The Kriegsmarine – the terrifying naval force of the Third Reich during World War
II, manned by over 800,000 soldiers at its peak, with 22 of the particularly feared Destroyer
class vessels at its disposal.
Even one of these would be a formidable opponent, but several Nazi Destroyer ships zeroing in
on an allied convoy?
Boy, you are really in trouble.
Today a squadron of Destroyers approach their prey, preparing for an easy victory, until
they see a huge shape on the horizon.
A Nazi Commander on the deck asks, “Is that an iceberg?
No, no, it couldn’t possibly be…Wait, is that—”
But by then, it’s already too late for this hapless Wehrmacht battalion, as dozens of
British Spitfires and Mosquito Bombers seem to spill out of this massive iceberg, bombing
and machine-gunning the shocked Nazi Destroyers into submission.
How was this possible?
Where did they all come from?
Were some of the Kriegsmarine’s most terrifying ships just brought to their knees by…a rogue
iceberg?
Well.
Not quite.
What we just described was the intended result of Project Habakkuk, a crazy brainchild of
the British Military during World War II.
The grand plan?
An aircraft carrier made of ice.
Project Habakkuk was a piece of deranged military beauty.
Two miles long, 200 feet deep, and 300 feet wide across the beam – the Project Habakkuk
Aircraft Carrier could carry 200 Spitfires, 100 Mosquito Bombers, 404 British Military
Officers, and 3,216 petty officers, soldiers, and workers.
This icy beast would be around twice the size of your average aircraft carrier even today,
and would be constructed with a practically magical new wonder-material: “Pykrete”,
a frozen alloy constructed from 14% sawdust and 86% pure ice.
The Project Habakkuk Aircraft Carrier was a creation unlike anything military history
had ever seen, and would remain to be unlike anything ever seen again.
You’re probably wondering, “How come I’ve never heard of this?”
That’s because this hare-brained plan never truly saw the light of day, but that doesn’t
make it any less fascinating.
It goes without saying that, in addition to being some of history’s biggest monsters,
the Nazis were also huge weirdos.
From the sickening experiments of madmen like Josef Mengele, to the absurd and often impractical
Wunderwaffe superweapons, Nazi military plans were quantifiably crazy.
And sometimes, to defeat crazy, you have to be a little crazy yourself.
The particular kind of crazy that fuelled Project Habakkuk came to us courtesy of one
Mr. Geoffrey Pyke.
Pyke was the kind of guy you’d love to have a beer with, seeing as spearheading the creation
of an iceberg aircraft carrier is only one of the many interesting things he did in his
life.
He escaped a German internment camp in World War One after a near-death experience, he
spied on Nazi Germany – despite being Jewish, and thus, in extreme danger – to find out
what the German people really thought of Hitler, and worked on Operation Plough, which was
an attempt to use another one of Pyke’s wacky inventions to help liberate Norway from
Nazi control.
With the incredible resume of prison-breaker, rebel, journalist, spy, strategist, and inventor,
Pyke made an extremely valuable friend: Admiral Louis Mountbatten.
Mountbatten thought that Pyke was a mad genius, and believed that his strange, strategic mind
would be an asset to the British war effort.
Thankfully for Pyke, Mountbatten was the chief of Combined Operations: A department of the
British War Office tasked with planning attacks on the Nazi Forces in Europe.
It was during his work on the aforementioned Project Plough in the United States that Pyke
was hit by a bolt of inspiration: They were running out of aluminium and steel, and cultivating
more of it was both time-consuming and costly.
But do you know what sturdy material is an awful lot easier to make?
Ice.
Ice could be manufactured for only a fraction of the energy it took to manufacture workable
steel, and numerous case studies had shown naturally-occurring icebergs decimating thought-to-be-unsinkable
ships.
If, nine times out of ten, icebergs beat ships, Pyke thought, “Why not make an iceberg ship?”
Pyke was so enthusiastic about the idea that he didn’t even wait to get back to England
to share it.
He wrote about his plans and sealed them in a diplomatic bag, with a written note that
it was only to be opened and read by Louis Mountbatten.
The Admiral, who seemed to be enamoured with any idea that Pyke came up with, immediately
took the proposal to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Churchill was apparently taken with the idea too, and gave Pyke and Mountbatten the go-ahead
to further explore the idea of an iceberg aircraft carrier.
This wasn’t the first time a floating ice micro-island for storing planes had been pitched,
as a similar concept was suggested by German scientist Dr. A. Gerke all the way back in
1930.
In every iteration since then, the idea had essentially been laughed off.
Pyke and Mountbatten were the only ones crazy enough to actually go through with it.
But, of course, for every crazy dreamer, you need some more down-to-earth experts to keep
their feet on the ground.
Max Perutz, a Nobel prize winning molecular biologist, was brought in to assess the feasibility
of Pyke’s floating ice fortress.
Sadly for Pyke, Perutz didn’t see much merit in the idea, as natural icebergs have only
a tiny portion of their overall surface area above water, and were prone to tipping.
While this isn’t a problem for an iceberg, it would be a catastrophe for an aircraft
carrier.
To make this whole idea work, an entirely new substance would need to be created – and
that entirely new substance was Pykrete, Pyke’s sub-zero ice-sawdust alloy.
It was stronger, melted slower, and most importantly of all, was significantly more buoyant.
Pykrete also had the miraculous properties of being able to be carved like wood and set
into shapes like metal, making it ideal for Pyke’s ambitious construction project.
However, Perutz once again found a potentially devastating drawback: The entire structure
would sag if not constantly cooled.
In order to solve this, Project Habakkuk would need fitted external insulation and an interior
ducting system and refrigeration plant.
This would keep the carrier at a perpetually stable temperature and prevent potentially
deadly sagging.
Research on Project Habakkuk and the Pykrete that made it possible continued in secret
under the Smithfield Meat Market in London, where Pyke and Perutz took advantage of the
pre-existing walk-in meat freezers.
If it wasn’t absurd enough already, the secret experiments were literally hidden behind
a wall of hanging, frozen meat.
But things were about to take another insane step forward, as a coalition of British and
Canadian engineers began constructing a large scale-model in Jasper National Park, of Alberta,
Canada.
Even at only sixty by thirty feet – a miniscule fraction of the intended size of the final
aircraft carrier – the model still weighed around 1,000 tons.
Testing was rigorous, with the main areas of focus being nailing the proper insulation
and refrigeration techniques to make Project Habakkuk seaworthy, and the artillery and
ballistics defence to keep it above water during battle.
The grunt work of creating this huge model was performed by conscientious objectors to
the war, who didn’t even know what they were making.
Though even the top brass behind this clandestine military project probably harboured doubts
about what they were doing – all except Geoffrey Pyke, the true believer behind it
all.
He was watching his crazy dream come to life in real time.
However, in April of 1943, Pyke’s dream project ran into trouble.
Perutz – who had just discovered the perfect 14/86 sawdust-to-ice ratio for Pykrete back
in the UK – gave the grim warning to Pyke that they’d have no hope of hitting their
1944 deadline if tests weren’t completed by May.
And the cost of Project Habakkuk was running up into the multi-millions, with more outlays
for steel reinforcement and insulation around the hull.
It was quickly becoming clear that if a comparatively tiny scale model was such a huge financial
drain, the real thing would run up some truly monstrous costs.
The whole planning and production process played out kind of like a bizarre dark comedy.
During the 1943 Quebec Conference, where the leaders of the allied forces gathered in Quebec,
a particularly strange incident played out.
Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt gathered to see a demonstration of the strength
and durability of Pykrete from Lord Mountbatten.
In order to show the two world leaders how resistant the Pykrete was to conventional
arms fire, he pulled out his service pistol and blasted it, sending the bullet ricocheting
around the room.
According to the diary of one witness, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, “the bullet rebounded
out of the block and buzzed round our legs like an angry bee.”
According to Max Perutz, a similar Pykrete ricochet incident almost saw Alan Brooke shot
again in Combined Operations Headquarters back in England.
It was a little less Saving Private Ryan and a little more Monty Python, but things were
about to get a whole lot worse for Project Habakkuk.
After the Canadian engineers said it was impossible to get the Project Habakkuk carrier finished
in 1944, Pyke’s superiors at the Combined Operations Headquarters felt that they needed
American funding and participation to ever get this project finished.
While the American government was willing to pitch in – and get their own awesome
iceberg aircraft carrier for their trouble – their involvement came with a pretty heavy
caveat for one member of the team: Geoffrey Pyke, the man behind all of this, had to go.
While Lord Mountbatten was a big fan of Pyke’s eccentric style and off the wall ideas, the
American forces were not.
He’d left a bad taste in their mouth after the failure of Project Plough, causing a rift
between him and the United States Army personnel.
Some of the top brass at Combined Operations, such as Pyke’s old friend John Bernal, had
also grown tired of the bizarre inventor’s antics, and supported the motion to remove
him from the project.
Much to his dismay, Pyke was removed and excluded from the project he’d conceived, and the
work went on without him under the control of Bernal and Perutz.
As the demands placed on the Project Habakkuk aircraft carrier grew, the cost continued
to grow with them.
The hull was made forty feet thick to protect from torpedoes fired by German U-Boats, the
engineers had to figure out how to create a hundred-foot rudder to steer the epic bergship
– spoilers, they did not – and Combined Operations had to choose between Pyke’s
original design, or the three designs presented to them by the Canadian Naval Architects and
engineers.
The whole project was becoming a chaotic mess, and criticisms from all sides were beginning
to pile up, but the team persisted.
Of course, effort and persistence can only take you so far, and not every seemingly great
idea is destined to be fulfilled.
In practice, the Project Habakkuk carrier had some huge issues.
For example, because of its insane size, the carrier would only be able to travel at around
six knots per hour, compared to the typical thirty knots of your standard aircraft carrier.
The sheer amount of sawdust pulp it would take to create all the pykrete would have
crippled ally paper production during the war, and the sheer cost of creating even one
Project Habakkuk aircraft carrier would equal the time, financial cost, and resources of
constructing a whole fleet of more conventional ships.
By December of 1943, it was finally concluded that the Project Habakkuk aircraft carrier
was too expensive and too impractical to ever be fully conceived.
Even Admiral Mountbatten, one of the first figures from the Combined Operations Headquarters
to believe in Pyke’s idea, finally withdrew from the project.
This was officially the end of Pyke’s frosty dreams – and sadly, it wasn’t all that
long before the end of him, too.
Geoffrey Pyke would take his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1948, a mere
five years after the end of his most strange and fantastical idea.
Over the course of three hot summers, the sixty-foot prototype was melted back down
to nothing.
Could this incredible iceberg aircraft carrier have turned the tide of the war even sooner?
Well, nobody can really know, as the last of the Axis Powers surrendered only two years
later in 1945.
Though one thing can’t be denied - while his life may have ended tragically, and his
ideas went down in history more as curiosities than life-changing innovations, the world
needs and always has needed people like Geoffrey Pyke.
After all, if you want to have a great idea, sometimes you need to be a little bit crazy.
Check out “Bear Who Fought Alongside Soldiers In WW2” and “Mad Jack – A Real Life
World War 2 Mad Man” for more crazy World War II Facts!