Shortly after Pyke’s unauthorised conversation with one of his staff, he did the same thing again with another employee. This time Bush went to General Moses to complain, pepping up his account of what had happened with phrases like: ‘I judge that Mr Pyke’s conversation was interspersed with many references to people in high places and that there were scarcely veiled threats involved.’ Moses, sensibly, took no action.
Bush returned to OSRD where he ordered his staff to have ‘no formal contact whatever with this particular British Mission’. Indeed, if any of them so much as spoke to Pyke they were ‘to put in my file promptly a full memorandum on the conversation’. It was one of the only times in his life when Bush issued such an order and, as he later wrote, ‘it is fortunate that I did’.
Soon after Mountbatten’s arrival Bush heard a more startling claim about Pyke. A newly promoted and perhaps over-confident Sandy Wedderburn had told a member of Bush’s staff that Pyke was ‘now sitting pretty with a direct liaison to the President’ and that ‘if the project did not move as Pyke wished, heads would roll’. Wedderburn had also claimed that Pyke had placed an ‘explosive charge’ under Bush, and that if Plough did not move in the right direction he would light the fuse. Bush reiterated to his staff that they must keep away from this man, which was why Pyke found the reception so frosty on his return from Canada.
Unaware of what Wedderburn had said, let alone Bush’s reaction, Pyke found himself in a quandary. He could ignore this reception, resign for a second time, or he could play his trump card: he could explain the situation to an acquaintance of his at the White House.
Seen in these terms it was not a difficult decision to make. Pyke was starting to understand the subtleties of people’s resistance to new ideas and the importance of having support at the highest level. So far he had failed to get the backing of Bush. It seemed that the only way to get Plough moving in the right direction was to win over an even more powerful body. The danger was that by going to the White House he might also alienate the US Army, and ultimately that would have repercussions for both him and the man who had shown such faith in him over the last five months: Mountbatten.
Pyke sat down for lunch with the Economic Adviser to the President, Isidor Lubin, on 22 June 1942. Mountbatten had told him to ‘be frank both with the President and his advisers’, and at lunch that day Pyke held nothing back. Disregarding everything Bush had ever said about ‘working through channels’ he explained to Lubin what had happened with Plough, concluding that ‘the organisational level of the American Army at this stage of its evolution is not adequate to the working-out of such a project as I’ve put before them’. Though Pyke was fulsome in his ‘appreciation of the treatment we have received from every officer in the War Department and the US Army with whom we have had contact. From me as a civilian such acknowledgement is particularly due. Every kindness has been shown us,’ he went on, but ‘they don’t understand war. They will win, of course, but by weight of numbers and material. And but for the Russians, they’d lose even then.’
Lubin listened at length, was silent and at last proposed a solution. ‘For one so imperturbable he then became quite enthusiastic and emphatic,’ recalled Pyke. Lubin’s plan was bold. He suggested that the British Government ask the Office of Lend-Lease Administration for assistance with Plough. Lubin’s friend there, Oscar Cox, could allocate the necessary funds for experiments and production costs, and the mistakes of the last two months could be rectified. In other words, Lubin and Cox would help Pyke take Plough away from OSRD and the US Army and have it developed through Lend-Lease instead.
The ramifications of this slowly dawned on Pyke. ‘It meant a Caste War. For no caste ever gives up the slightest of its privileges without a struggle.’ By agreeing to Lubin’s plan he would initiate a battle between the White House and the War Department, and ‘was almost certain to be a war casualty in that fight’. It was, however, a risk he was prepared to take in order to save his project. Lubin picked up the telephone, called Cox and arranged for him to see Pyke.
Oscar Cox was a bright-eyed, hard-working lawyer from Maine of whom it has been said that ‘in this big, husky Maine lawyer, Harry Hopkins had found his own Hopkins’. More importantly, when it came to rescuing scientific projects that had run aground in the military shallows, Cox had form. Back in May 1940 he had arranged a meeting between Hopkins and a scientist in need of state funding for atomic research – Vannevar Bush. That meeting led to the creation of OSRD and helped accelerate progress towards the Manhattan Project. Now Cox was being asked to take a different scheme away from the same scientist he had once helped, on behalf of a fast-talking Englishman.
Pyke explained to Cox ‘with complete frankness our experience of the American Army, and of the sabotage efforts of G-4 in particular’. If he was worried about how Cox would respond, he need not have been. Cox was ‘receptive and enthusiastic’ and agreed with Lubin’s suggestion to ‘set up a parallel organisation which would act competitively on the Army’.
The following day Cox called Lubin. ‘There is a lot to what he says,’ he began. ‘The problem is, how far it’s gone and what can be done about it.’ They agreed that the problem with the Army handling Plough was that ‘nobody wants to take it on because it is controversial and it will get them into trouble’. Although they found Pyke ‘fascinating’, or as Cox described him, ‘amazing’, both men could see how he ‘would drive the Army nuts’.
They agreed that Lubin should explain the situation to Hopkins, while Cox would buttonhole John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, and push to have a scientist placed in the War Department to get things moving from the inside. Pyke then sent Lubin and Cox copies of his damning report on the US Army’s handling of Plough, which he had recently submitted to Mountbatten. This was another dangerous move. ‘I am doing this after thinking thrice. My Chief, I believe, showed it to one or two high authorities, but you will appreciate that if it were known or even suspected that I had shown this to you or anyone else, the complications would be serious.’ Or as he told Cox, ‘you realise, I hope, that this is high explosive, and should be handled gently. It is best dealt with in the dark in solitude.’
Later that day two of Cox’s young assistants, both lawyers, visited Pyke in his hotel room. One was George Ball, who would go on to be Under-Secretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs; the other was Eugene Rostow, later appointed by President Lyndon Johnson as Under-Secretary of State. It was another sweltering evening in the capital, and by midnight the three men were still talking. ‘We “clicked” in the first ten minutes,’ wrote Pyke. ‘I applied my usual tests on them to see what they laughed at’ and concluded that they were ‘our sort’. The two lawyers were no less taken with Pyke, seeing him as ‘an unusually gifted and attractive Englishman’. ‘Pyke could not write or talk without skyrocketing wit, interlarded with quotations from Shaw, Churchill, Tolstoy, the Bible, or whatever apt epigram he might dredge from his vast arsenal,’ wrote George Ball, adding, ‘it did not endear him to the soldiers’.
His room that night was an echo chamber in which everyone seemed to agree on the Army’s anti-scientific bias, its resistance to new ideas and the absurdity of Bush’s insistence on Pyke having no contact with OSRD engineers. In the heat of it all, Pyke made a throwaway remark. He said that things were so bad that there should be an official investigation into the methods of the War Department. It was a comment that would come back to bite him.
Over the coming days, Cox and Lubin interviewed some of those working on the project. They learnt that the design of the prototype Weasel was so bad that the snowmobile could not steer. An expert in tank production told them that the ideal design should involve Archimedian screws, as Pyke had suggested. But before they could put together a report, Vannevar Bush heard of these White House enquiries. He also discovered that they had originated with Pyke.
Immediately Bush went to the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, an indomitable seventy-four-year-old Republican
who was, by that stage of the war, less than enamoured with the British, and handed him his docket of papers on Pyke and his contacts with OSRD. Some of these reports were tendentious, others riddled with exaggerations and omissions. Yet the gist of what they said was accurate: Pyke was deeply critical of the War Department’s handling of Plough; he had expressed these concerns to those at the White House; and had at one point suggested that there should be an official investigation into the methods of the War Department. These documents also indicated that there were security concerns regarding Pyke.
Stimson was livid. He summoned Field Marshal Dill to say that Pyke’s behaviour was ‘seriously upsetting friendly relations between the US and British Armies’. This man must ‘go home immediately’. As one of Cox’s assistants remarked: ‘The Weasel business has taken a turn for the acute.’
Mountbatten’s representative was now treading water. He sent another long letter to his boss telling him how much he was looking forward to receiving a cable from London to say that he had been sacked. He would throw ‘a large and riotous dinner here to celebrate my dismissal, inviting to it foe and friend alike, all united in common rejoicing, where I should dance on the table among the champagne glasses’.
All he really wanted to do just then was to work on the radical new idea which he had mentioned in Canada. By his nature, Pyke was forever more interested in the solution of fresh problems than the slogging and scheming required to steer a project like Plough through to completion. Yet to carry on with his new work he needed emotional assurances from the CCO. ‘It is very very difficult to think if you are feeling angry and aggrieved,’ he told him. ‘The elan vital gets drained off. You may be a bit staggered by this letter. “More Pykerie.” But this psychological fact is the basic one. Part of the difficulty is that while I can blow off steam to you about other people, I’ve no one to whom I can blow off steam about you.’
With his world starting to collapse around him, Pyke was reaching out to the man to whom he had come to feel closer than perhaps any other. In Richmond Terrace this proximity had been a source of occasional resentment. Shortly before Pyke’s departure, several officers had even gone to the trouble of disabling the magnetic lock on Mountbatten’s door because they were annoyed about the amount of time the Director of Programmes was spending in there. If there were moments when Pyke saw himself as the Figaro-figure in this relationship – nominally junior yet essentially in control – there remained a genuine camaraderie between the two and mutual admiration, all of which meant that Mountbatten would go to great lengths to resist having him dismissed.
In the thick of this, unaware of the crisis, Churchill cabled Hopkins. ‘I am anxious to know what the prospects are of carrying out Mountbatten Plough Scheme this winter and would be grateful to hear how development and planning are progressing.’ Plough was in disarray, Hopkins might have replied. There was no snowmobile, no guerrilla force and those involved in the project were busy casting about for scapegoats. Pyke had rounded on a Norwegian officer involved in the project. Cox’s two assistants thought ‘Putnam Must Go’, a reference to an OSRD employee. Bush and Stimson were convinced that Pyke was the problem. Cox and Lubin, meanwhile, described Pyke as ‘the red herring of this affair’, which in their opinion had become an unflattering reflection of the War Department’s approach to scientific development.
Several days later Bush’s department launched a fresh attack on Pyke. One of its employees circulated a punishing account of Pyke’s behaviour and character that was passionate and detailed, yet failed to make several valid criticisms.
Over the last month in the US, Pyke had allowed the power given to him by Mountbatten to go to his head, often coming across as obstreperous and brittle. Temperamentally he was better suited to roaming about within an organisation – suggesting, provoking, making people laugh, solving problems, coming up with ideas – than ordering others around. The court jester had become king and, as almost everyone agreed, this had been a mistake. Knox described Pyke in the wake of Mountbatten’s visit as puffed up ‘with the impression that he was to run the show and could boss anyone about’. As if to prove this, Pyke then referred to Knox in a cipher telegram to London as ‘that damned old woman’. This message passed through SOE’s headquarters on Baker Street and ‘caused so much amusement on arrival’, wrote Mountbatten, ‘that I actually had my leg pulled by people in the London office before the telegram reached me! Your telegram unfortunately tickles their sense of humour.’ Knox was less amused.
Pyke also had a tendency, Mountbatten observed, to rush ‘to the conclusion that everyone is out to be an obstructionist, or, until they prove themselves otherwise, are congenital idiots’. His technique of opening a conversation with a blast of provocative remarks did not always bring out the best in those he spoke to. ‘Most of the people he comes into contact with are all very busy,’ a friend of Mountbatten’s explained, and to them ‘his opening gambits are often frivolous, and, to the uninitiated, pointless; that is half the trouble.’
‘I have not gone deeply into pros and cons of case,’ Field Marshal Dill told Mountbatten, ‘but Harry Hopkins has taken full story as prepared by War Department and will, I know, ask you to recall Pyke before he further disturbs Anglo-American relations.’ Yet four days later, somehow, Pyke was still clinging on. ‘You don’t sack me now only out of obstinacy,’ he teased Mountbatten. ‘You are gambling on my pulling something off somehow, sometime, whereupon you reckon to turn round in glee on all your critics.’ But the pressure soon became too much.
‘It has been made absolutely clear to me that your particular scheme will probably best be served by your running it from here,’ Mountbatten told him. First General Marshall and then Hopkins had explained that if he did not have Pyke recalled they would force him out. ‘I know both of them well enough to realise that this was a polite way of giving me an opportunity of “withdrawing my son from school before he was sent down”.’
The top line of the charge against Pyke was serious. As a guest of the US, he had initiated a White House investigation into the methods of the War Department. Yet Mountbatten did not have him sacked. He merely asked him to return to Richmond Terrace to continue his work on Plough from there and, in the meantime, as a personal favour, ‘to avoid entangling us any further’.
Pyke felt a lift of relief. In spite of ‘the unspeakable misery of seeing the beautiful and delicately balanced plan I had taken so long to create crushed in the clumsy and unthinking hands of the Duncans, Hoags, Putnams etc.,’ he told Mountbatten, ‘I am like a soldier at the front delighted that having been wounded he is at last being sent home.’ He was also grateful for not being dismissed from Combined Operations. ‘This is your usual – your constitutional generosity – crystallised, maybe, round a seed of amour-propre to show the Americans that though you can be compelled to recall, you cannot be compelled to sack me.’
It had been a strange three months. Pyke had gone to America to win over the US military and shepherd Plough through to its conclusion. He had certainly failed in the first of these challenges, and in the process caused a contretemps between the White House and the US Army which had threatened to disturb Anglo-American relations, but his efforts had been worthwhile. In the months after his removal from Washington DC, his ideas would flourish.
The Weasel, as we shall see, became a huge success and, around the time that Pyke was recalled, training began for the Plough guerrilla force. Renamed the First Special Service Force (FSSF), this unit was a faithful rendering of Pyke’s blueprint. FSSF recruits were selected on their ability to hold their own in the wild and were ‘trappers, guides, cowboys, lumberjacks, etc’. Rather than sections, there were ‘war parties’; platoons were ‘bands’; battalions ‘tribes’ and as one FSSF document added, this elite new force might ‘possibly bring back a few “scalps”’ – a detail which later inspired the film-maker Quentin Tarantino to centre his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds on an imaginary FSSF that literally collected German scalps. F
or its brand of guerrilla warfare, its unconventional recruits and the sight of Canadians fighting in the same unit as Americans, the FSSF was unique. Against a backdrop of bitter personal antagonism and inter-departmental strife, Frederick’s leadership and Pyke’s imagination, as well as his persistence and propensity for breaking protocol, had all combined to produce a legendary military unit. It is seen today as the father of both the US Special Forces and their Canadian equivalent. Geoffrey Pyke, the creative, opinionated and sometimes childlike Englishman, had left his mark on North American military history.
PYKE HUNT, PART 5
IT WAS ONLY after Pyke flew to the US that MI5 realised he was on the staff at Combined Operations. This was a shock, especially in light of the latest intelligence to come in from one of their most reliable sources – ‘Kaspar’, the code name for a listening device hidden in the CPGB headquarters. Just two weeks after Pyke had left for America Kaspar supplied further clues to suggest that he was a communist propaganda chief.
‘PYKE is said to be mainly concerned with a Cutting Office which distributes to its contributors cuttings from newspapers of all kinds, above all economic ones, from all parts of the world,’ ran the summary of what had been heard. ‘He combines with this communist propaganda work and perhaps also passes on information. At any rate he is in contact with a number of officials of the German Communist Party.’ This was not the kind of individual MI5 wanted to have employed by Combined Operations, let alone sent to the US on a secret government mission.
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