Canol Pipeline Project

The Canol Pipeline Project was a proposed four-inch oil pipeline stretching 1,200 miles from Canada to Alaska. Launched secretly on the initiative of General Brehon B. Somervell, it advanced without adequate estimates of cost or serious consideration of terrain, climate, materials, manpower, or expert opinion. The Truman Committee’s examination revealed not only the project’s weak preparation but a larger wartime question: whether the military could direct vast industrial resources without effective civilian oversight.

Origins and Secrecy

The project’s name came from Canadian oil. Somervell had set it in motion without broad consultation, and the War Department concealed its budget request within a $25 million item described only as construction of military facilities in Canada and Alaska. The secrecy was intended chiefly to avoid interference from other civilian agencies, particularly Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior and head of the Petroleum Administration. That choice kept agencies with relevant responsibilities and expertise outside the process while the plan gathered momentum.

The project’s advocates had not established the practical basis for a pipeline on this scale. Its route crossed 1,200 miles of difficult territory, yet planning had not adequately accounted for conditions of terrain or climate, the availability of construction materials and workers, or the views of oil experts, the Corps of Engineers, and the War Production Board. Employees of contractor Stephen Bechtel promoted the undertaking as an exceptional achievement, but its grand scale was not matched by the groundwork needed to judge whether it was feasible or worthwhile.

The episode took place amid a wider expansion of military influence over the economy. In the first six months of 1942, military contracts added $400 billion to the economy, and Harry S. Truman worried that ambitious generals and admirals were gaining power over industry and agriculture. In a broadcast later that year, he described civilian control as a defining issue for the country’s future political and economic structure. His support for a single head of procurement, even when the committee disagreed with that official, reflected a related concern: oversight should not become lawmakers dictating policy, but the war effort still needed accountable civilian direction.

The Committee’s Examination

When Somervell appeared before the Truman Committee, Ickes also testified. He described the project as having grown from a one-page memorandum and called the pipeline useless; after hearing Somervell’s chief adviser, James H. Graham, the committee reached much the same judgment. Graham, a dollar-a-year man, did not know the planned length of the pipeline. He had prepared no cost estimate and believed no one else had either. His stance that wartime costs need not be considered sharpened the committee’s concern: the project had proceeded without even a basic accounting of its scale and expense.

The hearing made the distance between military authority and civilian accountability visible. Somervell arrived accompanied by four brigadier generals and several majors. During the proceedings, when he asked for water, his glass passed down the ranks; a major eventually filled it and returned it through the same chain. The detail, recorded by United Press reporter Allen Drury, gave the formal hierarchy a pointed physical expression. It was Hugh Fulton and Senator Harley Kilgore who conducted most of the questioning over four and a half hours, while Harry S. Truman listened and then brought the Navy’s position into the record.

Harry S. Truman had asked whether the Navy had been consulted or invited to participate. A search of Navy files, according to a letter from the department, found no record of such an inquiry, and no Navy officer or official had been questioned orally about the project. Somervell said he had never claimed to have asked the Navy. He then maintained that the Chief of Naval Operations and others had expressed support. Harry S. Truman pointed out that the Secretary of the Navy held the opposite view and adjourned the committee. The exchange left a concrete test of the project’s claims: the agency with a direct interest in ships and oil had not been consulted, and the account of naval support was disputed by its own department.

Cost and Consequences

The committee’s criticism did not stop the Canol Pipeline Project. It went ahead and ultimately cost $134 million, money the account judges need not have been spent. The loss was not only financial. At one point the work involved 4,000 troops and 12,000 civilians, along with materials and manpower needed elsewhere in the war effort. The project thus turned inadequate planning into a larger cost: resources were committed to a scheme whose necessity and feasibility had not been convincingly established.

Canol also showed the limits of congressional investigation. The Truman Committee could expose poor preparation, question military officials, and bring agency disagreement into public view, but it could not ensure that every criticized undertaking would be halted. The project continued after the hearing, making the scrutiny consequential without making it controlling. That distinction matters to the committee’s record: oversight could challenge decisions and reveal waste, but its authority did not amount to command over the agencies carrying them out.

Significance in the Truman Committee’s Record

The committee’s wartime work was later regarded as an outstanding congressional investigative effort, with estimates crediting it with savings as high as $15 billion. The exact total cannot be established, and that figure was almost certainly exaggerated. Its deterrent effect was less easily measured: the prospect of investigation and public exposure encouraged people in industry, government, and the military to do their jobs more carefully. Canol belongs on the less successful side of that record. The committee identified a costly failure, but its scrutiny could not undo the expenditure or recover the resources already committed.

The project’s significance therefore lies both in what it wasted and in what its hearing made plain. A military undertaking of continental scale had been initiated in secret, budgeted under a vague description, and advanced without reliable cost calculations or consultation with the Navy. By testing those omissions in public, the Truman Committee turned an obscure construction scheme into an example of the need to keep wartime power answerable to civilian judgment. Canol’s eventual cost also supplied the counterpoint: exposing a mistake was not the same as preventing it.