper set of his false teeth to Neptune beneath the heaving, scary walls of waves that engulfed the bobbing cork of Dunera that night. As junior GC, Joe Soup had taken temporary charge.
It’s always a source of comfort to feel the sun’s warming rise in the early morn, not least to those of us still recovering from seasickness and lack of sleep the night before. Sergeant Straw seemed especially eager to be up and about that second day.
The sarge wasn’t usually as warming to me, one of his pet, one-stripe lancejacks. His squint eye seemed to have not one but two twinkles as he buttonholed me.
“I want a favour from you Corporal”, he began. “It’s between you and me, of course,” he whispered.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The upright paragon of Army virtue wanted me to raffle his ‘trannie’ radio so that he could romance - ‘bed’ is a better word – any of the women sailing with us.
Women on board! That was news to me. Straw seemed well clued up, however. He let slip (‘on the quiet’, he kept repeating) that some women were billeted aft and on their way to meet husbands whom they hadn’t seen for a year or more. These were the men we were to replace on ‘the rock’.
He got his money, though any female would have to be truly sex-starved to have fancied the leering layabout.
Reeling and lurching over the Atlantic beyond Biscay to the calm of the Caribbean, in less than two weeks we berthed briefly at Willemstad the capital of Curacao. How Maddox sent it our I’ll never know but, without pausing for our land legs, we piled into a 1937 Austin banger as a taxi destined for Campo Allegro on the far side of the Dutch-owned island.
Dubious women housed beyond the fenced enclosure beckoned us excitedly. We never got farther than the steel gates.
Two US Marines – how come they were there? Persuaded us with a show of truncheons and holstered pistols that entry wasn’t for us. “It’s in your best interest guys, so turn around and beat it”. We did.
Panama City was different. The canal’s magic had kept s glued to Dunera’s rails for hours but now the expectation of twenty-four hours shore leave welled up in our starched green squaddies’ underpants. I looked to Maddox for guidance.
He must have had an inbuilt gyroscope in his wiry, young frame. No sooner had the gangplank clanged down on the metallic concrete of the dock’s quay than he had commandeered a knowing taxi driver for the short hop to the whore home.
…................................................
It would be another three weeks before land was sighted, three weeks of showers and mutual inspections of genitals finally dispelling the lingering doubts and shame of those miniscule minutes of Panama passion.
Land, did I say? A trillion myriad of plankton had fused together to create the flat coral mass substituting for a tropical island one degree above the Equator.
Palm trees, not lush with towering greenery as the holiday brochures would have you believe, but knurled and brown, somehow survived the parched excuse for earth between patches of the cutting coral core.
Monster land crabs and vulnerable, pink hermits carrying their shells on their backs scuttled noisily like disturbed rats among the decaying undergrowth left by the fallen palm branches.
Christmas Island, your discoverer Captain Cook and the fable of his epic 18th century voyage, you can keep. You are nothing but a barren outcrop of crustaceans welded together so that manic men can stop on it and practice ending the World with their toys of nuclear fission.
Practice – that's a laugh. No-one is going to convince those who crouched in apprehension and fear under a nuclear holocaust 240 times more powerful than that which decimated Hiroshima (the British Ministry of Defence written admission, not mine) that this was practice. This was for real.
The countdown tannoyed over the clearing. Forty seconds to detonation, 20 seconds, 10.....
The announcer’s voice hesitated as it reached zero. The surge of penetrating heat burning through its body’s back admitted that it, too, had never felt a million hot needles suddenly entering its skin all at the same time.
Seconds later – some say less than twenty – the thundering blast of the Hydrogen Bomb’s soundwave tore into eardrums told to expect nothing more than the report alongside a 303 Enfield rifle.
“That was quite a firecracker, wasn’t it”, Mr Tannoy weakly offered, trying to sound unabashed but clearly quaking from its effect. “You may now turn around and face ground zero”.
The most powerful, fervent rantings of Billy Graham in full flow, with his total command of the English language frightening his audience with Hell’s fire and damnation, could never find the final words to describe the monster before our eyes that awful morning.
Hell had emerged from the bowels of Mother Earth to defy and do battle with the Good Lord’s heavenly sky above us. We gazed transfixed at the boiling cauldron of fire which was enveloping the island’s southern world. Clouds of searing steam billowed around the huge crimson fireball, both growing bigger and even more menacing as each half minute passed.
No-one spoke. The clearing of 500 men was silent – awe-struck. Each felt he was seeing a happening so enormous that the earth’s very survival seemed in peril.
Soon the white, pillow-like, rotating clouds were turning darker, blackening the affronted sky and ominously turning towards us. The rich, clear blue above the Pacific would never return, we were convinced of that.
The ride back to the tented camp in the 3-tonner Army truck was made in silence. Only the drone of the tyres on the fiercely hard coral track disturbed the quiet of our thoughts as the ever-darkening ball of horror crept menacingly behind us along the way.
Much has been argued about the fallout which followed. How the constant, torrential downpour of radiation-enriched rain flooding into our tents twenty-four hours later may have subsequently affected the lives of the servicemen that April.
But, of course, it was only a practice! We were to ‘practice’ again, a further four times over the next five months. Except that when we cowered below those massive megaton monsters we were never again protectively dressed as white-clad Martians.
No, ‘they’ practiced on us with our issued shorts, boots and gaiters, and trilby-type floppy hats as our only wearing apparel. Perhaps ‘they’ had come to think that nuclear radiation couldn’t go any deeper than bare skin.
In this so-called enlightened world of progress, when the only glow in the sky above you now is a beautiful, God-given sunset, try convincing those whose lives have been cut down with cancers, whose offspring have been blighted with malformities, whose widows ache for the return of love lost so unnecessarily that ‘they’ were right to ‘practice’.
You won’t succeed. Neither will ‘they’.
Ron Taylor
Christmas Island nuclear test veteran.
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