Life under a cloud after nuclear tests

[Stacey King]

STUFF.CO.NZ by LEE UMBERS - Sunday News Last updated 05:00 14/06/2009

War hero's son Bill Anderson thought he was embarking on a patriotic adventure when he joined the New Zealand Navy at age 16. But he says he was sailing into disaster when he boarded HMNZS Pukaki for Christmas Island in the South Pacific to become one of hundreds of Kiwi servicemen exposed to a series of British nuclear tests. Now aged 69 and suffering from a variety of cancers, Bill blames his exposure to hydrogen bomb detonations in 1957 for robbing him while still a teen of the chance to have children.

"I'm quite dirty about it," Bill told Sunday News from his Whakatu, Hawke's Bay, home.

"I'm getting to the stage now, I'm having a bit of struggle with life at times and you've got no family."

Married at age 28 to Auckland milliner Patricia, 38, the couple hoped for children but eventually put their failure down to her age.

However, following the removal of his cancerous prostate and bladder in 2000, a doctor told him surgeons had discovered such bad historic damage he "probably wouldn't have been able to have kids anyhow".

Bill is telling his story after reading in Sunday News last week how he and dozens of Kiwi military veterans plus counterparts in Australia, Fiji and Britain have been given a green light to sue the British Ministry of Defence for radiation exposure during the 1950s nuclear testing.

He was one of the New Zealand sailors watching a nuclear mushroom cloud from the front of their frigate.

Bill isn't interested in any compensation, which he would give to charity anyway. "I just want someone to stand up and agree that, `Yes, we did send you there (to the testing sites) as guinea pigs."'

The youngest of eight children, he left Greymouth Technical School and enlisted in the navy at "16 years and four months".

Bill's family had a proud military tradition. His father, Cecil Anderson, was awarded the military medal and bar while a staff sergeant with the New Zealand Machine Gun Corps.

"Dad was a first world war and second world war veteran," he said. "He put his age up to go to the first world war and down to go to the second world war. He had his 16th birthday on the beach at Gallipoli."

Bill's brother, Ernest, was killed in Italy in World War II at the age of 22.

Bill turned 17 while at Christmas Island in 1957. He was one of 551 New Zealand naval men who witnessed nine nuclear detonations there and the Malden Islands, Kiribati, in Operation Grapple.

"I saw five of them (hydrogen bombs) go off over 12 months or so," he said.

"We had to sit down with our backs facing the (exploding) bomb. We just had nylon protective suits, which were bloody useless.

"We had shaded sort of sunglasses, you had to hold your hands over them. There was a flash of light, you could see all the bones in your hands through your closed eyes, like an X-ray.

Ad Feedback "We had to sail underneath where they'd gone off, at Ground Zero, and take samples some hours after."

Bill and his fellow servicemen were so naive about radiation exposure they swam and caught fish around the test sites.

Superior officers "didn't tell us a hell of a lot, because they didn't know a lot".

Leaving the Navy in 1965, Bill worked as a chef around Auckland before retiring.

He says he began "getting very suspicious" about the after-effects of Operation Grapple when mates from HMNZS Pukaki began having children with severe health problems.

"Spina bifida, different sorts of cancers, heart defects in new-born babies."

Bill thought he may have escaped any possible problems, "but when I hit 60 I wasn't so lucky". First he got Type 2 diabetes. Then his bladder and prostrate had to be taken out.

"The surgeon said he found some terrible things in my bladder. He asked me, `Did I work with chemicals?'

"I said I'd never worked with chemicals but I had been up at Christmas Island. He said, `I'll write you a letter and you'd better apply through Veterans' Affairs for a pension'. It was granted without any trouble, so they must have known something was going on.

"Since then, I've got melanomas on my back and I'm just waiting to go back into hospital to have a kidney operation," saysBill an original member of the New Zealand Nuclear Test Veterans Association.

He feels betrayed by both Britain and by New Zealand. "They obviously didn't know, they just said (to the British) , 'Yeah, you can have these fellas'. But they didn't take much responsibility ..."