ICEBERGS AS AIRFIELDS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 13, 19 August 1946, Page 4

ICEBERGS AS AIRFIELDS

AMBITIOUS ALLIED PLAN STRANGE CREATION OF SCIENTIFIC MINDS \ One of the most ambitious Allied plans of the war was to build flat icebergs out of manufactured ice to be used as aircraft carriers against German submarines and in invasion operations. That they were not actually built was only because the course of the war rendered such a vast undertaking unnecessary. “Habbakuk’ as this strange creation of scientific minds was to have been called, would had it been built, have been a flat floating mass of manufactured ice 2000 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 200 feet deep, big enough for 20 Spitfires or 100 Mosquitoes. It would have had electric motors built into it to drive it at a speed of seven knots, and a large refrigerating apparatus to keep the ice constantly hard. Habbakkuk would have been built of solid blocks of artifically made ice 40 feet thick, and it could not have been broken by any type of bomb or torpedo then known; bombs would merely have made small craters in the ice.

To build a Habbakuk 1,700,000 tons of ice mixed with a small amount of wood pulp would have been required, and the first one would have cost between £8,000,000 ■

and £10,000,000.