Heligoland (31 page)

The penultimate voice in the debate was that of Mr V. Yates, MP for Birmingham Ladywood, who summarised Savory’s views well. He raged:

With just minutes to go before Savory’s historic hour-long Heligoland debate ran out of time, the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Aidan Crawley, rose to reply for the government. He opened by venturing that Savory ‘will not expect me to answer for the mistakes of the government of Lord Salisbury or of any government between the wars’. Seldom can there have been such an ironic statement by a minister. Apparently unbeknown to Crawley it was virtually sixty years earlier (in July 1890) that Parliament had been told that Heligoland needed to be handed over because it was of sentimental and cultural value to the Germans, it had no foreseeable military use for Britain and it had not been a British possession for very long. Now, on 28 July 1950, Parliament was being told:

So keen was the junior minister to argue against the islanders returning to Heligoland that he divulged more details regarding Britain’s technical need for atomic bomb development than perhaps he ought:

All this meant that there was ‘no question of anybody’s home being on that island, nor can there possibly be any question of more than a handful of people – of fishermen – gaining their living there again’. He claimed that only a week or two earlier he himself had flown round the island, within a few hundred feet of its cliffs, and had a very close look at it. Chillingly he described the battered island as ‘the nearest thing to the Warsaw Ghetto I have seen in Western Europe’.

As a few of the debating MPs pointed out to the junior Air Minister, the question of the ongoing violation of the island by the postwar practice bombing could be expected to have some impact on the German people. In accord with the German press, which was publishing fiery articles protesting against the continued use of the island in peacetime as a target, the German Federal Parliament became interested. On 1 December 1949 it unanimously passed a resolution calling for the Federal Government to request Heligoland’s return. On 3 May 1950 the government of Schleswig-Holstein passed a resolution calling on Britain to lift its ban on the islanders. Then in May 1950 the Helgolander-Komitte appealed to the Vatican for the support of Pope Pius XII. All this agitation was encouraged by a group called the ‘Helgoland-Büros’. Otherwise known as the Heligoland Society, it was founded in Pinneberg that year by Henry Peter Rickmers, a distant descendant of the nineteenth-century Heligoland ship-owning merchant, Rickmer Rickmers. It lobbied various Europe-based institutions to broaden support for the displaced islanders. Its message went far. In Britain it got the newly founded Mebyon Kernow (Cornish National Party) to campaign for the islanders’ return. Then on 1 July 1950 the Federal Council of Minorities convened in Holland and approved a unanimous resolution calling for an immediate stop to the bombing of the island, and begged Britain to allow the Heligolanders to return to their island and to grant them self-determination to decide for themselves to which state they wished to belong.

Meanwhile, the islanders were becoming impatient to return to their homeland, and some of their supporters favoured direct action. Initially this took the form of individual members of the Heligoland Society occasionally making a token landing on the island for a few hours. Soon a rival protest group called Helgoland-Aktion was founded by Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein. A historian, from 1937 to 1946 he had lectured in American universities. Löwenstein was reputed to be a nephew of Lord Pirbright, who in 1888–92 had been under-secretary of state for the colonies. Helgoland-Aktion evolved from an earlier patriotic organisation of Löwenstein’s called the ‘Deutsche Bewegung’ (German Movement), which campaigned for the restitution of Germany’s lost lands. At the time, another of Löwenstein’s campaigns was to prevent the Socialist-preferred new national anthem
Hymn to Germany
from replacing
Deutschland über Alles
, which had long been synonymous with German militarism.

Few Heligolanders were involved with Helgoland-Aktion, although it and the Heligoland Society used remarkably similar tactics, such as quick ‘raids’ on the island, in order to make their views known. Sometimes their rivalry became dangerous. In June 1950 there was an absurd rowing-boat race to the island, a boat representing each group setting off from different ports to see who would get to Heligoland first. But they had overlooked the hazardous waters of the Bight. One boat did not get far, the other nearly perished. For those willing to endure the perilous voyages, there was also the risk of unannounced practice bombings. Now there were never any British personnel on either Heligoland’s main Rock Island or on Sandy Island; there were no signallers ashore to guide the bombers, nor was there often a duty guardship in the Bight. Even so, if there were protesters in the vicinity, the British forces in North Germany could invariably find some sort of boat to shoo them away.

All that changed at Christmas 1950. On 12 December that year two Heidelberg student protesters, Georg von Hatzfeldt and René Leudesdorff, reached the island undetected. They hoisted over the ruins a huge flag of the Communist World Peace Movement (designed by Pablo Picasso), sporting a huge letter ‘E’ signifying European unity, then moved on to the Oberland to establish their headquarters in the Red Tower. Never before had protesters attempted to occupy the island, and Hatzfeldt and Leudesdorff’s use of the Red Tower came to be regarded as especially poignant. The former wartime anti-aircraft post still contained firing-control and plotting rooms, and as the only building remaining intact on Heligoland it came to be publicised as a historic symbol of Heligolandish defiance. Although these Heidelberg students were dubbed ‘Communist squatters’ by newspapers, Prince Löwenstein, aware of the publicity value of such stunts, hurriedly sailed to the island with a few supporters. They may have been few in number but their presence on the island at Christmas that year meant that for the first time since 1945 the island was inhabited once again. By the New Year there were sixteen people on Heligoland, five of whom were either press photographers or journalists. The presence of the latter meant the protest occupation received considerable, indeed worldwide, newspaper coverage. In Germany (where the publicity stunt was much approved of) Hatzfeldt and Leudesdorff appeared set to become minor national heroes.

For Britain, suddenly everything seemed to go wrong. On 29 December the High Commissioner in Germany, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, declared an Exclusion Zone on and around the island and threatened those who violated it with heavy fines and a year’s imprisonment. The problem then was enforcement. Having no suitable ships of its own with which to send a platoon-strength force to evict the intruders, the Land Commission responsible for the area ordered the German-crewed minesweeping flotilla under its control to provide the necessary transportation. But opinions regarding the return of the island were no less strong in those warships than they were among civilians on the mainland, and the minesweepers’ commodore refused to take the order. No officer could be found who was willing to obey the instruction. In due course it was only the flotilla commander who was disciplined. It has always been kept quiet since, but effectively what had happened was that a significant portion of what remained of the German Navy had mutinied.

Resorting to desperate measures to do what was required of him, Major F. Messenger, the British officer in Cuxhaven responsible for Heligoland, embarked his force upon
Eileen
, the only vessel then available: a harbour tender. It was 1 January 1951 and the weather was foul. No sooner was the overcrowded boat out of the harbour than it hit heavy seas. It had been a very cold winter and an exceptional amount of thick sheet ice had formed on the estuaries and shallow waters off the Frisian coast. The tender steadily headed into the Bight through huge broken-off patches of this floating ice. Then disaster struck. In the dauntingly steep waves the spinning propellers of the tender happened to crash down on a jagged piece of ice, which smashed one propeller and knocked a blade off the other. The vibration from the unbalanced propeller became so severe that it threatened to cause an engine stoppage or the loss of more blades. Either would cause the vessel to stop, and without power it might very quickly capsize in such heavy seas. Accounts of that voyage subsequently appeared in British newspapers and were remarkably redolent of the stories of such trips written many years earlier by the ornithologist Ronald Lockley and Governor Barkly’s young widow. Eventually Messenger’s boat reached the island, and successfully removed the squatters and journalists. Not all survived. So deadly terrifying was the ordeal that one German journalist accompanying the platoon died, it was said, of fright.

That loss of life was overshadowed by the Cabinet’s apprehension of the possible repercussions in Germany were any squatters to be accidentally killed when practice bombing resumed. Regardless of all that, the Military Establishment was intent on fighting until the last minute to keep the island. Stalling for time, on 6 February 1950 the Secretary of State for Defence, Lord Alexander of Hillsborough, wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee: ‘I think we must bear in mind that we can expect continued pressure by the Germans for various concessions of this nature, which may be granted too easily in a piecemeal fashion unless we maintain a clear picture of our post-war policy towards that country.’ On 14 February the fledgling West German Federal Parliament, led by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, unanimously passed a motion demanding the island’s return. There were other factors now for Britain to consider, too. A few months earlier all prospect had gone of using the island for a static shallow-water atomic bomb test, and it was widely accepted that to prevent further intrusions by protesters a radar station would need to be established on the island – and this option Britain was evidently unwilling to pursue.

Another possibly significant consideration at that time was that Britain’s bombing of the island might also have been illegal. This unwelcome news had been brought to the government’s attention a few months earlier by Douglas Savory in his adjournment debate on 28 July 1950. There he notified the junior Air Minister that the continuing postwar bombardment was entirely contrary to international law. The diligent Savory had checked the writings of a professor of international law, Lassa Oppenheim, the author of
International ao the island the modern conventional submarine HMSLw
, an authoritative book that had been reprinted several times by Cambridge University Press. From Oppenheim, Savory saw that what Britain was doing was injudicious insofar as it was a clear breach of the US Army Field Manual. Article 56 stated that: ‘A measure of permissible devastation is found in the strict necessities of war. As an end in itself, devastation is not sanctioned by the law of war.’ Yet the Labour government had been permitting ‘devastation’ to continue through almost five years of peace. It seems Britain had forgotten that as recently as the commencement of the last war it had initially been most careful to act within the letter of the Hague Convention when bombing German targets.

Savory also cited the 35th Conference of the International Law Association, which in 1928 resolved: ‘Damage to or destruction of immovable property is only permitted for the purpose of attaining a specific military objective. Indiscriminate, wanton, and general devastation or destruction is prohibited.’ There was a third potentially legal embarrassment looming for Britain. As recently as 1949 it had publicly agreed to the incorporation into the Geneva Convention of a fourth protocol concerning the protection of civilians.

Already the Heligolanders were turning their minds to appeals for money and gifts in kind. In February 1952 Savory forwarded to the Foreign Office a petition requesting just that. What, the Cabinet must have wondered, if they should go so far as to demand compensation, citing as grounds Britain’s probable breaches of international law? Ministers would have had some justification in fearing for their careers. At the time a political scandal was coming to light regarding a Hampshire bombing range called Crichel Down, which had been seized from its former owners and improperly disposed of. The outcome of the Crichel Down affair was that the minister deemed responsible eventually had to resign in 1954.