Anthrax and Other Biological Weapons

Anthrax Island

Subject: 1945 proposed "Operation Vegetarian"(??)
From: trekkerjon@lycos.com (Jon Trekker)
Date: 10/23/01 2:33 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <3bde3968.7422729@news.pacific.net.au>

In today's Washington Post a letter to the editor describes a British operation which was
prepared, but not carried out.

According to the writer, Britain had prepared 5 million anthrax cattle cakes to be dropped on German pastures in order to wipe out beef and dairy herds. He said it was planned for the summer of 1944, but was abandoned due to the success of Overlord- the allied invasion.

If true, this sounds like something that would have only recently been declassified.

Has anyone ever heard of it?

Subject: Re: 1945 proposed "Operation Vegetarian"(??)
From: "Andrew Clark" aclark@cedar-consultancy.co.uk
Date: 10/23/01 9:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <9r44nk$k96$1@nntp6.u.washington.edu>

This is essentially true. The plan was first made widely known by the Science Museum exhibition "Cold War Hot War" in 1999. The following is the text of the caption from the exhibition:

"In a project code named Operation Vegetarian, anthrax spores were incorporated in 5 million cattle cakes after the Gruinard Island trial. The cakes were stockpiled for use as anti-livestock weapons that could be air-dropped over Germany. Fortunately, they were never used. Although two boxes of cattle cakes were kept as curiosities until 1972, the rest were destroyed at the end of the war".

Subject: Re: 1945 proposed "Operation Vegetarian"(??)
From: Dirk Lorek DiLore@pobox.com
Date: 10/23/01 9:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <9r44ol$13v4$1@nntp6.u.washington.edu>

It has been known for some years, I think it was the German historian Gellermann who discovered the relevant documents. The British newspaper Sunday Herald published details about the operation which can be found here:

http://www.sundayherald.com/19248

Dirk

Subject: Re: 1945 proposed "Operation Vegetarian"(??)
From: Nils K Hammer nh0g+@andrew.cmu.edu
Date: 10/24/01 2:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <3be790cb.4944117@news.pacific.net.au>

there was another allied bio-war program to use equine encephalitis to kill the horses of France before the Normandy invasion, since the German army relied mostly on horses for mobility, but the French farms would have failed with drastic consequences.

Nils

Subject: Re: 1945 proposed "Operation Vegetarian"(??)
From: "Sierra Hotel 111" panavia.tornado@ntlworld.com.no.spam
Date: 10/24/01 2:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <3be590be.4930453@news.pacific.net.au>

This was supposed to happen if Overlord failed to undermine the already starved German civilians' morale. In fact, there is an island called Gruinard, which was used for the testing of anthax on sheep, in the north west of Scotland. It was so badly polluted by anthrax no one has been allowed to live on it since the tests, which were conducted in the early '40s, even after a government clean up operation in the '80s. The operation involved lifting the entire topsoil off the island and the use of formaldehyde to decontaminate the spores. This was declassified here, in the UK, many years ago, due to the fact that Gruinard was inaccessible and people wanted answers for the government's testing of anthrax on animals.

Best Regards - Shaun

Subject: Re: 1945 proposed "Operation Vegetarian"(??)
From: "Nightjar" nightjar@insertmysurname.uk.com
Date: 10/24/01 2:58 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <3be690c7.4939411@news.pacific.net.au>

Most people in Britain in the past 50 years or so would have looked blank if you had spoken of Gruinard Island. However, it has been widely known for most of that period as Anthrax Island. The island was infected in 1941 using modified mustard gas shells and a bomb from a Wellington Bomber. Sixty sheep died in the operation and, when high seas dislodged a buried body, the disease spread to the mainland. It was widely believed that Germany was developing anthrax as a terror weapon against the UK and Porton Down carried out experiments with both harmless bacteria and, on Gruinard, live anthrax to determine what the effects would be. The island was decontaminated, at great cost, in 1999.

It has always been the official line that Britain had no intent to use either the biological or the chemical weapons it developed except as in retaliation for a German attack of that kind. Logically, for that to have been possible, such weapons had to be created. Even if the attack had genuinely been intended to go ahead, rather than being one of the many
contingency plans, the German civilians I know who were around at that time would not have noticed a change in their diet if there had been no cattle or sheep in 1944.

Colin Bignell

First Appearance 10/23/01
1-6 copied

Sunday Herold (Undated) Oct. 2001

UK planned to wipe out Germany with anthrax
Allies World War Two shame
By George Rosie

AS THE world recoils at the horrific possibility of al-Qaeda terrorists waging anthrax war against United States citizens, the Sunday Herald can reveal that Britain manufactured five million anthrax cattle cakes during the second world war and planned to drop them on Germany in 1944.

The aim of Operation Vegetarian was to wipe out the German beef and dairy herds and then see the bacterium spread to the human population. With people then having no access to antibiotics, this would have caused many thousands -- perhaps even millions -- of German men, women and children to suffer awful deaths.

The anthrax cakes were tested on Gruinard Island, off Wester Ross, which was finally cleared of contamination in 1990. Operation Vegetarian was planned for the summer of 1944 but, in the event, it was abandoned as the Allies' Normandy invasion progressed successfully.

Details of the wartime secret operation are contained in a series of War Office files (WO 188) at the Public Record Office in Kew. Some of the files are still classified . The man whose task was to carry out Operation Vegetarian was Dr Paul Fildes, director of the biology department at Porton Down near Salisbury in Wiltshire. Fildes had previously been in charge of the Medical Research Council's bacterial chemistry unit at Middlesex Hospital.

In early 1942, Fildes began searching Britain for suppliers and manufacturers of linseed-oil cattle cake to make five million small cakes. Large quantities of the bacillus itself had to be produced, while special containers to carry the cattle cakes had to be designed and made. Some RAF bombers had to be modified to deliver the anthrax infected payload. And all of it had to be done as cheaply as possible. The raw material for the cake was provided by the Olympia Oil and Cake Company in Blackburn. The contract to cut the cattle cake into small pieces went to J & E Atkinson of Bond Street in London, perfumers and toilet-soap manufacturers and suppliers to the royal family. The Atkinsons calculated that they could produce 180,000 to 250,000 cakes, each 2.5cm in diameter and 10 grammes in weight, in a 44-hour week. The price was to be between 12 and 15 shillings per thousand . The firm pledged to deliver 5,273,400 cakes by April 1943. By the middle of July 1942, the Atkinsons informed Fildes that 'we are now producing at the rate of 40,000 per day'.

The anthrax was manufactured by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries at its veterinary laboratory in Surrey. An Oxford academic named Dr E Schuster was set to work devising the pump to inject the bacilli into the cattle cakes. The Porton Down scientists settled on cube-shaped cardboard containers, 18cm square, to carry the infected foodstuff.

Each held 400 cakes. They would be fitted with a steel handle 'of a size which enables the operator to grasp the handle without difficulty when wearing thick leather or moleskin gloves ...' Thirteen women were then recruited from various soap-making firms, sworn to secrecy and given the job of injecting the cattle cakes with anthrax spores.
At the same time, Fildes and his team were working on the best way to deliver the diseased cattle feed to the German herds. The RAF's research unit came up with a simple solution -- easily made wooden trays that fitted on to aircraft flare chutes. Their Bomber Command Lancasters, Halifaxes and Stirlings were chosen for the job.

By the beginning of 1944, Operation Vegetarian was ready to go. It was crucial to mount any attack in the summer months. Fildes said: 'The cattle must be caught in the open grazing fields when lush spring grass is on the wane.' 'Trials have shown that these tablets ... are found and consumed by the cattle in a very short time. 'Cattle are concentrated in the northern half of Oldenburg and northwest Hanover. Aircraft flying to and from Berlin will fly over 60 miles of grazing land.' Fildes calculated that, at an average ground speed of 300mph, the distance would be covered in 18 minutes. 'If one box of tablets is dispersed every two minutes, then each aircraft will be required to carry and disperse nine, or say 10, boxes.'

One Lancaster bomber returning from a raid on Berlin would be able to scatter 4000 anthrax-infected cakes over a 60-mile swathe in less than 20 minutes. A dozen aircraft would have been enough to litter most of the north German countryside with anthrax spores. Operation Vegetarian was a seriously deadly project. But, by the time Fildes's operation was ready to go in the summer of 1944, the Normandy invasion had taken place and Allied armies were crashing through northern France and up through Italy. The war against Nazi Germany was instead being won by conventional means. At the end of 1945, five million anthrax-infected cattle cakes were incinerated in one of Porton Down's furnaces.

Biological Weapons in WWII

Subject: Biological Warfare in WWII
From: kvasilak@acs3.acs.ucalgary.ca (Konstantinon Vasilakos)
Date: 10/12/01 4:03 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <3bd3cdfe.347890@news.pacific.net.au>

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune claims that the Soviets intentionally infected advancing German forces with tularemia (a pathogenic bacteria which causes pneumonia) during the summer of 1942.

Apparently, the pathogen swept through both sides, resulting in about 100, 000 infections on both sides. The source for these claims arises from a bioweapon scientist, Ken Alibek, who defected from the Soviet Union in the early 1990's.

This is the first I have heard of the Soviets using biological weapons in WWII. Are these claims to be believed? Are there other examples on the Eastern Front (or in WWII in general)?

Thanks, Kosta

Subject: Re: Biological Warfare in WWII
From: Carey Sublette careysub@earthlink.net
Date: 10/14/01 5:18 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <3bca8291.775302@news.pacific.net.au>

Alibek's (Alibekov's) assertions about this are found in his book Biohazard (New York, NY: Random House; 1999:29-38). He recounts that he deduced the Soviet use of tularemia from a study of the outbreaks - he concluded (in the 1970s) that they could not be natural, and apparently had this conclusion verbally confirmed to him by someone whose involvement with bioweapons stretched back to that time. His conclusions seem entirely plausible - the are consistent with the level of knowledge and activity at the time (other nations had similar research programs, the technology for dissemination under the close combat conditions of the Eastern front existed, etc.), and are certainly consistent with Soviet desperation in 1942.

Documentary information on the Soviet bioweapons activity is virtually unobtainable. This area was subject to extreme secrecy (even by Soviet standards) and unlike its nuclear program, which has widely publicized its accomplishments, bioweapons are not prestigious and do bring the cachet of being a "nuclear power". Further the Soviet's ran a strictly illegal program for 20 years after agreeing to disarm. The result is that the record of this program has been concealed, and probably has been largely destroyed.

The activities of the Japanese bioweapon program has been widely documented and publicized however. Col. Shiro Ishii, and his Unit 731 in Manchuria, did extensive research on humans and employed these weapons against the Chinese (see for example: Harris S., Japanese biological warfare research on humans: a case study of microbiology and ethics., Ann N Y Acad Sci., 1992;666:21-52).
Carey Sublette

Subject: Re: Biological Warfare in WWII
From: Nils K Hammer nh0g+@andrew.cmu.edu
Date: 10/14/01 1:33 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <9qcsra$j5g$1@nntp6.u.washington.edu>

The Ken Alibek book is called "biohazard". It is mostly about his modern work, but mentions the tularemia attack durin Stalingrad. There is also a mention of glanders used against troops vacationing on the black sea.

If I recall his book correctly, he doesn't make firm claims, but reports plausible suspicions. I have no trouble believing them, but is is hard to say for certain about these things without very hard paper documentation. Armies always face disease due to the great suffering and shortages in the field. Some of the allegations about Japanese biowar are perhaps a bit less plausible, but we know they had a major program.

Nils