On Tuesday 03 May 2005 12:09, Keith Nagel wrote:
Google Pykrete and you'll find a wealth of information
about this odd bit of history.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/floatingisland.php
K.
-Original Message-
From: Jed Rothwell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 11:52 AM
To: vortex-L@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: BLP implementation path
Standing Bear wrote:
Conversely, the British once fully funded studies on a
battleship made of ice, purely to mollify a fearful public during the
depths of World War II.
I believe that was an aircraft carrier made of ice mixed with sawdust and
or ground-up newspaper. It was to be deployed in the far north Atlantic to
cover the air gap where German U-boats could operate without being
intercepted by long-range British aircraft. It would not be a highly mobile
aircraft carrier in the usual sense, but rather a large man-made island
that could be towed to any location and anchored. The craft would have had
internal freezers to replenish the ice as it melted. Ice mixed with sawdust
is incredibly tough material. It could easily withstand a German torpedo
strike.
It was actually a sensible proposal, but it was no longer needed after the
US began launching small jeep aircraft carriers made from converted
freighters that carried a couple dozen aircraft. (The British called them
Woolworth carriers.)
The proposal was not put forth to mollify the public. It was top secret. It
was pursued because it appealed to Winston Churchill.
- Jed
It was too put forth to mollify the public. People wanted a weapon that
magically slew the 'enemy'. One Brit idea was the 'solid searchlight'. You
turned your 'light' on, shined it on a plane that you hoped was not yours;
then you just 'pushed a button to solidify the beam and wanged it into the
ground'. When asked how this solidification was to be done, the simple
answer came as if by reflex: Simple if the desire is there to succeed in
the research! And so it was with the Habbakuk (original mis-spelling).
Only in this case the 'public' was influential military executives desparate
for winning ideas in the face of the German juggernaut that was sinking
supply ships much too quickly for the good of the morale of the population.
The Admiralty kept it secret to be sure, but only to spare themselves
embarrassment in case of yet another fiasco. I have found that early
stories on the subject tend to give more facts and preserve the mood
surrounding the story better. Hindsight being 20/20 tends to idealize
the victors and blur or obscure...or even omit...facts. A good website
giving the mood of the public on the street level is:
http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:UJYU2whR_IIJ:www.swalks.com/hab.pdf
+habbakuk+%2Bice+%2Bshiphl=enie=UTF-8
The Admiralty gave the research over to the supervision of the Americans and
Canadians, who built a model of it secretly on Lake Patricia in Northern
Alberta in Canada. Another website continues:
http://jwgibbs.cchem.berkeley.edu/CFGoodeve/habakkuk.html
And this reads in part:
--___--
The Ice Ship Fiasco
SIR CHARLES GOODEVE, F.R.S.
ONCE during the war an inventor brought forward the novel idea of a
searchlight that would itself bring down any aircraft caught in its beam. The
idea was to provide the searchlight with a button which when pressed would
solidify the beam. By rapidly turning the searchlight downwards, one could
'wang' the aircraft on the ground.
The incidental details as to how to solidify the beam were, according to
the inventor, merely matters of research and development easily solvable by
anyone who really believed in the idea.
Many inventions of varying degrees of absurdity, as well as some useful
ones were put forward during the war, but none produced a dislocation of the
Allied effort to a fraction of the extent achieved by 'Habakkuk', a proposal
put forward by Geoffrey Pyke. He himself named this grandiose scheme after
the prophet who said: I will work a work in your days which ye will not
believe, though it be told you.
New 'Weapon'
Wars had for long been fought with steel and explosives, and more recently
with aluminium and electrons. To these was now to be added a new element of
war, ICE.
Ice, it was pointed out, was plentiful and didn't sink. Let us build large
unsinkable aircraft carriers of ice and thus provide air cover for an attack
on a remote and unprotected part of France. Steel limits the size of our
carriers to tens of thousands of tons; with ice we can throw off our shackles
and build carriers of millions of tons each.
Ice is plentiful! Ice is unsinkable! Ice is hard! The enemy will never
suspect it! Ice will win the war!
At first the scientists and engineers working on their
