Operation Sea Lion by Leo McKinstry

Author:Leo McKinstry [MCKINSTRY, LEO]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781468311129
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2014-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

He concluded by urging the government to drive forward this scheme by setting up a ‘Petroleum Warfare Executive’ under Lloyd’s chairmanship.25 To give extra support to his case, Hankey sent these papers to Churchill’s aide Pug Ismay, with a covering note stressing that ‘Geoffrey Lloyd is prepared to drive this thing with volcanic energy and I am behind him 100 per cent.’26

Churchill, with his boyish delight in military innovation, might have been expected to respond eagerly but, because of his personal antipathy to Hankey, he was somewhat lukewarm. He explained, through his personal assistant Desmond Morton, that he was opposed to the creation of another ‘formal Executive Body’, but was happy for Lloyd to ‘press on, in collaboration with the military authorities, with the various devices described’.27

Long the master of administrative manoeuvring, Hankey put the most narrow, linguistic interpretation on the prime minister’s rejection of his organisational proposal. Instead of a ‘Petroleum Warfare Executive’, he set up a ‘Petroleum Warfare Department’ within Lloyd’s existing ministry, with Brigadier Sir Donald Banks as its chief. On 9 July the new organisation, without Churchill’s approval, came into existence, based in three small rooms at the ministry.

Even before the creation of the Petroleum Warfare Department, advanced experiments with burning oil were under way. The first were held at Dumpton Gap, on the Kent coast near Broadstairs, on 3 July. Several tests were conducted, including the explosion of a 50-gallon steel barrel on the beach and the igniting of eight 4-gallon tins in a row to form a fire barrier across a road. ‘The effect was striking,’ wrote Hankey of the latter.28 Of the former, Banks noted the reaction of a group of ‘high-ranking officers’ at the scene. ‘The flaming oil shot up to such a height that there was an instantaneous and precipitate movement to the rear.’29

Another experiment featured a car filled with 4-gallon tins of petrol and rolled into an old lorry chassis, which was meant to represent a tank. Hankey recorded that ‘there was dense black smoke and flames which burnt furiously for about 25 minutes. If this device was adopted, derelict cars containing petrol in their tanks could be used as effective road blocks and fire barriers.’ Equally impressive was the discharge of burning oil through controllable nozzles on a pipe connected to a large 600-gallon tank. ‘There was a fierce flame and considerable smoke,’ he noted happily. The one conspicuous failure was ‘an attempt to flood the sea with a mixture and set fire to it’. This had to be aborted because of a heavy thunderstorm and the receding tide.

Three days later, a similar set of tests were carried out at Dungeness on the south Kent coast, this time involving Colonel William Livens, whose flair for combining practicality with originality was reflected in his invention of the Livens Projector during the First World War, a simple device for firing oil- or gas-filled drums. Again Hankey and Lloyd pronounced the experiment largely a success, although they felt that the most effective,

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