WORLD WAR II FOLLY: BRITS’ ICEBERG SHIPS

As the Allies pre­pared to invade occu­pied Europe in 1942, a truly nutty idea swept through the British mil­i­tary hier­ar­chy: build giant air­craft car­ri­ers made of ice.
The ships could be made cheaply, they fig­ured. And, maybe, they could be con­structed tough enough to with­stand bul­lets and tor­pe­does.
With Churchill’s bless­ing, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations, began the task of devel­op­ing “berg-​​ships” up to 4,000 feet long, 600 feet wide and 130 feet in depth.
His task seemed to get eas­ier when, in early 1943, “two American pro­fes­sors dis­cov­ered that a very tough mate­r­ial could be pro­duced by adding a small amount of wood pulp to water before freez­ing. They called this mate­r­ial pykrete, in hon­our of (Mountbatten’s sci­en­tific advi­sor) Geoffrey Pyke,” Combinedrops​.com says.

Lord Mountbatten had a block of pykrete pre­pared by a Canadian engi­neer­ing com­pany, and took this block to the Quebec Conference in the fall of 1943. As it appeared that “Habbakuk” would run into sup­ply and tech­ni­cal prob­lems, not to men­tion the high costs ($100 mil­lion for the first ship), it was Mountbattens aim to get the Americans to take over the project. It is reported that he fired a revolver at the pykrete block dur­ing a cof­fee break, and the bul­let bounced off and struck one of the senior offi­cers who were present — thank­fully with­out seri­ous injury!

Defense Tech Dad Tom Shachtman wrote about this folly in Laboratory Warriors : How Allied Science and Technology Tipped the Balance in World War II (out now in paper­back). Take it away, Pop:

To my mind, the major inter­est of the story of this absurd enter­prise is how far it went before the bub­ble was burst. This was a loony idea all along, and its premise was eas­ily refuted by sci­ence and even eas­ier by math­e­mat­ics — you just had to com­pute how much of the stuff would be needed to make a float­ing air­field, plug in a few fig­ures about the out­put of wood from Canadian forests, and real­ize that it would take the entire country’s forests to make one field.
But because the idea had pow­er­ful patrons, Churchill and Mountbatten, who were not sci­en­tists but politi­cians whose author­ity could direct the spend­ing of mil­lions of tax­payer dol­lars, mil­lions of dol­lars were spent on it. It reminds us that Star Wars is not the only science-​​fiction fan­tasy to enchant the mind of a leader of the Western world. 

(via Boing Boing)
THERE’S MORE: Defense Tech buddy Wyatt Earp points us to great pic­tures and dia­grams of the berg-​​ships here and to a longer essay on the sub­ject here.
AND MORE: Another Defense Tech pal says Mountbatten’s effort wasn’t “really the folly that it seems.“

The coast guard long ago gave up try­ing to destroy ice­bergs and they are sim­ple fresh water bergs, not pykrete. Given the other advances dreamt up by the British that made carrier-​​based jet avi­a­tion prac­ti­cal (and safer) like the angled flight deck and steam cat­a­pults it’s not nec­es­sar­ily some­thing to be dis­missed out of hand. RULCCs (REALLY Ultra Large Crude Carriers) made of ice just might turn out to be struc­turally stronger and more dam­age resis­tant than the cur­rent crop of aging ULCCs rust­ing their way along the sea­ways today. Toss in built-​​in obso­les­cence and easy recycling…

June 6th, 2003 | Retro-Futuro | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.