David Stonehouse Features

Canada's secret anthrax-bomb project

In the Second World War, Canada played a key role in turning anthrax into a weapon of mass destruction. David Stonehouse reports.

On a midsummer's day in 1942, a group of U.S. military officials stood on a rocky outcrop in the St. Lawrence River downstream of Quebec City. Yes, they agreed: This would make an ideal staging ground for top-secret germ warfare projects.

Not only was Grosse Ile isolated, it was already outfitted with two hospital buildings, barracks and a large disinfection centre from the days when the island had served as a quarantine station for newly arrived immigrants.

The Americans first imagined Grosse Ile as a place in which to perfect vaccines, but it wasn't long before it was adapted for another purpose: Cultivating anthrax for the British, who, fearing the Germans would resort to biological attacks, were eager to stockpile germ-warfare bombs of their own.

Today, the island is a national historic site commemorating the thousands of immigrants who fled their homelands in search of a better life in Canada, only to succumb to disease on the island. Few visitors to the memorial today would guess that here, toiling in secret
laboratories under primitive, filthy conditions, Canadian and British scientists once raced to mass-produce anthrax for so-called N-Bombs, making Canada a pioneer in efforts to turn anthrax into a weapon of war.

"What the British wanted ... was enough anthrax to fill 500 bombs and drop it on some German city somewhere," says John Bryden, a Liberal MP, former journalist and author of the 1989 book, Deadly Allies: Canada's Secret War 1937-47.

As fears of anthrax attacks grow in the wake of Sept. 11, few people realize the key role Canada played more than half a century ago in developing the deadly potential of the bacteria: Not only was Grosse Ile used to produce anthrax, but Canadian scientists also experimented with anthrax at laboratories at Queen's University in Kingston; U.S. and
British officials held clandestine strategy meetings on biological warfare with Canadian authorities in Ottawa; and the sprawling military grounds at Suffield, Alberta, were created to test anthrax.

It was Sir Frederick Banting, the scientist best known for his pioneering work with insulin as a treatment for diabetes, who raised the alarm about germ warfare. Although he wasn't directly involved in the Grosse Ile project (he died in 1941, before the experiments began) he got the ball rolling, telling his connections in the corridors of power about his fears the Germans would turn to biological weapons.

"He thought this ruthless enemy would stop at nothing in terms of winning the war, that the Allies had to develop defensive measures and had to develop retaliatory capability," says Donald Avery, an historian and author of The Science of War: Canadian Scientists and Allied Military Technology During the Second World War.

Other scientists who shared Dr. Banting's fears formed a secret agency within the National Research Council, which was later folded into the military. By early 1942, they were meeting with their U.S. and British counterparts to speculate about what biological weaponry the Germans and the Japanese might use against the Allies.

The former quarantine complex at Grosse Ile, about 50 kilometres east of Quebec City, was initially used to develop vaccines for use in the event of a biological attack, but it was soon converted into an anthrax factory after a high-ranking British scientist convinced the Canadians anthrax was a powerful and effective weapon and asked them to help build
a supply.

Paul Fildes, a microbiologist and onetime naval surgeon who worked at Britain's Porton Down chemical and biological warfare headquarters, told scientists in Ottawa about his experiments with crude anthrax bombs on Gruinard, a remote island off the coast of Scotland.

In the summer of 1942, he supervised a team that filled a bomb with a thick, brown soup of anthrax spores and detonated it above a field full of sheep. The anthrax was the inhalable kind, a more sophisticated version of which has left four people dead in the U.S. in recent incidents.

"Billions of spores formed an invisible cloud that wafted over the terrified sheep and gradually dispersed over the testing site and the sea," British Broadcasting Corporation journalists Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxton write in A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare.

"A day later, the sheep began to die. The pile of carcasses grew steadily throughout the week. They were incontrovertible proof that biological warfare was no longer just a nightmare science-fiction fantasy: It could be made a reality."

But British authorities were horrified to see how little control they had over the anthrax they had unleashed. Spores spread with the wind, contaminating the entire island. A dead sheep, contaminated with anthrax, washed up on the shores of the Scottish mainland and touched off an outbreak among residents.

Panic set in.

Dr. Fildes ordered the island set ablaze, sending up a huge plume of black smoke filled with anthrax. Not only did the anthrax float out over the sea with the smoke, but the fires failed to obliterate the bacteria on the island.

Gruinard Island was sealed off for more than four decades because of the heavy contamination. It took an intensive four-year effort to finally clean up Gruinard, which was off-limits to the public until 1991.

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Despite the sobering results of the Guinard Island experiment, Dr. Fildes' team was undeterred. The Canadian scientists were soon persuaded to produce a supply of the bacteria. They began work at Grosse Ile in earnest in 1943, using techniques developed by Dr. Guilford Reed's laboratory at Queen's University, one of the most important labs
producing biological agents in this country at the time.

But problems plagued the top-secret island research station. With soldiers and scientists cut off from friends and family, morale was low, and there were discipline problems.

Worse, officials discovered that, while staff were well protected in their spacesuit-like gear, the bacteria, which were concocted on open trays, were somehow leaking out of the production building. It soon became apparent that even house flies posed a potentially deadly problem, buzzing around the workers and their lethal brew, then carrying the anthrax outdoors.

"The techniques of research were pretty crude and the enclaves they were working with were quite rudimentary," Mr. Avery says.

At least a dozen staff had to be sent to hospital in Quebec City after they came down with flu-like symptoms, he says. No connection to the anthrax was ever established, although hospital officials were doubtless unaware of the secret anthrax experiments. Military staff "were trying to hush it up because they didn't want this operation too widely known about," Mr. Avery points out.

Soon the American military came up with a safer and more efficient way of mass-producing anthrax, and began producing it themselves at a research centre near Washington, D.C. The Grosse Ile station was shut down and the buildings eventually torn down.

But the British, still skittish over the Gruinard Island experiment, pressed Canada to help in another way: They needed a testing area for the anthrax bombs. When the Canadians offered them the vast expanse of wilderness at what is now Suffield, 50 kilometres northwest of Medicine Hat, the British jumped at the opportunity.

"Britain is very small; it doesn't have large areas that can accommodate a sudden shift of wind that might take the gas, or whatever it is, 10 miles," Mr. Bryden says. "That was the whole incentive to use the proving ground at Suffield because (the wilderness) is 50 miles in every direction -- nobody on it but elk.

"When it became apparent that these wide open spaces were available, the British came out in some strength and ran their own trials," he says, so that "the British biological warfare program during the Second World War was primarily in Canada, not in England.

"In fact," he adds, "the head of the Suffield station during the war was British."

The base became a testing ground for various chemical agents, including trials of mustard gas on soldiers. There were plans to test anthrax bombs there in 1944, but officials at Suffield say there is no evidence these trials took place.

But the legacy of Suffield's wartime role lives on: To this day it houses a research centre dedicated to studying "chemical and biological defence" -- the Canadian-run Defence Research Establishment Suffield.

Clement Laforce, deputy director of the establishment, says the wartime plans to test anthrax bombs were cancelled because the bombs didn't not work properly. "All of the documents we have reviewed indicated the tests were not carried out," he says. "Furthermore, sampling on the range has never shown any residual (effects) of these tests."

Adds Mr. Avery: "It would have been madness to test anthrax spores at Suffield -- and nobody was that mad."