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

by Henry Hemming

  This string of small victories – diplomatic, tactical, technical and industrial – had combined to change the complexion of the Battle of the Atlantic, and by September 1943 Allied shipping losses were ten times fewer than during the same month the year before. Indeed, by the end of the year Admiral Karl DÖnitz, Grand Admiral of the German Navy, ordered all German U-Boats away from the North Atlantic. All this meant that Habbakuk was no longer needed to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Instead it had been given a new purpose.

  During the early stages of the Quebec conference there were detailed discussions about Operation Overlord and a nuclear agreement was signed. Yet on several issues the British and American delegations found themselves far apart. Tempers were getting short, as they had done in a meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff on 19 August. Field Marshal Brooke suggested that the sixty or so junior staff officers present be asked to leave the room so that the senior Allied commanders could speak off the record.

  This seemed to work, and the discussion became smoother. Mountbatten then went up to Brooke to remind him that he had promised to allow him to introduce Habbakuk. Brooke duly gave him the floor.

  ‘Dickie now having been let loose gave a signal, whereupon a string of attendants brought in large cubes of ice which were established at the end of the room,’ wrote Brooke. ‘Dickie then proceeded to explain that the cube on the left was ordinary pure ice, whereas that on the right contained many ingredients which made it far more resilient, less liable to splinter, and consequently a far more suitable material for the construction of aircraft carriers.’

  Churchill also recorded the scene: ‘He invited the strongest man present to chop each block of ice in half with a special chopper he had brought. All present voted General Arnold into the job of “strong man”.

  General Henry H. Arnold

  ‘He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves [in another account Arnold spat on his hands], and swung the chopper, splitting the ordinary ice with one blow. He turned round, smiling, and clasping his hands, seized the chopper again and advanced upon the block of Pykrete. He swung the chopper, and as he brought it down let go with a cry of pain, for the Pykrete had suffered little damage and his elbows had been badly jarred. Mountbatten then capped matters by drawing a pistol from his pocket to demonstrate the strength of Pykrete against gunfire.’

  Brooke recalled that once Mountbatten had produced his pistol ‘we all rose and discreetly moved behind him. He then warned us that he would fire at the ordinary block of ice to show how it splintered [. . .]. He proceeded to fire and we were subjected to a hail of ice splinters! “There,” said Dickie, “that is just what I told you; now I shall fire at the block on the right to show you the difference.” He fired, and there certainly was a difference.’ Rather than become embedded in the Pykrete the bullet ricocheted off.

  Accounts differ as to precisely what happened next. In Churchill’s version of events the bullet narrowly missed Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. In another it nicked Admiral King. One has the bullet landing in Mountbatten’s stomach, elsewhere it takes a lump of plaster off the wall. Another account has General Hollis diving for cover under a table, where he ‘collided, skull to skull, with [Field Marshal] Alan Brooke, approaching from the opposite direction’.

  ‘Dickie, for God’s sake, stop firing that thing!’ cried Brooke.

  ‘The waiting officers outside,’ Churchill went on, ‘who had been worried enough by the sound of blows and the scream of pain from General Arnold, were horrified at the revolver shots, one of them crying out, “My God! They’ve now started shooting.”’

  Calm was soon restored. Thankfully Pykrete had not been responsible for the death or injury of any senior Allied commanders. Instead this incident seemed to enliven the mood and there followed a constructive discussion of Habbakuk. Though the original purpose of Pyke’s ships had been to win the Battle of the Atlantic, in Quebec they were presented to the Americans as offensive vessels which were cheap and unsinkable and could be used in operations against Japan and occupied Europe. The consensus was that if further experiments could show that these berg-ships were both practical and cheap then they should be built without delay.

  By the end of the conference the British Chiefs of Staff had agreed to construct two of the smaller berg-ships for use in the Pacific theatre and to continue experiments on a larger vessel. It was also decided that the Habbakuk project would become an Anglo-American-Canadian venture and that the London team of Habbakuk engineers and scientists should be flown over to Washington DC.

  Mountbatten also introduced two other proposals from his ‘lunatic asylum’ on Richmond Terrace: the concept of a floating harbour which could be towed to northern France on D-Day; and the idea of laying an oil pipeline underneath the Channel to supply the Allied forces. Better known as Mulberry and PLUTO, they would become two of the best-known inventions of the war. And yet, of the three ideas from Combined Operations, Habbakuk was seen by many of those in Quebec to be the most realistic prospect.

  None had been quite so gripped by these ideas as Churchill, who now began to suggest building Mulberry floating harbours out of Pykrete. Pyke, Perutz and others would soon draw up plans for D-Day landing stages and breakwaters constructed from Pykrete, code-named Gog and Magog, as well as small non-propelled vessels made from Pykrete to be known as Monitors.

  At last it seemed that Pykrete’s potential as a cheap, buoyant and revolutionary material had been recognised. Almost a year after Pyke’s proposal had first arrived on Mountbatten’s desk, Habbakuk, or at least the basic concept behind it, was set to play a major part in the closing stages of the war. That was the good news from Quebec. The bad news took a little longer to reach London.

  HOW TO SURVIVE

  BY THE TIME he boarded the Queen Mary, before it set sail for Quebec, Mountbatten had become restless. He longed for another naval command and over the next five days, as the ship zigzagged across the Atlantic, he tried to corner the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound. ‘I followed him like a shadow, pacing the decks for exercise, or up on the bridge. He always seemed to be talking to someone. It never occurred to me that he might be avoiding me. Then one day I did catch Pound alone. “I’ve finished my work at Combined Operations,” I said, “and I think it’s about time I went back to sea.” He did not seem to take any interest at all.’ This was because he knew what was in store for Mountbatten.

  Soon after this encounter Churchill told the CCO that he was to become Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia. His appointment would begin in less than two months. Not only was Mountbatten to be denied his naval command, but Habbakuk was set to lose its most energetic advocate.

  Although Admiral King had been impressed by the Habbakuk idea when he had heard about it earlier that year, now that it was to be developed jointly by the US, Canada and Britain he wanted a detailed assessment and asked a team of US naval engineers to go over the project in detail. This was when things began to fall apart.

  They objected to the lumbering speed of these berg-ships as well as the amount of steel required to build them, given that large refrigeration plants would need to be constructed to produce the Pykrete. Beneath these concerns lay a more stubborn and irrational reluctance. The naval engineers disliked the idea of building an aircraft carrier out of ice. Often the greatest challenge faced by an innovator is not the conception of a new idea but, rather, persuading others to overcome their often automatic preference for the status quo. Another problem was Pyke.

  Jack Mackenzie, now directing the multinational Habbakuk project, knew that Pyke’s reputation in America after Plough was so noxious that he must be kept away. Mountbatten was given the unfortunate task of telling his Director of Programmes not to come out to Washington DC, adding that he had ‘consulted Bernal who entirely agrees’. ‘We are both so sorry.’ The idea of Bernal and Mountbatten combining like this to keep him away from Habbakuk flattened Pyke. Indeed, his relationship with Bernal would never recover.

  In
spite of Mackenzie’s best efforts, Pyke’s original connection to Habbakuk soon became known and, as he had feared, it did nothing to endear the project to the Americans. Even Vannevar Bush, the head of OSRD, heard about Pyke’s involvement and later told Roosevelt, when asked for his opinion of Habbakuk, ‘I think it is the bunk.’ In his memoirs he also described the moment when the two men behind the scheme came to him for help.

  ‘Mountbatten and Pyke walked into my office,’ he began. ‘They had evidently just come from the White House, there was no presentation of a proposal, no request that OSRD should study one and advise on it. Rather, Pyke told me the plan was approved and just what OSRD was now to do about it. [. . .] Mountbatten looked embarrassed but not nearly enough so. I listened. Then I told Pyke, no doubt with some emphasis, that I took orders from the President of the United States and from no one else, and that ended the interview.’

  One of the most interesting features of this conversation is that it never took place. At no point during the development of Habbakuk were Pyke, Mountbatten and Bush in the same country. Bush had contrived to imagine this encounter, and as a pure fantasy it is revealing. The emphasis on taking orders from the American President, rather than these interloping Englishmen, is telling. It is a reminder of the resentment that some Americans felt towards the idea of being told to work on a British idea like Habbakuk.

  Another reason why Pyke’s involvement in the project was so troublesome was that he continued to be seen as a security risk, thanks to the cartoon character Superman. In late March 1943 an exciting new plot-line had emerged in the Superman daily cartoon strip, then syndicated to newspapers throughout North America and read by millions. Just as the Habbakuk prototype neared completion, the Man of Steel encountered a strange-looking iceberg.

  Superman ™ and © DC Comics, 29 March 1943

  The following day the attack began.

  Superman ™ and © DC Comics, 30 March 1943

  Luckily Superman was on hand to put an end to these ‘fiendishly clever’ ‘floating fortresses’.

  Superman ™ and © DC Comics, 31 March 1943

  The similiarity between these floating fortresses and Habbakuk was astonishing. One of the Canadian engineers working on Habbakuk saw the cartoons and immediately sent copies to Jack Mackenzie. The chances of this being coincidence seemed to be infinitesimal. Earlier that year Pyke had been in New York, where those behind the comic strip lived – a detail which did nothing to remove any lingering suspicion about the man responsible for Habbakuk.

  Yet it was Bernal who delivered the coup de grace. Admiral King’s engineers had given their cautious assessment of the project to the new American-Canadian-British Habbakuk board, after which Bernal was called upon to counter their criticisms. He did no such thing. ‘Bernal, who had become so expert in proclaiming the points in favour of Habbakuk, now, with his Jesuitical mind, volunteered to produce all the points against it as well,’ explained Mountbatten wearily. ‘The criticisms of the project were so powerful that they turned the scales against it.’

  It was not that Bernal had lost faith in Habbakuk, but that he had become impatient and wanted to be back in London during the build-up to D-Day. Perhaps Zuckerman was right. Bernal really did find it hard to see a project or relationship through to the very end. News of his performance even reached Churchill who told Mountbatten that, in future, ‘you must not bring your Scientific Advisers’ to such meetings.

  Habbakuk remained ‘practical politics’, as the Admiralty had put it, but the momentum behind it had evaporated. The projected cost of the scheme, the amount of steel required and the war’s adjusted strategic aims all militated against it, and so did the identity of its author. With Mountbatten gone, Pyke excluded and Bernal bored, it had lost three of its most passionate supporters, and by January 1944 the British Admiralty and US Navy had ceased all work in connection with Habbakuk. What might have been the most ambitious ship ever produced by a nation at war, the world’s largest vessel, would remain in utero. For the moment Pyke did not have time to digest the scale of this defeat – his more immediate concern was surviving at Combined Operations now that his great supporter had left.

  In the weeks after Mountbatten’s departure, Pyke circulated papers around Richmond Terrace on seemingly everything from the ideal width of a typescript through to the need for a handbook of ‘ruses de guerre’ culled from history and literature. ‘If professional historians were too busy, school-boys should be invited to undertake the task and thus to play, intellectually, a real and early part in the war by remedying the omission of their elders.’ He proposed having an actor dress up as Hitler to trick German units into withdrawing from small Mediterranean islands. He submitted plans for gravity-propelled ball-bombs to be rolled down beaches onto coastal defence walls. He sketched out plans for different vessels made from Pykrete. He returned to the ‘Trojan Horse’ idea of tunnelling through glaciers. But the idea into which he devoted most of his energy in this frenzied post-Habbakuk period was reserved for Mountbatten in his new role as Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia.

  Pyke understood that one of the great problems that Mountbatten now faced was moving men and materials either from ships to the shore or across paddy fields and through dense jungle. He proposed large-bore pipes through which cylinders could be pumped containing either supplies or troops, with each soldier breathing from a hand-held oxygen canister as his cylinder was shot down the tube. These pipelines could run from warships to islands or across inhospitable terrain, and would be called Power-Driven Rivers, as he explained in the 50-page proposal he sent to Mountbatten in India. ‘Like Plough, but unlike Habbakuk, it is both new and orthodox,’ he went on. ‘So orthodox and obvious that everyone will say “Poof, I could have thought of that” and from that they’ll slide into saying they did think of it (almost), and start on the reasons why nothing should be done about it.’

  But Power-Driven Rivers was not in the same league as his two earlier schemes, and Mountbatten was ‘perhaps not so obviously enchanted with the idea as he was with Plough and Habbakuk’, as Wildman-Lushington delicately put it. It was also turned down by the British Chiefs of Staff, following a presentation by Pyke and Bernal. But it was Mountbatten’s rejection which had stung the most.

  Pyke struggled to reconcile himself to not being invited out to South-East Asia, especially after learning that both Bernal and Zuckerman had been asked to go. His letters lost their verve. ‘Dear Mountbatten,’ began one, ‘Do the old terms still apply?’

  His former boss had not lost faith in Pyke or his abilities, and in the coming months he wrote to Sir Charles Lambe, Director of Plans at the Admiralty, describing Pyke as a man possessing ‘a brain twenty or thirty years in advance of any scientist’s and one that is particularly suitable for planning’. He urged Lambe to keep Pyke ‘in fullest touch with the various plans in my own field of operations, to be able to see the relevant papers and intelligence, and to communicate to me directly, any suggestions he may have to make on this and other subjects’. But he did not want Pyke to join his South-East Asian Command.

  The truth was that Mountbatten had by then received far too much criticism for his decision to recruit Pyke in the first place. As Wildman-Lushington reminded his boss, firmly, ‘I do not think you want him out here.’ The issue had nothing to do with Pyke’s irreverence or moments of eccentricity but with his inability to work easily in a group. Pyke’s emotional fragility and heightened sensitivity to being sidelined appeared to make this impossible. When he felt himself being marginalised he had a tendency to self-destruct, and would either cast around for a scapegoat or become difficult and behave, as one colleague put it, like an ‘awkward cuss’.

  A typical example was his reaction to the news that he was not to attend a key Habbakuk meeting at Downing Street shortly before the Quebec conference. Pyke had rounded on the officer he felt was responsible, the news of which soon reached Mountbatten. ‘I share with Professor Bernal the highest possible opinion of y
our brain,’ he told him, ‘and have often wondered that a man of such outstanding intellect should be unable to guide his everyday life in such a manner as to avoid friction for himself and all his supporters.’

  Pyke’s reply came in the form of a mocked-up ‘Obituary Notice of Lord Louis Mountbatten’, dated to 2001, in the British Socialist Republic of the USSR (which he imagined coming about after a Communist uprising in 1949–50). It contained a long and playfully absurd confession from ‘our beloved Comrade and Commissar – habitually so calm, so benign, so dialectical’ – Mountbatten. ‘I had belonged to a set within a caste within a class which lacked the experience of frustration,’ Pyke has him say. ‘We had only to see to desire, and had only to desire to obtain or to do. Sensations poured down the gullet of experience, and yet left the whole body thirsty and exhausted.’ There followed a detailed critique of the way Mountbatten ran Combined Operations, in which Pyke called him decisive without being reflective. ‘You are too arrogant to refuse to apologise . . . You are the living dialectical reverse of Bluntschli in “Arms and the Man”: and the Chocolate Soldier: – you always apologise. It is part of your technique.’ Nor was he ‘sufficiently hard-boiled’. At one point Pyke imagined Mountbatten describing himself as having ‘something of the innocent in me. [. . .] My technical advisers even referred to me, among themselves, as Peter Pan. They were right. It was a Peter Pan age. One of the most vital accusations against the Capitalist system is that under it, it was for everybody so very, very difficult to become truly adult.’ This was the sort of letter you might write in the heat of the moment but never send. Pyke, of course, sent it. He had to, such was the power of his self-destructive impulse in moments like this.