Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  The week after Pyke’s letter of resignation, Duncan approved OSRD’s proposal to produce an amphibious snowmobile and later that day the contract to build these machines was given to Studebaker. General Joseph T. McNarney and Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, then approved Eisenhower’s suggestion that the War Department build 860 of these new Plough vehicles, all designed to Duncan’s specifications, adding that these should be ready ‘by the early fall of 1942’.

  Men from OSRD now scoured the Americas for suitable test sites, travelling as far afield as Chile and Alaska, while the snowmobile acquired a new name. It would be called the ‘Weasel’ after a description of this mammal as ‘very active, bold’ and known to ‘turn white in winter’.

  From a distance, the Weasel appeared to be on schedule. But, in their rush to produce these vehicles, OSRD had failed to investigate alternative snowmobile design or tackle basic questions like whether these vehicles could actually fit into the planes that would carry them. ‘The Americans are remarkable,’ wrote Pyke, ‘but many are rather in love with the process of production for its own sake.’ Things were moving too fast, and there was a danger that the Weasel might become a white elephant.

  Pyke was desperate to be involved in the design process – asking questions, teasing, testing, probing, pushing for further research – but with Duncan in charge he was powerless. Instead he and Wedderburn stewed in their room in the War Department. They would ‘sit day after day and sometimes literally all day, with nothing to do’. In the heat of the capital, Pyke’s mind wandered to other more radical ideas. Occasionally they received a note from Duncan to say how well his work was going. Pyke’s response was to fire off another letter of resignation to London.

  ‘I’ve made no mistakes,’ he complained to Mountbatten, on the same day that Churchill asked for a progress report on Plough, ‘because I’ve not had the chance to do anything. Your assumption “Pyke is the only person capable of seeing it through”, “Pyke is indispensable” is a bitter joke to us at this end. Could you have been an invisible witness of what has happened you would realise it. What has happened is that Pyke, far from being “indispensable”, has in fact been dispensed with . . . gradually, skilfully and indisputably.’

  Knox believed that ‘Duncan had behaved outrageously’. Field Marshal Sir John Dill, head of the British Joint Staff Mission and the most influential Briton in Washington DC, ‘was shocked and said that Duncan ought to be sent home at once’ – though Dill did little to bolster Pyke’s credibility by ribbing General Marshall whenever he saw him for listening to Mountbatten’s ‘tame lunatic’. Only when a glut of delayed letters from Pyke reached the CCO in London, including his initial letter of resignation, did the situation clear up.

  ‘At last understand position,’ sighed Mountbatten, before ordering Duncan back to London, promoting Wedderburn to Lieutenant-Colonel and declaring that ‘Pyke is now my sole representative of Snow Plough scheme’. He even followed up on Pyke’s reminder to bring in the Russians and obtained ‘sympathetic support’ for Plough from Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. ‘In spite of my somewhat petulant telegrams,’ he assured Pyke, ‘I have not lost faith in you and I feel that the misunderstandings that have cropped up are already disposed of.’

  At a stroke, control of the British Mission was back with Pyke. The Russians might be coming in. Relations with Mountbatten were restored. Pyke’s mood soared.

  Several days later, however, it emerged that Mountbatten had put these sweeping decisions on hold. Rather than dismiss Duncan by telegram he would come out to Washington DC to sort things out in person. Perhaps he had also heard about the security matter concerning Pyke: some of his secret papers, including a report on the Inner Front in Norway, in an envelope marked ‘On His Majesty’s Service’, and a diary on Romania labelled ‘Secret – for Mr Pyke only’, had gone missing. Though they had been under lock and key in the capital’s Grafton Hotel, they had since ‘vanished into thin air’.

  Mountbatten boarded a plane for the the United States on 2 June 1942, where, it was noted at Richmond Terrace, ‘he will be dealing with the matter of Mr Geoffrey Pyke and Brigadier N. W. Duncan’. Yet there was another objective he had been given for this trip.

  On arrival, Mountbatten went to General Eisenhower for an update on Plough. The two men had hit it off in London and by that stage of the war Eisenhower was pushing for Mountbatten to become sole commander of the Allied invasion of Europe, such was his faith in the CCO. No doubt he wanted to give him good news. But this would not be easy.

  Earlier that day, Eisenhower had received a sobering and detailed report on Plough from an officer in Operations Division which concluded that the prototype Weasel did not meet the necessary specifications, on balance it would probably be easier to ask the Norwegian resistance to carry out the proposed sabotage work, and that the US Army should have nothing to do with Plough.

  ‘I can’t sign that report,’ Eisenhower had complained to the author, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert T. Frederick.

  ‘Why not, General?’

  ‘Because I told them in London that we were going ahead full speed with this project.’

  Though Eisenhower might have mentioned this damning report to Mountbatten he did not dwell on it and instead whisked his visitor and Lt-Colonel Frederick off to the Russian Embassy where they met Litvinov, the Soviet ambassador. There followed an ‘animated discussion’ about Plough with Litvinov expressing a strong desire for the Soviets to have some of these new snowmobiles once they were ready.

  The following day, 4 June 1942, Mountbatten met Duncan and Pyke separately. He concluded that the former had ‘(a) failed to ensure that the machine being designed could be carried in any existing form of aeroplane; (b) failed to press for more than one type of machine to be investigated; (c) failed to press for the formation of a Planning Staff to plan the project; (d) failed to press for the establishment of an Intelligence Department to collect and collate all the topographical and other intelligence of the area in which operations were to take place.’ Indeed, Duncan had behaved ‘just like a schoolboy’, he told Pyke. ‘The Service is full of them. They become greybeards but they remain schoolboys. They don’t grow up.’ Pyke coined a term for this condition: ‘Duncanitis’. Symptoms included a tendency to be ‘charming, moderately sincere, sometimes energetic, but simply behind the times’. Though a curable disease, it seemed that most sufferers refused treatment. Brigadier Duncan was sent back to London.

  Later that day there was a meeting on Plough in which Mountbatten explained to Eisenhower, McNarney, Frederick and several US staff colonels that from now on Pyke would be his sole representative on Plough. This was a risky move. Replacing a senior army officer with an irreverent civilian was never going to endear Mountbatten to the US military, and nor did the gentle criticism of the War Department’s approach to Plough that he then delivered, with Pyke chipping in occasionally.

  ‘If I’d known you could do as well as that, I’d never have hung Duncan on you,’ said Mountbatten afterwards of Pyke’s performance in that meeting. ‘If I may say so,’ replied Pyke, ‘we have dropped into the habit of playing doubles together, and know without thought which shots to take and which to leave to the other fellow.’ Yet for his visit to the White House five days later, the meeting that would define his trip, Mountbatten was on his own.

  Churchill had given Mountbatten two tasks in the US. He was to get Plough back on track and to persuade Roosevelt, Hopkins, Marshall et al. that an all-out assault on Europe before the end of 1942 was unrealistic. The two were entwined. Ideally Mountbatten would channel American enthusiasm for Round-Up and Sledgehammer into Plough and Jupiter – this being Churchill’s plan for the invasion of northern Norway. It was, reflected Mountbatten, ‘probably the most important job I had to do in the war’.

  There are no minutes of the conversation between Roosevelt, Mountbatten and Hopkins – it was not the President’s style to keep precise records of meetings like these – but we kno
w that they spoke for five hours and that the tone would have been sympathetic. Roosevelt was fond of the CCO, having got to know him the year before. Indeed, Mountbatten was just the kind of Englishman that most Americans would take to – he spoke clearly, was good-looking, of royal birth and possessed an American sense of optimism. Mountbatten’s stock had risen considerably since his last visit to the US, and on the day of the meeting his portrait adorned the cover of that week’s Time magazine. But when it came to watering down the American enthusiasm for a major amphibious assault on occupied France before the end of the year he proved to be no match for the President and Harry Hopkins.

  Though he won them over to Plough – Roosevelt even asked to meet Pyke – the President maintained that US soldiers must see action in Europe before the Plough force would be ready. In Mountbatten’s account of the meeting, Roosevelt reminded him of Churchill’s assurances that ‘in the event of things going very badly for the Russians this summer, a sacrifice landing would be carried out in France to assist them’. This was the Sledgehammer plan mooted by Hopkins and Marshall in London. Following his talks the week before with Molotov, the Russian Foreign Minister, the President was more determined than ever to make this happen.

  Mountbatten assured him that the British would be ‘ready to follow up a crack in German morale by landing in France this autumn’, and that such an operation could be launched at two months’ notice. Just over two months later, Mountbatten oversaw Operation Jubilee, the disastrous Allied raid on Dieppe. It was Sledgehammer in all but name and resulted in no territorial gain, limited enemy losses and the death or capture of more than half of the 6,000 Allied troops involved, most of them young Canadians. Even if the mistakes made at Dieppe would go on to inform the landings on D-Day, this failure haunted Mountbatten for the rest of his life.

  Possibly uneasy at the assurances he had given Roosevelt, Mountbatten set off the next day by train for Montreal. He was due to meet the Canadian General Staff before flying back to London. In the carriage next to him was Geoffrey Pyke, bearded and talkative, and the author of the damning report on Plough, Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick, who was by contrast quiet and well turned out. Frederick was perhaps the last person you might have expected to have on this trip – indeed, it made no sense for him to be there – but for General Eisenhower’s decision the day before to put him in charge of the Plough force.

  ‘I was shocked,’ Frederick confessed. ‘It was beyond my comprehension that I should be the man picked.’ He was a staff officer in his mid-thirties with no experience of combat, working in a job which ‘carried the rating of a glorified chief clerk’. Now he was to build from scratch a force of elite guerrillas before leading them into battle at the end of the year.

  Most historians of the Plough force agree that the idea for this unlikely appointment came from the British camp. Of those who go further, the consensus is that Mountbatten was responsible. But it seems that Pyke was the one who put this idea in his head.

  Not only did the idea of appointing a scheme’s strongest critic as its chief advocate have an unmistakably Pykean ring to it – he often described the need to ‘embrace your defects and proclaim them virtues’ – but in a letter from Pyke to Mountbatten he referred to himself, in relation to Frederick’s appointment, as ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’, the 16th Earl of Warwick famous for his manoeuvring behind the scenes during the Wars of the Roses to set up or bring down several English monarchs. Having got rid of Duncan, Pyke, it seems, had put Frederick on the throne.

  ‘Bob’ Frederick turned out to be an inspired choice. He would go on to become one of the great military commanders of the Second World War. For now, just one day into his new job, he faced the monumental challenge of recruiting, training and leading a force which existed only on paper. He did not have the necessary infantry training, knew little about parachuting, mountaineering or winter warfare, and needed to win over colleagues who had read an unrelentingly negative report on this proposed unit – which he had written.

  In Montreal the three men sat down with the Chief of the Canadian General Staff, Lieutenant-General Kenneth Stuart, to whom Mountbatten outlined the idea behind Plough. He then handed over to Pyke and Frederick and made to leave. Before he could go Pyke asked for a word in private.

  Either in the corridor or perhaps in a room next door, Mountbatten’s Director of Programmes explained that he was working on a new idea that was bigger than Plough, and perhaps the biggest idea of the war. He would send over a detailed proposal once the results of certain tests had come in. The CCO said that he would be happy to look at it.

  As he left the building, Mountbatten was met by ‘a battery of press cameras’. We know this from the diaries of Guy Liddell, MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage, who happened to be walking past at that moment. On several occasions over the last few years he had gone through Pyke’s Personal File, but Liddell had no inkling that the same man had just been in conversation with Mountbatten. Very few people knew that Pyke was in Canada just then, let alone why.

  As Pyke and Frederick explained to General Stuart, they had come to discuss the prospect of bringing in the Canadians on Plough. Over the coming days the American colonel and the British inventor endured a barrage of meetings, explaining the idea to soldiers, politicians, civil servants and scientists. Although there were moments when the Canadians seemed unsure what to make of this gregarious civilian – during one meeting a Canadian general passed a note to Frederick, while Pyke was holding forth, saying ‘What the hell does he want?’ – generally the idea was received with enthusiasm, and in the days that followed a landmark decision was reached. It was agreed that this new military unit should be a joint American-Canadian force. This was without precedent, and would not have happened but for the intervention of a rule-breaking Englishman.

  Though there had been an agreement earlier that year between Combined Operations and the Canadian General Staff that several Canadian officers would work on the project, Duncan had failed to follow up on it. When Pyke discovered his oversight, he decided not to go to the US Army, for fear that they would merely sit on it, but to contact the senior Canadian officer in the US, Major-General Pope and arrange a meeting with the General Staff. He had ignored the proper channels. But he was determined to turn Plough into a multinational and collaborative enterprise, even if it meant breaking protocol. He was driven as much by his internationalism as a more practical sense that Canadians were ‘experienced cold-weather people’ and would probably take to this scheme well, as they did.

  In between their Canadian meetings, Pyke told Frederick about how this new force should operate. Though Frederick was receptive to these ideas, there were times when the man behind them became too much. ‘The son of a bitch won’t let me alone,’ he groaned. ‘I’m with him all day and he talks, talks, talks. Almost everything he says makes sense but after a while my ears close up. I stop listening because I get numb and although I’m sure that the things he is saying are brilliant, I just can’t absorb them any more.’ This was not the only time in his life when Pyke displayed an on-the-spectrum inability to know when to stop.

  Frederick returned to Washington DC alone on 13 June with a to-do list from Pyke that was almost comic in its length. As with the volunteers of VIAS, staff at Malting House School or his conversationalists in Nazi Germany, Pyke assumed that everyone he worked with would share his own extraordinary work ethic. Several days later Pyke arrived in the capital and was pleased to find the Plough force shaping up as he had hoped. The fate of the Weasel was less clear. As before, he was finding it difficult to discover how things were progressing. His calls were rarely returned, access was often denied and there were times, now that ‘Macbeth’ had gone, when his ghost seemed to linger. Or was there someone else now working against him behind the scenes?

  Vannevar Bush

  Dr Vannevar ‘Van’ Bush was, by 1942, America’s most senior government scientist. He ran OSRD, the department responsible for producing the Weasel, yet by his
own admission was ‘naturally sceptical’ of Pyke’s project and later described it as merely ‘an instance of Churchill’s unbridled enthusiasm’. On Pyke, he conceded that this man ‘had lots of ideas, some of them superficially brilliant and intriguing’ and was ‘a consummate salesman of a sort’, but felt that he was ‘short on physics, especially short on engineering judgment’. This is a reminder that in America, especially in the sciences, higher academic qualifications mattered more than they did in Britain at the time where Pyke’s lack of formal scientific training might more easily be overlooked. This was just one of the reasons why Van Bush began to turn against this unqualified Englishman.

  In the weeks before Mountbatten’s visit Pyke had complained to two OSRD employees about the development of the Weasel, a conversation which had left Bush incensed, less for what Pyke had said than the fact that he was even speaking to a member of his staff. Vannevar Bush was a stickler for organisational protocol. He argued that as his department and the British Mission were both attached to the US Army, like two tributaries of the same river they must never meet. He was all for ‘working through channels’. Pyke was not. He believed in intellectual cross-fertilisation and stressed the importance of seeking out those working beyond one’s official milieu. In many companies you will find similar attitudes, with some calling for greater interaction between departments while others might prefer compartmentalisation, but rarely are these opposite views held with such intensity by two senior figures on the same project.

  Bush labelled Pyke a ‘tyro’ – someone who ‘has a contempt for channels of authority and ducks around them. [. . .] Everyone who has ever worked in a complex pyramidal organisation recognises that there occasionally appears somewhere on the ladder of authority a dumb cluck who has to be circumvented if there is to be any progress whatever. [. . .] He can throw any organisation, civilian or military, into confusion. His breed should be exterminated for the good of society.’ Bush was referring specifically at this point in his memoirs to Pyke.