Churchill's Iceman

by Henry Hemming

  ‘It would seem that Pyke was taken on without any previous consultation with us,’ wrote one MI5 officer to Major Bacon of C Branch, the MI5 section responsible for vetting candidates with jobs involving the Official Secrets Act. ‘I should be interested to know how this could happen.’

  ‘We have only just started vetting the staff of Combined Operations,’ replied Bacon, ‘and have no trace of Pyke’s name being submitted to date.’ An earlier note from Richmond Terrace suggested that Pyke’s name had been submitted and later cleared. Someone, somewhere, had slipped up.

  Milicent Bagot was more interested in how Pyke had come to be offered this job in the first place. ‘Our records gave no indication that he has been trained for such work.’ She asked Bacon for ‘a copy of the curriculum vitae which was presumably put up when he applied for this employment or, failing that, to discover the grounds for his selection?’ Bacon would search in vain, for Mountbatten had never asked Pyke to submit a formal application.

  These MI5 officers were not the only ones intrigued by Pyke’s appointment. While he was away in the US, Kaspar picked up a suggestive conversation between the leader of the CPGB, Harry Pollitt, and Wilfred Macartney, one of the first British communists convicted of espionage and a trusted member of the Comintern. Macartney had said to Pollitt that Pyke – who was known to both of them – ‘has got the left ear of Louis Mountbatten’.

  Pollitt already knew. ‘I hear it’s amazing, what they take from him,’ he replied. ‘He’s the fellow down there. I hear it’s amazing the influence he’s got with Mountbatten.’

  One of Pyke’s neighbours later claimed that Mountbatten and Pyke were so close that the CCO ‘was unhappy if he didn’t have the daily stimulus of a conversation with him’ and would often come to visit Pyke in Hampstead ‘in a dull mood’ and ‘without any escort’.

  Pollitt was right. Pyke’s influence with Mountbatten was amazing, but it was hard to say whether Pollitt’s and Macartney’s reaction indicated that Pyke might be a senior Comintern official, or were they simply bemused by the incongruity of this pairing? It was equally hard to place another exchange in this conversation. One of the two had asked whether Pyke was in America, to which the other had replied that it would be ‘very interesting’ to know.

  Was Pyke engaged in undercover activities in the US? The answer to this, sadly, must remain a mystery. Given the FBI’s limited capacity for domestic counter-intelligence at that time, they did not have a file on Pyke. Although we know, as Christopher Andrew has it, that ‘every section of the wartime administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence’, including the various government departments with which Pyke worked, it is impossible to say whether he was involved. The precursor of the CIA, the OSS, was ‘the most penetrated intelligence agency in American history’ and would later be infiltrated by Pyke’s friend Kuczynski. More recently it has emerged that as the USSR and the US forged closer diplomatic ties, between 1942 and 1945, Soviet intelligence-gathering activities escalated. But the names of many of those involved remain hidden in closed Russian archives. Rather than drown in a sea of speculation we are left with what can be proved, namely, that by the time Pyke had been recalled from Washington DC MI5 had worked out what to do with him.

  The month before his return, one of the only MI5 officers who knew him personally, Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild, an accomplished jazz pianist, scientist, collector and MI5’s expert in counter-sabotage, had been asked for his opinion on Geoffrey Pyke. What followed would prove decisive.

  ‘He is a rather brilliant and persuasive talker,’ began Rothschild. ‘In fact he persuaded me to give him some money for what I now realise was a most fantastic project.’ This was either Malting House School or, more likely, Pyke’s scheme to explode the myth of anti-Semitism, yet given the latent anti-Semitism in some parts of MI5 it is unsurprising that Rothschild chose not to elaborate on this. ‘He is eccentric and erratic. He is clever, though he has little judgement.’ He had strong left-wing sympathies as well, yet ‘it would be idle for this office to try and prevent near-Communists from obtaining scientific posts in Government departments, even if it was considered desirable. Many scientists, particularly those who are still young, have very Left views, and so many of these are already in Government departments that to attend to any particular one would not only be pointless, but would also bring a certain amount of opprobrium on to MI5, as so many people are only too ready to accuse us of being Blimps. On the other hand, I feel that somebody who combines extreme Left views with an erratic character should not be at Combined Operations headquarters which must, owing to the operational nature of its activities, be one of the most secret government departments.’ Bernal should also be dropped, Rothschild went on, to avoid a situation in which ‘somebody whose first loyalty may be to Moscow rather than this country is in a position where he may well get information of considerable interest to Moscow and which the Government may not wish them to have at the moment’.

  The irony of all this was that Rothschild’s close friend Anthony Blunt, whom he had helped to bring into MI5, was at that time passing titantic quantities of information to Moscow. Rothschild had been blinded by both friendship and class. Pyke exuded ‘Soviet spy’ in the way that Blunt never would. Indeed, Rothschild was so convinced of his judgement on Pyke that he took it up with Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, who agreed that something must be done about him. Ultimately it was decided that MI5’s Director-General, Sir David Petrie, should contact Mountbatten and pressure him into dismissing both Pyke and Bernal.

  This was hardly an ideal moment for Pyke to show the CCO his radical new proposal. By then he had caused him major embarrassment in the US, threatening to upset Anglo-American relations, and now MI5 wanted him dismissed. But for Pyke there was no choice. His new scheme had the potential to change the shape of the war, and perhaps the future of warfare itself. ‘Either it is a washout,’ he told Mountbatten, ‘or it is of vastly greater importance than the Plough scheme could have been at its most successful. I hope it is a washout.’

  HOW TO WIN THE WAR WITH ICE

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1942, in the tight and swampy heat of the American capital, Geoffrey Pyke came up with a plan to end the war by using ice. There were just two problems. One was that he might be sacked at any moment, the other was that too many people might hear the idea and laugh.

  For many of us, laughter is an involuntary response to an idea or situation which challenges our understanding of how things should be while, at the same time, poses no threat. A joke is a ‘safe shock’, and throughout the history of invention some of the boldest and brightest ideas have been met with laughter. Pyke knew that he would be up against his ‘old enemy’ – ‘the appearance of absurdity’. His only chance of having this proposal taken seriously was to win over a man like Mountbatten who understood that new ideas could be both useful and funny.

  In the weeks after being ordered back to London, Pyke disappeared. He did not return to Britain, and in OSRD a rumour circulated about him being holed up in a New York hotel, hard at work on some mad new scheme. Another story was that he had checked himself into a ‘mental institute’.

  Instead he began to shoot up and down the Eastern Seaboard like a man who had lost something. He ate solitary meals in hotels, exchanged telegrams with an Austrian polymer scientist living in America and tracked down obscure texts on the properties of ice. He made at least one trip to Lake Louise in Canada and on two separate occasions went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, complaining of chronic exhaustion.

  Again he had been poleaxed by his mystery illness, but after numerous tests the doctors could find nothing wrong with him. They concluded that he was in fine physical condition for a forty-nine-year-old, apart from a gum infection which would require the removal of two teeth. To alleviate his condition he was prescribed a mild amphetamine and a phenobarbiturate. The latter was mildly addictive, sometimes known as ‘a doctor’s be
st friend’, and at the same time a drug often found to have to been taken in lethal quantities in cases of suicide.

  On his second visit to the Mayo Clinic, in September, Pyke stayed for several weeks, and as he slid between the extremes of complete exhaustion and a blissed-out chemically induced high, he finished his proposal. Given the need for secrecy, he had asked William Stephenson of British Security Coordination to supply a trusted secretary, who now took his finished proposal to New York where it was sent to London by diplomatic bag. On 24 September an enormous, book-length dossier arrived on Mountbatten’s desk from the Mayo Clinic.

  ‘It may be gold: it may only glitter,’ read the note stapled to the cover. ‘I have been hammering at it too long, and am blinded.’

  Pyke knew that in the past the CCO had asked junior officers to go through his proposals, especially the longer ones, and present him with a summary. He did not want him to do the same thing now. ‘You have an able and admirable staff,’ he warned, ‘but of those I’ve met you are the only Promethean. They can read, but not with your eyes.’ ‘You promised me half an hour of your time,’ he went on. ‘I don’t ask so much to begin with. Read only the first 33 pages. If you find it no good, so be it. Chuck it away. But if you find the basic ideas new and good and important to the war, then you must read on to the end of the half hour.’

  Mountbatten was busy and might have put this vast memorandum to one side had it not been for its epigraph, taken from one of his beloved G. K. Chesterton ‘Father Brown’ stories.

  Father Brown laid down his cigar and said carefully: ‘It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.’

  This intrigued Mountbatten. Perhaps more than any other pair of sentences it seemed to embody one strand of his intellectual outlook. He turned the page and began to read.

  How to Win the Battle of the Atlantic with Ice

  Churchill would describe the Battle of the Atlantic as ‘the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea or in the air depended ultimately on its outcome.’ Pyke’s proposal described how the Allies could win it.

  He began with a series of stark assertions: Britain’s ability to wage war depended on the millions of tons of vital supplies it received across the Atlantic; most of these were transported using unarmed ships manned by civilians; there were not enough Allied warships to protect them all; over parts of the ocean there was no air cover; Allied ships were being sunk in the Atlantic faster than they could be replaced.

  Few military strategists would argue with any of this. June 1942 had been the worst month yet in the Battle of the Atlantic, in which a staggering 652,487 tons of Allied shipping had been sunk, most of it by submarines marauding in a hitherto anonymous strip of ocean now known as ‘U-Boat Alley’. It was impossible to win the war without victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. No less important was the ability to mount attacks on enemy supply lines. Allied efforts fell short on both due to a lack of air cover. In each of the major naval exchanges of the war – whether it was the attack at Pearl Harbor or the sinkings of the Prince of Wales, the Repulse or the Bismarck – aircraft had played the decisive role. Only now was it becoming clear that control of the seas depended upon mastery of the air. So how to achieve this over the Atlantic?

  In an imaginary world Churchill might have waved a magic wand to conjure a fleet of new aircraft carriers, each vessel magically immune to torpedoes, comfortable in rough seas, requiring very little steel to build and capable of accommodating long-range bombers and fighters. This was fantasy, of course. There seemed to be no realistic solution to these strategic problems other than building up Allied military strength using existing weaponry until victory was assured by weight of numbers. Pyke proposed something else. He had found a way to turn fantasy into reality.

  His starting point was a dog-eared 1924 copy of the National Geographic Magazine which contained an account by Captain Zeusler of the North Atlantic Ice Patrol of what had happened when his men fired six-pound shells at an iceberg. Rather than shattering into icy smithereens, as you might expect, given that ice is brittle, these bergs absorbed the shells. None penetrated more than a few inches while some failed to explode. Zeusler had been bemused. Pyke was intrigued.

  The article also touched on the history of collisions with icebergs, stressing that the sinking of the Titanic was not an isolated incident but one of hundreds of encounters between boat and berg in which the vessel would always come off second-best. Pyke asked himself a silly-sounding question: was it possible to harness the colossal strength of icebergs to the Allied war effort?

  While Pyke had been left to stew in the capital as Brigadier Duncan made uninformed decisions on Plough, he had begun to track down historical references to ice including the story of an American businessman who wanted to tow an iceberg from Alaska to Los Angeles to make ice cream. It had come to nothing and, besides, the iceberg would have melted after reaching more temperate waters – but the story planted in Pyke’s mind the idea of moving these apparently unsinkable objects.

  At this point, Pyke had a fortuitous conversation with an old friend of Bernal, Professor Herman Mark, a charming Austrian scientist in his late forties who would later become known as one of the pioneers of polymer science. He had taught in Vienna before moving to New York at around the time of the Anschluss (his father was Jewish), since when he had built up a laboratory at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Earlier that year Pyke had got him involved in the Plough project, for Mark knew more about ice than almost any other practising scientist – though this was faint praise. By 1942 astonishingly little was known about the physical properties of this ubiquitous material.

  During their conversation Mark showered Pyke with information about ice, including the fact that it melts at a much slower rate when insulated. Were you to place a cube of ice some 300 feet wide in water heated up to 52º F., it would melt in less than a week. Surround that block with a wall of wood just one foot thick and it would lose no more than 0.9 per cent of its volume in 100 days.

  This appeared to change everything. Pyke pictured an Alaskan iceberg insulated by wood and hollowed out to store military materiel. Knowing that planes had performed emergency landings on the tops of icebergs in the past, perhaps the cap of the berg could be levelled off to form a runway? Effectively this would create a floating airfield. Tow one of these into U-Boat Alley, in the mid-Atlantic, and aircraft based on it could lay waste to nearby enemy submarines. Better still, it could be done at a fraction of the cost of building a new aircraft carrier from steel. Given that ice was so cheap, why not build an archipelago of these customised floating islands?

  ‘The war can be won either by having ten of everything to the enemy’s one (including the ships to carry it),’ he wrote, ‘OR by the deliberate exploitation of the super-obvious and the fantastic.’ Pyke had combined three ‘super-obvious’ ideas: icebergs are hard to destroy; ice melts slowly when insulated; ice is cheap.

  It is also brittle, which was why a customised iceberg along these lines could never work. It lacked the necessary crush resistance to withstand powerful mid-Atlantic swells and would break up after reaching U-Boat Alley. The resistance of a material that could cope, such as high-grade reinforced concrete, was 4,000 pounds per square inch (psi). Ice, at best, had a resistance of 1,300 psi, making it significantly weaker than even low-grade reinforced concrete.

  This would have been a good moment to abandon this train of thought and return to Plough. Many of us, at this point, might have done so. Pyke had checked his fantasy against reality and found it to be unworkable. But he did not let go. He saw this as the kind of setback one should expect when tackling a problem of this magnitude.

  Instead he took a step back and tried to unbutton his mind. He had to distance himself from every assumption that he had ever held about ice, to banish from his imagination the traditional uses of ice and to think of this material instead as
if he were a scientist who had discovered it for the first time.

  What had happened to most other new materials following their initial discovery? Iron had been alloyed with other materials to produce steel; wire had been added to concrete to make reinforced concrete; raw copper, as he knew from his days as a copper investor, had been smelted and refined. In other words, each of these new materials had been artificially strengthened. Why not do the same to ice?

  Earlier that summer Pyke had picked up a copy of the forbiddingly titled Refrigeration Data Book of the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers and had read that ‘frozen sand is harder than many kinds of rock’. The implications were fascinating. It seemed to suggest that you could strengthen ice by adding materials such as sand to the water before it is frozen.

  At this point Pyke had a rare stroke of luck. He asked Professor Mark to carry out several experiments into reinforcing ice, only for this Austrian scientist to say that he had already begun.

  ‘I told him that when I worked in a pulp and paper mill in Canada, we found that the addition of a few per cent of wood pulp greatly increased the strength of a layer of ice.’ Not only was Pyke right about strengthening ice but he was speaking to perhaps the only man in the world to have already begun experiments along these lines.

  Breathless at the thought of what might be just around the corner, Pyke asked Mark to conduct fresh investigations into the properties of ice made from water to which sawdust or cork had been added. The results were extraordinary. This reinforced ice was not only stronger than pure ice but the wood pulp formed a soggy protective layer which slowed the speed at which it melted. Two birds had been killed with one stone. Mark’s team was now producing reinforced ice which melted slowly and had a crushing resistance of 3,000 psi – a greater tensile strength than many varieties of reinforced concrete. A square column of this strengthened ice, measuring just one inch across, could support a medium-sized car.