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In late December 2021, an online advertisement showed three massive coils of what appeared to be wire or pipe on the ground at a facility. It read: Genius D-Day Inventions that Helped Win the War. The D-Day invasion of Normandy occurred on June 6, 1944. The ad appeared on MSNBC.com and other news websites that displayed ads from the Taboola advertising network. In the past, such military ads often ended up being misleading. However, this one was true. We clicked the ad. On page 20 of the lengthy article, it revealed that the picture showed part of what was known as Operation PLUTO. The acronym stood for Pipe Line Under The Ocean. We confirmed the photo's authenticity on the Getty Images website. The pipes carried gasoline to help the Allied war effort. The progress made in the weeks following D-Day allowed the operation to be completed by August 1944. In other words, the pipeline wasn't used for D-Day. Rather, the Allied invasion allowed for the operation to later be successful. On May 30, 1945, the Kingston Whig-Standard reported on the secret operation, calling it one of the most closely guarded secrets of the invasion of Europe. Winston Churchill, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, once paid tribute to the feat of British engineering: General Dwight D. Eisenhower also expressed his warm appreciation of the work the PLUTO pipelines have done in supplying United States as well as British forces in their drive into Germany. An old British Pathé newsreel provided a glimpse at how the entire process worked from planning to execution: In sum, yes, the impressive photo of massive coils of pipe did show something that helped to win the war. They supplied hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel for Allied forces, helping in the effort to drive Germany to surrender in early May 1945. For more information on Operation PLUTO, we recommend this page on the D-Day Revisited website.
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