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!’