Seeds of Death and the Mystery of Anthrax Island: The British Secret Plan to Defeat Germany in World War II

In the 1960s, the BBC began investigating rumors that secret and shocking experiments had been carried out on an island off the coast of Scotland during the Second World War, causing the island to become contaminated and the animals from the area to die inexplicably. Details of the dangerous experiments carried out on Gruinard Island were revealed only half a century later.

“Around here, they call it the island of death, the mysterious island, and rightly so,” said reporter Fyfe Robertson in 1962, near this isolated and deserted island in northern Scotland.

“This story is not about the dirty deeds of the distant past or the superstitions of the Highlands. No, this is a story from 1942. The war had been going on for three years when suddenly War Department scientists took over the island and began experiments so secret that even today, 20 years later, only a few people know what happened there. The locals were not told anything.”

Robertson was trying to investigate stories about dangerous experiments the government was rumored to be conducting on Gruinard Island.

At the time of Robertson’s report, the British Ministry of Defense had already declared the island off-limits to the public, and Robertson was unable to convince the apprehensive locals to take him on a boat trip around the island to get a closer look .

It was an ecological catastrophe. Even more shocking was that the island remained contaminated, remaining inaccessible for nearly half a century, until 1990, when the British government finally declared the island no longer in danger.

Operation Vegetarian and the devastating effects of the biological weapon that the British were preparing

The truth, which only came to light in 1997 after the British Army released footage describing the experiments, is that Gruinard Island was the site of clandestine attempts by Great Britain during the Second World War to convert anthrax, a deadly bacterial infection, in a weapon.

The project was called Operation Vegetarian and began under the direction of Paul Fildes, then head of the biology department at Porton Down, a military base in Wiltshire, England, which still exists today.

Porton Down was established in 1916 as a center for conducting experiments to study the effects of chemical weapons, which were increasingly used during the First World War.

In the 1940s, Britain was at war again, and Porton Down was tasked with developing biological weapons that could be used against Nazi Germany with catastrophic effect, with the aim of reducing direct combat between troops as much as possible.

The plan was for the British Army to drop flakes of linseed infected with anthrax spores from an airplane over pastures in Germany where cattle were grazing. The animals would become infected with anthrax, which would then spread to humans who ate the contaminated meat.

According to the plan, Germany’s meat supplies would be decimated by nationwide anthrax contamination, which would have caused a huge death toll.

“Death Island” and the flock of sheep “attacked” with clouds of anthrax

But to understand how anthrax used as a weapon would work in real-world conditions, the researchers needed an open-air place to test the plan, away from populated areas. In the summer of 1942, the army bought Gruinard, an isolated and uninhabited island of 200 hectares, and forbade the locals to land there.

A team from the army, under the supervision of scientists, began to conduct frightening experiments. They brought domestic animals to the island to use in experiments and released anthrax spores throughout the island.

The objective of the experiment was to test whether the bacterium would survive an explosion and retain its virulent properties.

Around 80 sheep were tied at various locations on the island chosen specifically for the anthrax spores released by an explosion to be carried by the wind. The team remotely triggered the explosion, which sent a cloud of “very dangerous spores flying, causing infection and death wherever it went,” Professor Edward Spiers of the University of Leeds recounted in the documentary “The Mystery of Anthrax Island” in 2022.

The results were devastating: within just a few days, the sheep started showing symptoms and rapidly dying. Their infected bodies were analyzed and then cremated or buried under tons of rubble.

Some of the locals saw the clouds of anthrax falling over the island. “I think it was all kinds of toxic gas, anthrax,” said one local Robertson interviewed in 1962.

The secret experiments continued until 1943, when the military decided that the test results were a success and the scientists left and returned to Porton Down.

Five million flakes of anthrax-infected linseed were produced, but the plan was abandoned after the Allies began to make great progress following the Normandy landings. The flakes were destroyed after the war.

An ecological catastrophe: even rainwater was lethal

By 1952, Britain had succeeded in developing another type of weapon of mass destruction, becoming the world’s third nuclear power. Four years later, it ended its chemical and biological weapons development programs, and in 1975 it signed the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibits their use, manufacture, or stockpiling.

The consequences of Operation Vegetarian on the island were catastrophic. Anthrax is a very hardy bacterium and can survive in the soil for decades, causing infections even many years after an epidemic has broken out.

The military’s experiments made the island too dangerous for humans and animals – even rainwater reaching the island could be lethal.

Although the government tried to decontaminate the island, a series of tests done in 1971 showed that the soil underground still contained anthrax spores. It was only in 1990, after 48 years of quarantine, that the British government declared that Gruinard Island no longer contained any traces of anthrax.

Gruinard was not the only place where Britain conducted secret biological weapons experiments, but it was the first of them. The consequences of those tests show both the dangers of biological warfare and the destructive capacity of humanity.

Editor: Raul Nețoiu

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