Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  In Pyke, Amery had found someone who thought along similar lines to himself, yet with the ambition and scientific rigour which he lacked. He was ‘impressed by the remarkable originality and inventiveness of his mind’, and was not only sympathetic to Pyke but loyal. Amery’s experiences with his tearaway son, John, whose anti-communism would soon morph into fascism, had made him more patient, and he never tired of Pyke’s demands, unlike other politicians who dealt with him. Perhaps he also detected in Pyke a certain vulnerability following a remark he had made earlier in the war. ‘He told me’, wrote Amery, ‘that he was a Jew and that he saw no prospect for Jews in the future except suicide.’ Amery was Jewish himself and had helped to draft the Balfour Declaration. This comment left an impression.

  Pyke described Amery as ‘the sort of person who does not easily come into things, but that when he does, he bites’, which was what happened here. Pyke’s proposal ‘very naturally appealed to me as a skiing enthusiast’, explained Amery, who took it to the War Office, the Admiralty and to Sir Walter Monckton at the Ministry of Information. For now it would remain out of Churchill’s hands. ‘I am bothering the Prime Minister with so many things just now that I really cannot at this moment approach him on Pyke’s behalf.’

  Monckton felt that he was not the right person for this and after being pressed by Pyke – with whom ‘it seems to be all my time or none, and all it cannot be’ – he passed the proposal on to Churchill’s scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann, soon to become Lord Cherwell. A lifelong bachelor, fastidious, teetotal and vegan, Lindemann could be prickly and difficult to get along with. Though by no means a great scientist, Lindemann’s skill was his ability to explain scientific concepts to non-specialists. Having long ago befriended Churchill he was now one of his most trusted advisers. His reaction to this scheme would be pivotal.

  Over the next month Pyke sent an array of follow-up notes, left messages with secretaries, attended meetings and by late June 1940 had managed to get his proposal onto the desks of Lindemann, the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, and Major-General Bourne of the newly formed Combined Operations.

  None of them wanted anything to do with it. ‘Mr Pyke has here a number of fairly commonplace ideas,’ began Lindemann in his damning response; ‘he clothes them with so much garrulous, pseudo-scientific blather that the reading of it becomes extremely wearisome.’ Pyke had added to his initial plan two unrelated schemes, one for a grenade with hooks to catch onto tank tracks, the other for setting the Thames on fire using floating petrol mines and underwater petrol tanks. ‘Others have thought of this,’ Lindemann sniffed. ‘Mr Pyke is able to dash off reams of this pretentious nonsense. I suggest that he would be better employed annoying the enemy instead of us, by feeding their espionage with bogus information.’

  Bourne at Combined Operations, or more likely a junior officer, gave Pyke’s proposals a little more thought before ruling that they were ‘not considered practicable’. Although the snowmobiles had not been designed, let alone built, Bourne felt that they would be difficult to land and the Norwegian terrain was too precipitous for them. Alexander at the Admiralty echoed this strange conclusion, doubting ‘the circumstances he has in mind would enable these vehicles to be usefully employed’.

  Pyke had come up against what Evelyn Waugh later called the ‘measureless obstructive strength’ of military bureaucracy. ‘Unless all my skiing friends have informed me wrongly,’ protested Amery, ‘the main characteristic of all the upland regions of Norway is precisely the fact that they are not precipitous, but undulating.’ He disagreed too with the idea that getting the snowmobiles into Norway was unrealistic. This changed nothing.

  The strategic proposal had been rejected not in strategic terms but on mechanical and logistical grounds. It seemed that Amery was the only one to have grasped Pyke’s premise that it might be militarily useful to think of snow not as ‘a quality of weather like cold, rain and mud, which must be endured with whatever protection water-proofs, sheepskins and gumboots, etc. can provide’, but as ‘a medium like the air and sea which, if we can master it, can be made in a positive sense to serve the very ends of war’. Having mastered snow you might find a situation in which – as Lenin almost said – ‘The worse the weather for the enemy, the better for us.’

  Pyke claimed to be unsurprised by this rejection. ‘You won’t get it done,’ Bernal had warned him, adding that he was appalled by the sclerotic attitudes he had encountered in Whitehall. ‘I, with an official position, have for months been trying to get things done that – believe it or not – are even simpler. I have failed. And so have all of our type. You will find that the simplest and most obvious statements that you make, remarks that you would think at this stage would be taken as axiomatic – will be challenged, referred to and fro, back and forth, at best hundreds of letters will be written: – nothing will be done.’ ‘The whole country,’ Pyke later wrote, ‘and by no means least the administration, were saturated, and had been for years, with the defensive spirit, not to say the spirit of surrender, the inherent result of the Baldwin-Chamberlain epoch of appeasement.’

  The proposal was mothballed. Though Amery renewed their correspondence in February 1941, this came to nothing, and it was not until September of that year – shortly after Rolf Rünkel had begun to work as Pyke’s secretary, and with the Soviet Union suffering terrible losses in the German onslaught – that Pyke sent Amery a revised and expanded proposal. It described how this guerrilla force could be deployed in the Italian Alps or Romania, where it could target oil refineries, as well as Norway, where targets would include the country’s hydroelectric plants.

  Amery sent a copy to General McNaughton, then Commander of the Canadian Corps, and to Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Just as the shape of the war had changed, so had the military mood, and on this occasion Pyke’s idea was not rejected out of hand.

  It was also around this time that Pyke moved into the flat of Cyril Ray in Albany, off Piccadilly. Spritely and brave, Ray was a Manchester Guardian war correspondent who would later be mentioned in dispatches when covering the Allied advance into Europe and remains one of the only British journalists to receive an American Army citation. According to MI5, Ray was also ‘a Communist’.

  Earlier that year he had been embedded with the Fifth Destroyer Flotilla, the ‘Fighting Fifth’, then under the command of Lord Mountbatten – who had made a deep impression. For years afterwards the two would exchange Christmas cards and, after Mountbatten’s death, Ray labelled him ‘perhaps the greatest Englishman of the century, and all the more so for not being of English blood’. Pyke listened carefully to what Ray had to say about Mountbatten. ‘I heard things about him that made me say “Ecce Homo”.’ He even looked up a book co-written by Mountbatten back in 1931, An Introduction to Polo. What gave him hope was that this aristocratic young naval commander appeared to be hungry for new ideas, whether they concerned polo tactics or anti-submarine measures.

  Having been struck down over Christmas with pleurisy, as he had been several times in recent years, by February 1942 Pyke was back on his feet and on the attack once again. He asked Amery if he would take his proposal to Mountbatten. ‘I feel that, and I think you’ll agree, it is most desirable this should be dealt with by Lord Louis himself. The resistance to new conceptions is so strong that if it is dealt with by any member of his staff it may not stand the same chance. Could you ask him if he would 1) read the memorandum himself, then 2) see me, himself? Is this a feasible request?’

  Amery wrote to Mountbatten at once, and just three days later they sat down together for dinner in Amery’s house, whereupon he began to explain Pyke’s proposal with the pent-up enthusiasm of a man who feels he has been right all along. He referred occasionally to the ‘brilliant’ inventor behind it, and at the end of the meal Amery handed his guest a copy of Pyke’s proposal. Later that night, Mountbatten wrote him a letter.

  Lord Louis Mountbatten

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p; ‘Many of the descriptions of him are merely lazy attempts to foist on the public a stock figure from the waxworks’, Pyke would write of Mountbatten. To look at, he was magnificent: tall, handsome and stag-like. Yet beneath the glossy exterior was a man who sometimes struggled to belong. He had been born a German prince: however, owing to his grandparents’ morganatic marriage he was a Prince of Battenberg rather than of Hesse, the former more junior than the latter. As a teenage naval cadet during the First World War he watched as his father, the First Sea Lord, was forced to step down on account of his German ancestry. He was a victim of the same xenophobic spirit which had contributed to his family’s decision in 1917 to follow their cousins in the British royal family in anglicising their name. His Serene Highness Prince Louis Francis Battenberg, then aged seventeen, became plain old Lord Louis Mountbatten, second son of the suitably British-sounding Marquess of Milford Haven.

  After the war Mountbatten would appear in the press as an occasional sidekick to his cousin, the Prince of Wales, and for a moment was known as a playboy. But again the shoes do not quite fit. He would turn up to dances in large crowds and leave early to go home and read. He was cuckolded by his wife, Edwina Ashley, one of the world’s richest heiresses, to whom Mountbatten bemoaned his inability to flirt or ‘excite you more than I fear I do’. Instead he devoted himself to his naval career, determined to emulate his father and become First Sea Lord.

  For many in the Admiralty, where his nickname was ‘Master of Disaster’, he was thought to lack ‘sea sense’. According to his biographer, Philip Ziegler, his technical abilities as a naval captain were never more than second-rate. But he retained what Wallis Simpson called ‘extraordinary drive’ coupled with a knack for keeping his reputation spotless, and by the start of the Second World War Lord Louis Mountbatten was just where he wanted to be: at the helm of a ship.

  Although he had three destroyers go down beneath him, which might suggest a degree of recklessness – he was known to get carried away in the heat of the moment and to have a lust for speed – by the summer of 1941 he was thought to be having a ‘good war’. This spin had as much to do with skilful public relations as it was a reflection of his qualities as a leader. For all his lack of sea sense, Mountbatten was a decisive, forward-thinking commander with huge charisma. He could put anyone at ease and exuded throughout his life the breezy self-confidence of a man who slept well at night. One of the men to recognise these abilities as a leader was Churchill.

  The Prime Minister saw that he was popular both with his naval ratings and the British public and in October 1941 summoned the ‘Master of Disaster’ to Chequers. Over lunch he explained that he wanted him to take over Combined Operations, the military command responsible for Commando raids on occupied Europe.

  Mountbatten was unimpressed, and described himself as ‘damned annoyed’ at the job offer as he was about to take command of the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, then being repaired in the US.

  ‘You fool!’ Churchill shot back. ‘The best thing you can hope to do there is to repeat your last achievement and get yourself sunk.’

  The Prime Minister explained exactly what the new job entailed. ‘All the other headquarters in this country are thinking defensively, your job will be to think offensively – to restore the offensive spirit.’ Mountbatten was to plan and launch a crescendo of raids against the European mainland, with the objective of preparing the ground for D-Day, set to be the world’s largest-ever amphibious assault. Combined Operations was to determine which landing craft to use, how to supply an army operating in occupied territory, what level of air cover should be provided and where to make landfall. This was no ordinary desk job.

  Mountbatten accepted, and over the following months he immersed himself in his new task, often sleeping in his office, and by the end of the year this hitherto small and unloved command had been transformed. When he took over there were just twenty-three people working at Combined Operations headquarters, including messengers and typists. By the time he sat down to dinner with Amery he had a staff of more than 300.

  In his letter to Pyke that night, Mountbatten described the proposal as ‘very interesting’, adding that he would pass a copy on to one of his officers, whom Pyke should go to see. ‘When I return he will make a report to me and I shall then be in a position to judge what our next steps should be.’

  It would be wrong to say that Pyke now had a foot in the door at Combined Operations. But he had at least established the existence of a door and the possibility that it might open.

  ‘Major Parks-Smith reminded me a little of what the Prince of Wales must have been like in the last war,’ Pyke confided to Amery, of the Combined Operations officer he went to meet. ‘Very charming, modest and doing his best, but not, I should say, an outstanding intellect.’ Pyke had watched as the major read his proposal. ‘Like Mephistopheles, striving by art and artifice for possession of his mind, I saw his open face light up with complete understanding. Major Parks-Smith then suddenly rose as if he were about to come to attention. He needlessly lifted a bundle of papers from his desk; and with emphasis put them down again. He then resumed his seat. Unconsciously he was expressing the fact that he had made up his mind. Later on came the words, “I must go to the CCO and tell him this is important”.’

  The CCO was Mountbatten, just back from Scotland. Yet rather than invite Pyke in to meet him he arranged for a captain in Combined Operations to see him next. Several days later he was called back to meet a colonel, then another colonel, followed by two brigadiers, including Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, Geoffrey Wildman-Lushington.

  Pyke seemed to enjoy this. ‘They knew, only too well for my liking, that they were but agents, and their principal might cancel the bargain at any moment.’ By the same token he knew that he was there to pitch himself to Mountbatten through these ambassadors, a task he relished. Selling oneself was an art, he insisted, later referring to that moment in his life as ‘what my biographers will no doubt call my most mature period’. Indeed it was, and this artistry was about to be put to its greatest test.

  The first time Pyke set eyes on Mountbatten was at a meeting in Combined Operations to discuss whether or not this proposal should be taken on. As directed, Pyke got up before ‘a vast gathering of nabobs and experts’ and was asked ‘to expound the whole project at great length’.

  Though he prided himself on being able to sell himself in an interview, Pyke had ‘very little’ experience of meetings like this, and was not always very good at judging the collective character of his audience. Nor was he an academic or professional scientist who had devoted his career to the study of snow, snowmobiles or guerrilla warfare. Rather, he was an unemployed forty-eight-year-old, a civilian who had begun to read up on these subjects in his spare time less than two years ago. Yet his research had been comprehensive, he had an excellent memory, he ‘bore himself with immense natural dignity’ and could command attention when he spoke thanks to his ‘superbly resonant voice’.

  Standing up before a blur of khaki, Pyke ran through his proposal for what must have felt like the hundredth time. He fielded questions, and at last Mountbatten asked for a show of hands. Pyke’s pulse must have quickened. In the next few seconds he would find out whether Combined Operations was prepared to pursue his idea.

  For the men in that room what, if anything, was the appeal of Pyke’s plan? Part of its attraction lay in the novelty of the scheme. By February 1942 German forces were continuing to drive deeper into Russian territory; Rommel was apparently unstoppable in North Africa; Greece and Crete had recently fallen; and the Japanese were rampant in South-East Asia. Pyke’s plan outlined a daring British offensive in a war which had been dominated until then by German victories.

  It also proposed a new kind of military unit. At the start of the war there were just two British organisations devoted to guerrilla warfare: MI6’s Section D and MI(R). Neither was capable of operations on the scale that Pyke envisaged: instead, one was to operate ‘stay-b
ehind’ parties to harry any occupying Nazi forces in Britain; the other specialised in individual acts of overseas sabotage. During the summer of 1940, SOE had come into existence, as well as the Commandos, whose activities were coordinated by Combined Operations. Both performed small-scale attacks against occupied Europe, the Commandos concentrating on coastal areas and SOE carrying out sabotage work further inland. Though he was unaware of this division, Pyke had proposed, by chance, a hybrid unit: a Commando force performing SOE-style sabotage in what was seen as SOE territory.

  As well as bringing into existence a new kind of force, this plan would divert enemy troops away from France, which was another attraction for those in Combined Operations given that they were preparing for D-Day. Indeed, the strategy of drawing enemy troops up to Norway, described by Hitler as a ‘zone of destiny’, would soon become an established principle in Allied military planning. Later that year, in the build-up to the invasion of North Africa, MI5 tried to gull the Germans into thinking that an invasion of both Norway and northern France was about to take place; in 1943 the London Controlling Section’s ‘Cockade’ plan again tried to divert German troops to Norway, and in 1944 Operation Fortitude North was an attempt to fool German commanders into thinking that a British Fourth Army of some 100,000 troops was about to invade Norway. Yet by February 1942 the idea was an original one.

  No less attractive was the impact of Pyke’s plan on Germany’s economic and industrial capacity. Norway produced 30,000 tons of aluminium per year from just six plants, each connected to an HEP station. Pyke’s scheme would knock out some fifty HEP stations, including these.