To the extent that the petroleum pipeline network built during the war became publicly known after the war and still is known, it is most likely to be with regards to the PLUTO cross-channel pipelines laid in 1944. I was contacted in the 2000s by a national organisation with regards to a storage depot near the Stanlow refinery in the Wirral. The organisation assumed that the depot had originally been built for part of the PLUTO pipelines. In fact the depot had been built in the 1950s and had nothing to do PLUTO.

It would probably be also true to state that the perception of those who have heard of PLUTO is that it was a great success and that the Normandy invasion might not have succeeded without it. This perception was started almost immediately after the end of the war in Europe when the secret of the PLUTO pipelines was made public. For example, Henley Cables ran an advert referring to ‘Operation “PLUTO” the petrol pipe-lines that made V.E. possible’. Captain Hutching, Senior Naval Officer Commanding Force “PLUTO” wrote to all members of Force “PLUTO” advising them that they had ‘contributed not a little to the final victory’ advising them, rather more modestly, that the Allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower described it as ‘second only in daring to the Mulberry artificial harbours’.

This view has scarcely changed over time. For example the message from Sir Winston Churchill at the unveiling of the plaque to commemorate the laying of the PLUTO pipelines described it as being ‘crowned by complete success.’ In 1995 Lord Prior in his introduction to Adrian Searle’s book on the PLUTO pipelines, wrote that ’possibly because a pipe-line is essentially a prosaic object, largely unseen and uninspiring to the eye – unlike, for example, the floating prefabricated Mulberry harbours - PLUTO has perhaps not received its due recognition in the context of our wartime victory.’ An online article on PLUTO based on information provided by Captain F.A.Roughton states ‘Soon after D Day, a continuous flow of petrol to meet the heavy demands of the liberation armies and air fleets was maintained by the ‘Pipelines Under the Ocean’.’ A BBC Hampshire news item on 8th June 2010 described PLUTO as a ‘key contribution to victory in World War II’. The BBC interviewed Robin Maconhy, Chairman of the Bembridge Heritage Society , who declared “If PLUTO had not worked, there is a chance we wouldn’t have won.”

For the reality of the contribution of the PLUTO pipelines to the success of the invasion of Normandy and Victory in Europe, one needs to consider how much fuel was actually delivered by PLUTO during the battle of Normandy, the answer is none. It was not until 22nd September 1944, three and half months after D-Day that gasoline first flowed through PLUTO, by which times the allies had reached the Netherlands.

Tim

In April 1943 was the setting up of COSSAC to plan for the invasion of North West Europe. Up to now PLUTO had been planned on the basis that the invasion would take place at the Pas de Calais, the shortest route, with PLUTO having to run around thirty miles under the sea. However, for very good military reasons, it was decided that the landings should take place in Normandy. This meant more than doubling the distance that the PLUTO pipelines would have to operate over, if it was decided to continue with the project. That the planners chose to switch from the Pas de Calais to Normandy illustrates that, contrary to what one would conclude from reading some accounts, PLUTO was not considered essential to the success of Operation OVERLORD, the codename for the projected invasion. In fact, the primary means by which the allies were planning to supply the invasion armies with fuel was by using tankers. The shortest distance between England and Normandy was from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg at the top of the Cotentin Peninsula, a distance of 65 nautical miles. However, the Normandy landings were not going to be there but further south and east. The allied armies would then have to secure the Cotentin Peninsula before the HAIS cables and HAMEL pipelines could possibly be laid. Despite this, the decision was taken in June 1943 by the British Chiefs of Staff to proceed with the PLUTO project.

There were, however, now to be not one but two sets of PLUTO lines. The first to come into operation would run from Sandown Bay on the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg, code-named BAMBI. Later when the allied armies had broken out of Normandy and secured the French north coast a much shorter series of lines, codenamed DUMBO, would be laid from Dungeness in Kent to Ambleteuse near Boulogne.

Tim

The plan for Operation PLUTO was to lay the first pipeline from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg eighteen days after D-Day. This was based on phase lines that had been drawn up by the staff of 21st Army Group, which would initially command all the allied armies involved in the Normandy invasion. The planned phase lines are shown in figure 8 and detailed the perimeters which the allies might be expected to be in control of within a specific number of days from D-Day. The River Seine was expected to be reached by D-Day+90. They were designed for logistic purposes but it is questionable that General Montgomery, the 21st Army Group Commander would have expected such lines to be adhered to over such a long time period.

On the basis of the planned phase lines Cherbourg would, in theory, have been occupied within eight days. However, the commander of the American army charged with capturing Cherbourg, General Omar Bradley, was furious when he saw the map with the phase lines and never accepted them. Bradley set his own timetable to capture Cherbourg of between ten and thirty days after D-Day. Cherbourg was in fact taken on 27th June, within Bradley’s own timetable. The over-optimism of the planned phase lines, at least in the initial period of the invasion, can best be seen in that, according to them, the British and Canadians were expected to have captured Caen on D-Day and it was not completely occupied until the 20th July, that is D-Day+44. Given that the United States Corps commander, Major-General Collins was one of the best and most thrusting of allied corps commanders and the German forces defending the Cotentin Peninsula and Cherbourg were second grade units, it is difficult to see how Cherbourg could have been captured any quicker. Hitler had expected Cherbourg to hold out for months and was furious when he heard of its surrender. General Eisenhower, in his report to the Chiefs of Staff commented that, if the Germans had retreated to Cherbourg earlier, ‘Cherbourg might have been able to hold out as long as Brest did subsequently.’

While it could be said that the PLUTO team were not responsible for the time taken to capture Cherbourg, the programme for getting the PLUTO pipelines operational was clearly unrealistic. The next delay in PLUTO’s timetable, however, seems inexplicable and reflects a total lack of planning for possible differing outcomes. Prior to Cherbourg’s capture, the Germans had systematically demolished all the port facilities such that it was not to be until late September that Cherbourg reached anything like full operational capacity. This was hardly surprising and General Eisenhower wrote that ‘the thunder of the German demolitions in the port area reverberated from the surrounding hills.’

The intention had been to run the PLUTO lines into the harbour but, with that wrecked, over a month was wasted in debate. Should the pipeline terminal now be located outside the breakwater, which would increase the difficulties with discharging the fuel, or inside which might endanger the harbour with possible fuel spillages, fires or explosions. Eventually it was decided to run the lines to a terminal sited in the bay of Urville-Nacqueville, outside of Cherbourg. Surely plans could have been put in place for such an eventuality prior to D-Day?

It was not true, though, to say that there was no fuel flowing through any pipelines into Normandy, for the allies had been pressing ahead with Operation TOMBOLA. On D-Day+19 the first ship to shore pipeline was laid to Port-en-Bessin whereby a tanker moored off the coast could discharge fuel. A second route was later established and five TOMBOLA lines were also laid to St. Honorine-des-Petres. This was situated a few miles west of Port-en-Bessin. These lines were used to supply the Americans. The first fuel flowed through TOMBOLA on 3rd July but TOMBOLA proved to be only a limited success as the pipelines tended to break. One of the causes for this was the rocky foreshore in the area where the pipelines were being laid.

A small pipeline network was constructed from the two small ports of Port-en-Bessin and Ste. Honorine-des-Petres to a tank farm that was constructed at Mont Cauvin. The tanks had to be built above ground because of the very short time scale in which they needed to built, but they were heavily camouflaged to protect against enemy attack.

‘Chants’ and other small tankers of up to 1,300 tons were also used to take fuel directly into Port-en-Bessin. However, the weather and the sea was such that many of the pre-fabricated ‘Chants’ were too badly damaged for them to continue in operation. By 28th July, with the stalemate in Normandy finally ending with the success of the United States breakout code-named Operation COBRA, no less than sixteen of the thirty nine Chants were either being repaired or awaiting repair at Hamble in England where a tanker repair facility had been constructed.

In view of Operation PLUTO now being so far behind programme some naval authorities suggested that the whole project should be cancelled. It was, however, decided to continue with the project and eventually on 10th August HMS Latimer set out to lay the first HAIS cable. The ship sailed to Cherbourg and on 12th August started laying cable from Urville-Nacqueville to Sandown. On what was a fine, calm day the HAIS cable was laid in only twelve hours. However, one of the escorting warships managed to catch the cable with her anchor such that it was damaged beyond repair. A second cable lay was carried out by HMS Sancroft on 14th August but that also ended in disaster. As Sir Donald Banks wrote, ‘The technique of cable laying had been mastered but we were not yet sufficiently versed in the practice of connecting the shore ends, nor in effecting repairs to the undersea leaks which were caused fairly close inshore through these faulty concluding operations.’

There were also problems with the HAMEL pipelines as the Conundrums were heavily loaded with the seventy miles of pipe needed to for the long crossing. Conundrum I had managed to gain ten tons of barnacles while in Southampton water. They upset the balance of the Conundrum and the tides and rocky bottom on the sea at the Cotentin Peninsula were not favourable for pipe-laying. However, it could be argued that all of this could and probably should have been anticipated by the PLUTO team. As a result when two HAMEL pipelines were finally laid by Conundrum I between 25th and 28th August, by which time Paris had been liberated, they were not successfully connected ashore. Whether the failure to date of Operation PLUTO was the cause is debatable, but the allied armies, as they sped across France and into Belgium found themselves running out of fuel. As the commander of the American Third Army, General Patton, succinctly put it “My men can eat their belts, my tanks gotta have gas”. During August Cherbourg was finally opened to receive ocean tankers. In September it started to receive tankers direct from the United States. But Cherbourg could only handle one tanker at a time and had little gasoline storage capacity. On 2nd September Patton’s army effectively ran out of fuel.

It was not until 18th September that a HAIS cable was finally water-tested and commissioned. On 22nd September it was brought into operation. Sir Donald Banks recorded that he received a telegram from the Quarter-Master General declaring “Well done the King of the Underworld.” However, the cable was only providing about 250 tons per day, at a time when the ‘Red Bull Express’, the American trucking columns were consuming 1,000 tons per day just keeping their army supplied. The original planning had been that at full capacity the BAMBI lines would provide 3,300 tons per day. The first successful lay of a HAMEL pipe took place using HMS Conundrum II on 29th September and pumping now proceeded using both systems. On 3rd October an attempt was made to increase the pressure in the HAIS cable from 50 to 70 bar. At first all went well, but suddenly the pressure fell to nothing indicating that the cable had failed, shortly afterwards the HAMEL pipe also failed. Sir Donald Banks recorded how ‘elation was changed into funereal gloom.’ On 4th October the BAMBI operation was abandoned and all efforts were shifted to DUMBO.

‘The Story of Force PLUTO’ in the November 1946 Naval Review has a somewhat different account of the reason for the ending of the BAMBI operation. It does not mention the failure of the HAIS cable and HAMEL pipeline following the increase in the pumping pressure. It also claims that ‘unexpectedly a large commercial oil installation complete with tanks and pipelines was found practically intact’, meaning that BAMBI was no longer required. Given the general agreement of accounts of the battle of Normandy that ‘the Germans had done a thorough job in mining and demolishing the harbour [of Cherbourg] and its installations’ and that ‘Cherbourg possessed little white oil storage’ ; this scarcely seems credible.

A huge amount of engineering effort and resources had been poured into BAMBI, but despite the best endeavours of everyone involved, it had only delivered 3,300 tons of fuel. This was equivalent to only one day of PLUTO pumping in the original planning and only enough fuel to keep the allied armies supplied for a few hours. Compared to the total amount of fuel stored and used in the war effort, 3,300 tons was miniscule. For example, by 1944, one storage depot constructed during the war in southern England, on its own, could store up to 180,000 tons and most ’Greyhound’ tanker could carry 16,700 tons. The total amount of fuel delivered to the allied armies in North-West Europe from D-Day to 10th May 1945, when organised German resistance ceased, amounted to 5.2 million tons. BAMBI had delivered less than 0.1 percent of this, but at a huge cost in resources. As the official history states ‘PLUTO contributed nothing to Allied supplies at the time that would have been most valuable – that is when no regular oil ports were available on the Continent and the Allies were relying on the unsatisfactory Port-en-Bessin.

Lord Prior in his foreword to Adrian Searle’s book claims ‘That Operation PLUTO was one of the outstanding engineering achievements of the Second World War is beyond question.’ Searle, himself, is too good a historian to ignore the figures contained in the official history and comments ‘It cannot be denied that, judged against initial operational targets and objectives, the pipe-line in the original BAMBI guise did fall way below expectations.’ Searle does point out, as does Sir Donald Banks, that Operation PLUTO had originally been conceived when the expectation was that the invasion would be in the area of the Pas de Calais. However, neither they nor other supporters of Operation PLUTO draw the obvious conclusion from the near total failure of BAMBI. Once the decision was made to carry out the invasion in Normandy, then the concept of supplying the initial stages of the invasion by pipeline from England should have been abandoned. If Arnhem was ‘a bridge too far’, then Cherbourg and BAMBI was ‘a pipeline far too long’.

Going on from the failure of BAMBI to consider the pipelines from Dungeness to Boulogne code-named DUMBO.


As the PLUTO pipelines into Cherbourg were closed down, another pipeline was expanding out of the port. Army engineers were rapidly building a pipeline out from Cherbourg running south of Paris to carry fuel to the front. This pipeline was eventually to be extended into Germany. It was, however, not supplied by undersea pipelines, as some maps would seem misleadingly to imply, but by ocean tankers and so cannot be considered an extension of the PLUTO pipeline network as implied in some accounts

Those in charge of Operation PLUTO hoped that, with the much shorter run from Dungeness to Boulogne, DUMBO would be more successful than BAMBI. The original plan had been that the DUMBO lines should be terminated at a beach at Ambleteuse near Boulogne, but this was found to be heavily mined. It was instead decided to utilise the outer harbour area of Boulogne even though this would make the approach for the cable-laying ships more difficult and that harbour area had also been mined. The first run was made by HMS Sancroft on 10th October, but while the HAIS cable laying was carried out successfully great difficulty was encountered in securing the cable at Dungeness. With the weather deteriorating, it took until 27th October for pumping of gasoline to start.

By mid December a total of six HAIS cables had been laid (four 3 inch and two 2 inch), but only four of the cables were operational. The performance of these was also well below what had been expected of them. This was due to them operating at between 20 and 30 bar pressure instead of the planned 99 bar. As a result daily deliveries averaged around 700 tons instead of the planned 3,300 tons. According to the official history ‘There were frequent changes of plans and the enthusiasm of the PLUTO force gradually dwindled.’ In December the Royal Navy asked whether DUMBO like BAMBI should also be shutdown. If that had happened then presumably Operation PLUTO could never have been perceived as the success it generally was considered to be after the war. DUMBO was still well below its planned capacity when the Germans launched their final offensive in the West on 16th December in the Ardenne region of Belgium and Luxemburg, catching the allies completely by surprise. The target of that offensive was not the DUMBO terminal at Boulogne but the port of Antwerp. On 2nd January, with the Battle of the Bulge largely over, a committee ruled that DUMBO should continue and that all the available HAIS cables should be laid in an attempt to reach the originally planned throughput of 3,300 tons.

Attempts to deploy the remaining HAMEL pipe utilising the Conundrums ran into difficulties because of the worsening autumn weather. One of the Conundrums went out of control near Dungeness and ended up being wrecked onshore, the mass of unwound cable adding to the wreckage. It was eventually realised that it was best to fix a length of HAIS cable to the ends of the HAMEL pipe as the HAIS cable, being more flexible, made it easier to be brought ashore. It was not, however, until late January 1945 that the new technique for laying HAMEL pipes was mastered.

A pipeline network was extended out from Boulogne running to Calais, Ghent, and Antwerp. At Antwerp the pipeline split, going to both Eindhoven and Maastricht in the Netherlands. Both lines were eventually extended into Germany. Unlike the pipeline running from Cherbourg, these lines could truly be considered an extension of the PLUTO system and gasoline was eventually able to flow from the Mersey through PLUTO to Germany. Due to the rapidity with which the pipelines were built there were losses due to damage, spillage and theft of around 1.8 per cent. This was a loss rate that certainly would not be accepted on any modern pipeline system, in fact no loss is considered acceptable, but perhaps such a loss was understandable under the circumstances in which it was built. I was approached in the early 2000s by the Defence Estates concerning a claim for compensation from the British government by the Belgian government for the pollution caused by the pipeline network. My suggestion that the British government should charge the Belgian government for the cost of their liberation was probably not acted upon.


Sir Donald Banks relates in his book how he, Geoffrey Lloyd, and various other dignitaries attended a ceremony near Termonde, north of Brussels. The final piece of pipeline was laid to connect the Rhine with the Mersey. A band of the Royal Canadian Engineers celebrated the occasion with suitably martial music. Banks related how the Belgians were perplexed about how the British ‘could succumb to such emotions about a prosaic bit of piping’; an enthusiasm for pipelines that I can share.

DUMBO lines continued to be laid right up until the German surrender and even after the war in Europe had ended. A 3 inch HAIS cable was laid on 24th May 1945 as the most expedient method of getting the cable off the ship. The lines continued to be used up to the end of July 1945 to help supply the occupying forces but were then closed down to free up the technical manpower required to operate them. According to the Official History a total of ten HAIS cables and six HAMEL cables were laid of which eleven cables and pipes were operational giving, at peak, a flow-rate of 4,000 tons per day. However, according to Sir Donald Banks there were eleven HAIS cables laid and this is reflected in maps such as Figure 9. The HAMEL pipes, though had only a limited life expectancy before they failed. According to Donald Banks they lasted from between 55 and 112 days while according to the Official History they only had an average operational life of 56 days.

DUMBO was clearly more successful than BAMBI but did it justify the resources devoted to it? Only 370,000 tons, 8 per cent of the fuel delivered to the allied forces on the Continent, was by PLUTO, the rest being by tanker, either in bulk or in cans, or by airlift. Sir Donald Banks increases that total to 575,000 tons by including fuel delivered after the surrender of German forces, but clearly that did not contribute to the victory over Germany. Given that tankers were not set ablaze and destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the invasion, one defence of PLUTO is that “it saved a very large tanker tonnage which was badly needed in the East.” Sir Winston Churchill states that in October 1944 he requested Sir Geoffrey Lloyd for an update on the progress with PLUTO. ‘He informs me that a cross-Channel pumping of 1,000,000 gallons of petrol [3,600 tons] a day is aimed for. A figure of this magnitude must effect a large saving of tankers and manpower’. However, according to the Official History, DUMBO did not reach its peak flow-rate until after the war with Germany was over and that the average flow-rate was around 1,800 tons per day [500,000 gallons] from when pumping started in October 1944. One Greyhound tanker could carry 16,700 tons of fuel and so the amount carried by PLUTO would be the equivalent of only two Greyhound tankers per month. Obviously smaller tankers were also used into ports such as Ostend and Le Havre but the number saved by Operation PLUTO would still have been quite small when compared to the total United Nations tanker fleet in May 1945 of 1,686 ships. In addition, if PLUTO was so important in terms of ‘savings of tankers’, why was it closed down at the end of July while the war with Japan was continuing? It could not have been known that the two atomic bombs plus the declaration of war on Japan by the USSR and their subsequent invasion of Manchuria would lead to such a speedy surrender by Japan. The Labour Government on taking power in July 1945, based their plans on the war with Japan continuing for another eighteen months.

The other possible justification for Operation PLUTO given by supporters of the project is that it enabled fuel to reach the allied armies in North-West Europe which could not have been received by any other methods. There is certainly some validation for this view because, following the failure of Montgomery to secure Antwerp, the allies could not have realistically have brought any more fuel in by tanker. Even when Antwerp was secured, the allies still suffered from supply difficulties with the port sustaining a ferocious assault from the Germans of around 7,000 V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. However, it was not just fuel where the allies suffered from shortages. All allied divisions, and in particular American ones, were profligate in their consumption of supplies compared to German ones. American units consumed three times the supplies of an equivalent sized German unit. During 1945 discharge of supplies from ports under allied control was between fifteen and twenty per cent below capacity. Some newly raised United States divisions were even diverted to Britain from the Continent due to the shortage of supplies.

However, any fuel shortages that the allies sustained were nothing compared to that suffered by the Germans. Even before the Normandy landings the USAAF had switched to attacking German synthetic oil plants. Output, which in March 1944 had been 927,000 tons, fell to 472,000 tons in June. At the end of August Soviet forces occupied the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. Although DUMBO was useful, the allies would have still won without it. Again quoting the official history, ‘DUMBO was more successful; but at a time when success was of less importance. It made no substantial contribution until the campaign in Western Europe was already more than half over’.

Postscript

The PLUTO pipelines installed at such considerable cost were no longer secret and various parties moved to publicise their ‘success’, as for example the July 1945 Henley Cable advert. However, the PLUTO pipelines were not only no longer required, they had also become a nuisance. Ships repeatedly fouled their anchorages on the HAIS cables. In addition, there was significant salvage value to the lead in the HAIS cables and the steel in the HAMEL pipes. As a result a large scale recovery project was put into place and 22,000 out of the 23,000 tons of lead in the HAIS cables was eventually retrieved. The reclamation of the HAMEL pipes was less successful with 3,500 out of 5,500 tons being recovered. Salvage operations ceased in July 1949.

Tim

I was emailed this link to a film of the PLUTO pipelines. It is quite interesting to watch but it is peddling the same myth as to the extent of the 'success' of PLUTO. Interestingly the map only shows the DUMO line from Dungeness to Boulougne and not the better known BAMBI line from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg. For anyone who may be interested and could make it I am giving a lecture in London on 14th May at City University on the reality of the PLUTO pipelines and the rest of the WW2 petroleum pipeline and storage system.

https://www.youtube.com/v/Nv9lBqPVuoE&feature=uploademail

It's not listed on their list of forthcoming lectures on their website, Tim. Maybe you should drop them a line and ask them to update their listings - City University is known for hosting lectures related to engineering so I'm sure some little publicity from them would excite ready interest amongst people watching out for future talks.

Hi nordmann

The Lecture is to the Institute of Measurement and Control London Section, I am a fellow of the institute. It is on the IMC website but I am giving rather than organising the lecture and I do not know to what extent those who organise the section publisize the lectures within the University. I was for a number of years programme secretary of the Surrey and Sussex section and my recollection was that students at the University of Surrey in Guilford were very poor attenders at Institute lectures held there. Thanks for the interest and should you wish to read anymore chapters of my book, including the ones on PLUTO, then please drop me a message.

Happy Easter

Tim

Hi Tim

The university has a page devoted to public events, including lectures. If you like I can contact an associate who can probably help get yours listed (if it's open to the public of course). He migrated from the Imperial with Dinos Arcoumanis some years ago and helped develop their website so I'm sure he'd help an old buddy. You're competing on the day with a lecture about mental health as a citizen's rights issue so you'll hardly be "nicking" their audience, I wouldn't imagine.

City University Events listing

God Påske til deg og dine!

Hi Nordmann

thanks and please do. Below is the blurb that the London Section of the IMC are putting out about the lecture. It is open to the public but they do ask attendees to advise the programme secretary, this is for catering purposes.

Tuesday, 14th May 2013 (17.30 for 18.15)

Technical Lecture:


Pigs, Pipeline &PLUTO

TIM WHITTLE

City University London, College Building, St John Street, Rooms AG01 (catering), AG07 (lecture)

Travel information to City University College Building can be found at www.city.ac.uk/visit (click on ‘University Buildings’ and then ‘College Building’ from the menu). The nearest Underground stations are Angel, Barbican and Farringdon. Please come to the St John Street entrance of City where the reception will guide you to the rooms.



AGENDA

The lecture will discuss Before and during WW2, an enormous system of petroleum pipelines and protected storage tanks was constructed throughout Great Britain. This system was vital to winning the war both with regard to the air campaign and the successful invasion of Western Europe.


Tim Whittle has degrees in Combined Science and in Technology. He started as a control and instrument engineer at Foxboro in 1973. He worked for British Gas for 10 years from 1980. In 1990 he joined the Oil and Pipelines Agency and was responsible for SCADA, COMAH, instrumentation and other engineering projects on the Government Pipeline and Storage System (GPSS) until he retired in 2012. He is currently writing a history of the GPSS. Tim is a fellow of the Institute, has twice won the Ardley Prize for papers presented to the Institute, and put together original list of standards that appears in the Institute Year Book.

Refreshments will be provided before the technical lecture.
Please confirm your attendance to our programme Secretary Henry Downes at:
Henry Downes

Your wish is my etc ...

A polite request has been duly sent.

Thanks Nordmann

The lecture seemed to go very well and was also filmed.  The Institute are intending to produce a DVD of me giving the lecture together with my powerpoint presentation.

I have also heard that the two papers that I submitted on the history of the pipeline and storage system have been accepted for publication.

Great to hear it and congratulations on both the publication and the DVD!

Everything ends up on YouTube these days - look forward to linking to it here.

Thank you Nordmann, at the moment though I have the slight problem, must bigger problem for my book of copyright on the various photos and drawings used in the book.  For example a paper produced by someone, who has since died, writing for a government organisation that has since ceased to exist contains a diagram of a salt cavity (means of large scale storage of oil).  Because my copy of the paper is rather poor, I get the diagram redrawn - whose copyright?

I will probably post the first paper here, as I feel it is of general interest concerning a little known aspect of the war in this country.  The second paper, which concentrates on the development of instrumentation and computer controls on the system after the war is probably too specialised.  However, I shall wait until I now the question of photos/diagrams is sorted.

regards

Tim

Hi Tim - if the organisation was government then the artwork is covered by what they call "Crown Copyright" and is protected for 125 years after original publication as opposed to 70 years for "normal" copyright. Payment for use of material covered by Crown Copyright is made to the Intellectual Property Office by the standard method. Your publisher should check first with the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) to see if the material in question has not in fact had its copyright waived - quite a lot of government material goes straight into the public domain. In my experience however even if the material is still covered by Crown Copyright the fee for use is much less than material under normal copyright protection.

Edit: Nearly forgot - redrawing someone else's artwork is still utilising their material so copyright still applies and the original artwork should be acknowledged in your own published material.

Hi Nordmann

Thanks for the reply.  In this case the paper was written for BNOC (British National Oil Corporation), the Oil and Pipelines Agency (OPA) who I used to work for are the successor organisation to BNOC and so I am hoping that OPA giving the go ahead with be good enough.  

regards

Tim

ps I will get back on the question of the administration of Judea.