Operation PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) was to supply petrol from storage tanks in southern England to the advancing Allied armies in France in the weeks and months following D-Day during the latter stages of WWII.

Constructing flexible yet pressure-resistant pipes and leak-free couplings was a difficult and slow process.

After the war, more than 90% of the pipeline was recovered as salvage, and subsequently scrapped. This was accomplished during the period September 1946 to October 1949, using Standard dressed – mostly civilian – commercial divers operating from the ships Empire Ridley (ex HMS Latimer), Empire Taw (ex HMS Holdfast), Empire Tigness (a German built steel-hulled 407-ton tanker), Wrangler (an ex Admiralty Mark III tank landing craft), and Redeemer (an ex Admiralty motor fishing vessel).

The value of the scrap lead and steel was well in excess of the costs of recovery, one in which one of my uncles – my Dad’s younger brother, and the taller of the two people in uniform in the image (I was the smaller person in front of him) – played a leading role as an extremely competent commercial diver.

Categories: History