It is unclear whether Pyke, Mountbatten or Churchill came up with the idea, yet in the days after that conversation at Chequers it was suggested that these snowmobiles should be designed and manufactured in the United States. This was without precedent. Churchill had sent Sir Henry Tizard across the Atlantic earlier in the war in order to strengthen Anglo-American ties and draw in the American scientific community, but until then a British military concept had never been outsourced like this to the United States.
Pyke suggested taking things further. Why not bring in other Allies and set up a ‘United Nations snow-warfare board’? Norwegians, Canadians, Americans, British and Russians would all work together to create an international guerrilla force. His plan was welcomed in Combined Operations, save for the inclusion of the Soviets. This was not the first time that Pyke had pushed for greater collaboration with Russia, nor would it be the last.
Pyke knew somehow that in July 1941 the Soviet Union had ordered three Armstead snowmobiles, and felt ‘they are sure to be at work on them’. The Russians had greater experience of snow warfare, he went on, and could easily supply logistical support for assaults on Romania and Norway, as well as summer training grounds in Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land and Spitzbergen. ‘We are now at the 59th minute of the hour!’ he told Mountbatten on 2 April. ‘I submit most urgently that:- 1. We go at once to the Chiefs of Staff [. . .] 2. We then go at once to Maisky [the Soviet ambassador], telling him the whole story frankly, putting every card on the table. [. . .] Once satisfied of our good faith – AND of our security – Maisky, I am advised, would probably wire Stalin or Vorosholiv at once; and you’d get an immediate reply.’ The phrase ‘I am advised’ was striking. In case his opinion was unclear Pyke called in the same letter for ‘a 101% honest and persistent effort be made to secure the cooperation of the Russians’, adding that they were bound to like Combined Operations for it was ‘a small, vital, growing (if delicate) organisation. The Russians have a slogan:- “We are always on the side of the embryo.”’
Mountbatten and Wildman-Lushington felt otherwise, and had heard about the legendary reluctance of Soviet commanders to collaborate with their allies. They were more interested in gaining American support, and it is possible that they were aware of the imminent visit of two high-profile Americans to whom the idea could be proposed.
Harry Hopkins was a farm boy from Iowa who was later described by Churchill as ‘the most faithful and perfect channel between the President and me’. Hopkins was President Roosevelt’s right-hand man, confidant and adviser. He was a tenacious negotiator, a Washington insider who drank too much coffee and was often at his best at a negotiating table with an agenda and a deadline. He had been sent over the year before to see Churchill. Now he had been dispatched to London again, accompanied this time by General Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff, in order to discuss the Allied invasion of Europe.
On arrival the two men went to Downing Street where they made the case for opening a second front against Germany right away. ‘I doubt if any single thing is as important as getting some sort of a front this summer against Germany,’ Hopkins had told the President. The Americans outlined two plans: Round-Up and Sledgehammer. The first was an all-out assault on Europe by forty-eight infantry divisions to begin in a year’s time, while Sledgehammer involved a smaller force mounting a heavy raid against a single French port. This was to happen by September 1942 and would, it was hoped, divert German troops from Russia.
The response at Downing Street was opaque, yet at dinner that evening, as Churchill got drunk and told stories about the American Civil War, Field Marshal Brooke explained to Hopkins and Marshall that it would be impossible to launch a major assault on Europe so soon due to a lack of landing craft and the necessary intelligence about their targets.
This was not the response that either had been hoping for, and the following morning Hopkins met Churchill alone to stress again the need for prompt action. ‘Churchill took this very seriously and led me to believe that he didn’t fully take in before the seriousness of our proposals.’ But the Prime Minister remained non-committal.
While Hopkins was at Downing Street, Marshall had gone to see the British Chiefs of Staff and was won over by the youngest: Mountbatten. Churchill had appointed him as the fourth Chief of Staff only the month before, much to the annoyance of those he had leapfrogged and two of the three existing Chiefs. While Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal welcomed his arrival, Sir Dudley Pound, a fellow naval man, resented it. ‘Rather doubtful how that business will run!’ wrote Field Marshal Brooke, later describing Mountbatten’s appointment as ‘a snag’.
General Marshall, on the other hand, harboured none of their prejudices and was drawn to Mountbatten’s can-do spirit. At the end of this meeting he arranged to visit Combined Operations.
‘This is amazing,’ Marshall was reported to have said as he was shown around Richmond Terrace. Like most senior American officers he had never seen members of all three services working together like this.
‘Well, after all, we all speak the same language,’ replied Mountbatten. ‘Come to think of it, so do you and we. Why don’t you send me some American officers?’ Less than a month later, nine American officers were installed in Richmond Terrace.
During this brief tour of Combined Operations, General Marshall was also introduced to Pyke. As prompted, the suspected Soviet agent told the US Army’s Chief of Staff about his plan. Though bemused by his appearance, Marshall was intrigued by what he had described and left the building with a twelve-page memorandum explaining the project in more detail. This document was among Marshall’s papers as he travelled to Chequers the next day.
With just four days to go, the Americans had so far failed to pin down the British. Both knew the importance of returning to the US with cast-iron commitments, and in the less formal setting of Chequers they hoped to get them. Hopkins, for one, was inspired by his surroundings. ‘It’s only when you see that country in spring,’ he recalled, ‘that you begin to understand why the English have written the best goddam poetry in the world.’ Nor was he feeling the cold at Chequers as much as he had done on his last visit, having remembered to pack some heavy underwear. While it was doing its job of keeping him warm it was, as he cabled Roosevelt that night, ‘itching like the devil’.
There followed on that first morning in Chequers an event which would have made Hopkins forget all about his underwear: the British suggested a new offensive against the Germans.
In the presence of Hopkins and Marshall as well as Churchill, Nye and the ever-present Lindemann (now Lord Cherwell), Mountbatten proposed that the Americans take on Pyke’s scheme. The US Army could develop the new snowmobiles and train up a specialist guerrilla force to use them. What was now known as the ‘Plough’ project – a code name Pyke had insisted upon to disguise the fact that these new snowmobiles would skim over the surface of the snow rather than plough through it – would be responsible for an operation in Norway before the end of 1942. Plough would be a snow-borne Sledgehammer, only less suicidal and far more damaging given its capacity to knock out HEP stations such as Vemork where heavy water was being produced.
Plough was not what Marshall had come for, and nor had the man Churchill liked to call ‘Lord Root of the Matter’, Harry Hopkins. But they needed to go home with something.
They accepted. As the minutes of this meeting show, ‘it was agreed that the United States authorities would undertake to develop and manufacture the necessary armoured fighting snow vehicles (to be known by some suitable “cover” title, such as “snow ploughs”). It was further decided that Mr Pyke, the originator of the scheme, with one or two assistants should be flown to the United States as soon as possible after General Marshall’s return and work under his general direction.’ The Norwegians and Canadians would be asked to send an officer with experience of snow warfare to work alongside Pyke, and it was also agreed that Churchill would ask Stalin to send over a Russian officer.
This was s
taggering. Three months earlier Pyke had been bed-ridden, unemployed and in possession of a proposal that had been dismissed by Churchill’s scientific adviser as ‘pretentious nonsense’. Now, with that same adviser in the room, it had been taken up by some of the most powerful men on Earth.
At Churchill’s suggestion, Pyke was to be sent to the US to see his idea through to completion. Enormous sums would be poured into its development. Men’s lives would be risked on the basis of his logic. It was the kind of plot twist that would feel contrived in many a novel, and for Pyke it was evidence of the ‘ferocity of purpose’ at government level that he had always craved – the decisive, sudden and emphatic backing for a new scheme which he had once believed to be impossible outside a country like the Soviet Union.
Seeing that Pyke was to go on a ‘most secret’ overseas mission Mountbatten had his salary transferred to SOE, sometimes known as Churchill’s ‘Secret Army’, and from late April he was officially employed by this rival organisation and lent to General Marshall’s staff through Mountbatten. A new passport was made for him and towards the end of April this most unusual SOE operative was ready to leave.
Unlike others employed by this organisation, he would not be parachuted into enemy territory to help bring supplies and expertise to the local resistance. Instead he was destined for Washington DC, where there was perhaps less desire to be given advice by the British.
‘I have a feeling that perhaps the USA Army may not be altogether our cup of tea,’ Pyke confided to Mountbatten before his departure. ‘Military people, if I may say so, don’t really plan at all. What they call planning is trying to adapt what they were taught in youth, with the minimum of alteration, to what they can see. That’s why they see so little.’
This was the military approach that Pyke had battled against during the last two months in Richmond Terrace. He had suggested improvements to nearly every aspect of Combined Operations, from its administrative structure and the way it might impede fresh ideas through to the choice of newspapers in the officers’ club. His thoughts were not always welcomed, but on many colleagues he had made a positive impression. In a six-side parting note to Mountbatten, accompanied by Shaw’s (almost) complete works for the Combined Operations HQ Library – ‘I hope that the interest in them will be such that by the time I return they will all have been stolen’ – Pyke described the changes he had observed. While the George Medal was awarded to civilians for gallantry, he suggested a counterpart for ‘Distinguished Courage at the Desk’. The first medals, he told Mountbatten, should go to three majors in Combined Operations, including a Major Wyatt, about whom he wrote, ‘I tremble for his future. Only by sending him back to his regiment will he be saved from becoming a Bloomsbury intellectual.’
Pyke also reminded Mountbatten of the moment during a critical meeting when he had thanked Pyke on behalf of the three services ‘for introducing a new idea’. This had left him speechless. ‘For not far off half a century I have been on this unhappy planet. During, probably, all of that time I have been asking, “Why?” – “What for?” “So what?” and “Why do you do like that, why do you not do like this?” I have put forward a certain number of new ideas. Your remark at this meeting was the first occasion in my life when I have been thanked for introducing a new idea. Hitherto my experience has been to be heartily kicked in the pants for doing so. I was completely taken aback at the time, so that I could not even say “Thank you”; you must allow me to do so now.’
This passage reveals something of the powerful bond that had formed between the two men. Mountbatten not only listened to Pyke’s ideas but thanked him for putting them forward and did his utmost to have them realised. By offering him a job at Combined Operations he had brought Pyke, for the first time in his life, into the establishment, a feeling which resonated with a man who sometimes craved acceptance. Indeed, the tie between them was so close that Pyke had even begun to refer to Plough as a joint creation.
‘Whatever may happen to our scheme now, something, I feel, has already been achieved, and that is that the whole Department is now conscious of the fact that new ideas do exist outside, amongst the general public, and that the Department has the power to appreciate them and to drive them through all resistance to the highest authorities.’ It was another iteration of Pyke’s most radical idea: there is no such thing as a genius for new ideas, and that with care and hard work anyone could do what he did. With that, Geoffrey Pyke set off for the United States, unaware that MI5 had just contacted Mountbatten about his new Director of Programmes.
PYKE HUNT, PART 4
ON 19 MARCH – the day that Combined Operations agreed to go ahead with the Plough scheme – Special Branch filed a new report casting Pyke in a suspicious light once again. They had learnt of a covert organisation called the Inter-States Committee of Communist Groups in Great Britain (ISC), later described as a ‘hush-hush body’ that was ‘shrouded in secrecy’. Chaired by Harry Pollitt, the restored head of the CPGB, it was a ‘channel through which the different refugee communist groups have contact with Moscow’ and, as one man close to it observed, it ‘came near to being a little Communist International in itself’. For Special Branch, the existence of this body was evidence of just what ‘a dangerous experiment’ it had been during 1939 to allow ‘so many leading Czech, German and Austrian Communists – many of them being the most experienced and trusted Communists of Central Europe, while others were for years the frontier workers of the Comintern’s illegal groups – to find a refuge in England’. These communists were now laying the foundations for a post-war Europe that was in thrall to Moscow. They saw themselves as ‘the rulers of tomorrow’, and were ‘closely in touch with London Soviet circles, who saw their importance at a time when others thought that they counted for little’.
One of the ISC’s strategies was to set up émigré organisations called ‘Free Movements’ in the style of the Free French movement. These were designed to look and sound like governments-in-waiting, in the hope that the Allies would instal them after the defeat of the Axis powers. In reality they were under hidden Communist control.
In late 1941 the German communists in Britain were instructed to start a Free German Movement. The only problem was that their arch-rivals, the German socialists, had got there first and were now on the verge of setting up their very own ‘Free German Committee’. The communists decided to launch a smear campaign.
‘THE “FREE GERMAN” TRICK’ was the headline splashed over the front page of the left-wing Sunday Dispatch on 8 February 1942, followed by a virulent denunciation of this socialist-backed Free German Committee. ‘The men concerned must be watched,’ the article fumed, ‘and their activities curbed.’
Special Branch was curious to know who had placed the article, as this would obviously lead them to the ISC. They soon had a name. One of their informants assured them that the individual behind this Sunday Dispatch article was also ‘said to be in charge of Communist “action propaganda”’. His name was Geoffrey Pyke.
Pyke in the 1940s
Could this be true? Was Pyke both ‘Professor P.’ and the man in charge of CPGB action propaganda?
During the first two years of the war, before joining Combined Operations, Pyke had certainly been an active journalist. By looking at what he wrote and when, and those times when he suggested an article or pushed for a particular book to be published, it may be possible to see if he was working as a communist propagandist.
Early on in the war Pyke wrote a string of articles on one subject: the need to dig deep air-raid shelters in the seams of chalk outside the capital. Tunnelling through chalk was relatively easy and in very little time vast underground dormitories could be made to house the population of London each night. As early as May 1939 Pyke had called for a Royal Commission to examine the question. Public inquiries like this usually happened in response to an outcry – but ‘it is not essential to have the disaster first’.
Between December 1940 and late April 1941 Pyke follow
ed up with a flurry of further articles about the need for deep chalk shelters – ‘Perfect safety for a million in six months’, ‘Cheaper than Andersons’, ‘Experts Back “Safety in Chalk” proposals’ and ‘Build Chalk Shelters Now, Mr Morrison’ – all of which appeared in the left-wing weekly Reynolds News. He gave an impassioned speech on the subject at a public meeting of Democratic Movement and he persuaded an Oxford statistician, E. J. Buckatzsch, to write a piece in an academic journal in support of them. He also tried to get an article in The Times but was turned down on the grounds that ‘it played straight into the hands of the Communists’.
The chalk-shelter campaign had by then been taken up with great enthusiasm by the CPGB. It had ‘everything to it from our point of view’, explained Douglas Hyde, then News Editor of the Moscow-backed Daily Worker. ‘It had the appearance of being a crusade for greater safety for the common people, whilst at the same time it spread alarm about the provisions already made by the authorities. Moreover, it gave us an opportunity to use many of our crypto-communists on public activity.’
These undercover communists included Dr Allan Nunn May, later imprisoned as a Soviet agent for betraying atomic secrets, as well as J. B. S. Haldane and Ivor Montagu, both friends of Pyke who were later revealed to have been Soviet agents, belonging to the ‘X-Group’, a GRU espionage cell.
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 26