PIPE-LINE TO BATTLE

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 1, 12 February 1945, Page 7

PIPE-LINE TO BATTLE

Supplying Water to a Desert Army

By

in The Listener, England, July 27, 1944

In 1940 the British General Staff was faced with the necessity of main-

taining an army in the waterless areas of the Egyptian western desert. The water-supply was the greatest problem : water, the one essential without which no army could exist. One gallon , of water for each man’s daily ration, and half a gallon daily for the radiator of each vehicle. At that time the Army of the Nile numbered only a few thousands of men and was being supplied with water from the City of Alexandria in tank cars along the singletrack desert railway. But, to hold the vital Middle East, that little army must be expanded many-fold and. the desert railway would be completely incapable

of supplying the . great convoys of reinforcements which were already converging on Egypt from Great Britain and the Dominions. So the Staff decided to build a pipe-line from the Nile Delta out into the desert and pump their water up to the battle-line. I was selected to build this water system, and for almost three years I was in charge of the water-supply. I moved out into the desert with two subalterns and a dozen sappers. I had no intention of undertaking the laying of 100 miles of pipe with such a small force. They were only my staff : labour was what I needed now. The pipe must be buried— meant 100 miles of ditch. The pipe must be distributed

along that ditch. The only means of carrying the pipe into the desert was by rail, and therefore I decided to dig the ditch alongside the railway-line. Once the pipe was distributed along the ditch, it must be laid in the ditch, jointed together, and buried before water could be pumped through it. The desert was white with groups of Bedouins driving their goats and camels towards the safety of the Nile Delta away from the invading Italians, and in a week I had a couple of thousand of them swinging their picks and shovels on the job. They were shepherds by profession, and it was their first attempt at western manual labour. They proved poor workmen, but made up in numbers what they lacked in skill. By November, 1940, our 100-mile pipe project was nearing completion. We were already pumping water through the easternmost sections of our pipe, much to the delectation of the local Bedouins, who moved their tented camps to the pipe-line to take advantage of leaking joints. They often used to coax a joint to leak with a railway spike or a nail, but we had one recurrent trouble which was more than mere Bedouin pilfering of water. Night after night I used to find a certain airvalve smashed and a column of water spurting 40 ft. in the air. This was sabotage by some enemy agent. One of my subalterns and myself lay hidden one dawn to catch the saboteur. As we lay there the light grew quickly. The swell of land behind the pipe-line stood out clear-cut. Suddenly three figures were standing on it dressed like Bedouins. Boldly they threaded their way among the tussocks to the air- valve —stood over it. My rifle bullet got one through the chest as he raised a hammer to smash the valve. The second went down with my bullet between the shoulder blades even as he began to run. My subaltern and I both missed the third as he raced madly for cover. That third man escaped, but the other two lay dead. We left them there as an example to the rest. The Army of the Nile gradually grew into the powerful Eighth Army; a force of some 8,000 men grew into an army of more than 100,000 ; the enemy

was driven back across the Egyptian border and my water system kept pace with the growth of the army. By the spring of 1942 I had 600 miles of main pipe-line. On the Nile Delta I had built great filtration plants. Two million gallons of Nile water was being filtered daily and pumped westwards 600 miles right into the conquered portion of lalian Libya. Numberless branch lines carried filtered water into all sections of the Western Desert, and by now I had a force of 5,000 men under me, working on water-supply. It was ' the greatest water scheme ever conceived to nourish an army at war. And the British Eighth Army was the bestwatered army in the history of desert war. The Eighth Army man was outraged if he did not receive his daily gallon. In June, 1942, the Eighth Army suffered the disastrous defeat of Knightsbridge, lost ■many men, most of its tanks and guns, and was forced to retreat 500 miles to the El Alamein positions. To the water-bloke of the Army this involved blowing up 500 miles of pipe-line which during the last two years we had constructed with so much sweat and toil. We blew that, up. Under each low spot we placed a. charge of high explosive so as to drain it and deny to the enemy the water that lay in it. Because a full pipe-line of eight inches diameter and 500 miles in length holds many millions of gallons, enough water to allow the enemy to pursue us in comfort, we drained that pipe-line of water so efficiently that the enemy pursued us with a thirst that rose each day of the pursuit. Along the water system, too, were twenty-four pumpingstations, twenty-four systems of underground reservoirs for water storage. Somehow in the rush and clamour of that retreat we managed to get our pumping sets out of the pumping-stations, loaded them on any empty vehicle that offered and got them safely to the rear. We drained the reservoirs and threw into them bone oil, a stinking liquid distilled from waste bone. At last the remnants of the Eighth Army rolled behind the prepared El Alamein line of defence, the Afrika Korps in hot pursuit. The enemy

attacked that line. On the third day he broke through it and was only stopped when he was almost within ” sight of Alexandria. Some of the Germans who broke through found a pipe-line running the length of our El Alamein defences. They tapped it and drank some of the water which gushed out. Next day those who had drunk the water surrendered in an agony of thirst.' The water in that pipe had been salt. It was a new pipe-line being tested for leaks and I never wasted fresh water in testing. It was Mediterranean water which the Germans had drunk. After the Germans had been halted, there ensued four months of static warfare around the El Alamein positions. Near El Alamein station was one of my key water points. There I had four pumpingstations, pipe-lines radiating in all directions and many millions of gallons of water in underground storage. ' For some months this key network for the water system was under direct observation from the enemy, and they used to shell and bomb it regularly. Yet so well was everything protected underground that practically no damage, was done. During those months of static warfare the enemy repaired my pipe-line, developed wells at the western end of it and pumped water eastwards to his El Alamein positions. Many times I have watched from our forward positions his water-carts queueing up at his water point, and he was using my pipe. That annoyed me considerably. When we finally broke through after the decisive breach at El Alamein the enemy blew up the pipe-line as he retreated. His demolitions were not very efficient,

however, as regards draining the pipe, probably because he followed his drill closely. He placed his charge of high explosive under the pipe at mathematically regular intervals at a kilometre apart. And it just so happened that those kilometre points were often on high ground so the water failed to drain out of the pipe ; and when we advanced we found that pipe half-full of water, a great convenience to our armoured divisions in .the pursuit.

Then I had to repair that pipe-line. The worst part, of course, was where it ran through the battlefield itself. There it had been shattered by shell fire, riddled with bullets, and squashed flat by tanks. To make matters worse it rained heavily, and much of the desert became a lake. There were hundreds of unburied dead lying around after the battle. It was impossible to bury them until the water subsided. As my men repaired the pipe, the bloated dead floated round them. By the time I had the pipe-line repaired, the pursuing Eight Army surged on past the end of it. The pipe-line was now of no more use. For the remaining 1,500 miles between Egypt and Tunisia I got water for the Army by boring wells in the desert, and the speed of the Eighth Army’s advance was measured by the rate at which I could tap underground water: At last I stood on the green plain of northern Tunisia. North of me rose the mountains, seamed with running streams. No need to develop water resources there. I felt very tired. Three years. 2,000 miles. It was a long, hard road to look back on.