Royal Engineers were training in pipeline assembly and laying techniques, so they could lay pipe behind the troops once advancement had begun. Clearly, a pipeline assembly following the troops was the answer. But that was still just a conduit. Where would the source be?

Hopes of capturing an intact port that could accept and discharge oceangoing tankers were the stuff of dreams, and fueling armored vehicles from hand-held 4-gallon cans was not a much more realistic alternative. No one could know it at that moment, but their problem would be solved and the invasion assisted, not by military men, but by oilfield engineers.

Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, suggested and tested the idea of running a short pipe out into the water to discharge coastal tankers, but that was deemed too risky; any ship that got in close enough would just be a sitting duck for an air attack.

Mountbatten asked the Secretary of Petroleum, Mr. Geoffrey Lloyd (supervising England’s land line project), if there were any existing techniques for laying underwater pipelines that could be brought to bear on the problem. Experts advised that the known techniques required a large number of support vessels and, worse yet, would need a lot of time for on-site assembly and laydown. Again, the proposed solution would just provide the enemy with some free target practice.

Lloyd brought the problem next to Sir William Fraser, CBE, Chairman of the Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Corporation (a predecessor to British Petroleum) and honorary Petroleum Advisor to the War Office. He in turn brought the problem to Mr. AC Hartley, a born problem-solver and Anglo-Iranian’s chief Engineer. Hartley’s innovative proposal was, since you can’t assemble the pipe at sea, why not manufacture it in one continuous length, and deploy it rapidly off the back of a ship, in the way submarine telegraph cables had been laid.

Thus was born Operation Pluto (for Pipe Line Under The Ocean), the daring, inventive, and top-top secret plan that eventually delivered a million gallons of fuel a day behind the Allied troops as they advanced across France and Belgium and into Germany.

The suggested pipe had to be of small diameter, to keep size and weight manageable. Hartley recalled that a difficult pumping problem in Iran’s hills had been solved using a three-inch diameter pipe carrying fluid at 1,500 psi, which brought 100,000 gallons/day 40 miles between pumping stations.

He approached Siemens Brothers to adapt the submarine telegraph cable to high-pressure fluids carriage. Joining forces with a rival manufacturer and the National Physical Laboratory, and working under Hartley’s direction, Siemens developed the Hais (for Hartley-Anglo-Iranian-Siemens) cable: a lead pipe swathed in insulation, reinforced by steel wire, and coated in tar and yarn.

Though not strictly a cable, it was referred to as such in order that an inadvertent slip would not reveal that a pipe project was in progress. Total secrecy was of desperate concern. Should the enemy pick up even the phrase "a pipe running undersea like a telegraph line" it would render the project open to investigation, infiltration, and attack.

Within a year, development and testing of the Hais cable had been completed, and manufacturing begun. During the testing, two other engineers were inspired to make their own contribution to the project. BJ Ellis, Chief Engineer of the Burmah Oil Company, and HA Hammick, Chief Engineer of the Iraq Petroleum Company, recalled that when they had handled steel pipe in the oil fields, it was flexible in long lengths just like the Hais cable. They suggested that a three-inch steel pipe could be coiled around a large drum and rapidly deployed at sea. The suggestion was most welcome; doubts were beginning to grow as to whether there was enough lead available to make all the needed Hais cable. The resulting Hamel (Hammick-Ellis) pipe was tested successfully, and also laid in Operation Pluto.

The Hais cable weighed 63 tons per nautical mile, and so needed to be deployed from a special vessel. A coastal freighter was converted to work as a cable layer, and christened HMS Holdfast. Two means were proposed to deploy the Hamel pipe. The first, a sort of large wheel mounted on a barge, was rejected in favor of the second, a gigantic floating drum somewhat like a large cotton bobbin. The drum was named HMS Conundrum, or "Conun" for short. The Hamel and Conun technology would become the grandfather of the pipe-laying barges that supported the early development of the Gulf of Mexico oilfields.

Vulnerability testing for the Hais cable was provided free of charge by the enemy. A Hais line was undergoing flow testing at the Welsh seaport of Swansea, when an air raid landed bombs a hundred feet from it. A subsequent gale caused a ship to drag the line with her anchor. These confirmed the pipes’ durability, recoverability, and reparability. Testing also showed that a Hamel pipe with a Hais line attached at the end was easier to recover and connect at the beachhead.

In the meantime, the English land line system had reached the coast. The Quartermaster-General to the Combined Forces, Sir Thomas Riddell-Webster, inspected the production and testing of the lines, endorsed their accelerated manufacturing, and recommended that the land line be extended at two points: across the Solent Channel to the Isle of Wight, and to landfall at Dungeness in Kent. These were the points from which the pipelines would be brought to France.

From the Isle of Wight they would cross to Cherbourg, and from Dungeness to Boulogne. Pumpworks and systems were erected at each point, heavily camouflaged as bungalows, gravel pits, and garages. With every aspect of the project under a heavy veil of secrecy, all critical movements were enacted under cover of dark. The RAF flew regular photographic control missions to be sure no visible traces of the project existed.

With production stepped up and England’s factories working at capacity, Hartley went to the United States to seek manufacturing assistance for more Hais cable. General Electric, Phelps-Dodge, Okonite-Callenders, and General Cable signed on to the project. There were 710 nautical miles of Hais cable produced for Operation Pluto, and 140 of it came from America.

Though Operation Pluto was ready to roll well before D-Day, deployment was delayed a little over a month due to the difficulty in capturing Cherbourg and clearing its sea mines. The lines to Boulogne were run in October. The land lines assembled behind the armies’ advance became a network that reached into Germany.

In all, eleven Hais and six Hais-Hamel lines were laid. The pipelines carried 1,350,000 gallons daily, delivering a total of 172,000,000 gallons by VE Day. Pumping continued through July 1945 so that all available tankers could be employed in the Far East. The liquid life for the machinery of liberation was faithfully delivered by Operation Pluto.

The Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, dubbed Operation Pluto "second in daring only to the artificial harbors project," writing into his report that "this provided our main supplies of fuel during the Winter and Spring campaigns."

The Quartermaster-General, unable to know that the technology pioneered in this effort would one day nurture the nascent offshore oil industry, noted in his report that Operation Pluto "saved a very large tanker tonnage which was badly needed in the East. Thus, Pluto had a reaction which extended all over the world."

 

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