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

by Henry Hemming

  The following week Cherwell launched a fresh attack on Habbakuk that would again test the faith of those behind it. At this critical meeting the Prime Minister’s scientific adviser produced a steamrollering display of destructive criticism. Each point was countered by Bernal or a convalescent Pyke – until Mountbatten snapped. As the minutes reveal, the CCO ‘outlined the state the war had now reached, stressing the seriousness of the U-boat campaign. He pointed out that when a scheme was presented which might relieve this stalemate, it should not be turned down out of hand through incredulity and natural antipathy, but every facility should be given to prove its worth.’

  It is easy to forget when looking back at the period which stretches from the British victory at El Alamein in 1942 through to D-Day two years later, that during the early months of 1943 the outlook for the Allies was bleak. In very few theatres of war did they have control of both air and sea, and during the last year they had lost 7.8 million tons of shipping, most of it in the Atlantic. There were few indications that this would change. ‘The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war,’ wrote Churchill, ‘was the U-boat peril.’ Mountbatten’s words proved decisive, and Cherwell backed down. It was also agreed that given the urgency of the scheme they would need Churchill to help get things moving in Canada.

  On 14 January 1943 a Canadian civil engineer named Jack Mackenzie received a call from his Prime Minister, who had just got off the phone with Churchill. He wanted his help in developing a top secret British scheme.

  Mackenzie was ‘small in stature and quiet of mien’ with a head that rose up out of his shoulders like a block of weathered stone. When he first heard about Habbakuk his reaction was cool, to say the least. ‘This is another of those mad, wild schemes that we come in contact with frequently,’ he grumbled in his diary. ‘While one cannot say that it is not practicable I am quite sure that if it were suggested in normal circles here we would not have the ghost of a chance of getting it before even a minor official.’

  This was ominous. As Acting President of the National Research Council of Canada, Jack Mackenzie was one of the few Canadians who could give Habbakuk the energetic push it so needed. Of course he was quite justified in dragging his heels. Little was known about either ice or reinforced ice. Again, it was a question of imagination as well as faith.

  Four days later, having inspected the plans, Mackenzie and his colleagues mellowed. ‘The soundness appeals more to us as we get deeper into the problem.’ Perhaps Habbakuk could work. Certainly he appreciated the jaw-dropping nature of Pyke’s scheme and that if this was going to happen, work had to begin immediately.

  Mackenzie set off right away for the blinding, snowy wilds of Western Canada to get the necessary experiments started. He knew better than to issue orders from Ottawa and instead met the relevant engineers and scientists in person. Soon the Canadian side of ‘Project Habbakuk’ was under way. The Canadian Department of Finance approved a budget of £150,000 for Habbakuk’s development, largely due to Mackenzie’s lobbying, and in Banff and Jasper National Parks the first experiments began. Scientists from the universities in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Edmonton began to direct teams of conscientious objectors in their investigations into the effects of stress or enemy fire on giant blocks of ice and reinforced ice. On a frozen lake in a remote part of the Canadian Rockies work would soon begin on a scaled-down model of the first berg-ship.

  None of this was made any easier by the sapping wintry conditions. ‘When I tell you that at Banff we have to open up a road forty miles through the mountains with snow ten feet deep, take in supplies, secure ice-cutting equipment, and all accommodations for a staff of twenty or thirty which we hope to assemble, you will see that we have to move rapidly,’ wrote Mackenzie.

  No less remarkable was the level of security. The Canadians went to great lengths to keep the project secret. Each Habbakuk research site was guarded by Mounties, while none of the conscientious objectors labouring in the cold on Pyke’s chef d’oeuvre were told what they were working on. Most were tough young Mennonites and Doukhobors unable to fight for religious reasons. While they knew their scripture and could tell you about the biblical Habakkuk, none would hear about a ‘Habbakuk’ berg-ship. For many months, nor did the other scientists working on the project, including Max Perutz.

  By that stage of the war, Perutz could be forgiven for having something of a persecution complex. This bespectacled crystallographer, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for Chemistry, had left his native Austria partly on account of his Jewishness, which had limited the number of academic positions open to him, before finding a place at Cambridge. Here he had excelled, first under Bernal and later Sir Lawrence Bragg. He was awarded a Ph.D. and relished ‘the stimulus, the role models, the tradition of attacking important problems, however difficult, that Cambridge provided. It was Cambridge that made me, and for that I am for ever grateful.’ By April 1940 everything seemed to be going right in his life. He had a girlfriend. His parents had made it safely out of Austria to England. The stars in his life had aligned and, just as it seemed that nothing could go wrong, it did – and spectacularly so.

  In May 1940 Max Perutz was called before an Enemy Aliens Tribunal to determine whether he was sympathetic to the Nazi regime. To his astonishment he was judged to be a ‘Category B’ alien: ‘absolute reliability uncertain’. It is hard to imagine why. If Perutz’s criminal record played a part, we can only presume that the actual offence was never revealed. One night in Cambridge he had been arrested for riding his bicycle without lights.

  To keep Britain safe from Nazi Fifth Columnists this twenty-six-year-old Jewish crystallographer was shipped off to Quebec, strip-searched, relieved of his possessions and deposited in a detention camp that looked out over the St Lawrence River. He gave lectures, became the ‘doyen of the camp’s scholars’ and was taught theoretical physics by fellow detainee Klaus Fuchs, the man who later went to Jürgen Kuczynski to start passing atomic secrets to the USSR.

  Perutz was not released until the following year when he returned to Cambridge to resume his work on the structure of haemoglobin. It left him feeling detached. ‘Nobody wanted my help for anything related to the war except fire-watching on the roof of the laboratory at night.’ All this changed in the Spring of 1942 when he received a call from a man with a ‘gentle, persuasive voice’ who wanted advice on tunnelling through glacial ice. It was Pyke, then exploring an icy version of the Trojan Horse ruse in which the Plough force would pretend to withdraw from Norway but instead hide deep within a glacier. Later that year Perutz was contacted again by Pyke.

  ‘This time, he sized me up with a volley of provocative remarks, and then told me, with the air of one great man confiding in another, that he needed my help for the most important project of the war.’ Perutz dropped his haemoglobin work and agreed to conduct experiments for Pyke into the properties of reinforced ice. To do this he was given the use of a secret laboratory five floors below London’s Smithfield Meat Market.

  His new workplace had once been a refrigerated meat store and was lit by blue fluorescent lights, which gave it an eerie, futuristic atmosphere. Perutz and his six assistants, each one a muscular Commando, went about in electrically heated flying suits, while the soundtrack in this subterranean lair was the rhythmic grind of a generator, a wind tunnel and the concrete mixer which stopped the pulp composite from drying out. It was like something out of a science fiction novel – and so was the material they were working with.

  Perutz was fascinated by the properties of the strange new substance, even if he did not yet know what it was for. ‘It can be machined like wood and cast into shapes like copper; immersed in warm water.’ It was buoyant and cheap and very strong. By freezing a mixture of water and 4 per cent wood pulp, Perutz was manufacturing reinforced ice that was ‘weight for weight as strong as concrete’. This gave him and Lieutenant Commander Douglas Grant, one of the Combined Operations officers assigned to the project, an idea for what to name it.
‘In honour of the originator of the project, we called this reinforced ice “Pykrete”.’

  Mountbatten was eager to see this material for himself, so a visit was arranged to Perutz’s laboratory. Wearing civilian clothes to make sure they did not arouse the suspicions of the local meat porters, Mountbatten, Wernher and the Canadian High Commissioner were driven in an unmarked van from Scotland Yard to Smithfield Market where they were taken underground and shown into Perutz’s lair. The balding Austrian scientist led them over to two blocks of ice, one pure, the other Pykrete and produced a hammer. He then asked one of his guests to smash the blocks.

  The clearer of the two shattered easily enough. That was ice. Yet when the hammer struck the Pykrete it pinged off the icy compound and fell to the floor.

  Seeing is believing, and for many this demonstration was an epiphany. Not so Sir Harold Wernher, however – indeed, he was so determined to prove the material’s inherent weakness that he took out his pistol and fired at the block of Pykrete. Still it did not shatter. As Perutz’s Commandos had recently discovered, a bullet fired from a rifle into a Pykrete block one foot thick merely formed ‘a little crater and was embedded without doing any damage’. Ironically, given his reasons for producing the gun, the effect of Wernher’s bullet was only to harden the faith of those in the room. The Canadian High Commissioner, Vincent Massey, now called for construction on the first berg-ship to start immediately. Mountbatten agreed, but understood that for this to happen the project needed another push from up on high. He filled a thermos with one of Perutz’s samples and set off for Chequers.

  There was a large party staying that weekend, with guests ranging from the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough to ‘Bomber’ Harris and the Turkish Ambassador. When Mountbatten arrived, shortly before dinner, he was told that the Prime Minister was in the bath.

  ‘Good, that’s exactly where I want him to be,’ he replied, before bounding up the stairs into Churchill’s room. He called through to the bathroom: ‘I have a block of a new material which I would like to put in your bath.’

  It is unclear whether Churchill was still in the bath when Mountbatten strode into the room. Either way, the CCO went over to the tub and launched a block of Pykrete into the warm water. Apparently Churchill complained that this would make the bath cold, which suggests that he was either already soaking himself or planned to be doing so very soon. Perhaps this is the image we want, that of Churchill in his bath, face full of wonder as a miniature version of Pyke’s artificial iceberg bobs about between his legs. In the bath or out of it, on the weekend of 18 March 1943 the Prime Minister saw for himself the magical sight of Pykrete afloat in warm water.

  ‘I must tell you about our wonderful new plan,’ he had told the US President in Casablanca earlier that year. Admiral King, the Commander-in-Chief of the American fleet, also heard of the scheme while in Morocco, and said that if Habbakuk was feasible it would ‘win the war at one blow’. Now that he had seen Pykrete for himself, Churchill was more determined than ever to bring this extraordinary scheme to fruition. It would become something of an obsession.

  That month he and his Minister of War Production, Oliver Lyttelton, were shown a cross-section of a proposed berg-ship. They were ‘both enthusiastic and anxious to know the approximate earliest date [by which the] first ship [was] likely to be complete’. Thousands of miles away, on a frozen lake in Canada, the author of this scheme was trying to find out.

  Soon after the decisive Habbakuk meeting at which Mountbatten had clashed with Cherwell, both Bernal and Zuckerman had set out for North Africa to investigate why the RAF had failed to inflict greater damage on Rommel’s retreating Afrika Korps. This was ‘operational research’, the marriage of scientific analysis and military practice which Bernal had been calling for since 1939. He was in his element. But almost as soon as they landed in Cairo, Bernal was handed a telegram calling him away from his work.

  Mountbatten knew all too well what had happened the last time Pyke had gone to North America on a secret military project. He had also come to believe that Habbakuk might be ‘the most important single idea of this war’, and at the last minute had decided that Bernal must join Pyke in Canada. It was a canny move: Pyke listened to Bernal, who was also far more sensitive in his dealings with others.

  Yet Bernal turned a blind eye to this telegram and instead accompanied Zuckerman to Tripoli. They spent the next week inspecting RAF bomb craters, and their work was going well until the night when Bernal sat down with Zuckerman to announce that he was leaving.

  ‘He had been just as nervous about telling me as he always was when making a break with one of the many women who used to fall in love with him,’ fumed Zuckerman. ‘I was appalled at the thought of being left alone, with the responsibility of carrying out not only the enquiries for which I had become trained, but also those that he would have done. I spent hours that evening, pleading with him by candlelight – there was no electricity in the hotel – not to go, saying that Habbakuk was nonsense’.

  Zuckerman accused Bernal of being an emotional and scientific dilettante who was incapable of commitment. The same thing would happen with Habbakuk, he warned. Bernal would give himself to it until the situation became more serious, when he would run away. ‘Des became more and more silent as, in desperation, I added accusation to accusation. But all to no avail.’ Bernal had been asked to decide between Canada and Libya, experimentation and analysis, Pyke and Zuckerman. He had chosen the former in each case. Zuckerman would never forgive him. ‘Habbakuk, or rather Pyke, proved the beginning of the parting of the ways for Bernal and me.’

  From a khaki tent in the Libyan desert Des Bernal was driven to Cairo where he took a plane to Accra and spent the night in a stable with a shipwrecked sailor. On Ascension Island he swam off a bone-white beach in shark-infested waters and by night drank whisky with American servicemen. There followed a forced landing in the Amazonian forests of British Guiana, a cricket match in Trinidad, and lunch with his old friend Professor Mark in sub-zero New York. Here he found Pyke, who had also found crossing the Atlantic harder than expected, and the next day the two friends flew north to Ottawa.

  Jack Mackenzie, the Canadian civil engineer, was unsure what to make of them. ‘Bernal and Pyke are a queer-looking team,’ he tried, describing Pyke as ‘a most unusual type’, adding ‘most people think he is absolutely mad. He is not mad. He thinks in a most unorthodox way.’ Mackenzie enjoyed Pyke’s account of getting into and out of Germany, calling him ‘a bit of a psychological expert’ whose ‘advice on commando tactics is very useful’. But he could not understand his wardrobe. ‘He lands in this country without any gloves and with only a light raincoat to embark upon a trip into the Arctic weather.’ Not to be outdone, Bernal was apparently ‘dressed like a tramp’ in ‘a little pair of corduroy trousers with a belt halfway down from the waist, and a blue and green shirt like a lumberman’s’.

  Mackenzie was to escort the British mission, two-thirds of Mountbatten’s Department of Wild Talents, out to the experimental sites in western Canada, a job he found initially exhausting. ‘Travelling with Pyke is like travelling with a small child’, he complained, for he ‘can never find anything [. . .] He just goes through his pockets and the most unusual things come out – memos, tickets, dollar bills, etc.’ It came as no surprise on the train out of Ottawa that Pyke had lost his ticket. Mackenzie had to buy him a new one, muttering to his diary, ‘I am still perfectly sure that his ticket to Jasper will turn up some day.’

  The mood changed once they arrived at the first of the Habbakuk experiments. Over the next few days, covering vast distances in between, the three men witnessed tests into how Pykrete bonded with pure ice, the rates at which mixtures of water and wood pulp could be frozen, and the extent to which Pykrete displayed plastic flow or ‘creep’. Everything was progressing at remarkable speed, as it needed to.

  It had taken sixty years of scientific tests and experiments to establish beyond doubt the fundamental propert
ies of concrete. The Habbakuk project demanded an equivalent understanding of Pykrete in less than a year and for this knowledge to be incorporated into the design of the world’s largest ship. This was research and construction on an almost Soviet scale, which was perhaps why it appealed so much to Bernal and Pyke. It was daunting, certainly, a project of brazen ambition, but from what they had seen so far it might just be possible, a belief that was only strengthened by what they saw next.

  Over the past few weeks the frozen surface of Patricia Lake had become an outdoor factory. On this picturesque lake in Jasper National Park labourers were now working round the clock on a scaled-down model of the Habbakuk berg-ship. They had begun by laying out a wooden floor on the ice in the shape of a vessel sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. While this was not the 1:10 model requested by the British Admiralty (it would have needed to be 140 feet longer for that) it would at least answer the question of whether a self-refrigerating berg-ship made from ice was at all practicable.

  Once the floor had been laid out it was sealed with pitch before work began on the walls. Tinsmiths installed a web of refrigerating ducts sandwiched between blocks of ice, which would stop the ship from melting in warmer waters. Originally brine coolant was to be pumped through the ducts, but some of these had been damaged en route to the site so cold air was pumped through instead. With the ducts sealed in place, just days before the arrival of Pyke, Bernal and Mackenzie, the outer blocks of ice were moved into position.

  It was a thrilling sight. The icy vision which had come to Pyke in the pummelling heat of Washington DC in the summer was materialising fast, and the construction proved to be rapid and intuitive. ‘They are working in the most primitive way using wheelbarrows, etc.,’ Bernal reported to London, adding that a 1,000 ton model would probably take no more than fourteen days to build, confirming Pyke’s assertion that unskilled labourers with little specialist equipment could make these vessels in very little time.