Lennox knew nothing of this, and nor did he read his audience at all well. He told Mountbatten that Pyke should go, largely on the grounds of his left-wing political outlook, but had failed to grasp the extent to which these views were shared by Mountbatten himself. At the time one of the closest friends and advisers to the CCO was the committed Marxist Peter Murphy; Mountbatten’s wife was receptive to the Left and had become increasingly pro-Soviet; it has even been suggested that Mountbatten was a keen student of the Week, edited by Comintern agent Claud Cockburn, and in 1936 had read excerpts to the King, Edward VIII, stressing the perils of Nazism. A call from MI5 to say that one of his most intelligent, creative and industrious employees had communist sympathies was never going to scare him off. If anything, it might have endeared him to Mountbatten, who was ever the contrarian.
The CCO ignored MI5’s suggestion that Pyke should be dropped. He was under no legal obligation to act on this advice; and, anyway, he was under the impression that a separate branch of MI5 had given Pyke security clearance. Instead, he did everything to ensure that his trip to the US got off to a good start. The scheme which had been proposed by this civilian – their scheme – could change the shape of the war and Mountbatten was not prepared to let the unsubstantiated concerns of the Security Service get in the way.
HOW TO SUCCEED IN AMERICA
FROM THE SIGNS in restaurants and cafés inviting you to drink as much coffee as you liked, through to the unbombed majesty of the city’s ramrod-straight avenues, Washington DC had an unreal and at times magical quality for anyone who had spent the early years of the war in London. There was a weightlessness to life without air raids, rationing or the threat of Nazi invasion. The city looked healthier and more affluent than the British capital. Its people were better dressed and rosier in the cheek, their way of speaking was more confident and direct, and so was the mood, as Geoffrey Pyke discovered on arrival towards the end of April 1942.
General Marshall, Harry Hopkins, Churchill and Mountbatten had agreed that if Pyke was to be taken seriously by the US Army he would have to be accompanied by several British Army officers. One of the men chosen was Major E. A. M. Wedderburn of the Royal Scots – Sandy to his friends – a barrister in peacetime who suffered from a weak heart, asthma, bronchitis and gastric ulcers. In spite of all this, remarkably, he was a formidable mountaineer and one of the most respected instructors at the Winter Warfare School in Lochailort, Scotland. Though Pyke found Wedderburn initially distant, he soon warmed to this perspicacious Scot, praising his ‘intelligence’ and ‘absolute integrity’.
The third member of the party was altogether different. Just days before they left for the US, Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s Special Envoy to Europe, had shared with Mountbatten his fear that a temporary officer like Wedderburn would not pack enough of a military punch on the other side of the Atlantic. Though a businessman in peacetime, Harriman understood the shibboleths of the American military all too well. This third man should be ‘preferably from the Royal Tank Corps and of a rank not less than Brigadier’.
By coincidence, just two weeks earlier Brigadier Nigel Duncan had joined Combined Operations from the Royal Tank Corps. He was a slender, upright individual who spoke in short, stammered bursts. For Pyke he was both ‘War Office par excellence’ and ‘“Staff College” par excellence. He is not even aware of this quality. To change him, he would have to be born again, and born different.’
Duncan seemed to be a perfect fit and was hastily attached to the British mission just days before its departure for the US. Efforts were made to bring the Sandhurst-schooled brigadier up to speed. He was given papers to read and told by General Nye – no less than Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff – that the Plough project ‘may shorten the war by years’. But there was only so much he could take in.
In Washington DC the three Britons spent their first night in the luxurious Wardiman Park Hotel, one of the largest hotels in the world, before moving the next day. Perhaps one of them had pushed for a more central location, as for the rest of their stay they operated out of the air-conditioned Sheraton Lee Hotel, on 17th and L, two minutes from the White House. It was also one block from the Soviet Embassy.
Pyke was thrilled by the sights and sounds of the American capital, even if he found the latter somewhat muted. Since crossing the Atlantic in ‘the bomb rack of a bomber’ he had become ‘slightly deaf’. It was as if he was hearing everything through a fine layer of cotton. In conversation he had always prided himself on his ability to read his audience and adjust his message accordingly, yet now that the need to do so was greater than ever he felt himself to be at a small disadvantage.
Perhaps this did not matter. He was in the American capital on a secret government mission which had backing at the highest level. He had never felt so relevant. Among his papers were letters of introduction to Harry Hopkins, also known as the ‘Assistant President’, and to William Stephenson, the British spymaster and head of British Security Coordination (BSC), who was to devise ‘adequate cover’ for Plough. Another letter was to Captain John Knox, Combined Operations Liaison Officer in the US, to whom Mountbatten stressed ‘the great importance which the Prime Minister and Mr Averell Harriman attach to this scheme which, indeed, has grown in importance in their minds since the departure of General Marshall and Mr Harry Hopkins’. In 1929, during Pyke’s bankruptcy hearings, one of the examining barristers had referred witheringly to the Malting House School as the bankrupt’s ‘great scheme’. Now Mountbatten described Plough using the same phrase. ‘If Mr Pyke’s great scheme comes off,’ he continued, ‘“never in the history of human conflict will so few immobilise so many” (to paraphrase the Prime Minister).’ Such is the nature of ‘great schemes’.
Pyke’s task was simple. He would have to win over the American military to this new idea. For the first time it seemed as though this restless, industrious innovator had been handed the chance to shape history.
Three days after their arrival the three members of the British mission made the short journey through the mounting heat of the day to the War Department. They were led past armed sentries to a room containing fifteen US staff generals and colonels, including the Deputy Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Joseph MacNarney who was there to preside over the meeting, as well as General Eisenhower, Assistant Chief of Staff and head of Operations Division, who had brought along ‘all the officers of my staff immediately concerned’. There were also officials from the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), a powerful new government agency coordinating war-related scientific research and industrial engineering. It was a mighty display of military and scientific capital and, as requested, Pyke got up to introduce Plough.
Nobody in the audience was used to being addressed by someone looking like this. The battered glasses, scraggly facial hair, lack of uniform, the more expressive and at times musical delivery – all this set Pyke apart. But they had been warned. General Marshall had circulated a note about the project, describing the man behind it as ‘a very odd-looking individual’ who ‘talks well and may have an important contribution to make’.
‘No one, except Hitler, has ever spoken to so many generals for so long,’ Wedderburn later wrote of Pyke’s performance. Others referred to him ‘lecturing’ the room and resisting attempts by others to interrupt. He had a lot to get through, certainly, and as well as introducing the generals to the scheme he tried, no doubt, to describe the broader philosophy behind it. The gadfly Pyke was forever happy to make a fool of himself and elicit laughter, confusion or anger if – and only if – it challenged the preconceptions of his audience. Yet by his own admission, on that day he ‘spoke badly’ and did not endear himself to everyone in that room.
His partial deafness might have played a part; he might have been nervous. But what really threw him was the growing sense as he spoke that the room was not with him. When he described the importance of international collaboration and wide-ranging scientific research, he looked o
ut onto a sea of blank faces. It seemed that the US Army was enthusiastic about Plough but wanted the project for itself. He worried that the generals had failed to grasp the strategic concept behind it, not because it was too complex but, rather, ‘because the idea is too simple’.
In spite of his shaky performance, by the end of that session, wrote Eisenhower, ‘a working committee was organised, which will start on the task of developing snow-sleds without delay’. Days later Project Plough was divided in two. The elite Plough force would be trained up by the War Department’s Operations Division under General Eisenhower, while Brigadier-General Raymond W. Moses, Assistant Chief of Staff and head of the Army’s Supply Branch, would oversee the development of the snowmobile by OSRD.
‘Things had to happen fast, and they did,’ began Dr Vannevar Bush, head of OSRD. ‘[Palmer] Putnam carried the ball throughout, and he certainly made it move.’ Under Putnam were the likes of Hartley Rowe and Sherman Warner, experienced industrial engineers who would later play key roles in the the atomic-bomb research programme, the Manhattan Project, at Los Alamos. The Plough snowmobile was in safe hands and, as Pyke wrote to Mountbatten, ‘despite hirsute appearance of your Director of Programmes’ the project had been taken up with genuine enthusiasm. General Moses confirmed on 3 May that the Plough force would be operational by the end of the year, replete with snowmobiles each capable of carrying two men, food for thirty days, fuel for 250 miles, 600 rounds of ammunition, two rifles, one automatic weapon and 100 pounds of explosives.
It was a thrilling claim, and of a piece with the contagious confidence of the US Army which Pyke had begun to relish. ‘Because of the American attitude to the unknown and to the impossible, even in Army circles, I find myself more at home here than at home,’ he told Mountbatten in the first of a long series of letters back to London. Provided the US Army’s ‘hostility to basic research’ could be overcome, ‘we may be ready in time with [a] practicable venture’.
The Plough project was swimming in optimism, and it seemed as though Pyke had more or less succeeded in winning over the American military. Indeed, after that first week in Washington DC it was hard to see how anything could really go wrong.
Several days after these confident assessments of the project, Sandy Wedderburn arrived at Soda Springs Ski Resort, in northern California, where he expected to find Pyke. It was the first day of a week-long set of tests on different snowmobiles to determine which one should be adapted for the new Plough vehicle. By the end of the fourth day most of the project’s key players had arrived in Soda Springs. But there was still no sign of Pyke.
Wedderburn was told that Pyke was finding the heat in the capital ‘trying’ and had decided to stay where he was rather than endure higher temperatures on the West Coast. It was an unusual explanation. In fact, it barely made sense: a Californian ski resort was much less humid than Washington DC. But Pyke was known for idiosyncratic decisions like this.
Those who did make it to California were given demonstrations of the various snowmobiles. First the Eliasson motorised toboggan – dismissed by Wedderburn as ‘little more than a winter sports toy’ – followed by track-laying vehicles, a single-screw snowmobile and the Burgess, similar to the Armstead that Pyke originally favoured in that it was propelled by twin Archimedian screws. Yet this particular Burgess had not been used all winter and the sprockets of the chain drive had warped, meaning it would need to be repaired.
Rather than wait to have this done, the assembled party discussed the vehicles they had seen and agreed that the new Plough snowmobile should be track-laying and amphibious, similar to the Tucker ‘Sno Cat’. Pyke’s idea of using an Archimedian screw was, they felt, a distraction. Too little was known about it.
Once this discussion had ended Colonel Hoag formally instructed OSRD to ‘design, develop, build and test one or more pilot models of a track-laying, airborne, amphibious snow vehicle, to carry a pay-load of 1200 lbs up a 25-degree slope in deep snow, and have a maximum speed on level packed snow of 35 mph’. The DNA of the new Plough snowmobile had been decided. Two days later Pyke found out.
‘I wish to submit my resignation from this mission and work in connection with my project,’ he cabled Mountbatten (note that it was no longer ‘our’ project). ‘I ask you to have me returned to London by air within some reasonable time as agreed.’
The idea that he had been unable to cope with the Californian heat was an invention. Pyke had been kept away from those tests by design.
What infuriated him about this was that he knew more about the evolution of snowmobiles over the last twenty years than perhaps anyone else in North America, possibly the world. He had studied every snowmobile patent ever filed and during his months of intensive research had compiled a list of small-scale experiments to help determine which of the existing vehicles should be adapted. Yet rather than have the tests observed by an expert like Pyke they were overseen by the former Chief Engineer at the United Fruit Company, a naval architect, and two senior military men who between them had no experience of snow warfare and knew almost nothing about snowmobiles. It was like organising a Combined Operations conference on polo without inviting Mountbatten. Brigadier Duncan saw things differently.
Shortly before setting off for the West Coast he had sent Pyke an apparently artless note promising to return his copy of Shaw’s Major Barbara, which he had now read three times, adding that he would be sightseeing the next day and, finally, ‘I am off this week.’ He did not explain where to.
With Machiavellian efficiency this upright, unassuming soldier had taken control of the British Mission. As Duncan saw it, he was the senior officer on a military project which, by some oversight, still had a civilian attached – a troublesome one at that. Keeping Pyke away from Soda Springs was, for him, no more than an expression of rank.
‘I am sure Duncan sincerely believes he was sent out here to carry out my ideas at his discretion, according to his method,’ Pyke complained to Mountbatten, ‘and that, as we don’t agree, he had the authority to arrange things without reference to me, including the authority to think me unable to endure the heat of the snow fields. Brigadier Duncan would, I am sure, lead his tanks into battle with bravery and efficiency. He is, I have no doubt, a good officer in peacetime. But in my opinion he does not possess the qualities requisite for helping to bring my ideas into being.’ The problem, he went on, was ‘that Duncan not only does not believe in my policy; he does not begin to understand it, and does not really understand that there are two policies’. Duncan was ‘in fact so contra-suggestible that he would not understand anything I were to say. When I demur to his statements that 2 and 2 are 5, he thinks me no gentleman because I won’t agree they are 4½.’ This was not to say that Duncan was at all slow: his attitude was ‘due to rigidity of intellect, not lack of it’. He possessed ‘both the extreme cunning and the extreme simplicity of a child’, both of which he had employed to force Pyke’s resignation.
But Pyke had no intention of actually resigning. You do not need to look hard between the lines of his resignation letter, all 3,000 words of it, to see that this was a bluff. He wanted Mountbatten to choose between him and Duncan, yet the CCO had other ideas.
‘Once a civilian has joined a fighting organisation and involved his country in a major project in war he loses the ethical right of withdrawing,’ came the reply, testier than usual. Bernal was more direct. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ he wrote. ‘Your resignation disastrous not only to scheme but to whole of scientific collaboration in war effort. [. . .] I can help on scientific side if you let me know what problems are.’
Yet neither Mountbatten nor Bernal was responding to Pyke’s 3,000 word exposition of the situation. Instead they had been sent a crude précis written by Captain Knox, through whom most of Pyke’s messages went. As he must have known, no cypher clerk would be prepared to encrypt a 3,000 word text. Instead Knox had cabled over to London what he felt was the salient point: ‘Pyke’s grievance is based entirely upon diffe
rences with Duncan.’
Mountbatten thought it ridiculous that Pyke should ‘allow personal grievances to interfere with the major project’ and asked Knox to ‘smooth out differences between Duncan and Pyke and get team spirit into them. Surely Pyke realises that only real hope of getting his own scheme through is by using British Brigadier. Advise Duncan to be above board with Pyke. I wish them to be friends and co-operate closely.’
The following night Knox took Pyke out to dinner and ‘during three and a half hours discussion, I appealed to Pyke from every point of view, but failed to alter his decision, which he states is taken on fundamental differences and not on personal grounds’. Pyke then wrote to Mountbatten describing himself as ‘anxious and distressed lest you continue to think I am or would let either you down or what became of our joint concept’. ‘If irritation and impatience were adequate causes for chucking this project, it would never have survived its first 20 months,’ he added. ‘Put briefly, my reason for resignation is this: I am a drag on Duncan’s policy; he is a drag on mine. [. . .] I am not chucking the job, it has chucked me. There is no question of dropping the pilot, only of discarding the mascot. I am not a mascot. In London you generously let me be the pilot.’
Pyke’s task in the US had changed. The Plough vehicle and the Plough guerrilla force looked set to go ahead. It was up to him to ensure that both lived up to their promise, and to do this he had to wrest back control of the British Mission. Otherwise there was a danger that Plough would end up as a confused and watered-down translation of his original idea and as such would be militarily useless. Rather than withdraw his resignation, Pyke decided to hold out for a change of heart in London. As he waited, Brigadier Duncan ran amok.
‘Macbeth’, as Pyke and Wedderburn now referred to him, spent the days that followed travelling up and down the East Coast making uninformed decisions on snowmobile design. Earlier it had been agreed that the vehicle must travel at 35 mph on level packed snow. Duncan approved plans for a vehicle with a maximum speed of just 20 mph. The difference did not bother him. He described the inferior specifications as ‘good enough for the very good reason that I do not think anything better can be obtained’. There is no more accurate expression of the difference between Duncan and Pyke when faced with the mechanically unknown.
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 28