British reconnaissance flights over Baku

On 30 March 1940 an unmarked twin-engined Lockheed 12A airliner, painted pale blue, took off from the British air base at Habbaniya in the Kingdom of Iraq. It belonged to British intelligence, the Secret Intelligence Service, and to an RAF photographic reconnaissance unit led by the Australian airman and inventor Sidney Cotton. The crew flew over the mountains of Iranian Kurdistan and along the shore of the Caspian Sea, and after some four hours in the air they were over Baku, the capital of the Azerbaijan SSR and the largest oil centre in the Soviet Union. According to British accounts the aircraft circled the city for about an hour, roughly from 11.45 a.m. to 12.45 p.m., and from a height of about seven kilometres took several series of stereoscopic photographs of the refineries, storage tanks and port. Then it returned to Iraq.

The flight was no intelligence escapade. The photographs were needed for a plan on which the French and British staffs had been working for several months: the bombing of the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus, even though Britain and France were not at war with the Soviet Union.

Oil for the Reich

Since the autumn of 1939 Paris and London had been looking for a way to strike at the German economy while the Phoney War dragged on in the west. Oil was regarded as the Reich’s weakest point. The British blockade had cut Germany off from overseas supplies, and by contemporary estimates its stocks would last only a few months of war. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet share in the partition of Poland, the Allies regarded the Soviet Union as Hitler’s accomplice, and the economic agreement of 11 February 1940, under which the USSR undertook to supply Germany with 900,000 tonnes of oil and oil products within a year, seemed to confirm it. Most Soviet oil came from the Caucasus: by Allied calculations of the time, the region, chiefly Baku, accounted for over 90 per cent of the USSR’s crude production and 80 per cent of its refining.

The idea of destroying these resources gathered momentum after the Soviet attack on Finland. The French pressed hardest for it. On 19 January 1940 Prime Minister Édouard Daladier instructed the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, and the head of the navy, Admiral François Darlan, to examine the possibilities of intercepting Soviet tankers in the Black Sea, striking directly at the Caucasus and stirring up risings there among the Muslim peoples. The American ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, reported to President Roosevelt that the French considered an air raid on Baku from Syria the most effective way of weakening the Soviet Union. On 22 February Gamelin handed Daladier a memorandum in which he wrote that dependence on Caucasian oil was the “fundamental weakness” of the Soviet economy, and that cutting it off could paralyse the army, the air force and mechanised agriculture, and might even bring about the collapse of the whole state. Preparations on the spot were entrusted to General Maxime Weygand, who since August 1939 had commanded the French forces in the eastern Mediterranean from Beirut.

The British were more cautious. On 8 March 1940 the Chiefs of Staff Committee submitted to the government a memorandum on the consequences of a possible war with Russia. It identified the oil districts of Baku, Grozny and Batumi as the most vulnerable targets in the Caucasus, but stipulated that war with the Soviet Union would make sense only if it hastened the defeat of Germany. The air planning was directed at the Air Ministry by Air Commodore John Slessor.

After the Moscow peace

The Moscow Peace Treaty of 12 March 1940 deprived the Allies of the pretext, discussed at the meeting in Paris on 5 February, for sending troops to Scandinavia under the banner of aid to Finland. In some minds, however, the Caucasus plan became even more important, as one of the few ways of showing, after the failure over Finland, that the Allies were not idle. In Paris the Daladier government fell, and his successor Paul Reynaud, prime minister from 21 March, demanded a vigorous prosecution of the war. In a memorandum to the British government of 25 March he wrote that decisive action in the Black Sea and the Caspian was needed not only to restrict oil supplies to Germany but also to paralyse the economy of the USSR, and that France was ready to take responsibility for a break with Russia.

The Allied Supreme War Council, which met in London on 28 March, dealt above all with Norway and decided to mine Norwegian coastal waters. On the Caucasus it adopted a cautious line: the staffs were to prepare plans, but whether they were carried out would depend on the Soviet Union’s future conduct. The British, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain among them, feared that an attack on the USSR would drive it into an open alliance with Hitler. The day after the meeting, on 29 March, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, summed up the war with Finland in a speech to the Supreme Soviet and accused Britain and France of hostility towards the USSR.

Flights over the Caucasus

Planning the raids required up-to-date photographs of the targets. They were supplied by Sidney Cotton, who before the war, posing as a businessman, had photographed German military installations with hidden cameras from a civilian Lockheed, and who since September 1939 had been building up a photographic reconnaissance unit in the RAF, then known as the Photographic Development Unit. His aircraft flew high, were light and were painted blue to make them hard to spot from the ground. The Lockheed used over the Caucasus had extra fuel tanks and cameras concealed in the fuselage.

The first flight, over Baku, took place on 30 March and went off without a hitch. The second, in early April (5 April is the date most often given; according to Russian sources it came a few days after the first), took the aircraft across Turkish territory to Batumi and Poti on the Black Sea, where there were refineries and oil ports. This time the Russians spotted the aircraft. According to Soviet documents the anti-aircraft artillery opened fire twice and fired 34 rounds of 76 mm ammunition without scoring a hit, and according to British accounts a fighter was also sent up after it. Both routes violated the airspace of neutral states, Iran and Turkey, which had not been told anything. Turkey had been bound by an alliance with Britain and France since 19 October 1939, but in a protocol to the treaty it had stipulated that it could not be drawn into a war with the Soviet Union.

The photographs confirmed that the refineries and tanks at Baku and Batumi were concentrated in a small area and were easy to attack from the sea. The British planners concluded that the less accessible Grozny should be struck first, so as not to lose the element of surprise, and that the oilfields should be set ablaze with incendiary bombs.

Operation Pike

The British plan for the raids was given the codename “Pike”. Under arrangements agreed by the two countries’ air staffs on 4–5 April 1940, between 90 and 100 aircraft were to take part in the operation: six French bomber groups and three British squadrons, flying from airfields in Syria and in northern Iraq, in the area of Mosul. The British envisaged using Bristol Blenheim and Wellesley bombers, the French American Martin Marylands and heavy Farman bombers. The planners allowed themselves about fifteen days to destroy Baku, twelve for Grozny and a day and a half for Batumi, and the whole campaign was reckoned at roughly three months. In Syria the French were building new airfields, which were to be ready by mid-May.

All this, however, existed mainly on paper. On 17 April Weygand reported to Gamelin that preparations might be completed at the end of June or the beginning of July, but that none of the air groups assigned to him had yet reached the Levant. The Soviet Union, for its part, clearly expected a threat. On 25–29 March the command of the Transcaucasian Military District held a war game in which it repelled an attack from the south, and in the spring of 1940 the anti-aircraft defences of Baku were strengthened and radar stations were moved there from the Finnish front.

Place in the war

On 9 April 1940 Germany attacked Denmark and Norway, and on 10 May France and the Low Countries. The Caucasus plan was pushed into the background. As early as the meeting of the Supreme War Council on 22–23 April, Chamberlain argued that the Soviet Union was observing neutrality ever more scrupulously, that a strike was unnecessary and that the aircraft would be needed against Germany. After the fall of France in June 1940 the operation was no longer even discussed. On 19 May Gamelin had been replaced as Commander-in-Chief by none other than Weygand.

The plan nevertheless had an afterlife. In the second half of June 1940 German soldiers found, in a train halted at the station of La Charité-sur-Loire, crates of secret files of the French General Staff that had been evacuated from Paris. Among them were documents on the plans for air raids on the Caucasus. From the beginning of July German propaganda trumpeted them as proof that Germany, by defeating France, had saved other nations, the Soviet Union among them, from being dragged into the war. Hitler mentioned them in his Reichstag speech of 19 July 1940, and the files were published in a special “white book”. Moscow took them as confirmation of Western hostility. In the autumn of 1940 the British ambassador in Moscow, Stafford Cripps, seeking an understanding with the USSR, offered among other things a guarantee that Britain would not attack Baku and Batumi.

After the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 the old plan was revived in a different role: as preparation for destroying the Caucasian oilfields should they be about to fall into German hands. That danger became real in 1942, during the German offensive into the Caucasus. Historians still argue over how seriously Operation Pike was taken in London and Paris. Some regard it as contingency planning; others stress that in the spring of 1940 the French genuinely wanted to carry it out. What is certain is that had the raids taken place, Britain and France would have found themselves at war with Germany and the Soviet Union at the same time. Operation Pike grew out of a desire to do something, anything, far from the Western Front during the Phoney War, and out of an exaggerated faith that air bombing alone could decide the fate of a great power.