(Editors Note: Don Bourgeois is a historical writer specializing in some of the more unusual aspects of WWII. This is his first article for The Combat Report) 

All-out war carries with it a total effort on the part of the belligerents.  Such effort is not a fanciful endeavor because nothing less than a nation’s survival depends upon it.  Accordingly, during wartime giant forward leaps in technology are realized.  And when the stakes are as high as survival, no idea or invention can be discarded out of hand.

Warfare has produced such inventions as the longbow, a weapon so powerful that it could propel an armor-piercing arrow with the force of a bullet.  The American Civil War produced the Gatling gun, the world’s first machine gun, and ironclad ships that were nearly impervious to cannon shot.  In World War I the airplane was first employed as a scouting device, then as a bomber.  Once the interrupter gear was developed and a nose-mounted machine gun could shoot directly through a plane’s propeller, the fighter was born. 

The list of wartime inventions is practically endless and not all of them were successes.  During World War II, the Japanese came up with the idea of floating incendiary bomb-carrying paper balloons on the jet stream that flows from Japan to the American west coast.  Their plan was to ignite multiple forest fires that would cripple our lumber industry and terrorize Americans at the same time.  However, only one bomb succeeded in causing any injury.  A minister’s family picnicking near Klamath Falls, Oregon was killed when they discovered and disturbed one of the touchy devices.  The American government ordered that the incident be kept secret so the Japanese never learned that even one of their bombs had detonated.  Realizing no apparent success, they abandoned their plan.  Accordingly, the effort had no effect upon the outcome of the war.

Nonetheless, necessity is indeed the mother of invention.  And in the early years of the Second World War, no nation was in greater need than Great Britain.

The United States was doing it’s very best to supply Britain with what it required to keep the Nazis at bay across the English Channel.  It was in the interests of both nations that this be done.  Britain obviously was not anxious to be conquered by the totalitarian Nazis.   Likewise, the United States was well aware that if Britain fell, there would be little chance of reclaiming a free Europe.  Standing alone in the east, the Soviet Union would have no hope of defeating Hitler.  Thus in 1940-41 a Europe under total Nazi domination was a real possibility if not a likelihood.

The Germans knew that they had to bring Britain to terms.  One way to do this was to cripple the British’s ability to wage war by preventing the importation of supplies from the U.S.  In the Battle of the Atlantic, German untersee boats (U-boats) attempted to torpedo and sink as many cargo ships sailing to and from the United States as they could.  Early tactics such as the formation of merchant vessels into convoys and the presence of naval escorts helped, but the problem remained far from solved as the Germans were sinking these ships faster than the Allies could build them.  Any and all notions as to how to avert the devastation wrought by the U-boat wolf packs would be given serious consideration.

Geoffrey Pyke

Ultimately Pyke was inspired to design a ship fashioned entirely of ice.  This scheme was to prove to be his signature and the proposed material to be used in the construction of this ship would come to bear his name.  

Pure ice, that is, simple frozen water, is an interesting substance.  In a glacier under intense pressure, it can bend, compress and flow.  However, when it is struck violently, it will shatter and break. And it melts, of course. But if sawdust or wood pulp is mixed and frozen into the liquid, a substance of a much different nature is created.  It is strong: it is as impermeable as masonry when a bullet is fired into it.  It is malleable: it can be worked and shaped much like wood and it can be sculpted into any desired shape. Its mass is sufficient to support heavy weights.  And perhaps most importantly, it melts very slowly.

Geoffrey Pyke’s genius married this ice/wood pulp technology to his notion of the ice ship.  Thereafter, the frozen substance would be known as Pykrete.   And what a marriage it would become.  Pyke’s scheme was nothing less than a solution to the problem of transporting large volumes of materiel across the Atlantic to Britain.  And this could be done safely and with no risk to human life, the vessel or its cargo.

To carry huge amounts of supplies Pyke urged that a massive ship made entirely of Pykrete be constructed.   While the standard large battleship of the day   (Iowa class) displaced some 45,000 tons empty (57,000 tons loaded with fuel, the crew, ordnance and supplies), Pyke’s ice ship would displace one million tons or more.   It would be so large that its flat upper deck would stretch more than 2,000 feet and could be used as a landing field for fighters and even long-range bombers such as the B-17, B-24 or the Avro Lancaster. Although it would be many times larger, the interior of the vessel would be similar to that of any other conventional ship.  As the inner surfaces would be insulated and sheathed with metal or some other appropriate material, the environment for the crew and the cargo would be perfectly dry, warm and livable.

The vessel’s Pykrete-filled steel hull would be tens of feet thick and would be completely impervious to any known weapon of the time: no torpedo could penetrate it and no bomb could cause significant damage.  And, as the ship was made of ice, it was truly unsinkable.

Why would the ship not simply melt away?  Pykrete was a very slow melting substance, but refrigeration coils embedded in the ice would ensure that the proper freezing temperature would be maintained.   Accordingly, there would be no melting at all.  The outer hull could also be sheathed, but one of the properties of Pykrete was that it formed its own outer rough surface that protected it from further deterioration.

One might imagine that landing a large aircraft on a sheet of ice would be tricky.  However, the flight deck’s surface would not be constructed of Pykrete.  More conventional materials such as wood or steel would be used.  Even if the surface were Pykrete, air operations would still be possible.  As an example of this, each winter an airfield is fashioned on the frozen surface of Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire.  Private pilots have no trouble taking off from and landing on the lake.

Speed was not a factor as it was unnecessary for the protection of the vessel.  It didn’t have to outrun U-boats, as could the troop transports (that often were converted ocean liners such as the Queen Mary).  The ice ship could plod along at almost any speed and simply take its time.  As long as it eventually managed to reach its destination the voyage was successful.   Accordingly, its engines had only to be just powerful enough to push it forward through the waves. As one might imagine, steering this behemoth would be tricky.  However, as it would not enter any port but would be unloaded off the shore of its destination, nimbleness was not an essential characteristic. Its role was not to be just that of a transport.  As a giant aircraft carrier, it could station itself anywhere as a floating island/airfield/embarkation point and act as a battle center.  And the enemy just couldn’t touch it.

So why wasn’t this magical super weapon ever produced?   After all, for the nation deploying just a few of these ships it could mean world domination.  Well, for one thing, it was expensive.  The incredible cost of constructing this iceberg/ship had to be weighed against the measures that were already being used to combat the Kriegsmarine in the North Atlantic.  But this is just why the vessel was seriously considered in the early stages of World War II.  At that time the more conventional methods of combating the U-boats were just not successful. The Atlantic war was being lost.  More ships were being sunk by wolf packs than could be replaced.  If this trend continued Britain’s lack of supplies would force its capitulation. 

As the Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten was forced to think in broad terms.  This fit his personality perfectly as he was a romantic and greatly imaginative.  He faced so many perplexing, complex and important challenges that he had to view things on a wide screen.  To Mountbatten no idea was without merit.  If an idea was truly useless there were plenty of people who would point it out in due course. To illustrate Mountbatten’s broad scope, another of his pet inventions was the famous Mulberry harbor concept.  To provide the Allies a ready-made harbor for the D-Day embarkation, hollow concrete piers were constructed in England and floated to the Normandy coast.  Once there, the floating devices were flooded and sunk into place end to end.  Lines of these components formed the artificial harbors at Arromanches and Omaha Beach that were used for the offloading of troops and vital supplies.  By constructing these harbors soon after D-Day, the Allies avoided having to capture a natural harbor such as Cherbourg.   When closely examined, the wild concepts of giant floating piers and an ice ship are really not that different from one another.  In fact, between the two, the ice ship was probably the saner notion. 

Pyke had already succeeded in convincing Mountbatten of the worthiness of his idea and had talked himself onto his staff.  Mountbatten, in turn, convinced Churchill.  In December 1942, Mountbatten sent Sir Winston a memorandum in which he claimed that a single vessel constructed of Pykrete “would abolish the aeronautical disadvantages of the sea.”  One legend has it that Mountbatten went so far as to actually toss a block of Pykrete into Sir Winston’s warm bath water to demonstrate to the P.M. its slow melting characteristics.

Like Mountbatten, Churchill was entirely open to any idea that would help beat the Nazis.  After studying the technical aspects of the notion, he became a strong proponent of Pykrete and of the ice ship.  He came to view the ice vessel as an invincible aircraft carrier.  He wrote in his memoirs of World War II (Closing the Ring):

“This substance, called Pykrete, after its inventor, seemed to offer great possibilities not only for our needs in North-West Europe, but also elsewhere.  It was found that as the ice melted the fibrous content quickly formed a furry outer surface which acted as an insulator and greatly retarded the melting process.”

The secret ice ship was to bear the code name Habakkuk after the prophet of the7th century BC.  In the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk, first chapter, fifth verse, God speaks to him of Judah’s swift and violent annihilation by the Babylonians: 

“Behold ye among the nations, and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I work a work in your days, which ye will not believe though it be told you.” 

These words aptly describe the concept of an ice ship.

In August 1943 the idea was “floated” by Mountbatten at the Quebec Conference of Allies.  Ever dramatic, he wheeled two blocks of ice into a closed meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.  One block was ordinary frozen water and the other was Pykrete.  The group selected the “strongest” man present, Gen. Hap Arnold, to attempt to break the blocks with a special chopper that Mountbatten provided.  The block of ordinary ice split with Arnold’s single blow.  He took a similar swing at the block of Pykrete.  The Pykrete did not yield.  It was so resilient that Arnold jarred his elbows in the process.  Mountbatten didn’t leave the demonstration at just that.  He drew his pistol and fired at both the ice and the Pykrete.  The ice shattered but the bullet ricocheted off the Pykrete and nicked the leg of Admiral Ernest King, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations. Hearing the shots, aides rushed into the room.  They were convinced that the high-ranking allied officers had begun shooting at one another.

So Pykrete was proven a success and the Allies were moved to recommend that a vessel be constructed.  Unbeknownst to the officers, Mountbatten secretly had ordered both the production of quantities of the icy substance and the building of a prototype.  On Patricia Lake in Alberta, Canada a 1,000-ton mock-up was built.  It was some 60 feet in length and 30 feet wide.  Its preliminary tests were encouraging; the vessel was slow and unwieldy, but it was stout and strong.

Unfortunately for Pyke, Pykrete and Habakkuk, this was late 1943.  The Battle of the Atlantic had taken a dramatic downturn for Germany in “Black May” of that year when dozens of U-boats were destroyed.  Other inventions were beginning to make a difference in the war in the North Atlantic and the Habakkuk vessel could not have been deployed until 1945.  The United States was on its way to producing more than 125 aircraft carriers.  Many of the light (CVL) and escort (CVE) carriers began accompanying the convoys on their way to Britain.  The first of these flattops, the USS Bogue, (CVE 9), was credited with destroying several U-boats.  She nearly captured one of them intact.  Also, navy blimps served as eyes in the sky for the convoy escort destroyers. Moreover, the Allies had produced long-range aircraft that were able to patrol the entire span of ocean between Europe and North America.  Further, improved undersea detection devices such as SONAR aided in locating and weapons like the “Hedgehog” depth charge helped in destroying the submerged U-boats. 

The price tag for the ice-vessel soared to six times the original estimate.   Habakkuk simply proved to be too much too late…the expense didn’t justify its potential as great as that potential might have been.  The great ship was never built and the prototype eventually sunk…melted…into that Canadian lake.   Today her hard parts still rest on the bottom.

So Habakkuk was never to be a factor in the winning of World War II.  But what a war it would have been if giant ice aircraft carriers were deployed in the struggle against the Nazis and perhaps even against the Japanese.  Had they been built, would victory have been achieved sooner?  Would fewer lives have been lost?   Their impact on the course of the war is only conjecture, but full development of the Pykrete technology certainly would have revolutionized warfare.  Imagine giant floating ice-bases off the coasts of Korea or Vietnam and the effect their presence would have had in those conflicts.  The Cold War would have been conducted very differently if such a weapon had been available to either the United States or the USSR.  Today, the building of huge, movable floating bases has again been proposed.  But the plan is to construct these bases on traditionally designed hulls.  Sadly, it appears that the planners are not historians…why not construct these bases of Pykrete?

Copyright 2007 Donald P. Bourgeois

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