Project Habakkuk - Shooting Incident

Shooting Incident

According to some accounts, at the Quebec Conference of 1943 Lord Mountbatten brought a block of Pykrete along to demonstrate its potential to the bevy of admirals and generals who had come along with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Mountbatten entered the project meeting with two blocks and placed them on the ground. One was a normal ice block and the other was Pykrete. He then drew his service pistol and shot at the first block. It shattered and splintered. Next, he fired at the Pykrete to give an idea of the resistance of that kind of ice to projectiles. The bullet ricocheted off the block, grazing the trouser leg of Admiral Ernest King and ended up in the wall.

Sir Alan Brooke's diaries support this account, telling how Mountbatten brought two blocks, one of ice and one of Pykrete. After first shooting at the ice, with a warning to beware of splinters, Mountbatten said "I shall fire at the block on the right to show you the difference". Brooke reports, "the bullet rebounded out of the block and buzzed round our legs like an angry bee." The meeting in question was a high-level summit with a US delegation in the Château Frontenac in Quebec.

Max Perutz gives an account of a similar incident in his book, I Wish I Made You Angry Earlier: a demonstration of Pykrete was given at Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ) by a naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Douglas Grant, who was provided by Perutz with rods of ice and Pykrete packed with dry ice in thermos flasks and large blocks of ice and Pykrete. Grant demonstrated the comparative strength of ice and Pykrete by firing bullets into both blocks; the ice shattered, but the bullet rebounded from the Pykrete and hit the Chief of the Imperial Staff (Sir Alan Brooke) in the shoulder. Brooke was unhurt.