If we simplify things a bit, we can say that by the First World War we had already perfected killing to such a level that soldiers would rather crouch in cold, wet, dirty, uncomfortable trenches than rush out into the minefield into the crossfire of machine guns. However, this broke the momentum of the war – so much so that several veterans claimed that they played football with the enemy in no man’s land on Christmas Day 1914 – so something had to be found to shake up the slowing fighting. This is where chemical weapons come into play, in the form of gas attacks.
Chemical and biological weapons have appeared several times since antiquity, but on an industrial scale only in the 19th and 20th centuries. They were planted in the century. They weren’t necessarily brutally deadly, instead they spread over a large area and caused serious damage to health. New weapons, on the other hand, had to be developed and tested.
Anthrax for the win
In the United Kingdom, the Ministry of War established an experimental station at Porton Down in 1916, where chemical weapons for deployment were tested. In 1940, the country was again at war with the Germans, so the ministry commissioned Porton Down scientists to develop the most destructive chemical weapon possible. This is how the Vegetarian Operation started.
The idea was to attack the livestock and people in Germany at the same time, in order to take as many victims as possible. That is why it was invented that biscuits made from flaxseed are infected with anthrax (the bacterium Bacillus anthracis is responsible for the disease) and they are dropped on pastures in Germany. Animals eat these and die within a few days. Because of this, there would be a shortage of meat in the country, people would slaughter and eat animals that did not show symptoms but were already infected, so they themselves would become infected and die. It was also not unthinkable that starving, desperate people would also eat infected animals.
Anthrax can also be contracted through the skin, respiratory tract or intestinal tract (ie by eating) and threatens all warm-blooded animals (including us). It got its name from the fact that due to bloodstream infection, the patient’s spleen enlarges and turns black-brown. The spores stick to the fur, skin and bones of animals and remain infectious for years.
Cutaneous anthrax is the most common in humans, and the spores enter the body through wounds. The incubation period is about a day or two, and first an itchy lump similar to an insect bite appears at the site of penetration. A day or two later, the nodule becomes a blister, and more and more of these develop on the patient’s body, which, during the course of the disease, coalesce into a one-to-three centimeter anthrax carbuncle, also known as a hell stitch. This is usually not painful, but the center will later turn black and nearby lymph nodes will swell. It is fatal if not treated, but then in about twenty percent.
Pulmonary anthrax is much rarer and starts by inhaling the spores. Most often, it is latent for only one to four days, but it can last up to sixty days, and the first symptoms are cold and fever, then shortness of breath, bloody sputum and pneumonia. Pulmonary anthrax leads to death within a day or two.
If a person drinks the raw meat or unboiled milk of a sick animal, intestinal anthrax can develop. This is usually accompanied by symptoms after two days, such as loss of appetite, fever, abdominal pain, then bloody vomiting, and the emptying of bloody stools due to intestinal inflammation. Twenty to sixty percent of patients die without treatment.
A test is not a test
If you want to subject many living things to a painful death, anthrax is a great choice. However, this had to be tested, so the British government bought the Scottish island of Gruinard in 1942 and banned all locals from it and its surroundings.
They then shipped a bunch of sheep over there to see if the anthrax plan would work. The first question was whether the spores would survive being dropped in a bomb. Edward Spiers, a professor at the University of Leeds, told the BBC in 2022 that 80 or so sheep had been herded onto the island and moored with the wind blowing from the suspected site of the explosion.
A few days after the first blast, the first symptoms appeared on the lambs, and the animals quickly died. Several people living near the island said they saw the cloud covering the animals, which they suspected might be some kind of poison weapon. The researchers dissected the remains and then either burned them or buried them with several tons of debris.
British Ministry of Defense base on the island in 2001 – Photo: Chip HIRES / Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images
They worked on the island until 1943, and finally the army decided that the experiment was successful, so they produced five million pieces of anthrax flax crackers. These were not deployed in the end, because the Allied Powers were more focused on the Normandy landings. Because of this, after the war, the biscuits were destroyed and focused in a different direction. The result of this was that in 1952, their weapon, much more destructive than the bacterial biscuit, was completed, which made the United Kingdom the third nuclear power in the world.
The experiments completely destroyed the two square kilometer small island. The spores were embedded in the soil, so they were still infected decades later. People and animals were not allowed to return to the island, but as long as they followed the government regulation, the bacteria did not care about the cattle. Rainwater washed the pathogen into the sea, so more and more livestock around Gruinard Bay became sick and died. In order to avoid publicity, the government paid the compensations one after the other, but in the meantime it was communicated that an infected sheep had fallen from a Greek ship in the bay and the pathogen had spread to the area.
“It was pretty clear to us that they knew something about it or they wouldn’t have paid as quickly as they did”
a farmer living in the area told the BBC in 1962.
Purification
In the decades since 1943, several attempts have been made to decontaminate the island so that it can be returned to – and presumably not infecting the people in the area. These attempts were mostly unsuccessful, because although the surface of the soil could be peeled off with chemical methods and burning, the spores still remained in the soil. A farmer said that in the spring, when the grass was growing and it rained a lot, more of his cattle always died along the water’s edge than elsewhere.
In 1981, an environmental group sailed over to the island, where they took several soil samples. A bucket of earth was also placed at the gates of Porton Down and in Blackpool, the site of the then-in-power Conservatives’ annual conference, to draw attention to the quarantined island.
They returned to the island in 1986 and first removed and burned the topsoil, then disinfected it with formaldehyde-salt water. On April 24, 1990 – exactly 34 years ago to the day – the government declared the island anthrax-free again after 48 years.
A chemical and biological defense facility worker next to a warning sign on Gruinard Island during the evacuation in 1986 – Photo: PA Images / PA Images
A few days later, on the first of May, the descendants of the island’s original owners bought Gruinard back, for 500 pounds – exactly the amount the government bought it for decades earlier, although at today’s value it is more like 35,000 pounds (16 million forints). With this, the government did not get rid of the problem completely, because many people believed that anyone could buy the island for that price, so they wrote letters to several ministries, in which they indicated that they would attack the never-returning offer.
In 2022, a fire unexpectedly broke out on the island and approximately two hundred hectares were completely burned. But a spokesman for the owners said it was actually good for the island and would breathe new life into Gruinard. He didn’t say if they knew what happened, but some said it was a spark from a canoe campfire, while others said it was a deliberate burn to grow fresh grass to graze on. It has not been revealed since then what happened.
