The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (27 page)

Dickie's father had grown up speaking German, French, and English; and Dickie—the youngest, by eight years, of four children—was expected to do the same, which was easy enough because as a young boy he holidayed in Germany and spent time with his cosmopolitan Russian cousins, the Romanovs. His father rose to become an admiral and eventually (1912) First Sea Lord, a position he resigned in October 1914 as his health declined under the stress of the First World War and the mob's demand for the scalp of the “German” Battenberg. In July 1917 he renounced his
German titles and changed the family name to the more English-sounding Mountbatten.

Dickie, unlike his father, had no foreign accent, and thus was freer to live the serene life of an English aristocrat (he was in fact, properly, “His Serene Highness Prince Louis”); he was cheerful in demeanor, diligent in his studies (he had to be, as he was not naturally clever), and eager, even if not gifted, on the playing field. There was no question as to his career—he was bound for the Navy, supposing he could scrape by on his mathematics. He was twelve, nearly thirteen, when he entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne; the First World War began while he was a cadet, and he was there when his father was forced to resign as First Sea Lord. His ambition crystallized: he would take his father's place. The next step was to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in January 1915, and then on to the Naval College at Keyham where he surprised by graduating top of his class. By July 1916 he was a midshipman aboard the battle cruiser HMS
Lion
, the flagship of the Admiral of the Fleet, Sir David Beatty, the hero of Jutland. Beatty became commander in chief of the Grand Fleet and Dickie transferred to the flagship of the fleet, HMS
Queen Elizabeth.
It was aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
that he learned that his surname had been changed and he was now Lord Louis Mountbatten. He ended the war a sub-lieutenant and executive officer of a patrol boat. In 1919, the Navy sent him to attend Cambridge.

This proved to be a bad idea. Mountbatten had been raised with a simple creed: do the right thing. It had been reinforced by the Navy. It provided what moral ballast there was to his agnostic Anglicanism. As he had no greater philosophical resources—and also had a tremendous fondness for gadgets, inventions,
²
and new technology; in short, for “progress”; he was vulnerable to the conceit—fed to him by a cultured, leftist subversive
named Peter Murphy—that the Left was on the side of justice and progress. The Bolsheviks who murdered the Russian royal family, his cousins the Romanovs, might have gotten carried away, but on the whole, the Left's goals were enlightened. Mountbatten might glory in his bloodlines (his best friends at Cambridge were the Prince of Wales and the future King George VI), his cultural tastes might be conservative and traditional, he might be a career Navy man pledged to the defense of the realm, but in his politics he always assumed that the Left spoke for the future and for what was morally right. Nevertheless, when he accompanied the Prince of Wales on his trip to India in 1921, Mountbatten had no sympathy for Indian nationalists—his mind was focused more on mastering the great game of polo (to which he became devoted) than on the rumbling independence movement.

If Mountbatten made a mistake in befriending Peter Murphy at Cambridge, he perhaps compounded it by marrying Edwina Ashley (the Prince of Wales approved of her, but then again, he was a famously disastrous judge of women). Edwina had loads of cash from her maternal grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, a German Jew who had come to England as a young man and become an extraordinarily successful financier, friend of King Edward VII, and Catholic convert. Her father was Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfrid Ashley, a Conservative M.P. Edwina, however, was no conservative. An opinionated flapper, she shared Mountbatten's left-wing politics but was impatient with Mountbatten's desire for a traditional marriage, had a taste for extramarital affairs, and left an ever-understanding Mountbatten to do most of the raising of their children—while resenting and trying to prevent his closeness to them. Like many a high-living socialite she proved her merit when danger threatened, working with the St. John's Ambulance Brigade during the war, and easing the suffering of Indians amidst the carnage and misery of India's partition. She died in 1960 while inspecting hospital facilities in Borneo; Mountbatten never remarried.

Mountbatten survived the swingeing cuts to the armed services after World War I—and while some attributed this to royal intervention on his behalf, there was no doubt that he was a dedicated, energetic, industrious officer who knew how to handle men (he made a point of memorizing a biographical profile of every man under his command). As at school, he possessed no extraordinary talent, but he did have the gift of charm, a determination to succeed, a natural capacity for detail and hard work, and an ability to teach and inspire young officers.

He excelled as a signals officer, qualified as a French translator, and commanded a destroyer before being appointed to the Fleet Air Arm at the Admiralty. He was no mere pencil pusher but an active proponent of myriad improvements from acquiring better guns to adopting the Typex enciphering machine. In London, and with his social connections, he became the close friend of two Tory politicians, Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper—all three of them sharing strong anti-fascist sentiments and opposition to a policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Captain Cosmo Graham wrote this assessment of Mountbatten on his departure from the Admiralty in 1938: “He possesses a naïve simplicity combined with a compelling manner and dynamic energy. His interests incline mainly towards the material world and he is, therefore, inclined to be surprised by the unexpected; he has been so successful in that sphere that he does not contemplate failure. His social assets are invaluable in any rank to any Service. His natural thoroughness is extended to sport. Desirable as it is to avoid superlatives, he has nearly all the qualities and qualifications for the highest commands.”
³
With a second World War imminent, he was about to test his mettle.

In 1939, he became commander of the destroyer HMS
Kelly
, and quickly earned a reputation for dash, daring, and fearless and inspiring leadership
.
The
Kelly
evacuated troops from Norway, fought German U-boats and bombers, battled in the Mediterranean, and survived (at least for a while, thanks to gallant seamanship) wounds that should have sunk her. Churchill, ever appreciative of a well-born swashbuckler, became one of Mountbatten's wartime champions. When German bombers finally sank the
Kelly
during the battle for Crete in 1941, Mountbatten was last to leave the ship—indeed almost went down with her—and then swam to help others as German machine guns strafed the water. They were rescued by HMS
Kipling.
The
Kelly
's story became the (officially unacknowledged) basis of Noël Coward's film
In Which We Serve
, with Coward playing the captain based on Mountbatten (they were friends).

With the
Kelly
at the bottom of the ocean, in August 1941 Mountbatten was assigned to command HMS
Illustrious
, then being repaired in Norfolk, Virginia, giving him an excuse to make a triumphal tour of the United States (where his two daughters had been evacuated). He not only met with the president but toured Pearl Harbor—and was appalled at how vulnerable it was to a possible Japanese attack. While in America he received an urgent message that his appointment to HMS
Illustrious
had been canceled. Churchill wanted him to organize combined operations. Promoted to commodore, Mountbatten was ordered to prepare everything necessary—from landing craft to men—for raiding the coast of France, though in fact Mountbatten's first raid was in Norway. (Mountbatten also backed an extraordinary
project to make unsinkable iceberg aircraft carriers—an idea, developed by some of his boffins, which collapsed because of the enormous expense involved.)

Just as Drake had singed the beard of the king of Spain, Mountbatten's task was to singe the toothbrush moustache of the führer of the Reich. In March 1942, his men destroyed the dry dock at St. Nazaire. Though these and other raids pleased Churchill and raised Allied morale, they often came at a high cost in casualties for the gains made. Churchill made Mountbatten an acting vice admiral and chief of combined operations.

As combined operations chief, Mountbatten organized the ill-fated raid on Dieppe where Canadian commandos took nearly seventy percent casualties—though Eisenhower said the hard lessons learned at Dieppe made success at Normandy possible, and Churchill's confidence in Mountbatten was unabated. In October 1943, Churchill appointed Mountbatten Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, leading the campaign to reclaim Burma. In that role Mountbatten had to manage such difficult customers as the Anglophobic, misanthropic American General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell—one of whose nicest names for Mountbatten was “glamour boy” and who was officially his deputy—and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese nationalist government. The end result was victory over formidable obstacles of geography and disease and a fanatical enemy.

Mountbatten saw British victories in Southeast Asia as a triumph of civilization over the depraved barbarism of imperial Japan. He believed that
Britain's colonies welcomed the return of the Union Jack (which for the most part they did),
⁴
while also believing it necessary to accommodate nationalist, and usually leftist, native forces. For Britain's Labour government (elected in July 1945), Mountbatten's position and progressive sympathies made him the natural choice to replace Lord Wavell as viceroy of India in 1947.

Wavell had given up trying to reconcile India's Hindus and Muslims. After the Hindu-dominated Congress Party refused to accept a federated India—and Muslims responded with sectarian massacre—Wavell thought Britain was left with two unpalatable choices: scuttle and run, or massively reinforce the Indian army and put off independence for another decade and a half. Mountbatten's assignment was to guide the subcontinent into independence, and to do so swiftly.

Mountbatten was already well-regarded by Indian nationalists. Jawaharlal Nehru, who had met him in Singapore, had remarked to Aung San, the Communist-nationalist leader of Burma, that Mountbatten was “a very noble speciman of British imperialism.”
⁵
He was sworn in as viceroy in March 1947 with a deadline of 1 June 1948 to bring India to independence. There were two main parties to the negotiations: Nehru, leader of the Congress Party, whom Mountbatten found congenial and willing to negotiate, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, whom he found cold and intransigent—Jinnah had plumped for partition, for an independent Muslim Pakistan. As Jinnah would not budge, and as the deadline was inexorable, it was a fait accompli, in Mountbatten's opinion, that British India would not become independent whole and entire. The major loser in this was the Indian people themselves, as millions were forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands were killed as Muslim and Hindu
butchered each other freed from the constraints of effective British peacekeeping.
⁶
Another casualty was the Indian princes whose rights, privileges, and semi-autonomous status were crushed by the governments of India and Pakistan. The Hindu maharajah of Muslim-majority Kashmir delayed declaring his loyalty to either side for as long as possible. He hoped against all evidence that Britain would stay. When he finally declared he would join India, it sparked the first Indian-Pakistani War in 1947–48, leading to Kashmir's own partition between the two states.