Operation Pike

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The code name Operation Pike refers to a planned and prepared bombing of Soviet oil fields and facilities by British - French troops under the command of Air Commodore John Slessor . The western campaign prevented the company from running.

The plan

The British military planning for this company took place during the first two years of World War II , when the Soviet Union became an ally of Hitler's Germany through the Hitler-Stalin Pact , at least in the case of the division of Eastern Europe and, through the German-Soviet economic agreement, also in armaments or raw material economic point of view. The planned air strikes had the strategic goal of destroying the Soviet oil industry, with a focus on Baku, in order to reduce the mobility of the Red Army and cause a possible collapse of the Soviet economy. The operation was also aimed at preventing Germany from accessing Soviet resources. Planning began in December 1939. In April 1940, six French and three British bomber squadrons were deployed to Syria and Mosul in Iraq. On April 17, 1940, Maxime Weygand reported to Maurice Gamelin that the preparations for the bombing of the oil fields in the Caucasus had progressed so far that the operation could begin in late June or early July. Under the direction of Sidney Cotton , aerial photographs of the oil fields were taken in March and April. 117 Farman F.221 , Martin Maryland and Vickers Wellington aircraft were to be used. They were equipped with additional tanks and were supposed to drop 324 tons of bombs on Batumi , Poti , Grozny and Baku within 10 to 45 days . Since the soil of the oil fields is completely saturated with petroleum, it was assumed that the oil fields could easily be set in non-extinguishable fires. The use of ground troops and the initiation of an Islamist uprising were also considered.

Disclosure of the plan

On June 16, 1940, the 9th German Panzer Division captured a large number of secret files of the French General Staff in La Charité-sur-Loire . This included files relating to Operation Pike . After a staff of experts had confirmed the authenticity, the plan was presented to the public by the German press on July 3, 1940 as a sensational find. Hitler mentioned the plan in his Reichstag speech on July 19, 1940. The documents were published in "White Book No. 6".

At the Nuremberg trials , Hermann Göring testified that he used long-range reconnaissance officers from the Rowehl command to observe the gathering of French and English aircraft squadrons for Operation Pike in Syria .

In October 1940, the British ambassador to Moscow Richard Stafford Cripps proposed to the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov a quid pro quo for a neutral stance by the Soviet Union in the German-British war. One point of the British consideration was the abandonment of military action against Baku and Batum.

literature

  • Günter Kahle : The Allied Caucasus Project of 1940 . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1973.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Patrick Osborn: Operation Pike: Britain versus the Soviet Union, 1939-1941 . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000, ISBN 978-0-313-31368-4 .
  2. ↑ Keith Neilson: Stalin's mustache: The Soviet Union and the coming of war , Diplomacy & Statecraft, Volume 12, Issue 2 June 2001, pp. 197-208.
  3. ↑ Kahle, p. 20.
  4. ↑ http://www.zeno.org/Geschichte/M/Der+N%C3%BCrnberger+Proze%C3%9F/Hauptverhandlungen/Vierundachtzigster+Tag.+Montag,+18.+M%C3%A4rz+1946/ Morning session
  5. ^ Franz Knipping : American policy on Russia during the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 1939-1941. Tübingen 1974, p. 155.