Ralph Gray: “In my corrugated hut I was close, very close. The bomb seemed to go off right over my head. Through a slit hole I saw the blast approaching and it was as though the whole island was being shaken. As I watched palm trees were suddenly flattened; a large oil bowser was tossed around like a leaf; a huge refrigerator that had recently been delivered and was too heavy to move was shunted neatly into the space allotted to it. It was a terrifying experience.”
Forty thousand feet in the air Eric Denson was suspended between heaven and hell. Above him the clear, blue sky, clean and serene. Below the dark, boiling mushroom cloud rose to meet him like fumaroles from the bowels of hell.
Instructions from his squadron leader 20 miles upwind filled his earphones. Sophisticated monitoring equipment in the Canberra targeted areas of maximum radiation burn. Denson assimilated the information, adjusted his controls, took one last deep breath and flew his aircraft arrow straight into the maw of the monster. As he entered the cloud he intoned over and over again Tennyson’s tribute to foolhardy courage in the Charge of the Light Brigade: “Into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell…”
Denson fought with the controls as WH980 was tossed around like a leaf. The controls were loose and floppy, it was like trying to steer a car on an icy lake in a blizzard. He made several passes through the mushroom cloud. When the aircraft emerged after the final run it was alive with radioactivity. And when it landed and taxied to a halt at the far end of the runway near the decontamination pits, the Canberra sent every radiation counter crazy. His log book showed he was in the air for 1 hr 55 mins
Kevin Murphy, one of the ground crew, recalled: “We were told WH980 was the hottest aircraft ever to return from a cloud sniffing mission. We were on the far side of the runway, but we could see there was a hell of a flap on about it. Men in protective suits were running around, but no-one went too near. They sprayed hoses on to the aircraft, but that was as close as they got…”
Flt Lt Glen Stewart, the navigator of a Shackleton aircraft on patrol 60 miles from ground zero watched as the sky around the explosion boiled with clouds and smoke. He noted that the blast set off a chain of violent thunderstorms that marched in a line toward Christmas Island, and his aircraft ran into torrential rain on its return. He said: “The rain entered the unpressurised cockpit like a sieve, turning the only detector, a small rudimentary device on the captain’s lapel, immediately the wrong colour. I believe another Shackleton was caught in the same predicament.”
An RAF observer in one of the cloud sampling “sniffer” planes, also testified the aircraft was lashed by a belt of heavy ‘black rain’ which he saw cascading down the sides of the mushroom cloud. Flt Lt Joe Pasquini recorded his aircraft was suddenly “pelted” with rain and all the radiation monitoring equipment lit up “like a Christmas tree.” The downpour lasted for about 30 seconds and he estimated the rain belt to be three nautical miles wide.
He recalled: “We were flying near the stem of the mushroom cloud when I saw quite clearly a huge belt of black rain. The heat from the fireball had obviously vapourised the surface of the ocean which sent up huge quantities of steam into the stem of the cloud. As it rose, it cooled and came back down to earth as this dirty rain.” Pasquini watched in awe as the cascading waterfall of rain scythed across the island in a sizzling curtain of radioactive droplets.
The phenomenon was observed by a senior RAF officer on the island, Squadron Leader Kenneth Charney. He was in the reinforced steel and concrete bunker at ‘C’ site about 17 miles from ground zero. After a nerve-jangling few moments as the blast wave made the steel structure creak and groan, he and a group of scientists ventured outside to examine their instruments. As they scrambled about the scorched terrain they were hit by a sudden belt of rain that disappeared almost as soon as it arrived. Charney knew instinctively that this was ‘bad’ rain and like so many others he was to pay a terrible price in the future. The swirling curtain of rain moved up the island like a tsunami gathering strength from the crackling air, and by the time it reached Port camp, it had morphed into a full-blown tropical storm.
Unaware of the dangers servicemen, used to only saltwater bathing because there was no natural freshwater on the island, stripped off their clothes and ran naked and whooping into the downpour. They opened their mouths to suck the moisture into their parched bodies and only the arrival of a posse of scientists, garbed in protective ‘moon-suits’, alerted them to the danger. But no warning was issued to stop thousands of men from later swimming in the lagoon at Port camp, where most of the heavy rain fell.
Caught out in the open RAF fire crewman Jim Wallace welcomed the storm. But he soon changed his mind. For this was like no tropical storm he had ever experienced. “The droplets were unnaturally large,” he said. “And then I realised they were black. This was a dirty rain that I’d never seen before. I knew then that something had gone wrong with this bomb.”
Archie Ross also remembered: “After the blast the clouds started building in the sky and I noticed they were a peculiar shade of deep green and turquoise. And then it started to rain, very sudden, very heavy and very wet.”
Thousands of men received a radioactive shower that day. But nearly everyone on the island was contaminated in one way or another from either drinking water distilled from the sea, or from the lagoons where they swam.
Out at sea the ships were last to receive a radioactive bath. HMS Narvik, the scientific and supply ship, which was 30 miles from ground zero, was anchored just offshore from Port London. Bernard Geoghan, an officer on board described how the cloud “developed and developed and developed.”
“It was absolutely enormous,” he said. “Eventually it came right over the top of the ship and passed the ship. Then it started raining… it absolutely bucketed down; a real tropical drenching. We were all soaked to the skin. Most of us were wearing the cotton zoot suit and perhaps a pair of tropical shorts. We were all very apprehensive. Here was this rain coming smack out of the nuclear cloud right over our heads. Inevitably everyone was pretty petrified about it. Very soon after that a broadcast came from the bridge assuring us that there was no contamination registered on the ship, which we did not believe for one minute. It was a while before we were allowed to disperse.”
Most of the islanders had been evacuated to the Narvik. Mrs Sui Kiritome, reporting to an official inquiry some years later, told how the islanders had been roused at 3am ready for evacuation: “We were told the test would take place early in the morning around 5 or 6am and that we should be at the wharf ready for evacuation from the island. We were transported to the ship on landing crafts.”
Mrs Kiritome’s husband acted as interpreter for the British officers. A roll call was taken and the people were grouped on the basis of their home islands (most of the people were migrant workers from nearby islands). People made their way to landing crafts as their names were called. Before leaving their homes, the islanders were told to remove items hanging from walls as well as ensuring that pets and other animals were put out of harm’s way. Once on board they were escorted to the holds were a movie show of Disney cartoons had been set up. Large bags of sweets were handed round by two WVS ladies, Billie and Mary Burgess