Pyke managed to convince Lord Mountbatten of the worth of his project some time around 1942, and trials were made in two locations in Alberta in Canada. Blocks of Pykrete were attacked with various explosives and it was found that a charge corresponding to a torpedo warhead would have made only a minor dent in the planned Habbakuk carrier.
At the Quebec Conference of 1943 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. It is reported that he first asked a US admiral to test the solidity of Pykrete by trying to break it with an axe. The axe bounced off the block and nearly chopped off the admiral's foot. Mountbatten then took out his service pistol and shot at the block, to give an idea of the resistance of this kind of ice to projectiles. The bullet ricocheted off the block and hit one of the walls, a few inches from the head of a US general. The comments of the aforementioned admiral and general (or their colleagues) were not recorded for posterity.
As a bit of fun, Pykrete can easily be made in small quantities by shredding bathroom tissue in water (or you can use sawdust) and molding it in (say) an ice cube tray. As an experiment, vary the volume fraction of pulp to water, and freeze it. One could bang on it with a hammer to see how resistant it is to impact loading.