Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy

by Henry Hemming

  These were only the initial results. In time Mark’s team was bound to find more fecund combinations of water and wood-pulp. ‘The possible repercussions of having a material of this quality that can be made in any desired shape, uniform and monolithically AND which floats, are obvious.’

  Just before Mountbatten ordered him back to London, Pyke’s iceberg scheme underwent its final evolutionary leap. Rather than customise a natural berg, Pyke proposed to build an artificial one using reinforced ice. Just as a refrigerating ship is kept cool by a series of ducts webbed out over its hull this man-made berg would contain ducts capable of keeping the temperature of the ice low enough for it to sail through tropical waters.

  The document he sent to Mountbatten seven weeks later was summarised by its title: Mammoth Unsinkable Vessel with functions of a Floating Airfield. This ‘berg-ship’ made out of reinforced ice would be cheap to build and, on account of its gargantuan size, would be capable of accommodating even modern fighters and bombers. It would measure at least 2,000 feet from bow to stern, making it twice as long as the ocean liner Queen Mary and twice as wide; this would be the largest vessel ever made by man. What was more, it would be unsinkable.

  Water weighs eight times less than steel but is heavier than ice. A berg-ship could not be sunk. To destroy it, an attacker would need to break the vessel up into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which would float, and do this before the initial holes in the hull could be patched up. Here was another startling claim: ‘A battleship, when hit, has to go into port for repair. There is no such need for the berg-ship. The damage done by projectiles can be repaired at sea and in a very short time. All damage will be made good by filling the hole with about five-sixths crushed ice and water replacing the refrigerating pipes (made of cardboard) and refreezing.’

  The berg-ship, in theory at least, was an astounding improvement on the modern aircraft carrier. Each one would be cheap, unsinkable, capable of carrying heavy bombers and equipped with one of the most powerful secret weapons in any war: surprise. Until then, most major breakthroughs in naval design had occurred in peacetime, and as a result of this few sides had ever gone to war with a telling technological advantage over the other. The berg-ship was different in that it had been conceived during a war. Weapons designed to sink ships of steel would have little or no impact. Magnetic mines would drift harmlessly past; torpedoes would perforate the ship without sinking it. ‘Its adoption by one side will give advantages of surprise that have, I believe, never accompanied the introduction of a new strategic material.’

  The rest of Pyke’s proposal was an imaginative journey into a world in which one side had mastered the military potential of ice before the other. It is unlikely that Mountbatten read these latter sections. They contain colourful descriptions of what Pyke called Super-Cooled Water, or Liquid Ice, being sprayed onto enemy coastal defences before being used to form icy barricades around cities like Genoa, Naples and Hamburg. There are ice floes and dummy ice floes, each with tricksy neon-lit messages for Luftwaffe pilots, such as ‘This is a real floe. Please waste bombs on it.’ Pyke envisioned hundreds of berg-ships lumbering around the world and into enemy ports, where they could merrily ‘smash up every ship to be found there’.

  Lacing the proposal together were broader ideas about deception, the need to take ground without holding it and the importance of winning civilian hearts and minds. Some of this extraneous material has since been dismissed as science fiction, which it was, in the purest sense. But to understand Pyke is to realise that every idea he had was science fiction – science in the fictional stage of its development. This is the passage through which every scientific idea must travel before it can be subjected to rigorous experimentation. What set this proposal apart was the extent to which Pyke had allowed his imagination to race beyond the point at which most scientists would stop. This is why some of it felt outlandish or silly. ‘One way to beat the Germans is precisely by being – not merely funny – but funny, and as thorough as the Germans are. Do you think the men who conceived and built the Trojan Horse were stiff and solemn men?’ Again he was pointing Mountbatten towards something more than cunning and intelligence or what the Ancient Greeks called metis. His emphasis was on laughter, the gateway to deception, which ‘destroys German morale’. The goal should be not just ‘to beat them but to make fools of them in beating them.’ Again there are echoes here of his childhood, of being chased down the corridor at Wellington and the realisation that the only way to really get back at his bullies was by making them look ridiculous.

  For all its flights of fancy Pyke’s scheme contained a brilliant military innovation. It proposed an unsinkable aircraft carrier made out of a cheap new material that could be produced quickly. Yet his paper was merely a starting point, ‘a catalyst of the ideas of other people. NO idea is a good one which does not breed its own successors.’ It was up to Mountbatten to grasp its potential. If he did and was able to press it upon Churchill with characteristic gusto then the scheme might survive its infancy. More likely was that Mountbatten would chuckle at this latest instalment of ‘Pyke’s Nonsense’ and set it aside to focus on more urgent and realistic plans.

  Pyke’s only chance of beating his old enemy, the appearance of absurdity, was by winning over Mountbatten, which was why the proposal was aimed specifically at him. Its jokes and references, even the declarative nature of its sentences, all were tailored to the CCO. ‘My style is a reflection, not of me, but of the man I am writing to,’ Pyke had explained to him. ‘That is why my letters and memoranda to you have been what they are.’ ‘That I do this is your fault,’ he wrote elsewhere. ‘You egg me on. You don’t suppose I write like this to other people – or do you? I am not clear in what leadership consists, but I know – to my cost – that you are a born stimulator of men.’ Mountbatten had become both patron and muse, which was why Pyke chose ‘Habakkuk’ as a cover-name for this proposal (misspelt by his American secretary as ‘Habbakuk’, the spelling that stuck).

  Habakkuk was the Old Testament prophet who had warned: ‘Be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.’ There is also a Donatello sculpture of the same name, a hollow-eyed Habakkuk who seems to stagger under the weight of his prophecy, and who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pyke. But the intended reference was to what Pyke imagined to be Voltaire’s line on Habakkuk: ‘Il était capable de tout.’ So was Mountbatten. From a hospital bed in the Mayo Clinic, his mood mediated by powerful drugs, Pyke began to wait for a response.

  Within three hours of reading Pyke’s proposal, Mountbatten had arranged a conference in Richmond Terrace to discuss the practicality of the scheme. He was captivated. His staff went over Pyke’s document and agreed that it was ‘both sound and brilliant’. The problem was that Mountbatten might not be in a position to do anything about it.

  The CCO’s reputation was at a wartime low. Two weeks after ordering Pyke back from the United States, Mountbatten had overseen the ‘sacrifice’ landing discussed with Roosevelt, the disastrous Commando raid on Dieppe. While the blame for the scale of the defeat was not entirely his – he had called for a pincer attack rather than Montgomery’s frontal assault – Dieppe was seen as his ‘show’ and in the weeks that followed he was openly rebuked by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, and the Prime Minister had demanded a full explanation.

  But it was not yet clear whether the fallout from Dieppe had fundamentally changed the dynamic between Mountbatten and Churchill. At the heart of their relationship had been a weakness for bold, daring ideas, the kind of schemes that made them gasp. Churchill wanted proposals from inventors with ‘corkscrew minds’, and was open to all but the unlikeliest suggestions from his effervescent Chief of Combined Operations. In the past, when they had sat down to discuss these ideas, a curious thing had tended to happen. Usually two people who know each other this well will assume complementary roles, so that if one has a habit of g
etting carried away, the other is there to apply the brakes. Yet during a conference of ‘Mahomet’ and ‘God Almighty’, as they were known in Combined Operations, the opposite was often true. Mountbatten and Churchill had a habit of pushing each other skywards, which was why Brooke and his fellow Chiefs of Staff had come to dread Monday-morning meetings after one of Mountbatten’s weekends at Chequers.

  Churchill and Mountbatten in Casablanca in 1943

  Over the weekend of 5 December 1942 Mountbatten introduced Churchill to the most daring scheme yet from ‘John the Baptist’ – Pyke’s nickname in Combined Operations. The US Ambassador John Winant was also staying, along with Cherwell and Roosevelt’s special envoy, Averell Harriman, but Mountbatten would have explained this idea to Churchill alone.

  He jumped at it. Indeed, by the end of their conversation the Prime Minister had been won over with the force of an infatuation. Churchill was entranced by the idea of a floating airfield made of ice. It was just the kind of spectacular technological innovation that he would find irresistible throughout his premiership. The atomic bomb, for example, might possess more destructive force than any other weapon but it remained, for him, just a bomb. He was more intrigued by proposals which possessed a paradoxical elegance and ingenuity, and in this sense the idea that Mountbatten had just explained was without equal.

  Early on Monday morning Churchill issued an emphatic Personal Minute to his Chiefs of Staff. ‘The advantages of a floating island or islands are so dazzling that they do not at the moment need to be discussed,’ he began. ‘I attach the greatest importance to the prompt examination of these ideas, and every facility should be given to CCO for developing them. He will report to me weekly on the setting-up of the organisation and the preliminary work.’ Pyke could not have hoped for more.

  In the same minute Churchill gave a detailed account of how he felt these berg-ships could be built. Either Mountbatten had slightly misunderstood the proposal or various elements had been lost in translation at Chequers, for Churchill described customising an existing iceberg. This would never have worked. ‘Bombs and torpedoes would crack it, even if they could not sink it,’ wrote one scientist, ‘and natural icebergs have too small a surface above water for an airfield, and are liable to turn over suddenly.’ That was not the point. What mattered was that Churchill’s impulsive and romantic imagination had been seized by the idea of creating these mammoth airfields out of ice.

  Lord Cherwell was the first to try to talk him down. As well as having a track record of rubbishing every scheme associated with Pyke, Cherwell had recently urged MI5 to have him dismissed. So his hostility was to be expected. In a long letter to Churchill he explained that Habbakuk should be abandoned because too little was known about ice. Couldn’t they use concrete instead?

  ‘Prof,’ came the reply. ‘I have long thirsted for the floating island (see backpapers). It was always broken down. The ice scheme must be reported on first. Don’t stand in its way.’

  Though Pyke was never aware of it, there was further good news in the days that followed: the Security Service was no longer angling for his immediate dismissal. As MI5’s Roger Fulford explained to Milicent Bagot, ‘on strictly security grounds’ it was no longer ‘practicable to ask for Pyke’s removal from CCO, since he was not for certain a member of the CPGB’. They remained confident of being able to get him out, but not now. ‘Mountbatten is liable to sudden enthusiasms for unorthodox recruits to his staff, and at the moment he has this enthusiasm for Pyke and Bernal,’ their source in Richmond Terrace explained. ‘It will not last.’ Once this moment had passed, MI5’s contact would gently suggest that work be found elsewhere for Pyke. ‘I think that this is all we can do for the moment.’

  Pyke, meanwhile, was busy anticipating the reaction to Habbakuk from the ‘collection of fools on whom Churchill had to rely for the conduct of the war’, also known as the Chiefs of Staff. He worried that they would take one look at this proposal and brand Mountbatten ‘brilliant, but unsound’, or they might resent him ‘for having gone with his suggestion direct to the Headmaster without consulting the Prefects’.

  Pyke was right to sense that it required unusual conviction from his chief to propose an idea as radical as Habbakuk. Mountbatten’s reputation remained fragile. As well as the ignominy of Dieppe, some had called his character into question following the release of the film In Which We Serve. This was a fine piece of wartime propaganda starring Noël Coward as a fictionalised version of Mountbatten during his command of the destroyer HMS Kelly. Yet for the Canadian newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, among others, it smacked of vanity. After the film’s release he had staggered up to Mountbatten at a party and told him that he was finished. He disliked the film’s simpering portrayal of Mountbatten’s abilities as a naval commander as well as the sight of Coward – for Beaverbrook a ‘pansy’ and ‘war slacker’ – playing the war hero. No less irksome was the moment in the film when the camera zoomed in on the 1 September 1939 edition of one of Beaverbrook’s papers, the Daily Express, carrying the headline ‘There will be no war this year’.

  Beaverbrook’s outburst was just one instance of the burgeoning resentment some felt towards Mountbatten. While he remained as decisive and charming as ever, enjoying the continued loyalty of his colleagues, by December 1942 the ranks of those waiting for him to make a mistake had grown insidiously. His decision to back one of the wildest schemes of the war was a mark of supreme confidence in both Pyke and his own judgement. The last thing he could afford was a costly fiasco.

  The response to Habbakuk at that first Chiefs of Staff meeting was cautiously enthusiastic. ‘Discussed Winston’s new project of making battleships and aircraft carriers out of ice!!’ wrote a bemused Field Marshal Brooke. The next day the same group looked at Pyke’s plans in more detail, and by the end of that session Habbakuk had been given an amber light. ‘In discussion the strategical value of this project was freely accepted,’ ran the official account, ‘but it was considered premature to go into questions of planning and construction until we were satisfied that it was in fact a practicable proposition.’ Further research was needed, for which the Habbakuk Directing Committee was formed. It met just three days later.

  In a more dispassionate world none of the men who attended that session would have arrived with fixed views on the practicality of the scheme. All would have waited for the results of the scientific research. Instead they followed their gut instincts. While for some the idea felt fascinating, others found the notion of a ship of ice hard to stomach. As many studies have subsequently shown, how we feel about an idea is more than capable of overpowering what we know.

  Mountbatten was at the forefront of those in favour, such as Pyke and Bernal, as well as scientists and engineers from the advisory panels including Professor Pippard, then working on the ‘dambuster’ bomb with Barnes Wallis. The opposition clustered around Lord Cherwell, unsurprisingly, as well as Sir Charles Goodeve from the Admiralty and Brigadier Sir Harold Wernher of Combined Operations, who felt that Habbakuk went ‘against Nature’ and later confessed that he ‘had no faith in it or its promoter and considered that it was a waste both of time and energy’.

  Notwithstanding this antagonism, the Habbakuk Directing Committee agreed that reports and experiments were needed and that one or two ‘enthusiasts’ like Pyke should go to Canada to investigate the properties of reinforced ice and whether a berg-ship was practical. With the backing of Mountbatten and Churchill, and the cautious enthusiasm of the Chiefs of Staff, the project was starting to gather momentum.

  On New Year’s Eve 1942, in a high-ceilinged bedroom just a stone’s throw from the gentle thrum of Piccadilly, an unusual meeting began. Propped up in bed amid a jumble of papers, ashtrays and empty milk bottles was Geoffrey Pyke in a pyjama coat. In a courtly semi-circle around him were a Vice-Admiral, a Brigadier and two wild-haired scientists. One of these, Solly Zuckerman, recalled Pyke at the heart of this ‘extraordinary conference [. . .] looking, with his stran
ge beard, like some jaundiced Christ’.

  His illness had struck again, but rather than delay any Habbakuk discussions, Mountbatten, Wernher, Bernal and Zuckerman had come to see the Director of Programmes in the Albany bedroom he had borrowed from his friend Cyril Ray. Though Ray had been out of the country when Pyke returned from America, he had managed to let himself in and had since taken over the main bedroom. Ray found the whole incident amusing and was happy for him to stay on.

  Bernal began by stressing that in his opinion the possibility of success justified all risk of failure, for the introduction of just one berg-ship could transform the Battle of the Atlantic, and as such the Canadian trials should begin right away. The next report they considered, from an elderly engineer named Mr Spanner, was altogether more dour. Pyke and Bernal groaned as Mountbatten read out his pessimistic conclusions, protesting that Spanner had shown ‘a complete lack of imagination throughout his investigations’.

  Mountbatten agreed. For him ‘the success of a project of this nature was dependent on how determined one was to do it. If Mr Spanner was too old to tackle such a problem, he should be paid for his services, and a man with a more fertile brain should be asked for an opinion.’ This was what they agreed to do.

  Yet it was not enough to lift Pyke out of his darkening mood. Propped up in bed like a dying patriarch surrounded by his family, his words still slurred following the operation on his gums in the Mayo Clinic, he complained that too many of those working on Habbakuk had no faith. ‘Mountbatten tried to assure him that work was proceeding as fast as it possibly could,’ recalled Zuckerman. ‘Pyke was not satisfied. “Without faith,” he kept protesting, “nothing will come of this project.” “But I have faith”, replied Mountbatten. “Yes,” said Pyke, “but have the others got faith?”, and turning to Harold Wernher he asked solemnly, “Have you got faith, Brigadier?” Poor Wernher did not know what to say.’