Since the days of the Industrial Revolution, the "eccentric inventor" has been a standard comedy character. The chaotic conditions that wartime imposes on the structure of governments, especially as they cast about for a technological advantage over the enemy, can propel examples of this comic stereotype into positions of power and influence. One such person was Geoffrey Pyke, who came up with one of the more bizarre schemes of World War Two - a plan to build huge aircraft carriers of ice. Pyke was born in London in 1894. When war broke out in 1914, he tried to infiltrate Germany disguised as an American salesman so he could send back dispatches to an English newspaper from within the Reich. He was arrested soon after he reached Berlin and placed in an internment camp, but he escaped to Holland. After the war, he made a fortune dealing in commodities, using the money to support a private school to test his radical theories of education. He lost his fortune in 1928 and spent the rest of the interwar period in pursuing various idealistic schemes. One of these was to send teams of students disguised as golfers into Germany to conduct a secret public opinion poll proving the German people did not want war, and then present the evidence to Hitler. Unfortunately, Pyke launched this project in the summer of 1939, and Hitler invaded Poland before the students could finish their work. Pyke spent the next two years trying to interest the British government in his ideas, but their unorthodoxy and his odd, scruffy personal appearance combined to prevent him from making much headway. He did attract the attention of Leo Amery, then Secretary of State for India, who gave him an introduction to Mountbatten. In March 1942, Churchill appointed Mountbatten head of Combined Operations, an inter-service command responsible for amphibious operations and commando raids, and Pyke was taken on the staff. He soon distinguished himself by the imaginativeness but ultimate unworkability of his plans. For example, he proposed to destroy the Rumanian oil fields so crucial to the German war effort by simultaneously dropping incendiary bombs and parties of British commandos dressed as Rumanian firemen on them. The bombers would start some fires, and the disguised commandos, riding replicas of Rumanian fire engines, would spread confusion and stoke the fires on the ground. Another plan was for small groups of commandos to infiltrate Norway on mechanized sledges to carry out raids on German-occupied factories and power stations. This idea had a better reception from the American government and was to have been one of the first missions of the newly-created First Special Service Force, a joint American-Canadian unit. The initial design work Pyke did on the snow-crossing vehicle the raider groups would use led to the development of the "Weasel" tracked utility vehicle. However, at this time the Battle of the Atlantic presented a more pressing problem. Because there was a critical shortage of aircraft carriers to escort them, merchant convoys were taking enormous losses from U-boat action once they were beyond the range of land-based ASW aircraft. In September 1942, Pyke presented Mountbatten with "Habbakuk", a 232 page plan to build huge aircraft carriers and transports out of "Pykrete", a frozen mixture of wood pulp and water that he had developed that was much stronger and less likely to melt than ordinary ice. With a minimal amount of power used to keep them cool, these frozen ships would be impervious to shells, torpedoes, or aircraft bombs. These "bergships" could remain in the mid-Atlantic to provide air cover for convoys, or could also serve as offshore bases when the time came to invade France, Germany, or Japan. Mountbatten was so enthusiastic that he went to see Churchill with a block of Pykrete, dropping it into his bathtub to show how slowly it melted. Churchill happened to be in the bath at the time, but this did not prevent him from taking a personal interest in the project. On December 7, 1942, Churchill wrote a memo to the Chiefs of Staff: "I attach the greatest importance to an examination of these ideas. The advantage of a floating island, or islands, are so dazzling that they do not at the moment need to be discussed. There would be no difficulty in finding a place to put such a stepping stone in any of the plans of war now under consideration." The obvious place to build these ships was in Canada, and the aid of the National Research Council was enlisted. Work began on solving the engineering problems associated with building and deploying ships of the planned size and materials, and the University of Saskatchewan began to build a small prototype carrier at a mountain lake near Jasper, Alberta. Pyke came to Canada in the spring of 1943 to check on the work being done. Surviving preliminary drawings for one of these ships showed a vessel 2,000 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 200 feet deep, with walls of Pykrete 50 feet thick. This was over twice the size of the largest aircraft carrier afloat at the time. It would have displaced at least 2 million tons, and could have carried up to 150 aircraft. Building one would have required 300,000 tons of wood pulp and 6-8,000 man-years, at a cost of 70 million dollars. It would also have needed a crew of 2,000 men to maintain it, and 26 aircraft engines to move it around at speeds of no more than 10 knots. Mountbatten had kept his interest in the project and arranged a demonstration of the properties of Pykrete at the Quebec Conference between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King in August 1943. Two blocks of ice and Pykrete were wheeled into the conference room. Mountbatten gave the American General H.H. 'Hap' Arnold a cleaver and told him to chop away. Arnold split the ice block easily but could not damage the Pykrete. Then Mountbatten pulled out a revolver and started shooting. The ice block shattered, but the bullet ricocheted off the Pykrete and bounced around the room before burying itself in the wall! Despite this impressive demonstration, engineering studies completed in late 1943 showed the impracticality of Habbakuk. The project had only gotten as far as it had because of the prestige of its backers. In October 1943 Mountbatten was named Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, and Churchill had found other things to obsess about. Support for Habbakuk waned quickly after Mountbatten left. The inter-Allied board charged with directing the research on the project disbanded in March 1944, and Pyke was transferred to other projects at the Admiralty. By the summer of that year, the invasion of France and the near-absolute Allied naval superiority in the Pacific made it obvious that the usefulness of Habbakuk had been overtaken by events. (Curiously, though, no one has ever exploited the properties of Pykrete for civilian use.) Pyke continued to generate ideas for the rest of the war, but his star had fallen. After the war he turned his energies to "intermediate technology" projects, useful for the reconstruction of devastated Europe (for example, using human pedal power to drive trains and trucks). He also contributed to a plan for organizing the new British National Health Service. Frustrated with his lifelong battle to get other people to understand and appreciate the ideas and inventions that poured forth from him, he committed suicide in February, 1948. Back to Cry Havoc #25 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com