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after the turning of the tide at El Alamein and Stalingrad, meant that only
the most audacious, unconventional schemes for a Gulf operation were
worthy of consideration at the planning level. Four such schemes were
considered by Berlin; only one was executed.
(Narrative 4 [Abwehr]) The Bedaux-Felmy plan. The first, most gran-
diose Abw II scheme was designed to bring the war to the shores of the
Persian Gulf immediately preceding a (then conceivable) full-scale German
military invasion of the Middle East from the Balkans, the southern Soviet
Union, and North Africa, via Turkey, Transcaucasia, Transcaspia, and
Sinai. It was the brainchild of a most unlikely Abwehr stooge: the pro-
Nazi Franco-American billionaire tycoon and time-and-motion expert
Charles Eugène Bedaux (1886–1944), close friend of the Duke and
Duchess of Windsor.^33 Bedaux had developed his own purely theoretical
système d’ensablement (sanding-up technique), whereby the Abadan refin-
ery and associated oilfields in Persia and Iraq were to be put temporarily
out of action before the British had a chance to sabotage them as part of
their Tenth Army oil-denial scheme (Plan WONDERFUL).^34 Bedaux’s
countersabotage scheme envisaged the filling of refinery vessels and tubes,
borings, wells, derricks, and conduit pipes with fine sand to render such
infrastructure impervious to bombing or shelling. His engineering opera-
tions were to be protected by a mobile strike force composed of 4000–6000
Luftwaffe special forces (Sonderstab FELMY [or F])^35 and Abw II special
forces (Brandenburgers)^36 (but no Waffen-SS), under the command of
Luftwaffe General Hellmuth Felmy. We know from British and German
archival records that the main component of Felmy’s force
(Wüstensonderverband 287 [287th Special Desert Unit]), a highly mobile
motorized unit (with a ratio of one vehicle to every three men), was trans-
ferred from southern Greece to Stalino (Donetsk) on 22 September 1942,
destined for Armavir, having been issued with tropical kit (Movement
TARNKAPPE).^37 This formation included a small Arab Luftwaffe special-
forces contingent (Deutsch-Arabische Lehrabteilung [DAL]), consisting
of a few hundred men but no more than 24 Iraqis, whom the Germans
intended to use as the nucleus of the new Iraqi army they would create
after occupying the country.^38 Felmy’s operational goals for the autumn of
1942 had been defined as ‘the opening of the Iran/Iraq border crossings
and continued advances to Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.’^39 British oil-
denial plans show that the Germans were even expected to invade Kuwait,
Bahrein, and Saudi Arabia.^40