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!
