During the Second World War, the Allies dreamed up something that sounds impossible — an aircraft carrier made of ice and sawdust. Not a metaphor, not a Canadian stereotype, but a real, bulletproof iceberg ship, built in secret on a frozen Alberta lake.
This is the story of Project Habakkuk, the bizarre wartime invention that could have changed the war. We’ll travel to Jasper National Park, where pacifists worked under RCMP guard to build the prototype, and to the meeting rooms where Winston Churchill became giddy at the thought of a floating fortress.
It’s a tale of wild ingenuity, Canadian resourcefulness, and a legacy that still shapes Arctic engineering today. Sometimes, wartime courage isn’t about storming beaches — it’s about building an iceberg and seeing if it floats.
In this episode:
- Why the Allies needed a floating mid-Atlantic airbase
- How Canadian scientists turned ice and sawdust into bulletproof pykrete
- The strange role of conscientious objectors in the project
- Why the ship never sailed, and how its legacy lived on
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