Project Habakkuk
Project Habakkuk (actually misspelled as
Habbakuk — see below) was a plan by the
British in
World War II to construct an
aircraft carrier out of
ice, for use against German
U-boats in the mid-
Atlantic, which was out of range of land-based planes.
The
Habakkuk, as proposed to
Winston Churchill by
Lord Mountbatten and
Geoffrey Pyke in December 1942, was to be approximately 2,000 feet long and 300 feet wide, with a deck-to-keel depth of 200 feet, and walls 40 feet thick
[National Archives docket DEFE 2/1087 — Habbakuk scheme: history, institution etc]. It was to have a draft of 150 feet, and a
displacement of 2,000,000 tons or more, to be constructed in
Canada from 280,000 blocks of ice
. (For comparison, an
Essex-class carrier displaced 35,000 tons.) The building material was later changed to a mixture of ice and
wood pulp known as
Pykrete after Pyke, who proposed the Habakkuk project — the material was invented by others. The ship's deep draft would have kept it out of most harbours. Inside the vessel a
refrigeration plant would maintain the structure against melting. The ship would have extremely limited manoeuvrability, but was expected to be capable of up to 10 knots (18 km/h) using 26 electric drive motors mounted in separate external
nacelles (normal, internal ship engines would have generated too much heat for an ice craft). Its armaments would have included 40 dual-barrelled 4.5" DP (dual-purpose) turrets and numerous light
anti-aircraft guns, and it would have housed an airstrip and up to 150 twin-engined bombers or fighters.
The
Habakkuk was imagined to be virtually unsinkable as it would have effectively been a streamlined
iceberg or
floating island kept afloat by the buoyancy of its construction materials, and to be highly resilient to damage by virtue of its sheer bulk. It was projected to take $70 million and 8,000 people working for eight months to construct it, an expenditure which the British were unwilling to make at the time on such an experimental craft. Experiments on ice and pykrete as construction materials were carried out at
Lake Louise,
Alberta, and a small prototype was constructed at Patricia Lake, Alberta, measuring only 60 feet by 30 feet (18 by 9 m), weighing in at 1,000 tons and kept frozen by a one-horsepower motor.
Work on the project continued through 1943, but major doubts as to feasibility had surfaced by October, and abandonment was recommended in January 1944. The use of ice had actually been falling out of favour before that, with other ideas for "floating islands" being considered, such as welding Liberty Ships or Landing craft together (
Project TENTACLE)
[National Archives docket PREM 3/216/4 -- Adm. Noble's reports on Habakkuk/Tentacle]. The ice
Habakkuk itself was never begun.
The ship is a fairly popular subject in
alternate history fiction.
The project's code name seems to have been consistently (mis-)spelled
Habbakuk in the Admiralty and Government documents at the time. This may in fact have been Pyke's own error, as at least one early document apparently written by him (though unsigned) spells it that way. (However, post-war publications by people concerned with the project, e.g. Perutz and Goodeve, all restore the proper (one 'B' and three 'K's) spelling.) The name is a
biblical reference to the project's ambitious goal: "...be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told." (
Habakkuk 1:5, NIV)
The Habakkuk design received criticism, notably from Sir
Charles Goodeve, Assistant Controller of Research and Development for the Admiralty during World War II.
In an article published after the war Goodeve pointed out the large amount of wood pulp that would be required, enough to affect paper production significantly. He also claimed that each ship would require 40,000 tons of cork insulation, thousands of miles of steel tubing for brine circulation, and four power stations, but that for all those resources (some of which could be used to manufacture conventional ships of more effective fighting power) Habakkuk would only be capable of six knots of speed. Much of his article also contained extensive derisive comments about the properties of ice as used for ship construction.
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Some notes on the article by Perutz referenced above *
Royal Naval Museum about Habakkuk
