Episode 56 - Project Habakkuk: Churchill’s Iceberg Navy

In 1942, with German U-boats ravaging Allied shipping in the North Atlantic, Britain faced a brutal problem: how to close the Mid-Atlantic Gap without enough steel to build more carriers. Enter Geoffrey Pyke, a brilliant and eccentric inventor with an idea so strange it almost worked—build a massive aircraft carrier out of ice.In this episode of The Rum Ration, Rejoy and Colin dive into Project Habakkuk, the secret Allied plan to create a 2-million-ton floating airbase made from pykrete, a mixture of ice and wood pulp. From Churchill’s enthusiasm and Mountbatten’s infamous live-fire demonstration to the hidden Canadian prototype built by conscientious objectors at Patricia Lake, Alberta, the story is equal parts ingenuity, desperation, and absurdity.Ultimately undone by physics, cost, steel demands, and changing technology, Habakkuk remains one of the Second World War’s strangest “plausible but ludicrous” ideas.