XD Operations

  That night they slept soundly, packed like sardines, taking up every available square foot of floor area. It must be remembered that there were eighteen men all told squeezed into that little cottage; ‘like the Black Hole of Calcutta’ was the general opinion. But, as the only alternative was to share the box-like shed with the cow or face certain capture, it had to be endured. The next morning the first two detailed for exercise wandered round the island and found a small plot of potatoes, a great stroke of luck as the question of eking out an existence with so many to feed was their most serious problem. For the first two days they had a slice of bread each, hot boiled potatoes and raw carrots, but after that the bread was finished. The wine was issued in microscopic tots but this too soon came to an end. The two chickens were laying most days, so they saved the eggs until all could have half an egg each. Occasionally at night, two Frenchmen would arrive covertly with a little food to help them to eke out their very limited food. This ‘Robinson Crusoe’ existence was endured for a whole week but by then they were getting despondent and didn’t see much hope of escape. They tried to console each other with the fact that they had had a poor start, what with three days adrift in a gale and being driven ashore onto an enemy coast, otherwise their diet of carrots and potatoes would have been fine! As it was they were a haggard party mentally and physically.

  Each day, all but the two out of doors, sat huddled up in the cottage. They maintained a duty watch through the little window and watched the Germans on the shore and steadily cursed them and all that they represented. They told stories to each other though even these had to be rationed to make them last as long as possible. They talked of families and relations, of work before the war and all the homely things they could think of to pass those long dreary days. At night their dreams were mainly about their time in that open boat wallowing in heavy seas. One lad who had been brought up on a farm tried to milk the cow, but as she only understood French, his entreaty to ‘come on old girl’ did not seem to convince her. After some perseverance, she relented and they got about a quart of milk after which she kicked the door off the shed to conclude the proceedings.

  At the end of the week things looked serious, as the Hun had evidently come to stay. What had happened to their friend the padre was the main theme of conversation. They had grown beards by now and were beginning to wonder what a British soldier really looked like. One thing upon which they all agreed was that they could take a lot more yet, while the carrots lasted and providing they got rain soon enough to replenish their sadly depleted water butt. At the end of the week, one evening after dark, they were down at the cove bathing when a ghostly little fishing boat drew up onto the sands and grounded.

  At first all were convinced that it was the Hun and, naked as they were, they surrounded the dark form which stepped ashore and were prepared to take him on. However it was a fisherman who had been sent out by the priest to negotiate the hire of a craft which would take them back to England. After much consultation this Frenchman agreed to bring a fishing smack and come out to them the following evening. The fare was to be 30,000 francs, payable in French currency when they arrived on the other side of the channel. Spirits rose tremendously, but the next day seemed like a life sentence. At last darkness fell and they assembled down at the little cove. Sure enough, before long the fishing boat came into sight and the fishermen, with the aid of their dinghy, ferried the whole party out. They were afloat once again.

  The crew consisted of two grisly Bretons who, having supervised the stowage of their peculiar freight through the hatchway, brought her up into the wind and slid silently out from the bay setting course northwards. The channel crossing was a tedious affair, particularly during the day when the skipper insisted they must remain out of sight. Twice planes came down and looked the little craft over but flew off obviously uninterested.

  After nineteen hours at sea they made a very fortunate landfall, for what turned out to be the Lizard was sighted on the starboard bow. They then made for Newlyn in Cornwall. When nearing the harbour a launch came out from the examination vessel and, circling cautiously round the party who were all on deck by now, hailed them. Coming alongside the naval officer bawled through a megaphone ‘Who the hell are you?’ A thickset but haggard little man with a beard, wearing wide bell bottomed blue trousers and a red striped shirt replied ‘Captain Bernard Buxton, Royal Engineers’. What the navy said was not audible, which was perhaps as well.

  Once ashore, the financial commitments were discharged, a night in bed, a visit to the barber and then the return, still in the ’onion sellers’ clothes to their unit in Gravesend.

  So ended a fairly hectic two week adventure. The remarks of the Quarter Guard at the entrance to the barracks when the party sought admission, mirrored those of the naval examination officer at Penzance.

  Chapter Ten

  IRAQ

  In August 1940 we were ordered to send one of our more experienced officers to the War Office where he would be briefed and we were warned that he was likely to be away for some time.

  Peter Keeble, who by now was a major, arrived at the Military Operations Branch in the War Office where he was put in the picture. The Government was most concerned about the Iraqi oilfields at Kirkuk which were British owned. It was considered that Hitler might decide to strike eastwards if only to secure oil supplies which his war machine so desperately needed. Because of our unit’s experience in oil denial it was decided to send an officer out to the Middle East GHQ to advise them as soon as possible. This was Keeble’s mission. Before leaving they asked him if there was anything they could do to help him and he asked them to type a letter of introduction for him which he could show to the authorities during his trip to ease his way through military bureaucracy. Keeble was then sent to the Movements Branch who were to arrange for his speedy transit to GHQ at Cairo.

  The demolition of oil wells as distinct from oil tank farms and refineries was completely new ground for us. Keeble appreciated straight away that it is one thing to set fire to oil storage tanks but quite another to destroy oil wells. In slight desperation, after leaving the War Office, he went straight to Foyles bookshop and bought a book on the drilling and production of oil. This he studiously read during his journey to the Middle East but he found he was not much the wiser on how to destroy oil wells!

  A day or two later he found himself boarding the liner Windsor Castle at Greenock on the Clyde. She was still very much as she had been in peacetime and he was allocated a comfortable first class cabin. They set sail as part of a large convoy. What an impressive sight it was as it spread out over the surface of the ocean. The convoy’s speed could be no more than the speed of the slowest tramp steamer, probably about eight knots. The next morning Keeble and the other passengers came on deck and to their amazement they looked out on an empty ocean with not a ship in sight. Later in the morning the captain of the ship spoke on the Tannoy system to all the passengers and told them that the convoy had been attacked by U-boats in the night and three of the merchantmen had been sunk. None of them had heard anything. The convoy commodore, a retired senior naval officer who had come back into the Service for the war, signalled the Windsor Castle after the attacks giving her captain the choice of either staying with the convoy or pulling out and making use of her vastly greater speed as a mail ship, to proceed on her own. He decided on the latter course of action. One of Keeble’s fellow passengers was a senior gunner major with a DSO who General Wavell had asked for to help out in the planned Ethiopian campaign; he was Orde Wingate.

  The rest of the voyage was uneventful and they docked in Cape Town three weeks later as, for obvious reasons, they had had to make a wide sweep out into the Atlantic and not gone by the normal direct route.

  At Cape Town passengers of all ranks were picked up by families who had them to stay and entertained these strangers royally. This hospitality was repeated whenever visiting troop ships arrived by these very generous people of loyal British stock who lived at the Cape.
Keeble and a few of his colleagues, including Orde Wingate, who were urgently needed in Cairo, went by train to Durban the next day. There they were transferred to an Imperial Airways flying boat, landing at Entebbe, Juba, Khartoum, Luxor and eventually Cairo. At all the intermediate stops they stayed the night in the best hotels in great comfort!

  As soon as he had arrived Keeble reported to General Wavell’s Chief of Staff who told him about the problems at Kirkuk. They, that is the Middle East Headquarters, were not sure of the probable effectiveness of their present plan to deal with the oil fields. The code name for this plan was ‘Bullion’. Because of their concern they had discussed with the War Office the possibility of sending out an ‘oil denial expert’ from England. Keeble sensibly did not let on that he had no knowledge whatsoever of destroying oil wells.

  He had been told before he left England to take civilian clothes with him and also his passport. However he was issued with a new additional passport so that when it was necessary to show it, there would be no clue as to where he had been. He left Cairo and was flown up to Haifa where he met the Chief Engineer of Palestine who was the sapper officer responsible for operations in Iraq at that time. He was then flown to Habbaniyah by the RAF. This RAF base went back to the 1920s and was built around a lake in Southern Iraq, miles from anywhere. They had, over the years, made it almost luxurious. One would not have known that there was a war on and life went on as normal. No blackout, cinemas, sailing on the lake and every comfort that could be expected. It had been developed as a staging post for India and the Far East. Not only aeroplanes could land there but also flying boats on the lake. However once outside the perimeter of the base there was nothing, just desert. No wonder so much effort had gone into making the base tolerable for the inmates who in pre-war days could be stationed there for years at a time.

  Here Keeble’s task had to become more clandestine. He changed into civilian clothes and the next day he was picked up by the British manager of the Kirkuk oilfield. He was flown up north to Kirkuk by the manager in his private plane. Here the manager and his wife kindly had him to stay during this period.

  He was ably briefed by the manager who was not only a tower of strength but full of innovative ideas. Apparently there were no less than fifty-six oil wells belonging to the company in and around Kirkuk. The oil was pumped hundreds of miles across the desert to the refineries at Haifa in Palestine. Of the fifty-six oil wells all but three were shut down. With Italy having entered the war, tankers could no longer ply down the Mediterranean to take on oil. The three wells in current use were kept operating to supply our Eastern Mediterranean fleet.

  The fifty-three oil wells not required had to be ‘neutralized’ somehow. Keeble suggested setting fire to them as an option only to be told by the Manager that they would burn all right but the flames could in time be snuffed out and the wells re-used. Eventually what they settled for was dropping the bottom section of the boring pipe with the hardened head for drilling uppermost down the well. They then back filled the well with concrete. This was all done with oil company labour. No demolition can ever be permanent but to make matters more difficult for the Axis forces should they ever overrun Iraq, the drilling rigs, which could easily be dismantled for moving from site to site, were sent south to Basra. Here they were taken out to sea and dumped. These measures would ensure that it would take the Axis forces many months before they could exploit the oil reserves. The manager was confident that he could handle the last three wells on his own if the situation should arise.

  The next problem was how to deny the use of the pipeline to Haifa should it be necessary. There were several pumping stations at regular intervals along the pipeline. The oil company employed a retired Naval Commander who had been an engineer officer to keep these pumping stations working. Keeble found that he had already anticipated that these stations might have to be destroyed. He had adopted a most ingenious solution. The pumps were a considerable size. He had ordered a new crankshaft for the machinery in each pumping station. The new crankshafts had had a pocket machined out of the metal and high explosives had been inserted. There was also a pocket for a glass file of acid, fuse and detonator. Should the Axis ever get close to Iraq the crankshafts would be changed over and if it became necessary to destroy the plant the acid file would be broken, the machine run up to full speed and the crankshaft would then be shattered by the explosion. The heavy spinning flywheel would ‘take off’ destroying everything in its path.

  They motored along the pipeline visiting all the pumping stations from Kirkuk to Haifa in a large open shooting brake with six of them on board. When they approached the Iraqi – Palestine border posts they suddenly realized that Keeble, who was posing as a civilian, was devoid of any entries in his passport as he had been flown into Habbaniyah by the RAF and not passed through immigration controls. The consensus of opinion in the car was that if all the passports, less Keeble’s, were passed up to the passenger in the front seat, all would be well. The five other passports made quite a pile and the man at the Customs and Immigration never bothered to count them and the car was waved through! Back in Haifa Keeble reported to the chief engineer and told him what had been achieved and the plans that were in place in case of an Axis attack. He was then flown down to Cairo and gave the chief of staff a similar report

  Keeble was now faced with getting home. Despite his relatively junior rank he had been given the highest priority on his journey out to the Middle East but he rated no such priority on his homeward trip. However his letter originating from the Director of Military Operations at the War Office acted like a magic wand in the Movements Branch at GHQ. In a day or two Keeble found himself boarding a small aeroplane. The few other passengers were all very senior service officers or important diplomats. After flying for hours over open desert they eventually landed at an airstrip in French Equatorial Africa where the aircraft was refuelled and they spent the night. The next day they flew on to Lagos. In due course Keeble again with the aid of his influential letter was able to board an Imperial Airways flying boat bound for England.

  On the way back they landed at Freetown, Bathurst in the Gambia and Lisbon. Each night was spent as before in luxurious hotels so very different from wartime Britain. They eventually landed at Poole. Keeble had been away for nearly three months. He reported to Military Operations at the War office to debrief them and requested permission to return to his unit. They said ‘Of course, however you do not know where they are; they have gone to Northern Ireland!’

  Chapter Eleven

  MICAWBERS ALL

  After the fall of France we were quartered in Gravesend again on the south side of the River Thames between London and the estuary. It was inevitable that after these XD operations there was much discussion over what quantity of oil had actually been destroyed. By assessing the number of oil tanks and their rough capacity, the consensus of opinion was that nearly 2 million tons had been destroyed or in other words 450 – 500 million gallons of fuel.

  Since our arrival in Gravesend earlier in the year we had been slowly expanding into Corps Troop Engineers which would ultimately consist of three army field companies of nearly 300 men each and a field park company of about 200 men. Over the summer of 1940 the Kent Fortress Engineers were gradually joined by the Suffolk Fortress Engineers TA, elements of the Cinque Ports Engineers TA and a complete London TA Field Park Company. As all these units were small, there was a further influx of sappers from the Training Battalions and, most usefully, some excellent young second lieutenants from the Royal Engineer Officer Training Unit.

  We worked long hours on defences against the ever impending threat of invasion; it was pill boxes, weapon pits, slit trenches and road blocks ad infinitum. Barbed wire became like a bad dream, in fact it became such a large part of life that at times it seemed to overshadow life itself, aptly styled the ‘barbed wire blues’! Everyone felt that the historic words of the Prime Minister were about to become true at any moment.

  We shall defend o
ur island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

  Defence schemes had by this time decentralized almost down to the local policeman, and digging in against the invader was contagious. Everybody was at it, day and night, particularly in south-east England; hence RE Field Companies were in high demand. Looking back, one wonders whether much of it would have been effective, but at least it kept the army busy in those dark days when Britain stood alone. The psychological effect was wholly beneficial. An occasional ‘stand to’ at first light, which turned tired and sleepy sappers out to man vulnerable points, was our only change of employment for some months. In the meantime we would, as a welcome relief to the rather dull daily round of hard work on defences, fall to discussing the prospects of another ‘party’ as, far from becoming ‘defence minded’, we looked forward to another operation.