The Ice Carrier by Claudio Nardi

«Let us cut a large chunk of ice from the Arctic ice-cap and tow it down past Corn-wall, fly on our aircraft, and tow it to the point of attack.»1

Statement awarded to Churchill, 1942

Islands and ice ships

The 1944 Walt Disney’s animated movie The Three Caballeros fea-tures the episode of Pablo, The Cool-Blooded Penguin, who nav-igates from Antarctica to Galapa-gos on an ice sail ship. Obviously the ice melts as the penguin ap-proaches the destination; but Pablito reaches anyway the desti-nation putting in the ocean his bath hub and using the shower as a propellant. In an episode of 1943 Superman finds that an unusual iceberg is really a disguised Ger-man battleship and destroys it by punches2.

The ice-ship was not a simple fantasy. In spite of the Atlantic air crossings without stopover of 1919 and 1927 (Lindbergh), for the com-mercial flights in that period intermediate stop were required and in Eu-

1 Donald Graeme, Loose Cannons: 101 Things They Never Told You about Military

History, Osprey Publishing, 2009, p. 295 («Fantasy Island»). 2 Published on various American newspapers starting March, 1943. See. Henry

Hemming, Churchill’s Iceman: The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy, Arrow Books, London, 2014, pp. 374-375.

rope was common the idea, made popular by a German film of 19323, of artificial stops on oceanic platforms. In the film the German Flugplatz is in steel and concrete, but someone envisaged it in ice, much less complex, much more economic and with the further advantage of being floating and therefore less vulnerable to storms, cataclysms and sabo-tages. The physicist Artur Gerke von Waldenburg persuaded the Ger-man government to make him perform and experiment on the Zurich Lake, where – with a framework of hollow bodies, where liquid air was pumped at -190°C to form around a body of iced water – was able to create an artificial iceberg, however the iceberg melted in six days after the shut-off of the coolers4. In 1940 the idea of the ice aircraft carrier circulated in the backstairs of the British Admiralty although stultified by a memorandum of Nevil Shute (1899-1960), an aeronautic design-er and novelist clerk in the Directorate for the development of various armaments5.

The idea was not so absurd, when you consider the four «spray ice is-lands» for oil exploration successfully tested in 1986-89 in the Beaufort Sea. It seemed for a few years the technology of the future, and to de-termine the abandonment was only the unexpected and destabilizing Arctic warming6.

3 F.P.1 antwortet nicht (F.P.1 Doesn't Respond), di Karl Hartl (1899-1978), subject

of Curt Siodmark (1902-2000), released December 1932. 4 In October 1932 the American paper Modern Mechanix published short news

about the Zürich experiment, provided from a fanciful image of a future glacial island («Ice-Island in Mid-Atlantic Proposed»), See Jan Strobel, «Das Geheimnis des Eisbergs im Zürichsee», Tagblatt der Stadt Zürich, 13 Juni. 2012. Alistair Bonnett, Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston-New York, 2014. pp. 214, 216. Id., Off the Map: Lost Spaces, Invisible Cities, Forgotten Islands, Feral Places, and What They Tell Us about the World, Aurum Press, 2015.

5 Edward Terrell, Admiralty Brief: The Story of Inventions that Contributed to Vic-tory in the Battle of the Atlantic, Harrap, London, 1958, p. 27.

6 Bonnet, 2014, cit., p. 215. Cfr. J. S. Weaver e J. Poplin, «A case history of the Nipterk P-32 spray ice island», Canadian Geographical Journal, 1997, vol. 34, Issue 1, pp. 1-25; A. Barker, G. W. Timco, Sliding resistance of grounded spray ice islands, Proceedings IAHR 2004, 2, pp. 208-216 and the report of the Canadian C. (Ice Island Study, Final Report, MMS Project No. 468, prepared for Minerals Management Ser-vice US Department of Interior, August 2005).

Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke

More intriguing than Disney and Superman is that in the same war years Churchill believed to an ice carrier un order to protect the route of Arctic convoys carrying supplies from Canada and USA ambushed by U-boote. Anyway the descendent of Marlborough enlisted also astrolo-gers7, magicians8 and illusionists9 and perhaps made a point of honor to do not repeat with the ice carrier proposed by Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke (1894-1948) the well-known error of Napoleon with the Fulton’s Nautilus10.

«Genius, fugitive, spy», as define by his second biographer, Pyke had a life short, adventurous and bitter . Jew born in London, father orphan , subject to anti-Semitic mobbing in a military college, student in Cam-bridge University, candidate correspondent of war behind the line and hero in 1914 of a adventurous escape from a German lager11, member of the “Club 17” (the Club of pro-Soviet intellectuals) and charmed by Freud, in the twenties opened a model school (Malting House), based on a permissive education and financed by the large gains of clever specu-lations on the copper price. However everything was fallen when the pool of American producers monopolized the stock. For Pyke too the annus horribilis was 1929; bankruptcy, closing of the school, separation from his wife, even a short admission in a mental hospital. Reduced in a country cottage rent by a cousin of Bertrand Russel, Pyke launched campaigns to contrast the anti-Semitic propaganda and in order to per-

7 Ellic Howe, Astrology and psychological warfare during WWII, Rider, 1972. 8 David Fisher, The War Magician: The True Story of Jasper Maskelyne, Corgi,

1985; Hachette UK, 2011. 9 Nicholas Rankin, A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win

Two World Wars, Oxford U. P., 2009. 10 W. M. Barclay Parsons, Robert Fulton and the Submarine, Columbia U. P., New

York, 1922, pp. 11-13 e 35, 44, 51. 11 On his escape Pyke wrote a book (To Ruhleben – and back, A Great Adventure in

Three Phases, Constable and Company, London, 1916).

suade the workers in the free time to restore old cars to send them in Spain to aid the republicans. Confident that the majority of the Ger-mans were against the war and to Nazism in Summer 1939 Pyke won-dered to demonstrate it, with conducting a clandestine pool in Germa-ny, and eventually organized it thanks to a soviet funding obtained through the Britannic Communist Party. In his naivety, he thought even that Hitler could take it into account, while the Soviets considered the pool useful to support the adhesion of England and France to a anti-Nazism coalition with URSS and Poland. The risky pool, started by a tenth of surveyors disguised in golfers in jaunt and escorted by mem-bers of the German Communist Party, was abruptly interrupted by the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement and by the outbreak of the war12.

This initiative Pyke informed the War Office about, caught the inter-est of Leo Amery (1873-1955), the unbowed campaigner and Anglo-Hungarian politician that forced Chamberlain to resign and brought Churchill at the national unity government . Stimulated by Amery, Pyke decided to contribute to war effort writing of great strategy and imagin-ing practical inventions, as mounting microphones on captive balloons in order to define the position of aircrafts by triangulation (Pyke, obvi-ously, was unaware of the existence of radar).

Plough and Weasel

After the blitz leading to Norway occupation by Germans, Pyke pro-posed to perform continuous raids with little groups having high mobili-ty, in order to force the enemy to employ big forces to control the ground. Equipping the raiders with a vehicle able to cope with the snow (snowmobile) propelled by screw cylinders type the Armstead tractor

12 The modified Gallup model foresaw a minimum of thousand interviews, however

only 232 were effected, transmitted to London through the diplomatic bag. Naturally is doubtful the casualness of the sample and, therefore, the reliability of the pool, but the results showed that 60% criticized the antisemitism, that more than a third hoped a Germany defeat in order to get rid of Nazism, that only 19% believed possible a victo-ry against a coalition of England, France, Russia and Poland, and only 16% though righteous a war to conquest Lebensraum. Hemming, pp. 190 ss. and 416.

(the first “snow-cat”). The idea was rejected by the Combined Opera-tions HQ, a department created on the July 17, 1940 to plan the special joint operations, but in October 1941 a King’s cousin, commodore Lou-is Mountbatten (1900-1979), was appointed as chief. Hs tasks were markedly expanded adding the advice on research and development jn tactics and techniques and the development of special devices “for every kind of CO, from limited raids to large scale invasion of the Continent”. Mountbatten selected as scientific advisors of CO Solly Zuckerman (1904-1993) and John Desmond Bernal (1901-1970), experts in operat-ing research, while Pyke, proposed by Amery was enlisted as director of programs, with an annual salary of 1500 pounds (against the 1750 of Mountbatten).

The project of raids using snowmobile was enthusiastically annotated by Churchill («Never in the history of human conflict will so few im-mobilize so many»13) and, excluding some sallies, Pyke presented wise proposals, as to order the snowmobiles in America and set up an inter-allied special force14. The plan was approved also by General George Marshall, in official visit at London with the American military delega-tion, and, at the end of April 1942, Pyke was invited in Washington to develop it, under the cover name of Project Plough15. As snowmobile the technical team, chaired by an English General, selected a tracked amphibian, next developed as M29 Weasel, by Studebaker in South Bend (Indiana). Excluded from the team, Pyke blame the selection and resigned in protest. This sign of cockiness from a non-professional, without any school certification sent to rage the search and development director (OSRD) of Pentagon, the rigid scientist and technologist Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) who persuaded the War Secretary to re-quest the Imperial HQ Chief to require the Pyke’s recall.

13 David Lampe, Pyke, the Unknown Genius, Evans Brothers, London, 1959, p. 111. 14 Hemming, pp. 273 e 382. Consisting in American and Canadian and used at An-

zio and in Provence, the 1st Special Service Force was the first to enter in Rome. From the recollections of two veterans was derived in 1969 the film The Devil’s Bri-gade about the capture of the Monte della Difesa, three days before the first italian attack to Montelungo (James A. Wood, We Move Only Forward: Canada, the United States, and the First Special Service Force, 1942–1944, Vanwell Publishing, St Catharines, Ontario, 2006).

15 Hemming, p. 297.

The cyclopean aircraft carrier in pykrete

Anyway, inmate in the well known Mayo clinic in Rochester for chronic nervous breakdown, Pyke stayed in America keeping on won-dering a new idea, already presented to the Canadian premier as “the biggest in the war” 16. The inspiration was a remark performed acci-dentally by the Austrian ice expert (and future Nobel prize) Max Perutz (1914-2002) 17. During the mission in America Pyke went on thinking, and, at the end of September, cutting short with his own doubts, sent a memorandum of 232 pages by diplomatic bag, to Mountbatten18, where he surmised various possible utilizations of ice and of the super-refrigerated water in war, including gigantic aircraft carriers in natural or artificial ice. Able for the dimensions to host, make take off and land-ing aircraft much more numerous and powerful than the ones used on conventional carriers, but also to extend the air cover to the center of Atlantic and be used as air-bases for amphibian attacks against France and Japan. In that months the Battle for Atlantic and the Allied raid against Dieppe had proposed the issue of how to protect convoys and raids in the Atlantic gap, the Ocean areas do not covered by the operat-ing radius of the ground based air forces. The most obvious solution were the aircraft carriers, but should be necessary a lot of them, while the supplies of steel and aluminum were limited and anyway required by different priorities. To build and work ice, instead, required only 1% of the energy required for an equivalent mass of steel.

Having no time, Mountbatten committed to study of the memorandum to Brigadier Godfrey Edward Wildman-Lushington (1897-1970), pet hate of Pyke and future director of the British Petroleum, who after a conference with Bernal, concluded that the idea of the ice carrier (IC) or Bergship could be developed. In December Churchill issued a statement

16 Hemming, p. 311. 17 Pyke consulted him ln April 1942 about the anti-ice protection of the ships acting

in Arctic. Refugee in Switzerland and after in England after the Anschluss, when war broke out Perutz had been interned in Canada as any German resident, but afterwards has been called back to Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory and consulted by CO about the Plough project.

18 Lampe, p. 127.

to give the maximum priority to the research, annotating that was nec-essary to use every natural resource19 and, during the Winter 1942-43 the Canadian national research council coordinated various preliminary studies, involving the Montreal Engineering Company too20. The testing started in February 1943 in the Canadian Rock Mountains (Alberta) with studies on techniques of thermal insulation and resistance of ice to explosives, while eight unaware conscientious objectors built in the Pa-tricia Lake a prototype of thousand tons and 19x9 m, assembling ice blocks manufactured in the close Louise Lake21.

The idea to flatten an iceberg was immediately discarded, because icebergs are submersed for 90% of their volume, and therefore they are swept by waves, with the risk to overturn suddenly. Moreover, basing in the Fleet Air Arm specifications a Bergship suitable operatively should have the ability to carry 300 otherwise ground based aircrafts22. This re-quirement leaded to a flight deck of 600x90 m and a free edge of 15 m from the sea level, attainable only by an hollow hull, with a 9 m thick-ness ad a draught of 48 m, leading to a rating of 2.2 millions of tons. The hull could supposedly be manufactured assembling slabs of natural

19 Max Perutz, «A Description of the Iceberg Aircraft Carrier and the Bearing of the

Mechanical Properties of Frozen Wood Pulp upon Some Problems of Glacier Flow». The Journal of Glaciology, Vol. I, No. 3 (1948), pp. 95–104.

20 Lorne W. Gold, The Canadian Habbakuk Project, a Project of the National Re-search Council of Canada, International Glaciological Society, Cambridge, UK, 1993. L. Dayan Cross, Code Name Habbakuk: A Secret Ship Made of Ice, Heritage House Publishing, 2012.

21 The ice blocks rested on a wooden deck lined by asphalt. Covered by a roofing to protect them from the Sun heath, they were cooled by pipes where was flown cold air by three compressors of freon, driven by a 7.5 kW motor. The work was ended the 10th of April, when the hypothesis to use pure ice had been already dropped. In June, therefore, the compressor was deactivated, and, removed the cooling equipment, the ice melt fully in three years. In 1985 on the lake bottom were yet visible the scraps of the deck, of the asphalt and of the roofing. Susan B.M. Langley, «Operation Habbakuk: A World War II Vessel Prototype», Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Jour-nal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Vol. 10, N. 2 (31), automne-hiver 1986, p. 119-131. Site U-Haul Venture Across America and Canada, Modern, Alberta (2015).

22 200 Spitfire fighters and 100 Mosquito bombers, with a crew of 2942 sailors and airmen, see site U-Haul Venture Across America and Canada, Modern, Alberta (2015).

ice, however they were too slim to the target (their thickness seldom is greater that 3.5 m), furthermore experiments performed in England and Canada on the mechanical strength of pure ice showed that it was struc-turally unreliable, and, therefore, risky.

However, in meantime , Pyke impressed a great turn to the project, asking an advice to Brooklyn Polytechnic Research Laboratory on cold-ness, which had the Anschluss expatriate Herman Francis Mark (1897-1992) was employee. As an expert of plastic materials, Mark hypothe-sized that the strength of ice could be heavily increased mixing fibers of cellulose. His first experiments with 4 and 14% wood paste, showed so encouraging results, that Mark christened the new composite ‘picolite’, and then pykrete (from the name of Pyke and the word concrete) 23. Ad-vised by Pyke, Perutz (who hat previously attended to Mark’s classes) got on the search on the pykrete in a secret laboratory in an huge butch-ery of five underground flats under the Smithfield Market, in front of St Paul Cathedral.

The experiments stated that optimum cellulose reinforcement (wood paste or saw-dust) was 14%. The pykrete was quite light (98% of water density). With a melting rate quite slow (because of the wood low thermal conductivity) and had a tensile strength greater than concrete (about 50 Kg/cm2) and until 210 Kg/cm2 compressive strength24. It could be machine worked as the wood and cold worked as the Copper. Being (unconfirmed) self adhesive the plates do not needed to be welded, but simply brazed, thing that, if from one side should make easier the working, on the other re-duced hazardously the mechanical strength of the joints25. But the main inconvenience of pykrete was the need to continuously cool it because the creep made him to deform under own weight. It was noted that, also using the cellulose at lower thermal conduc-tivity (i.e. paste of Canadian fir, instead of the common pine) as reinforcement it was necessary to keep it at -15 °C.

The pykrete excited Mountbatten26, giving new push to the IC project, in men time baptized by Pyke “Habbakuk” referring (with an erroneous

23 Lampe, p. 129. 24 Perutz, I Wish I Made You Angry Earlier, Oxford U. P., 2002. Hemming, p. 333. 25 Hemming, p. 338. 26 Later in an after supper he told that, in order to persuade the premier on the re-

sistance of pykrete was gone to the Chequers while baked smoking a cigar in an hot bath and threw a piece in the bat hub (Lampe, p. 136; Paul Collins, «The Floating Is-land», Cabinet, Issue 7, Summer 2002; Hemming, p. 351).

orthography27) to the your days that you would not believe,kuk 1, 5). In the Pyke’s opinionpossible leaks produced by the enemy fire could be easily filled in using ground ice and water solidified by cooling

In the meantime the characteristics of the carrier were further definedrectangular shape with beveled edges bow and stern in wood, sides lined by an insulating film, drive and mneuver by 26 electric motors mounted in external pods at sides of the hull (otherwise the heaturbo generators at steam with a power of 33,000autonomy 7,000 miles, petrol millions of liters.

Pyke was sent in Canada with a Churchill’s reference, addressed pesonally to Canadian premierCanadian government lion dollars under the conditions that it should be direct by Admiralty and that Pyke and Bernal should be kept in the engineers though they could get ready the first IC in 1944 with a cost of only 700,000 pounds and the use of 300,000

27 According to Lampe, p. 128, the fault was chargeable to secretary, and the name

should be inspired by the tioned.

28 Hemming, p. 336. cooling pipes too.

29 Hemming, p. 361.

the biblical verse “For I am going to do something ithat you would not believe, even if you were told.”

. In the Pyke’s opinion the IC was almost unsinkable, because leaks produced by the enemy fire could be easily filled in using

ground ice and water solidified by cooling28.

In the meantime the characteristics of the carrier were further definedrectangular shape with beveled edges in order to reduce the attrition, bow and stern in wood, sides lined by an insulating film, drive and mneuver by 26 electric motors mounted in external pods at sides of the hull (otherwise the heat could compromise the cooling), and

at steam with a power of 33,000 BHP, speed miles, petrol expenditure 120 t every day, tanks of 13

Pyke was sent in Canada with a Churchill’s reference, addressed pelly to Canadian premier Lyon Mackenzie King (1874-1950)

Canadian government accepted to finance the manufacturing with a mithe conditions that it should be direct by Admiralty

Pyke and Bernal should be kept in the project29. The Cengineers though they could get ready the first IC in 1944 with a cost of only 700,000 pounds and the use of 300,000 t of wood paste, 25,000

According to Lampe, p. 128, the fault was chargeable to secretary, and the name should be inspired by the Candide of Voltaire, where, anyway Habakkuk is not me

Hemming, p. 336. Anyway this was not possible, as the leak could affect the

Hemming, p. 361.

For I am going to do something in (Habak-

the IC was almost unsinkable, because leaks produced by the enemy fire could be easily filled in using

In the meantime the characteristics of the carrier were further defined: in order to reduce the attrition,

bow and stern in wood, sides lined by an insulating film, drive and ma-neuver by 26 electric motors mounted in external pods at sides of the

e cooling), and feed by BHP, speed 7 knots,

t every day, tanks of 13

Pyke was sent in Canada with a Churchill’s reference, addressed per-1950) and the

with a mil-the conditions that it should be direct by Admiralty

Canadian engineers though they could get ready the first IC in 1944 with a cost of

t of wood paste, 25,000

According to Lampe, p. 128, the fault was chargeable to secretary, and the name Habakkuk is not men-

Anyway this was not possible, as the leak could affect the

insulating panels in hardboard, 300,000 Mountbatten asserted that Churchill had invited the committee of heads of HQ to foresee the series manufacturing of some IC.

However in May Churchill received a report English naval buildings were was marked that the Canadian estimates did not take into account the creep and of the burden structural, logistic and financial imposed by the necessary continuous cooling of pykrete. This new situation quadrupled the costs to 2.5 million of pounds ity to launch the crossed and sexist telegram to Mountbatten IS AN OLD WOMAN. SIGNED PYKE

Pyke rushed in London to defend the project ten was able to save him from the evil rage of the admiral treated as an old hysteric maid. During the Summer the naval engineeland and in Canada got on to work on the project together with Bernal and Perutz and in August the chief of HQ committee(that is the Bergship) in mous dimensions (1200faster. Furthermore, staying the 620

insulating panels in hardboard, 300,000 t of wood and 10,000 t of steelasserted that Churchill had invited the committee of heads

of HQ to foresee the series manufacturing of some IC.

ay Churchill received a report signed by the chief of English naval buildings were was marked that the Canadian estimates did not take into account the creep and of the burden structural, logistic and financial imposed by the necessary continuous cooling of pykrete.

doubled the valuated need of material and energetic, the costs to 2.5 million of pounds and excluded the possibi

first IC before of 1944, Pyke complained with a crossed and sexist telegram to Mountbatten «CHIEF OF NAVAL CONSTRUCTION

SIGNED PYKE».

London to defend the project and, at first, Mountbaten was able to save him from the evil rage of the admiral treated as an old hysteric maid. During the Summer the naval engineers both in Enland and in Canada got on to work on the project together with Bernal

Perutz and in August they submitted three variants of Habakkukthe chief of HQ committee, the first one fully wooden. The second one (that is the Bergship) in pykrete with steel reinforcements and of enomous dimensions (1200 x 180 m) and the third similar, but smaller and

Furthermore, staying the 620 m deck for the take off of 150

t of steel. asserted that Churchill had invited the committee of heads

signed by the chief of English naval buildings were was marked that the Canadian estimates did not take into account the creep and of the burden structural, logistic and financial imposed by the necessary continuous cooling of pykrete.

doubled the valuated need of material and energetic, and excluded the possibil-

first IC before of 1944, Pyke complained with a CHIEF OF NAVAL CONSTRUCTION

, at first, Mountbat-ten was able to save him from the evil rage of the admiral treated as an

rs both in Eng-land and in Canada got on to work on the project together with Bernal

submitted three variants of Habakkuk to , the first one fully wooden. The second one

pykrete with steel reinforcements and of enor-smaller and

m deck for the take off of 150

heavy bombers, the headquarters complicated everything by claiming for guarantee an aerial radius of 11,000 km and the resistance to maxi-mum recorded waves, to increase the thickness of sides from 9 to 12 m to keep them safe from torpedoes30 and to add precautionary a gigantic rudder of 30 m31.

In mean time, moreover, the primitive demand ceased. The Battle for Atlantic was basically won In August, thanks to operating development (new antisubmarine systems, more aircraft carriers, greater flight radius using eject-able tanks) and to bases obtained by neutral islands (Iceland and Azores) 32. the Allied naval losses decreased in September to 1/10 of the ones in September 1942.

Mountbtten involved the Americans as a last effort to save the project. Put aside Pyke in order to avoid prejudicial angers, obtained to insert the Bergship (Habbakuk II) in the projects to be examined in the secret inter-allied conference at Québec of 17-24 August, where the Ameri-cans accepted to evaluate it for the Pacific Theater as far as it was suffi-ciently economic33. But in October Mountbatten was transferred in India to HQ of the British forces in the Asian South-East, and in December the U. S. Navy concluded that the Bergship was impracticable because of the technical difficulties and the enormous amount of required re-sources. The steel spared using pykrete was less than the one required for the coolers, and the energetic cost was anyway prohibitive34. More-

30 Increasing in this way the already very high triaxiality and the resultant brittleness

of the hull. 31 Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science, Oxford U. P., 2005, p. 231;

Hemming, p. 361. Bernal was not able to give convincing assurances on the nautical holding of the Bergship nor on his vulnerability at aircraft attacks, in spite of the pres-ence of about 40 binate turrets of 4.5 in and a great number of light cannons (Brown, p. 233).

32 Hemming, p. 366. 33 Hemming, p. 370. In order to persuade the Allies on the 19th August Mountbatten

triggered a dangerous accident: h exploded two pistol shots against an ice block and one in pykrete, but the second shot ricochet on the trousers of King admiral, ending in the wall. See Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939-1945, edited by Alex Danchew and Daniel Todman, Phoenix Press, 2001. Perutz, I Wish, cit., p. 84 reports and analogous accident.

34 Perutz, I wish, cit,, p. 94.

over also in Pacific the American airbases on islands. Therefore in January 1944 the Bergship was ultmately archived35.

Nemo Propheta

Starting from September 1943 Pyke tried to posing his use to different aims61 x 15 m and breakwaters and piers similar to the ones in concrete on whom Bernal was working, Harbors in Overlord operation. At the end of the year Pyke presented a memorandum on the proble

35 Hemming, p. 376. 36 Proposals and inventions of Mr Geoffrey Pyke; gravity propelled ball

pykrete and power driven rivers", chives (v. Pyke, en.wikipedia).

over also in Pacific the American Island Hopping assured sufficient . Therefore in January 1944 the Bergship was ult

rom September 1943 Pyke tried to at least save pykrete prposing his use to different aims36, as trails for amphibious assault

and breakwaters and piers similar to the ones in concrete on whom Bernal was working, and that were later used for the Mulberry

in Overlord operation. At the end of the year Pyke presented a randum on the problem of landing materials in absence of

Proposals and inventions of Mr Geoffrey Pyke; gravity propelled ball

pykrete and power driven rivers", The Catalogue (ADM 1/15677), The National A, en.wikipedia).

and Hopping assured sufficient . Therefore in January 1944 the Bergship was ulti-

pykrete pro-amphibious assault of

and breakwaters and piers similar to the ones in concrete on Mulberry

in Overlord operation. At the end of the year Pyke presented a in absence of suitable

Proposals and inventions of Mr Geoffrey Pyke; gravity propelled ball bomb, The Catalogue (ADM 1/15677), The National Ar-

harbors and with limited routes, as the Pacific islands and the Norman-dy. The proposal was to use the pipelines for the fuel supply with a di-ameter of 1 or 1.5 m, shooting inside using compressed air the material (closed in standard containers) and even the personnel (supplied with respirators and sedatives) 37. Not any longer more under the Mountbat-ten’ wing, his salary was halved after the landing in Normandy, Pyke refused this sop preferring to work free of charge. At the end of 1944 the sentries were instructed to do not allow him to enter38. Embittered asked with insistence the support of the admiralty in order to have the possibility to patent the pykrete, but the military gave him as food to the ironies of the press by releasing some documents and drawings related to Habakkuk in response in January 194639.

Pyke became even talk about himself with the proposal of ecologic and economic trains with pedals operated by the passengers, with the advantages of sparing cool and petroleum, optimize the redundant re-serves of sugar and make fitness. His last and fatal undertaking was the trial to calculate an algorithm to organize the recruitment of nurses by the National Health Service in a more fair way: the mathematical diffi-culties and the doubt of being stripped of his merit worsen his de-spondency and on February, 21 1948 he took his own life with a bottle of sleeping pills, commemorated by a Bernal’s obituary40.

In 1951 the Canadian chemist sir Charles Frederick Goodeve (1904-1980), one of the pioneers in the operating research and of the designers of antisubmarine systems (hedgehog and degaussing), that really defeat-ed the U-boote, removed a pebble in the shoe in a posthumous crushing

37 Lampe, pp. 164, 168. Hemming, p. 377. 38 Hemming, p. 381. 39 The images were published by London Illustrated News, 2 March 1946. Francis

E. McMurtrie, «Strange story of H. M. S. Habbakuk», The War Illustrated, Vol. 9, N. 230, p. 774, April 12, 1946. Hemming, p. 393.

40 Bernal, «Mr. George Pyke – An Appreciation», Manchester Guardian, 25 Febru-ary 1948, p. 3 C: «He remained always the knight-errant, from time to time gathering round him a small band of followers but never a leader of big movements. Because of the very greatness of his ideas most of his life was one of frustration and disappoint-ment, but he has left behind to all who knew him and were indirectly affected by him the vision he created for making all things possible». V. Time, 8 March, 1948.

of the project Habbakuk to which at proper time he vainly opposed41. Unburied in 1959 by the Lampe’s biography, Pyke, Habbakuk and the pykrete have been object of a diffused interest in recent times. As well the new biography of Henry Hemming (2014), two Canadian books about Habbakuk (Gold 1993, Cross 2012) and a one hour radio program of CBC (2012), in the web circulate a lot of articles, video and quota-tions. In the first novel of the series Darkness (1999), Harry Turtledove imagines a magician propulsion fueled Habbakuk used for the liberation of Jelgava, one of the twelve countries of the imaginary Derlavai planet.

No matter the material which was used, the military interest on artifi-cial islands went on in 1990, in front of political difficulties stirred up by the American of Saudi bases for the Gulf War, Foreseeing future ex-igencies of Pentagon, the McDermott International Inc. in Arlington (Virginia) developed a project of a floating modular base (Offshore Mobile Base, MOB) after the war to be deployed within a month in eve-ry place on the Globe. Composed of five auto propelled modules half submersible (more steady to undulatory movement), the MOB is con-ceived for the advanced air and logistic support, with an airstrip of 2 km (suitable for take-off and landing of the C.17 Globemaster III at full load), and harbor for cargos and a storage of 40 millions of fuel li-ters, and furthermore the infrastructures required for and heavy brigade of 3,000 men with his equipments, weaponry and landing crafts. A re-

41 Sir Charles Frederick Goodeve, «The Ice Ship Fiasco», Evening Standard, 19th

April, 1951, republished in Discovery, June, 1951.

port of the Institute for Defense Analysis in 2001 estimated the cost of 5-8 billions of dollars, equal at about 1% of the defense balance42.

In 1985 the pykrete was considered for a pier in the Oslo harbor and form 1996 his properties were subjected to experimental verifications43. Two experimental domes in pykrete were manufactured in the Wien and Eindhoven Universities. In 2009 the conductors of a Discovery Channel program (Myth Busters, N. 116, “Alaskan Special II) demonstrated that a little ship in pykrete “meager” (ice reinforced by simple newspaper) can navigate in the Alaskan waters at 25 knots (40 km/h). A similar trial performed in Portsmouth resulted instead in a failure because of a fault in mounting of the outboard motor in September 2010 by BBC (Bang Goes The Theory, N. 26) with an ice ship with hemp fibers.

Comparison between the mechanical properties of materials

Mechanical property Ice Concrete Pykrete Compressive tensile strength [MPa] 3.447 17.240 7.584 Tensile strength [MPa] 1.103 1.724 4.826 Density [kg/m³] 910 2500 980

Albeit belatedly the pykrete landed to science-fiction. In Seveneves (2015), of Neal Stephenson, is used to build low terrestrial orbit habitat where finds shelter the mankind survived to Moon breakage.

Acknowledgments: I wish to thank my son Marcello for the editing in english of this paper - Claudio Nardi

42 Jim Wilson, «Battle Island», Popular Mechanics, April 2003, pp. 92-93. The

MOP is quoted in videogames Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (EA Los Angeles, 2008) and Tom Clancy’s Endwar (Ubisoft Shangai, 2008).

43 Andreas Bastian Siddiqui, «The Mechanical Properties of Select Formulations of Pykrete Augmented with an Emulsifier in Uniaxial Compression», ENGR 059, De-cember 13, 2010. A pykrete at 14% of wood paste and emulsifying (xanthan gum) reached a compressive strength of 30.7 MPa.