Page 10 - April 2019

OPERATION HABBAKUK by Neil Taylor,
THE ICEBERG AIRCRAFT CARRIER Alberta Aviation
Museum

A small, picturesque lake nestled in the Canadian
Rockies just outside the Jasper townsite harbours a
mysterious secret dating from the Second World
Lake. Patricia Lake, named after Princess Patricia of
Connaught, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was
the site of wartime experiments examining the
feasibility of building an aircraft carrier out of ice.

The idea was born at the low point of the Second
World War when the German U-boat fleet was
threatening to starve the British Isles of food and war
materials. Despite the growing effectiveness of
convoys and hunter “Support Groups” of Allied
warships, German wolf pack attacks were particularly
successful in the mid-Atlantic where a gap in Allied
airborne coverage existed.
Desperate times called for desperate measures, and in mid-1942 eccentric British scientist Geoffrey Pyke
began to promote a bizarre scheme to build an unsinkable aircraft carrier out of ice that could guard the mid-
Atlantic shipping routes. He brought his idea, code named Operation Habbakuk, to Lord Louis Mountbatten,
Chief of Combined Operations. Always open to the unorthodox, Mountbatten was struck by Pyke’s plan and

immediately supported the venture.

The key to Pyke’s proposal was the use of pykrete, a mix of 15 per cent wood pulp and 85 per cent water, that
was stronger than concrete, resistant to thawing and largely immune to heavy blows (as might be inflicted by
a torpedo). Yet amazingly, it could be easily molded into different forms and shaped by saw or wood plane.

Mountbatten took Pyke’s proposal to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill where he demonstrated
pykrete’s unique characteristics by floating a block of the material in the Prime Minister’s bathtub. Churchill
was struck by the audacity of the plan and called for construction of a pykrete aircraft carrier 2,000 feet long
and 300 feet wide with a draft of 150 feet, and capable of carrying 200 fighter planes and 100 twin-engine
bombers.

Before committing to construction of such a colossus, a test model was required to prove the concept. Neither
the British Admiralty nor American naval officials were enamored by the proposal so the Canadian
Government was approached to determine both the feasibility and cost of a “bergship”.
The project was assigned to Dr. C. J. Mackenzie of the National Research Council who initially regarded it as
“another of those mad wild schemes” for which the British were famous.