By
now our readers know that in The Maier-Files – Book 1 – The Initiation
flying saucers (haunebus) appear (for those who didn’t: you can buy the comic here).
And the “Wunderwaffen” indeed are an essential part of the story, just
as they are an essential part of lots of “conspiracy theories”
concerning the escape routes of national-socialists after the Second
World War. But not only national-socialists were working on so called
wonder weapons. The Brits, amongst others, had some strange plans of
their own. One of them was worked on in Project Habbakuk.
The
idea was one of a certain Geoffrey Pike, who worked for the British
Combined Operations Headquarters and was considered a genius by Lord
Mountbatten, leader of that organization. Goal was – the U-boat war was
still very active – solving the problem of invasions from the sea or
Atlantic convoys that couldn’t be covered by airplanes. Steel and
aluminum were scarce and needed for other goals. Ice however could be
manufactured with about one percent of the energy needed for producing
the same amount of steel and so ice became the solution for Pyke. His
“bergship” (“berg” is derived from “iceberg”, which is originally
derived from the Dutch word “ijsberg”) would consist of a, natural or
artificial, ice mass flatted on top and hollowed to serve as an
aircraft-carrier.
Mountbatten
liked the idea and passed it on to Churchill, who liked it too. At the
start of 1942 Pyke brought in a specialist to decide on whether an
icefloat big enough and strong enough to endure circumstances in the
Atlantic could be build in a reasonable span of time. The specialist
said he’d better forget about a natural iceberg, because those have not
enough surface above water to build an airstrip on it and tend to roll
over rather suddenly. The project would have been dismissed if “pykrete”
wasn’t invented by then, a mixture of 86 percent water and 14 percent
sawdust much stronger than regular ice, melting much slower and
unsinkable.
We
spare you the technical details, but it was decided that a scale model
would be build in Jasper National Park in Canada. It measured 18 meters
by 9 meters, weighed a 1000 tons and was kept frozen by a one horsepower
motor. The Canadians were sure they could build the first real
“bergship” by 1944 and they had the necessary material to do so. But
soon problems emerged that would multiply the costs by five times what
was estimated first and the Canadians decided it wouldn’t be practical
to build the ship “in the coming season”. Conclusion: no Habbakuk ship
would be ready by the end of 1944. And meanwhile Pyke, who the Americans
disliked, was taken of the project.
Of
the three alternative concepts, Habbakuk I till III, the Habbakuk II
came closest to the original model, but the engineers still working on
the project couldn’t tell for sure that it would be practical until they
would have build a bigger model in Canada. That never happened: the
project lost priority by the end of 1943. Lord Mountbatten judged that
the steel (which was necessary for the plant where the “pykrete” would
be made) could be used better for other things, the Portuguese granted
permission to use airfields on the Azores to hunt for U-boats, British
airplanes were equipped with long distance fuel tanks, and the number of
escorting ships rose sharply. Mountbatten retreating from the project
says enough.
So the project went down in silence. A project which, for number of reasons, wouldn’t have been possible without … German help.
Pyke
namely was not the real inventor of the “bergship”, that was a German
scientist, Dr. Arthur Gerke (von Waldenburg), who had been experimenting
with it on Lake Zürich back in 1930, a fact on which an English
scientific magazine reported in 1932.
The
specialist Pyke brought in to decide on whether it could be done with a
natural iceberg (and that would continue working on the project) also
had something to do with Germany: Max Perutz. He was born in Vienna
(Austria), finished his studies there at the university, but had to run
when Hitler took over power in 1938. Perutz namely was, though being
baptized as a catholic, from Jewish decent. In the beginning of 1939 he
moved from Switzerland to England, but was deported along with other
people of German or Austrian nationality on command of Churchill to
Newfoundland. Only after a number of months of “internment” he was
allowed to return to England.
And
then there was the inventor of the “pykrete”: Herman Mark. He was an
officer in the Austrian-Hungarian army during the First World War,
became a hero on the Italian front, went to work for IG Farben in 1926,
was advised by his boss to return to Vienna in the 1930s (he was a son
of a, though converted to Christianity, Jew), worked on the university
there (where Max Perutz was one of his students), was arrested and
locked in a gestapo prison when the Nazis came to power, but could
escape to Switzerland with some luck and bravery. And with a swastika
flag on the radiator of his car …
