Heligoland (30 page)

A surreptitious reconnaissance of Monte Bello, and the treacherous waters around it, was made by British military personnel in October 1950. ‘Operation Hurricane’ – the preparation of the site for a nuclear test – began in the spring of 1952 with the arrival from Britain of an aircraft carrier and a host of supply vessels bringing miles of cables and instruments to record the effects of contamination, blast, heat flash and other factors of interest.
²⁴
Before leaving England the seismic and blast equipment had been tested in huge explosions near Shoeburyness in the Thames estuary.

The selection of Monte Bello saved Heligoland from utter destruction. In many respects there were astonishingly close geographical and logistical similarities between the two islands. Each had received a reconnaissance party, each had a shallow water area and each lay some 30 miles distant from the north-west point of a continent.

On 22 March 1951 the British High Commissioner in Canberra received a top secret telegram from London predicting the devastating effect the test would have on the inhabitability of the islands. It would

Under the guidance of William Penney, the first British atomic bomb was exploded there on the morning of 3 October 1952 at a strength of 20 kilotons – equivalent to that of the Nagasaki bomb. It was placed in the hull of the disused frigate HMS
Plym
, anchored in shallow water, and when the first flash burst through the hull the temperature was nearly 1 million degrees. Britain had joined the nuclear club just fractionally later than the five years Portal had planned it would take. In November 1953 the Blue Danube bomb entered service with the RAF. Three weeks after the Monte Bello explosion the Prime Minister made a lengthy public statement in celebration of the successful test. On the effects it would have on the lives of the fishermen who had made their living around that Australian island, curiously Churchill said not one word. What he considered really mattered was that: ‘No animals were used in the test, no mammals were seen in the affected area and such birds as there were had mostly been frightened away by earlier precautions.’

In Britain there appeared to be no limit to the concerns expressed by the government and various influential naturalist institutions for the welfare of the seabirds and other wildlife on Heligoland. In October 1943 the Council of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had met at their headquarters in Victoria Street, Westminster, and resolved to recommend to the Foreign Office, after the close of hostilities, that Heligoland be acquired as an international ornithological observatory. Then on 11 May 1945
The Times
printed a letter from an official of the Canoe & Camping Club of Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1, recommending the island be made a permanent bird sanctuary and controlled by an ‘international committee of naturalists’. What really alerted the Foreign Office and concentrated its mind on the wellbeing of the birds was news received from New York that well-organised ornithologists were petitioning the United Nations to make Heligoland an international biological station. Much logistical planning, and indeed physical danger, was involved in conveying explosives across the Bight for the ‘Big Bang’ in early 1947. Many VIPs were invited to witness this apparent attempt to make Heligoland uninhabitable. Curiously the celebrated explosion was twice postponed, from 15 and 31 March, and eventually took place amid much publicity on 18 April that year. The hitherto unexplained reasons for the delay were not the result of any technical hitch – but to allow time to scare off a colony of migratory guillemots.

It was all puffins before people. Since their evacuation from the island in April 1945 the Heligolanders had been cynically ignored and expediently forgotten. Their exile was quite unlike that experienced in the First World War when they were kept together in a Hamburg suburb. This time the traditionally close-knit seafaring community of two thousand islanders was fragmented into minute pieces and widely scattered across some 144 towns and villages in northern Germany. Often this meant there were usually only one or two islanders together, and scarcely ever more than a handful in any village. For a while it was feared that this really might be the end of Heligoland as a society. But their instinct to hold together was too strong and somehow, person by person, they tracked one another down. Soon their efforts were reinforced by the establishment of a group which became known as the ‘Heligoland Committee’. It consisted of eleven Heligolandish aldermen and was based at Cuxhaven, where the largest concentration of the exiles, about one hundred altogether, had been rehoused. The committee kept their people informed about matters of common interest while the ‘refugees’ evolved their own means of clinging to their independent culture. In addition to going to well-attended meetings at Cuxhaven, they formed local clubs where their songs, folk-dances and dialect were kept alive.

All the islanders shared a yearning to return home, an urge magnified when they had to spend their first Christmas away from the island. On 1 January 1946 the same sentiment prompted the Heligoland Committee to start a petition begging that Britain should again take back the island as one of her Crown Colonies. There were at that time around 250 Heligolanders who had been born under the British Crown – a factor which influenced the wording of their petition: ‘It is impossible for us to believe that Great Britain, or its people, to whom a lot of other small nations are again thankful for their regained freedom and liberty, should have forgotten their former subjects, the natives of the Crown Colony of Heligoland.’

Belatedly the Committee sought the assistance of British Members of Parliament who might lobby on their behalf. Only one was much interested: Douglas Savory, the Unionist MP for Antrim South. During the First World War he had been an RNVR intelligence officer, in which capacity – while posted as an Assistant Secretary to the British Embassy in Stockholm – he had worked for Admiral Reginald Hall, the head of Naval Intelligence. Savory was by descent a Huguenot, and had been a Professor of European Languages at Queen’s University, Belfast, where his concern for persecuted nationalities in Europe led to him being a respected independent investigator into the Katyn massacre. It was partly his own family’s history, combined with his concern that Germany had long been discouraging the Heligolanders’ use of their distinctive dialect, that caused him to respond to their call. Effectively he became the Heligolanders’ champion in British public life, a position that had been vacant since the death of William Black and the execution of Erskine Childers.

The Foreign Office made no response to the petition, so in April the Heligolanders tried again, this time urging that if readmission to the British realm were impossible, they would like to be annexed to Denmark. From the Foreign Office there was a stony silence. In the House of Commons Savory asked Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, what was happening regarding the Heligolanders’ petition – and quite incredibly he was told that the Foreign Office had ‘lost’ the document. Even if Bevin were not deceiving the House of Commons, although it seems that he was, the timing could scarcely have been more ironic. According to the
National Geographic
that summer the Foreign Office was readily responding to petitions from British ornithologists to select a time for blasting operations which would be least likely to disturb the birds nesting on the northern tip of the island.

Rather surprisingly, at this time there were official murmurings in London that seemed well disposed towards the notion of Heligoland once again becoming a British territory. Cabinet Office papers from March 1946 show that the Foreign Office was fairly amenable to suggestions of Heligoland becoming independent, annexed or even part of the British Isles. On 18 January 1947 the Foreign Office informed the Chiefs of Staff that, in view of the long-term requirement expressed by them, the question of the annexation of Heligoland had been reconsidered. Although there would be some political difficulty in that course, the Foreign Office felt that the territorial claims of the Netherlands, France and Luxembourg over Germany (as well as to the large areas of Germany in the process of detachment, namely Poland and parts of Russia), were likely to facilitate any claims put forward by Britain.

Yet under no circumstances ought the islanders be allowed to return to Heligoland. That was essentially the view of the Air Ministry, which was the only government department calling for Britain to regain possession of the island. According to declassified Cabinet Office papers, on 15 November 1946 – during the lull in the practice bombing when naval engineers were rigging the underground fortifications for the ‘Big Bang’ – the Chiefs of Staff informed the Foreign Office that they ‘considered the retention of Heligoland as a bombing range to be of considerable importance’. Of the three political alternatives proposed by the Foreign Office, the Chiefs of Staff preferred annexation. Failing that, they were prepared to agree to ‘other countries [presumably the United States] being permitted to use the island for bombing practice, provided control of the island was retained by us’. Unfortunately for the Heligolanders the Foreign Office had very little interest in their future. On 29 June 1949 Ernest Bevin indicated the mood of resistance to a full civilian reoccupancy of the island when he coldly told the House of Commons that the British-influenced Land government in Germany favoured the Heligolanders being permanently transferred for settlement to the Schleswig-Holstein island of Sylt, instead of back to their beloved homeland!

Undaunted by that and other discouraging replies, Savory courageously battled on at Westminster. Stoically persevering on behalf of the islanders, every few weeks he would seek parliamentary replies from senior ministers. Again and again he raised the matter in the House of Commons through questions directed to the Secretary of State for Air, Arthur Henderson. The replies he was given stated that the terrible destruction on the island had mostly taken place during the war, but he had evidence that that was not the case. Tactics used by officialdom to blunt the edge of such scrutiny included the besmirching of the inquisitors. This happened on 12 January 1952 when, as an effort to shake off a barrage of criticism, the parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office wrote to Savory that there must be ‘little substance’ in the complaints made by a distinguished leading islander, Franz Siemens, because he represented protest groups ‘created by himself’. There was also a glimmer of a possibility that Savory’s correspondence in support of the islanders was being monitored by British Intelligence. This became apparent to the professor on 13 July 1950, when he received a letter from Richard Kuchlenz, a Heligoland campaigner in Cuxhaven, who expressed puzzlement that an earlier letter from Savory had got ‘lost in the post’, and wondered: ‘Do you think that my correspondence to you and yours is watched by certain people on your side?’

Despite Savory’s endeavours, the bombing actually increased in ferocity, even though static explosions had destroyed all the remaining fortifications in the 1947 ‘Big Bang’. By far the heaviest bombing was Exercise ‘Bullseye’ on 2 June 1950. It was at that time that Savory at last hit upon a means of bringing the matter before the attention of the Commons. On the closing day, before the House adjourned for the autumn, it was customary for the Speaker to allocate time to various subjects which may be brought up ‘On the Motion for the Adjournment’. Savory managed to get a petition signed by a very considerable number of MPs begging the Speaker to assign, on 28 July 1950, a certain period for the discussion of the fate of Heligoland. That he did, but he warned Savory that the entire proceedings must not exceed an hour.

As it was the first time since 1890 that the House of Commons had debated Heligoland, it was a historic occasion and ought to have been an influential one, too. But a consequence of the time restriction was that in the debate, which opened at 2pm, Savory could only present the case for the island very briefly. Speaking with one eye on the clock, and keeping a tight rein on the anger that surged within him, he presented the facts: describing the island, its place in Frisian history and its links with Britain. Passionately quoting the January 1946 petition he called for the islanders’ return and a halt to the bombing.

The low attendance at the debate showed that then, even more than in the 1930s, there were very few MPs who understood what conditions were like on Heligoland. It was noticeable that each of the eight MPs who participated praised Professor Savory for his sincerity, kindliness and humanitarian views. He had, it was often said, ‘the respect and affection of everyone in this House’. Nevertheless memories of the war were still strong and a few were unsympathetic that the bombing of their island was ‘extremely inconvenient’ for the Heligolanders. Others, considering the new Cold War reality that West Germany was now under Britain’s protection, had differing views. The Sheffield MP John Hynd claimed that the use of ‘a remote spot away from the mainland, where there is no inhabitation of any kind’ was all Germany needed to do ‘to contribute to the defence of Germany and of the rest of Western Europe’. Mr Reginald Paget MP, who had been a barrister at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, argued that to use as a bombing target ‘an island of great history and tradition is an offence which will be resented by every German. If Western Europe is to be defended, these people must be our friends.’

For a while that afternoon it seemed that no island in the British Isles was safe from the possibility of being the target for future heavy practice bombing. The prospect was like an unwelcome prize in a pass-theparcel parlour game. It was prompted by suggestions in the German press that Britain should use some Scottish island, instead of Heligoland, for bombing exercises. Studiously keen not to encourage the RAF to use any part of his Orkney and Shetland Islands constituency, Jo Grimond (later to become leader of the Liberal Party) suggested Rockall or ‘islands around Ireland which are uninhabited’. Places such as the Channel Islands were suggested by other MPs. Such ideas would not have been out of place in Compton Mackenzie’s comic novel set in the Outer Hebrides,
Rockets Galore
(1957). It went largely unnoticed at the time that the most far-reaching contribution in the debate was made by laird Malcolm Douglas-Hamilton. The main supporter of Savory’s argument, he was the member for Inverness and came from a distinguished land-owning family on whose property the fleeing Rudolf Hess had landed during the war. An RAF wing commander, he had gained great experience of flying over the Heligoland Bight during the war, and in 1945 he had been appointed commandant of the Air Training Corps in Scotland. Thus it was with some knowledge that he suggested some alternatives to Heligoland. He also strongly objected to the use of uninhabited Scottish islands and helpfully suggested that, if the only purpose of the Heligoland bombing range really was just navigational training, then a point off Heligoland would do just as well. His view was that a suitable site could be found among the uninhabited islands at the mouth of the Elbe, such as Scharhorn, Trischen and Neuwerk. To continue to use Heligoland for bombing simply because it had served as a base for offensive operations during the war – an excuse which the Secretary of State for Air was apt to use – would, as Douglas-Hamilton scathingly remarked, be as absurd a stance as continuing to bomb Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven.