Germany reveals Operation Pike

On 4 July 1940 the official German news agency, the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (DNB), published extracts from secret documents of the French High Command captured by the Wehrmacht during the campaign in France. The most sensational of them concerned a plan on which the French and British had worked in the winter and spring of 1940: the bombing of the Soviet oilfields and refineries in the Caucasus, at Baku, Grozny and Batumi. The British called it Operation Pike. German propaganda presented the discovery as proof that the Allies had wanted to extend the war to further countries, and that Germany, by defeating France, had saved the Soviet Union among others from that fate. According to some sources the German press began to trumpet the documents as early as 3 July, and the series of publications went on for weeks.

A plan that never came to pass

The idea of striking at Caucasian oil arose after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet attack on Finland. In Paris and London it was believed that the Soviet Union was supplying the Reich with oil, especially after the economic agreement of February 1940, and that destroying the oilfields could both weaken Germany and paralyse the Soviet economy. The strongest advocate was the Prime Minister, Édouard Daladier, and after him Paul Reynaud. In February the Commander-in-Chief, Maurice Gamelin, drew up a memorandum on the “fundamental weakness” of the Soviet economy, while General Maxime Weygand in Beirut was preparing airfields in Syria. In the spring a British intelligence aircraft photographed Baku, and the air staffs of the two countries agreed that about a hundred bombers would be used for raids from Syria and northern Iraq. The British were more cautious than the French and feared that a strike would drive the Soviet Union into an open alliance with Hitler. On 28 March the Supreme War Council merely ordered preparations to continue.

The German attack on Denmark and Norway in April and the offensive in the west on 10 May pushed the plan aside. Weygand replaced Gamelin as Commander-in-Chief and had other worries than the Caucasus. When France signed the armistice at Compiègne on 22 June, raids on Baku were out of the question. But the documents remained.

The train at La Charité

When the front collapsed in June 1940, the French High Command evacuated its archives to the south. One of the trains carrying files was stranded at the station of La Charité-sur-Loire on the Loire, because the wrecked track made it impossible to go any further. According to German accounts, it was found by soldiers of the 9th Panzer Division. Sources give different dates, most often 16 or 19 June. The French had not managed to burn the documents. Into German hands fell the minutes of meetings of the Allied Supreme War Council, plans for sending troops to Scandinavia and the Balkans, correspondence on the Caucasus plans, and files showing that the French staff had agreed with the commander of neutral Switzerland, General Henri Guisan, on cooperation in the event of a German attack on his country.

To the military the files were of little value, because the plans they described were already out of date. To the propagandists they were a treasure. After specialists had verified their authenticity, Joachim von Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry and Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry began to release them in instalments. They were to convince the world that it was the Allies, not Germany, who had wanted to spread the war to neutral countries: Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands, Switzerland, the Balkans and even the Soviet Union. The DNB communiqué of 4 July claimed that Germany deserved credit for saving these countries from being dragged into the chaos of Allied intrigue, since it had taken countermeasures in time and swiftly defeated France.

The reader in Moscow

The most important intended reader of the revelations about the Caucasus was Joseph Stalin. Moscow had known of the Allied intentions earlier. On 25 January 1940 the German ambassador, Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, had warned Vyacheslav Molotov of Anglo-French activity in the Caucasus, and Soviet intelligence had reported plans for air raids. In the spring the Transcaucasian Military District had practised repelling an attack from the south, and the air defences of Baku had been strengthened. Now the Germans were supplying proof from French filing cabinets.

The moment was carefully chosen. On 12 June a new British ambassador had arrived in Moscow – Stafford Cripps, a left-wing politician expelled from the Labour Party in 1939 – with the task of improving relations. On 1 July Stalin received him. Cripps argued that a victorious Germany would become a threat to the Soviet Union and that the two countries should act together against German hegemony in Europe. Stalin replied that he saw no danger of German domination, and on 13 July Molotov handed Schulenburg a record of the conversation. The publication of the Caucasus documents strengthened Berlin’s hand: it showed that the same British and French who were now seeking Moscow’s friendship had wanted to set fire to its oilfields a few months earlier. In those weeks, moreover, the Soviet Union was occupying Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and had demanded Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania, and had no intention of changing course.

The end of the plan

The disclosure of the documents finally buried a plan that had in practice been dead since May. France had left the war, and the French forces in the Levant had submitted to Marshal Pétain’s government. Britain, fighting Germany and Italy alone, had neither the aircraft nor any reason to start a war with yet another great power.

Place in the war

Hitler referred to the La Charité files in his Reichstag speech of 19 July 1940, and the documents were later issued in a separate “White Book” by the German Foreign Ministry. They were also used to put pressure on Switzerland. In the autumn of 1940 Cripps, still seeking an understanding with the Soviet Union, offered Molotov, among other things, an assurance that Britain would not attack Baku and Batumi. Moscow did not take up the offer.

After the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union became allies, and British plans concerning the Caucasus changed their purpose: they were now prepared in case the oilfields should fall into German hands during the 1942 offensive. The memory of Operation Pike nevertheless survived in Moscow. For decades Soviet historiography cited it as proof that the Western powers had been preparing aggression against the Soviet Union in 1940, and Western historians still argue over how far it was a serious intention and how far contingency planning. What is certain is that the German publications of the summer of 1940 were meant to deepen Stalin’s distrust of Britain at the very moment when London most needed his neutrality.