BLOOD OF EMPIRE

Southland Times, Issue 23793, 15 April 1939, Page 13

BLOOD OF EMPIRE

The Great Iraq Pipe-Line

By

C. I. SEMPILL

FROM a long, low, bare range of hills rising sombrely eastward from the Mesopotamian plain to the snow-clad peaks of the Persian plateau, there runs a curious, threadlike scar westward across the land. Set an ear to the ground above the scar and hearken. Maybe, if you are quick of hearing, there will come to you the sound of a low, steady throbbing as though somewhere beneath, a giant heart were beating. The scar, and that beat, and a little cluster of dots here and there along the scar, are all there is in the immensity of the surrounding desert to mark one of the world’s greatest engineering feats, and perhaps, for Britain, a very life-artery—the Iraq-Mediterran-ean Oil Pipe-line. Of the actual pipe-line there are some 1200 miles: west of the Euphrates it bifurcates, one branch leading through French territory to Tripoli in the north, the other by Transjordania and Palestine to Haifa in the south. It lies in a shallow trench, at an average depth of two feet below the surface, but is not otherwise protected.

Over by far the greater proportion of its length the line runs through arid and waterless desert, utterly shelterless, subject to intense heat in summer, intense cold in winter, and violent storms. Into this roadless, grim wilderness, bounded upon the one side by the unbridged Tigris and Euphrates rivers and on the other by the formidable cleft of the Jordan, came the men who built the pipe-line—literally dragging it with them. The idea of bridging the rivers had to be rejected, both on the score of time and of cost. So the line was carried beneath them and all that went to its building was slung across. A tall order, the last, when the span of the “sling” is near on 2000 feet. "fc ★ 'Ar On opposite banks at each crossing, set deep in concrete, tall steel towers were raised, 140 and 130 feet high. Between these, heavy wire cables were slung. Then platforms were made, depending from the cables by running tackle which enabled them to be mechanically raised from the ground, propelled across and lowered again. These platforms will carry a 10-ton lorry from bank to bank. _ The major work of building the line forms only a part of the tale. The location of water to supply the thousands of men employed, and later the desert pumping-stations, was a separate and enormous undertaking in itself. Over 126 wells were drilled before a sufficient or suitable supply was found. Miles of pipe-line were laid to distribute it. Roads had to be built. Across a great lava plain there is now a 100mile highway. Stone-crushers and steam-rollers were brought across the desert to make it. More than 2000 men were constantly employed on it for months.

A comprehensive system of communications had to be established. It took a little army of specialists to link the base in the Kirkuk foothills with intervening posts and the Mediterranean at Tripoli and Haifa by telegraph, telephone and wireless. Hundreds of technicians were occupied at special repair depots, and in travelling workshops furnished with every conceivable device of modern mechanical engineering, in the gigantic task of servicing and maintaining in the field the transport and other mechanical equipment employed. A medical service with hospitals, dressing-stations, ambulances and travelling surgeries had to be organized to care for that straggling line of men spread over 1200 miles of country, 800 miles of it a wilderness, much of it the home of every disease to which human flesh is heir.

British, American and French predominated among the skilled workers. From America there came the cream of electric welders, specialists in pipeline construction. It says much for the quality of their work that over the whole 1200 miles of line bound into one composite length by 175,000 welds, only three welds proved defective when the line was finally tested. Now the task is done. Day and night, without cease, to the rhythmic beat of the twelve pumping-stations that send it surging upon its way, the thick brown stream goes flowing west into the great reservoirs at Tripoli and Haifa—ll,22o tons a day. That thick, brown stream is more than oil—it is blood: the blood of British men-o’-war that shall perhaps not fight without it, and British cargo ships that shall perhaps not sail without it. The steel line that carries it is in every sense an artery. The pumping-stations are vital pulses that may yet reflect the measure of our strength to resist and endure. In the Great War only a few of our fighting ships and practically no merchant ships depended upon oil. Today the Navy has not got a ship of any

value that is not wholly dependent upon it. A large Air Force has grown up which is tied to the ground without it: a mechanized Army has evolved which is paralysed without it. Oil from coal will not solve our problem. The huge plant at Billingham, in England, produces about three per cent, of British motor-car requirements, and the process is uneconomical and incapable of swift expansion. But the Iraq pipe-line can solve it. The supply from the Kirkuk fields is capable of almost limitless expansion. So long as we preserve our lines of communication in the Mediterranean, it is our nearest and most accessible supply. It could provide at need, on the basis.of our share alone, the whole requirements of the British Fleet and then leave a handsome surplus over. The Iraq Petroleum Company is a British Company, with a British chairman, registered in London. But there are extensive foreign shareholders — American, French and Dutch. The proportion of oil to which we are entitled is about 47 per cent. Given only the Fleet’s requirements, we can ensure the safe convoy from other sources of all the further supplies we want. ★ ★ ★ The protection of that line is a matter of vital importance to us, and it is, physically, about the least defendable thing in the world. Tanks and guns and aeroplanes will not defend it.

It is in the bazaars and coffee-shops of Baghdad, Damascus, Jerusalem, Amman that the defenders work, where men sit and gossip and plot—and listen; in the oases and by desert well and water-hole, where the tribes must come for water; on the fringes of the “desert and the sown,” where they drift in season and barter, watchful eyes and heedful ears are the defenders’ weapons. In the north, the French military authorities keep in touch with the tribes. In the east and south, the Iraq Desert Police watch over them. In Transjordania and over a great area of adjacent country, a body known as the Arab Legion functions. It is commanded by a white man whose name may yet rival that of Lawrence in the world, and in the desert already does. The patrols of the Arab Legion never rest, and its intelligence service is everywhere, they say. Yet, during the past year, as a result of the Palestine disturbances, and while Palestine itself has been alive with troops, the line has been breached over eighty times! These were mere crude, unskilled efforts. The breaches were repaired in a matter of hours, and the sumtotal of their efforts was no more than mildly annoying. But what might not be done in a night in that 800 miles of wilderness by determined and skilled men with the resources of modern science in their hands? The pumping-stations are sensitive nerve centres which, within 60 seconds, will indicate on their pressure gauges any break in the line. At each station repair gangs are standing by day and night to be rushed to any point where a breach has occurred. Within two to three minutes the flow of oil through the pipes can be stopped. Within two to three hours the repair gang is on the site of the breach. ★ ★ ★ Every pumping-station is also a little fort. It has a bastioned central block. It is surrounded by a tall steel-wire fence which is floodlit at night. It has its armed garrison, and ample water and food reserves to withstand a small siege. At each there is an aerodrome, and each is linked with the outer world by telephone and wireless, Daily, car patrols pass between them. All it is possible to do for their safety has been done. The result is on the whole very effective. But the effectiveness of any defence works, however strong they may be physically, can hinge upon factors quite other than their strength. You may, if you will, set up a literally impregnable fortress in the desert. But so long as the surrounding country for hundreds of miles is peopled by tribesmen whose allegiance to such Governments as they own, and to you, is as shifting as the sands, so long as you must depend for the garrisons and the labour within your fortress upon men recruited from among these tribes or among neighbouring people intensely susceptible to their sympathies, your defence ceases to be physical. For economic reasons, labour at the pumping-stations is recruited locally, and for political reasons they are garrisoned by nationals of the various Governments of the territories through •which, the line passes. So that, in practice, the safety of pumping-stations and of the line depends not upon physical factors but upon conditions, and upon the ability of the different Governments _ concerned to cope with these. And in the end it depends upon individual men — men who go about unobtrusively and whose work is rarely heard of; but whose fingers are ever on the pulse of things, whose knowledge of the minds and ways of those they move among has often been our bulwark in the past and shall be again, and whose personal influence can sometimes do what an army corps could not.