H-bombs and hula girls
How a wide-eyed National Serviceman of 21 witnessed history ...and was seduced by ‘exotic, erotic’ Pacific
AT FIRST light on May 15, 1957, in a far-flung margin of the South Pacific, a small group of young Naval officers stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Warrior to await history.
Each of these Naval Reserves, completing their National Service, was kitted out in white protection suits tucked into their socks, long gunner’s anti-flash gloves and dark goggles. Attached to the suits were radiation detectors and slung over their shoulder was a gas mask with an anti-radiation filter.
The tension had been palpable since the previous day when their commander announced the hour at which Britain intended to test its first hydrogen bomb over the uninhabited atoll of Malden Island.
Warrior would be the nearest ship to the explosion, 26 miles from ‘ground zero’ and an RAF Valiant, with its one megaton thermo-nuclear device primed, would fly directly overhead as it made its run-up to the release point.
Success for the mission, code-named Operation Grapple, would allow the UK to sit at the top table of international diplomacy alongside the world’s other nuclear superpowers. Failure would mean global humiliation and potentially catastrophic loss of life.
As the broiling equatorial sun left the flight deck baking hot in minutes, a 21year-old Scottish sub-lieutenant, Michael Johnston, was among those who recalled the ship’s Tannoy crackle into life reporting that the Valiant had taken off from Christmas Island 400 miles distant. Before long, it roared overhead and the crew were ordered to turn their backs.
‘Bomb gone!’ announced Midshipman Rupert Cooper. ‘Pull down your goggles, put your hands over the goggles and close your eyes tight. … Ten seconds … five, four, three, two, one!’
Mr Johnston, who has written a dramatic account of the epoch-changing moment to mark its 60th anniversary, recalled: ‘One second later there was a burst of light of such intensity that many of those who were there will claim to this day that they saw an image of the bones of their fingers as the brilliant flash imprinted them on their retinas, even through their gloved hands, dark goggles and tightly shut eyelids.
‘After only ten seconds, those on deck were told they could turn round and remove their goggles. What they saw was more awesome by several orders of magnitude than they had been “conditioned” to expect.’
The closest any of them had come to such an apocalyptic scene were images of much smaller atomic tests in black and white photographs or on relatively small cinema screens.
‘Now, in front of them and taking up the whole sky was a kaleidoscopic display of all the colours of the spectrum,’ wrote Mr Johnston.
A fireball of angry reds and oranges merged ‘with ascending blacks and greys as the downward blast of heat that had vaporised the surface of the ocean more than a mile and a half below the air burst rose rapidly to form the stalk of the familiar death’s-head toadstool’.
Mr Johnston and the crew were transfixed, and ‘watched in almost complete silence, apart from a collective exhalation of expletives.
‘Then, just as their defences were being lowered, there came a rumble of thunder as the sound wave, travelling at a mere fraction of the speed of light, reached the ship. Many instinctively ducked.’
By now, the sailors were allowed to take photographs and cameras were passed around to capture the aftermath of this almighty explosion. The Warrior would later steam back to base at Christmas Island, but the spectacular mushroom cloud hung in the still Pacific air for another six hours.
The staff of Christmas Island’s newspaper, The Mid-Pacific News, were the first to break the news, declaring: ‘A flash, stark and blinding, high in the Pacific Sky, signalled to the world today Britain’s emergence as a top-ranking power of this nuclear age.’
But, what the paper’s special ‘Souvenir Edition’ did not disclose, as Mr Johnston’s book makes plain, was just how close to disaster Britain’s first H-Bomb test came.
Only the highest echelons of military top brass knew that the bomb’s explosive charge had split in transit and was stuck back together with glue.
These ‘Warriors’ never knew how close they came to being history. The paper also made no mention of the sailors’ idyllic life of sun, surf and the allure of ‘dusky maidens’ who welcomed them with hula dances to this island paradise.
Like the rest of the ship’s company, Michael Johnston, a wide-eyed Borders lad from Galashiels, had no inkling of any danger. For him as for his fellow officers, this was simply the greatest adventure of their young lives. ‘The event was beyond belief but we weren’t scared,’ he said this week. ‘Remember, most of us were teenagers and I was the eldest at 21. You’re not scared as a teenager, you think you’re going to live forever.
‘We had been told there was no risk and no evidence of untoward radiation was ever picked up from fish in the sea or the sea water itself. After the first test, I wouldn’t say we were blasé, but it almost became routine for the next two. I think more damage was caused by the aircraft spraying DDT over Christmas Island to kill the flies than by the radiation.’ In his book H-Bombs and Hula Girls, Mr Johnston, 81, paints a vivid picture of
A blast of heat that had vaporised the surface of the ocean
Britain’s race-against-time for nuclear arms as it stirred from its post-war austerity slumbers.
This was a time of growing prosperity at home and increasing geopolitical polarisation abroad. In Cold War terms, the US was already a thermonuclear power and had carried out an aerial H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll on May 21, 1956; it was the year of Suez and the Hungarian Uprising. That October, the Queen opened the world’s first commercial nuclear power station at Calder Hall, a by-product of which was weapons grade plutonium. A year later came the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
Domestically, it was a different kind of boom time. Tesco opened its first self-service stores in St Albans and Maldon in 1956, while Slough saw the UK’s first double yellow lines to combat rising traffic.
Third Class railway travel was abolished by the simple expedient of rebranding it Second Class.
But Britain’s desperation to join the nuclear club coincided with mounting pressure on the major powers to agree a test-ban treaty outlawing above ground testing of nuclear weapons. It would be a race to explode a successful H-bomb before any treaty came into force.
Mr Johnston was unwittingly caught up in such political machinations after he was called up for National Service in 1956.
Although a self-confessed ‘landlubber’, he opted to serve in the Royal Navy and the appealing prospect of visiting exotic climes on board the Warrior.
‘I grew up in Galashiels, about as far from the sea as you could get,’ he said. ‘Everywhere was green, rolling hills, mill chimneys and church spires and I was transported to these coral atolls on the Equator.
‘We visited Hawaii, which had yet to be invaded by American tourists in the days before jet travel and package holidays. We saw these, to our eyes, quite exotic islands, densely tropically clad with palm trees and pineapples or, in the case of Christmas Island, a strip of sand and coral that was a convenient airstrip.’
With time of the essence, Warrior raced to the chosen bomb test site, barging its way through a damaging Atlantic hurricane before squeezing through the Panama Canal with just inches to spare at its narrowest point.
Once in situ, the officers’ time was split between perfecting the drills for the ‘drop’ and soaking up the local sights and hospitality. Mr Johnston said: ‘It was idyllic in many ways and they had such a free and easy lifestyle so at odds with the British way. If you want lunch you swim out and catch it or climb a tree and knock it down.’
It was difficult not to be seduced by the intoxicating pleasures afforded by this slice of heaven on earth. ‘It was exotic, erotic, exciting and something which was beyond our previous experiences.’
During their ten-month mission, touring most of the South Pacific and Latin America and covering almost 40,000 miles, some young men inevitably got carried away: ‘Indeed, when we got to Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands, some sailors – no officers, I am happy to say – did desert and try to get married. One was arrested at the altar and brought back on board.’
It was not all navy larks, though. There was constant paranoia about Russian spy submarines lurking in the waters.
More worryingly, the explosive supercharge shell which goes round the radioactive core of the first live round had arrived cracked. With no time to secure a replacement, the technicians had to bodge a fix on their terrifyingly powerful bomb. The era of make-do-and-mend even extended to fixing nuclear warheads, it seems.
Bill Cook, the Scientific Director of Operation Grapple, told the task force commander bluntly: ‘We’ve stuck it together with Bostik and we’ll just have to hope for the best.’ Somewhat unnecessarily, he added: ‘I think it better not to broadcast this in case it affects morale.’
Fortunately, morale remained intact, as did the men of HMS Warrior, who were able to steam home as heroes, after a lengthy flag-showing detour around much of South America – the first British carrier seen there since the Second World War. At one point, the Warrior was berthed beside the Argentinian battleship, General Belgrano, later to achieve notoriety during the Falklands War in 1982.
Mr Johnston said his fellow crew members had no idea that the true purpose of their visit was to show off the carrier to prospective buyers.
By July, 1958, HMS Warrior had been sold to the Argentine Navy for £1.75million and renamed the ARA Independencia. By 1971, she had been scrapped.
Before then, she conveyed her homesick crew back to Portsmouth, where the completion of their mission coincided with the ending of National Service.
Although they went their separate ways after disembarkation, the friendship forged in that second sun of nuclear fission bound those young officers for life.
Mr Johnston said: ‘I was in with a terrific group of folk, who became lifelong friends united by this common experience.
‘It changed us all at the time, no question. We became much more international in our outlook, we had a broader perspective. One of our group, Laurence Reed, became MP for Bolton East, others became captains of industry, while some pursued their career in the Navy.’
Mr Johnston returned initially to Galashiels and his father’s textile mill before pursuing careers as a writer, broadcaster, businessman and councillor.
The twice-married father of four said: ‘The Warriors still meet regularly and will mark the 60th anniversary of the tests with a dinner at the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
‘One of our group, Rupert Cooper, is a member and the Duke of Edinburgh, who is commodore of the RYS, was gracious enough to write the foreword to the book after learning that all proceeds will be donated to Royal naval charities.’
He admitted to mixed views about the development of nuclear armaments, but said: ‘Once the genie is out of the bottle, you cannot put it back.
‘In the climate, with the hordes coming out of Russia and others possibly getting their hands on the bomb, I don’t think the British Government had any real choice as to whether or not they developed it. And once they developed it, they couldn’t uninvent it.
‘The significance of what we witnessed sank in more and more over the years because, of course, the significance of nuclear weapons has not diminished over 60 years, it has grown.
‘Now is not the time to abandon our nuclear weapons, but I hope that we will never have occasion – either ourselves, or North Korea or the US – to use the weapon because it would be the end of civilisation.’
H-Bombs & Hula Girls, published under the Uniform imprint of Unicorn Publishing, is available online and from all good bookshops priced £30.
Perfecting drills and soaking up local hospitality
A free and easy lifestyle at odds with British way