Perhaps the only danger was that some of the labourers might learn that they were building the model of a ship designed to carry bombers and other weapons of war. When the nature of this project, known to them at the time as ‘Noah’s Ark’, was revealed many years later at least one of these pacifist Mennonites and Doukhobors felt that ‘his principles had been violated in the name of science’. But security was tight and it remained a secret. That same pacifist remembered the day when the site was visited by two Englishmen including one with a goatee beard, thin coat and pork-pie hat who apparently inspired among the labourers a lot of ‘humorous talk’.
On 8 March 1943, the day after they had inspected the model at Patricia Lake, Mackenzie and the two-man British mission arrived at Lake Louise in Banff National Park, a place of astounding natural beauty. Valley walls slid into the water at graceful intervals while, beyond, a majestic vista swept off into a blueish distance. Yet when Pyke and Bernal arrived the tranquillity was shattered repeatedly by the sound of enormous explosions. A team of scientists and labourers was busy blowing up sections of ice and Pykrete to see how the berg-ships would respond to enemy fire. As before, progress was better than expected. ‘The Lake Louise outfit has done a remarkably good job,’ concluded Mackenzie. ‘Very valuable information has been obtained.’
Work on Habbakuk at Lake Louise
Further work on Habbakuk at Lake Louise
Their work had been done and the three men were due to return to Ottawa, when Mackenzie noticed that the two British boffins had begun to gaze longingly at the snow-covered mountains around the lake.
‘Hope I live long enough to ski once again,’ Pyke had written the year before. On that morning both he and Bernal decided that they would go to see the nearby glacier.
Mackenzie, as ever, could not understand what they were wearing. ‘At ten o’clock they got on their skis and their spats and started for Victoria glacier without a watch or any method of knowing what time it was,’ he wrote, before describing Pyke’s get-up as ‘the most grotesque outfit – a little hat on top of his head with his muffler and raincoat and a pair of spats’.
Later it seemed as though this lack of suitable clothing had been his undoing. Bernal had reappeared two hours later by himself. ‘We thought probably Pyke had collapsed as he had not been feeling very well. However, Bernal said the only reason Pyke was not there was that he could not get him to come back. He was going on for another hour and should be back about two. Actually he showed up just at train time and looking very fit.’
It turned out that Pyke was an ‘excellent mountaineer’ – one of the last things you would expect of a bookish forty-nine-year-old who was often so ill that he could not get out of bed. It suggests that his illness was periodic and did not make him generally infirm. On the train back from Lake Louise, Pyke reminisced to Mackenzie about skiing in Switzerland during the 1920s, in the days before his bankruptcy, and the occasion when he had rescued a party of stranded skiers by skiing down a mountainside during a snowstorm. Were it not for those skiing holidays, paid for with the profits from his speculation, Pyke’s interest in snow and ice might never have taken hold. Now he was caught up in another life, a more impoverished life, and yet one that could include the sight of hundreds of men labouring in the freezing cold to realise one of his contributions to the war against fascism.
On their return to Ottawa, Bernal sent an effusive telegram to London describing the ‘great energy and enthusiasm’ everywhere they had been, and how ‘on a number of occasions work on the Habbakuk experiments had continued all night’. No major obstacles had been encountered, excellent progress had been made. They had also learnt that blocks of Pykrete were essentially self-adhesive: you had only to place them next to each other at suitably cold temperatures for bonds to develop, a discovery which might save thousands of man-hours when building the full-scale vessels.
The only problem was the unknown nature of ‘creep’. Creep was the rate at which Pykrete, or any other material, changed shape – and the extent of that change – when exposed to consistent pressure. With little or no research into the rates of creep in pure ice, let alone Pykrete, this was one of several questions that required Habbakuk scientists to steer out into uncharted waters. While it was possible to estimate the compressive, tensile and flexural strength of both pure ice and Pykrete, the rate of creep would take much longer to understand as one needed to measure the effect of sustained pressure over a matter of weeks. While it might be possible to build an enormous berg-ship, until the issue of creep had been resolved there was a danger that this leviathan might start to sag under its own weight once it had put out to sea. This was a problem, but Pyke saw no reason to think that it might be insoluble.
In London the mood was becoming impatient. By late March 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic was going so badly that some in the Admiralty had proposed abandoning convoys altogether. The Canadian High Commissioner asked Mountbatten to draw up a shortlist of possible sites for the construction of the first full-scale berg-ship. His concern was that this ship would not be finished by the end of that year ‘unless the necessary organisation is set up at once and proceeds to act in every way as if success were assured’. He was calling for a mental adjustment. ‘If a thing is sufficiently badly needed, the risk of failure due to incomplete knowledge can well be taken.’ Even if Habbakuk might prove to be impossible, ‘the attempt would have been worth the cost’.
Mountbatten showed this note to Churchill, who cabled the Canadian Prime Minister the following day. ‘I am very much interested in the project called Habbakuk,’ Churchill reminded him, ‘and am most anxious to have your vehement support. The Chief of Combined Operations is arranging to send Mr Pyke and Professor Bernal to you to tell the whole story. This is for you alone as the utmost secrecy is indispensable.’
On the same day, Churchill wrote to his Chiefs of Staff with news of the progress from Canada and his wish that an order for the first berg-ship be placed ‘with the highest priority and for arrangements to be made for further ships to be built without delay should it appear that the scheme is certain of success.’ Towards the end of a month in which more than 100 Allied ships were lost, the Chiefs of Staff duly instructed the Admiralty to ‘initiate action in accordance with the Prime Minister’s instructions’.
Admiral Sir Charles Kennedy-Purvis, the Deputy First Sea Lord, then met his Director of Plans to discuss Habbakuk. Until then the Admiralty had been lukewarm on the scheme, yet in light of the initial reports from Canada their position changed. On 27 March, Kennedy-Purvis agreed that ‘fundamentally, Habbakuk is practical politics’, and that three berg-ships might be ready in little over a year, each expected to cost about the same as a standard destroyer. With the Admiralty apparently behind the scheme, one of the last obstacles to Habbakuk’s development had been removed.
The following day Jack Mackenzie had dinner in Ottawa with Pyke and Bernal, who were to tell the Canadian Prime Minister ‘the whole story’, as per Churchill’s telegram, and on 29 March they went to meet him.
‘Mr Chamberlain has sent me such a nice letter about you,’ began the Prime Minister. It is not clear whether he realised his gaffe, only that the next awkward remark in that meeting came from Pyke. He drew the Prime Minister’s attention to his own trouser fly. It was open. In an attempt to smarten up for this meeting Pyke had bought a new suit the day before which came with the latest advance in fly design – a zip. Perhaps feeling anxious before the meeting, Pyke had popped into the nearest restroom only for his fly to become stuck (apparently this was not the first time that something like this had happened to him). The root of the problem, he explained to the Prime Minister, was shoddy Canadian engineering.
In spite of this, the meeting was thought to have gone well. The Canadian government formally agreed to take responsibility for the construction of the first Habbakuk berg-ship and for further research related to Pykrete. Their only conditions were that the British Admiralty should supply naval architects
and that Pyke and Bernal should remain attached to the project. These terms were readily accepted, and the Canadian War Committee approved the expenditure of an initial $1 million on a full-scale berg-ship (roughly £6 million in today’s money) with Mackenzie in charge.
Mackenzie approached the Montreal Engineering Company, which agreed to carry out the work at no cost beyond their expenses, and during the weeks that followed, in April 1943, work on Habbakuk accelerated. Communications zinged back and forth between London, Cambridge, Ottawa and the five research stations in Western Canada about how much steel and pulp would be required, where to source it, how this would affect costs, the ideal distance between refrigerating ducts in the walls of Pykrete, the size of the bulkheads and how to improve the ship’s manoeuvrability. A mechanical spreader was designed to speed up the manufacture of Pykrete in industrial quantities. Explosives tests continued in Canada. Perutz worked out the ideal ratio of wood pulp to water. At Patricia Lake the finished model was cut away from the ice and showed no signs of melting. Potential construction sites were whittled down to one in Newfoundland and another on the St Lawrence River, and it was agreed that the stern and bow of the ship must be made from wood. Spaced out along each side of the vessel would be twenty-six enormous propeller units. While Pyke had argued that these obviated the need for a rudder – to steer the ship one could vary the propulsive strength on either side – the Admiralty insisted on having one. It was also during April 1943 that Max Perutz tackled the problem of creep.
Pykrete was robust in response to a sudden application of pressure, like the impact of a hammer or bullet, but when compressive force was applied over a long period it had a tendency to sag. Although the rate of creep was less pronounced in Pykrete than in ice – and after the first two weeks it tended to stabilise – a solution was needed. Perutz consulted Sir Lawrence Bragg at Cambridge, took a well-earned break and at last solved the problem. He discovered that at temperatures below freezing Pykrete’s rate of creep was greatly reduced. He concluded on 4 May that ‘at -15ºC. creep will be no obstacle to the safety of the vessel’. This temperature was easily achieved in refrigeration boats, and there was no reason to think that the hull of the proposed berg-ship could not be cooled to the same extent. This was a critical advance, but not one that Pyke and Bernal were able to enjoy for long.
The day after Perutz announced his solution to the problem of creep, the Admiralty received a preliminary report on the viability of Habbakuk from two naval architects. Churchill’s instruction had been to place an order for the first berg-ship should it appear that the scheme is certain of success. Rather than wait to hear the answer from Canada, the Admiralty had sent out two of its own men to investigate. Mountbatten would have objected, had he known, but he was on sick leave for the first time since taking over Combined Operations. ‘During the illness of CCO I require weekly reports on “Habbakuk”,’ Churchill had informed his Chiefs of Staff. However, nothing was sent to Downing Street which mentioned the Admiralty’s decision to carry out its own study.
The two naval architects concluded that ‘it will be impossible to complete the project next year’, before going beyond their engineering brief to suggest that the project would also be over-budget. Pyke and Bernal were furious. They protested to Mountbatten that this conclusion ‘has in our opinion and as almost admitted by them, been arrived at by means of feeling [. . .] rather than by QUANTITATIVE investigations’. The risk of failure in Habbakuk was no more than was ‘customary in sound commercial engineering enterprises’.
The clash here was between two different engineering philosophies. The Admiralty wanted to follow the proven peacetime method of starting with research before moving on to design and finally construction. Pyke and Bernal called for all three stages to run in parallel, ‘to design without an exact knowledge of the properties of the material and to plan construction without a detailed design’. Owing to the pressure of time, and the lives this new invention could save, ‘the procedure for tackling this job successfully will have to be different from anything that has been undertaken before’.
They dispatched the telegram and set out for London, urging Mountbatten not to make any Habbakuk decisions until they were back. There followed a ‘nightmare journey’ across the Atlantic ‘in an unheated bomb bay’ in the company of the British film-maker and secret agent Sir Alexander Korda. On arrival, Bernal was asked by a reporter from the Evening Standard what he had been up to in North America. ‘I wish I could tell you,’ he replied, ‘but I can’t.’
What he might have said was that he had been working on the strangest and most ambitious idea of the war, one which appeared to have been delayed by a critical Admiralty report, and was now back in London to fire up his boss, Lord Louis Mountbatten. On the day of their return Pyke and Bernal had lunch with the CCO – only to be joined by an uninvited guest, Evelyn Waugh, then a Liaison Officer to Combined Operations, who ‘arrived rather tipsy’ and by his own admission ‘behaved rather badly’. Waugh noted that, with Pyke and Bernal back in the office, Richmond Terrace was once again ‘a nest of Communists’. Yet over the weeks that followed Mountbatten’s faith in the project was renewed. Pyke and Bernal, working now as a team, wrote a detailed rebuttal of the report from the Admiralty. But they could not undo all the damage that it had done.
In a meeting of the Habbakuk Standing Committee on 3 June it was agreed that the project was still feasible, but there was a new note of caution in the projected timings. It was no longer thought that a berg-ship could be ready by the end of that coming winter. There was, at least, full agreement on the strategic need for these vessels, particularly in the Pacific, and the importance of getting American planners involved. Habbakuk had regained some of its drive. But for Churchill the progress was still too sluggish.
‘Well, Lord Louis, what is the situation?’ the Prime Minister had asked at the start of a meeting in Downing Street called to discuss Habbakuk. Cherwell was on his right. Elsewhere in the room were Mountbatten, Sir Stafford Cripps, Kennedy-Purvis, Bernal and Jack Mackenzie, who described the Prime Minister on that day as ‘a little old man in a zippered suit with a big cigar in his mouth. Incidentally he does not smoke – he chews about half a cigar, smokes one inch, throws it away, takes out a gold case and starts the proceeding over again.’
Churchill at 10 Downing Street in his bespoke zippered ‘siren’ suit
Mountbatten explained that the berg-ships would not be ready that year, at which ‘Churchill showed very definite annoyance. He said he did not care whether the equipment would last over a month if he could get it on the coast of Norway. He went on a long dissertation on the value of having Habbakuks which was all very sound. He said it was impossible to invade Europe without a fighter cover, that where a fighter cover was now possible the defences were impregnable, that if he had Habbakuks he could get into Norway and the Bay of Biscay, etc., all of which we knew.’ Mountbatten ‘danced around’ and agreed that Combined Operations should draw up a report on the idea of building modified Habbakuks from wood which would not be designed to last for long. Churchill also wanted a report on whether these Habbakuk berg-ships could be used as part of his Jupiter plan for attacking northern Norway.
It fell to Pyke to produce this report, a task he did not appreciate. He continued to believe that the idea of occupying northern Norway was ‘fundamentally fallacious [. . .] I trust I may not appear critical of the authors of the Jupiter Memoranda. To a layman these appear a most competent solution of a problem. But it is the wrong problem.’
Days later, just after the start of the Allied invasion of Sicily, Churchill returned to the idea of using Habbakuks in an invasion of Norway. He told his Chiefs of Staff that if a cross-Channel invasion of northern France was impossible for May 1944 ‘then Operation Jupiter must be in place, and that for this “HABBAKUK” would be an invaluable aid, and it would seem prudent in view of all the uncertainties ahead to make the wooden “HABBAKUK” at a cost of £2 millions now.’
That was not the end of it. The Prime Minister had suggested at the recent Trident Conference in Washington DC, on the question of invading Japan, that ‘“HABBAKUK” in one of its ice forms might play a very important part’. Churchill would not let go of this idea and asked for his last note on Habbakuk to be passed on to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. General Ismay assured him that answers to his questions would be ready in time for the Quadrant Conference, in Quebec, where Habbakuk would be officially presented to the Americans for the first time.
In early August 1943, the Queen Mary set out for Quebec carrying a precious cargo: Churchill, Mountbatten, various British Chiefs of Staff, several Cabinet ministers and more than 200 military officials. The fact that this journey could even be contemplated was a sign of just how much had changed in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Over the past twelve months a raft of small improvements in Allied weaponry and tactics had tipped the balance in this theatre of war. Aircraft could now travel further and some were equipped with Leigh Lights, connected to centimetric radar. Escort ships had become more numerous and better equipped, with HF-DF masts and ‘Hedgehogs’ to launch depth charges fore and aft. A growing number of Bogue-class escort carriers allowed for greater aerial cover, while new anti-submarine tactics devised by the likes of Captain ‘Johnnie’ Walker, an expert U-boat hunter, were helping to turn the tide. Bletchley Park had gained the upper hand over B-Dienst, its German equivalent, giving the Allies better intelligence on the location, size and direction of U-boat wolf packs. No less significant was the recent renewal of a treaty between Britain and neutral Portugal which allowed the British to operate an airbase in the Azores, an archipelago in the heart of the Atlantic. In exchange, the Portuguese government received six squadrons of Hawker Hurricanes. Britain had effectively gained possession of a large and unsinkable aircraft carrier in a key strategic location, so perhaps they no longer needed one made out of ice.
Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy Page 34