Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79 9781350230262, 9781350230286, 9781350230279

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Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

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Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79 Adrian Smith

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Adrian Smith, 2023 Adrian Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: First Sea Lord Louis Mountbatten, Earl Mountbatten, at his office in the Admiralty, 22nd April 1955. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3026-2 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3027-9 eBook: 978-1-3502-3025-5­ Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.­

To Adam again, and to Justin Champion and Alex Danchev – bright stars in the firmament who faded far too soon

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­Contents List of Illustrations ­Acknowledgements Introduction ­1 From Viceroy to First Sea Lord Mountbatten and India ­2 The Suez crisis, 1956 ­3 The legacy of Suez, 1956–80 ­4 ‘The winds of change’: Commonwealth and cold war ­5 Learning from the Americans: Nuclear deterrence from beneath the waves ­6 Moulding the modern MOD Conclusion: Afterlife and assassination Notes Select Bibliography and Filmography Index

viii x 1 15 53 77 97 115 139 169 194 248 257

Illustrations 1 2 3

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5 6 7

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South-East Asia Command: the Supreme Commander and the ‘Forgotten’ 14th Army South-East Asia Command: the Japanese surrender in Singapore, 12 September 1945 South-East Asia Command: Edwina Mountbatten watches among former POWs and internees the Japanese surrender in Singapore, 12 September 1945 South-East Asia Command: Mountbatten driving with Pandit Jawarhal Nehru from Government House to the Indian YMCA in Singapore, 19 March 1946 India: the last Viceroy and Vicereine meet Mahatma Gandhi for the first time, 8 March 1947 India: the Mountbattens inspect riot devastation in Lahore, 20 July 1947 India: the Viceroy initiates the ceremony for the transfer of power to the new Dominion of India in the Constituent Assembly Council Chambers, 14 August 1947 India: a welcome home for the now former Governor-General and Lady Mountbatten from the Duke of Edinburgh, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, High Commissioner Krishna Menon and Indian Finance Minister Shanmukam Chetty, Northolt, 23 June 1948 First Sea Lord: the Mountbattens’ first visit back to India, 18 March 1956 First Sea Lord: a welcome for Admiral Lord Mountbatten from Admiral Arleigh Burke, observed by Rear Admiral Lorenzo Sabin, Washington National Airport, 27 October 1955 First Sea Lord: Admiral Lord Mountbatten [briefly] defers to Field Marshal Lord Montgomery Chief of the Defence Staff: MOD board meeting with Peter Thorneycroft, Minister of Defence, attended by the Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, 1964 Chief of the Defence Staff: Admiral of the Fleet Mountbatten leaves the Ministry of Defence for the last time, 16 July 1965

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Illustrations 14 Commonwealth Immigration Mission: Archbishop Makarios welcomes the CDS and his chef de cabinet Philip Woodfield, 3 June 1965 15 The Report into Prison Escapes and Security: Lord Mountbatten and his three assessors outside HMP Wormwood Scrubs, December 1965 16 Filming of The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten: Lord Mountbatten riding for camera on the beach at Classiebawn, Co. Sligo, with his daughters Lady Pamela Hicks and Lady Brabourne, late 1968

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A ­ cknowledgements Specific thanks can be found in the relevant endnotes. Thank you to readers of the original proposal and of the manuscript for their helpful comments, and to everyone involved in production of the book, not least Bloomsbury’s Emily Drewe, Abigail Lane, Katrina Calsado, Faye Robinson, Viswasirasini Govindarajan and Deepu Raghuthaman. I am grateful to Getty Images, the University of Southampton and the US Navy for permission to publish appropriate photographs (presumed copyright holders for four other photographs held in the University of Southampton’s Special Collections were approached, and informed that after a requisite period of time the absence of a reply would be interpreted as tacit approval – no replies were received). As always, a special thanks for their love and support to close friends and relatives, especially Georgia and Jess and Rose, and above all, my darling wife Mary. Adrian Smith Lymington Winter 2021–2

Introduction

Mountbatten and the exercise of power In the forty-plus years since his death, interest in Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten of Burma has ebbed and flowed. Publication of Andrew Lownie’s mildly sensationalist The Mountbattens in 2019, and Netflix’s worldwide streaming of The Crown, has seen an awareness of ‘Uncle Dickie’ inconceivable a decade ago.1 Second cousin of King George VI and uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh, Mountbatten’s continuing appeal lies in a racy private life and fiction-fuelled speculation as to his relationship with the Queen, her late consort and her heir. Since 2016 Mountbatten has been portrayed on screen by three high-profile actors: Greg Wise, Charles Dance and Hugh Bonneville.2 Only the latter, in Viceroy’s House – a deeply flawed but highly watchable depiction of New Delhi in the summer of 1947 – failed to capture something of the man.3 In The Crown, despite an absurd plot (an abortive coup thwarted by Her Majesty), Charles Dance rendered Mountbatten utterly convincing as a man unable to adjust when the levers of power are prised from his hands. In practice, as the final chapter shows, Mountbatten enjoyed a crowded retirement, compensating for his absence from the heart of government by inflating past deeds – his egotism was congenital.4 The irony, of course, was that the more he exaggerated his role in the war at sea, Combined Operations, the defeat of Japan, Indian independence and the end of empire, the courting of America and the modernization of the British armed forces, the greater the scepticism and the more ferocious the attacks. His career up to the Second World War was largely uncontentious, but after that every ostensible triumph saw cause for criticism, and never more so than India in the summer of 1947. Instead of boring all and sundry, the ageing Earl Mountbatten should have let his record speak for itself. After all, here was a man who packed into just twenty-five years the prominent roles of naval hero, wartime supremo, departing Viceroy, ‘imperial undertaker’, Whitehall warrior and parvenu courtier turned royal patriarch.5 It’s scarcely surprising, therefore, that Dickie Mountbatten was in every sense of the term a player (and, of course, the same could be said of Edwina Mountbatten – wealthy socialite and wayward mother transformed by war into brilliant nursing administrator, future Vicereine and selfappointed voice of the dispossessed, whether at home or abroad). When in the autumn of 1955 Henry Fairlie coined the term ‘The Establishment’ (‘the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’),

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he signalled Mountbatten as the embodiment of a governing elite rooted in a seamless melding of ‘old’ and ‘new’ money, meritocratic gain and aristocratic privilege, modernity and tradition, pragmatic egalitarianism and unyielding order.6 In this respect Mountbatten was uniquely qualified to operate at the heart of Fairlie’s matrix: a self-proclaimed modernizer in a once great power tested by war, redefining its global identity and experiencing profound social and cultural change  –  while at the same time preserving a strikingly durable structure of power, wealth and social hierarchy. Over thirty years later, Tom Nairn located the oft-labelled ‘shop steward of Royalty’ within a more focused and purposeful ‘Establishment’ for whom the perpetuation and popularization of monarchy was vital to a maintenance of social order and a concentration of power – the crown was the ‘essence and apex of the British State,’ seen by its ‘courtiers and stage managers’ as a vital counter to the ever-deepening crisis of national identity.7 Was he, as David Cannadine once suggested, the supreme manager of national decline, displaying ‘such finesse, assurance and aplomb that it often seemed as though it was not happening: reversal became advance, failure was really success, defeat was presented as triumph, and each setback appeared as a new initiative’? Here is Lord Louis the supreme illusionist, convincing an increasingly ill-at-ease nation that all is well.8 This seems too neat a summary of Mountbatten’s function in the body politic. He was hard-headed about Britain’s post-colonial place in the world, but he was no declinist, not least when propagandizing the achievements and the potential of research-led manufacturing industry. Sir David was writing in the early ’eighties, offering a gently iconoclastic commentary upon the British aristocracy. In a postBrexit era of boosterism, ‘Global Britain’ and imperial nostalgia, would he so cynically view Mountbatten’s efforts to temper geopolitical reality – or would his cynicism be reinforced by recent events? Throughout the ’fifties Lord and Lady Mountbatten were much in the public eye as a still glamorous couple who together had orchestrated Indian independence before resuming their respective careers of high command and global good works. Edwina’s unexpected death in 1962 did little to lower her husband’s high profile, nor did his retirement three years later. Mountbatten’s close association with the Royal Family  –  an ever present upon the balcony of Buckingham Palace on great public occasions – made his assassination by the Provisional IRA in August 1979 that much more shocking. An impressive BBC Northern Ireland documentary forty years later brought home to younger viewers why Mountbatten’s murder had left such a deep impression on the national psyche. This wasn’t just a jolly old man in a fancy uniform with a direct line to Prince Charles, but instead a major figure in the post-war British state. A millennial audience whose history came courtesy of The Crown could now appreciate Mountbatten’s central role in Britain’s imperial and postcolonial story – he was indeed a player.9 If, in Christopher Clark’s words, ‘Power is at once the most ubiquitous and most elusive theme of historical writing’, the challenge for programme makers and authors alike was – and is – to establish why, with the return of peace, Mountbatten’s star never waned.10 If he was ever a subaltern actor that time was long past. Championed by Churchill in wartime, the flotilla captain of May 1941 had within three years risen to be Supreme Allied Commander of South-East Asia Command (SEAC). In due course

Introduction

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Mountbatten’s partitioning of India would infuriate his old patron, hence Churchill’s keen sense of betrayal. Contrary to Mountbatten’s preferred narrative, Churchill was not alone in insisting that Dickie had prematurely surrendered the Raj, doing the Socialists’ dirty work for them while providing a spurious royal gloss. Tory dismay over the ‘loss’ of India, and Mountbatten’s principal responsibility for so visible a body blow to Britain’s continuing imperial mission, lie at the heart of Chapter  1. A firm belief among many Conservatives that Mountbatten was somehow a traitor to his class fuelled backbench antipathy and threatened his over-riding ambition. That ambition, as he never sought to hide, was to emulate his father, Prince Louis Battenberg, and become Chief of the Naval Staff; hence Mountbatten’s insistence in 1946 and again in 1948 that he must return to the Royal Navy, even if this necessitated a reduction in rank. Clark rightly distinguishes between power and influence.11 In Mountbatten’s career there was a continuum of influence, but the exercise of power, unconstrained and with tangible consequences, was clearly determined by circumstance  –  in essence when full authority had been delegated to him in specified fields of decision-making, most notably when Viceroy of India. There were those moments when he bucked accountability and acted arbitrarily, and he was of course the master of scheming and back-door diplomacy. Nevertheless, he respected the model of civil-military relations presumed to operate within a mature democracy  –  and in Mountbatten’s eyes not just any mature democracy, but a fully functioning constitutional monarchy. For all the fantasies of The Crown, the unique nature of the British state and the critical (quasi-mystical?) role of the sovereign as head of the armed forces were of paramount importance to Mountbatten as a public servant and as an officer of the crown. Mountbatten did of course make it to First Sea Lord, Churchill begrudgingly confirming the appointment. Yet Mountbatten’s scarcely disguised opposition to invading Egypt saw the end of an always troubled friendship with Anthony Eden, and further infuriated those diehard Tories resentful of imperial withdrawal. If the Dieppe raid of August 1942 constituted a pivotal moment in Mountbatten’s wartime apprenticeship as a senior commander, the same can be said of the Suez crisis in terms of his post-war career. Chapter  1, on India, is essentially discursive, but Chapters  2 and 3 explore in depth Mountbatten’s dual track approach to the invasion of Egypt, and his efforts to establish a heroic narrative of principled dissent. No chief of staff is irreplaceable, and yet – as we’ll see in Chapters 4 and 5 – Mountbatten came close given his centrality to negotiations with the Americans over the transfer of nuclear technology and a stabilizing of the ‘special relationship’. Perhaps, therefore, it’s not so surprising that he forged fresh relationships with Eden’s successors in Downing Street. Mountbatten cultivated a sceptical Macmillan and a suspicious Harold Wilson. Equally striking is his adroit handling of the MOD’s most combative ministers: Peter Thorneycroft and Denis Healey were both ferociously bright, single-minded and resistant to flattery, and yet, as Chapters 5 and 6 show, the Royal Navy always avoided a significant shrinkage in the size of the surface fleet. Macmillan and Mountbatten formed a formidable combination, their legacy still visible at Faslane and Holy Loch; and, as seen in Chapter  6, a now tried-and-tested model of defence management within Whitehall is testimony to their reforming zeal.

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Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

Yet, as is obvious from Chapter 1, the Prime Minister with whom Mountbatten enjoyed his warmest working relationship was Clement Attlee. This unlikely combination bore a striking similarity to Mountbatten’s partnership with the architect of SEAC’s victory in Burma, Sir William Slim. It was ‘Bill’ Slim who, urged on by Mountbatten, Attlee rescued from early retirement in the autumn of 1948 to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). Also, it was ‘Uncle Bill’ who, when on leave in London, told Churchill the Fourteenth Army’s British battalions would not be voting Conservative. Mountbatten similarly came back from Burma certain Labour had won a famous victory.12 In July 1945 Labour’s capacity to initiate change rested on a formidable majority in the House of Commons. A. J. P. Taylor famously described Labour’s first two governments as in office but never in power. The same could scarcely be said of someone who, notwithstanding his tenure as Viceroy and then Governor General of India, served a total of fourteen years on the Chiefs of Staff Committee. A combination of privilege, patronage, genuine ability, ferocious self-belief and driving ambition saw Mountbatten attain high office in wartime, and then match that achievement in time of peace. He exercised power and/or influence in a myriad of fashions, and therein lies his interest to anyone fascinated by the exigencies of high command. As already noted, he was on the whole respectful of constitutional norms, and usually conscious of the profound consequences for those over whom his authority lay. Note the qualifications, wherein lies ample ammunition for fierce critics of his record, not least concerning the Dieppe raid and the partition of India five years later. Mountbatten’s most tenacious adversaries, of whom Andrew Roberts, Nigel Hamilton and Brian Loring Villa are still the best known, highlight the obvious character flaws, not least a refusal ever to acknowledge error and an insistence on having always been right.13 Their adversary’s determination to control the narrative  –  rewrite history even – relied heavily on the support of Peter Murphy and later Alan Campbell-Johnson, intuitive masters of prose and PR. Remarkably, John Terraine crafted Mountbatten’s story as a screenplay and a memoir without compromising his reputation as a military historian.14 Campbell-Johnson, in-house chronicler of successive missions east of Suez, acknowledged years later the damage to Mountbatten’s reputation when as an old man he grossly exaggerated his contribution to the success of SEAC and the independence of India. Philip Zeigler, Mountbatten’s official biographer, largely concurred, a previous readiness to give his subject the benefit of the doubt compromised by evidence contesting the last Viceroy’s version of events.15 Peter Murphy, a closet Communist with society connections and a love of intrigue (Combined Ops and SEAC intelligence, SOE and so on), served as confidant to both Dickie and Edwina for over a quarter of a century  –  in Richmond Terrace, Kandy, Singapore and New Delhi he drafted position papers and rewrote despatches, both interim and final.16 At SEAC HQ the Supreme Commander’s admirers found inexplicable his insistence that Murphy was the ‘ablest man he knows’.17 After 1947 Murphy faded from the scene, but by the late ’fifties a fresh, more potent eminence grise had taken his place. As Whitehall’s most hands-on and influential scientific adviser Solly Zuckerman enjoyed power in his own right. Zuckerman had established his reputation when pioneering operational research at Combined Operations. Fifteen years later, the Chief of the Defence Staff again relied on Zuckerman’s fierce intellect and integrity.

Introduction

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If anything, Mountbatten’s retirement in 1965 saw an even greater dependence upon Zuckerman’s shrewd judgement, however uncomfortable the advice. Unsurprisingly, Zuckerman features prominently in later chapters. Technocrat and keen student of human psychology, the now Lord Zuckerman had no illusions about an ageing, ever more conceited Mountbatten: his memoirs are sympathetic, insistent on putting the story straight, but they eschew the myth-making Murphy and Campbell-Johnson happily embraced.18 Zuckerman had observed at first hand the exercise of power, recognizing that for Mountbatten the moments of self-doubt were rare indeed, and that he relished the opportunity to shape the course of history. As we shall see, both men shared a capacity to compartmentalize – acting to the best of their ability in implementing government policy while at the same time profoundly disagreeing with the Cabinet’s chosen course of action. To reiterate, for the then First Sea Lord this disconnect between principled opposition and professional duty rendered the Suez crisis a defining moment in his post-war career. For Zuckerman, and for Mountbatten, nuclear strategy, whether national or NATO, was increasingly problematic. This is all too evident in Chapters 5 and 6, notwithstanding their respective contributions to doomsday planning in Brussels, and at home the creation of a submarine-based deterrence system. Peter Murphy and Solly Zuckerman took their places in the story of Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord. The present volume is a companion not a sequel to its predecessor.19 Circumstance  –  a pandemic and a strictly enforced word limit  –  precludes a full biography. The focus is firmly upon Mountbatten the commander and proconsul, the servant of the state. As such it reverses Andrew Lownie’s prioritizing of the private over the public in The Mountbattens. Not that there is ever an either/or, and Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord emphasized the degree to which an understanding of its subject’s public persona required a proper appreciation of the complex personality hidden behind the carapace of gold braid and seemingly effortless endeavour. Lownie offered a fresh perspective on Dickie’s and Edwina’s complicated marital relations, providing a detailed but never prurient account of their painful dealings with each other, and with their respective friends, lovers and offspring. This intense and intimate exploration of the Mountbattens’ private lives contrasted with the unduly brisk narrative whenever the story moved from the bedroom to the bridge, the country house to the conference chamber. Lownie’s book is both readable and entertaining, but any student interested in Earl Mountbatten as a paramount figure of importance in mid-twentieth century Britain would surely feel short-changed.20 In this respect Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79 complements and builds on The Mountbattens, and as with the preceding volume it updates Philip Zeigler’s magisterial biography, published nigh on forty years ago.21

Signals from SEAC Zeigler recognized Mountbatten’s tenure at the head of South-East Asia Command as a hugely formative experience, marking the moment when a tyro mover and shaker, boasting few friends around the top table, finally came into his own.22 More jaundiced

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observers of Mountbatten, such as Max Hastings, point to the serial cancelling of SEAC’s most ambitious operations as evidence of how little weight the Supreme Commander carried back in London, let alone in Washington: the Joint Chiefs of Staff saw Burma as a colonial sideshow, while only after Germany was defeated did the British service chiefs seek to build on Slim’s success.23 The CIGS and the First Sea Lord – Sir Alan Brooke and Sir John Cunningham  –  saw Mountbatten as a political appointment, acceptable to the Americans but lacking the weight and experience appropriate to a chief of staff with an exceptional range of responsibilities. Mountbatten was as old as the century when he flew east – an age deemed as appropriate to command in the field, but too young for a theatre of war. His good looks and youthfulness proved useful, especially in Washington and Chunking, but to older, unsympathetic colleagues they signalled a lightweight. For the future Lord Alanbrooke, Dickie Mountbatten was one more favourite of the Prime Minister and the press, over-promoted and ill-suited to the tasks of alliance-making and taking tough decisions.24 The CIGS could never be swayed but Mountbatten’s lengthy spell at SEAC – from the autumn of 1943 to the summer of 1946 – displayed his talents as a diplomat, not least in charming Madame Chiang and massaging the egos of the American generals Stilwell and MacArthur.25 Also evident was a readiness to take personal responsibility for vital operational decisions. To Mountbatten’s credit, he promised greater air support for Slim’s forces in Arakan and again on the Imphal plain, and through herculean lobbying of the Americans he duly delivered.26 The supremo’s presumption that air power, both combat and logistical, was the key factor in waging war, his recognition that supreme command was an essentially executive role, maximizing support for his subordinates on the front line and his capacity to work with even the most unaccommodating of allies, all constituted key aspects of Mountbatten’s later career. In this respect South East Asia Command signalled several significant themes in Mountbatten’s professional life from 1945 through to his retirement as CDS twenty years later. As discussed in Chapter 6, Mountbatten was like no other chief of staff, by dint of his exceptional wartime experience, his direct line to the sovereign, his political connections at home and abroad and his unique relationship with successive Prime Ministers. At SEAC, and even at Combined Operations, he could exercise extraordinary leverage, with Churchill’s patronage a vital element in his bruising encounters with the other Chiefs of Staff.27 Adept at transferring allegiance, for Mountbatten the door to Downing Street was invariably open. Attlee’s accession to power was an opportunity not a crisis, and, as we’ll see, the future First Sea Lord swiftly distanced himself from Labour after the Tories’ return to power in 1951. When Churchill and later Eden became openly antagonistic towards him, he played down their antipathy, insisting that mutual goodwill rendered past differences irrelevant. Here of course was a familiar trope – the assertion that for all the clashes of personality everyone got on famously – and Mountbatten was by no means alone in always accentuating the positive. This even extended to his diaries, and Brooke’s record of events offers a clearer insight into Mountbatten’s wartime relations with his fellow chiefs, and with his senior service commanders in New Delhi and later Kandy (the astonishing size of SEAC HQ a familiar feature of any enterprise associated with Mountbatten).28

Introduction

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As in the decade following his mid-fifties return to the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Mountbatten’s solipsism, calculations and machinations, readiness to exploit royal connections and general failure to generate trust fuelled suspicion and hostility within the most senior layers of command. This echoed a wariness in the wardroom, evident before and after the war: SEAC confirmed a striking contrast between those working close to Mountbatten and the thousands of men and women on or behind the front line, most of whom saw him as an inspirational speaker with a genuine interest in their individual and collective wellbeing. This reminds us that Mountbatten was a highly effective communicator, whether working the room in a Simla soirée or despatching 16 Brigade across the Chindwin. Like Slim he made the raising of morale an absolute priority, using every means at his disposal to convince forces drawn from Cumbria and Kathmandu, Calcutta and Accra that they could defeat the Japanese, and that they would be given all they needed in order to do so: ‘Youthful, buoyant, picturesque, with a reputation for gallantry known everywhere, he talked to the British soldier with irresistible frankness and charm. To the Indian he appealed equally. The morale of the army was already on the upgrade.’29 Concert parties starring Noel Coward and George Formby were of limited value, but not a stage appearance by Vera Lynn with personal messages straight from home, nor the film shows with congratulatory newsreels, the forces network, the daily news bulletins or above all the SEAC newspaper created by Frank Owen.30 All these initiatives were consistent with Mountbatten’s career-long insistence on harnessing the full power of mass communication (and making the most of his social connections, hence the absence from the Evening Standard of Owen and, remarkably, Mike Wardell, his PR adviser in London at the end of the war). When back home Mountbatten found time to brief journalists, both on and off the record, about the success of Slim’s forces – throughout his career he was the supreme propagandist.31 Whether setting up a high-frequency wireless station or micro-managing railway and road improvements in East Bengal, Mountbatten displayed a familiar engagement with fresh thinking in applied science and engineering.32 Always a gadgets man, and a signals officer by training, he needed to know how complex operating systems could exploit innovative technology, and never more so than in the 1950s when focused upon the maritime application of nuclear propulsion and weaponry. At Combined Ops Mountbatten had promoted operational research, and SEAC saw employment of a proto-systems analysis to maximize logistical support, and to facilitate a radical improvement in front-line medicine and hospital provision. Speedier and more effective treatment of the wounded and a dramatic drop in malaria infection were key factors in the Fourteenth Army’s enhanced fighting morale and operational effectiveness. The Supreme Commander always claimed responsibility for these changes, and clearly his drive and leadership were crucial factors – as was Edwina’s contribution, especially when maximizing aid for former POWs and internees following the Japanese surrender. However, as Slim makes clear in his memoirs, radical changes were taking place across the winter of 1943–4 before Mountbatten seized the initiative. Nor were divisional commanders reluctant to fight through the monsoon season, despite a diary entry implying this to be the case.33 As much as any other moment in Mountbatten’s career, his claims to have single-handedly altered the course of events warrants close scrutiny and healthy scepticism, but never a default dismissal.

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Unsurprisingly, Mountbatten’s time at SEAC was dogged by controversy, concluding with the veracity or otherwise of his (or Peter Murphy’s) final despatches.34 Putting aside issues over post-surrender control of events, arguably the biggest controversy was whether Mountbatten authorized General Leese to remove Bill Slim from command of the Fourteenth Army at the moment of victory. The double irony is that Slim and the Supreme Commander were genuine brothers-in-arms, and that in this case the evidence supports an injured Mountbatten’s insistence that Leese translated easing the burden on an exhausted ‘Uncle Bill’ into his immediate dismissal.35 Reading the correspondence ‘Dickie’ and ‘Bill’ maintained after the war it seems inconceivable that Mountbatten would wish to move sideways the man he considered, ‘absolutely splendid in every way and never changed my point of view from beginning to end’. Mountbatten knew his old comrade was dying when he visited him for the last time in the autumn of 1970 – Slim’s near final words to him were, ‘We did it together, old boy.’36 Leese paid the price for his peremptory action, reflecting Mountbatten’s ruthlessness in removing older, well-regarded service commanders he considered no longer up to the job. No tears were shed in losing Oliver Leese, nor his predecessor as Army Commander, George Giffard, an old school general who in March 1944 saw the monsoon season as a reason for retrenchment.37 Throughout his career Mountbatten had the good fortune to serve with service personnel of the highest calibre. Of the officers who served under him he inevitably made poor appointments, reversing his decision as and when appropriate; but he also had an eye for fresh talent and for the tried and tested. This was most obvious within the Royal Navy, but not exclusively, as seen in his time at SEAC and at the MOD. He also benefited from appointments made to keep him in line or to compensate for inexperience, with Generals Sir Henry Pownall and Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay covering Mountbatten’s back in 1943–4 and 1947 respectively. These were extraordinarily well-qualified chiefs of staff who kept in check their ostensible boss’s impetuosity, obsessions and prejudices.38 Pownall certainly saw this as his role, in the early weeks of his appointment for ever fretting over the Supreme Commander’s suitability for the job. Those doubts faded, but not a deep-rooted fear of defeat, only partially tempered by Mountbatten’s efforts to reassure a chief of staff, ‘thirteen years older in age but a good thirty years older in outlook’.39 Mountbatten benefited enormously from that rare individual capable of conveying a few home truths, a role frequently played by his close friend and eventual successor as First Sea Lord, Charles Lambe. Here of course family had a key role to play, most obviously Edwina until her sudden death far from Broadlands (her presence in North Borneo to inspect local medical facilities confirming the same hands-on support for the region’s frontline carers as in 1945–6 and again in 1947).40 Although the Viceroy’s youngest daughter, Pamela, proved a shrewd and precocious observer of events in 1947, it was Patricia, the future Countess Mountbatten, who from an early age was the one member of the family in whom her father had absolute confidence and trust. Patricia’s centrality to her father’s life was reinforced by her marriage to John Knatchbull in 1946. The young Lord Brabourne, scion of the Raj and Man of Kent, boasted impeccable establishment connections  –  Eton, Brasenose, Coldstream Guards  –  and from Germany he was posted as ADC to Slim and then Mountbatten.41 Brabourne and his

Introduction

9

future father-in-law bonded from the outset, both of them sharing a capacity for hard work and an indifference to colonial shibboleths (they also shared German ancestry, and above all, a fascination with film). The two men stood side by side up until the moment of Mountbatten’s death, with Lord Brabourne experiencing life-threatening injuries and the decimation of his family. Brabourne’s career as a successful film and television producer saw him occasionally seek Mountbatten’s assistance in the 1950s, but after 1965 the situation was reversed, as shown in the final chapter. SEAC’s Supreme Commander had little say in military appointments, although he did restructure the joint air force apparatus to delegate operational responsibility to his RAF and USAAF commanders – handling a force of nature like ‘Air Commando’ Colonel Phil Cochrane left him unfazed by first-generation joint NATO commands, as in the Mediterranean at the start of the ’fifties.42 Mountbatten got on surprisingly well with Orde Wingate, and he thought the same was true of ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell.43 Pownall loathed both men, and he despised Chiang Kai-Shek. Age and personality left him unable to comprehend why the Supreme Commander worked so hard not to alienate them.44 Unsurprisingly, Mountbatten was never fazed by monster egos, convincing himself that beneath the public persona Douglas MacArthur was a sensitive soul, sincere in his declaration of friendship and affection. Back home the Foreign Office and the service chiefs had spent months fruitlessly petitioning MacArthur and the Navy Department to include the Pacific Fleet and British land forces in a final assault on Japan.45 As with so many Americans, MacArthur’s collegiality was rooted in the surprising discovery that Lord Louis Mountbatten was anything but the archetypal English aristocrat. Later in July, Mountbatten’s briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at Potsdam was a cheerful and convivial affair  –  the Americans finding the SEAC supremo a striking contrast with his fellow chiefs of staff, not least the wary, always distant Alan Brooke. This was the occasion when George Marshall informed Mountbatten that the success of the Manhattan Project meant an imminent end to the war with Japan. Later that evening Churchill confirmed the Americans’ intention to drop one or more atomic bombs, as did a courteous Truman the following morning. After such a momentous revelation it’s scarcely surprising that Mountbatten’s meeting with Stalin was something of a non-event.46 In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the MacArthur-Mountbatten love match ended in tears when SEAC HQ ignored the American’s order that no action be taken until after the Japanese had formally surrendered – the survival of thousands of prisoners and internees in Malaya, Siam and the Dutch East Indies rightly took precedent over one man’s vanity.47 Throughout his career Mountbatten rubbed along with rum coves like Wingate and Geoffrey Pyke, primarily because he liked to confuse his peers, but also because he enjoyed a parallel life out of uniform where supposed oddballs regularly came across his radar.48 For all the suspicion back home, Mountbatten worked well with Archie Wavell and Claude Auchinleck, respectively Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army. They had little in common, but then neither at first did Mountbatten and Slim. Both men, partly by chance and partly by design, could rely on corps and divisional commanders of exceptional quality. It was Mountbatten’s good luck that the martial credentials of Philip Cristison, Frank Messervy and Douglas Gracey were

10

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

matched by their capacity to maintain order in the face of gaping power vacuums (the Potsdam conference saw a greatly enlarged SEAC given responsibility for the whole of the Dutch East Indies, and for Indo-China south of the 16th Parallel). Questions remain regarding the role and purpose of SEAC forces in liberated territories, not least the future Vietnam and Indonesia, but in the DEI Cristison displayed a blend of firmness and flexibility rare among British officers of his age and class. Having said that, Cristison’s deployment of overwhelming force to recapture Surabaya rendered a deeply confrontational situation even more volatile.49 Messervy meanwhile faced the unique demands of maintaining order and cohesion within multi-ethnic Malaya, a country now spared Japanese resistance to Operation Zipper, SEAC’s most ambitious amphibious operation. Acknowledgement by the ethnic Chinese bourgeoisie that the returning colonial power had made contingency plans for constitutional reform defused nationalist sentiment and helped postpone a guerrilla war with the Malayan Communist Party, itself overwhelmingly Chinese. Nevertheless, the ‘Malayan Spring’ of 1946 camouflaged an accelerating decline into violent confrontation.50 In the winter of 1945–6 Kuala Lumpur and Singapore each avoided serious street violence because the military authorities, on Mountbatten’s orders, adopted a low-key response to Communist-inspired protests. By the following year he felt powerless to oppose the joint military-civilian administration’s deportation of prominent Communists to Chiang’s China, and certain death. The medium-term consequence was a level of political violence which more enlightened elements within the armed forces, not least its Supreme Commander, had anticipated and sought to forestall.51 Arguably these generals’ experience in the Indian Army, most especially in Gurkha regiments, left them better qualified to handle an explosion of anti-colonial nationalism than their counterparts in the British Army. In both Burma and Singapore Mountbatten insisted his commanders on the ground were more sensitive to the new reality than returning colonial officials, police commissioners and sinecured generals  –  the transfer of responsibility to a civil authority was invariably seen as premature, with London too often ignoring SEAC’s insistence that a return to the antestatus quo was out of the question.52 Serious tension arose when the likes of Gracey were given conflicting signals regarding policing and counter-insurgency operations. In Saigon, Gracey found the returning French authorities eager to suppress dissent while  –  as in the Dutch East Indies  –  staff at SEAC HQ were urging compromise, reconciliation and negotiation. Early in his command Gracey proclaimed martial law, thereby clashing with Mountbatten over the interpretation of his role prior to the arrival of French reinforcements; on appeal to London, the Chiefs of Staff gave the general their full backing. By this time, however, freed French POWs and colons had run riot in Saigon, torpedoing any fledgling compromise with the Viet Minh leadership, who immediately declared a general strike and a de facto call to arms. Mountbatten was incandescent, his annoyance compounded by the stark contrast between the Free French authorities’ praise for ‘leurs freres d’armes brittaniques’ and their expedition force’s racist treatment of Gracey’s Indians and Gurkhas.53 Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Commander’s final despatch had the last word, at Gracey’s expense – full control of the official record was of course consistent with every crucial moment in Mountbatten’s career.54

Introduction

11

Pownall’s successor, ‘Boy’ Browning, wrongly presumed General Leclerc would arrive in Singapore the humble supplicant and not the conquering hero  –  yet even the Viet Minh were in awe of 2e Division Blessée, the legendary liberators of Paris.55 The Free French presumed a meeting of equals when negotiating with SEAC and the Chinese, and Mountbatten never cut through the rising violence to convince Leclerc and his supreme commander Thierry d’Argenlieu, let alone de Gaulle, that a successful reoccupation of Tonkin signalled the chance to negotiate from strength.56 The case for compromise and power-sharing en route to full Vietnamese sovereignty was undermined by French suspicion of perfide albion, in that the British showed no sign of imminent withdrawal from Malaya or India, or even Burma given an obvious tension between the military command and the returning civil administration. Behind the fixed smiles and the expressions of gratitude, the Dutch were equally resolute, ready to rely on Cristison’s troops in the absence of their own, but increasingly resistant to trenchant advice that their efforts to reimpose authority had been overtaken by events; and that the Japanese on whom they initially relied to maintain order had only weeks earlier encouraged an indigenous declaration of independence.57 The interim use of Japanese forces to guard vital facilities and to maintain policing duties in IndoChina and the DEI was especially painful, and especially ironic given Mountbatten’s unforgiving view of the Emperor Hirohito and his people – searing memories of what he saw and heard from ex-POWs and internees stayed with him for the rest of his life.58 Unlike MacArthur, Mountbatten and Slim saw Japan’s surrender as a collective humiliation, not a prelude to pre-Cold War nation-building.59

Figure 1  South-East Asia Command: the Supreme Commander and the ‘Forgotten’ 14th Army

12

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

Throughout 1944–5 SEAC Headquarters’ dealings with Americans fighting in Burma were generally very good. The same could not be said of Mountbatten’s relationship with the generals commanding US forces in China and advising Chiang Kai-shek. Stilwell and his successor in Chunking, Albert Wedemeyer, differed only in the coarseness and subtlety with which they lambasted British aims in south Asia and beyond as no more than a speedy reimposition of colonial power. In this respect they were articulating a powerful viewpoint within the Roosevelt administration, scarcely tempered by Truman’s arrival in the White House.60 Wedemeyer’s suspicion of Mountbatten’s intentions was doubly painful as the American had served with him at Combined Operations and as his deputy chief of staff in Kandy. Once established in Chunking Wedemeyer demanded SEAC’s Chinese and American forces revert to his command, and then vehemently opposed British and Free French intervention in Indo-China before and even after the Japanese surrender.61 More than anyone other than Edwina, Wedemeyer was party to his old boss’s belief that a restoration of the status quo was inconceivable.62 Clear evidence of this was Mountbatten’s belief in Aung San’s good faith when changing sides, and his recognition in March 1945 of the Burmese National Army’s readiness to fight their former ally. Two months later Slim was similarly convinced by Aung San’s belief that the case for an independent Burma could best be made on the field of battle. Both general and Supreme Commander saw the nationalist leader as a Burmese Jan Smuts, and the parallel seemed apt when Aung San’s meetings with cabinet ministers in January 1947 convinced him the British were negotiating in good faith. However, not all his comrades agreed, and within six months he was dead.63 The late spring of 1945 was a pivotal moment in SEAC’s perception of Burma as a protonation state ripe for independence – a view shared by Labour ministers following the general election, but loudly contested by the returning Governor, Sir Reginald DormanSmith. The latter accepted the case for Burma as a dominion, but not Aung San as its leader. Mountbatten believed Burma would never have left the Commonwealth at independence had Dorman-Smith been more accommodating towards Aung San, and had he not tacitly encouraged his enemies within the political wing of the BNA, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League. He expressed this view so forcefully and so publicly that in 1955 he was obliged to pay Dorman-Smith an undisclosed sum by way of a libel settlement. Imminent appointment as First Sea Lord necessitated a compromise, but in an interview for The Times fourteen years later Mountbatten again charged the now recently deceased Dorman-Smith with gross incompetence.64 Bill Slim’s cautious approval of Aung San illustrates how, contrary to popular mythology cultivated by the man himself, Mountbatten was not alone in acknowledging the strength of individual nationalist movements across the region, their potency and support greatly increased by Japan’s humiliation of the old colonial powers. In the summer and autumn of 1945 Mountbatten’s broad-brush conviction that the old order was dead and buried slowly translated into clearer policy intentions. In this respect Burma led the way, India being beyond his jurisdiction and anyway a far greater challenge for the new government in London; and for a Viceroy well-intentioned but ill-suited to an era when hard bargaining invariably carried a threat of political violence. For all Wavell’s undoubted attributes Mountbatten was a man more tailored

Introduction

13

to the time. SEAC had proved a steep learning curve, and Mountbatten’s world view was radically different from just two years before.65 Here was a proto-postcolonial mentalité moulded by the bloody events unfolding day by day, the advice given by the most prescient members of his staff, the blend of cynicism and political calculation proffered by visiting journalist Tom Driberg and Peter Murphy and above all, the field reports of Edwina Mountbatten, her ear fixed firmly to the ground. Tom Driberg reached Kandy largely at the instigation of Frank Owen and Mike Wardell, but soon endeared himself to the Supreme Commander. He quickly gained the trust of Aung San, and within weeks was busy courting Ho Chi Minh. Mountbatten viewed Driberg as a second Peter Murphy, but with better contacts back home; theirs was a relationship which endured, throughout the 1950s. Driberg was a Labour backbencher, but at arm’s length from the party leadership, and always with his own agenda. Nevertheless, he and Edwina constituted a potent combination, not always a force for good but invariably listened to.66 Edwina’s other asset was her astonishingly easy access to ministers when back in London, most notably Ernie Bevin. Her insistence that the Foreign Secretary put pressure on the Dutch to compromise only gained traction after Brooke visited the DEI in December 1945 and endorsed Mountbatten’s handling of a difficult situation. The CIGS recognized the insidious nature of SEAC’s entanglement in France’s and the Netherlands’ bloody endeavours to restore colonial authority  –  and the lessons to be learnt. Here was a rare moment of agreement with Mountbatten, and with the thousands of demob-happy Tommies shocked by the level of violence displayed on both sides. These were wars which, ‘did little to re-establish Britain’s imperial confidence, nor its martial reputation. They disillusioned profoundly many of the British who fought there, and few of them wished to celebrate their achievements.’67 British and Indian casualties totalled over 2,000. The Palestine parallel is striking, with men dying in a conflict they neither volunteered nor were conscripted to fight in. Equally striking is how one anti-colonial struggle fed off another, with nationalists from India to Indonesia inspired by the sacrifices of their counterparts across southeast Asia’s ‘connected arc of protest’.68 Mountbatten needed no convincing of the need to negotiate with a new, younger generation of nationalist leaders. These were educated anti-colonialists radicalized by the war and in some cases – like Aung San and Sukarno – empowered by an alliance of convenience with Japan. Having previously tried and failed to meet Nehru, in March 1945 he insisted the authorities in Singapore host the Congress leader as they would a head of government.69 We’ll return to that meeting in the next chapter, but already evident is how much Mountbatten’s status as a pivotal figure in Britain’s withdrawal from empire derived from his final year at South-East Asia Command. His standing among first-generation leaders of newly independent nations across Asia – and, albeit to a lesser degree, in Africa and the Caribbean – is attributable to the way in which as Supreme Commander he acquired a wholly fresh perspective, one rooted in geopolitical realism and what might loosely be termed post-imperial altruism. A combination of Mountbatten’s political record, not least his tenure as Viceroy and Governor General, and his perceived (if not always actual) place at the heart of the Royal Family, ensured a unique position within the Commonwealth as it evolved across the 1950s and 1960s.

14

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

It also ensured a unique insight into the operation and the internal dynamics of the Commonwealth which successive Prime Ministers chose either to tap into, or to ignore. Ignoring that insight would, in the autumn of 1956, have especially damaging consequences, for both premier and nation. On the other hand, as Macmillan quickly recognized after entering Downing Street, Mountbatten’s unique standing in many of the Commonwealth’s newly independent nations was an obvious asset. How that asset was exploited forms the first part of Chapter 4. There was of course one Commonwealth nation where the former Viceroy was distinctly unwelcome. Mountbatten courted Pakistan’s political and military elite, but with little success. Generals and civic leaders alike shared and encouraged a collective belief that the process of partition had seen Mountbatten short-change and disempower Jinnah’s fragile, bifurcated creation. For many in East Pakistan confirmation of Mountbatten’s ingrained prejudice came in his support as Governor General for the Indian Government’s armed incursion into Kashmir. The enduring power of that collective grievance and the profound consequences for Indo-Pakistan relations across the next seventy-plus years highlight the continued relevance of a fiercely contested historiographical debate – a debate that forms the backdrop to the chapter which follows.

­1

From Viceroy to First Sea Lord Mountbatten and India

A ceaseless storm of controversy Indian independence looms large in the history of late imperial Britain, and in the record of the 1945–51 Labour Government. It looms as large in the charmed life of the last Viceroy and India’s first Governor General.1 Mountbatten’s admirers, not least himself, see the handover of power to the nationalist elites of India and Pakistan as the warrior-statesman’s finest hour  –  a unique achievement of drive, determination and diplomacy. Mountbatten’s detractors see only incompetence, insensitivity and a staggering indifference to the suffering of so many. The passage of time has seen the pendulum swing noticeably towards the latter viewpoint, although few would go so far as Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians, insistent that the architect of partition merited a court martial for his vacuity and pursuit of vainglory in the spring and summer of 1947. Endorsement of Roberts’s views can be found in the unlikeliest of quarters, whether that be south Asia, California or closer to home: the late American academic Stanley Wolpert proved an unlikely ally; as did Perry Anderson in a long essay for the LRB on partition, albeit concentrating his formidable intellectual firepower on Jawaharlal Nehru. More recently, the distinguished nineteenth-century historian Miles Taylor deplored the Viceroy’s handling of partition in a prime-time TV overview of his career. Ironically, one of Mountbatten’s earliest critics, H. V. Hodson, whose varied career began in the Red Fort and ended at All Souls, was welcomed with open arms at Broadlands. Hodson’s unfettered access to the viceregal papers caused consternation among Whitehall’s security-conscious archivists.2 The base line for hostile historians in Pakistan is a viceregal bias towards India and the leaders of Congress.3 Meanwhile their counterparts in India interpret partition as evidence of Mountbatten and the Attlee administration’s incipient Cold War agenda. A good example of this, even if his reputation is not high among south Asian historians, is Narendra Singh Sarila, who portrayed Pakistan as a key element in Britain’s continuing ‘Great Game’ ambitions.4 Others on the subcontinent advance a more persuasive argument, that the departing administration had no set agenda other than to stagemanage and disguise a palpable disaster – and that in terms of deceiving a domestic audience Mountbatten and his political masters in London enjoyed remarkable shortterm success. Thus, diplomat turned Delhi MP Shashi Tharoor – drawing heavily upon

16

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan’s impressive account of Indian independence – sees the Raj’s denial of any responsibility for lives lost as simply the climax of a long-standing dependence upon divide and rule. Khan herself sees Mountbatten as ‘shockingly’ callous.5 Her argument is that much more persuasive given The Great Partition’s skilful fusion of a master narrative and a synthesis of the subaltern experience within individual communities and provinces either side of the religious and territorial divide.6 Seven decades since the British left India the debate over partition and communal violence remains as intense as ever, contributing directly to a chronic failure of conflict resolution, most visibly – and most alarmingly – in Kashmir. The volume of literature, narrowly academic or aimed at a wider audience, reflects that intensity of debate, feeding into global policymaking as well as into popular culture, whether in south Asia or across the wider world: television and cinema (and to a much lesser degree theatre and the novel) have clearly influenced audience perception of the Mountbattens in India, depending on time, place and quality of production. To take one relatively recent example, the feature film Viceroy’s House, released in 2017 and relying heavily on Singh Sarila’s interpretation of events seventy years before. The movie generated global box-office takings of nearly twelve million dollars pre-DVD release and television screening. Its appeal relied heavily on Hugh Bonneville channelling his best known transatlantic television role, of Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey, into a portrayal of Mountbatten that bore scant connection to reality. Here was a flawed film, redeemed only by Gillian Anderson’s convincing depiction of Edwina, and yet it fixed in most cinema-goers’ minds a highly contestable version of what actually took place.7 The power of the screen in moulding opinion, multiplied by streaming platforms and magnified by social media, reinforces the case for dealing with Dickie and Edwina’s eighteen months on the subcontinent in a suitably nuanced fashion, eschewing unequivocal condemnation at one end of the spectrum and at the other blinkered approval of a tough job well done. Mountbatten’s biographers have been understandably cautious when writing about India. Philip Zeigler took a measured view of his man, but when it came to the difficult decisions, he invariably gave him the benefit of the doubt. For Ziegler, observing the Herculean efforts of decent chaps doing the best they could in difficult circumstances, common sense and integrity had always prevailed. As we shall see, Zeigler later changed his mind, acknowledging evidence that the Viceroy intervened to ensure Sir Cyril Radcliffe arbitrated in India’s favour over the head waters of the River Beas in Ferozepur. Nevertheless, any criticism was heavily qualified, and Mountbatten remained worthy of congratulation.8 Unlike Zeigler, Richard Hough was thin on detail, focusing firmly on the Vicereine – a prelude to his other alternative to the official story, Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma. Hough’s deferential even fawning approach to Mountbatten was scarcely evident when writing about India. He was surprisingly censorious, attributing an unnecessary acceleration of British withdrawal not to career priorities, dynastic ambitions, marital difficulties or Cold War machinations; but simply the fact that Dickie’s ‘destroyer … 35 knots’ mentality meant he couldn’t operate in any other way. Why on earth did he agree to set aside his naval career to become Viceroy, and then compound his error by  staying  on?  Mountbatten  should

Viceroy to First Sea Lord Mountbatten and India

17

have kept his eye on the prize, and not agreed to do Attlee’s dirty work for him.9 Placing a heavy emphasis on duty rather than ambition, Sir Ian McGeoch disagreed. His no-frills treatment of the Mountbattens’ time in New Delhi eschewed controversy, other than to dismiss Roberts’ charge of incompetence in an uncharacteristically combative fashion.10 Hough wasn’t alone in recognizing the Vicereine’s key role in proceedings, and the astonishing range and intensity of her humanitarian efforts before and after independence. Zeigler and McGeoch properly acknowledged that this was a joint effort, seen fully from Edwina’s perspective in Janet Morgan’s official biography.11 Relying heavily upon Pamela Hicks’s recollection of her time in India, Brian Hoey focused on life inside Viceroy’s House, scarcely considering turbulent events further afield – but then, this was ‘the private story’.12 Not surprisingly Andrew Lownie placed Edwina at the heart of a pacey but judicious account of their joint enterprise – like Zeigler, he acknowledged the Mountbattens’ continued stay in India as being far from an anti-climax.13 This recognition of an equal partnership, however rocky its foundations, contrasts with the fiercest attacks on Mountbatten’s fast-forwarding of partition and independence: too often remarks regarding Edwina’s relationship with Nehru, or even her undoubted flair for organizing on the grand scale, display more than a hint of misogyny. Such criticism could not be made of Patrick French or Alex von Tunzelmann, separated by a decade in writing their anniversary accounts of India’s path to independence.14 Both praised Edwina, while finding Dickie an easy target – deference and Ziegler’s officer-class faith in fast-fading values of duty, service and sacrifice had long since disappeared. Profiling the proto pro-consul, von Tunzelmann adopted a mocking tone, dismissing Dickie’s career as a succession of disasters which a privileged minor royal invariably talked his way out of. Thus, Edwina was the fulcrum of Indian Summer, not least in her dedication to alleviating the most appalling suffering and of course in her growing obsession with Nehru. French was more thoughtful and more generous, and consequently his book constitutes a fuller, shrewder, better balanced portrait of Mountbatten on the eve of his return to India. French didn’t dismiss the harsh assessments of David Cannadine and, most especially, Roberts. These were the barbs of bright young iconoclasts eager to make a name for themselves – the former already a well-regarded historian, and the latter genuine in his belief that Mountbatten was a mendacious agent of betrayal (a provost marshal not a premier waiting to greet him at Northolt). Roberts’ remarks were dutifully noted, but so too were the wry ripostes of family, friends and former colleagues.15 In public Mountbatten’s maestro of public relations, Alan Campbell-Johnson, was a model of discretion, even when his annotated 1947 journal, Mission With Mountbatten, was republished in 1985.16 Yet in his final years Campbell-Johnson acknowledged the extent to which his old boss had in retirement embellished his ever-evolving account of exactly what did happen in India so long ago: he told an academic audience in Southampton that Mountbatten’s ceaseless myth-making had served only, ‘to induce rather more heat than light, and at times, to trivialize and distort issues’. Patrick French teased out of him the telling observation that, ‘during his last eighteen years, without Edwina there to cut him down to size, his surface vanity flourished. He [Mountbatten]

18

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

Figure 2  South-East Asia Command: the Japanese surrender in Singapore, 12 September 1945

did a lot of damage to his reputation in those years.’17 The more Mountbatten sought to defend  –  even exult in  –  his actions, the more he provided ammunition for his enemies, most visibly in the case of partition where the scale of suffering rendered an old man’s boastfulness at best distasteful and at worst obscene. French wasn’t alone in noting the considerable damage done to Mountbatten’s credibility by Freedom At Midnight, the bulky mid-seventies account of the British departure from India by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Ostensibly investigative journalists, in reality Collins and Lapierre relied far too much on Mountbatten, who was only too happy to confirm his decisiveness, his diplomatic skills and his delight in exercising viceregal power over the people of south Asia, high and low – with the notable exception of Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.18 French identified an aspect of Mountbatten’s personality increasingly evident in the later chapters of Freedom At Midnight, and which even Richard Hough recognized, namely, ‘an odd combination of conceit and lack of self-assurance which grew worse as he grew older’. Yet, unlike most cynical observers of the great man’s triumphs, French didn’t deem shameless self-aggrandisement a reason to write off Mountbatten’s record before or after the pivotal date of 15  August 1947. Thus, ‘Mountbatten was sentimental, unreflective, and a doer rather than a thinker,’ but he did get things done, and that included his time in India.19 After all, he boasted an impressive set of transferable skills, not least in the fields of applied science and communications – his

Viceroy to First Sea Lord Mountbatten and India

19

early accomplishments and achievements, unaffected by privilege and position, were highlighted in Mountbatten Apprentice Warlord (as, of course, were his failings and failures). However poor his seamanship, Mountbatten had credibility as an engineer, and as a problem-solver. Until ego clouded his judgement he could, if the situation demanded, be focused and analytical, formulating a solution and then acting speedily and forcefully. Sometimes, of course, he acted too speedily, impetuously, even callously, which – however adverse the outcome – was when he proved guilty of retrospective justification. This doesn’t mean to say he was wholly unprincipled, and indeed there were those occasions when Mountbatten behaved in exemplary fashion; however, a sign of true character and accomplishment, perhaps even greatness, is not drawing attention to the fact. Patrick French made a simple yet telling point: that if Mountbatten really was the overpromoted popinjay his critics claimed – and claim – him to be, then why did so many of Britain’s front-rank politicians on both sides of the House ignore the character flaws and place so much trust in him to get the job done? How did he get to the very top, and, notwithstanding controversy surrounding Dieppe and India, why was his career not cut short by catastrophe? After all, Mountbatten wasn’t short of enemies, witness Lord Beaverbrook waging a twenty-year newspaper campaign to destroy him. Of course, in so many respects partition was a catastrophe, which prompts the obvious question, why in Britain was it scarcely seen as such? In the winter of 1946–7 Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps clearly did think Dickie Mountbatten was the man to get the job done, their ambitions for a well-orchestrated withdrawal from India battered by the harsh reality of events at home and abroad since Labour’s accession to power eighteen months before. Mountbatten’s dealings with Attlee and his cabinet deserve consideration, as does his troubled relationship with Churchill and the Conservative front bench. The key controversies surrounding Mountbatten’s tenure as Viceroy can’t be ignored, not least the accelerated timetable for withdrawal and the charge of intervention in the work of the Boundary Commission; but also, the extent to which ending British rule embodied a convenient decolonizing narrative, providing a template for the transition of Empire into Commonwealth.

From the New Jerusalem to New Delhi: the Mountbattens and Labour Clem Attlee was an archetypal company commander, bloodied at Gallipoli, injured in Mesopotamia and wounded again outside Lille in the summer of 1918. A major in an unfashionable infantry regiment, he was never in awe of generals, let  alone intimidated by them. The Chiefs of Staff underestimated Attlee, even after July 1945. To be fair, Alan Brooke noted approvingly the new prime minister’s effortless chairing of cabinet and Defence Committee meetings: sneering ceased, the CIGS’s contempt now fully concentrated upon Mountbatten (‘Seldom has a Supreme Commander been deficient of the main attributes of a Supreme Commander … ’).20 Brooke was surely aware of Churchill loyalists inside Downing Street convinced Mountbatten was already cultivating Labour power brokers, not least Cripps and Attlee. Evidence lay in the

20

Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945–79

astonishing number of ministers, in and outside of the Cabinet, who he saw in his five days in London following the Potsdam Conference. For wide-eyed cynics like Jock Colville here was shameless opportunism, rooted in Dickie’s undisguised ambition and Edwina’s champagne socialism.21 Yet a social democrat as grounded as the Prime Minister was never going to be impressed by a smooth talking charmer arriving in the Cabinet Room with a copy of the Daily Herald under his arm. Attlee clearly didn’t see Mountbatten as anything like other senior commanders, but neither did he single him out as someone special. He certainly didn’t romanticize him as some sort of seafaring chevalier in the way Churchill had done earlier in the war. However badly he behaved towards them, Churchill idealized the Chiefs of Staff Committee as a cornerstone of the nation’s constitutional edifice.22 Attlee’s polite formality and sharp focus upon the business in hand signalled his indifference to the panoply of tradition and self-importance surrounding the Chiefs, notwithstanding the vital contribution of Brooke, Portal and Cunningham to securing final victory. Arguably, in his time in Downing Street Attlee only warmed to one chief of staff: Bill Slim was the service chief he was most directly involved in appointing, and the one he had most in common with. Needless to say, Mountbatten claimed a key role in Slim’s appointments as CIGS. As for Slim’s predecessor at the War Office, Attlee respected Montgomery’s wartime achievements, but questioned his credentials as a peacetime commander.23 When in early 1947 Attlee at last backed down on his leftfield proposal to vacate the Nile delta and consolidate military forces south of Sudan, it was not because the entire COSC threatened resignation, but rather the realization that his Foreign Secretary was adamant in his opposition.24 The Attlee-Bevin axis was crucial to the effective conduct of government for the first five years of Labour in office. Yet the Prime Minister always remained the senior partner, as his handling of the crisis in India clearly demonstrated. In the words of the then Viceroy, ‘Bevin like everyone else hates the idea of our leaving India, but like everyone else has no alternative to suggest.’ Wavell was mistaken. As with most of the Cabinet, Attlee considered the end of the Raj regretful but necessary – and he did have an alternative, as yet known only to Cripps and a small circle of confidants.25 Attlee was famously swift and unsentimental in dismissing anyone who fell out of favour, never avoiding the unpleasant duty of telling someone to go. Yet the way in which Field Marshal Lord Wavell was removed as Viceroy reflected poorly upon a politician renowned today for his probity and keen sense of fairness. How ironic that a prime minister famous as a man of few words dismissed an equally taciturn public servant for displaying a fatal lack of loquaciousness, not least when briefing ministers as to his plans for an early evacuation of the subcontinent. To explain why Attlee decided a new Viceroy was needed, and that Mountbatten was the man for the job, necessitates going back two years to when Wavell was first appointed, and then a further twelve months to the failure of Cripps’s embassy to India in the spring of 1942. Back in the spring of 1943 Wavell’s war was all but over: failed counter-offensives meant the Japanese still threatened Bengal, and a restructuring of the military command in India was imminent. Archie Wavell was an unusually cerebral general, with a proven record of heading large organizations. His availability rendered him the one credible candidate in a long list of names drawn up to succeed Lord Linlithgow as Viceroy. Eden

Viceroy to First Sea Lord Mountbatten and India

21

Figure 3  South-East Asia Command: Edwina Mountbatten watches among former POWs and internees the Japanese surrender in Singapore, 12 September 1945

had ambitions, but as Foreign Secretary fulfilled a key role keeping Churchill in check when far from home. As for Sir John Anderson, in tandem with Bevin and Herbert Morrison he was vital in masterminding the Home Front. Some saw Viceroy’s House as a fitting reward for Butler’s hard slog in the early 1930s aggressively fighting backbench opposition to the Government of India Bill – but for the Prime Minister Rab’s pre-war record as a reformer of the Raj and an active appeaser was precisely the reason why for the present he should work his passage at the Board of Education.26 With hindsight, it’s ironic that Churchill gave serious consideration to Mountbatten, whose appointment would have raised eyebrows even higher than his subsequent selection for SEAC.27 Of course, the White House would have been delighted, with Mountbatten a stark contrast to the stiff, uncommunicative, inflexible Linlithgow. Washington would have approved back corridor negotiations with the Congress leadership, their eventual release from prison secured in the face of stern Downing Street disapproval. Spurred on by Edwina, the young Viceroy would surely have been more hands-on in alleviating

22

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the worst consequences of the Bengal famine. Mountbatten must have known he’d been considered, and could well be again, confiding to Edwina two years later that a return to India wasn’t entirely out of the question: ‘if it ever became unavoidable I know that you would make the world’s ideal Vicereine.’28 Back in the real world, Wavell’s experience in 1943–5 was essentially a holding operation, an extended exercise in crisis management. Urged on by Sir Stafford Cripps, an unlikely admirer, Wavell tried to kick-start talks, but was hampered by the view of friends and foes alike that he was always a stopgap choice, and that he lacked support from the Prime Minister.29 Prewar hopes that the 1935 Act would secure significant constitutional reform, with India ultimately emerging as a sovereign state enjoying dominion status were always exaggerated. By the end of 1939 whatever misplaced optimism existed within the India Office and the Indian Civil Service had gone; swept aside by Congress’s furious response to Linlithgow’s guileless exercise of his viceregal power when unilaterally declaring war. For India, the Second World War changed everything, with successive viceroys incapable of imposing their authority  –  and crucially their personalities  –  on fast-changing events. The edifice of British power remained in place, but the state apparatus was increasingly dysfunctional. The ratio of British to Indian administrators was reversed, and a recruitment crisis saw the size, effectiveness and collective morale of the ICS shrink dramatically. After 1942 indigenous civil servants often felt intimidated, or they openly displayed their nationalist sympathies; in many towns and villages where a British presence was no longer visible, Congress filled the void.30 If the foremost representatives of the Raj were no longer in full control, the same could be said of nationalist leaders buffeted by more militant, more vociferous and more populist elements within their parties. The Muslim League and Congress increasingly eschewed compromise with the British and between themselves because leaders like Jinnah and Nehru had to accommodate young, radicalized factions with agendas that eschewed incremental achievements and top-down party discipline. After the failure of the Cripps mission in March-April 1942 and the suppression of Congress’s ‘Quit India’ civil disobedience campaign, an incarcerated party leadership was left remote from its mass membership. Force majeure saw the Congress Working Committee surrender the initiative, at the same time as Sir Stafford’s diminished influence saw the same of the British. Stasis ensured a political vacuum, filled by the Muslim League and the most unaccommodating elements of Congress. With civil disobedience deemed by the British disproportionately damaging given the transformation of India from an oasis of peace to a front-line combatant nation, Linlithgow sanctioned a ratcheting up of coercion; a formidable military presence in the country facilitated harsh police action, further antagonizing young radicals, both Hindu and Muslim. The forces of moderation  –  on both sides  –  were now wholly discredited. In any case, far from the barricades in Calcutta or Bombay had emerged an alternative nationalist voice, unequivocally committed to political violence as the path to Indian independence: thanks to Japanese broadcasters orchestrating an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign, support grew for ousted Congress president Subhas Chandra Bose, his Indian National Army made up of POWs and of workers left to their fate when the British fled Burma. The British authorities rightly viewed Bose’s popularity in India as

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sign that militant nationalism was now a potent force within the Congress coalition. Fortuitously for both Wavell and Auchinleck, the INA’s record in battle was poor and Bose died when the aircraft carrying him to Tokyo crashed in Taiwan.31 The Indian National Congress was a multifaceted movement happy to embrace both Hindu religionists and hard-nosed businessmen. Fundamentalists scorned Nehru’s secular state, fostering a very different vision of ‘Hindustan’. At the same time, industrialists ignored the Pandit’s left-leaning pronouncements, looking to build on India’s wartime economy once the British were gone. Congress was radically different from the anti-fascist fraternal institution Labour wanted – in the face of demonstrable contrary evidence – the party to be. Cripps, himself not yet readmitted to the Labour Party, encouraged this misapprehension, his credentials based upon a visit to India in late 1939 where he established a rapport with Nehru.32 Acclaimed for his alliancebuilding endeavours as ambassador in Moscow, Cripps in the spring of 1942 enjoyed remarkable popularity ratings.33 Military disaster in the Mediterranean and the Far East forced Churchill to bring Sir Stafford into government; and to acknowledge the insistence of senior ministers, both Labour and Conservative, that an imminent threat of Japan invading India necessitated a firmer commitment to post-war independence than had so far been made. Further pressure came from the White House; the presence of GIs in Calcutta as Japanese forces advanced on Bengal gave Roosevelt greater leverage. The carefully calibrated pre-war path to ultimate sovereignty had been overtaken by events, hence the urgent need for contingency planning. Cripps set the pace in forging a declaration of intent, kept Attlee and Bevin on board and made himself the obvious choice as envoy (if only because Churchill rightly anticipated Cripps would be tainted by failure). Given that Linlithgow and Churchill were united in thwarting Sir Stafford’s efforts to secure agreement with the two principal nationalist parties, it’s remarkable how close the Cripps mission came to success.34 Failure saw a sharp deterioration in Nehru’s personal relationship with Cripps, and a growing resentment towards Attlee for not maintaining India high on the political agenda when Britain’s changing fortunes saw Churchill reassert his authority. Labour ministers inside the War Cabinet and within the wider coalition were seen as looking favourably upon the Muslim League given Jinnah’s calculated support for the Allied war effort. In Nehru’s eyes they consistently ignored the harsh impact of wartime inflation. Critically, Labour members of the War Cabinet had failed to prevent disaster in Bengal by insisting upon more interventionist measures to avert famine: there was a moral imperative to ensure adequate food provision across the entire sub-continent, and Labour was party to the colonial power’s collective responsibility for a chronic abnegation of responsibility (in Wavell’s words, ‘one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and [the] damage to our reputation here … is incalculable.’).35 Thus, when Labour came to power in the summer of 1945 – with the defeat of Japan still seemingly some years off – relations between the Congress leadership and the key drivers of Indian independence inside the incoming administration were at rock bottom. The new Cabinet’s India and Burma Committee comprised lightweights alarmingly ignorant of south Asia, closet imperialists like Bevin and two principal players, Attlee and Cripps. Even the latter failed to recognize how much events had moved on since Congress launched

24

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the Quit India campaign; hence the delusion that intense negotiation could secure India dominion status, with Britain retaining a powerful influence, particularly over defence and external affairs.36 The failure of the 1942 mission had seen Gandhi’s goodwill towards Cripps turn to deep distrust. Another unfortunate legacy was Sir Stafford’s failure to establish a lasting rapport with Jinnah. The latter had repeatedly claimed that Cripps was ‘a friend of Congress’. Nehru’s veto of a draft declaration already agreed by the Muslim League reinforced Jinnah’s prejudicial opinion of Cripps. Ironically, the latter’s bruising experience with Congress left him more sympathetic to Jinnah’s insistence that the Muslim minority would not be adequately protected in a one-nation sovereign state.37 Between the wars Jinnah had articulated a ‘two nations doctrine’ that embraced respect and representation not separatism; but after March 1940 he led a more identifiably Islamic movement, which interpreted nationhood as meaning separate states for those parts of India with Muslim majorities. The Lahore Resolution or ‘Pakistan Demand’ was a motor for the Muslim League’s growing power and popularity throughout the war years, riding roughshod over the impracticalities of partition and reversing the party’s poor showing in the 1937 provincial elections. If for Jinnah the division of India was at first no more than a negotiating ploy, by 1945 the establishment of Pakistan had become his party’s raison d’être, its members making ever more extravagant territorial claims. Jinnah and his followers avoided antagonizing the authorities by distancing themselves from the incarcerated Congress leaders’ policy of non-cooperation, while at the same time avoiding any charge of having compromised their nationalist aspirations. Sensitive to the disproportionate number of Muslims in the Indian Army, Linlithgow pursued a policy of favouring Jinnah, underestimating his capacity to acquire a power base in Punjab and Bengal and granting him a virtual veto over any future constitutional settlement. Similarly, in April 1942 Cripps had promised no part of India would be forced to join a post-war settlement. For the British on the eve of peace the prospect of partition remained unthinkable, but an unintended consequence of nurturing Muslim goodwill was supporters of the League out the streets impatiently voicing the ‘Pakistan Demand’. A political project rooted firmly in religious belief was mirrored by militants inside and outside Congress demanding a Hindu state purged of ‘non-believers’. In addition, devout Sikhs were equally demanding of a territorial ‘home’. The future of India was henceforth defined by religious differences. This became starkly clear to Wavell in June 1945 after he authorized the release of Congress’s most senior figures. That summer the Viceroy invited prominent nationalist leaders to a conference at the Viceregal Lodge. Any hope of compromise over the way forward collapsed when Jinnah insisted that all Muslim members of the proposed Indian Executive Council should be League members. Jinnah enjoyed a power to influence the future shape of India unthinkable six years earlier. Eleven days after the Simla summit collapsed Attlee entered Downing Street.38 An abrupt end to the war in the Far East saw India’s economic problems compounded by demobilization, sharply rising unemployment, further price rises and renewed famine and hardship in the countryside. The Indian armed forces numbered nearly three million when Japan surrendered, with the proportion of British to Indian officers more than halved.39 The return of peace saw well-trained soldiers resume civilian life,

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the number of unauthorized weapons rise, the officer corps shed its first loyalty to the Crown and individual units display an alarming collapse in discipline and morale.40 Congress leaders eventually placated naval mutineers in Karachi and Bombay in February 1946, but they failed to stop incipient ethnic cleansing and to stem the rise in both rural and urban disorder. Their fear of uncontrolled revolution saw a shift towards accepting partition as a necessary cost in order to secure a rapid transfer of power and a restoration of order. The horrors of the Great Calcutta Killing in August 1946 were merely a prelude to the heightened communal violence of succeeding months  –  an unprecedented ‘genocidal’ violence reliant on organization, police collusion and a vacuum of authority; as evident in the decimation of Muslim minorities in Bihar and Garhmukhteshwar that autumn. The slaughter in Calcutta confirmed religion as a fundamental dividing line for south Asian nationalism. Thus, crucially, violence facilitated partition, and was not simply a by-product. An administration with an unreliable military, and an increasingly impotent police force, unsurprisingly failed to keep in prison three of Bose’s followers convicted for treason. The strength of grassroots support for the INA officers had forced an unsympathetic Jawaharlal Nehru to defend them in court and secure their eventual release. The high-profile trials in the winter of 1945–6 had turned the three officers into national heroes. For Wavell the decision to prosecute had made a bad situation far worse. On a SEAC farewell tour Mountbatten was Wavell’s guest as he agonized over riots in Calcutta to secure the INA prisoners’ release. Twelve months later, one of his first acts as Viceroy was to gain a grudging agreement from the Indian Army’s C-in-C, Field Marshal Auchinleck, that the Chief Justice should review the original sentences. Nehru’s Assembly motion of acquittal was duly dropped, the Congress leadership acknowledging Mountbatten as a man happy to do deals – ideally in public, but if deemed necessary by sleight of hand behind the scenes.41 Change and revolution were in the air, and, as the party at Westminster and in the country grew more impatient, the Labour Government seized the initiative away from Wavell and his governors. Early optimism waned as it became clear the Muslim League was anything but a fading force, and that the goal of a unified dominion within the British Commonwealth was fast disappearing. The Viceroy’s visit to London in late August 1945 had exposed a fundamentally different approach between Wavell and key ministers on the India Committee, notably Cripps.42 There was still common agreement on the goal of a single sovereign state, not least as ICS and India Office officials questioned the viability of a separate Pakistan; as such, ‘the epithet of reluctant partitionists may be deserved.’ However, the League’s sweeping success in the provincial elections of February 1946 consolidated support for Pakistan, especially within the Muslim community of the Punjab where a previously dominant Unionist Party saw its support collapse.43 A month later Cripps lead a second mission to India, joined by the aged Lord Pethick-Lawrence, a well-intentioned but conveniently ineffectual India Secretary, and A. V. Alexander, long-serving as First Lord of the Admiralty and like Bevin a reluctant decolonizer. As in 1942 compromise proved impossible, leaving mission members to advance their own notion of a way forward. Cripps and his colleagues proposed an All-India Union with a central government responsible solely for foreign and security matters. Thus, power would be decentralized, ceding control

26

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of domestic affairs to three distinct groups of provinces, each provincial government largely determined by the sectarian composition of its electorate. Jinnah signalled acceptance, but Nehru expressed serious reservations, questioning the feasibility of the groups. The Sikh leadership was similarly hostile, although with hindsight their opposition proved detrimental to the interests of the communities they represented. The Muslim League consequently withdrew its previous agreement, and Congress finally denounced the whole proceedings. Attitudes towards the Cabinet Mission, like the day-to-day workings of the present provincial governments, signalled a shift of adversarial politics away from the historic anti-colonialist struggle against the British towards an increasingly bloody confrontation between two  –  in Punjab three – nationalist movements which were wholly distrustful of each other; that distrust between the leaders of each party was magnified and multiplied when embraced by their respective followers.44 No one was more aware of this intensifying breakdown in day-to-day life across northern India than the embattled administration in New Delhi. The Viceroy bore ultimate responsibility for public order, and for conveying to the world a clear impression that Britain was withdrawing from India in a speedy yet controlled fashion. His problem in the late spring and summer of 1946 was that the Cabinet, including a sickly Cripps, had other priorities, focusing upon Labour’s domestic programme, and parallel crises in Greece and Palestine. Yet by the autumn of that year India was again high on the Prime Minister’s agenda. The Muslim League had joined the interim government but was boycotting the Constituent Assembly, due to meet in December. Meanwhile Wavell saw a fast deteriorating situation as requiring a contingency plan for a phased British withdrawal should a fresh attempt to secure bipartisan acceptance of the Mission Plan fail. His challenge was convincing the Government, and in particular Attlee, Cripps and Bevin, that his plan was both credible and necessary. In September 1946 Wavell warned that control could at best be maintained for eighteen months, and Britain should be gone by March 1948. That December he flew to London with Nehru, Jinnah and their acolytes. On arrival he forwarded the India Committee his paper setting out the Government’s options, including the Breakdown Plan. The Cabinet was appalled, Bevin in particular viewing Wavell’s strategic retreat as the ‘scuttle’ Churchill railed against. Ministers overestimated the potential damage the Tories could inflict, managing Commons business to avoid a major parliamentary confrontation; but precipitous withdrawal would require legislation, with the absence of a convincing strategy for the handover of power painfully obvious. Ironically, Attlee initially impressed Wavell with his handling of an irreconcilable Nehru and Jinnah. Yet only a fortnight later he was complaining to the Prime Minister that desultory treatment of his plan, not least a failure to answer his formal request for further instruction, had seen him ‘very discourteously treated’. Wavell flew home in time for Christmas disillusioned with Attlee and even more distrustful of Cripps (‘the directing brain’).45 The Prime Minister’s uncharacteristic behaviour was easily explained. Even while Wavell was still in London Attlee and Cripps had told Mountbatten that a new Viceroy was needed, and that he was the obvious candidate. Returning to New Delhi in late December 1946 a bruised Wavell could see that his time was up, and yet well into the New Year no signal was given that he would shortly be vacating Viceroy’s House.46

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Meanwhile, in London protracted negotiations continued with a still reluctant successor. Back on the Active Flag List, with the substantive rank of rear-admiral, Mountbatten had been listed on the Senior Officers Technical Course. Portsmouth was a prelude to being back at sea. As such India appeared an unattractive prospect, and yet … In drawn out negotiations prime minister and prospective proconsul edged towards agreement. Whereas Attlee and Wavell too often conducted a dialogue of the deaf, Mountbatten’s conversations and correspondence with the Labour leader proved surprisingly full and revealing. Consequently, once Mountbatten was in New Delhi and dealing directly with Downing Street, a reversion to the PM’s more familiar terseness was immediately read as a sign of displeasure. The day before he first spoke to Mountbatten, Attlee had cleared the idea with George VI. The King’s enthusiasm extended to convincing his cousin that he could do the job when Mountbatten played hard to get. Mountbatten’s name had cropped up at the start of the year when he was still at SEAC. The seed of the idea may have been sown by Nehru’s ally Krishna Menon, whose London-based India League boasted a broad spectrum of progressive-minded supporters.47 Cripps’s principal biographer gave substance to the suggestion that approaching Mountbatten was not entirely Attlee’s initiative, and that Lady Isobel returned from India conveying Congress’s desire to see Wavell go. Nehru, party hard man Sardar Patel and arch advocate of dialogue Chakravarti Rajagopalachari could no longer counter Hindu militants’ well-organized efforts to create a mono-religious state; with their Muslim counterparts equally intent on enforcing partition, whatever the best intentions of the Constituent Assembly. A fresh approach was urgently needed, with the likes of Patel quietly acknowledging that partition might be unavoidable. Like many ICS veterans, Patel anticipated Pakistan’s economic collapse, leaving a chastened Jinnah and his colleagues acquiescent to Congress demands. Over Christmas and into the New Year Cripps courted and briefed Mountbatten, either alone or in tandem with the Prime Minister. Early 1947 was when the Mountbattens and the Cripps translated close acquaintance into genuine friendship, particularly between Edwina and Isobel. Astonishingly, Cripps at one point offered to join the new Viceroy’s staff. Mountbatten declined his offer, suggesting to Attlee that Sir Stafford replace Pethick-Lawrence. In due course the Postmaster General, Lord Listowel, succeeded as Secretary of State. Unsurprisingly, Mountbatten later claimed that this too was his suggestion. Attlee was always his own man, but in this instance he might have listened to advice – Listowel was highly unusual as a peer in boasting a doctorate and a commission in the Intelligence Corps, and in the Coalition he had served as a junior minister with responsibility for Burma, hence his familiarity within SEAC.48 Mountbatten is often depicted as an unusual and imaginative choice, but this was far from the case. His name had been in the frame for the past four years, and his diplomatic skills had been well honed as Churchill’s emissary in America and as a supreme commander dealing day by day with volatile characters like Madame Chiang and Joe Stilwell. He was both industrious and imaginative, and he was always up for a challenge: his vision and ambition could be tempered by pragmatism when required. Serving as SEAC’s supreme commander provided a necessary knowledge of India, and a proud association with its fighting forces, the mainstay of Slim’s Fourteenth Army.

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By the standards of the day Mountbatten was free of colonialist prejudice, and his positive view of India’s political elite was evident from the friendship he and Edwina formed with Nehru on an eventful day in March 1946 – Mountbatten had appalled colonial officials by insisting his guest be treated as a de facto head of government while visiting Singapore.49 Nehru’s visit was a great success, noted in London. So too were Mountbatten’s efforts to head off violent confrontation between nationalist movements and the returning colonial powers in Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies, and above all, to secure a settlement in Burma.50 He was clearly sensitive to those forces in south and south-east Asia resistant to a restoration of the status quo; while the influence of his more radical-minded partner was common knowledge in every salon from Belgravia to Bombay. Much has been made of Mountbatten’s youth, but he was as old as the century and wartime promotions meant high office was no longer synonymous with age. Mountbatten’s weaknesses were well known by 1947, but for Attlee and Cripps – two men whose respective lifestyles could scarcely be more different  –  their man’s failings were outweighed by the simple fact of who he was: ostensibly, a war hero with the common touch who consorted with kings. The connection with the Crown was crucial: in keeping the King-Emperor on side, in impressing India’s numerous Princes, in countering Conservative charges of an unpatriotic ‘socialist scuttle’, in underpinning his viceregal authority, in enhancing the credibility of necessary spectacle and ceremony and in coating the narrative of timely closure with royal approval. The present Viceroy had been right to insist that time was fast running out, but he was a busted flush. Pressure was on well before the ‘big freeze’ hit hard at the end of January, with devastating consequences for the economy. To maintain sterling convertibility, and to fund key manifesto pledges, radical cuts in defence and overseas expenditure were necessary. Imperial policing was an obvious candidate, and nowhere more so than in south Asia: the price of Montgomery accepting a six months’ reduction in National Service was an assurance that all troops would be back from India by the end of the year.51 Thus, at a time of multiple crises, courting Mountbatten was a priority. The Government could build around the new Viceroy an explanation of why it was necessary to quit India by a defined date, and how it could be done. This was hard on Wavell, and cruelly ironic. Remarkably, he only learnt of his dismissal in the second week of February, having turned down an earlier request to fly home (and learn his fate): ‘An unexpected appointment but a clever one from their point of view; and Dickie’s personality may perhaps accomplish what I have failed to do.’52 A phlegmatic Wavell moved fast to ensure no key staff resigned in sympathy, fully briefing Mountbatten before and after his arrival in New Delhi. By the time he met the India Committee on 28 March Wavell could scarcely disguise his contempt for Cripps and Attlee (‘a singularly ungracious person’).53 A shared belief among the military, the Conservatives and their natural supporters that Archie Wavell had been shabbily treated fuelled an upper-class view of the Mountbattens as unprincipled chancers  –  just as Dickie had effortlessly switched allegiances from Edward VIII to his brother in December 1936, so nine years later he was consorting with the sort of people he wouldn’t dream of inviting down to Broadlands. Such cynicism became more muted when the Mountbattens’ time in India

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was seen by all but Express Newspapers as a great success, but it certainly didn’t go away. Much of the criticism was directed at Edwina, whose remarkable record with St John Ambulance in the course of the war served only to deflect Society memories of her pre-war affairs and extravagances.54 Extra-marital activities had by no means disappeared, and in due course her intense relationship with Nehru became common knowledge among the Mountbattens’ friends, associates and enemies. Yet the many accomplishments of Lady Mountbatten were clearly a key factor in choosing the last Viceroy. This was made clear in Attlee’s sparse account of his time at Number Ten, and in his subsequent – almost equally sparse – memoirs: Edwina was demonstrably ‘a very unusual wife’, who would ‘admirably assist’ her husband. She was also a woman resistant to the idea of heading east, despite in due course proving Attlee right. Yet, when finally she did arrive in India the last Vicereine succeeded in upholding tradition while at the same time radically redefining the role, reaching out to Indians high and low. Her extended stay in south Asia was marked by a fierce work ethic and a deep desire to alleviate appalling hardship – she carried on where she left off with the POWs nearly two years before. Yet at the same time she suffered from a succession of debilitating health issues, their severity compounded by episodes of intense emotional upheaval.55 The irony is that once Edwina was in India then she proved reluctant to leave, initially refusing to return home for Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip. Her final departure was a moment of great sadness, and she was soon planning the first of several return trips. Following mid-August’s transfer of power, the Prime Minister’s congratulatory telegram made a special point of thanking Edwina. Two days later Mountbatten wrote to thank ‘the person who helped me most’, enclosing the message from Attlee, ‘who is under no illusion as to the part you played … I’m deeply grateful too, for the way you’ve helped to keep me on the rails in certain matters in which I’m very apt to go off them.’56 Edwina’s diary confirms her husband’s hesitation in accepting Attlee’s invitation, his obvious reluctance enabling him to set out his conditions big and small. These ranged from again having sole use of his SEAC Avro York to taking with him a formidable team of advisers. Mountbatten’s chief of staff was the newly ennobled ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s highly regarded representative on the wartime COSC. Ismay found his old boss furious that he had agreed to go.57 As always, Mountbatten’s entourage was absurdly large, but he relied on a small circle of old India hands like Ismay, Sir Eric Miéville and – inherited from Wavell – George Abell, all of whom boasted a wealth of experience but were open to fresh thinking re India’s future status. A late arrival at SEAC HQ had been a rising star in the Scots Guards: Vernon Erskine-Crum returned to India two years later as Mountbatten’s conference secretary. An adviser on constitutional affairs after more senior staff members finally left, Erskine-Crum apparently wrote the first draft of his boss’s final report.58 In his memoirs Lord Ismay noted the presence in the Viceroy’s inner circle of the ever loyal Ronnie Brockman, by now a four-ring captain, and press attaché Alan CampbellJohnson, but he made no mention of Peter Murphy. More surprisingly, neither did Campbell-Johnson in Mission With Mountbatten. As we’ve seen, Murphy had been a fixed presence in the Mountbatten’s lives since the mid-twenties; a shift-shaping presence at Richmond Terrace and in Kandy, the sexuality and left-leaning tendencies

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of ‘the sixth best brain in England’ generated inevitable rumours and suspicion. The Mountbattens had spent hours discussing with Murphy whether they should go, and for their first few months in Viceroy’s House he fulfilled his familiar role of confidant for Dickie and for Edwina. He was trusted implicitly, seen as a suitable foil for working through new ideas and entrusted with tasks Mountbatten withheld from his regular staff. Murphy only stayed three months, but he remained in regular correspondence with the couple. Arguably he left too soon. The spring of 1947 was the last time Peter Murphy combined the role of marital go-between and ex officio political adviser. From this time onwards the Mountbattens would distance themselves from him, in the same way that they did Noel Coward. Yet Murphy was never completely cut off, and in later years he received a generous monthly allowance. He died in 1966, and six years later his old friend recorded a fulsome tribute to him.59 That tribute was originally intended for broadcast after Mountbatten’s death – Murphy’s sexuality had always necessitated his omission from the grand narrative.60 All credit to Philip Ziegler for recognizing his importance in India, as at other key moments in Mountbatten’s career. The same can be said for Janet Morgan who placed Elizabeth Ward (later Collins) and Muriel Watson at the heart of Edwina’s story; both women were SEAC veterans whose support roles in India have otherwise been forgotten. Mountbatten naturally demanded that his naval career be in no way impaired by a lengthy absence, and Attlee provided due reassurance. In later life he purported to have dictated his conditions, not least the exercise of ‘plenipotentiary powers’. After Brockman queried this claim, Mountbatten implied that scarcely anyone other than Attlee, Cripps and Lord Ismay appreciated the full extent of his executive power. When recorded for posterity in 1972 Mountbatten was even more insistent that he had been given carte blanche. Lord Listowel, who outlived Mountbatten by eighteen years, was always sceptical, pointing out that when Attlee appointed him Secretary of State he made no mention of the new Viceroy’s complete autonomy.61 Furthermore, Mountbatten was exemplary in reporting back to London, only acting with the full backing of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet as a whole. If necessary, he or an envoy – Ismay or Abell – would fly home for instruction or authorization. The volume of correspondence in the Transfer of Power document series reveals a dense and detailed dialogue between the Prime Minister and his emissary. To be blunt, the Viceroy made sure his back was covered. What Mountbatten should really have said was that in India he enjoyed an unprecedented degree of discretion and autonomy. Nationalist leaders, especially Nehru, soon recognized this fundamental difference between the last Viceroy and his predecessors – as did Mountbatten’s subordinates, most obviously the provincial governors. No resident of Viceroy’s House had ever enjoyed so much power – the irony being that at no point since 1857 had the British found themselves so powerless. Mountbatten’s post-retirement feats of exaggeration extended to taking personal credit for fixing the date of withdrawal. Again, the picture is grey: the India Committee had previously discussed a deadline for withdrawal, even while dismissing Wavell’s scenario for a phased departure; but Mountbatten insisted Attlee translate an aspirational time frame into a definite date for the transfer of power, 1 June 1948.62 Once the Prime Minister accepted the argument for a deadline, Mountbatten was on board. The two men shook hands on 11 February 1947, Attlee writing to his brother

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that it was curious, ‘the Royal Family should provide a Viceroy who is completely in agreement with Labour policy.’ A mixture of sentiment and cold calculation saw the Old Haileyburian add, ‘I feel sure that the first Empress of India would be glad to see a descendant complete the last part of a century’s work.’63 Attlee and Cripps initiated a series of briefings for Mountbatten and Ismay, of which the most important was a meeting with the prominent physicist and government adviser Patrick Blackett, fresh off the plane from India. For nearly twenty years the BlackettNehru-Mountbatten triangle would prove crucial to India’s defence policy, at both strategic and operational levels. Remarkably, despite their shared naval background, and the former Chief of Combined Operations’ enthusiasm for operational research, Mountbatten and Blackett had never met. Blackett told Cripps that the first meeting had not gone well, for which he blamed a ‘blimpish’ Ismay.64 Yet Mountbatten surely took on board Blackett’s warning that a fast deteriorating situation meant an acceleration in the transfer of power. Post-independence Blackett was soon back in India, and if Nehru was in London the two men would always meet, often in the company of Dickie and Edwina. We shall return to the friendship of Blackett and Mountbatten in the final chapter. Blackett’s biographers make a powerful argument that his influence over the Congress leadership and the Indian military was more powerful and more enduring than that of Mountbatten.65 The new Viceroy’s appointment was announced in the Commons on 20 February 1947. The Conservatives expressed shock and surprise (‘an unjustifiable gamble’), although Attlee had already warned Rab Butler. Brendan Bracken, always close to Churchill, bewailed the choice of a ‘miserable creature, power-mad, publicity-mad’, and in hock to Nehru.66 The Lords debated Mountbatten’s appointment ahead of the Commons, and no doubt to Churchill’s intense annoyance, Labour found an unexpected ally in Lord Halifax. On 6 March MPs debated Mountbatten’s departure a fortnight hence. Stafford Cripps’s powerful opening speech constituted his last great contribution to determining the future of the sub-continent. Henceforth he worked behind the scenes, and when seen in public was invariably endeavouring to raise morale in the face of harsh austerity. The reality was that Cripps’s ultimate goal in 1942 and in 1946 – of a unified dominion remaining close to Britain inside a multi-racial Commonwealth – was now redundant.67 A single sovereign state remained an aspiration; but, for all Gandhi’s fading hopes, even Congress’s Working Committee was coming to terms with harsh reality. That awareness extended to Wavell’s imminent successor, and to the man who appointed him. Winding up the debate Attlee insisted that the ball was now firmly in the Indians’ court. He tackled head on Churchill’s charge that ‘Operation Scuttle’ entailed the Government making use, ‘of brilliant war figures to cover up a melancholy and disastrous transaction whose consequences will darken, aye, redden the coming years’. Here was the actual moment when Churchill turned his back on Mountbatten. It was a moment anticipated by Attlee, swift to claim the moral high ground: ‘ … whatever the differences there may be between us … I am sure that the whole House will wish “God speed” to the new Viceroy in his great mission. It is a mission, not, as has been suggested, of betrayal on our part. It is a mission of fulfillment.’ For Campbell-Johnson up in the press gallery this was the speech of a man, ‘who burns with a hidden fire and

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is sustained by a certain spiritual integrity which enables him to scale the heights when the great occasion demands’. Attlee countered Churchill’s charge of betrayal – not least on the part of Mountbatten – by anticipating the new Viceroy would join the long line of ‘great men’ who, ‘looked to the fulfillment of our mission in India, and the placing of responsibility for their own lives in Indian hands’. This then was as much a story of continuity as of change.68 Newspaper and newsreel coverage of the Mountbattens’ arrival in New Delhi, and of the new Viceroy’s swearing-in ceremony (both elaborate and businesslike), depicted events as simply another chapter in the long history of the Raj. At the same time the cinematic contrast between the Wavells and the Mountbattens  –  old and new, tired and youthful, stuffy and stunning – was stark.69 Less visible was a striking difference in the time, energy and effort devoted day after day to tackling India’s multiple challenges. Wavell was always committed and conscientious, but he didn’t drive the viceregal staff in the same way as his successor, working extraordinarily long hours and displaying an attention to detail which was bound to take its toll. Edwina had her own crowded schedule, and anyway she was never a partner ready to wipe the fevered brow. Mountbatten’s support came therefore in the emotional bond belatedly forged with his second daughter, Pamela. It was Patricia who always enjoyed an exceptionally close relationship with her father, but in the spring and summer of 1947 her younger sister stepped into the breach. Pamela became Mountbatten’s companion, confidant and comfort – and, at only eighteen years of age, a precocious chronicler, as confirmed by her memoir of life inside Viceroy’s House. For someone so young she took on a remarkable array of tasks, especially in the crisis-filled days immediately following partition.70 It’s worth at this point recalling the key moments in Mountbatten’s three crowded months as Viceroy of India.71 Weeks of intense but fruitless negotiation with Congress and Muslim League leaders left the viceregal staff looking to partition as either a reality check conducive to compromise, or more likely, the only means of avoiding civil war. Crucially, partition was not the outcome of post-colonial calculation, but the consequence of mutual mistrust on the part of Congress and Muslim League leaders, and a shared belief that a duality of future statehood could realize respective visions of political, economic and religious cohesion. Mountbatten insisted his staff minute the Viceroy’s deep regret that the threat of civil war thwarted his goal of independence for a united India.72 He lamented his inability to visit all but two of the provinces, his most delicate mission being to placate Pathans in the fiercely contested North West Frontier (NWFP) – in a moment of great drama he and Edwina confronted a deeply hostile crowd and won them over.73 Ismay took a heavily decentralized Partition Plan to London, and it was approved with minor amendments by the India Committee on 8  May. Full approval by the Cabinet was scheduled for five days later. In Simla on 10 May Mountbatten privately revealed the plan to Nehru, prior to its formal unveiling the following day. This highly contentious act was fortuitous in so far as a furious Nehru denounced the ‘Balkanization of India’: the plan enabled individual provinces to vote for their own independence, as crucially could the Princely States. Thus, Bengal and the Punjab could split, join one of the two new states, or go it alone  –  as could the highly contested NWFP, which particularly appalled Nehru. Assuming Nehru and the other Congress leaders would

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accept a grand design where India and Pakistan might only be first among equals was a huge miscalculation on the part of the British negotiating team, not least the Viceroy himself. Mountbatten was in despair, but only briefly. In no time at all his leaking of the plan to Nehru was seen as clear evidence that he had anticipated trouble; as he told Campbell-Johnson, ‘only a hunch on his part had saved him from disaster.’ In due course Mountbatten claimed his speedy response to Nehru’s veto had laid the foundation for a more mutually acceptable settlement; and in so doing created a fresh opportunity for India and Pakistan to join the Commonwealth. This was quite simply Mountbatten at his most opportunist.74 There was no obvious conspiracy as some have alleged. Evidence that he deliberately contrived to secure Nehru’s rejection of the Partition Plan in order to ‘browbeat’ Congress leaders into accepting Commonwealth membership is at best circumstantial. As both Ziegler and French have pointed out, Mountbatten was more calculating than cunning. In this instance the calculation exploded in his face but – to employ a later aphorism – for Dickie Mountbatten every crisis really was an opportunity.75 The Reforms Commissioner V. P. Menon, Sir Eric Miéville and their aides swiftly formulated a ‘Revised Plan’ acceptable to both Nehru and Jinnah, whereby all provincial assemblies would vote to join either India or Pakistan; a choice also open to the Princes. Menon, an untrustworthy figure in the eyes of the Muslim League because of his closeness to party boss Sardar Patel, was conscious of Congress shifting from the goal of an independent republic to dominion status, however temporary, within the Commonwealth.76 Thus, if the final outcome was two separate states, then both could enjoy dominion status, ideally sharing the same eminent figure as their respective Governor General. This alternative blueprint in due course regained Mountbatten the confidence of Attlee. Relations were undoubtedly strained, with both Dickie and Edwina fearful that their concerted effort to gain the confidence of all, including an ever-wary Jinnah, would result only in resignation and the end of a brilliant career. Summoned by Downing Street, Mountbatten had no choice but to return home, taking Menon with him. On arrival Mountbatten was reunited with his chef de cabinet. He briefed Ismay, before convincing the India Committee that Menon’s plan was viable, and that a fast deteriorating situation demanded an acceleration of the timetable for withdrawal.77 Attlee shared Mountbatten, Ismay and their staff ’s keen sense of urgency, securing cabinet approval for withdrawal later that year, with a transfer of power to two separate states should the British fail in their final plea that India remain unified. Once back in New Delhi Mountbatten presented the nationalist leaders with the Government’s latest proposal, securing their qualified agreement twenty-four hours later (serendipitously Gandhi maintained his day of silence, while Jinnah begrudgingly accepted the partition of Punjab and Bengal, and the prospect of a bifurcated state). The next day, 3 June 1947, Attlee announced the imminent passage of a bill facilitating Indian independence, which the Government hoped would prove acceptable to all parties. For reasons we must return to, Churchill made clear that the Opposition would not obstruct the legislative process.78 Meanwhile, halfway around the world the Viceroy broadcast to the peoples of India, followed by Nehru and Jinnah. He tabled a paper on ‘The Administrative Consequences of Partition’, triggering a timetable for provincial

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Figure  4  South-East Asia Command: Mountbatten driving with Pandit Jawarhal Nehru from Government House to the Indian YMCA in Singapore, 19 March 1946

decision-making, and the division of all national assets between the two new states – the consequences of partition and the maintenance of public order in Bengal and above all in Punjab were now paramount issues. The Viceroy’s press conference the following day was, like all events masterminded by Campbell-Johnson, carefully orchestrated; but, either by accident or design, Mountbatten surprised officials in New Delhi and London with the seemingly throwaway remark, ‘I think the transfer could be about 15 August.’ Eighteen months later Mountbatten was claiming the change of date had been in his mind all along, but eighteen years later it had become a brilliant act of spontaneity.79 Whatever the reservations of Listowel and the Downing Street staff, Attlee accepted the new date, powering the bill through Parliament, with tacit support from Halifax in the Lords.80 The Indian Independence Act received the Royal Assent on 18 July 1947 with effect from mid-August, eight months earlier than the deadline stipulated by Mountbatten at the start of the year. Already a rushed, often chaotic process of dividing India’s human and material assets into two proportionate parts was in progress – the blueprint for partition was The Administrative Consequences of Partition, intended by Mountbatten and his ‘Dicky Birds’ to focus the minds of Congress and Muslim League leaders. Few individuals or institutions emerged well from such a hurried bifurcation, with deep fissures in the ICS and the Indian Army especially painful. Appalled by the timetable set for splitting units steeped in history and tradition, Claude Auchinleck

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nevertheless agreed to stay on as ‘Supreme Commander’, a largely titular position from which in due course he was ignominiously removed. Meanwhile an ostensibly independent Boundary Commission headed by the distinguished barrister Sir Cyril Radcliffe adjudicated on the frontiers, east and west, of the two new states.81 The Commission’s report was held back by Mountbatten until immediately following independence. On 25  July the Viceroy convened a grand assembly of the Princes, massaging their egos while firmly pointing out that survival depended on each of them making the necessary if uncomfortable choice of joining India or Pakistan.82 The two new countries secured their respective freedoms on 14–15 August. Karachi and New Delhi saw historic scenes of great drama, intense excitement and national celebration. Elsewhere, especially in the Punjab, there was tragedy and bloodshed, a foretaste of the horrors to follow. This then is the bare outline of the most extraordinarily eventful period in the lives of both Dickie and Edwina – a period culminating in apparent success, but also a deeply controversial period marked by high risks and appalling consequences. Attlee’s faith in Mountbatten faltered briefly mid-May, but otherwise Viceroy and Prime Minister forged a powerful partnership. When Mountbatten’s plan to be Governor General of both India and Pakistan was torpedoed by Jinnah in early July it was Attlee who insisted that he remain in New Delhi post-independence (‘If Mountbatten had left India, it would have looked like a victory for that twister, Jinnah.’). Attlee and Ismay together made sure Mountbatten had no choice but to become Governor General of India alone.83 Relations between Jinnah and Mountbatten became icier and more strained by the day. Even in Karachi on the eve of independence they were still arguing.84 Yet at no point was there ever any threat of the Muslim League acting unilaterally in its heartlands. The Prime Minister’s view of Jinnah may have been common knowledge after the two men had met in London the previous December, but only the Viceroy’s inner circle was party to Mountbatten’s true feelings – given his close connections with the likes of Nehru and Krishna Menon, discretion and detachment were vital when dealing with the Muslim League. Downing Street recognized the delicacy of viceregal diplomacy, not least in the final days, and was suitably supportive.85 In his reply to Attlee’s post-independence telegram of congratulations Mountbatten insisted that, ‘The Man who made it possible was you yourself. Without your original guidance and your unwavering support nothing could have been accomplished out here.’86 All correspondence was of course private at the time, but the full consequences of the Attlee-Mountbatten axis, as seen in the summer and autumn of 1947, reinforced a popular perception among the governing classes that the last Viceroy was a Labour man; and, as we shall see, that perception never wholly went away.

Grand narrative and modus operandi On 3  June 1947 Harold Nicolson noted in his diary Attlee’s announcement on partition, with warm words for Mountbatten on both sides of the House: ‘I am sure that Dickie has done marvellously. But it is curious that we should regard as a hero the man who liquidates the Empire which other heroes such as Clive, Warren Hastings

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and Napier won for us. Very odd indeed.’87 It’s hard to think of Nicolson as a man of the people, but the view from Sissinghurst reflected a popular view in Britain that partition had been avoidable, and that a readiness on the part of respective nationalist leaders to divide up India in some way constituted ingratitude. Nehru was seen as no friend of Britain – a prejudice regularly endorsed by Churchill – and now it seemed the same was true of Jinnah. Why otherwise would he and his followers not accept the path to independence originally on offer? If a domestic audience was to see Indian independence as a positive development, consistent with Britain’s continuing status as a major player in the world, then partition called into question the transfer of power as a smooth and natural process, particularly when the appalling consequences were all too apparent in contemporary newsreels and pictorial magazines. Partition subverted the grand narrative, requiring both Government and Viceroy to work even harder in dictating and controlling the message back home. Attlee’s approach, seen so clearly in his parliamentary joust with Churchill on 6 March, was to place Mountbatten in a long line of ‘great men’ stretching back to the earliest days of the East India Company: in answer to Harold Nicolson, these were the architects of the Raj, and the last Viceroy was promoting Britain’s interests in south Asia as assiduously as any one of his auspicious predecessors. Seen from this perspective those same interests gained immeasurably if the Mountbattens were well regarded by India’s political classes. More specifically, the Labour Party’s interests gained immeasurably if the British people also acknowledged the Mountbattens as a force for good. The Viceroy and his entourage embodied a benevolent imperial mission, dedicated to acknowledging and redeeming the metropole’s wartime debt. The Prime Minister’s hour-long speech on the second reading of the Indian Independence Bill saw withdrawal as in no way an abdication, but rather, ‘the fulfillment of the British mission. It is the culminating point in a long course of events.’ Once more Mountbatten joined a long line of reforming viceroys and secretaries of state. Cripps had previously labelled independence ‘a great civilizing experiment’, and this was very much the theme of Attlee’s address – key to strengthening not weakening ties with the fledgling dominions was the readiness of the ‘civilized European community’ to remain, with of course the Mountbattens seen as the most visible symbol of continuity.88 Here lay the roots of a powerful and enduring myth, its potency rendered that much greater by Attlee’s sincere belief and Mountbatten’s powers of persuasion. Time and again the last Viceroy portrayed the withdrawal from India as an act of extraordinary magnanimity and reconciliation. As he told television viewers in 1969, ‘15th August 1947 was one of the great days in world history … a day of unbelievable goodwill.’ No doubt it felt that way in New Delhi, but back in London the drain on the nation’s dollar reserves signalled a far bleaker end to empire, bereft of celebration and stage management – in austerity Britain the news from India brought little comfort once the full consequences of the convertibility crisis hit home.89 The dual ceremonies of 14–15 August were carefully planned, with the leadership of Congress, and to a lesser degree the Muslim League, keen to ensure events in Karachi and New Delhi reflected well on respective successor regimes. Mountbatten of course relished masterminding these highly visual transfers of power. What Alex von Tunzelmann scorned as a characteristic failure to prioritize, Nicholas Owen read

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as the attention to detail of a man fascinated by the propagandist force of ceremony and symbols – a fascination shared by Indians like V. P. and Krishna Menon sensitive to the power and potential of mass communication in the second half of the twentieth century.90 In provinces and districts across India Campbell-Johnson arranged simultaneous ceremonies where the union flag was lowered and full authority passed into the hands of local politicians and officials. For secularists like Nehru this nationwide transfer of power represented a multi-ethnic, multi-faith nation acting in unison. Most governors and collectors viewed these stage-managed events with a mixture of sadness, scepticism and outright cynicism. In northern India in particular even the most downbeat changing of the guard contrasted starkly with the violence and mayhem beyond the maidan and the residency – nowhere more so than among the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs of the Punjab, where the furious response to Radcliffe’s post-independence report rendered a residual violence that much more explosive.91 Newsreel, radio and newspaper correspondents swiftly turned their attention from dutiful coverage of the birth of two nations, with all its pomp and spectacle, to reporting atrocities and mass movements of population on a scale not seen since the final year of the war. With honourable exceptions, most reporters and script writers exempted the British from blame, implicitly or explicitly seeing Indians of every background as responsible for the escalating violence. The orderly handover of responsibility from one venerable democracy to two fledgling democracies was seen in sharp contrast to the appalling carnage triggered by partition. News management by Campbell-Johnson, working closely with sympathetic editors, provided the necessary diversions: counterbalancing scenes of deprivation and desperation was deferential coverage of Edwina’s humanitarian efforts and the Governor General’s enthusiastic embrace of Indian life, not least its colourful rituals and traditions. A pooling of film material meant cinema audiences back home were fed a largely positive image, focused on the Mountbattens’ vital role before and after independence and distancing the outgoing administration from the endemic disorder in northern India. British newsreel companies were heavily dependent on John Turner, a veteran cameraman from SEAC imbedded with the Mountbatten entourage. Genuinely frightened by his experience filming riots and acts of intense violence, and far more comfortable accompanying Mountbatten on his visits to the Princely States and Edwina on her tours of refugee camps and hospitals, Turner provided the dominant film narrative for a domestic audience.92 Such heavy reliance on John Turner’s film footage restricted London editors’ capacity to determine a genuinely independent take on events. Inevitably, therefore, the Mountbattens were portrayed in a highly positive light. Thus, Pathé’s – essentially second-hand – newsreel reporting of independence and partition depicted the couple as figures of genuine historic significance, resplendent in uniform and designer dress and as ‘normal’ people merging into the masses surrounding the Red Fort on India’s first day of freedom (besuited and bejeweled, both had a remarkable capacity to look cool in searing heat). The same film showed heart-rending images of famine and violence, but its commentary reassured shocked viewers that these were solely the responsibility of the two new states. This refusal to look back and acknowledge a legacy of British rule extended even to the March of Time; by 1947 the American

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newsreel company no longer maintained a London office, and had no reason to rein in its instinctive radicalism. Again, reliance on Turner’s footage dictated a perspective not that different from the coverage of events across the Atlantic.93 In his journal Campbell-Johnson indicated a dissatisfaction with the prevailing approach. He wanted a greater emphasis on the future, acknowledging past failures and emphasizing the new states’ potential for success. The press attaché claimed that he and the Viceroy thought as one on this, contrasting their positive approach with the fixed ideas of Francis Williams – Attlee’s PR adviser saw his role as calming popular expectation, not heightening it.94 Campbell-Johnson had mixed results in persuading the BBC’s Director-General Sir William Haley to look forward not backward. Thanks to Haley the BBC worked closely with All India Radio in the summer of 1947 to ensure extensive coverage of events across the sub-continent. Broadcasting House despatched an impressive array of front-line correspondents, all of them indifferent to imperial nostalgia. Yet at the same time Haley insisted they highlight, ‘the British record of achievement in India’. To their credit reporters like Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and producers like Louis MacNeice travelled far and wide in the days and weeks after partition, reporting unflinchingly on what they witnessed.95 Unlike the BBC, forced by the nature of its [originally] live reporting to abandon a largely triumphalist account of independence and partition, British newspapers across the political spectrum saw little immediate advantage in questioning Mountbatten’s ‘imperial choreography’. The harsh reality of post-partition communal violence forced a re-evaluation, not least on the part of the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle. A notable exception was the weekly New Statesman, then close to the peak of its popularity and influence. Editor and veteran anti-colonialist Kingsley Martin had a wide network of acquaintances from the Punjab to Bengal, many of them painting a vivid picture of systemic violence. Otherwise, as Chandrika Kaul pointed out, in the first of her commentaries on the British media’s independence coverage, the message emanating out of Viceroy’s House – and Downing Street – was that a peaceful transition could be achieved: crucially, the transfer of power was a progressive act long sought by liberal opinion, and a measure acceptable to anyone insistent that the British Empire was a force for good. For the latter, confirmation came in the violence that escalated after 14–15 August, swiftly interpreted as a vindication of British rule.96 For many on the Opposition benches the bloodshed that followed partition provided further vindication – that Dickie Mountbatten was an aristocratic chancer, a parvenu and a man no staunch Conservative could ever fully trust. Few members of the Carlton Club toasted his post-independence elevation to Earl Mountbatten of Burma.97

Myth making in operation: the Viceroy and Sir Cyril Radcliffe Key to the myth-making was projecting the Viceroy as a figure of ultimate authority and final judgement. Here was someone uniquely qualified to engage in hard bargaining with the key protagonists and yet at the same time remain above the fray. This was where the ceremony and solemnity were so vital, reinforcing an image of formal detachment and genuine impartiality. Mountbatten may have found Jinnah near impossible to deal

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with and Nehru a kindred spirit, but it was vital that such feelings remained behind closed doors. Neutrality was the message, and never more so than in the partitioning of Bengal and the Punjab, for which respective boundary commissions were appointed. The best qualified adjudicator of the new states’ frontiers was the widely respected Chief Justice of India, Sir Patrick Spens, and yet for no obvious reason he was never invited to head the overall Boundary Commission. Instead, the Government appointed Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a distinguished barrister and man of letters but someone with no knowledge or experience of India – perversely, seen therefore by some in London as a guarantee of impartiality. Mountbatten had no objection: appointed Director-General of the Ministry of Information in 1941, Radcliffe had made a favourable impression on the Chief of Combined Operations whenever the two men met. Running the MoI had given Radcliffe an insight into the cut and thrust of wartime debate on the future of India. Sir Cyril felt no bias against any of the nationalist parties in India, but – as Lucy Chester has pointed out – he was unrepentently biased in favour of maintaining Britain’s best interests. Aptly described by Patrick French as, ‘the insider’s insider … a natural choice for cutting up the British Empire’s rough diamond,’ Radcliffe arrived in New Delhi on 8 July. Installed in a villa on the viceregal estate, he quickly became acquainted with all the key players on the British side.98 After independence Mountbatten encouraged the belief that for most of his six weeks in India Radcliffe was in purdah, scrupulous avoiding contact with anyone who might influence his thinking. It was of course vital for both men that they were seen to have behaved scrupulously in the delineation of Pakistan’s and India’s borders. Radcliffe’s integrity was on the line, and such was the strength of establishment respect for a Fellow of All Souls and future Lord of Appeal that for decades after 1947 any charge of influence and chicanery was largely confined to south Asia. In the month that Radcliffe and his team worked on their report, Mountbatten rebuffed suggestions that he might act as an intermediary. To do so would have made him a hostage to fortune, and where appropriate he made public his refusal to intervene. Thus, a Sikh delegation from the Punjab were denied entry to Viceroy’s House and peremptorily despatched in Radcliffe’s direction. The viceregal staff were told to keep their distance, and yet key figures like the Punjab’s Governor, Sir Evan Jenkins, found themselves across the dinner table from Radcliffe, as indeed did the Viceroy himself.99 In conversation Radcliffe may have exercised suitable discretion, but by attending even a single function arguably he compromised himself. Ironically, no one knew more about the final report’s potential for escalating violence in the Punjab than Jenkins. He had been appalled by the chaotic proceedings when the Punjab boundary commission took evidence in Lahore for ten days in late July. A particular concern for Jenkins was the Sikh community’s anticipated response to a denial of specified sovereign territory, and a frontier splitting their holy sites and their concentrations of population between two separate states. Jenkins advised against inflaming the situation by arresting Sikh militants, but like George Abell he opposed Mountbatten’s decision to postpone publication of Radcliffe’s recommendations. The report was all but complete by 9 August, and, whereas his advisers urged an announcement so that troops could be concentrated in especially contentious areas ahead of independence, Mountbatten ordered a delay to avoid further protests marring the formal transfer of power. He sent

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Figure 5  India: the last Viceroy and Vicereine meet Mahatma Gandhi for the first time, 8 March 1947

his secretary and Campbell-Johnson to convince a reluctant Radcliffe that he should find grounds for the report not being made public until 17 August.100 This failure to acknowledge the size and scale of Sikh discontent, and consequent refusal to release Radcliffe’s findings in order to authorize pre-emptive action, has been highlighted by Mountbatten’s critics, and none more so than Andrew Roberts.101 For Roberts the original appointment of Radcliffe and the postponement of the Commission’s findings until after the independence celebrations were deliberately

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intended to ensure Mountbatten would not be directly blamed for the carnage which partition would surely bring. Furthermore, the delay could not be separated out from the report’s most contentious recommendations and the charge that, for all his insistence on impartiality, the Viceroy had directly intervened in India’s favour. Roberts constructed his case with forensic precision, focusing on both the original intervention and Mountbatten’s later attempts to disguise his actions. Going to great lengths to orchestrate a cover-up was consistent with his behaviour at other moments of crisis, notably in the aftermath of Combined Operations’ catastrophe at Dieppe. Normally, Mountbatten’s acolytes were acquiescent, but Roberts uncovered evidence of Ismay’s adamant refusal to co-operate.102 There’s a widely shared belief in Pakistan that Mountbatten facilitated India’s acquisition of Gurdaspur, with its tiny Muslim majority, because the district facilitated access to Jammu and Kashmir; a quid pro quo was supposedly the Hindu-majority Chittagong Hill Tracts being given to East Pakistan.103 Stanley Wolpert and Alastair Lamb, both trenchant critics of Mountbatten, believed Pakistan had indeed been cheated of Gurdaspur, and neither Perry Anderson nor Andrew Roberts saw any reason to disagree. Pakistan’s grievance was compounded by Radcliffe excluding from East Pakistan fertile tea-growing areas such as Darjeeling and its trading

Figure 6  India: the Mountbattens inspect riot devastation in Lahore, 20 July 1947

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centre, Calcutta. When in due course Mountbatten muddied the waters (‘I’ll tell you something ghastly.’) by claiming that Radcliffe worked off a crude rule of thumb when aligning land and population his protestations of innocence were greeted with derision.104 Roberts was by no means alone in pursuing a parallel charge, that Radcliffe had been pressurized into giving India the west-facing, Muslim majority sub-districts of Ferozepore and Zira. Mountbatten’s intervention was ostensibly a consequence of the Maharajah of Bikaner threatening to join Pakistan if the proposed frontier denied India control of the strategically important Ferozepore canal headworks, considered vital for the princely state’s extensive system of irrigation.105 These were the charges that Lucy Chester examined when arguing that it would have been surprising if the Viceroy had not found Radcliffe receptive to advice (in Alastair Lamb’s words, ‘Radcliffe was a barrister following a brief ’, with Mountbatten his client).106 Supportive evidence includes: the lack of confidentiality surrounding the Commission’s work; a cryptic telegram telling Jenkins to ‘eliminate’ a sketch map from Abell which placed the Ferozepore salient in Pakistan; and diaries, memoirs and letters from the time that suggested Mountbatten was putting pressure on Radcliffe. The smoking gun was a statement by Christopher Beaumont, Radcliffe’s secretary, which he drafted in 1989 and made public three years later. Beaumont claimed his old boss considered such a tight deadline ‘irresponsible’, as was the appointment of Rao Sahib V. D. Ayer as an assistant secretary. It was an open secret that Ayer was passing confidential information to Nehru and V. P. Menon. As a Reform Commissioner Menon was himself a security risk inside Viceroy’s House. He clearly knew that Ferozepore and Zira would be in Pakistan as he visited Radcliffe’s villa, only to be turned away by Beaumont. A flimsy excuse saw only Radcliffe invited by Ismay to lunch with Mountbatten, after which the line through the Punjab was shifted to India’s advantage. Beaumont speculated that an exhausted Viceroy, genuinely fearful that giving Ferozepore to Pakistan meant war, put undue pressure on his luncheon guest. Radcliffe hated the heat, was permanently tired and felt unqualified to question the authority and expertise of both Mountbatten and Ismay – quite simply, he was outgunned, and he buckled.107 In 1992 Beaumont was himself an eminent legal figure, and thus it’s not surprising Philip Zeigler saw no reason to question such a clear recollection of events a quarter of a century before. He simply couldn’t understand why Radcliffe had succumbed to pressure, or why Ismay hadn’t advised Mountbatten to keep quiet and call Congress’s bluff. This was a significant shift from Ziegler’s position a decade earlier when he had examined the episode in detail and concluded that Mountbatten probably did discuss with Ismay whether he should act on Nehru’s request to intervene: ‘however, commonsense and the counsels of Ismay must have convinced him that the risks were too great; the game was not worth even a small part of the candle. He may have been guilty of indiscretion, but not of the arrant folly as well as dishonesty of which his enemies accused him.’ Here was a microcosm of the official biographer’s final, deftly drafted conclusion – yes, this was a great man ‘who flared brilliantly across the face of the twentieth century’; but a great man who was deeply flawed. However, at a seminar in 1995 Zeigler acknowledged that Mountbatten did have a role in denying Pakistan the Gurdaspur district, and that he did indeed intervene to ensure Radcliffe reassigned the Ferozepore head waters to India. Zeigler had reviewed all the evidence, especially

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Mountbatten’s correspondence with Ismay in the spring of 1948 when questions had been asked in Parliament about Radcliffe’s impartiality. Thus, he would now conclude that, ‘It was arrant folly on Mountbatten’s part to jeopardize the position of neutrality which he had so painstakingly built up, on what was in fact a pretty trivial issue. It was dishonest to pretend that he had not done so and to keep up this lie until the day he died.’ This was a distinct lie, as opposed to simply a favourable version of events, fervently held until that final fateful day at Mullaghmore. The irony, as we shall see in succeeding chapters, is that this was precisely the sin Mountbatten believed Anthony Eden to be guilty of, in never admitting collusion with France and Israel to facilitate the invasion of Egypt in November 1956. Eden burned Britain’s record of the Sèvres protocol, but agonized that copies remained in the French and Israeli archives. Mountbatten made sure all of Radcliffe’s papers were incinerated, although not all documentation disappeared: eight months later Ismay ignored his instruction to destroy a potentially incriminating letter.108 Radcliffe had no intention of compromising himself, so he swiftly moved on. He stayed silent out of a sense of duty. It was for this very reason that he reallocated the Ferozepore salient after his lunchtime hosts spelt out the consequences of not doing so. Duty can provide a handy rationale for real politick. In ‘Partition’ W. H. Auden brilliantly encapsulated Radcliffe’s six weeks of misery – a man plagued by heat and loose bowels who delivered his verdict and headed straight off to England, ‘ … where

Figure  7  India: the Viceroy initiates the ceremony for the transfer of power to the new Dominion of India in the Constituent Assembly Council Chambers, 14 August 1947

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he quickly forgot/The case as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,/Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.’109 Safe in St James’s, the recently returned Radcliffe mused on his misadventures in New Delhi. He invited to lunch Robert Bruce Lockhart, a fellow beneficiary of a wartime knighthood, his reward for heading the Political Warfare Executive. Bruce Lockhart had spent the war oscillating between Dalton, who had a sneaking regard for Mountbatten, and Beaverbrook, who increasingly loathed him. Sir Robert was back working as a freelance journalist, but he respected Radcliffe’s reluctance to go public. Here was a man unsuited to summer in India, unfamiliar with the intransigence of India’s politicians and above all, unhappy with the Viceroy. He had found Mountbatten ‘terribly ambitious’, as evident in his ‘exuberant personality and thirst for publicity’. Nor did Radcliffe think much of the viceregal staff other than Ismay. They compared poorly with ICS veterans like George Abell. Horrified by sectarian atrocities in the Punjab, Radcliffe was convinced partition had been a ‘great mistake’: ‘We could have held India, he said, quite easily, but having let things go so far we had no alternative but to get out. He blames Parliament and the people at home for the lack of interest … ’ Radcliffe clearly thought along similar lines to most leading Conservatives, and yet Bruce Lockhart was sure they would never learn the inside story of how the boundary map was finally confirmed: ‘I do not think he will vote Labour at the next election, although he will never vote for Winston.’110

Winston and Dickie: the Conservatives and surrendering the Raj Neither Attlee nor Mountbatten disguised the depth of their differences with Churchill over India. Attlee believed Churchill had been guilty of a betrayal of trust, as he revealed to the Observer after the death of his old adversary. Keen to counter accusations of a ‘scuttle’ the Prime Minister had briefed the Leader of the Opposition under Privy Council rules, but he stopped doing so when Churchill distorted privileged information in the Commons: ‘This put me in perhaps the most embarrassing situation of my whole career, since I could not divulge in detail all the facts of the matter, and therefore could not give the lie to Winston.’ Mountbatten’s appointment provoked a furious quarrel, with Churchill adamant that Attlee was conspiring to ensure the Royal Family carried the can for quitting India.111 Not that Churchill looked on Mountbatten as a fall guy, considering him as guilty as the Government for such a speedy transfer of power. Unsurprisingly, Mountbatten encouraged the widely held assumption that he and Churchill enjoyed an ‘extraordinary’ relationship, rooted in close social and family ties. Moreover, ‘He knew I backed him through thick and thin when his voice was crying in the wilderness against Hitler and Mussolini … ’ To be fair, this wasn’t a wholly inflated claim, as Mountbatten’s Admiralty appointment in the late ’thirties meant regular contact with Churchill, who had been cleared to receive regular briefings on naval affairs. Yet Mountbatten also saw an advantage in revealing that Churchill had berated him at a Buckingham Palace reception after Princess Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew Philip (‘“Dickie, stop. What you did in India is as though you had struck me across the face with a riding whip.”’), and that for the next seven years had made no attempt to get in touch.112

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However bloody partition was in reality, the granting of independence to Pakistan and India was generally seen as a good news story in Britain. In this respect the grand narrative worked, and within a few years the transfer of power was rolled up into a presumed bipartisan consensus, ranging from a shared fear of Soviet intentions to a  Keynesian belief in full employment and the state’s responsibility for maintaining the nation’s health and welfare. The Conservatives’ begrudging endorsement of the Indian Independence Bill, with its proviso for the new states’ Commonwealth membership, was cited as evidence of common agreement. Yet Churchill’s diehard opposition to constitutional reform in the early 1930s and his loud objections to independence a decade later could scarcely be ignored when recalling India’s path to freedom. In contrast to Churchill, viewed by many at home as well as in south Asia as an unreconstructed imperialist, Mountbatten was considered an agent of progress and a force for change, to his great delight. When interviewed by the authors of Freedom at Midnight, Mountbatten insisted that he was always his own man when dealing with Churchill, and never more so than in May 1947 when despatched by Attlee to persuade his old patron not to delay Indian independence. An uneasy encounter ended in triumph when ‘the ambitious young Viceroy’ convinced a brooding Churchill that Congress had accepted dominion status and Commonwealth membership. Narendra Singh Sarila heard a similar story when he visited Broadlands around the same time as Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre.113 Mountbatten’s recollection twenty years earlier was of a far less dramatic meeting, which simply sealed a deal done with the Tory grandees the day before – after all, even Churchill had accepted Cripps’s 1942 promise of dominion status at the earliest opportune moment. This earlier memory chimes with Ismay’s account of proceedings, and with evidence that Mountbatten’s intermediary role between Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition required a second visit. Singh Sarila noted Churchill’s assumption of special arrangements for the Princes, and his misapprehension that Pakistan’s and India’s immediate constitutional status would be permanent.114 The belief that he had been misled on both counts poisoned his relations with Mountbatten, but in any case resentment across the parliamentary party was an ever present. The Opposition’s agreement that it would not use its majority in the House of Lords to torpedo Mountbatten’s plan was a concession not a surrender. The Conservatives continued to attack government policy, but registered no lasting damage because Attlee and Herbert Morrison, the Leader of the House, moved so swiftly and so adroitly in pushing through the necessary legislation. Despite the size of its majority Labour invariably over-estimated the power and effectiveness of their opponents. Too often, especially in the eyes of the left, ministers trimmed and compromised; but just occasionally they moved fast to catch the Opposition off guard, as was the case with securing parliamentary approval for surrender of the Raj. The failure to secure a political settlement by the end of 1946, polling evidence of growing dissatisfaction with the apparent stasis in India, and the growing volume of Tory discontent, had forced the Cabinet – specifically Attlee and Cripps – to embrace an alternative strategy. In retirement Mountbatten encouraged the view that his performance as Viceroy and later Governor General enjoyed quiet approval within Tory ranks, and that their endorsement was always muted in order not to embarrass Churchill. Across

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the intervening years most senior members of the Conservative Party had quietly encouraged a presumption of cross-party endorsement. The reality, as Mountbatten knew only too well, was that Churchill was by no means alone in his criticism of both the Labour Government and the Viceroy. Nicholas Owen and others have demonstrated most shadow ministers’ antipathy towards Attlee and his colleagues over their accelerated path to independence.115 For all the subsequent denials, that antipathy extended all the way from the Palace of Westminster to Viceroy’s House. Entrusted by Churchill with responsibility for Indian affairs, Butler was by no means as accommodating as he later claimed. His criticism of government policy was partly fuelled by personal animosity towards Cripps. The same was true of Harold Macmillan who, having lost his seat in 1945, visited India in the dying days of Wavell’s viceroyship. Unlike Butler, Macmillan in later years never disguised his belief that Cripps had gifted Congress control over India’s future destiny, not least her membership of the Commonwealth. In New Delhi he had met Nehru and been singularly unimpressed; but then the same was true of the Muslim leaders. His conversation with Jinnah confirmed how keenly Churchill was cultivating the Muslim League, much to Labour’s annoyance. Macmillan returned from India appalled by an inertia of administration at every level, but equally unhappy that the Government was content to turn its back on such a chaotic state of affairs. He was remarkably hawkish, and, as during the Suez crisis nine years later, he looked to overwhelming force as a means of restoring order. Only the news of Congress’s volte face over India’s future constitutional status brought about a more measured response. By July 1947 Macmillan was back in the Commons. A sick Churchill deputed him to lead for the Opposition on the second reading of the Indian Independence Bill. Macmillan made clear his party would not obstruct passage of the bill, and he complimented the Viceroy on persuading all parties to accept dominion status and Commonwealth membership for both Pakistan and India; but he also made clear how poorly he felt Labour had conducted affairs up until the eleventh hour.116 Chapter  4 considers Macmillan’s real feelings towards Mountbatten at the time – suffice it to say here that in the summer of 1947 a close working and personal relationship between the two men seemed well-nigh inconceivable. The same could not be said of Eden and Mountbatten, if only because the latter was so keen to maintain good relations with Churchill’s heir apparent. Arguably Mountbatten deluded himself as to how ‘progressive and bold’ Eden was in his thinking, not least regarding decolonization.117 Over India the shadow Foreign Secretary advocated a pragmatic approach, not least because the prospect of a return to government ruled out any action likely to antagonize Nehru. Eden and Macmillan led cross-party negotiations over passage of the Indian Independence Bill. They left Churchill to bewail India’s ‘loss’. His begrudging acceptance of harsh reality denied diehard opponents of the bill in the Lords a credible standard bearer. Quietly supportive of Bevin, Eden preferred his party to focus on Labour’s domestic record; this was where the next election would be won. Yet he sympathized with Churchill over India, largely because, in the words of his official biographer, he ‘thoroughly distrusted Mountbatten’s judgement and style’. Crucially, neither Attlee nor Cripps made any effort to engage with Eden over India. Bevin on the other hand provided regular briefings on trans-Atlantic relations and the deepening division of Europe.118 Downing Street’s insensitivity was nothing

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compared with Mountbatten’s: in 1972 he pestered an unforgiving Eden, urging him to state on record that unlike Churchill he felt the transfer of power had been well handled. Lord Avon, unreconciled with Mountbatten since Suez, politely demurred. Like Butler, Eden saw Wavell’s appointment as Viceroy in 1943 as a lost opportunity, to which he was never wholly reconciled. These were men who, despite their reputation as modernizers, retained an emotional engagement with the Raj more commonly associated with Enoch Powell, or with an older generation of former diehards untouched by the electoral upheaval of July 1945. They heard Attlee maintain Dickie Mountbatten was following in the footsteps of empire-builders, but they didn’t believe him, insisting that to leave so soon was an abdication of responsibility by a government colluding in the end of empire.119 Labour’s opponents saw confirmation of a chronic failure of competence in three key areas: the Princely States’ loss of sovereignty and status, the frontier disputes between India and Pakistan, particularly over Kashmir and the sharp rise in communal violence that followed partition – for all of which Mountbatten’s critics deemed him responsible. The most powerful Princes had close ties with Britain, and they were seen within wealthier circles as having been shoddily treated. The same was true of ICS veteran Sir Conrad Corfield, who quit India in July 1947 angry that Mountbatten had failed to defend him from Nehru’s charge of being the Princes’ stooge.120 Congress’s post-independence preference for coercion over persuasion was assumed to have the Governor General’s tacit approval. Churchill and his colleagues had endorsed Mountbatten’s appointment as Governor General, and shared Attlee’s view that he should remain in New Delhi when Jinnah torpedoed Britain’s ideal scenario of Pakistan and India united under a single sovereign representative.121 While their feelings changed in later years, both Churchill and Macmillan held a jaundiced view of Nehru – how could such a wily political operator be both an Old Harrovian and a Kashmiri Brahmin? The Conservative leadership had found grim satisfaction in Mountbatten’s failure to convince the Maharaja of Kashmir that he should accede to Pakistan.122 That autumn they noted the Governor General’s support in his role as chair of India’s Defence Council for a heavy military response to the seizure by Pashtun militias of disputed districts in western Kashmir. Mountbatten justified his actions by pointing to public concern back home as to the lives of those staying on in Srinagar, given the killing of Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Dykes and his wife and the ransacking of the Baramulla Mission Hospital. Nevertheless, Mountbatten’s critics sent out a clear signal that, while still Viceroy, he should have prevented what so quickly become a running sore in Indo-Pakistani relations, and that a procrastinating Maharaja had given him the run-around. Convincing the Indian Government to refer the dispute to the UN in December 1947 counted for little, not least as Mountbatten had joined Nehru in forcing the Maharajah into signing a backdated accession agreement. Any criticism was, however, muted. By the winter of 1947–8 Mountbatten’s prestige and influence had increased markedly. For all his failure to ensure future generations of the Royal Family bore his name, his nephew’s marriage to the heir to the throne meant he was now at the heart of power. A beneficiary of the multiple honours and titles acquired by Philip Mountbatten was his uncle, effortlessly lifted from the edge of court life to the very centre. Nevertheless, for Mountbatten’s many enemies,

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the continuing crisis in Kashmir was a legacy of accelerating the transfer of power: a lengthier time frame would have seen Kashmiris of all faiths given a clear signal as to where their future loyalty lay.123 Hyderabad, predominantly Hindu but ruled by a Muslim dynasty, had early separatist ambitions, but in September 1948 this huge territory was forcibly integrated into the new Indian state. It joined an India growing in self-confidence and assertiveness, as signalled by the imminent handover from Mountbatten to a native-born Governor General, Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari. The Nizam of Hyderabad’s Constitutional Adviser was Sir Walter Monckton, who had got to know Mountbatten during the Abdication crisis when acting as Edward VIII’s legal representative. Mountbatten looked on Monckton as an ally, and only belatedly learnt that his presumed friend had provided leading Tories with confidential information which they could draw upon when criticizing the conduct of cabinet ministers and, by implication, the Viceroy. Campbell-Johnson and Mountbatten still considered Monckton a valuable intermediary between the Indian Government and the Nizam. Yet Monckton himself was adamant that the Governor General had too often let down the Princes, not least his employer. Attlee dismissed such a charge, insisting the Viceroy had warned the Princely States their destinies were not the ultimate responsibility of His Majesty’s Government.124 In June 1948 Monckton returned home for the last time, and three years later he became a Conservative MP. Made Minister of Labour by Churchill, he transferred to Defence when Eden became Prime Minister in 1955. Once more he found himself in frequent contact with Mountbatten. The First Sea Lord bore no grudges, having convinced himself that Monckton had been a force for good in India. For this reason, he still considered Sir Walter a friend upon whom he could rely. As we’ll see in succeeding chapters, Mountbatten and the minister shared similar misgivings over Eden’s aggressive response to the Suez crisis, but they behaved very differently: in the late summer of 1956 Monckton’s prioritizing of party loyalty over conscience recalled his behaviour in India nine years before.

Mountbatten in India – guilty as charged, or is the jury still out? Like Mountbatten, Sir Walter Monckton was skewered by Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians, but without the same undisguised loathing. Monckton was simply a weak man who in the early 1950s had failed to challenge trade union power, tolerating chronic wage inflation and outmoded restrictive practices. Mountbatten was demonstrably lacking in humanity, unmoved by the thousands who died as a consequence of accelerated partition, thereby viewing amelioration as just another technical problem, albeit one unusually challenging.125 By no means the first to cry foul, Roberts insisted that this was a human disaster which could have been avoided had the Viceroy heeded expert advice. Thus, as early as 25 April Auchinleck had warned that a hasty division of the Indian Army would have disastrous consequences in terms of morale and maintenance of order. Once the date of partition was announced Sir Evan Jenkins and General Pete Rees were adamant that their short-lived Punjab Boundary

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Force was wholly inadequate, with 55,000 men insufficient to cover a border area of nearly forty thousand square miles and fifteen million people. They were not alone in advising that the Viceroy seek London’s agreement to deploy some or all of the thirty thousand British troops still in India, on the understanding that they would still all be gone by Christmas. Mountbatten was charged with: tunnel vision but at the same time a lack of focus (too easily distracted by palace manoeuvrings and self-glorifying genealogy), a damaging prejudice in his dealings with Pakistan and its founding father, an equally damaging bias in favour of India and its founding party and a duplicitous readiness to play down the numbers who died of violence or enforced hunger and sickness throughout the eighteen months he exercised direct or indirect power. To that charge sheet could be added an acknowledgement of mistakes made, while at the same time passing the buck; as in accepting the case for tougher policing, notably the arrest of Sikh militants, while blaming the indigenous Intelligence Bureau for its inaccurate information. Roberts was simply the latest in a long line of critics, both in Britain and south Asia, dating back to the summer and autumn of 1947.126 The Opposition agenda was shifting even as the situation post-independence remained critical, but neither Churchill nor Beaverbrook, nor indeed Macmillan or Eden, accepted a seemingly all-pervasive message that here was a job well done. In due course a critical assessment of Mountbatten’s record in India moved from polemics and position papers to popular histories and scholarly investigations. By 1996 Ian Talbot, Britain’s most eminent authority on the Punjab, found himself addressing the same audience as a now less fiercely loyal Alan Campbell-Johnson. He noted the long history of charging the last Viceroy with an abdication of responsibility, while suggesting that neither harsh critics (Roberts, Conrad Corfield et  al) or slavish admirers (Collins and Lapierre) had recognized that a key element in Mountbatten’s mind was not just the fear of communal civil war, but how Congress would respond to such a fast-deteriorating situation (for example, if British troops were deployed, which Nehru vehemently opposed). To accommodate British strategic and commercial interests, even if stripped down in the face of harsh reality, Congress’s leaders had to be kept onside. This would later form the basis of Alex von Tunzelmann’s case for the defence (Mountbatten’s principal failing in her eyes being his decision to stay on).127 Talbot complained that very often the degree to which sectarian leaders tolerated or even encouraged violence was understated, rendering it too easy to blame one man for perhaps as many as a million deaths and an unprecedented displacement of refugees. Yet Yasmin Khan would insist one man and his immediate circle did indeed make ‘momentous decisions affecting 400  million’.128 Sceptics in south Asia would insist that the psychological outlook of sectarian leaders tolerating the intolerable remained the ultimate responsibility of the British, their having fostered communal division as a century-old strategy for the maintenance of power. Thus, Shashi Tharoor quoted Khan’s definition of partition as, ‘testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different and unknowable paths’. From this perspective Mountbatten was never the well-meaning if frustrated unifier, but yet another proconsul intent on divide and rule, irrespective of whose flag flew over the Red Fort. Ian Talbot, however, would argue that the Punjab’s brutally conflicting

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territorial nationalisms were rooted in rival religious revivalisms and the politicization of religious identity, and were thus, ‘responses to colonial modernity, rather than being willed by it’.129 Back in 1996 Talbot saw Mountbatten’s provision for the maintenance of order and security as being woefully inadequate, but he insisted that violence of such magnitude defied successive administrations’ ability to reassert their authority, presumably even if residual British and Gurkha forces had been deployed. Had troops been used, the intensity of violence within the Punjab would have risen dramatically given the number of para-military militias, and the anger of ex-servicemen with easy access to illicit weapons.130 This was in no way an apologia for the last Viceroy (the same paper highlighted clear evidence of the pressure placed on Radcliffe to change his mind), but it made a persuasive case that the image Mountbatten and his admirers projected of a man thinking strategically and responding adroitly to fast changing events was a chimera. He was ‘in fact as much a helpless bystander of events as a shaper of historical destinies … the end of the Raj was more an exercise in smoke and mirrors than a genuine demission of power.’ Thus Mountbatten, ‘succeeded brilliantly in adding lustre to what could have appeared a humiliating retreat’. In ‘straitened circumstances’ he did the best he could, most notably keeping both new nations, above all India, within the Commonwealth. Here, indeed, was a unique ‘response of imperial statecraft to intractable religious conflict’. Sectarian intractability of such magnitude left Mountbatten with only one option, partition. But this was a partition that, ‘was more than a mere territorial division; it was foremost accompanied by a division of minds,’ hence its poisonous legacy.131 Here was a downbeat assessment, decidedly at odds with both the damning and the heroic views of the Mountbattens’ time in New Delhi. Ten years on from his biography Philip Zeigler had adopted a similar viewpoint.132 Does it adequately address the argument that sticking to the original schedule would have saved lives? The implication must be that, given policing and military aid to the civil power were inadequate in the summer and autumn of 1947, defending the authority of the Raj for a further ten months would have been impossible, especially if Congress embraced non-cooperation and militant resistance. In other words, the bloodshed would have been that much greater, as spelt out so clearly by the much-quoted Rajagopalachari: ‘If the Viceroy had not transferred power when he did there could have been no power to transfer.’ Furthermore, British personnel and their families would have been highly vulnerable, and Congress had recognized the immediate and long-term damage to an independent India of a colonial power keen to leave suffering serious loss of life. In this respect, contrary to Wolpert’s portrayal of a supine Congress, its leadership were even more fearful than the British of a prolonged withdrawal stoking social revolution.133 With Palestine, an incipient Cold War, welfare reform and public ownership absorbing the Government’s attention, crisis management in New Delhi would have slipped further and further down the cabinet agenda. An overview that suggests the figure of ultimate authority is anything but naturally questions his or her capacity to shape events. Clearly there were those moments when Mountbatten was an agent of change, or a powerful presence exercising an immediate impact (think of his quick thinking in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination: he

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silenced those claiming the murderer was a Muslim, united Nehru and an estranged Patel in mourning and imposed order on a chaotic funeral.)134 If Mountbatten increasingly had little or no control over what was taking place across the country he could at least create a credible operational environment at the heart of government. Yes, his method of working left him open to criticism (all those ‘Dicky Birds’), but it was orderly, systematic and above all, markedly different from the Victorian practices that previously prevailed inside Viceroy’s House. The success of a fresh bureaucratic structure is evident in the volume of documentation recording the transfer of power. Not found in the official record of course are the off-the-cuff remarks, the indiscretions and the episodes where Mountbatten clearly did have an impact, but with negative consequences. An example of the latter was his habit of halving the time his staff anticipated necessary to complete a task; any such exercise would be completed to meet the imposed deadline, but without adequate contingency planning. Thus, despite warnings from the likes of Evan Jenkins, Mountbatten was repeatedly surprised by the turn of events, not least the level of violence provoked by his revised plan for partition (to be fair, he wasn’t alone in this, witness the horror felt by Nehru). It’s hard wholly to refute Yasmin Khan’s charge of callousness. It’s even harder to dismiss her contention that, ‘the British government’s most grievous failure was the shoddy way in which the plan was implemented’, a view endorsed by Lucy Chester in her forensic examination of Radcliffe’s modus operandi and eventual recommendations. What was brilliantly devised within the viceregal corridors of power too often fell apart when officials in the field set about supervising change. The consequence wasn’t just a further round in a bruising party political and sectarian battle, but a ‘cauldron of traumatic transition’, out of which emerged mirror images of the ‘other’ state as a malign and permanent entity.135 To be fair, a fresh environment and a fresh mentality meant an inclusive approach to Anglo-Indian relations previously unseen, and one realized in a myriad of different ways. Mountbatten led from the front on this, but the vital force in a radical reshaping of the Raj in its dying days was clearly the Vicereine. For seventy-plus years Edwina’s humanitarian efforts in India have been rightly praised, even if too often the contribution of south Asian woman working alongside her has been ignored. Mountbatten endeavoured from the moment they came home to ensure his wife’s role was properly recognized, and not solely so that he could bask in reflected glory.136 If he was open to the charge of repeatedly re-writing history, in this case he was for once consistent: Edwina Mountbatten fell in love with India and Indians – and one Indian in particular – and she translated that deep affection into tangible measures to improve the well-being of the displaced, the starving and the abused. For Edwina, leaving India in July 1948 was a painful experience, in no way eased by the warm reception that awaited in London: the Prime Minister made a point of being at Northolt to welcome the Mountbattens home.137 Attlee was scrupulous in respecting Admiralty autonomy when it came to determining Mountbatten’s future career. A posting to Malta saw command of the 1st Cruiser Squadron, as once more Mountbatten reclaimed his place on the Active Flag List. Elevation to Vice-Admiral preceded promotion in April 1950 to second-in-command of the Mediterranean Fleet. Soon after, Mountbatten was back in London as Fourth Sea Lord, his responsibility for procurement and logistics clearly playing to his strengths. At this point Mountbatten’s

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progress to the Navy’s highest office might easily have stalled, had he accepted yet another secondment. In late 1950 Attlee gave serious consideration to the suggestion of John Strachey, fellow-travelling polemicist of the ’thirties now ensconced at the War Office, that he should appoint Mountbatten as British High Commissioner for the Far East. Here was someone ‘genuinely and at heart in sympathy with the new Nationalism of Asia’.138 In the end no offer was made, and instead Mountbatten found himself commanding the Mediterranean Fleet. He simultaneously assumed command of all NATO forces in what clearly was a critical theatre of operation. Promotion to full admiral duly followed, by which time a change of government had called into question his progression to First Sea Lord. A vengeful Churchill could easily have thwarted Mountbatten’s ambition  –  no one knew better than the man who had regretfully accepted the father’s resignation in October 1914 how much the son sought to right a wrong. Mountbatten never disguised his desire to emulate Prince Louis Battenberg in leading the Royal Navy through a dynamic process of rebuilding and renewal. Churchill queried and questioned, signalling his readiness to veto Mountbatten’s appointment. That power of veto was shared with Andrew Cunningham, as an admiral of the fleet technically still a serving officer. From his days as C-in-C the Mediterranean Fleet Cunningham was never a great admirer of Mountbatten, invariably siding with Alan Brooke after he joined the COSC as First Sea Lord in October 1943. ‘ABC’ was unarguably the Royal Navy’s greatest fighting admiral since Nelson, and his word was final. In the autumn of 1954 Mountbatten’s rise to the very top hung in the balance, but Cunningham gave him the benefit of the doubt and, once Ismay had bent his ear, a reluctant Churchill said yes.139 On 18 April 1955 Mountbatten returned to the Admiralty as Chief of the Naval Staff. The last Viceroy could have paid a heavy price for his time in India, and the obvious closeness of his association with Attlee and Cripps, but in the end he successfully reached the top of the tree. Not that his ambition was in any way satiated, or the challenges to come that less demanding than those faced in Richmond Terrace, Kandy and New Delhi.

­2

The Suez crisis, 1956

Introduction One event above all others marked Mountbatten’s initial tenure as Chief of the Naval Staff: the Egyptian government’s nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. The Suez crisis is of course synonymous with Anthony Eden. It destroyed his career and in the eyes of many his reputation. A further casualty was, as we shall see, Eden’s fragile friendship with the First Sea Lord. Not that the latter saw their relationship thus. The first principle of what might be labelled the Mountbatten meta-narrative was that any adversarial relations were only temporary, with all parties in due course reconciled. In recounting his life story Eden fitted neatly into Mountbatten’s ‘increasingly fragile myth of consensuality, conviviality, and camaraderie – he got on well with everyone, and in turn they got on well with him.’1 Self-deceiving or not, Mountbatten considered himself a firm ally of Eden the anti-appeaser before the war, and a staunch friend in the years that followed: ‘I think it is not too much to claim that I was able to influence him more than he influenced me, for I had a progressive outlook from the beginning and he started with a rather reactionary Tory outlook and gradually came round to my point of view.’2 Yet Eden was always his own man, unlikely to have his politics remoulded by an Admiralty fast-tracker, however elevated his connections. Mountbatten was writing in 1966, conveniently forgetting that two years earlier, when pressed by Eden and Lord Salisbury, he had admitted exaggerating his influence over them when both men chose to quit Neville Chamberlain’s government in February 1938.3 Clearly any irritation at the time was soon forgotten, if only because letters from Mountbatten during and after the war were always warm and cordial, with a genuine concern for the recipient’s health and well-being. At South East Asia Command Mountbatten was suitably sensitive and supportive when Eden and his estranged wife’s eldest son died flying with the RAF in Burma. In 1953 as C-in-C of the Mediterranean Fleet he arranged for the convalescent Foreign Secretary and his second wife Clarissa to cruise the Greek islands on board HMS Surprise.4 Two years later, in February 1955, Mountbatten orchestrated a meeting at Broadlands between the new Prime Minister and Jawaharlal Nehru. This awkward gathering did little other than to demonstrate how little the two men had in common. Eden’s jaundiced impression of the encounter highlighted the degree to which he and Lady Mountbatten loathed each other. This was scarcely surprising, as three years

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before Eden had signalled to his private secretary his strong dislike of ‘playboys and smarties, including the Mountbattens.’5 As it transpired, Edwina Mountbatten – unlike Clarissa Eden – felt wholly detached from the crisis that transfixed Downing Street in the summer and autumn of 1956. On hearing the dramatic news from Egypt Edwina urged her husband to take a firm stand against the use of force, and then – no doubt to Mountbatten’s immense relief – she left London to spend the summer in Majorca.6 Mountbatten would remember 24  September 1956 as the only occasion during the whole of the Suez crisis when he found himself alone with Eden – here was the moment that – out of uniform, and out of role – he spoke frankly to his old friend.7 This was no ordinary Sunday at Chequers, which helps explain why an official photographer mingled among the ministers, mandarins and military advisers. Out in the garden Mountbatten was caught with his guard down. In an informal shot of the Prime Minister and his chiefs of staff, only the First Sea Lord acknowledges the camera. The bespoke suit seems ill-fitting, the cigar appears incongruous and the stance belies self-assurance. For once the photogenic aristocrat looks older than his fifty-six years. Unusually for Mountbatten, the photograph conveys the impression of a man uncomfortable with himself. It’s a rare moment, but in retrospect revealing. The Prime Minister has his back to the camera, and Mountbatten’s body language signals indifference to whatever Eden is saying.8 With the benefit of hindsight one can read too much into a single image. Yet only the deepest sceptic would contest Mountbatten’s post-retirement claim that he anticipated the consequences of an Anglo-French taskforce invading Egypt in order to reclaim the Suez Canal. Here after all was a chief of staff uniquely qualified to comment upon the prevailing force of anti-colonial, nationalist sentiment across the developing nations of south Asia and the Middle East. It’s scarcely surprising that he anticipated Eden’s actions would destabilize the region, undermine the authority of the UN, divide the Commonwealth and diminish Britain’s global standing. Thus, however contradictory Mountbatten’s behaviour at the time, there seems no reason to question the sincerity of his beliefs.9 Surprisingly, Mountbatten’s most recent biographer is rather dismissive of his agonizing over Eden’s readiness to reoccupy the Canal Zone and to remove President Nasser – Andrew Lownie is more interested in connecting the First Sea Lord to the fate of the frogman ‘Buster’ Crabbe, who disappeared while spying on the Soviet cruiser which brought Bulganin and Khruschev to Britain in April 1956.10 Yet it’s no exaggeration to say that the Suez crisis was a pivotal moment in an already eventful life. No one knew this better than Mountbatten himself, which was why – like the Dieppe raid – he kept revisiting his actions and attitudes, consequently revising and refining his narrative of events from Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956 through to the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force four months later. On two occasions he drafted letters of resignation; the second time on the eve of battle, only for Lord Hailsham as First Lord of the Admiralty to insist, with Eden’s full backing, that he remain at his post. The question arises as to how seriously Mountbatten considered leaving the position his whole career had been focused upon attaining; not least because he continued to fulfil his responsibilities as head of the Royal Navy in a suitably professional and efficient manner. Indeed, the paradox regarding

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Mountbatten’s behaviour throughout the Suez crisis is highlighted by his being the first chief of staff to learn of the protocol signed with the French and Israelis at Sèvres on 25 October. In retirement he was highly critical of collusion, and yet following the United Nations ceasefire he was characteristically thorough in removing from Royal Navy records evidence of conspiracy.11 Mountbatten’s credentials as a stalwart opponent of invasion are further compromised by his insistence later in life that Eden should have accepted his initial advice to stage a rapid coup de main. When the Chiefs of Staff met ministers in Downing Street late on the night of 26 July Mountbatten proposed that the Mediterranean Fleet sail from Malta to collect the two Commandos stationed on Cyprus, and with carrier-based air support secure a bridgehead on the Canal from Port Said south to Qantara. The belief of both the Army and the RAF in the need to deploy overwhelming force meant a lengthy delay in the arrival of armoured support, with suitable logistical back-up. Nevertheless, Eden insisted that two battalions of Royal Marines could easily withstand any Egyptian counter-offensive. However, a cautious Mountbatten now lined up alongside the other chiefs and withdrew his original suggestion. Despite extensive documentary and oral evidence that he changed his mind – including his own recollection of the meeting, as recorded seven weeks later – an elderly Mountbatten insisted this not to have been the case, and that an early opportunity to negotiate from strength was lost.12 For all the vanity and conceit, in the years following his retirement Mountbatten remained sufficiently reflexive as to embrace rigorous self-examination where required.

Figure  8 India: a welcome home for the now former Governor-General and Lady Mountbatten from the Duke of Edinburgh, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, High Commissioner Krishna Menon and Indian Finance Minister Shanmukam Chetty, Northolt, 23 June 1948

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Admittedly the answers would be confirmative and affirmative, but the questions were nevertheless pertinent. To what extent was Mountbatten the consummate professional in practice a party to the collusion he later condemned? What insight did the First Sea Lord’s experience in 1956 offer into the most testing crisis of civil-military relations, namely a chief of staff considering resignation on a matter of principle? In Mountbatten’s case that principle concerned a military operation the planning of which he oversaw with his usual assiduousness, and which he always portrayed as a model of inter-service collaboration. Clearly, we need to understand why on two separate occasions Mountbatten did not relinquish his post, with political reverberations far greater than if any subsequent chief of staff chose to resign. Any such understanding necessitates a recurring theme, namely the manner in which he reconciled gnawing doubts with wholehearted application. As later chapters demonstrate, Mountbatten’s complex, sometimes contradictory, attitude towards nuclear weapons, not least the capacity of the United Kingdom to maintain a genuinely independent deterrent, provides a comparable tension between conscience and healthy scepticism on the one side, and pragmatism, professionalism and ambition on the other.

­Anatomy of a crisis (1): the summer of 1956 As we’ll see in Chapter 6, Mountbatten refused Eden’s invitation to serve as the first permanent chair of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Despite his unique position as a former member of the COSC he was still fresh in his post as First Sea Lord. He was also well aware that his reputation as a modernizer was interpreted by the traditionalist Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Gerald Templer, as naked ambition.13 The Prime Minister therefore turned to the RAF’s Sir William Dickson, an experienced and highly regarded Chief of the Air Staff. Dickson, however, was ill when the Chiefs of Staff were summoned with great urgency to Downing Street on the evening of Thursday, 26 July. Dickson’s absence meant Eden treated Mountbatten as primus inter pares when asking his military advisers for a swift response to President Nasser’s brilliantly executed seizure of the Canal. Unfortunately for the service chiefs, the Joint Planning Staff ’s contingency arrangements for countering such a radical and dramatic move on the part of the Egyptian government were still in draft form. The planning priority in the eastern Mediterranean was fulfilling Britain’s 1950 treaty obligation to defend Jordan if attacked by Israel, a military response code-named ‘Cordage’. It would be easy to assume that henceforth this became a secondary consideration. In fact, this was far from the case, and the planning and implementation of Operation Cordage remained a key concern of the COSC until late October: the nightmare scenario within Whitehall saw Britain confronting Israel on one front and sharing a common enemy on another.14 As the crisis unfolded Mountbatten became increasingly fearful of such an alarming development. However, inside Number Ten late on 26 July he raised Eden’s spirits by proposing a rapid coup de main. Why not, he suggested, despatch the Mediterranean Fleet from Valetta to collect the two Commandos currently stationed on Cyprus? Then, with carrier-based air support, the Royal Marines would achieve a surprise landing at Port Said prior to securing the causeway – but crucially, not the whole waterway. Eden

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was exultant, but then Templer, backed by Dickson’s successor as Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Dermot Boyle, provided the necessary reality check. They anticipated six and three weeks respectively to provide adequate military and air support for a bridgehead held by only 1200 commandos. A deflated Prime Minister turned to Mountbatten, who conceded that, ‘it would be extremely difficult to maintain them there in the face of Egyptian opposition.’ In his own words, he therefore executed a neat about-turn, and ‘recommended that unilateral action by the Royal Navy and Royal Marines should not be taken’.15 For Templer an isolated assault force signalled another Arnhem but for Mountbatten it was Dieppe that cast the long shadow, as evident in his cautious response only two days before to the JPS paper on war with Egypt: the CIGS had considered the force projections too conservative, whereas the one-time Chief of Combined Operations thought they under-estimated the likely level of resistance.16 Eden railed but the First Sea Lord now sided with his peers, and the orthodoxy of overwhelming force dictated a lengthy delay in preparation of a suitable military response. Some historians have suggested that the Chiefs of Staff threatened resignation should the Prime Minister order the implementation of Mountbatten’s initial suggestion, but there is no clear evidence to support this claim. Crucially, Mountbatten makes no mention of any such threat in his account of that night’s heated discussion.17 The decision not to initiate military action as an immediate response to news reaching London of the Canal’s nationalization had profound ramifications. This reluctance to act fast was precisely the outcome Nasser’s intelligence analysts had

Figure 9  First Sea Lord: the Mountbattens’ first visit back to India, 18 March 1956

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anticipated: the President’s advisers calculated that international pressure on Britain to accept a negotiated settlement meant only a 20 per cent chance of war by the end of September.18 Thus, if the Egyptians proved capable of running the Canal, and they avoided further provocation of Britain and France, then nationalization would soon be seen as a fait accompli, further undermining both countries’ questionable justification of force under international law. This soon became obvious to the Egypt Committee, Eden’s hastily assembled body of senior colleagues discreet from the Defence Committee and remote from rigorous scrutiny by the full cabinet.19 As the Egypt Committee’s most hawkish member, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was especially exercised by the need for a credible casus belli. The same was true of Sir Walter Monckton, Eden’s Minister of Defence, but for very different reasons from Harold Macmillan. Uninterested in matters military, Monckton had begrudgingly moved to the MOD pending his anticipated elevation to the head of the judiciary. It was a sceptical Monkton who is said to have commented after reading the service chiefs’ first stab at an invasion plan, ‘Very interesting, but how do we actually start this war?’.20 William Clark, the Prime Minister’s press secretary, attended that first crisis meeting in Downing Street, where, in his own words, ‘the Chiefs of Staff told Eden that although Britain could deal with Cyprus or Mau Mau or with atomic war, it could not deal militarily with a little local episode in the eastern Mediterranean. I felt ashamed that our nakedness could be thus revealed to the French and American representatives present … ’ In 2003 Jonathan Pearson questioned the veracity and authenticity of Clark’s diary entry, and he queried whether Gerald Templer was in fact present. Pearson was on firmer ground when pointing out that Mountbatten’s remarks to the Cabinet and to the COSC on 27 July contradicted his recollection of the previous night’s meeting, as recorded six weeks later.21 Pearson argued that, ‘the political directive was clear and pacifist’, establishing at the outset an executive policy based not on single-minded belligerence but an intention to negotiate from a position of military strength. In his – clearly contentious – view, Eden’s goal was internationalization of the Canal and not regime change. Like David Dutton, one in a long line of Eden biographers, Pearson pointed out that the future Lord Avon’s refusal to admit collusion even in retirement was self-defeating. Eden’s misguided intransigence undermined the very real case that a credible and coherent policy had been pursued prior to his embracing France’s conspiracy with Israel on 14 October. Seen in this light the dominant historiography of the Suez crisis, depicting the Prime Minister as intent on ‘resolution’ by force, was a recycling of contestable evidence from those officials and politicians who resigned, notably Clark and the Foreign Office minister Anthony Nutting; as well as dissenting grandees such as Monckton, Rab Butler and of course Admiral Lord Mountbatten. Pearson was only mildly interested in why Mountbatten later changed his story. Not least because he refused to believe the story in the first place.22 Pearson highlighted early tensions within the Chiefs of Staff. He drew attention to Sir Frank Cooper’s dismissal of Mountbatten as a man of principle, whether in 1956 or at any other time. Over the years Cooper, a former Spitfire pilot and a future permanent secretary at the MOD, observed Mountbatten at close quarters. In his opinion, ‘nobody trusted him’, not least during the Suez crisis. It was Cooper to whom Dermot Boyle

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confided, ‘Eden has gone bananas. We may have to mount some invasion of the Canal Zone.’23 While Templer’s later quarrel was with Mountbatten, in the first instance it was the Chief of the Air Staff whose commitment he questioned. The CIGS soon emerged as the keenest advocate of action. A disastrous mission to Amman had left Templer sympathetic to Eden’s increasingly hostile view of Nasser’s pan-Arab ambitions.24 Mountbatten on the other hand saw the Egyptian leader as no great threat to British interests, unless for any reason he was seriously provoked.25 His talks with Nasser in late 1954 had not borne fruit in terms of military collaboration, but they were nevertheless cordial. This contrasted starkly with Eden’s experience in Cairo a few months later, when he was uncharacteristically clumsy in his courting of the Egyptian President. Mountbatten’s conversation was sufficiently cordial that he strayed well beyond his brief, raising with Nasser the prospect of an Anglo-Egyptian partnership at some point in the future. The Foreign Office felt keenly that Mountbatten had blurred the boundary between security concerns and matters of diplomacy. Eighteen months later, when the notion of a second meeting arose, Eden made clear his disapproval: the First Sea Lord’s latest tour of the Mediterranean would most definitely not extend to Egypt.26

Anatomy of a crisis (2): orchestrating an invasion and a resignation The First Sea Lord may not have met Nasser again, but their solitary meeting was surely in his mind when, on 1 August 1956, he drafted a personal letter to Eden. According to Mountbatten, his intention was to correct the Prime Minister’s assumption of unanimity when talking on the telephone the day before: a gushing Eden had supposedly declared, ‘how happy I am to have you with me during this time of crisis and I hope that you agree with all that I am doing.’ In his draft letter Mountbatten sympathized with Eden over the ‘great weight you are bearing’, but advised caution when dealing with the regime in Cairo. Mountbatten recommended offering Nasser terms which, ‘it would be patently unreasonable and provocative for him to reject.’ Such action would maximize sympathy for Britain around the world, as would a clear message that any military preparation was precautionary and not with a view to imminent invasion. Meanwhile efforts should be intensified to secure an alliance sufficiently broad that the British and French governments could rebut any charge of acting unilaterally should force prove a last resort. Attracting a broad base of international support for a ‘realistic, constructive offer’ would not only negate a widely shared belief in south Asia that Britain remained at heart ‘imperialistic’, but it would also silence critics in the United States. With due prescience Mountbatten pointed out that the Egyptians had no record of seriously sabotaging the Canal, but that they might well do so if an invading force, ‘seized the means by which Nasser has told them their standard of living can be raised’.27 India’s first Governor-General was uniquely qualified to stress the importance of the former colonial power convincing the Commonwealth’s newest members to come on board. Similarly, he knew that early gestures of support from senior staff within the US Navy meant nothing if the prevailing political mood in Washington was hostile.

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As we shall see in Chapter 5, Mountbatten was regularly crossing the Atlantic in the mid-fifties. He was courting the Navy Department for greater access to the USN’s nuclear submarine programme, and his close military contacts gave him a unique perspective on the Eisenhower Administration.28 Mountbatten’s advice to Eden might be that of a friend but he was after all writing to the Prime Minister in his capacity as First Sea Lord. As such, the letter needed sanction from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Cilcennin. Jim Thomas’s elevation to the House of Lords signalled his imminent retirement after thirteen years of front bench responsibility for naval affairs. As Eden’s PPS he had resigned in February 1938 and then abstained in the Commons vote on the Munich debate. Mountbatten respected Thomas’s anti-appeasement credentials, his affability, his obvious affection for the Navy and his popularity in the wardroom and on the lower deck. He considered the reform-minded Thomas to be ‘a great personal friend of mine’, as confirmed by their correspondence across the 1950s. In 1956 Mountbatten was loath for the now Lord Cilcennin to leave office, and the minister himself was in no rush  –  not until the First Sea Lord fixed up a week at Windsor as Prince Philip’s guest, prior to his joining the royal consort’s entourage for an extended tour of the Commonwealth on board Britannia.29 Although wholly in agreement Cilcennin vetoed Mountbatten’s letter, partly ‘for his own good’ but primarily because constitutional convention dictated that a chief of staff could not furnish the Prime Minister with purely political advice. Ten years later Mountbatten claimed that he fought ‘bitterly’ to persuade Cilcennin to change his mind, fruitlessly seeking support from ‘another very old friend’, the Minister of Defence. Surprisingly Monckton and Mountbatten had much in common, not least their politics. To the disgust of arch-critic Andrew Roberts, both men were advisers of Edward VIII, allies of Sir Stafford Cripps, admirers of Nehru, appeasers of the TUC and advocates of ‘liberal internationalism’ as an ideology of imperial retreat.30 While Monckton shared Mountbatten’s familiarity with India and consequent fear for the future integrity of the Commonwealth, he also saw himself as, ‘one of those Englishmen who felt a strong affinity with the Arabs’. His account of the Suez crisis, unconvincing and often disingenuous, states that he, ‘was not fundamentally troubled by moral considerations’. Thus, he questioned military intervention solely because of its impact on Arab opinion.31 This contrasts with Mountbatten, for whom there clearly was a moral dimension, and who assumed Monckton was similarly fearful of naval bombardment inflicting disproportionate civilian casualties. Opposition principally rooted in real politick does however explain why the pragmatic Monckton proved so reluctant to resign. For an ostensibly non-partisan centrist he proved every inch the party politician in not wishing to damage Eden’s administration. He told David Astor, the Observer’s owner-editor, that, ‘I owe my position to Anthony. It would be an act of betrayal. I can’t be the person who knifes him, and brings him down.’ For this reason, if for no other, Monckton remained in the Cabinet as Paymaster General when Antony Head was promoted from the War Office to Defence the following October.32 Retaining power influenced Monckton’s dealings with an assortment of Whitehall dissenters, not least the First Sea Lord. Typically Mountbatten saw the veto of his letter as a genuine watershed in the unfolding of the crisis, ‘because it might have been

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the means of pulling up the Prime Minister in his headlong rush to disaster at the very beginning’.33 On 2  August the Egypt Committee approved the Chiefs of Staff ’s plan for an Anglo-French taskforce to seize Port Said: while the French favoured elite forces undertaking a fast and flexible operation, the British insisted upon an armada of warships, auxiliary vessels and overwhelming military force. Attention focused upon the seizures of both Port Said and, on the opposite bank, Port Fouad. However, eight days later Harold Macmillan submitted a powerful critique of the plan, which, despite its emanating from the Treasury and not the MOD, prompted a radical rethink. Consequently, there emerged a fresh Force Commanders’ Outline Plan. This envisaged an assault on Alexandria, eventually code-named Operation Musketeer. At subsequent COSC meetings Mountbatten looked beyond the harsh reality of a planned attack on Egypt’s second city to urge consideration of what now would be labelled an exit strategy.34 In this respect the Chiefs of Staff pre-empted the planning for regime change undertaken by the Cabinet Secretary’s Egypt (Official) Committee of senior civil servants on and after 24 August. That same day Monckton most forcefully expressed his reservations about the whole enterprise at a meeting of the Egypt Committee, restating his views in Cabinet on 28 August. Monckton never again voiced his concerns so loudly, which helps explain why a further two months would pass before Eden finally facilitated his departure from Defence.35 The First Sea Lord was present at the cabinet meeting on 28  August. He heard Monkton insist that the challenge was not mounting an invasion of Egypt but establishing the ‘means of extricating ourselves’. This echoed the argument Mountbatten repeatedly aired at the COSC, with strong contemporary resonances in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan: the Egyptian people could not be expected to embrace western principles of liberal democracy if imposed by force of arms; and in any case how long could such an occupation be maintained? Throughout August and into September Mountbatten voiced dissatisfaction with the Joint Intelligence Committee’s assessment of internal opposition. Time and again, he called on the Foreign Office to be more pro-active in its analysis of what impact military action would have across the whole of the Middle East and beyond.36 Mountbatten and Templer repeatedly clashed. The CIGS had seemingly learnt little from his experience in Malaya, seriously underestimating the momentum of anti-colonialism and the dynamics of nationalism across the developing world. In this respect Templer was not that different from Eden, whose views on the Commonwealth, in the words of one leading post-colonial historian, ‘seem to have been the standard fare of the 1920s and 1930s, rather superficial and not by personal choice at all subject to, or ripe for, agonising reappraisals’.37 Someone still so close to Congress’s most powerful family could scarcely ignore such a profound geopolitical shift, witness Mountbatten’s efforts to promote Krishna Menon and through him Nehru as intermediaries.38 Relentless lobbying of Sir William Dickson saw the chairman of the COSC accede to Mountbatten’s wishes and initiate a Joint Planning Staff report on the exact size and composition of an occupation force.39 Ministers on the Egypt Committee had assumed that only the Canal Zone would require a long-term presence. Conversely, the JPS confirmed the view of Mountbatten and the taskforce C-in-C, General Sir Charles Keightley, that a new regime would survive only if supported across Egypt

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by up to four divisions. The report’s manpower projections made alarming reading, and Mountbatten secured his fellow chiefs’ agreement that an amended version be submitted to the Egypt Committee. Crucially the introduction now stated that, ‘We should endeavour to gain Egyptian co-operation by avoiding occupation or by restricting it to the minimum.’ On 26 October an irate Prime Minister, by now a party to co-ordinating Anglo-French military action with Israel, insisted that the Chiefs of Staff withdraw their paper.40 Eden’s bad-tempered dealings with his most senior military advisers are welldocumented, Dickson confiding to Sir John Colville that he, ‘had never been spoken to in his life in the way the PM several times spoke to him’. When Keightley tried to raise his concerns over the long-term occupation of Egypt, ‘Eden gave him a very severe dressing down and told him that there were political questions with which military commanders should not concern themselves.’ Mountbatten learnt of this meeting in June 1958, quoting it as further evidence of the Prime Minister’s refusal to think through the consequences of his actions. Eden’s narrow interpretation of the basic tenets of command and control was intended to stifle debate whenever the military asked awkward questions and/or sought clear ministerial direction. According to Dickson, the Prime Minister was especially averse to Mountbatten’s persistent questioning, ‘about the political factors affecting the operation’. The First Sea Lord refused to back down, while at the same time never appearing, ‘half-hearted in any way in executing the political directions’.41 Mountbatten’s unique authority rested partly on an obvious ability to ensure the Navy would meet ministers’ high expectations, but primarily upon who he was. His singularity as a chief of staff – all too obvious to the occupant of Number Ten – is discussed at length in Chapter 6. Always keenly aware that rank and record translated into real power Mountbatten’s huge self-belief rendered him a formidable opponent, not least because the arrogance only rarely tipped over into a sense of invulnerability. For this reason, a cautious First Sea Lord followed his September 1956 calendar of events with an equally detailed memorandum, entitled ‘Naval Responsibility for Inflicting Civilian Casualties’.42 By this point the taskforce’s destination had switched back to the Canal Zone. Musketeer’s abortive plan for securing Alexandria had assumed extensive collateral damage, and the restored operation to seize Port Said was still heavily dependent upon air power. A sustained aerial campaign across Egypt meant unavoidable civilian losses. Sir Guy Grantham as C-in-C of the Mediterranean Fleet had a dual concern in that deployment of the Fleet Air Arm would leave the Royal Navy vulnerable to the charge of indiscriminate bombardment by both sea and air. Grantham was close to Mountbatten, as was the vice admiral in command of the carrier force, Manley Power. Unlike the First Sea Lord both men believed that there was a strong case for military action. Nevertheless, they shared deep misgivings over the prospect of Royal Navy pilots bombing targets certain to contain non-combatants. They questioned the Admiralty’s acceptance of RAF assurances that a ‘short conclusive campaign’ could keep casualties to a minimum; a sympathetic Grantham had passed on to Mountbatten ‘Lofty’ Power’s complaint that navy pilots, ‘are trained for war not for indiscriminate killing … I do not consider it either right or fair that they should be used in a manner which can only earn the obloquy of our own people and of the whole world.’43

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Not that Grantham was averse to naval bombardment if considered appropriate and proportionate. This would be confirmed on 30 October when, with the taskforce already at sea, Eden tried to reinforce the artificiality of a policing operation by ordering that Port Said should not be shelled. Stung by Grantham’s complaint that this ‘was the same kind of damn nonsense that happened in Dieppe’, Mountbatten flew him home to confront the Prime Minister.44 At that moment professional judgement and bitter experience prevailed over any continuing crisis of conscience. With the Nuremberg trials still fresh in their minds, Mountbatten and his operational commanders in the eastern Mediterranean were genuinely concerned that, in the messy aftermath of an internationally condemned assault upon Port Said, they might find themselves charged with war crimes. Lord Hailsham’s biographer has suggested that these concerns extended to the First Lord of the Admiralty given the warm relations he enjoyed with Mountbatten early in his tenure.45 The Foreign Office’s Legal Adviser questioned the case for retaliation by force, but the dominant legal opinion within the Egypt Committee and the full cabinet was that of the Lord Chancellor: Lord Kilmuir’s maximalist interpretation of defending property rights overrode adherence to a less conservative, less confrontational interpretation of international law, as embodied in the United Nations Charter. Neither the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, nor the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, saw reason to provide ministers with an adequate riposte to Kilmuir. Indeed, Sir Frank Cooper later claimed that Selwyn Lloyd discreetly denied his cabinet colleagues access to the cautious advice emanating from the Foreign Office’s Legal Department. Nevertheless, an experienced international jurist like Monckton recognized the questionable nature of Britain’s case for war – and so did the head of the Royal Navy.46 As Mountbatten recalled nine years later, ‘the era of gun boat diplomacy was over and we were bound to lose our name with the great majority of the United Nations, as indeed we did.’47 Flouting the founding principles of the UN, threatening innocent civilians and endangering global security together formed the basis of Mountbatten’s objection to Eden’s warlike policy. On 20 August he drafted a letter of resignation, insisting that, ‘I  would be failing in honesty and integrity if I did not beg you to reconsider your action.’ Rather than the Prime Minister, it was in fact Cilcennin who first learnt that the Chief of the Naval Staff felt he could no longer remain in situ. He urged Mountbatten to seek advice from the Minister of Defence.48 At a meeting with Cilcennin and Monckton on 1 September both men expressed sympathy, urged Mountbatten to wait upon events and insisted that he tell no one of his intention to resign. This raises the intriguing question of what Mountbatten might have confided to Her Majesty while staying at Balmoral the previous week. Monckton maintained his cabinet colleagues knew he would resign if Musketeer was not modified to reduce the risk of civilian casualties; and Cilcennin said the same would have been true for him were he not finally making way for Lord Hailsham. A long debate ensued on the complex legal and constitutional issues raised by a chief of staff choosing to resign rather than carry out executive orders to initiate a war. Monckton challenged the propriety of a serving officer at the very highest level of command in effect refusing to carry out orders. Mountbatten pointed out the prevailing juridical principle at the Nuremberg trials that obeying orders was no excuse or justification

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for causing avoidable civilian deaths, and that by bearing ultimate responsibility a commanding officer must therefore acknowledge guilt. Monckton argued that United Nations approval, or simply the backing of parliament for action, provided an umbrella of legitimacy, at which point resignation became a clear dereliction of duty. In the first instance, therefore, Mountbatten should brief Eden as to his concerns but make no mention of resignation. If plans for Musketeer remained the same, and their imminent implementation forced the Minister of Defence to leave office, then Mountbatten, having already advised the Prime Minister as to his opposition, would be justified in resigning.49 Presumably the central tenet of Monckton’s argument was that the departure of a cabinet minister so intimately involved in preparation for war would signal deep division within the Government, and further call into question the legitimacy of military action which lacked overwhelming parliamentary and public support. As we’ve seen, it was for precisely this reason that over the ensuing weeks Monckton chose not to resign, convincing himself that a Conservative government’s survival was in the national interest; in so doing he overrode those profound objections to military intervention which he openly shared with Mountbatten.50 Whether or not the Queen was party to Mountbatten’s thinking, a number of other questions arise concerning his stated intention to resign. Keenly aware of the huge political fallout did he ever believe his resignation would be accepted? If not, then was this no more than a cavalier gesture of dissent? Given that Mountbatten’s advancement to Admiral of the Fleet was imminent did he seriously consider sacrificing the supreme accolade? His record of meeting Cilcennin and Monckton states that he did, but any account provided by Mountbatten demands a healthy scepticism on the part of the reader. Could such an ambitious and driven man have given up so much on a matter of principle? When the First Sea Lord next raised the possibility of his resigning he had secured promotion, and the potential cost was not so great.51 Second time around Eden did become involved. By then Mountbatten was dealing with a much tougher politician as First Lord of the Admiralty. In the first week of September Lord Hailsham arrived at the Admiralty, where his first meeting was with the First Sea Lord. To his considerable surprise he learnt that no briefing on the taskforce could occur without the Prime Minister’s permission. Hailsham later recalled how, once authorization had been given, a staff officer briefed him on Operation Musketeer. Pressed for his opinion the young captain labelled it ‘madness’ and the minister readily agreed.52 Hailsham’s enthusiasm for the enterprise was tempered by calculation of the scale of Egyptian casualties. In North Africa during the war he had seen for himself the devastation caused by naval bombardment. Unsurprisingly, in Mountbatten’s account he himself briefed Hailsham, who then admitted that ‘he had never envisaged anything as horrible as this and he was in despair what to do’. Mountbatten ostensibly advised that he seek a meeting with the other two service ministers and Walter Monckton. Hailsham later told him all four men had agreed that, ‘this monstrous form of aggression could not be permitted to go ahead’; even if Antony Head said that he could see no alternative other than suffering ‘deaths by a thousand cuts and slow strangulation’.53 Head’s qualification was important in the light of his subsequent support for Eden, and an obvious need to maintain a

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harmonious working relationship with his chief of staff, Gerald Templer. Regularly summoned from the War Office to meetings of the Egypt Committee, Head was the only service minister to have a clear picture of what was going on. According to Mountbatten he was now visited by Charles Keightley, the C-in-C Middle East Forces, who was similarly fearful of excessive civilian casualties. Keightley was keen for the Chiefs of Staff to endorse his radical reworking of the Force Commanders’ Outline Plan, with the invasion again focused upon Port Said and Port Fouad: the British would seize the larger port, on the western side of the Canal, while French forces would secure control of harbour facilities on the far bank. At the next meeting of the COSC a majority of those present – including Mountbatten – convinced Templer to abandon the idea of capturing Alexandria. Unlike their French counterparts, British commanders anticipated stiff resistance, hence their fear of sustained street fighting in a large and unfamiliar city. Keightley and his small staff of largely RAF personnel argued that a targeted air assault would reduce Egypt’s capacity to counterattack, by disrupting the state apparatus and the local economy. Crucially, a short but intense bombing of urban and military targets would complement an increasingly aggressive campaign of psychological warfare. In consequence, they argued, morale would be seriously undermined, among both civilians and Egyptian ground forces. This new approach meant that a previously cautious timetable for securing the Canal could be significantly shortened.54 On 7 September Monckton and the Chiefs of Staff took Charles Keightley to brief the Prime Minister. Years later Hailsham would recall a conversation in Downing Street during which he alone convinced Eden to think again; but this was clearly an inflated claim and in any case he was mistaken as to the date.55 When Eden met his military advisers Mountbatten took the lead (‘I don’t think I have ever been so eloquent’), with the CIGS surprisingly supportive. Initially the Prime Minister dismissed the anticipated scale of Egyptian resistance and the predicted number of casualties; but was he really surprised when Mountbatten warned of a hostile UN response? The Chiefs’ reality check saw Eden eventually come around to their point of view. That afternoon, according to Mountbatten, it was his arguments which Eden drew upon when convincing the Egypt Committee to endorse Keightley’s wholly ‘new concept of operations … the aero-psychological campaign’. When informed of the committee’s decision, General Hugh Stockwell, the taskforce’s land commander, voiced his opposition on behalf of the original Anglo-French planning team. They saw the seizure of Alexandria as an obvious first step to removing the regime in Cairo, as did Guy Mollet the French Prime Minister. Guy Grantham, protective of his Fleet Air Arm pilots, remained fearful of excessive collateral damage. Yet this collective scepticism counted for little because both the COSC and the Cabinet were agreed on a fresh timetable for what now became ‘Operation Musketeer Revise’. An irony-free Mountbatten noted how his grateful minister had, ‘congratulated me on my courage and felt that I had saved him from a very embarrassing situation’.56 Nearly half a century later Eric Grove and Sally Rohan were similarly effusive, seeing this as ‘probably Mountbatten’s finest hour in the entire Suez affair’. In their view, without the First Sea Lord’s ‘strong personal commitment’ to a change of plan, Eden might have dragooned the Chiefs of Staff into attacking Alexandria, ‘with all

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of its potentially disastrous consequences’. With so many contingencies even the most prescient counter factualist could not conceive what would have happened; nor could such a dramatic conclusion be derived with confidence from the commentary of someone so notoriously solipsistic.57 As already noted, within the Chiefs of Staff Committee Mountbatten kept pressing for a full appraisal of what would follow a successful invasion. Predictably, he claimed credit for the Joint Planning Staff ’s contentious recommendation that the priority should be to avoid occupation in order to secure Egyptian support.58

Anatomy of a crisis (3): realizing an invasion and submitting a second resignation Throughout September and into October Mountbatten had no reason to relax concerning the crisis over the Canal. At Chequers on 24  September the Prime Minister accepted the need for an eleven-day notice of invasion. He conceded that growing problems of logistics, let  alone the retention of reserve forces, meant a deadline of mid-October for any autumn offensive. However, this was also the day when, according to Mountbatten, he found Eden alone after lunch and ‘really took him apart’. Three days prior to the taskforce being stood down, a month-long ‘Winter Plan’ was adopted in order that action might still be undertaken until mid-November. These deadlines appeared increasingly irrelevant as Britain moved slowly towards a diplomatic settlement under the auspices of the United Nations. Cabinet discussion of General Keightley’s plan on 10 and 11 September had given Monckton a platform for supporting the Chiefs of Staff while at the same time continuing to urge caution. More significantly, a less equivocal Rab Butler was now urging the dispute be resolved through reference to the Security Council.59 The declining salience of Musketeer Revise and the renewed importance placed upon the forthcoming defence review were reflected in the priorities of the First Sea Lord and his most senior colleagues.60 Mountbatten reassured Cilcennin, by this time on board Britannia, that, ‘the old friend who gave Walter, you and me such anxious moments is definitely dead though the young but less objectionable brother is hovering in the background. By and large I feel much happier than I did when I saw you last, though, of course, we are not out of the woods yet.’ If Mountbatten believed this to be the case then how could he claim on film in 1972 that, just five days after reassuring Cilcennin, he was at Chequers accusing Eden of a conspiracy with France to encourage Israeli aggression.61 There’s a fine line between healthy scepticism and straight cynicism, and for any follower of the Mountbatten narrative this claim might constitute the tipping point. At this point the Admiralty’s priority was not an imminent invasion of Egypt but updating the naval element within Operation Cordage once Israeli aggression towards Jordan rendered British intervention more likely. The Navy’s assumption that fighting would most likely take place against Israel prevailed until the final week of October. However open or disingenuous Eden may have been in cabinet on 18 October regarding

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his knowledge of Israeli intentions, he did concede Britain’s continuing obligation to King Hussein under the Tripartite Agreement. After the meeting Mountbatten signalled the Mediterranean Fleet to prepare all Cordage forces for imminent action, in that the Israelis might view the final fortnight of the American presidential campaign as, ‘their last chance to square matters with the arabs’.62 A week earlier, at the very moment Israel was launching its largest incursion into Jordanian territory, Mountbatten had urged his fellow chiefs of staff to recognize the strategic paradox of their contingency planning for the Middle East. … if during Musketeer Israel attacked Jordan and the United States went to Jordan’s aid against Israel then we and the United States would be fighting on opposite sides. We should be the unwilling allies of Israel and our forces in Jordan would be hostages to fortune. If the United States had gone to the aid of Jordan and Egypt before Musketeer was launched, it would not then be practicable for us to launch Musketeer.63

An Admiralty briefing had identified a scenario whereby the British and Americans found themselves on opposite sides; but a greater concern for Mountbatten’s staff was ‘being regarded as one of Israel’s de facto allies’ should an invasion be launched while Egypt was helping Jordan resist an outright attack. Convinced that Israel was justified in launching a pre-emptive strike against Egypt, and that in such circumstances Britain ‘should be extremely foolish not to safeguard the Canal,’ Hailsham dismissed fears of any Jordanian entanglement.64 Hailsham’s Zionist sympathies were unusual among conservative opinion at the time. More familiar is the military’s jaundiced view of Israel only eight years after an ignominious end to the Palestine mandate. That lingering resentment was compounded by growing evidence of France’s covert collaboration with the Israeli Defence Forces. It was for precisely this reason that by mid-October Monckton felt he could no longer attend the Egypt Committee in his capacity as Minister of Defence: ‘I did not like the idea of allying ourselves with the French and the Jews in an attack on Egypt.’65 Neither of course did the Foreign Office, with junior minister Anthony Nutting, and not Selwyn Lloyd or Ivone Kirkpatrick, articulating a widely shared view that deploying force at such a late hour was wholly inimical to British interests in the Middle East and beyond.66 Collusion with Israel flew in the face of Whitehall’s residual suspicion of ‘the Jews’, but, by neutralizing an Israeli threat to Jordan, it assuaged the First Sea Lord’s fears. Even while secret meetings with Prime Minister Ben Gurion’s delegation were taking place outside Paris on 22 and 24 October, the Royal Navy was finalizing its preparations for war with Israel, much to Eden’s alarm.67 Another three days would pass before British task force commanders in Cyprus finally abandoned Operation Cordage. Forewarned by their French counterparts, they at last received authority from London to anticipate intervention in Egypt. Signals from the Admiralty concerning Cordage ensured naval dispositions in the eastern Mediterranean suitable for an attack on Egypt or on Israel, and Grantham continued to plan for either or even both scenarios. He made clear to Mountbatten his personal preference that all operations be postponed owing to the unseasonal weather.

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From mid-October a succession of ultra-secret signals from the First Sea Lord and the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff (VCNS) secured the Mediterranean Fleet’s preparation for action, while still giving no clear indication as to what might be expected of it. The upcoming communications exercise, ‘Boathook’, provided a thin cover for taskforce vessels sailing east from Malta. These signals make clear how much Grantham was in the dark, and how little he appreciated the full extent of French naval support for Israel. They also raise the question of when Mountbatten became aware that joint action with the French was imminent. Easier to pinpoint is the moment he lost patience with ‘this fantastic degree of secrecy’, as from 23 October both Grantham and Sir William Davis, the VCNS, were ‘in the know’.68 Equally easy to identify is when Grantham, Power and the naval task force commander Vice Admiral Robin Durnford-Slater discovered that Israel would invade Egypt on 29 October. Three days earlier Stockwell had arrived in Cyprus with information gleaned from his French deputy, General André Beaufre. Power was appalled at the prospect of any military involvement with the Israelis, but through Grantham he secured Downing Street’s approval that escort vessels could depart Valetta in darkness on 28 October. His three carriers left at dawn on the following day, their aircrew being briefed the next morning despite strict orders to the contrary. The bulk of the taskforce would remain in port for at least another two days, so as to maintain the facade of Britain and France responding rapidly to a surprise Israeli attack.69 The reason for the delay could not be spelt out to naval commanders in the Mediterranean, even if they strongly suspected that the French were acting in unison with the Israelis. Indeed, signal traffic indicates that on 27 October Keightley and Grantham agreed that the air assault would commence exactly four days later.70 His subordinates might have lacked a clear idea of what was going on but the same was no longer true of the First Sea Lord. As we’ve seen, Eden embargoed the COSC paper on the costly consequences of deposing Nasser. Nevertheless, on 25 October the Chiefs of Staff provided the Egypt Committee with a no-nonsense insight into the aftermath of victory. Their warnings of a long-term military occupation were by now largely irrelevant. The Prime Minister already had the support of his cabinet for separating the belligerents if Israel and Egypt went to war. By this stage he was more exercised by the fact that the governments in Paris and Tel Aviv retained written records of the Sèvres protocol, the secret agreement that detailed the nature of Britain and France’s collusion with Israel in order to bring down Nasser’s government.71 25 October was also the date on which Keightley arrived in Cyprus to assume direct control of operations. He had left London astonished by Eden’s rudeness at their final meeting, and by the news that an Israeli offensive was imminent. The attack on Egypt, he was surprised to discover, would provide Britain and France with an excuse to secure the Suez Canal. This was essentially the news Mountbatten had communicated to Guy Grantham thirty-six hours earlier. However secure the cipher, there was no way the First Sea Lord could have sent details of the Sèvres protocol to Grantham. He had, however, had the opportunity to put Keightley fully in the picture – and he’d chosen not to do so. Later of course Mountbatten openly condemned Eden and Selwyn Lloyd’s decision to overcome their scruples and join the French in secretly plotting

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with Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan to destroy Nasser. Yet Mountbatten was the only chief of staff at Number Ten on the night of 24 October when the diplomat Patrick Dean reported to Eden and key members of the Egypt Committee on a second meeting with the Israelis. Almost certainly Mountbatten was one of the very few people to see the British copy of the Sèvres protocol before it was swiftly reduced to ashes.72 Keith Kyle counted seven cabinet ministers, including Eden plus minister of state Anthony Nutting, familiar with the talks in France. Among the small circle of civil servants and military advisers aware of the Sèvres meetings Mountbatten was in an almost unique position. Naively he assumed the Prime Minister’s sympathy for his dilemma, a week later reminding Eden how, on the evening of 25  October, ‘you told Edwina and me that you realized how much I hated making the preparations which had been ordered.’73 Sir Percy Craddock interpreted the minutes of the COSC meeting on 1 November as suggesting the Chiefs enjoyed a degree of knowledge short of ‘the full mysteries of Sèvres’.74 The one person present who did have the complete picture – and the only chief of staff to contemplate resignation – was the First Sea Lord. Not that he mentioned this level of knowledge in his 1966 record of the crisis, nor in any subsequent recollection of events. To do so would have constituted admission of having been party to an act of collusion he was ostensibly unaware of (‘None of the Chiefs of Staff had the least doubt about collusion, although Ministers subsequently denied this.’) and which he condemned.75 Not that evidence of a cover up is absent from what Mountbatten intended to be a comprehensive and definitive archive of his career. Thus, all correspondence was preserved regarding the urgent rewriting in early 1957 of Durnford-Slater’s draft report on the naval operation. Four incriminatory paragraphs detailed how Boathook had offered a convenient cover for ships departing Malta before 30 October, the earliest permissible date within Sèvres’ fictional timetable for intervention. Mountbatten assumed direct responsibility for the report’s redrafting and the destruction of the offending pages. He chose however to defy his own orders by retaining a copy of Durnford-Slater’s original draft, with a reference in his 1966 memorandum to, ‘strict Ministerial instructions that nothing that could hint at collusion with Israel or even prior arrangements with France should appear in any report’. Such a comment implies disapproval, yet Mountbatten’s correspondence with Keightley, Grantham and Durnford-Slater in the winter of 1956–7 suggests that he approached the task of allaying any suspicion of premeditation with his customary gusto, ruthlessness and efficiency.76 Scott Lucas speculated that the taskforce commanders in Cyprus learnt about Sèvres on 3 November when Anthony Head confirmed what they already knew about France’s support for Israel. Once in on the secret Keightley and Stockwell were urged to heed the French Army’s call for a less cautious approach. Inside the Admiralty Mountbatten’s closest colleagues were cognizant of collusion at least five days previously, witness a memo recommending that ‘immediately prior to the ultimatum’ Eden secure New Zealand’s agreement to deploy the cruiser HMNZS Royalist. A draft paper the same day briefed the Chiefs of Staff on the ultimatum’s implication for British merchant vessels passing through the Canal. That morning Mountbatten ordered the bemused captain of HMS Jamaica to ensure his cruiser’s presence off Port Said when

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‘the ultimatum’ expired.77 After lunch he went to brief the Prime Minister, pausing to converse with William Clark: ‘Mountbatten came up to me conspiratorially and said, “Well I don’t envy you your job in the next few days; this will be the hardest war to justify ever.”’ Discretion was never one of Mountbatten’s more obvious traits, and a conversation at the Imperial Defence College on 1 November confirmed Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh’s suspicion of collusion: ‘Mountbatten (First Sea Lord) came to lecture this morning, and could not conceal from us the fact that he, too, profoundly disapproves of the policy. He said he had spoken against it up to the limit of what is possible, and was surprised that he was still in his job. This added greatly to our gloom … ’ Note the plural. Naturally Chatham House rules extended as far west as Belgravia, but Mountbatten was remarkably frank in the detailed information conveyed to Shuckburgh’s trainee grandees.78 The First Sea Lord’s lecture presumably displayed the usual clear exposition laced with humour. Yet by 1  November he feared the damage Anglo-French action was inflicting upon a close working and personal relationship with naval staff in Washington. Until the final rupture of relations with the US Navy Mountbatten used Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Barnard, naval attaché to the Joint Services Mission, as a back channel for briefing NATO’s Supreme Commander in the Atlantic, Admiral Jerauld Wright. Equally well informed was the USN’s Chief of Naval Operations, Arleigh Burke, whose dealings with Mountbatten are detailed in Chapter 5. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had all been openly supportive of Britain at the start of the crisis. That ended after a National Security Council meeting on 8 August when the President squashed Burke’s suggestion of sending the British enough landing craft to complete the formation of a taskforce.79 Yet ten days later, in direct contravention of Eisenhower’s orders, Burke had passed on to Mountbatten his service’s ‘interest and admiration’ regarding the Royal Navy’s readiness to fight.80 Ten weeks later and Burke was ordering the Sixth Fleet to take all steps short of direct attack in order to delay Durnford-Slater’s leaden footed fleet. Throughout the first five days of November the US Navy intensified its activities to the extent that, as Mountbatten pointed out to ministers, American ships had all but blocked the convoy’s access to Port Said. The longer the Sixth Fleet delayed the taskforce the more vulnerable Eden’s government became to intense political pressure, at home and in New York. The scale of American intervention and the potential for a major international incident appalled Mountbatten, in his own mind a pioneer of the Atlantic alliance since serving as an envoy of Churchill in the summer of 1941.81 Such an aggressive signal of intent by the Americans highlighted the full extent of British isolation. Spine-stiffening support from the colonialist ministrables of the Fourth Republic was scant consolation. Francophile yes, but by instinct and intellect Mountbatten was an Atlanticist.82 His alarm at the collapse of regular relations with Washington was compounded by concern for the future cohesion of the Commonwealth, and the fear that extensive civilian casualties were unavoidable once the bombing switched from destruction of Egyptian aircraft to a wider range of targets. This extension of the air assault was discussed by Head and the Chiefs of Staff only hours before a meeting of the United Nations Assembly on 2  November. That meeting endorsed by a large majority an American resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire. The vote starkly illustrated the rupture in the ‘special relationship’,

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and the extent to which Britain found itself at odds with the other sovereign nations inside the Commonwealth. Only Australia and New Zealand voted against a motion which effectively condemned the actions of Britain and France as well as the perceived aggression of the Israelis; and in both cases that support was equivocal.83 The invasion fleet was still four days sailing time from Port Said, but the accelerated schedule for an airborne landing meant Mountbatten had little time to act as if experiencing a genuine crisis of conscience. He justified his decision to petition the Prime Minister on the basis that their long-standing friendship overrode constitutional convention.84 In any case, as he pointed out in a handwritten letter couriered to Downing Street on 2 November, Eden was ‘fully aware over these past few weeks of my great unhappiness’. Furthermore, a demonstrable efficiency in preparing the invasion force justified this particular ‘serving officer to question the political decisions of his government’. He claimed to have done ‘everything in my powers to carry out your orders’ because a Royal Navy ready for war meant Britain could negotiate from strength. Diplomatic leverage might now have been undermined by ‘the decisive step of armed intervention’, but it was not too late.85 I am writing to appeal to you to accept the resolution of the overwhelming majority of the United Nations to cease military operations, and to beg you to turn back the assault convoy before it is too late, as I feel that the actual landing of troops can only spread the war with untold misery and world-wide repercussions. You can imagine how hard it is for me to break all service custom and write direct to you in this way, but I feel so desperate about what is happening that my conscience would not allow me to do otherwise.

According to Mountbatten the Prime Minister called to, ‘thank me profusely for being such a good friend as to write and tell him freely what I thought. When I begged him to act on my suggestion and allow me to turn back the assault convoy before it was too late he replied that he could not possibly do that and hung up the telephone.’86 It is difficult to gain a clear idea of what was going on in Mountbatten’s mind over the next forty-eight hours, witness his reaction to Keightley warning the Chiefs of Staff that resistance in Port Said might be stiffer than anticipated. Fearing even greater loss of life he suggested the taskforce advance on the Canal from Gaza, or even consider a landing at Haifa. Not surprisingly Templer and the other chiefs scorned these suggestions, while formally noting their colleague’s ‘continuous protests’ concerning civilian casualties. With Eden furious that such discussions should be taking place so late in the day, Head made his lightning visit to Cyprus, partly to put the British generals fully in the picture but primarily to secure further reassurance as to the anticipated level of collateral damage.87 By now Mountbatten was fully focused upon ensuring the amphibious and airborne landings at Port Said would prove successful. Nevertheless, on 4 November he was relieved to learn from Dickson that Israel would accept the UN call for a ceasefire. Inside the Cabinet advocates of action for the first time found themselves under pressure, with Monckton threatening resignation if the invasion went ahead. His successor as Minister of Defence, doubtless exhausted from shuttling between

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London and Larnaca, kept the Chiefs of Staff abreast of developments in Downing Street. Eventually Head informed the COSC that the Israeli government had changed its mind, a cabinet split had been averted and the parachute landings could go ahead at first light the following day. In his post-crisis memorandum Mountbatten expressed relief that a successful airborne assault negated the need for a naval bombardment, such that ‘civilian casualties were avoided to a remarkable extent’.88 Not that he had known this across the proceeding forty-eight hours, hence the stormy proceedings inside the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and a dramatic coda to the conscience-driven request that Eden think again. Across the weekend of 3–4  November, the First Sea Lord tested the resilience and authority of his minister, to a degree matched only by Jackie Fisher’s querulous questioning of Churchill’s judgement in the spring of 1915. The First Lord of the Admiralty’s attempt to escape home for a few hours of rural peace and quiet was thwarted by Mountbatten insisting he return to London. Hailsham recalled in his autobiography how an overexcited ‘Dickie was having a brainstorm’  –  evidence of which was that he’d instructed the Surrey police to trace and to stop the minister’s car.89 Mountbatten had drafted what could be construed as a letter of resignation because, in his own words, naval personnel facing the prospect of inflicting disproportionate casualties would ‘rightly blame’ the First Sea Lord had he not voiced their concern for the honour of the service: ‘I felt that I should have been lacking in moral courage if I had not made my views crystal clear.’90 Hailsham now learnt in writing of Mountbatten’s letter to the Prime Minister, and of Eden’s negative response. If anything, Hailsham’s own letter continued, the situation was now worse in that, despite a concerted effort to lesson civilian casualties, ‘it must in the main fall to the navy to inflict them.’91 However repugnant the task the Navy will carry out its orders. Nevertheless as its professional head I must register the strongest possible protest at this use of my service; and would ask you as the responsible minister to convey that protest to the Prime Minister. I recognise that a serving officer cannot back his protest by resignation at a time like this, so I must ask you to handle this whole matter on behalf of the Navy. Bearing in mind all the implications, I must ask you after consulting the Prime Minister to give me the order to stay or go.92

Mountbatten always claimed that he enjoyed full support from William Davis, and the VCNS’s formal record of events a fortnight later seemed to bear this out.93 Less clear is the role of Charles Lambe, Second Sea Lord and Mountbatten’s closest colleague. Here was someone in no way intimidated by Mountbatten’s personality and reputation; if anything, the reverse was true. Mountbatten implied that Lambe had supported his actions, but Hailsham suggested otherwise. I turned on him [Mountbatten] firmly and with the full approval of the Second Sea Lord told him that I was the political head of the department, that if the honour of the Navy was in any way impugned it was I and not its professional head who would have to resign, that he was entitled to the protection of a direct order from me, and that I would go at once to my room and write out and sign a direct order

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to him to stay at his post until further notice, but that I would report at once directly to the Prime Minister what I had done and ask him either to confirm or countermand it as he thought best.94

The following day Hailsham’s brief but courteous note acknowledged the legitimacy of Mountbatten’s concerns and reassured him, ‘that the position is quite plain. If anything happens to impair the honour of the Navy I must resign.’ The question of Mountbatten’s resignation was briskly dismissed by reassurance that the matter would be properly considered by the Prime Minister, and that full protection derived from the First Lord’s insistence that ‘you remain at your post until further orders’. Hailsham duly informed Eden of Mountbatten’s demarche, advising that ‘it would be disastrous to relieve him now, which is the only other possible course.’ The Prime Minister concurred, and on Monday 6  November the First Sea Lord learnt that Eden had endorsed Hailsham’s order to remain in post.95 Hailsham considered resignations, however principled, to be out of the question once ‘forces are actually engaged in combat and serving men’s lives are in the balance.’ Whatever the merits of his argument he dealt with Mountbatten’s protest firmly and shrewdly, as the latter acknowledged in his diary: ‘Satisfactory letter from Ist Lord.’ Hailsham’s ‘vigorous line’ was to his credit, not least because there was no obvious rupture in his relations with Mountbatten.96 Each man was stunned by the suddenness of Britain’s acquiescence to American insistence on an immediate end to the fighting  –  Washington’s support in stemming a run on the pound was conditional on a ceasefire in the Canal Zone. With cruel irony, this was a sterling crisis largely orchestrated by the Eisenhower Administration. In early autumn Macmillan had reassured the Cabinet that the Americans would not take punitive measures in response to military action against Egypt. Two months later, he was warning of economic catastrophe should British and French forces keep fighting. Notwithstanding his opposition to the whole operation, Mountbatten recognized the speed with which the Canal Zone could now be occupied. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he shared Hailsham’s contempt for Macmillan’s volte-face.97 Together they endorsed Eden’s abortive effort to link an evacuation of troops from Port Said to the United Nations’ acceptance of an Anglo-French salvage fleet, with Mountbatten feverishly endeavouring to bring the US Navy on side.98 More surprisingly, they shared a common interest in repairing relations with India as speedily as possible. A less obvious parallel however was Hailsham’s claim late in life that ‘I hated the whole operation quite as much as Dickie.’99 Hailsham was better informed with reference to operational planning than the impression he cultivated of a humble service minister left almost wholly in the dark. Initially ignorant of the Sèvres protocol, he was nevertheless briefed on French and British intentions before Israel attacked across the Sinai peninsula on 29 October.100 While uneasy of the circumstances surrounding collusion, Hailsham saw Israel’s Arab neighbours as bent on destroying a sovereign state worthy of western sympathy and support. In this respect his position differed sharply from that of Walter Monckton, and when attending cabinet on 4 November he favoured invasion irrespective of the Israelis accepting the UN ceasefire.101 Like Anthony Head he felt strongly that, ‘we should have occupied the entire length of the canal, cleared it, and then departed.’ Acceding to

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American pressure was nothing more than abject surrender, and Hailsham scarcely disguised this view at the time or in subsequent years.102 In his memoirs Hailsham clearly set out to counter any impression of lasting antagonism between himself and the Mountbattens. Privately, he voiced a more jaundiced view of the former First Sea Lord, albeit tempered by respect for a man of undoubted accomplishments who was murdered in appalling circumstances. Writing to the Cabinet Secretary in the winter of 1979–80 Hailsham lamented the late Lord Mountbatten’s readiness to rewrite history. Why he felt the need to place on record his recollection of Admiralty business in the autumn of 1956 is made clear in Chapter 3.103

Dickie and Anthony: a fragile friendship (1) There is certainly a striking contrast between the increasingly open conspirator, signalling dissent to likeminded members of the great and the good and the ultraprofessional chief of staff insistent his service must meet the challenge of a complex and wholly unique amphibious operation. Mountbatten was carrying out his duties to the best of his ability because it was in his nature to do so, and in this instance the predictable boasting should not disguise the qualified success of the Navy and the Royal Marines in the seizure of Port Said. As with his stewardship of naval operations, Mountbatten’s purely military advice to the Egypt Committee could not be faulted. The opportunity to inform ministers of his personal concerns was limited once Eden strictly delineated between professional expertise and political perspective. For this reason, the First Sea Lord relied on Monckton to check Macmillan and Eden’s grander designs. A crucial mistake was in presuming Lord Hailsham would prove as pliable as his predecessor at the Admiralty, Lord Cilcennin. Not that this was enough, hence the letters to Eden, both draft and actual. Correspondence and personal lobbying, as at Chequers on 24 September, was justified by Mountbatten on the basis of his being both a chief of staff and a close friend. A second key error was failing to comprehend how any such presumption of friendship and intimacy might not be shared. For this reason alone, one should be wary of Mountbatten’s subsequent claim regarding his request in late October 1956 that Eden retract the order to invade: ‘I fully expected to be released from my job with such a tough letter.’104 Did he really believe this given the devastating consequences for any prime minister, however firm his or her grasp of power, should a chief of staff depart on the eve of battle? After all no one knew better than Dickie Mountbatten that here was no ordinary chief of staff. Certainly, the Admiralty boasted an extraordinary range of potential First Sea Lords tested by war, not least Charles Lambe. A keen sense of duty would have seen Lambe put friendship and personal loyalty to one side had Eden called Mountbatten’s bluff. The Royal Navy would have hailed its new chief, with Mountbatten’s many enemies inside the service fostering disapproval of his ill-timed departure. This counterfactual scenario is of course irrelevant, in that Eden was by now indifferent to moral and legal argument; at such a critical moment in the crisis he had no intention of allowing Mountbatten a grandstand exit on a matter of principle.

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Given that resignation was so wholly at variance with a career driven by both fierce ambition and a strong sense of public service, why did Mountbatten behave in the way he did? Contemptible or commendable, this surely constituted something more than mere posturing. Revisiting Suez in 1966 the now ex-Chief of the Defence Staff recorded for posterity that, ‘I do not believe I have ever been so embarrassed, distressed and put in such a painful position … ’ Even the harshest critic has to take such a statement at face value. The crisis of conscience Mountbatten keenly felt at the time was compounded by his being party to an act of collusion he perceived to be fundamentally wrong, but which in the immediate aftermath of the crisis he had no hesitation in disguising. Perhaps this helps explain the claim repeatedly made in retirement that at the onset of the crisis he offered Eden a viable plan for the Royal Marines to seize Port Said in a rapid and decisive coup de main. Any accusation of hypocrisy, and of flagrantly rewriting history, should be tempered by acknowledgement that the consequences he foresaw in August and September 1956 largely came to pass. Thankfully, civilian casualties proved less than he had originally anticipated, the British economy recovered faster than he had feared and the nations of south Asia proved less eager to quit the Commonwealth than he had anticipated. Otherwise, the outcome of this ‘inexcusable … aggressive war’, bereft of a convincing casus belli, was very much as Mountbatten predicted.105 The presence of a clear casus belli in April 1982 rendered the Falklands conflict a very different experience from the Suez crisis. As David Carlton observed while Mrs Thatcher was still in power, the final outcome was determined by her decisiveness at the start of the crisis: ‘In 1956 such absolute clarity about British intentions was conspicuously absent.’ An equally striking contrast is between the respective First Sea Lords. Both Admiral Sir Henry Leach and Admiral Lord Mountbatten responded by immediately proposing naval taskforces, albeit differing significantly in size and composition. For all his later denials, on the fateful night of 26  July Mountbatten changed his advice to Eden once Templer and Boyle highlighted the danger of an isolated bridgehead stretching south from Port Said to Qantara. Desperate to defend the present size of the surface fleet in the face of John Nott’s defence review, Leach accommodated the concerns of the other two services, but he never surrendered the initiative. Nor was he plagued by doubts as to the mission, hence a single-minded commitment to the task in hand.106 Mountbatten of course was haunted by political distractions, not least his doubts at the time as to the Prime Minister’s physical and mental well-being. Free from concern as to the legitimacy of the operation, he would have relished reconquering the Falkland Islands.107 Neither Leach nor Mountbatten agonized over cost for the duration of each operation; as opposed to their preoccupation with procurement and manpower budgets before and after the respective crises. This contrasts with the experience of more recent First Sea Lords, wary of undertaking an additional front line commitment because of the budgetary implications. For example, in June 2011 Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope pointed to the impact on an overstretched Royal Navy of NATO support for Libyan rebels. His public admonishment by David Cameron highlighted how over the past two decades the relationship between the Chiefs of Staff and senior ministers has become more public, and in the process more politicized. A week later the Defence

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Reform Unit’s recommendations for consolidating the CDS’s power at the expense of the service chiefs were accepted by ministers as vital to restoring the pre-eminence of military advice over special interest lobbying.108 With defence displaying a high degree of political salience, respect for deference and confidentiality much reduced and the means and method of media investigation at an unprecedented level of technological and forensic investigation, it seems inconceivable that within Britain’s contemporary political culture a gulf of opinion as great as that separating Eden and his First Sea Lord over Suez could be confined to so small a circle of ministers, mandarins and military personnel.

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Dickie and Anthony: a fragile friendship (2) Anthony Eden saw a malign combination of disloyal colleagues and debilitating illness as having destroyed his political career. As so many have noted, the supreme irony was to see such an accomplished exponent of international diplomacy brought down by deep personal animosity towards the leader of a country where acute poverty belied grand regional ambition  –  appeasement cast a long shadow, but Nasser defied lazy comparisons with Hitler or Mussolini.1 Yet the cruel irony did not end there. At the very moment when he most needed a clear mind Eden was critically dependent upon a toxic combination of drugs – few anticipated that he would survive long after leaving office, and yet he lived for another twenty years. Two decades was a long time to avoid social contact with Mountbatten, and through this time an uneasy peace reigned. It was, after all, necessary for Mountbatten to support the claim made in his initial account of seeking to sway a resolute Prime Minister: ‘Nothing, however, I could do could shake his policy nor apparently shake his friendship for me.’2 In the years following Edwina’s sudden death in 1960 propriety and convention dictated politeness even as the wounds of Suez festered and refused to heal. Surprisingly, the now Lord and Lady Avon lunched with Mountbatten in Romsey in September 1965. Having finally departed the MOD, a retired Chief of the Defence Staff had the time to socialize and to renew acquaintance with ostensibly old friends.3 For all the politeness in public, sabre-rattling over Suez became ever louder. Eden’s anger in his twilight years was provoked as much by his supposed friend’s contentious claims when looking back on the events of 1956 as by his behaviour at the time. Mountbatten’s ostensibly discreet remarks in the penultimate episode of his 1969 television memoirs were anything but: … those who have followed my story so far will realise that the Suez policy was inspired by very different ideas from those which I had tried to work out in South East Asia in 1945 and 1946, and in India in 1947 and 1948. I carried out my duties, but it would be foolish to pretend that I did not have very grave doubts about the whole thing.4

Nor, incidentally, was Lord Avon the only protagonist who believed that Mountbatten in old age peddled a wholly inaccurate version of events. As we’ll see

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later in the chapter, Lord Hailsham successfully objected to the Queen’s second cousin speaking on Suez from beyond the grave. Tellingly, the Mountbatten/Knatchbull family silently concurred.5 Eden was insistent that, if Mountbatten wasn’t ‘ga-ga’ in 1956, then in the years since he had become so, not least when recalling his behaviour in the course of the crisis. A dying Lord Avon was determined to discredit a ‘congenital liar’ with malign intentions. He furiously disputed an elderly Mountbatten’s claim that the Queen privately shared his fears regarding the consequences of military action.6 From early in his premiership Eden was sensitive to the concern of court officials that Mountbatten either directly, or via his nephew, exercised an unhealthy influence over the Queen.7 The royal couple were at Broadlands the first weekend of the crisis, and a month later Mountbatten spent four days at Balmoral. Come the autumn he was regularly in attendance at Windsor and Buckingham Palace. It seems inconceivable that he refrained from airing his views, and in 1970 Hugh Thomas maintained that Mountbatten had urged the Queen to advise Eden that he should inform the Leader of the Opposition an invasion was imminent.8 Eden was insistent that, ‘the Queen never protested strongly or otherwise to me about Suez’, yet the frequency with which she saw the First Sea Lord was widely known. Eden clearly could not ignore Mountbatten’s close personal relationship with the monarch and her husband – it troubled him deeply at the time, and it continued to do so for the rest of his life.9 He suspected the journalist Robert Lacey of listening sympathetically when Mountbatten insisted that Her Majesty had opposed military intervention, but that she was constrained by her constitutional position from questioning Eden’s determination to bring down Nasser. Seriously ill with cancer, Eden met Mountbatten for the last time in the Provost Lodge at Eton on 13 June 1976. Mountbatten endeavoured to take the heat out of their quarrel, but Eden was insistent that he would take legal action should Lacey’s Silver Jubilee celebration of the Queen’s reign suggest royal dissatisfaction with his handling of affairs in the autumn of 1956.10 Majesty, Lacey’s weighty biography, confirmed Eden’s worst fears; but by the time it became a bestseller he was dead. Had he lived well into his nineties, then Lord Avon would have been equally shocked by Sarah Bradford’s landmark biography, Elizabeth, with its suggestion of Her Majesty dismissing Eden’s actions as ‘idiotic’. More persuasive was Ben Pimlott’s authoritative The Queen. Pimlott’s reputation as a historian and biographer secured him an interview with Sir Martin Charteris, a stalwart at Buckingham Palace for twenty years, but someone whose tongue loosened in old age. It was Charteris to whom Eden had raged back in 1976. Twenty years later, the Queen’s former secretary recalled Mountbatten informing her that most of the Cabinet, ‘are being absolutely lunatic’. Questions remain as to how Charteris had overheard such a remark, and as to the reliability of his claim that palace officials believed Her Majesty to consider Eden mad. The unstated question was whether the Prime Minister during his weekly audiences at Buckingham Palace in the autumn of 1956 had at worst lied over the level of collusion with France and Israel, or at best been economical with the truth. Eden’s most recent biographer took a neutral line, conscious perhaps of Lady Avon’s keen interest in his book.11 Thus, D.R. Thorpe observed how a highly contestable ‘accepted truth’ rested solely upon the evidence of two of Eden’s

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harshest critics: ‘When Suez came under the historical spotlight, both Mountbatten and Charteris  –  now old men  –  were keen to put down markers, establishing their position on the “right” side of the barricades.’12 Fifteen years on, and artistic licence allowed Peter Morgan to eschew discretion when writing the relevant episode of The Crown: in ‘Misadventure’ Mountbatten makes clear to the Queen what he thinks of Eden’s plan to invade Egypt, and she makes clear to her prime minister that she recognizes the nefarious means necessary to facilitate military action; and that she feels vindicated when humiliation ensues. Were he alive to watch Greg Wise’s silver fox portrayal of the royal consort’s calculating yet charismatic uncle then Mountbatten would have purred with satisfaction. Not so Eden, portrayed by Jeremy Northam as prematurely old and grey, hubristic and predestined to failure.13 Yes, Eden aged noticeably as invasive surgery took its toll, but before he finally entered Number Ten few other than Churchill judged the heir apparent wholly lacking in character and competence. German rearmament and the Geneva Conference confirmed 1954 as a high-water mark in Eden’s lengthy stewardship of foreign affairs, on both sides of the House. Diplomacy demanded good manners and good taste, sophisticated conversation (not always in one’s native tongue) and clarity of purpose: Eden’s public persona disguised character flaws all too obvious to close colleagues, friends and family, not least his neurotic work habits, his impatience, his infidelity and his dependence on the sound judgement of Alex Cadogan, Pierson Dixon and like-minded guardians of British foreign policy. Mountbatten may have lacked selfconfidence, but he disguised it extraordinarily well; and his capacity for work and play was never undermined by the tightly controlled combination of nervousness and ill health which ultimately did for Eden. Good-looking and immaculately dressed, Eden and Mountbatten appeared the coming men in an era of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Yet, unlike Mountbatten, Eden’s actions rarely inspired loyalty, witness his half-hearted leadership of the backbench ‘Glamour Boys’ in 1938–9.14 Anti-appeasement was in due course vindicated, reinforcing Eden’s image as a man of principle. At the same time, royal connections and the Kelly made Mountbatten the man of the hour. In private both men’s marriages were in free fall, but one survived, with Edwina’s wartime activities creating austerity Britain’s best-known power couple outside of Buckingham Palace. For Mountbatten divorce would have stalled his progress to the top, and yet Eden’s second marriage encountered surprisingly little public disapproval (marrying Churchill’s niece no doubt helped). Eden finally – belatedly – did reach the top. Only then did his progress stall, well before Colonel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. It soon became clear to senior civil servants, cabinet colleagues and intuitive backbenchers that dear Anthony wasn’t up to it. In Robert Skidelsky’s words, ‘Even before Suez Eden’s premiership had started to look ominously transient.’15 Here the contrast with Mountbatten is at its starkest. In none of his most powerful posts, not least First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff, did his appointment appear ‘ominously transient’ – unlike Eden, he was demonstrably up to the job. Nor did a succession of extraordinarily demanding posts take their toll physically and mentally, in the way Eden’s front bench responsibilities so visibly did. Time and again Mountbatten felt he could take on the task, suppressing or squaring self-doubt in a way Anthony Eden demonstrably could not.

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Yet in other respects the two men were not so different. David Carlton in a largely hostile life of Eden saw Mountbatten as simply another stick with which to beat his subject. However, David Dutton  –  another unsympathetic biographer  –  identified aspects of Eden’s character which might equally apply to Mountbatten: the adamant refusal to admit error, and the scrupulous archiving to facilitate posthumous vindication, the carapace of indisputable charm hiding an irascibility and vanity long tolerated by suitably loyal subordinates, the ability in negotiation to disguise fundamental differences by forging short-term consensus, the sensitivity to any suggestion that early success was based on image not substance and the attention to detail, capacity for hard work and eagerness to micro-manage that together fostered an impression of diligence not brilliance.16 The degree of irascibility was of course far greater in Eden’s case, and again, the key difference is that Eden’s modus operandi broke down at a critical moment in a way that Mountbatten’s never did. Oliver Harvey observed Eden at close quarters over many years at the Foreign Office. When his old boss finally left for Downing Street, Harvey saw Eden’s work ethic as a means of survival: ‘His approach to problems often strikes one as instinctive rather than based on long intellectual process. But he always safeguards himself by a very firm grasp of the facts.’ The same applied to the then First Sea Lord, of whom another mandarin ungenerously observed, ‘Mountbatten is full of undigested bright ideas and is really a simpleton though very nice.’17 No diplomat would have dared describe Eden in such a dismissive manner, nor ever seen cause to do so. Mountbatten was deeply sensitive to such charges, his arrogance in part a consequence of intellectual insecurity – a facet of his character returned to in later chapters.18 Did Anthony, with his Cambridge First in Oriental Languages and his love of fine art, look on Dickie as something of a Philistine? D. R. Thorpe implied as much, noting Eden’s grudging respect for Mountbatten’s ‘Prussian thoroughness, regarding him as an outstanding administrator, albeit a man of impulsive judgement’.19 For all his fluency in French, it’s hard to imagine Mountbatten discussing the joys of reading Madame de Stael in the original. But then it’s difficult to believe Eden shared a passion for Bogart, Bergman and Bacall. Thorpe also noted how, as prime minister, Eden considered the First Sea Lord to be rudely presumptuous and far too familiar – not that Mountbatten ever had much time for constitutional proprieties. In his official biography Robert Rhodes James had said much the same, endorsing Eden’s keen sense of betrayal and suggesting the First Sea Lord was guilty of deception. Rhodes James made the best case he could in defence of his subject. If attack is the best form of defence, then that meant questioning the intentions of Eden’s adversaries in the summer and autumn of 1956. Not that Mountbatten considered himself an adversary, even if he was deluding himself as to the reality of his relationship with Eden, then and later. Rhodes James insisted that, ‘Mountbatten did not fight his corner as strongly as he later claimed. Indeed he did not fight at all.’ Furthermore, his ostensible friendship with the Prime Minister was ‘singularly misplaced’ in that ‘he did Eden the gravest disservice possible’. Such conduct might best be described as ‘unheroic … virtually amounting to a dereliction of duty’: here was a trusted adviser who had ‘seriously misled’ members of the Egypt Committee, not least the Prime Minister himself.20

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Rhodes James pointed to Mountbatten’s malevolent influence upon Walter Monckton, in that that he’d fuelled the fears of a weak minister who was reluctant to resign.21 Monckton may by his own admission have been weak as a Minister of Defence in that the post neither drew upon his obvious strengths as a lawyer nor held the authority its cabinet status suggested; in 1956 the service ministers could still exercise autonomy if they were strong personalities backed by their chiefs of staff, as both Head and Hailsham clearly demonstrated. Yet Monckton remained his own man, scarcely requiring Dickie Mountbatten to point out the deep flaws in Eden’s thinking. Rhodes James rightly suggested Monckton should have left office outright by the start of September in that his position was clearly untenable. However, Mountbatten, as a serving officer, was in a wholly different situation. Should he be criticized for remaining, in Philip Ziegler’s words, ‘a loyal public servant doing his duty and preparing for war’? Nor, Ziegler insisted, should Mountbatten be criticized for not having spoken out sooner and more forcefully.22 This was a view shared by Eric Grove and Keith Kyle, the one a campus-based naval historian and the other a veteran foreign correspondent. From their very different perspectives both saw Mountbatten’s actions as genuine and well-intentioned, maintaining, in Kyle’s words, ‘the narrow line between duty and conscience with difficulty but honour’.23

Suez and the long shadow of Combined Operations – the French connection ‘A great man’s well-attested habit of improving the historical record’ is not unusual, but for Mountbatten this was the norm.24 His respect for accurate recollection was at best cavalier and at worst malign, witness nearly four decades refusing to accept any criticism of the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942.25 As with Dieppe, we need to examine closely the aftermath of the Suez crisis, linking the operation with arguably Mountbatten’s most controversial tenure of command, at Combined Operations from late 1941 through to the autumn of 1943. Mountbatten’s solipsistic perspective on events in the summer and autumn of 1956 began to reach a wider audience after his retirement as CDS nine years later. In his 1966 account of the Suez episode he insisted that any personal disagreement with the nature and purpose of the mission had at no time affected his obligation as head of the Royal Navy to ensure all personnel under his command performed to the highest standard of operational efficiency.26 This was the view he had formally placed on record even as the crisis was unfolding; and which he asked Sir William Davis, the Vice Chief of the Naval Staff, to endorse in a post-operation memorandum.27 Although, four years after leaving the MOD, Mountbatten informed television viewers that his status as a former chief of staff prevented him from commenting upon the Suez crisis, this was precisely what he then went on to do. Mountbatten projected to a primetime audience, no doubt including an incandescent Eden, an image of ultraprofessionalism: experiencing ‘the extraordinary position of being neither at war nor peace’, the armed forces faced a unique challenge, and yet ‘the operation went forward

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with great efficiency. The Services did not let the country down, I am sure of that.’ As we’ll see, this was the view reiterated in 1972 when Mountbatten was filmed providing a franker, more contestable account of Suez, with a view to posthumous screening.28 In retirement or when still working, Mountbatten cultivated a keen sense of history. In and out of uniform he was a political animal. This wasn’t a state of mind acquired over time, or somehow evolved out of a sense of duty – like, say, Eisenhower. He was after all someone who, having adroitly moved from the periphery to the heart of the Royal Family, had survived the vicissitudes of wartime command and somehow emerged from the violent partition of India with his reputation bruised but intact. It’s scarcely surprising that he relished the power and influence he wielded at both ends of The Mall. Mountbatten was the very embodiment of the ‘Whitehall warrior’, shamelessly name-dropping, ceaselessly lobbying and systematically cultivating the goodwill of powerful individuals and institutions. Here was a mode of operation employed to great effect at home, across the Atlantic and among old friends east of Suez, with overseas allies mobilized where appropriate to amend or abort domestic policy. Ever the adroit communicator, Mountbatten courted Fleet Street, the newsreel companies, the BBC and above all commercial television, their favourable coverage a counterweight to the toxic reporting of the Daily and Sunday Express.29 Lord Beaverbrook remained an implacable enemy throughout the 1950s, and never more so than before and after the Suez crisis: Mountbatten had betrayed the British Empire as Viceroy of India, and the same was true nine years later. Beaverbrook considered Edwina just as guilty, damning her with faint praise: ‘Mountbatten is vain, not clever. The woman is clever not vain.’30 Mountbatten dated Beaverbrook’s vendetta from a post-dinner diatribe in 1943 when ‘my old friend Max’ charged him with spurning generous offers of ministerial support, encouraging Noel Coward to mock the Daily Express in In Which We Serve and sacrificing brave Canadians at Dieppe, overseeing Indian independence and aspiring to head the Navy constituted further provocation. Recalling on film his long-running feud with Express Newspapers, Mountbatten briefly mentioned Beaverbrook’s mistress Jean Norton, an old friend of him and Edwina. Beaverbrook’s suspicion that his lover’s relationship with Dickie was anything but Platonic may explain his refusal to compromise. Jean Norton died in 1945, and Beaverbrook was said to have found incriminating letters. Yet, when pressed by Richard Hough, Mountbatten insisted that he had never had an affair with his wife’s best friend. Mountbatten sought to effect a reconciliation in May 1961, but a begrudging handshake ‘in memory of Edwina’ merely delayed a fresh assault: a dying Beaverbrook saw his adversary as a privileged courtier whose abysmal record in war and peace belied his prime position at the heart of the British Establishment. With hindsight, Mountbatten saw the enmity of Lord Beaverbrook as a bonus, prompting Fleet Street’s other press barons – Kemsley, Camrose, Astor and Thomson – to promote his suitability as Chief of the Defence Staff, and before that, First Sea Lord. These were men he shamelessly courted, as became clear when Mountbatten looked back on his quarrel with Beaverbrook eleven years after their final, miserable meeting.31 The Daily and the Sunday Express each insisted Mountbatten was an unsuitable choice as First Sea Lord in that he was incapable of making hard choices. Nothing could be further from the truth. Inside the Admiralty he battled with a creaking

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bureaucracy little changed since his tenure there in the ’thirties. He fostered inclusivity, blue-sky thinking and a mentality that was pre-emptive not reactive; but the degree to which this approach was successful depended greatly on the attitude of senior colleagues, whether acolytes or adversaries. This, after all, was a man who could inspire or infuriate, frequently fuelling a mixture of emotions  –  admiration and antipathy, amusement and annoyance. Organizational change would prove radical and lasting, but fresh working practices were still in their infancy when operational plans were laid for the invasion of Egypt.32 Ever his father’s son, the First Sea Lord enjoyed the trappings of office, yet as a loyal servant of the crown he bore ultimate responsibility for the combat performance of the Navy and of the Royal Marines – he was never more conscious of that responsibility than in the autumn of 1956. Ten years on from the end of the Second World War, the modern Royal Marines was still very much the creation of Combined Operations, hence Mountbatten’s keen personal interest. In the November assault on Port Said two Commandos spearheaded British forces’ first major amphibious operation since 1945, while the other Commando pioneered carrier-based helicopter landings. What by 1960 would become the new orthodoxy was seen only four years earlier by many inside the Admiralty as the First Sea Lord’s costly obsession. The speed of deploying airborne troops vindicated Mountbatten’s insistence on Royal Navy helicopters’ offensive potential, with Bulwark and then Albion converted from fixed wing to commando carriers before deployment on active service in the Middle and Far East. In this instance at least Mountbatten was entitled to boast of his pioneering role.33 True to form he rarely missed an opportunity to point out the full extent of his achievement, albeit initially relying on others to do the job for him. Thus, Bernard Fergusson’s quasi-official history of Combined Operations, The Watery Maze, highlighted the dramatic descent of 45 Commando on to the quay, and the speedy evacuation of wounded Marines back to the carriers.34 Given Mountbatten’s heavy involvement in the drafting of The Watery Maze, it comes as no surprise that Fergusson portrayed the seizure of Port Said as a stunning triumph over adversity.35 The book located the landings within the history of an organization moulded by Mountbatten, restating a familiar message that the lessons so painfully learnt at Dieppe in August 1942 would never be forgotten. The Senior Service’s belated embrace of air power (‘The Fleet Air Arm covered itself with glory’) enhanced its reputation, and that of its most senior officer. Furthermore, The Watery Maze allowed its patron to criticize Eden at a distance. Thus, the assault upon Port Said, ‘was a model operation. Its worst feature was not a professional military one: it was the degree of control which the Government sought to exercise throughout.’36 This was the argument Mountbatten advanced in 1963 when, as Chief of the Defence Staff, he recommended a rigorous reappraisal of the Suez episode. He protested vigorously after Macmillan overruled a decision by the Chiefs of Staff Committee that the Joint Services Staff College should initiate a thorough re-examination of the 1956 campaign.37 Mountbatten was confident that operations undertaken over the succeeding seven years, most recently in Borneo, bore out his immediate post-invasion assessment: that at sea, on land and in the air the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines had performed to the best of their ability, determining their lead role in any future amphibious operations.38

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Following retirement in 1965 Mountbatten’s attitude towards criticism of the Suez expedition was no different from his response to any sceptic questioning the other military operations for which he held direct responsibility, not least the raid on Dieppe. All hostile opinion was dealt with by the exercise of gentle persuasion or ruthless pressure, a relentless search for favourable evidence and an uncompromising restatement on screen or in print of the most favourable individual version of events. Nor did this refusal to countenance criticism in any way diminish, as Mountbatten’s correspondence from the 1970s confirms. The more exaggerated the ageing hero’s claims, the more assiduous his search for supportive documentation.39 Spurred on by Charles Keightley, the taskforce’s commander-in-chief, in the spring of 1973 Mountbatten maintained a spirited correspondence with the distinguished military historian, Michael Howard. He complained that a review by Howard in The Times had referred to the armed forces’ ‘humiliating performance’ against the Egyptians. As Oxford’s Chichele Professor of the History of War, and with an MC gained on the slopes of Monte Cassino, Howard was potentially a formidable opponent. After all, as an official historian of the Second World War he had inside knowledge of Mountbatten’s final months at Combined Operations and his baptism of fire at South East Asia Command. Instead, he was suitably respectful, muting his formidable intellectual firepower.40 More sympathetic was the playwright Ian Curteis whom producer John Brabourne took to meet his father-in-law on 28 May 1975. At this point Curteis was not the controversial figure he later became, hence Mountbatten’s readiness to discuss Suez. Methodical and meticulous, Curteis promised his screenplay would indicate how well the three services had performed. In December 1977 he warned Mountbatten to expect a delay in screening: ‘As it’s still such a sensitive subject – people I talk to about it get terribly worked up almost immediately, as if it’s still happening – I suspect it could be a bumpy run.’41 Clearly it was important for Mountbatten to demonstrate that his professional conduct was in no way affected by his personal beliefs, but as in every other aspect of the Suez episode his recollection of the three services’ fighting efficiency more and more reflected the ideal rather than the real. Had Mountbatten revisited the Admiralty’s final assessment of the Royal Navy’s contribution to Operation Musketeer he would have found the relevant fleet commanders qualifying his initial enthusiasm. They didn’t pull their punches when lambasting ministerial micro-management (‘ … there is the danger that political considerations may so emasculate our plans, organization and the conduct of operations as to render them impotent’); but neither did they shrink from highlighting failures unique to the Royal Navy, not least regarding logistics and communications. On the positive side, ‘the whole operation provided compelling evidence to all of the flexibility and ubiquity of carrier-borne air power.’ On the negative, no less than seventy-two recommendations emphasized an urgent need to rebuild reserves of landing-craft and Royal Fleet Auxiliary support ships, revive continuous commando training in amphibious landings and restore purpose-built communications headquarters.42 The lamentable record of HMS Tyne as an ad hoc taskforce headquarters, and the breakdown in sea-land-air signals at critical moments during the fight for Port Said, reminded planning staff of the Calpe’s misfortunes at Dieppe; Combined Operations

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had responded speedily in the autumn of 1942, providing a purpose-built off-shore command centre in time for the North African landings. Although not the author, the First Sea Lord’s influence was obvious in almost every paragraph of the Royal Navy’s post-Suez wake-up call. The admirals’ conclusions were consistent with those arrived at by the Way Ahead Committee, which, as we shall see, was Mountbatten’s agency for reducing manpower and rendering the Navy fit for purpose. This was scarcely surprising seeing as the report was signed off by the C-in-C of the Mediterranean Fleet, Sir Guy Grantham, an ardent advocate of reform.43 The seizure of Port Said had seen a succession of fatal errors and miscalculations, many of them involving the RAF. But neither were the Navy and the Marines exempt or unaffected, with the most serious incident involving men of 45 Commando coming under attack from aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm. Regret in the Admiralty report, and then in The Watery Maze, that Marines had sacrificed commando training to conduct counter-insurgency operations in Cyprus hinted at Mountbatten’s original frustration over the time taken to secure a bridgehead, and the subsequent insistence that a swift coup de main could have occurred had his initial advice been accepted.44 Also pursuing Eoka guerrillas were units of the Parachute Regiment, in early August 1956 brought home to retrain for jumping into a hostile landing zone. As Fergusson tacitly acknowledged, the contrast with Jacques Massu’s Algerian-based 10th Para Division was striking.45 Fighting the FLN for eighteen months had not blunted the French paratroopers’ fighting ability, nor their ruthlessness (as confirmed by the murder of Egyptian civilians in Port Fuad). Carrying superior weaponry and flown in tail-loading aircraft, the elite French forces were used to regularly jumping at low altitude, rapidly securing an offensive base and then pressing home their advantage. For many British observers the catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 had compounded post-1940 prejudices regarding the French Army. Yet the all too obvious crisis of command and control within the Fourth Republic had obscured the Expeditionary Corps’ previous successes when fighting the Viet Minh.46 The most remarkable aspect of Dien Bien Phu was not that the colonial regiments and the Foreign Legion surrendered, but that they were able to maintain control of the perimeter and then the actual air base for so long.47 In planning and then implementing Musketeer the French were the junior partners, curbing the offensive instincts honed in Vietnam and deferring to British planners haunted by Arnhem. Gerald Templer, Charles Keightley, the taskforce’s commander on the ground Sir Hugh Stockwell and their staffs, were all in agreement that any airborne vanguard must be relieved by overwhelming force as speedily as possible, and only then should a major assault be launched to seize the Canal Zone.48 Naturally there were exceptions to the stereotype story of a misentente cordiale, witness French officers’ suspicion of the cerebral and unashamedly anglophile André Beaufre, the deputy taskforce commander. The colonial veterans’ fear that a general with no experience of the war in Indo-China might be tainted by Anglo Saxon caution was ironic given Beaufre’s later indictment of the British.49 Equally ironic was General Massu’s support late on 5 November for British efforts to secure a formal surrender of Port Said, and when this failed not to launch a night-time offensive.50

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To suggest the invasion was simply a story of British consolidation and French frustration is too crude an interpretation, but this was how the failure to advance south was perceived in Paris. In 1957 Mountbatten read Le Figaro’s serialization of Les Secrets de l’Expédition d’Egypte by Merry and Serge Bromberger. Rapidly translated into English, this was a lively, readable account of the expedition by embedded war correspondents insistent that the veterans of the Régiments Parachutistes Coloniaux were more offensive-minded than their British counterparts, and that the planned drop at El Qantara should have gone ahead  –  securing the exit causeway meant a rapid advance on Ismailia, a key objective. A similar view was expressed by Terence Robertson when the Canadian journalist moved on from exposing incompetence at Dieppe to uncovering collusion at Sèvres. By the late 1960s few in Britain fretted over the taskforce’s failure to seize the Canal Zone, as the prevailing view was that it should not have been there in the first place. Nevertheless, those still insistent that Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet should have negotiated from a position of strength found further reason to admire France’s aggressive posture when General Beaufre’s L’Expédition de Suez appeared in English.51 Beaufre detailed fundamental strategic differences between respective command structures, with the British service chiefs and their staffs prioritizing political convenience over military necessity. He highlighted the contrast between the respect shown to French forces in the field and the cavalier treatment of their commanders at every stage of the operation. A rapid response at the outset would have created a fait accompli, but the longer Nasser negotiated the more Britain required serious provocation in order to justify armed intervention. Like the less enthusiastic members of Eden’s Egypt Committee, Beaufre recognized that UN diplomacy and an open Canal negated any obvious casus belli. He readily acknowledged that because of Algeria the French had a different agenda to that of the British, but scarcely mentioned the scale of support provided to Israel between 1948 and 1956.52 Neither did Mountbatten when recalling Suez, because either the Royal Navy scarcely appreciated the full extent of French-Israeli collaboration, or – more likely – it chose to turn a blind eye. In Cyprus the taskforce’s deputy naval commander, Vice Admiral Barjot, maintained a communications link between Tel Aviv and his headquarters; and on 31 October the cruiser Georges Leygues was given permission to leave the convoy and support the Israelis’ advance into Gaza. Any evidence that the Admiralty tolerated such activities reinforced the charge of collusion, which naturally Mountbatten sought to disassociate himself from. In any case the Israeli air force’s ‘friendly fire’ attack on the frigate HMS Crane revived a scarcely muted antipathy towards ‘the Jews’: Cordage, the operational element of Britain’s diplomatic and military support for King Hussein, had called for a rigorous naval response when ‘aiding Jordan against Israeli aggression’. Married to the granddaughter of Sir Ernest Cassell, Mountbatten’s innate suspicion of Israel was clearly distinguishable from an innate anti-Semitism, unlike a majority of cabinet ministers.53 Beaufre was measured yet telling in his criticism of the British, as befit a soldierintellectual well known to Mountbatten in the late 1950s and the early 1960s as a NATO technocrat and strategic thinker. He shared the former Viceroy’s pragmatic view of decolonization as a ‘disease’ by no means fatal to the west: nationalist

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aspirations warranted accommodation not aggression. In this respect Beaufre and Mountbatten shared a common view of the Egyptian expedition: ‘Its defeat, due first to the disarray of the West, and secondly to belated and over-deliberate execution, far from curing the disease, definitely aggravated it.’54 Where they differed was in the lesson of Suez for their respective nations’ ambitions to acquire a credible nuclear deterrent. By mid-1957 Macmillan had secured Eisenhower’s agreement to revive technical collaboration. Meanwhile – as detailed in Chapters 4 and 5 – Mountbatten focused upon repairing relations with the US Navy, its stateof-the-art technology crucial to the construction of Dreadnought, Britain’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Across the Channel, a chastened Beaufre welcomed Mollet’s decision in December 1956 to sanction the construction of prototype thermonuclear weapons, thereby reducing France’s dependence upon the United States. Over the next decade, as one of the most senior generals in the Fifth Republic, he articulated the strategic thinking behind de Gaulle’s commitment to a genuinely independent force de frappe. In private, his thinking was at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy inside the Élysée: Beaufre argued that a much smaller deterrent would provide a cost-effective trip wire, its use forcing France’s allies to intervene.55 Fluent in the language, and a former NATO commander in the Mediterranean, Mountbatten’s close contact with France’s military elite dated back to Combined Operations’ commando training of the Free French; and later, SEAC’s problematic transfer of power following the surrender of Japanese forces occupying Indo-China. Recognized as a Francophile, Mountbatten had been the initial contact for the French military on the first weekend of the Suez crisis.56 Unlike the other service chiefs the First Sea Lord was surely appalled by the heavy-handed and duplicitous treatment of the French delegation prior to Keightley assuming overall command in mid-August. Security fears meant that on 8 August newly arrived French planners were told the taskforce would seize Port Said and not the actual objective at that time, Alexandria. French officers’ unhappy experience of subordinate command, culminating in adherence to an acquiescent Britain’s acceptance of a UN ceasefire, fuelled a residual anti-Atlanticism; the consequences of which Mountbatten was forced to confront when Chief of the Defence Staff.57 Inside Whitehall in the summer of 1956 he witnessed a clash of military cultures, with British planners’ inter-service collegial system the antithesis of France’s presumption that strong leadership meant swift action. With hindsight, Mountbatten’s subsequent promotion of service integration within the Ministry of Defence may be considered an over-ambitious attempt to secure the best of both worlds: clear lines of accountability within an essentially functionalist model.58 France’s contribution to Musketeer clearly influenced Mountbatten’s view of the operation. Mountbatten reconciled his insistence that all three services, not least his own, performed in exemplary fashion with a tacit acknowledgement that once the fighting began battle-hardened French elite forces had the edge. Their rapid seizure of Port Fuad and Raswa, while the British were still mopping up resistance in Port Said itself, signalled that once the Royal Navy had transferred control of the operation to Stockwell and his staff the momentum for swiftly moving forward waned. Mountbatten

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conveniently interpreted the French paras’ offensive mentality as confirmation that a coup de main could have worked. France’s political and military elite thought so at the time, with Mountbatten in later life convincing himself that he too had always been of the same opinion.59

­Suez and the long shadow of Combined Operations  – the Fleet Street connection The belief that speed and resolution had fallen victim to political expediency was a view shared by the writer, farmer and former staff officer at Combined Operations, Robert Henriques. A very different view of the expedition was expounded by Colonel Henriques’ junior colleague at Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ), the Observer’s editor and proprietor, David Astor. Their respective attitudes towards Suez help inform our understanding of Mountbatten’s role in the affair. In The Watery Maze Fergusson noted how key figures from COHQ found themselves dramatis personae in the Suez episode, with Robert Laycock, Mountbatten’s successor at Richmond Terrace, the Governor of Malta and a hawkish Antony Head elevated from the War Office to Minister of Defence.60 Fergusson might have added General Charles Haydon, one-time Commando chief and in 1956 responsible for Middle East intelligence. Mountbatten was all too aware of how much the Suez expedition drew upon the legacy of Combined Operations, not least at a critical moment in the crisis Head replacing Monckton, the sole member of the Egypt Committee sensitive to the First Sea Lord’s gravest fears and doubts. Brigadier Anthony Head had ended the war as COHQ’s most senior planner, and in parliament from July 1945 he put his military expertise to good use. As shown in the last chapter, Head was more involved than the other two service ministers in planning the invasion, regularly attending meetings of the Egypt Committee. Yet it was only on 18  October that he succeeded the unhappy Monckton and joined the Cabinet. The Prime Minister, ‘had no doubt that Anthony Head was the man for the job’. Eden judged his new Minister of Defence a staunch ally, steely when bearing the full brunt of Labour’s anger in the Commons. Head was entrusted on the eve of battle with joining Templer in Cyprus to brief General Keightley on the terms of engagement. Forty-eight hours later, on the morning of 6  November, it was Head who articulated the most convincing case in Cabinet for not accepting a ceasefire until the whole of the Canal Zone had been secured. Having shared the War Office’s fear of another Arnhem, Head now read the reality on the ground as suggesting rapid advance and early success.61 In this respect the Minister of Defence’s thinking paralleled that of his old boss at Combined Ops, except that Head’s concern over civilian casualties never caused him to question the whole enterprise. It is unlikely he knew that the First Sea Lord had considered the intensity of military intervention, and then the act of invasion itself, as reason to resign. The tone and content of later correspondence over Suez suggests Head knew little if anything regarding Mountbatten’s threatened resignation.62 In any case Mountbatten would never have confided in his one-time subordinate in the same way that he shared his concerns with Walter Monckton, an old friend seen as far more

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of an equal. In 1956 Whitehall convention still allowed a troubled chief of staff to deal directly with his service minister and Downing Street, thereby negating any obligation to discuss such matters with the Minister of Defence. Mountbatten was perfectly entitled to seek advice on a personal basis from Monckton, but not necessarily from his successor. Head was the one veteran of Combined Operations as intimately involved in the Suez operation as its former C-in-C. Robert Henriques’ credentials as a staff planner had been similarly impressive but his perspective on British intervention proved radically different, and much more that of the outsider. Henriques’s deep dislike of Mountbatten had prompted his eventual departure from COHQ, and in 1956 he judged the First Sea Lord as incompetent as the other chiefs of staff. Henriques asked why, with a convoy taking five days to sail from Malta to Egypt, the Admiralty had not demanded deep-water harbour facilities on Cyprus ahead of Britain evacuating the Canal Zone.63 Henriques, a member of a well-known, long assimilated Anglo-Jewish family, was previously indifferent to Zionism. However, a visit to Israel in early 1956 made such a deep impression that the following September he undertook to offer his military expertise at a moment of national emergency. Haydon and Head each urged caution; but then the latter, at this point still outside the Cabinet, gave Henriques a message for David Ben-Gurion. The Israeli premier was urged to avoid war with Jordan and to time an attack on Egypt to coincide with British military action. Britain would publicly condemn Israeli aggression but be supportive in subsequent peace talks. Head’s reputation for calmly thinking through every option was such that it seems hard to imagine this initiative was not sanctioned by Downing Street and/or the Foreign Office. According to Henriques, in Tel Aviv the clandestine envoy duly delivered his message to a sceptical prime minister.64 Henriques interpreted Head’s apparent indiscretion as one element within what he saw as a formidable body of evidence disproving the charge of collusion. In his version of events Ben-Gurion’s influenza had ruled out any secret trip to France, the delivery of military equipment had been delayed and the Israeli Defence Forces’ last-minute improvisation had indicated no foreknowledge of French let alone British intentions. Henriques dismissed the case for conspiracy in his reminiscence of the Sinai campaign, written almost as the war unfolded. His celebration of Israel’s unique triumph over adversity appeared early in 1957, with extracts serialized in the Daily Telegraph. He was similarly dismissive in October 1959 when the Spectator, having advised readers not to vote Conservative in that month’s general election, revived its original charge of collusion. A lengthy article by Erskine Childers concluded that the French and Israeli governments had clearly conspired together, with the British a de facto partner. A heated correspondence between Childers and Henriques extended to other readers, including Bernard Fergusson.65 The Spectator’s call for Eden to resign may have sent shock waves through the Carlton Club but its impact was muted, and today is largely forgotten. Not so the Observer’s op-ed pages in the issue of 4 November, the eve of British forces going into action. That Sunday’s editorials reflected David Astor’s pent-up fury. In the words of his biographer, ‘The leader [“The Fallacy”] made such an impact precisely because of

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its tone; the Observer had always prided itself on its moderation and reasonableness.’66 Not only did the paper launch a fierce personal attack upon Eden, urging his party to cast aside their leader, but it accused Britain and France of conspiring with Israel: ‘This is surely the strangest police action in history.’67 For all the furore regarding the tone and language adopted in this and subsequent issues, the Observer’s principled opposition was consistent with its sympathetic coverage of anti-colonial movements in Africa and the Middle East. The instinctively liberal Astor had prioritized withdrawal from empire when repositioning his paper as a well-informed commentator on world events. Yet, as Richard Cockett recognized, Astor’s enlightened view of decolonization remained compatible with his extended family’s ‘essential Atlanticism’. Not only was Eden’s folly alienating Arab opinion and dividing the Commonwealth, but it threatened the very fabric of the western alliance.68 Cockett recorded David Astor asking Monckton on 1 November for confirmation of collusion, and only when the invasion was launched receiving a sympathetic but unhelpful reply.69 They may have moved in the same patrician circles but the former Minister of Defence and the editor of the Observer were not natural allies in the same way that Astor and the Mountbattens clearly were. It’s not known whether Astor was at the eve-of-battle party Dickie and Edwina gave on 30  October. The chances are that he was, along with the philanthropic educationalist and economist Mary Stocks. The Observer trust’s newly appointed chair recalled the mood at Wilton Crescent that night: ‘ … that was the moment I decided we were being governed by lunatics’.70 This most definitely was not the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, and, while the First Sea Lord might exercise a degree of discretion, Edwina saw no reason to disguise her instinctive opposition to military intervention, especially among friends. If Mountbatten was foolish enough to try and undermine Eden’s position by leaking information to the press then David Astor was the most obvious confidant. On 19 August 1942 it had been Astor whom Mountbatten entrusted with controlling press coverage of returning Canadian regiments decimated in the debacle at Dieppe.71 Throughout the immediate post-war years the two men had proved of like mind regarding decolonization in Africa and Asia, and Astor retained a healthy respect for his old boss. The two men came across each other in the normal course of events, but they clearly became a lot closer after 1956. Mountbatten would brief Observer correspondents and even while still CDS was interviewed by Kenneth Harris for a controversial profile in the paper’s inaugural colour supplement. From 1957 Astor became a weekend guest in Romsey. In July of that year he was invited by Mountbatten to meet Nehru at Broadlands. Not that Astor’s meeting with the Indian Prime Minister proved any great success: after a good lunch the two men fell asleep in midconversation. However inauspicious the occasion, Astor nevertheless thanked his host, ‘for the confidence you showed in me’.72 That confidence had been evident ten months earlier when the First Sea Lord wrote to Astor advising him as to whom the Observer’s Washington correspondent should contact for the US Navy’s view of the deteriorating crisis. An interview was fixed with Admiral Jerauld Wright, the NATO Supreme Commander in the Atlantic. As we saw in the last chapter, Mountbatten maintained back channel communications with Wright until Eisenhower cracked down on tacit support for the Royal Navy inside the

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Navy Department. As instructed, Astor destroyed the letter, but Mountbatten typically ignored his own advice and preserved the reply. Clearly Wright and Mountbatten got on well, but that was no reason for the Chief of the Naval Staff to compromise his position by arranging for an American admiral to give an off-the-record briefing potentially critical of British foreign policy.73 If Astor and Mountbatten saw more of each other after 1956 perhaps it was because they shared a conspiracy of silence. A chief of staff, however distinguished and well-connected, was taking a huge risk in advancing his personal agenda via a Fleet Street  ally. Such action was singularly ill-advised, and it revealed a great deal about Mountbatten’s delusional belief that he was invulnerable. It also constituted a breach of the Official Secrets Act. Not that Mountbatten was alone in leaking to the press, and thereby breaking the law. Monckton maintained regular contact with Mirror Newspapers’ senior executives, Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King. He may also have passed privileged information to the ambassador in London, Winthrop Aldrich. By way of contrast, although Eden’s most vocal critic within government, Anthony Nutting preferred not to put the Americans in the picture.74 In private and via his newspaper Astor charged Eden and Selwyn Lloyd with malpractice. The Observer’s lead editorial on 11 November, ‘The Question of Collusion,’ is noteworthy for its accuracy and for its dependence upon unnamed sources in the United States. In later years the paper’s editor never revealed that on at least one occasion, possibly more, the First Sea Lord had acted in an inappropriate manner. The irony is that Astor was always adamant William Clark never compromised his position as Eden’s press secretary.75 Whatever the Prime Minister’s suspicions, there is no evidence that Clark passed information to the newspaper which he had left the previous year and to which he would return in 1957. As the crisis came to a head Eden’s staff restricted Clark’s access to offices and meetings, leaving him dependent on veiled hints and informed guesses. His letters to Astor signalling a fear of collusion and an intention to resign were actually written after the editorials for the 4 November issue had been drafted.76 In point of fact Clark was singularly underwhelmed by his old employer’s diatribe: ‘ … the Observer seemed hysterical and I was really too tired to read it, so I took it home and fell asleep reading that Eden must go. But me first.’77 Clark, like Astor, found Monckton deeply unhappy but reluctant to resign: ‘He replied that even the rats (“and I am a rat”) must stay on the ship now, but the government would fall soon.’ The same day, 6 November, he found Mountbatten with more than a hint of schadenfreude relishing the next phase of the operation, namely its closure: ‘“I can’t think why they haven’t sacked me. I’ve said such outrageous things.”’ What’s striking about such a remark is that a chief of staff could say this to someone who, for all his credentials as an experienced journalist, was significantly junior to him in the Whitehall hierarchy. Clark’s diary records a surprising degree of candour and intimacy on Mountbatten’s part throughout the crisis. A refreshing egalitarianism perhaps, but the gravitas and discretion of his fellow chiefs of staff surely constituted more appropriate behaviour. Mountbatten wasn’t naïve re his seemingly off-the-cuff remarks. He wanted Whitehall if not the wider world to know that he disapproved of Eden’s actions, and he could pose as the maverick secure in the knowledge that he would not – and could not – be sacked given the huge political ramifications.78

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­Maintaining a myth, from beyond the grave Mountbatten could of course have forced the Prime Minister’s hand, as signalled by the letter of dissent he handed to Lord Hailsham on 2 November. Other than Mountbatten himself, the one person with a clear knowledge of whether he seriously intended resignation on the eve of invasion was Hailsham. In early 1980 the former First Lord of the Admiralty was invited by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, to read the transcript of a programme based upon Mountbatten’s filmed reminiscences of Suez. By now Lord Chancellor, Hailsham described the recently deceased Mountbatten’s remarks as ‘not history but fiction’. His annoyance extended to writing a memorandum of correction, but in so doing he exposed his own lapses of memory.79 That autumn the BBC pulled the second episode of its posthumous series Lord Mountbatten Remembers. Edited and framed by Ludovic Kennedy, this extended tribute to a fallen hero was originally intended as six half-hour programmes of Mountbatten speaking from beyond the grave. In fact, footage of the loquacious Lord Louis had been shot at Broadlands in the spring of 1972. As we’ll see in the final chapter, Mountbatten had asked John Brabourne to reunite the same team that had shot his well-received TV life a few years before. The intention was to film a less inhibited record of Mountbatten’s career, suitable only for screening after his death.80 The tongue was clearly a lot looser than in previous television appearances. Even so, Mountbatten’s comments in front of the camera were more temperate than the pre-production notes recorded on his cue cards. Nowhere was this more evident than in the unscreened episode on Suez: Mountbatten may have courted controversy by accusing Eden of abusing prime ministerial power, but at least he dropped the idea of declaring him ‘mad’.81 Broadcast twice in August 1979 following Mountbatten’s assassination, Ludovic Kennedy’s film obituary had attracted warm praise. Kennedy was no great admirer, but his wartime service at sea and his passing acquaintance with the great man made him an obvious choice to work on Lord Mountbatten Remembers. The series was envisaged as a coda to Kennedy’s obituary, with the Prince of Wales invited to introduce the first episode. Ironically, in his final months an impatient Mountbatten had thrown caution to the wind: in due course Prince Charles’s quiet decision to withdraw became widely known, but not Mountbatten’s request shortly before his death that the film shot seven years earlier be aired in his lifetime. In June 1979 the trustees of the Broadlands Archives and the BBC had agreed a contract, with the producer accepting that no programme would be broadcast if the Cabinet Office objected. Lord Brabourne admitted to Sir Robert Armstrong in July of the following year that, if not seriously injured when the IRA blew up Mountbatten’s boat in Mullaghmore harbour, he would have terminated negotiations with the BBC. Had this proved impossible then Brabourne would have insisted the Corporation respect the Cabinet Office’s power of veto. In the event no final signing took place, and, in the convalescent Brabourne’s absence, Kennedy and colleagues had pressed ahead with producing the six programmes.82 Lord Brabourne clearly feared the series would portray his late father-in-law in an unfavourable light. One suspects the same view was held by the Queen given the access to all relevant correspondence enjoyed by her private secretary, Sir Michael

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Palliser. The depth of briefing provided to Downing Street suggests a parallel concern on Mrs Thatcher’s part that such a prominent victim of Republican terrorism should so speedily become mired in controversy. The Broadlands trustees clearly sought to accommodate the Cabinet Office’s reservations regarding every programme, but most especially the episode on Suez. Sir Ian Trethowan, the BBC Director General, was similarly sympathetic to government concerns, witness the scheduled time of broadcast. Trethowan was wary of excessive editorial control at the behest of Whitehall, especially as his generation of broadcasters saw the Suez crisis as television’s finest hour. No doubt he felt reluctant to go beyond asking that Kennedy accommodate specific requests to tailor the shooting script. Eventually, however, Trethowan had to order the programme be dropped. The Broadlands trustees had acceded to the wishes of the Cabinet Secretary and withdrew their permission to use the relevant film footage. Ironically therefore, the absence of a legal agreement proved in the event to Brabourne’s advantage.83 Armstrong’s principal concern regarding the Suez programme was the impact of Mountbatten’s trenchant comments upon Arab opinion at what the Foreign Office judged an especially sensitive time in the Middle East. Ludovic Kennedy and his eventual champion at The Times, the acerbic columnist and critic Bernard Levin, insisted that the situation was always sensitive; and that hostile Arab opinion towards Britain might shift after hearing such a prominent figure denounce Eden’s adventurism. Both Kennedy and Levin rejected Armstrong’s insistence on a ‘breach of confidential relationships’, as defined four years earlier in the Report of the Privy Counsellors on Ministerial Memoirs. They pointed out that Lord Radcliffe’s committee, set up in response to the furore surrounding publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries, had recommended ministers and officials wait fifteen years before airing their views in public.84 Armstrong and his advisers rejected this argument on the grounds that all the ministers named except Eden were alive, and in the case of Lord Hailsham still holding high office. Kennedy and his director cut some of the harsher remarks concerning Hailsham, Macmillan and the Earl of Selkirk; but their refusal to remove Mountbatten’s repeated criticism of Eden was seen by Armstrong as confirmation that the programme could not be broadcast in a meaningful and mutually acceptable form. Aware of Mrs Thatcher’s concern for the impact on a now elderly Macmillan, and urged on by the Lord Chancellor, the Cabinet Secretary refused further compromise.85 Buckingham Palace continued to monitor a dispute that had begun just four months after Mountbatten’s death, but which was only picked up by the press the following summer. It finally became a matter of public and parliamentary debate over a fortnight in November 1980, when Levin’s column included Mountbatten’s leaked comments regarding Eden and collusion. The size and prominence of Levin’s first article generated letters to The Times, above all Hailsham’s lengthy explanation as to why, ‘Lord Mountbatten’s memory must have played him completely false by the time that the programme was recorded.’ The Lord Chancellor’s carefully crafted blend of respect and rebuttal had been seen and approved by the Cabinet Office. Prior to this Armstrong had himself appeared in the correspondence columns of the BBC’s weekly magazine, the Listener,

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when he agreed to Ludovic Kennedy replicating a letter within the latter’s postscript to an account of the affair published the previous week.86 Neither Kennedy nor Levin debated the accuracy of comments made in the programme, although this was crucial to their argument that ‘the truth’ was being suppressed ‘in the teeth of Lord Mountbatten’s wishes’. Noting that ‘the Establishment censorship machine had won a notable victory’, Levin insisted that his intention was not to adjudicate in a conflict of testimony, but merely allow ‘Mountbatten be heard posthumously through the gag that had been tied round his words’.87 The controversy was short-lived, and rates only a passing mention in Mountbatten’s official biography. No one noted the irony of a man once seen as the embodiment of the Establishment supposedly becoming victim to its ‘censorship machine’. Armstrong was particularly sensitive to the feelings of Lady Avon, and to the scarcely disguised view among Mountbatten’s relatives that his performance across all six programmes could be construed as unflattering and perhaps even demeaning. However, the Cabinet Secretary’s abiding concern remained the impact of the Suez programme upon all parties in the Middle East conflict, both Arab and Israeli. On this matter the Cabinet Office, Downing Street and the Foreign Office were all in agreement, with Buckingham Palace hardly likely to demur.88 The harsh reality was that, however flawed or faithful his memory of Suez, an elderly Mountbatten found it increasingly hard to distinguish between exaggeration and actuality. (This was especially ironic given his obsession with bequeathing to both family and nation a definitive archive of his life. That same archive, replete with duplicates of official documents, contained the evidence contradicting his most extravagant claims. When Mountbatten retired as CDS in the summer of 1965 the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, requested the return of all documents concerning the Suez crisis labelled ‘Government Property’. Mountbatten duly adhered to the request, but not before he instructed his staff to photocopy the files: one set joined Suez-related documents already held by the Romsey branch of Lloyds Bank, while the other set was placed in the Royal Archives; further papers were forwarded to Windsor in the spring and summer of 1967.)89 Mountbatten was of course by no means alone in insisting that all three services, led by the Royal Navy, had performed in exemplary fashion when securing control of Port Said and its immediate hinterland. The long shadow of Dieppe lay over any amphibious attack on a large port, especially when the build-up to the actual landings was so ponderous, prolonged and problematic. Yet the overall operation, not least the use of carrier-based commandos, was testimony to the lasting legacy of Combined Operations. The First Sea Lord’s strong sense of personal satisfaction was tempered by French forces signalling a potentially much greater degree of success, whether at the time or at the onset of the crisis. Mountbatten’s objections to military intervention were essentially strategic, with Cold War calculation matching post-imperial insight. This principled yet pragmatic dissent was distorted late in life by his claim that Eden should have resolved the Suez crisis in a swift and satisfactory fashion, pre-empting any rupture in relations with America and the Commonwealth. Contrary to the impression given in the 1972 film footage, the Prime Minister did not exacerbate the crisis by ignoring Mountbatten’s

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initial advice to strike hard and strike fast. The reality was that the First Sea Lord had almost immediately changed his mind, but in later years this inconvenient truth did not fit his preferred version of events. The need for ultimate vindication demanded a necessary distortion of the narrative, as Lord Hailsham pointed out four months after the assassination. The irony is that Mountbatten had no need to rewrite history in that his opposition to military intervention was largely vindicated, and his reputation for fresh thinking enhanced by the deployment of an airborne assault force. Yet to enjoy quiet satisfaction in being proved right was never an option  –  as with every other aspect of Dickie Mountbatten’s career, he had to be seen to be right.

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‘The winds of change’: Commonwealth and cold war

Two very different men Harold Macmillan’s arrival at Westminster Abbey for Mountbatten’s funeral was captured by a Movietone cameraman. In September 1979 the Conservative Party’s grandest grandee was eighty-five. Twice wounded on the Western Front, he always looked a lot older than his age. Born only six years before the man he now mourned, Macmillan eschewed Mountbatten’s enthusiastic embrace of the here and now. Hence the striking contrast in physical appearance  –  Balliol, Pirbright and Chatsworth moulded Macmillan’s wardrobe of beloved tweeds and baggy suits, while Belgravia and Fort Belvedere shaped the well-cut, fashionably tailored suits and uniforms of a man obsessed as much with image as with reputation. Emerging from his limousine that chilly late summer morning Macmillan took a firm grip on his stick, dismissed offers of assistance and made his way into the Abbey, slowly, surely and with great dignity.1 Here was the moment Dickie Mountbatten had devoted so many hours to planning, albeit scarcely envisaging the tragic circumstances which would trigger such a splendid, elaborate and extravagant occasion. His model for the grand procession, the solemn celebration and then the ‘final journey’ to a family interment far from the metropolis was of course Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral in 1965, at which both Mountbatten and Macmillan had taken their place among the pall bearers.2 Age and infirmity ensured Macmillan’s absence when the last viceroy was carried into and then out of Westminster Abbey. If truth be told his was a shadowy presence among the five ex-premiers and spouses sitting alongside the Prime Minister and Denis Thatcher. The presence of so many ‘One Nation’ Tories in Mrs Thatcher’s first cabinet gave Macmillan modest assurance that in the coming months monetary policy would avoid a wholehearted embrace of Friedmanite free market thinking. The Treasury’s conversion to monetarism under the chancellorship of Geoffrey Howe was an anathema to the veteran Keynesian. Nevertheless, he remained silent, reluctant to join Ted Heath in veiled or not-so-veiled criticism of the present party leader. Five years would pass before Macmillan was once more in the public eye: as Earl of Stockton he deplored the second Thatcher administration’s privatization programme, and its apparent indifference to accelerating deindustrialization. The Prime Minister brushed aside Macmillan’s reservations regarding her programme of privatization3

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Yet, on at least one occasion Mrs Thatcher did adhere to her predecessor’s advice: when constructing her de facto war cabinet at the start of the Falklands conflict. Looking back to the summer and autumn of 1956, Macmillan urged her to avoid Eden’s ad hoc committee structure. Aware of his own contentious role in the Suez crisis – famously mocked by Harold Wilson as ‘first in, first out’ – Macmillan advised Mrs Thatcher to exclude her Chancellor of the Exchequer. With the Treasury not immediately party to operational decision-making, the Ministry of Defence enjoyed a free rein over contingency spending. As we’ll see, Macmillan responded speedily and with overwhelming force when Iraq threatened to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1961. Not surprisingly, therefore, he highlighted the Eden Government’s slow, ponderous response to Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal as a lesson in how not to mount a military expedition.4 This, of course, was precisely the advice Admiral Lord Mountbatten would have offered had he been alive in the spring of 1982. From April to June 1982 the humiliation of Suez was forever present in the minds of ministers, officials and senior military personnel. As for Macmillan and Mountbatten, Suez left a lasting if unexpected legacy. While, as we saw in the preceding chapter, Operation Musketeer all but destroyed Mountbatten’s friendship with Anthony Eden, an unlikely consequence was the forging of a successful working and personal relationship between the incoming Prime Minister and the future Chief of the Defence Staff.5 Within three years of a national humiliation, Harold Macmillan was orchestrating an electoral triumph for his party and, as shown in Chapter 6, his CDS was urging a radical reorganization of defence management, which remains the basis for inter-service decision-making six decades on. The concluding twelve months of the 1950s proved critical for Harold Macmillan and for Dickie Mountbatten. In his television memoirs Mountbatten singled out 1959 as ‘an astonishing technological year’, marking the moment when space exploration became a critical facet of the Cold War.6 In the general election that October Macmillan’s leadership was crucial to his party increasing its Commons majority from sixty to 100 seats. Three months earlier the First Sea Lord had been appointed Chief of the Defence Staff. The Prime Minister interpreted a very personal election victory as a mandate for initiating profound policy changes, at home, and most especially, abroad.7 The new CDS was seen by Macmillan as uniquely qualified to facilitate change within defence and national security. Furthermore, Mountbatten’s experience in south-east Asia and in India, and his scarcely disguised dissent over Suez, would be a handy asset, if properly used, once Macmillan accelerated the process of decolonization, and the consequent reshaping of the Commonwealth. Mountbatten’s importance for Macmillan was confirmed within weeks of the Conservatives’ election triumph: only six months into the job, and the CDS was asked to extend his tenure from three to five years with a view to seeing through anticipated changes in the defence establishment. Mountbatten declined, but he changed his mind following Edwina’s sudden death in February 1960, aged only fifty-nine: in accordance with her wishes she was buried at sea, having died in her sleep while touring Borneo on behalf of St John’s Ambulance. Mountbatten was devastated but found work a welcome distraction as he adjusted to life as a relatively young widower. As Chapter  6 explains, Downing Street fixed his retirement for July 1964, but in fact he stayed on a further year to ensure continuity

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as creation of the modern Ministry of Defence entered its final stage. In consequence Mountbatten served for twice the time of every Chief of the Defence Staff from 1965 through to the present day.8 In the interwar years and into the war, Macmillan viewed Mountbatten from afar. Both men carved out careers, in publishing and the Navy respectively, but both had also married into money, old and new: unlike Edwina, the favoured grandchild of a Jewish merchant banker, Dorothy Macmillan’s wealth derived from having the Duke of Devonshire as her father. Yet, despite the Cavendish connection and the society wedding, the serious-minded Macmillan avoided the glamorous social circles favoured by Dickie and Edwina. A voracious reader and a conscientious constituency MP, Macmillan didn’t have time for night clubs, polo matches and fashionable dinner parties. Spurred on by the poverty he encountered in Stockton-on-Tees (which haunted him for the rest of his life), throughout the 1930s Keynes’s publisher was a solitary figure on the Tory backbenches, prominent in drafting centrist policy planning initiatives such as The Next Five Years. Macmillan was extraordinarily professional in all that he did, but then so too was Mountbatten. Where they differed was in their chosen hinterlands. The only passion Harold shared with Dickie was shooting, but the latter’s postings abroad meant it unlikely their paths crossed. Nor could Macmillan anticipate a pre-war invitation to fish the Test so long as Chamberlain was still welcome at Broadlands. Unlike Mountbatten, a serving officer, Macmillan never disguised his deep antipathy to appeasement. If Mountbatten looked to Eden as an obvious point of contact, Macmillan deliberately kept his distance from the ‘glamour boys’; most of whom viewed the Member for Stockton’s serial rebellions over the National Government’s foreign and domestic policy with a mixture of amusement, bemusement and scorn.9 Anti-appeasement was rooted in a mutual suspicion of Germany and Germans. Macmillan was physically and mentally scarred by the Western Front, while the former Prince Louis Battenberg too easily recognized Teutonic drive and determination. Both men were Francophiles and fluent French speakers, sharing a respect, even a degree of affection, for De Gaulle.10 Mountbatten had enjoyed good relations with the Free French when Chief of Combined Operations, and Macmillan established a lasting relationship with le general in the Mediterranean, as of course he did with Eisenhower: as prime minister he could ill afford personal animosity towards the President over Washington’s torpedoing of Anglo-French efforts to regain the Suez Canal; while De Gaulle’s vetoing of Britain’s initial application to join the Common Market saw public stoicism veil private grief.11 Neither Mountbatten nor Macmillan had shared the English upper classes’ pre-war distaste for Americans, the one cultivating close friends in New York and LA, and the other devoted to a mother born in Indiana. In the late ’fifties the Daily and Sunday Express maintained their now familiar campaign of attrition, displaying minimal respect for Mountbatten’s status as the most senior chief of staff. Then in 1962 Beaverbrook found a fresh agent of imperial betrayal when Macmillan secured a cabinet majority for prioritizing Europe over the Commonwealth.12 While rarely as fervid as Beaverbrook, Churchill had of course been similarly unforgiving of Mountbatten’s role in ‘surrendering’ the Raj. Churchill saw partition as an act of personal disloyalty; his wartime patronage had after all

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been the making of Mountbatten. The same was true for Macmillan, who more than repaid the debt when orchestrating an unprecedented surge in house building after the Conservatives regained office in October 1951. Macmillan’s loyalty to Churchill extended to India  –  as we saw in Chapter  1, he had been appalled by the Viceroy’s handling of partition. Macmillan’s discreet dealings with Opposition frontbenchers like Hugh Dalton, forged in the final years of peace, ended with the break-up of Churchill’s coalition.13 This of course was the very moment at which, spurred on by Edwina’s self-proclaimed socialist sympathies, Mountbatten became more closely associated with the Labour Party  –  an association consolidated following his appointment as Viceroy in 1947. While the Mountbattens enjoyed their unlikely friendship with Sir Stafford and Lady Cripps, ambition dictated Dickie also cultivate Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson, neither of whom Macmillan held in high regard.14 His diary entries were damning of both men, as indeed they were of Mountbatten throughout the 1950s. The violence and bloodshed that followed partition, and the Labour Government’s calculated efforts to portray Indian independence as a triumph for the viceregal couple, reinforced Macmillan’s jaundiced view of both Dickie and Edwina. In the summer of 1951 Macmillan labelled the Mountbattens pernicious ‘Orléanists’, hoping ‘to exercise great influence in Britain’ courtesy of their troublesome nephew. This became a regular complaint following the Queen’s accession to the throne, and Mountbatten’s abortive attempt to see the Royal Family adopt his surname.15 The First Sea Lord’s Janus-like capacity for combining duty and dissent throughout the Suez crisis reinforced Macmillan’s suspicion that he played the press to his own advantage. Six months into his premiership Macmillan complained that Mountbatten ‘is a strange character and tries to combine being a professional sailor, a politician, and a royalty. The result is that nobody trusts him.’ As late as September 1960, when Prime Minister and Chief of the Defence Staff were seemingly as one in their agenda for change, Macmillan could still write, ‘Poor Dickie M. talks all the time and has (with all his charm) a very limited mental capacity. I fear the Americans are finding this out.’ Perhaps the PM had experienced an especially trying day as henceforth the tone changed. By May 1963, with shooting weekends at Broadlands now a regular date in the Macmillan calendar, Mountbatten was deemed, ‘awfully nice and very intelligent – but he is really rather silly sometimes’.16 The silliness related to Mountbatten’s obsession with genealogy and the family name, not his readiness in pushing through Macmillan’s reform of the defence establishment and his geopolitical blueprint for Britain’s role in an ever more fissured east-west divide. Here was a man famed for his attention to detail, yet too often preoccupied with the petty and the inconsequential. Macmillan dismissed Mountbatten’s fascination with the fripperies of privilege. More attractive, and far more useful, was Mountbatten’s capacity to grasp the bigger picture; albeit without the light and shade an intuitive and erudite Prime Minister displayed in his late ’fifties musings on withdrawal from empire and engagement with Europe. It’s clear Mountbatten and Macmillan had more in common than at first sight seemed obvious. At Broadlands in the twilight months of Macmillan’s premiership, over a last, late-night cognac, did the two men discuss their most painful shared experience,

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the infidelity of their wives? Edwina’s succession of lovers was semi-public knowledge. The same was not true of Lady Dorothy’s ultra-discreet, decades-long affair with Bob Boothby. The future Lord Boothby was once the coming man on the pre-war Tory backbenches, but his political career stalled at the very moment Harold Macmillan’s took off. One can safely assume Macmillan chose not to confide in the recently widowed Mountbatten. Always a very private man, the Prime Minister was appalled by ’sixties shifts in sexual mores, not least the behaviour of John Profumo, Duncan Sandys and their fellow party-goers at Cliveden, that pre-war nest of aristocratic appeasers. Macmillan’s uncharacteristically inelegant handling of the Profumo affair was rooted in a deep distaste for perceived sexual depravity on the part of presumed officers and gentlemen.17 The Chief of the Defence Staff, no doubt relieved that his own sexual proclivities had not seen him caught up in the imbroglio, or the divorce proceedings of the Duchess of Argyll, found himself offering frank advice to an old friend and admirer, Douglas Fairbanks Junior. Having consulted with his closest confidant, Solly Zuckerman, Mountbatten urged Fairbanks not to sue for libel unless he could categorically disprove newspaper reports of a close acquaintance with the Duchess and with Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. No legal action ensued.18 Here then were two very different personalities, with contrasting perspectives on the contemporary world. Mountbatten, Fellow of the Royal Society and President of BAFTA, had always enthusiastically embraced modernity; he saw himself as an agent of change.19 As, strangely enough, did Harold Macmillan. A scholar whose tastes in fiction began with Austen, peaked with Trollope and ended with Forster, Macmillan recognized a fast-changing world; but that didn’t mean to say he liked it. When the English translation of di Lampedusa’s The Leopard was published in 1960, appropriately it was championed by E. M. Forster. His fellow Edwardian, the Prime Minister, embodied and exemplified the novel’s oft-quoted statement of Burkean conservatism: ‘If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change.’ While Lampedusa’s lengthy novel scarcely registered with Macmillan, Mountbatten almost certainly saw Visconti’s epic screen adaptation. Birch Grove boasted a well-stocked library of learning, while Broadlands boasted a state-of-the-art screening room.20 There lay the difference between the two men.

‘Supermac’, the ‘imperial undertaker’ and Commonwealth challenges Remember David Cannadine’s memorable labelling of Mountbatten as the nation’s ‘imperial undertaker.’21 Macmillan clearly shared the funereal duties, delegating the Empire’s final rites to his colonial secretary, Iain Macleod. Once inside Downing Street Macmillan recognized the restoration of good relations across the Commonwealth as paramount. The level of disharmony generated by the decision to invade Egypt was most intense in south Asia. The Indian government’s vocal opposition to British military action had been exactly as predicted by Mountbatten in his warnings to Eden on 1 August and 2 November 1956. In the aftermath of the Suez crisis Anglo-Indian relations were at their lowest ebb since independence. India’s prime minister was aware

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Macmillan’s support for intervention had ceased only when America’s ferocious assault on sterling forced the Treasury to urge recognition of the UN ceasefire and a suspension of military operations in the Canal Zone. Nehru was of course well aware that his old friend had strongly opposed an Anglo-French invasion of Egypt. As we’ve seen, Mountbatten had twice offered to resign, while continuing to oversee preparation of the task force with his usual attention to detail. For Macmillan the enforced withdrawal of British personnel from Port Said was a brutal reality check, signalling the need for unequivocal American support if a future British government contemplated the unilateral use of military force. For Mountbatten the Royal Navy’s operational efficiency provided quiet satisfaction, but the damage to Britain’s global reputation brought a grim vindication, his knowledge of collusion with Israel conveniently swept under the carpet.22 Unsurprisingly, at the start of his administration Macmillan kept Mountbatten at a distance, the latter lamenting to Nehru the novelty of not being ‘on intimate terms’ with the prime minister of the day: Eden may have ignored his views on Egypt, but he was always receptive to advice on south Asia, unlike his successor; and so, ‘perhaps this is why our relations with India are not so good as they used to be!!!’.23 In July 1957 India’s premier visited England, spending a miserable night at Chequers. Macmillan’s visit to India in early 1947 had fuelled a residual ill will towards the leader of Congress. Ten years later he set out to forge a warmer relationship with Nehru. His initial effort was a demonstrable failure, but prior to the Pandit’s return home Mountbatten intervened. He urged Macmillan to hold a further meeting with Nehru, focusing upon specific issues rather than sharing a broad brush overview of global tensions. Second time around, both men discovered a surprising amount in common, and the meeting ended with Nehru inviting his host to visit India.24 The success of that visit, in January 1958, confirmed the remarkable speed with which Macmillan saw the slate wiped clean over Suez – he consolidated his relationship with Nehru, and revelled in the reception he received at a massive rally in the Red Fort.25 A readiness in New Delhi to move on was matched in Colombo and even Rangoon; but not in Karachi, where Mountbatten’s influence was minimal.26 He was still persona non grata in Pakistan, the government of Ayub Khan vetoing his presence at a meeting of the Central Treaty Organisation’s Military Committee in October 1962. For all his moaning, the ban suited Mountbatten as he shared India’s fears regarding Pakistan’s membership of the Baghdad Pact (an obsolete term once the end of Hashemite rule saw Iraq quit CENTO in 1959). Created as an anti-Nasser bloc in 1955, the Baghdad Pact was very much a British initiative until the United States joined its Military Committee in 1958, after which Pakistan’s influence grew: U2 surveillance missions over the USSR flew out of Peshawar, and the Americans viewed the Pakistanis as reliable Cold War allies – unlike the non-aligned Indians. Yet, because CENTO was now seen as primarily an anti-Soviet  alliance, Pakistan was left isolated in September 1965 when border skirmishes with India developed into a short but costly war; the same was true in 1971, when the stake were far higher. For Mountbatten in retirement this was a reassuring turn of events, but at the start of the ’sixties his apprehension seemed justified, not least as perceived western support for Pakistan, when combined with the reality of Chinese aggression, pushed India into ever closer ties with the Soviet Union.27

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Nehru found Mountbatten an invaluable conduit for conveying to Macmillan the real state of Anglo-Indian relations, behind the diplomatic niceties.28 By the summer of 1958 Mountbatten could point to a marked improvement in personal relations between Nehru and Macmillan (in contrast with Eden, where a weekend gathering at Broadlands in February 1955 had proved disastrous).29 The same was true for his own dealings with Macmillan, the latter’s letters to ‘Dear Dickie’ no longer cold and official, but remarkably warm and informal. During Macmillan’s premiership Mountbatten made only one visit to India, in the spring of 1963. He was back in New Delhi less than a year later for a farewell visit to the ailing Nehru, but by then Macmillan had made way for Sir Alec Douglas-Home. The 1963 visit was part of an Anglo-American initiative to secure a permanent settlement in Kashmir. Mountbatten’s role was to inject a ‘gale of dynamic emollience’, ahead of hard bargaining between the British delegation and Jawaharlal Nehru.30 The complexity of the Kashmir conflict was rendered that much greater by its enmeshment in Cold War geopolitics, and the failure of the American and British governments to resolve policy differences and deepening personality clashes.31 Although responsibility for the border dispute was clearly outside the CDS’s remit, Mountbatten devoted much time and effort to promoting the notion of an independent, demilitarized Kashmir. In Lahore and London his hawkish attitude when Governor General had not been forgotten, and in this respect Kashmir was unfinished business – fostering a settlement would silence critics of his interventionist position in the winter of 1947–8. Having floated the idea with Ayub Khan when the Pakistan president visited London in March 1961, Mountbatten waited for an opportune moment to broker a deal with Nehru. When the time came for Mountbatten to make his case, he somehow persuaded a reluctant Nehru to discuss bilateral mediation with his cabinet. This augured well for the following day’s formal discussions with Duncan Sandys and Paul Gore-Booth, Commonwealth Secretary and high commissioner respectively. But before then Mountbatten addressed the National Defence Council’s most senior military committee in a private capacity, stiffening sinews in the aftermath of India’s de facto defeat by China the previous autumn (‘I said I had tackled this task from the point of view of being once more an Indian employed by the Government of India as I was on 15  August 1947 … I had done so much preparation, and it went over remarkably well.’). It’s not surprising that, when talks with the British delegation took place the following day, Nehru’s ministers were once more talking tough over Kashmir.32 Nevertheless, Duncan Sandys secured a begrudging agreement to the joint appointment with Pakistan of an independent mediator. On balance, Mountbatten had fulfilled his role. A subsequent failure to secure effective mediation was as much the fault of trans-Atlantic tensions as postpartition enmity.33 Equally unsuccessful were efforts to use Mountbatten’s popularity in Burma as a means of convincing General Ne Win that Commonwealth membership would help his country unite and prosper. In the spring of 1947 Mountbatten had encouraged the Attlee Government to find a means by which the Burmese republic could remain a Commonwealth member. No action was taken, and yet two years later a satisfactory compromise was found when India became a republic: Mountbatten argued that the 1949 Declaration of London, whereby the British sovereign enjoyed a separate status

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as Head of the Commonwealth entitled Burma to become once more a member. He insisted the country would never have left had Aung San not died; and had relations with the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League not deteriorated so badly during the disastrous ten months of Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith’s governorship following the Japanese surrender.34 Aung San had introduced Ne Win to Mountbatten when an APFL delegation travelled to Rangoon in June 1945. The two men had hit it off from the start, and despite their very different backgrounds found that they had a surprising amount in common. Over the next thirty years their friendship grew, and when staying in his Wimbledon pied à terre Ne Win would travel down to Broadlands for a weekend of fishing and shooting. Through Mountbatten the head of Burma’s de facto military regime became well acquainted with the Royal Family; while his passion for game and golf endeared him to Macmillan. In July 1960, and again in May 1961, Mountbatten urged Ne Win to consider Burma’s return to the Commonwealth. Both approaches were rebuffed, and within the Foreign Office it was recognized that here was a topic guaranteed to annoy a prime minister better known as Chairman of the Union Revolutionary Council. Thus, when diplomats briefed Mountbatten ahead of his visit to Rangoon in January 1964, he was advised to steer clear of Commonwealth membership and instead encourage Ne Win to temper his radical and authoritarian instincts. Politely but firmly, Ne Win warned Mountbatten not to risk their friendship by advising him on matters that were no business of the British Government or of its most senior military adviser. Henceforth, the two men’s conversation rarely strayed beyond field sports, golf, horses and social chit-chat.35 As First Sea Lord most of Mountbatten’s trips beyond Europe and the Mediterranean were to North America, but after his appointment as Chief of the Defence Staff he travelled further afield. Invariably  –  and characteristically  –  he took a large retinue with him, made up of daughters, ADC and Military Assistant and a handful of former aides always happy to reminisce with the old man in lengthy late-night sessions long after Pamela or Patricia had retreated to bed. A sizeable number of Wrens provided secretarial support, their duties extending to assistance for any Foreign Office officials attached to the official party. Ever present were Chief Petty Officers Nelson and Evans, personal assistant and valet respectively. Evans oversaw a vast quantity of luggage, with uniforms and civilian dress to cover every conceivable occasion. On certain occasions, such as the visit to South America in the spring of 1964, a select group of specialist journalists would make up the numbers. Mountbatten’s days on tour were packed, early morning until late at night, and yet he remained just a call or a cable from colleagues inside the MOD and further afield. He always kept a close eye on events at home, and, when not attending public and private functions, maintained a work schedule akin to being in his office. Contact with London was via the local embassy, high commission or consulate or via the hi-tech comms system standard to the Comet 4s designated by Transport Command for VIP deployment.36 No longer tied down by departmental responsibility, the CDS toured the Commonwealth, liaising with veterans’ associations, attending alliance meetings, inspecting overseas bases and advancing the views and interests of HMG in formal and informal discussions with local leaders, both friendly and not so friendly – Mountbatten remained an unashamedly political chief of staff, by dint of

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birth, status, influence, charm, achievement and of course, shameless self-promotion. He rarely lingered long in countries without a close connection to Britain, although early 1963 did see an illuminating tour of South America. As Churchill had recognized in his early dealings with the Roosevelt administration, Mountbatten was the ideal envoy, uniquely qualified to launch a charm offensive or to conduct tough negotiations as and when required. For Macmillan and Macleod he was the perfect man in the field, eschewing reactionary attitudes and projecting a positive image: even if he couldn’t facilitate change himself, he could convey to a mass audience a keen impression that change was on its way. This was a man who in the Far East still enjoyed a huge bank of goodwill, dating back to SEAC and the aftermath of the Japanese surrender; and who invariably eschewed the rapid transit from VIP lounge to select accommodation in favour of working the crowd. This readiness to subvert carefully orchestrated hospitality was evident when Mountbatten visited Cyprus on the eve of his retirement in the summer of 1965. Although he knew the island well this was his first visit since independence, and, while he endeavoured to cultivate the goodwill of Turkish Cypriots, the majority Greek community dictated the nature of his stay. An accidental meeting at a royal wedding in Athens the previous year set the tone for the visit: at the palace ball a previously hostile Mountbatten had no option but to acknowledge Archbishop Makarios, the episcopal president sending him a strong signal that here was no Castro in a cassock. During that same visit a prescient Mountbatten had warned the Greek military how powerless they were to stop a Turkish invasion of Cyprus: in July 1974 he gained grim satisfaction when an Athens-inspired plot to depose Makarios had disastrous consequences. Back in June 1965 the CDS’s visit saw Mountbatten burnish his credentials as an anticolonialist, giving Makarios the impression that at a Chiefs of Staff Committee meeting he had questioned Churchill’s insistence on sending the turbulent priest into exile: … an official from the Colonial Secretary came to ask if I would provide a frigate to take him [Makarios] to the Seychelles. I replied, “Certainly, how long do you want her to stay there?” The Colonial official was taken aback and said, “Why should she stay there?” I replied, “To save fuel, because you cannot get any settlement until you bring Makarios back again.” This delighted His Beatitude.

A decade later Mountbatten embellished this story, telling Richard Hough that back in March 1956 the joke had infuriated Sir Gerald Templer, the CIGS snarling, ‘“I hate you, Dickie, you’re anti-British – you’re just yellow!”’. All Mountbatten’s recollections must be viewed with deep scepticism, but this anecdote sounds entirely plausible.37 Mountbatten finally got to meet Makarios, but it’s striking how rarely he found himself in direct contact with the first generation of post-independence leaders, particularly in Africa. Too often he was kept away from indigenous politicians by colonial officials. A notable exception was the West Indies in March 1962 where he met  all the islands’ aspiring statesmen, a few familiar from previous encounters in London: his diary entries suggest no Cold War suspicion of a radical nationalist like Guyana’s Cheddi Jagan, nor of Jamaica’s Norman Manley, the architect of the West Indian Federation’s demise.38

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Macmillan invested far more political capital in the Central African Federation than its Caribbean cousin. The CAF’s flaws were all too obvious by the time Mountbatten and his eldest daughter toured Nyasaland and Northern/Southern Rhodesia in the autumn of 1960.39 Their visit was delayed by Edwina’s death earlier in the year, but also because Macmillan had prioritized his own six-week tour of southern Africa: the significance of this trip meant there could be no distractions, not least vying for media attention with a high profile courtier and chief of staff viewed warily by white politicians either side of the Limpopo. Although Mountbatten met the Federation prime minister, Sir Roy Welensky, the visit was essentially a jolly. Welensky ensured no meetings with local anti-colonialists, and in any case both Kenneth Kaunda and Hastings Banda were abroad. Mountbatten was lucky in his timing, having left Salisbury before publication of Sir Walter Monckton’s report on the Federation’s future provoked fury among the white Rhodesian community. Welensky already felt betrayed by the British Government’s ‘appeasement of African nationalism’, and, however unfairly, the CDS would have found himself in the firing line. In Kenya and Uganda Mountbatten was similarly cocooned from nationalist opinion, with scant opportunity to capitalize on the change of mood engendered by Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ speech to the South African Parliament the previous February. This was a holiday, not a mission.40 The one tangible benefit was a familiarity with the political landscape when advising Harold Wilson against military intervention after the white minority Rhodesian government declared independence in November 1965.41 Mountbatten chose not to visit South Africa in 1960, nor on any subsequent tour. Here was a quiet, unstated, almost unnoticed boycott of the National Party’s apartheid regime. The Prime Minister’s polite but nevertheless blunt address to Hendrik Verwoerd and his fellow parliamentarians on 3 February 1960 echoed Mountbatten’s advice to Eden at the time of Suez: the era of white supremacism was at an end, and, in Macmillan’s words, ‘the great issue in this second half of the twentieth century is whether the uncommitted peoples of Asia and Africa will swing to the East or to the West.’42 In the early 1960s Mountbatten drew heavily upon his legacy as C-in-C South East Asia Command and India’s last viceroy to ensure the newly independent nations of south Asia remained within the western orbit. Notwithstanding India’s readiness to buy arms from the Soviet Union, his endeavours reaped rewards, not least in Malaysia and Singapore. At the same time a continuing British presence east of Suez was consolidated by integrated inter-service commands.43

Mountbatten in a nuclear age (1): the 1957 Defence White Paper A sizeable naval contingent across the Indian Ocean and beyond was in part a consequence of the Indonesian-Malaysian confrontation, at its most intense from the final year of Macmillan’s premiership. The principal reason, however, was Mountbatten’s fierce resistance to post-Suez proposals for a dramatic scaling-back of the Royal Navy’s surface fleet, not least its aircraft carriers. A cross-Commonwealth network of high-level contacts was regularly called upon to endorse the Admiralty argument that being able to respond rapidly to unanticipated crises necessitated naval forces on

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permanent station in the most unstable parts of the world. Transatlantic links ensured Washington’s discreet intervention whenever a curtailing of Admiralty ambitions was deemed damaging to alliance security. Mountbatten’s well-honed political skills rendered him a formidable opponent in the corridors of power. A loyal, talented and dedicated Naval Staff, plus a natural propensity for hard work, meant the First Sea Lord was always well briefed. Charming and articulate, Mountbatten remained the consummate communicator, with a unique talent for news management.44 He had a clear idea of how, at every level, the Navy needed to modernize and embrace a fastchanging world. The challenge was to reconcile that vision of the future with the demands of an administration intent on restructuring and retrenchment. Ever the realist, Mountbatten acknowledged the need for spending cuts, so long as they were not disproportionate; and so long as the Royal Navy retained control of where those cuts would hit hardest: but from February 1957 the Chief of Naval Staff faced a formidable foe in Duncan Sandys, a Minister of Defence with the authority and prime ministerial backing to challenge the autonomy of the service ministries, to question their strategic and operational priorities and to curtail their spending. Sandys was no friend of the Navy, having repeatedly questioned the need for naval air power when Churchill’s Minister of Supply: his aggressive questioning of the Royal Navy’s presumed role in a much changed world, and his relentless querying of naval expenditure, were countered by an equally obdurate First Sea Lord, keenly supported by his minister45 Unlike Sir Roderick McGrigor five years before, Mountbatten could expect scant support from Lord Selkirk, an Edinburgh barrister and minor politician whose wartime record in the Royal Air Force rendered him an odd – but clearly deliberate – appointment as the new First Lord of the Admiralty.46 Before and after publication of the landmark 1957 Defence White Paper, Mountbatten contested almost all of Sandys’s proposals, rooted as they were in the presumption that nuclear weapons, sophisticated missile technology and formidable – land-based – air power rendered a large navy obsolete.47 As First Sea Lord, he and his fellow chiefs of staff questioned the minister’s deterrence-based strategy, while recognizing that the combative Sandys was clearly Macmillan’s man: a Downing Street directive had sanctioned a decisive shift of power away from the services – all three bruised by their abortive seizure of the Suez Canal – towards a freshly energized Ministry of Defence. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, Mountbatten differed from the other chiefs of staff in his integrationist sympathies, but he shared their objections to a drastic reduction in conventional forces. Instinctively sceptical of the case for an independent nuclear deterrent, Mountbatten was an early critic of ‘massive retaliation’ as a doctrinal concept. He believed that in the event of war Britain would still need secure supply lines at sea, with NATO rigorously contesting Soviet incursion into the North Atlantic: the Royal Navy would maintain its vanguard role in anti-submarine warfare (ASW), above and below the waves and in the air.48 Sandys began his two-year tenure at the Ministry of Defence confident that a deterrent-based strategy, reliant on new technology and on radically rethinking the nature of contemporary warfare, could secure a significant shrinking of the defence budget, in both procurement and manpower. From the outset he enjoyed the confidence and support of his department’s most senior officials, permanent secretary Sir Richard

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Powell and his deputy, Richard Chilver. Both men viewed all three services as cavalier in their respect for centrally agreed strategic priorities and budgetary constraints: within a week of Sandys’ appointment they had submitted a set of proposals strikingly similar to the final shape of the eventual White Paper. Sandys and his advisers ‘were united as they entered into the bureaucratic trench warfare’ with the service chiefs and their protective ministers. That strong sense of common purpose was shared equally by the new Prime Minister. Macmillan, fresh from a Treasury rocked by the crippling run on the pound which ended Eden’s adventure in Egypt, placed a premium on restoring the Conservatives’ reputation for financial prudence – demonstrating a tight control of all aspects of government expenditure was an absolute priority. Sending Peter Thorneycroft to the Treasury was a demonstration of intent; although the following two years saw increasing tension between a fiscally conservative Chancellor and an instinctively expansionist Prime Minister. That tension focused on domestic spending, fuelled by contrasting views on the control of wage-driven inflation. Whatever their differences long-term, in the spring of 1957 both men shared – along with Sandys and his senior staff – a clear desire to rein in defence expenditure, across all three services.49 The problem for the Royal Navy was that, with the smallest share of the defence budget (22 per cent) an overall fall of 8 per cent, as anticipated by both the Treasury and the MOD, would be disproportionately damaging. In contrast, the RAF’s medium-term trajectory was upwards, guaranteeing a one-third share of the overall budget early in the following decade.50 In heated and protracted negotiations prior to publication of the 1957 White Paper, Sandys insisted upon a post-conscription army significantly smaller than the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Gerald Templer, deemed acceptable. Despite the minister’s firm belief in the efficacy of a credible nuclear deterrent, he rarely sought to accelerate development of the Blue Streak liquid-fuelled missile, and, to the consternation of the RAF, indicated a cut in the planned expansion of the V-bomber force. The latter’s future largely depended on the successful replacement of free-fall bombs with Blue Steel, a prototype glide missile intended to elude sophisticated Soviet air defences: critical to a credible nuclear deterrent was guaranteed destruction of the UK’s primary targets.51 The Army and Air Force were thus unholy allies in undermining Sandys’s blueprint for change. The Admiralty was equally fearful of the final outcome, and yet the First Sea Lord sought to calm wardroom fears, insisting the Royal Navy disguise its real feelings towards Macmillan’s hatchet man.52 Within Whitehall Mountbatten expressed anxiety over the exact wording of the white paper. An early draft implied the service chiefs’ endorsement of the planned shrinkage in front-line personnel: for his colleagues on the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) this was an overtly political proposal, which should be signalled as such. After much wrangling a compromise statement emerged. A similar ambivalence surrounded the ‘somewhat uncertain’ role of the Royal Navy in any future global war. At this point Mountbatten stepped back from the immediate affray.53 Instead, he focused upon the longer-term goal of preserving a surface fleet equipped to fight a long war, in other words, to protect shipping lanes in the Atlantic and to respond rapidly if required anywhere from the Gulf to the South China Sea. Maintaining the programme for development and construction of the County class guided missile destroyers was

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an absolute priority (‘ … these certainly were the children of my imagination when I became First Sea Lord’). This necessitated abandoning other procurement projects; although cancelling a guided missile cruiser in April 1957 was deemed a blessing in disguise – state-of-the-art destroyers and frigates were more cost effective, and more adaptable to operational requirements. They were crucial in maintaining effective and secure carrier task groups.54 The Royal Navy’s role in the seizure of Port Said had confirmed the case for two Commando carriers, with the capacity to mount amphibious operations east of Suez seen as a priority. In the words of the First Sea Lord: ‘With the ever-growing uncertainty surrounding our overseas bases it is more than ever necessary that the Navy should be capable of transporting a first-class military force to a potential trouble-spot and landing it there by the quickest possible means.’55 In the early months of 1957 the Admiralty’s strategic priorities appeared an anathema to Sandys, not least Mountbatten’s insistence on a permanent naval presence in the near and far east. The First Sea Lord was similarly insistent on the maintenance of naval air power, requiring as it did a credible carrier force. Again, the Defence Secretary questioned such a fundamental – and expensive – assumption. Crucially, at a key moment in negotiations Mountbatten secured the COSC’s unequivocal support for retaining the Fleet Air Arm at full strength, despite the cost of fleet carrier refits and aircraft replacement: a detailed and forceful policy paper saw Sandys forced to concede defeat. Nevertheless, he continued to question first principles concerning the Navy’s future role, and, if anything, the minister’s scepticism deepened following publication of his eponymous white paper.56 While production of the Fleet Air Arm’s second-generation jet aircraft and ASW helicopters remained largely intact, Sandys cancelled plans for a supersonic fighter, and repeatedly questioned the case for parallel development of Blackburn’s NA39 – the Buccaneer  –  and BAC’s supersonic, multi-role TSR2. In due course the Buccaneer proved a highly successful low-level strike aircraft, serving with the Fleet Air Arm for sixteen years; in the late 1960s its shore-based variant was adopted by the RAF following cancellation of both the TSR2 development programme and the purchase of General Dynamics’ F-111K. The NA39 was very much a Navy project, and with over 200 built it was a rare example in post-war Britain of a cost-effective, high-functioning, variable purpose combat aircraft. Even if he claimed to be, Mountbatten was by no means alone in ensuring the Buccaneer’s ultimate success. Nevertheless, he played a crucial role in holding at bay Sandys and a predatory Air Staff prior to the prototype’s successful carrier trials in the summer of 1959.57 Mountbatten rightly saw publication of Sandys’s White Paper as no more than an opening gambit. He instructed his staff to prepare a detailed paper, justifying the Royal Navy’s importance in a variety of conflict scenarios; in September 1957 a final draft was submitted to the minister. Meanwhile the First Sea Lord embarked on an aggressive charm offensive, complemented by a scarcely veiled threat of resignation. He unashamedly courted Sandys, lavishing hospitality on his guest whenever he visited Broadlands. The Defence Secretary’s attitude towards the Navy changed markedly, much to the chagrin of the other chiefs of staff. Their long-standing suspicion of Mountbatten resurfaced, with the CIGS especially aggrieved. Templer’s loathing of

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Duncan Sandys verged on the violent, while his deep suspicion of the First Sea Lord was common knowledge.58 Mountbatten’s negotiating strategy throughout was to propose cuts in areas previously identified by the Admiralty’s ‘Way Ahead’ Committee, a body deliberately intended to create a slimmed-down, hi-tech, fit-for-purpose fighting force.59 Accepting cuts and closures already agreed internally enabled the First Sea Lord and his staff to convince Sandys that the Royal Navy was serious about saving money, while maintaining morale across the service. Ships, shore bases, aircraft and equipment in reserve and/or rapidly becoming unnecessary were readily sacrificed, while a consolidation of forces in the Gulf and Singapore was accepted as conducive to operational efficiency.60 The Admiralty Board’s apparent readiness to accept cuts made it that much harder for Sandys to halt modernization of the Navy’s fleet carriers, or to order a further reduction in manpower. A significant political signal was the ‘Autumn Naval Rethink’, intended to demonstrate the Admiralty’s openness to fresh thinking: the discussion paper emphasized the Navy’s flexibility and adaptability in any future conflict, and was presented to the Cabinet’s Defence and Overseas Policy Committee by an emboldened if besieged First Lord. In the winter of 1957–8 Sandy’s own paper on the future of the service recognized the scale of ongoing maritime commitments, not least the contribution of a Royal Navy carrier task group to NATO’s Americanled ‘Striking Fleet’. In consequence the number of surface ships and submarines was scarcely reduced following the next round of spending cuts. Over the previous twelve months Mountbatten had experienced a rollercoaster of emotions, but his feeling in February 1958 was one of immense relief that the Royal Navy (and the Royal Marines) retained clearly defined roles and a credible global presence.61 Realizing a strategy firmly rooted in nuclear deterrence, Duncan Sandys secured a drastic reduction in the armed forces’ reserve capacity, with the Royal Navy to a degree complicit in shedding costly equipment and establishment. Contingency provision too often embraced ships and personnel tailored to the last war, not the next. The 1957 Defence White Paper placed a premium on quality not quantity, in both weaponry and manpower. In David Edgerton’s words, ‘It was returning to liberal militarism, to professional capital-intensive forces in order to reduce expenditure to more manageable levels.’62 In this respect the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister formed a common front. Macmillan’s public support gave Sandys a powerful lever, but in Dickie Mountbatten both men faced a wily and experienced adversary. The Navy retained most of its carriers, destroyers, frigates and submarines partly because alliance real politick overrode strategic heterodoxy, and partly because construction and modernization projects were at a relatively advanced stage – cost-plus contracts were invariably well over budget, but high spending on R and D was driven down through economies of scale (for example, British shipyards pooled resources in building eight  –  of the ten originally ordered  –  County class destroyers). Weapons systems were entering service with apparently little risk of premature obsolescence, and in this respect the First Sea Lord played his hand well (the failings of his pet project, the Sea Slug missile, had yet to become apparent).63 Similarly, Mountbatten could take quiet satisfaction in a combined Navy and Marines establishment of 88,000, notwithstanding problems of recruitment once

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conscription ended. In this respect the Royal Navy experienced a period of respite. Mountbatten provided continuity and protection, even after his appointment as CDS (an obvious source of friction within the Chiefs of Staff Committee). In due course the Defence Secretary moved on, entrusted by Macmillan to see through his white paper’s blueprint for rationalizing the aircraft industry.64 Conveniently, Sandys’s accommodating successor, Harold Watkinson, had seen wartime service as a lieutenant-commander in the RNVR. The 1959 and 1960 white papers saw a rebalance in strategic thinking, with a consequent rise in defence spending. The Treasury was not alone in seeing an accelerated upward trend as unsustainable, even without the added cost of renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent. In due course financial crisis and a change of government saw a reduction in the procurement and manpower budgets well beyond what Sandys originally intended.65 With hindsight, the late ’fifties and early ’sixties was an Indian summer for the Fleet Air Arm: Mountbatten’s vision of carrier task forces on regular patrol both west and east of Suez somehow survived Sandys’s fierce interrogation, but – as shown in Chapter 6 – economic reality quickly caught up with a lingering realization of great power pretensions. Mountbatten could subtly undermine Sandys’s resolution. He could even, over time, counter Macmillan’s antagonism, courting the prime minister with country weekends and a shared concern – patrician and paternalistic – for the well-being of the common man. Yet, on the fundamental assumptions underpinning Britain’s nuclear deterrent, he differed profoundly from both men in his thinking.

Mountbatten in a nuclear age (2): doubts about the Bomb At a Chiefs of Staff Committee meeting in the spring of 1956 the First Sea Lord signalled his scepticism over a relentless accumulation of nuclear weapons either side of the Iron Curtain, and he voiced similar sentiments a year later: ten years hence would there be a ‘nuclear stalemate’, prompting a fresh approach to conventional warfare?66 In 1958 he broke cover, arguing within the COSC that the devastating capacity of the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals rendered a British nuclear deterrent irrelevant. Even assuming Britain’s nuclear threat was credible, in what circumstances would the United States not support an ally threatened with annihilation, and what purpose would be served by unilateral retaliation for a Soviet attack on Western Europe? To launch a retaliatory strike, ‘would surely be to commit national suicide immediately’.67 Throughout his time at the Admiralty, Mountbatten maintained a familiar twin track approach: articulating his concerns, while at the same time encouraging a myriad of nuclear-based development projects, ranging from surface/air-to-air missiles to ASW mines and depth charges; reinforcing the case for a carrier task force was the presence of Buccaneer aircraft armed with a deterrent-enhancing ‘Red Beard’ nuclear ordnance. In later years the Royal Navy’s interest in such weaponry waned markedly, with Mountbatten’s successors, Charles Lambe and Caspar John, unsympathetic to the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons if defending the North Atlantic against Soviet incursion. Only at the end of the ’sixties did ASW acquire a distinct nuclear dimension, not least in the deployment of helicopters boasting unprecedented firepower.68

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Mountbatten’s concern about disproportionately destructive nuclear weapons dated from soon after the war; not that he questioned the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His only objection had been that the Japanese could ‘save face after spending years as aggressors’.69 At the height of the Korean War he confided in Solly Zuckerman, whose Cold War career as an academic and a government adviser owed much to Mountbatten’s wartime patronage: a zoologist by training and profession, at Combined Operations Zuckerman had joined J. D. Bernal in redefining the concept of operational research.70 As an adviser to the Americans, Zuckerman passed on what little he knew about their testing of thermonuclear – fusion – weapons. Retired and serving officers contributed to an intense and impressively cerebral debate on what action was morally acceptable for the Royal Navy to undertake in a future – nuclear – conflict with the Soviet Union, and what should be deemed morally unacceptable.71 For all his seniority, during Churchill’s second premiership Mountbatten made little or no contribution to the COSC’s Global Strategy Plan, let alone Downing Street’s decision to follow America’s lead and build a hydrogen bomb.72 He was, however, familiar with the ‘Review of Naval Policy’, a chilling appraisal of the Royal Navy in a thermonuclear era initiated by his predecessor as First Sea Lord – Mountbatten challenged its worstcase scenarios, but put the review findings to good use when meeting Sandys’s call for a smaller surface fleet. ‘The Review of Naval Policy’ was a powerful counter to any notion of ‘broken backed warfare’ – the possibility, first advanced in the 1952 Defence White Paper, that naval operations might continue after a major nuclear exchange. In Washington the Navy Department’s conflict analysts were always sceptical, their doubts reinforced by the eminent nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie. Yet inside the Admiralty planning continued for a third Battle of the Atlantic, however unlikely: Mountbatten saw every reason to anticipate what role the remnants of the Royal Navy might play in the event of ‘nuclear stalemate’.73 Similarly, the logic of Zuckerman’s fierce opposition to the early use of tactical nuclear weapons was to maintain credible plans for a conventional war, on land and at sea. By 1960 Sir Solly Zuckerman was a grandee of the scientific establishment, whose advisory role to the Defence Secretary signalled eventual elevation to the post of Chief Scientific Adviser and a seat in the House of Lords. The dynamics of his relationship with Mountbatten had changed markedly since their days together at Richmond Terrace, the headquarters of Combined Operations. Sir Solly was a man of intellect, and a man of action  –  the combination impressed, even bedazzled, Mountbatten. Zuckerman’s influence over his former patron was unique, and over the years it grew ever greater.74 Although enjoying the highest security rating both sides of the Atlantic, Zuckerman was sympathetic to the ideas of Patrick Blackett and Henry Tizard, the founding fathers of operational research, and Whitehall’s most eminent scientific advisers. Neither Blackett nor Tizard ever really accepted the case for an independent nuclear deterrent.75 Yet, for all his doubts, Zuckerman found himself more and more a key figure in transatlantic nuclear planning, particularly after Congress, at Eisenhower’s behest, amended the 1946 McMahon Act to facilitate the UK-US Mutual Defence Agreement. For Macmillan, securing fresh access to some, if not all, of America’s nuclear secrets was the ‘great prize’: unlike earlier agreements on information

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exchange – from August 1943 when Churchill courted FDR at Quebec to November 1945 and Attlee’s hard bargaining with Truman in Washington  –  the 1958 treaty formalized a key facet of the ‘special relationship’.76 Critical to concluding such a major policy shift on the part of the Americans so soon after Suez was a close personal and working relationship between president and prime minister, seen first in the Mediterranean fifteen years earlier.77 Wartime familiarity could be counterproductive when dealing with unreconstructed Anglophobes in the military or on Capitol Hill, but it remained an invaluable asset for those ministers, officials and service personnel whom Washington deemed old friends and trustworthy allies – no one more so, of course, than Dickie Mountbatten. Zuckerman was similarly well regarded. His wartime reputation for tough, penetrating analyses of strategic bombing meant American Army and Air Force generals trusted him to provide the uncomfortable truth and not what he thought they wanted to hear.78 By the late 1950s Zuckerman was chair of two key Whitehall committees. From then on he provided the hard data and intellectual muscle which Mountbatten drew upon to question Britain’s nuclear orthodoxy, and to challenge NATO’s readiness to contemplate tactical nuclear warfare.79 Well briefed, and with the highest security rating, Zuckerman led rigorous inquiries into every facet of the nuclear state, comparing delivery systems, contesting intelligence assessments and challenging first principles. For more than a decade he questioned the scope and accuracy of Soviet air and anti-ballistic missile defences, culminating in his opposition to the costly Chevaline upgrade of Polaris. As early as 1958 Zuckerman commissioned research into the consequences of Bomber Command initiating a comprehensive nuclear strike: analysis of the data indicated that even a modestly successful attack would cripple the Soviet Union. From the autumn of 1961 he regularly questioned the huge financial costs – and critically, the opportunity costs – of maintaining and successively upgrading the British nuclear deterrent. The minister’s Chief Scientific Adviser recognized the irony of his position – at the heart of a defence establishment rooted in technocratic determinism, and insistent that national security necessitated ever more sophisticated warheads and delivery systems. Zuckerman had status and scientific authority, but in real terms he was powerless, with Mountbatten the only chief of staff or senior civil servant accepting his argument that nuclear weapons were not the means of waging war but the agents of annihilation. A sympathetic Chief of the Defence Staff enabled Zuckerman to communicate formally and informally with the service chiefs, and with members of NATO’s Military Committee. His heterodox views, rooted in hard science, were respectfully heard but invariably ignored. Zuckerman’s trenchant thinking really hit home whenever, in public or in private, the CDS endorsed his remarks; most famously at the 1962 SHAPEX meeting of NATO’s senior movers and shakers, in a bitter confrontation with the theoretical physicist turned nuclear evangelist Edward Teller.80 Teller’s fury was reinforced by a keen sense of betrayal: in August 1958 he had warmly welcomed a delegation of British technocrats by observing that, ‘after 12 years of disruption in Anglo-American collaboration, it was plain that the laws of physics operated on both sides of the Atlantic.’ Yet Zuckerman held him in contempt, and so, unsurprisingly, did Mountbatten. Nevertheless, ‘Lord Louis’ was always his own

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man. He used his authority, status and virtual invulnerability to question NATO nuclear strategy and operational planning, and to dissent from his fellow chiefs’ shared assumptions regarding the use of tactical nuclear weapons.81 A growing outspokenness in his last years as CDS proved problematic for both Conservative and Labour governments, but previously Zuckerman’s caution and direction had helped in shaping both his ideas and his approach.82 Collaboration resumed in 1969, culminating in a letter from Mountbatten to The Times on 20 February 1970 criticizing NATO’s flexible response strategy, and Denis Healey’s apparent endorsement of tactical nuclear weapons.83 The issue was never far from Mountbatten’s mind, even well into retirement. In May 1979 the old warrior travelled to Strasbourg to accept an award on behalf of the Stockholm Peace Research Institute  –  he had joined Zuckerman on the disarmament think tank’s Scientific Council. Unaware how soon his life would end, he hoped his speech, co-drafted with Zuckerman, would spark a national debate, and impress the newly elected Mrs Thatcher.84 In both respects Mountbatten was sadly disappointed; but, with cruel irony, the resurgence of CND in the years following his assassination saw the speech regularly quoted by opponents of Cruise and Pershing II missile deployment in Britain and West Germany: As a military man who has given half a century of active Service, I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. War cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions which they have generated … it is a dangerous misconception to believe that by increasing the total uncertainty one increases one’s own certainty.

In the Lords and The Times Zuckerman placated former colleagues by claiming the Stockholm speech was a plea for multilateral and not unilateral disarmament  –  it certainly doesn’t read as such, and few beyond the military have interpreted Mountbatten’s impassioned statement this way.85

­5

Learning from the Americans: Nuclear deterrence from beneath the waves

Dickie seeks inspiration stateside: a revolution in submarine design Mountbatten’s ardent implementation of government policy regarding nuclear weapons displays a striking parallel with his attitude and behaviour at the time of Suez: observing perceived flaws, while endeavouring to implement the executive’s orders to the best of his ability. The key difference, of course, is that at no point in the long, drawn-out process of the Macmillan Government endeavouring to renew the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent did the Chief of the Defence Staff contemplate resignation. Even when questioning the efficacy and moral justification of mutually assured destruction (MAD), Mountbatten acted with what he considered to be exemplary professionalism in ensuring that the UK would remain a nuclear power beyond 1970 (the same of course was true of Solly Zuckerman).1 This raises the question of whether, as captain of a Polaris submarine, he would have undertaken a retaliatory strike if ordered to do so – a wholly redundant question as, even if Mountbatten’s seamanship had not denied him a place on the ‘Perisher’ Submarine Command Course, psychological profiling would have questioned his suitability to command an SSBN (Nuclear-Powered Ballistic Missile Submarine). Mountbatten’s communications expertise suggested suitable qualifications to command a Vanguard-class nuclear submarine, but did he have the temperament to act without doubt and hesitation at that awful, critical moment? If he didn’t then many, of course, would say that this was to his credit. The irony of Mountbatten’s central role in the Submarine Service’s acquisition of nuclear propulsion, without which Polaris could never have come about, is obvious. If the man himself couldn’t recognize that irony – and that’s hard to believe – then Sir Solly Zuckerman, his éminence grise, surely did. In the mid-fifties Zuckerman embodied the loosening of congressional constraint on a transatlantic sharing of information, from warheads to weapons training. His memoirs suggest access to an astonishing range of highly classified material; but he was by no means alone in learning just how far the Americans were ahead of the British, across the board. In the four years prior to Macmillan securing his ‘great prize’, Eisenhower orchestrated an easing of the McMahon Act. He persuaded Congress to pass the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, enabling three key agreements on the exchange

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and instruction of personnel, joint operational planning and the transfer of nuclear technology in certain clearly defined categories. The most critical of those categories was nuclear ship propulsion, with specific reference to the United States Navy’s first reactor powered submarine, Nautilus: from June 1955 collaboration with the Royal Navy could proceed, subject to approval by the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).2 The civil application of fissile material was a development priority in post-war Britain, with Windscale’s twin graphite-moderated reactors prefacing the world’s first nuclear power station, Calder Hall, onstream from the autumn of 1956. It’s not surprising, therefore, that a decade earlier naval engineers and architects were working on the feasibility of nuclear propulsion. Reviewing their work in 1947, the Admiralty concluded that the necessary technology was at least a decade away. Their Lordships therefore prioritized research into hydrogen peroxide, an alternative energy source adopted by German submariners in the latter part of the war: HTP proved a long, expensive and ultimately fruitless R and D programme, paralleled at similar huge expense in the United States. The United States Navy (USN), however, maintained a keen interest in nuclear propulsion, the size of its budget enabling a sharp rise in development funding from the summer of 1951: with the Korean War entering its second year Congress authorized construction of the world’s first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus. Here was a lost opportunity for the Royal Navy, recognized as such well before Mountbatten was appointed Chief of the Naval Staff in April 1955.3 Efforts to ramp up research were hampered by the Royal Navy’s dependence upon the resources and goodwill of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment. The AERE director at Harwell, Sir William Penney  –  a titan of the British nuclear establishment  –  was deeply sceptical, while his staff wasted two years promoting a liquid metal-cooled reactor and ignoring the only credible option, the highly enriched pressurized water reactor (PWR). Westinghouse’s S2W PWR reactor powered Nautilus, its design easily replicated in a range of applications. Only in the final year of Churchill’s premiership did Downing Street step in and order a major upgrade of the Naval Section at Harwell. At the same time Rolls Royce and Vickers-Armstrong were contracted to design and build a British-built equivalent to the American prototype fast nearing completion. Rolls Royce linked up with the transatlantic engineering company Foster Wheeler to develop a suitable reactor, in effect reinventing the Westinghouse wheel.4 A few months later Mountbatten returned to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord. Mountbatten’s appointment roughly coincided with Arleigh Burke’s promotion to Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) – to the surprise of some ninety admirals senior to him. The highest-ranking officers of the Royal Navy and the USN were very different men, in background, career and personality; for example, Burke’s combat experience as a destroyer captain lasted far longer than Mountbatten’s, and he was demonstrably the superior sailor. Yet, beyond their both benefiting from fast-track promotion, the two men also shared a common understanding of what constitutes humane and effective leadership – at sea, and at the highest levels of command and control. They were also strikingly open-minded and internationalist, encouraging their respective services to work closely with NATO allies. There was no wartime bond to fall back upon, but mutual respect and a fledgling friendship emerged from their first meeting: Mountbatten recognized just how hard Burke must have worked

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to impress Eisenhower and be made CNO, while Burke respected Mountbatten’s technical expertise, drive and enthusiasm and ferocious attention to detail (witness an apocryphal tale of the Colorado football fan astonished by his English guest’s prior knowledge of NFL rules).5 Crucially, the two men trusted each other, as the volume and content of their correspondence confirms. They often disagreed, not least over the Battle of the Atlantic’s future relevance (considerable for the RN, but not much for the USN); but this was always an elevated and respectful debate. Ignoring his old comrade’s often shocking history of indiscretion, Burke offered a posthumous view of Mountbatten: ‘He was a good sailor [Burke’s ultimate accolade]. He did his best for his country. He had good judgement. He worked hard. I trusted his integrity.’6 The new First Sea Lord wanted the new CNO to ensure the release of an assortment of technical information; but the priority had to be a blueprint for building Britain’s Nautilus. That flood of material commenced as early as August 1955, the month of Burke’s appointment.7 There could be no better field of naval collaboration to build upon given the Submarine Service’s close ties with its American counterpart during the Second World War and into the Cold War. Mountbatten’s close working and personal relationship with Burke survived the Sixth Fleet’s harassment of the taskforce bound for Port Said, and the same was true of British and American submariners, working together on intelligence-gathering operations deep inside Soviet home waters. This was a joint initiative of the two naval chiefs, made possible only by Eden’s resignation and the arrival of a prime minister sympathetic to any operation likely to gain favour in Washington. A year earlier one of the Royal Navy’s rising stars had assumed a liaison role in Washington and at the USN Submarine Forces’ Atlantic headquarters in Connecticut. The number of Submarine Service secondments soon grew  –  one very senior appointment would focus upon nuclear matters, with Mountbatten characteristically claiming that this was all his idea.8 Unsurprisingly, when the First Sea Lord visited the United States in October 1955 Arleigh Burke was keen to demonstrate just how much the United States Navy had invested in cutting-edge technology: a tour of the speedy, super-streamlined, highly manoeuvrable USS Albacore left Mountbatten adamant that the Royal Navy should jump a generation in submarine design. A ‘Way Ahead’ conference in February 1956 made several key decisions regarding the future direction of the Submarine Service, notably the adoption of the ‘Albacore’ shape and superstructure (ten months later itself supplanted by an even more cutting-edge design). The Albacore visit had been unscheduled, and the fortuitous consequence of an embarrassed Burke being stopped from taking his guest on board Nautilus. Nuclear policymaking in America was hampered by deeply divisive power struggles and sharp political differences that cut across party loyalties. As yet, the AEC was not signed up to close collaboration with a foreign power, notably the UK, and the Commission’s most senior naval representative refused to brief Mountbatten unless authorized to do so by Congress and the Attorney General. When, in due course, that authorization arrived, then the First Sea Lord found an invaluable ally in Rear  –  soon Vice  –  Admiral Rickover, the idiosyncratic figure synonymous with American pre-eminence in innovative submarine design. In 1955 Johnnie Coote, a veteran submariner soon to quit his Washington posting for a distinguished career in Fleet Street, sent Mountbatten a

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long and shrewd profile of Hyam Rickover: ‘It struck me as being not unlike marking a Romanov’s card before meeting Rasputin.’9 The ‘Father of the Nuclear Navy’ sought control over every aspect of his submarines’ development and construction, their deployment and above all their personnel. Had Rickover had his way then America’s most obstinate and opinionated admiral would have appointed the captains and executive officers of Britain’s first generation SSNs and SSBNs.10 Rickover’s junior flag rank reflected his lack of seamanship, his insistence on being first and foremost an engineer and a physicist, his ability to antagonize even his closest friends and admirers and ironically, his single-minded determination to drive through even the most ambitious of projects, at whatever the cost. Rickover’s early career was undoubtedly harmed by his background as a first-generation refugee from the pogroms who had entered Annapolis courtesy of his Lawndale congressman. With Edwina half-Jewish, Mountbatten had no truck with anti-Semitism, and his obvious disdain for discrimination reassured Rickover that here was no normal English aristocrat. He had spent time in Britain during the war, gaining a healthy respect for the Royal Navy; newsreels and news reports of the fighting in Burma ensured Rickover knew who Mountbatten was, albeit never imagining their paths might cross. Returning to London a dozen years later, the klug kid from Chicago finally met the great-grandson of the Queen-Emperor – the naval grandee whose tour of Nautilus he had vetoed ten months before. Remarkably, these two very different men quickly forged an odd – but highly productive – friendship.11 The personal chemistry between Rickover and Mountbatten relied on the regular contact they enjoyed in the three years following the debacle of Suez. Macmillan’s tireless efforts to rebuild bridges with the Eisenhower administration were replicated in Mountbatten’s courting of Arleigh Burke, and above all, Hyam Rickover. Rickover wasn’t bothered by the minutiae of hospitality whenever the First Sea Lord flew into Washington National, but Mountbatten made damn sure Rickover had everything he needed from the moment his retinue arrived at Prestwick or Heathrow. On many occasions the prickly admiral’s brutal treatment of British submariners was wholly unacceptable, but any differences with host officers unwilling to tolerate bad behaviour were invariably resolved by a grudging apology or Admiralty intervention. His behaviour got worse not better as the years passed, fuelling deep resentment within the Royal Navy: senior staff simply shrugged their shoulders when Mountbatten, and later Solly Zuckerman, insisted that Rickover had always been a loud and persuasive advocate of Anglo-American collaboration, regularly briefing congressmen and columnists alike.12 Back in October 1955 Mountbatten flew home from the States reassured by the reservoir of goodwill towards the Royal Navy within the USN and the AEC. Like Rickover, the President sought nuclear collaboration not cooperation, but only if the law allowed.13 This was probably the first occasion on which Mountbatten directly lobbied Macmillan, whom Eden had recently moved from the Foreign Office to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. The release of significant Treasury funding sent a strong signal to the Eisenhower administration and to Congress that Britain would push ahead with building a home-grown nuclear submarine should the final brake on sharing information not be removed; the importance the Royal Navy placed on the

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project was shown by the choice of name: Dreadnought.14 Mountbatten was clearly the driving force, but the same might be said of Rear Admiral Woods, appointed Flag Officer Submarines in the same year as the First Sea Lord. For all his remarkable achievements in the course of the war, Wilfred Woods focused only on the future, placing the war beneath the waves at the heart of fundamental shifts in global strategy. He was a genuine visionary, arguing vigorously for a rebalancing of the procurement budget and an acknowledgement by the Admiralty Board that Dreadnought signalled only the start of a radical reshaping of the Submarine Service. The cost implications were huge, compounded by a universal dependence on British-based research and operational design.15 Arcane Washington politics delayed releasing the brake, so development costs continued to rise. Yet, at the very moment when inside the Admiralty Woods’s proposals were being fiercely tested and contested, Hyam Rickover proposed a private visit to London and a broad-brush discussion of what the Royal Navy could learn from the Nautilus project. Technical detail was off the agenda as Congress was still some way from final authorization of technology transfer; but initial steps might be taken to create the basis on which, once the brake was released, close collaboration could follow. Inside Whitehall many viewed Rickover’s visit with suspicion: like all members of the AEC he wanted to know more about Britain’s flagship nuclear project, the uranium-fuelled gas-cooled reactor. (That suspicion was confirmed the following year when Rickover asked to visit Calder Hall).16 Rickover spent eleven days in Britain, at the height of preparations for Operation Musketeer. His stay coincided exactly with Mountbatten drafting his letter of resignation, and then debating the consequences of such an abrupt departure with the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Cilcennin.17 This was an agonizing period for the First Sea Lord, and yet he still found time to orchestrate every minute of Rickover’s stay. His guest was driven directly from the airport down to Romsey. As so many times before – and after – Mountbatten relied on the delights of Broadlands, and the social adroitness of Edwina, to take the edge off a potentially tense and strained dinner party. A jet-lagged Rickover warmed to his host. In due course he displayed a grudging respect for his fellow guests: the Controller of the Navy, the Engineer-in-Chief of the Fleet and – a mark of how seriously this meeting was taken – Sir John Cockcroft, head of the Atomic Energy Authority. Urging Mountbatten to exploit offers of friendship whenever the opportunity arose, Rickover instructed his fellow guests on every aspect of project managing the construction of a nuclear-powered submarine. He strongly advised that Rolls Royce draw on its newly established connection with Westinghouse to acquire a tried-and-tested PWR, thereby saving the Royal Navy time and money. In practice Mountbatten played the long game, advising Duncan Sandys that the American option would in due course be available, but might not be required.18 The breakthrough came in early February 1957, following Eisenhower’s constructive meeting with Macmillan in Bermuda. An ad hoc committee inside the White House saw a consolidation of Anglo-American collaboration, and a strengthening of national security, if the USN shared its nuclear technology with the Royal Navy. The President issued an executive order instructing the AEC and all relevant federal departments to respect the June 1956 agreement, and thereby accommodate any British requests for

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technical information concerning nuclear propulsion. Rickover was only too pleased to oblige, although his mood changed when he felt too much was being asked too soon, thereby handicapping his staff ’s ability to focus upon their own programme. A British reluctance to discuss Calder Hall compounded his irritation.19 Rickover vented his wrath on both sides of the Atlantic, a potentially catastrophic visit to Rolls Royce in May 1957 saved only by the chairman applying the same mix of charm, self-deprecation, dry wit, hands-on knowledge and dogged refusal to be cowed that had worked so well for Mountbatten on his first encounter with the irascible admiral. Rickover left Derby suitably impressed, and with ambitious plans for a forthcoming tour of American nuclear facilities by representatives of Rolls Royce and its partner constructors, the Royal Navy and the AEA. The Admiralty continued to massage Rickover’s ego, while the Foreign Office and the State Department reassured major players on Capitol Hill that, in terms of respecting present legislation, all was above board. The British mission learnt much – but by no means everything – about the United States’ nuclear programme, and found itself subject to close scrutiny by Rickover and his aides: if entrusted with highly secret information could engineers across the Atlantic put it to good use in furthering shared knowledge of nuclear propulsion? The general conclusion was yes, as confirmed by the speed of development work at Harwell and Dounreay in the months prior to Nautilus crossing the Atlantic in the autumn of 1957. The submarine’s arrival coincided with the Admiralty and the Treasury competing fiercely to secure the Prime Minister’s support for their respective positions: Peter Thorneycroft, a fiercely cost-conscious Chancellor of the Exchequer, argued that if up to £30 million was being spent on such an ambitious project then the priority was finding an alternative means for powering surface ships, not submarines. Alarm bells rang inside the Admiralty.20 If Duncan Sandys was to take on the Treasury and defend the nuclear programme’s ever-increasing cost then he had to see for himself why Nautilus was so superior to any conventionally powered submarine. However, Mountbatten feared a scenario where Sandys would be so impressed by Nautilus that he deemed it a vindication of his white paper, and consequently sought further cuts to the surface fleet. Sandys in due course held back from any further demands, but he could scarcely ignore Nautilus’s dramatic impact on the Royal Navy’s autumn exercises. As a guest observer Johnnie Coote saw at first hand the submarine’s devastating potential as she evaded identification, ‘sank’ every designated target, and successfully screened the carrier Bulwark from underwater attack. A shocked C-in-C Home Fleet personally drafted the operational report, concluding, ‘that the only answer to a nuclear submarine is another one; and that, if the US programme is any guide, time is not on our side.’ A succession of analyses and papers saw the Admiralty Board view a non-nuclear future in apocalyptic terms; and Flag Officer Submarines insistent that Dreadnought was ‘not a lone venture into the atomic field’, meaning four more of her class should quickly follow.21 Across the winter of 1957–8 progress on just one Dreadnought, let alone five, was painfully slow. In terms of technical assistance little was happening. In October and December Rickover resurrected an earlier proposal for what was in essence a package deal, to supply an entire plant and fuel via a predominantly commercial arrangement. The Admiralty Board, including the First Sea Lord, remained sceptical, but growing

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tensions inside Whitehall concentrated the mind wonderfully. The cost could be as much as $15 million (soon increased to $22 million), including spares and training, yet this still constituted a considerable saving on the projected expense of an all-British system.22 Despite this, in January 1958 a meeting of Mountbatten’s high-powered ‘special nuclear committee’ recommended in his absence that the Royal Navy again go it alone, resurrecting Harwell’s original reactor design. Later that month Mountbatten convened a further meeting of the committee, on the same day that Rickover was due at the Admiralty. The American insisted that rejecting the nuclear technology currently on offer would be a costly mistake. Mountbatten readily concurred, and then took his guest to address the advisory committee. Rickover pointed out that between them Rolls Royce and Westinghouse could work to an existing design and together produce a fully integrated steam propulsion plant. Rickover wanted the project firmly rooted in the private sector, such that his own designers and engineers would no longer be distracted by working alongside their demanding British counterparts: the current arrangement was an ‘exchange’, but in practice there was little the Americans could learn from the UK’s fledgling programme, other than how much it drew upon parallel experimentation at Calder Hall. The contractors on the committee naturally warmed to the idea of dealing directly with their transatlantic counterparts, and they duly

Figure 10  First Sea Lord: a welcome for Admiral Lord Mountbatten from Admiral Arleigh Burke, observed by Rear Admiral Lorenzo Sabin, Washington National Airport, 27 October 1955

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endorsed Mountbatten’s argument that buying American was the only credible option. Rickover stressed that his was a personal initiative, but he felt confident an amendment to the Atomic Energy Act would ensure the realization of his proposal. In due course a detailed proposal was drafted for approval by the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee. The committee’s chair was absent on a tour of Australia. From the other side of the world Macmillan authorized a formal approach to the State Department, requesting that Rolls Royce, as lead contractor, be awarded the necessary licence of manufacture.23 Several months of negotiation followed, with permission granted only after the White House grudgingly accepted that the United States could not secure its desired quid pro quo, namely British expertise in building gas-cooled reactors. Macmillan maintained an uncompromising position throughout the summer of 1958, but in so doing sacrificed considerable goodwill across the Atlantic: his Downing Street meeting with Rickover in February 1959 would have been an awkward affair at the best of times, and the vice admiral was never a man to hide his feelings.24 Nevertheless, the nuclear agreement ratified in June 1958 did facilitate a remarkably comprehensive exchange of information. The treaty made provision for Westinghouse to provide Her Majesty’s Government with what in due course became its S5W stateof-the-art pressurized water reactor, intended to power the USN’s first generation of Polaris-carrying submarines: in October 1958 Mountbatten insisted he inspect every design feature of the newly built USS Skipjack, the result of which was Dreadnought securing the same propulsion system. This meant Admiralty architects and engineers, and key constructors like Rolls Royce and Vickers, could accelerate the building of allBritish nuclear submarines: the Dreadnought programme was led by brilliant project managers, who saw from the outset how they could adopt, adapt and build upon the ‘Skipjack’ prototype. HMS Valiant owed much to its predecessor’s transatlantic technology, but in complexity and sophistication it was a very different vessel from Dreadnought, providing a template for later SSNs and SSBNs – by the 1960s the British were very much in the business of building nuclear submarines, albeit at high cost and at the expense of parallel projects. No doubt this would have come about without Rickover’s intervention, but his double act with Mountbatten significantly speeded up the process.25 In less than a year the Royal Navy had moved from well behind to well ahead of the curve, and, as always, the First Sea Lord claimed full credit for such a dramatic change of fortune.26

A wary Royal Navy and the adoption of Polaris Similarly, Mountbatten encouraged the idea that he was an early champion of a submarine-based nuclear deterrent. A parallel with the Suez crisis has already been noted  –  Mountbatten cultivating a dual image of singular professionalism and visionary intent, and of profound reservations regarding first principles. He was of course by no means unique in maintaining a laudably professional approach while implementing policies with which he fundamentally disagreed. What marked him out

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was the extent to which he pursued this twin-track approach, and the manner with which, even prior to retirement, he highlighted his remarkable capacity for squaring the circle. Mountbatten was never an agonized warrior airing a crisis of conscience. He was too certain of his own convictions. No doubt he was wholly genuine in his deep reservations regarding the morality and the strategic value of possessing weapons of mass destruction – and nowhere more so than in the deployment of ostensibly ‘tactical’ nuclear ordnance. As we’ve seen, he and his more cerebral confidant were of like mind. The key difference was that Solly Zuckerman intellectualized his conflicting opinions in a way Dickie Mountbatten never could. Zuckerman’s memoirs acknowledged the contradictions while at the same time chronicling his contribution to the adoption and deployment of Polaris. This after all was someone who promoted multilateral disarmament at the very highest level, and who quietly but enthusiastically supported the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs. Understatement was never Mountbatten’s forte; his self-declared successes were intended to endure. Not surprisingly, therefore, his official biographer portrayed him as a driving force in the Royal Navy securing responsibility for delivery of the British nuclear deterrent.27 Later historians of Polaris suggest a more complex, more nuanced story, acknowledging, for example, the crucial role of successive First Lords of the Admiralty: Mountbatten found Lord Selkirk and later Lord Carrington shrewd and percipient allies. Consistently punching above his ministerial weight, it was Carrington who attracted the attention of MPs, correspondents and commentators; and yet his predecessor displayed a similar talent for political calculation: Selkirk’s visit to Washington in late 1957 convinced him that it was easier for a Conservative Government to justify a sea-based rather than a land-based deterrent system at a time when the case for unilateral disarmament was clearly gaining momentum.28 There was no inevitability about the Royal Navy acquiring Polaris. Within the Admiralty there were always voices expressing scepticism over the credibility of a British-independent nuclear deterrent. Even advocates of Polaris acknowledged an alarming opportunity cost for the Royal Navy if submarine-launched ballistic missiles emerged as the only viable future option.29 Yet, neither was it a case of the super enthusiastic First Sea Lord, ever eager to embrace yet another grand project, finding himself at odds with his colleagues. When, reeling from Sandys’s White Paper, the Admiralty Board endorsed a powerful position paper on the unacceptable cost of second tier nuclear status, Mountbatten didn’t demur. Siding with Templer, he voiced the Navy’s concern at the overall impact on the defence budget of an unqualified nuclear commitment, but without directly challenging the status quo. In February 1958 he established a working party to undertake a comparative cost study of the V-bombers, Blue Streak and Polaris. So long as Mountbatten remained First Sea Lord the Admiralty maintained a running battle with the Air Ministry, quietly promoting the sea-based Polaris missile as a cheaper and less vulnerable alternative to the landbased Blue Streak missile. Selkirk pursued a similar line, urging Sandys and Macmillan to consider all strategic options. Less evangelical members of the Admiralty Board urged caution, preferring to wait and see how well the USN adapted to handling such a large and complex programme. Concern over the escalating cost of Blue Streak only

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hardened into outright opposition after Mountbatten had moved on to become Chief of the Defence Staff.30 The speed with which the United States Navy’s Fleet Ballistic Missile – Polaris – programme progressed from initial concept to realization is remarkable. The parallel development of lightweight warhead, solid-fuelled missile and SSBN submarine demonstrated a level of resourcing which only the United States could afford. The newly commissioned USS George Washington’s initial test firing took place in July 1960, just four years after Arleigh Burke had ceased inter-service missile collaboration and ordered William Raborn to set up the Navy Department’s Special Projects Office. Rear Admiral Raborn was a carrier captain, bloodied in the Pacific. His CV and personality contrasted starkly with Hyam Rickover’s, but he shared the latter’s single-mindedness and ‘buck stops here’ mentality. These he combined with a pioneering approach to project management, and a collegiality rooted in the confidence that he’d secured the ablest of engineers, officials and advisers.31 ‘Red’ Raborn was always a distant figure, and Mountbatten had little contact with him, relying instead upon his close personal and working relationship with Burke. The Chief of Naval Operations strode the corridors of power with an assurance Mountbatten could comprehend, convincing both Congress and the White House that Raborn’s team would resolve initial problems with the inertial missile-guidance system, and establish Polaris as a secure, reliable and ultimately cost-effective means of primary deterrence. From the outset Flag Officer Submarines was familiar with the CNO’s nuclear initiative, but in later years Mountbatten maintained he was the first to tap into American expertise: he insisted he was instrumental in persuading Burke to take the case for a naval IBM to the Pentagon and the Oval Office. Almost certainly Mountbatten did take an early interest in the USN’s plans to go it alone, but typically, he exaggerated his role in persuading Burke that keeping him in the loop was mutually beneficial.32 Yet the First Sea Lord was by no means alone in identifying early on the advantage a sea-based deterrent system enjoyed over land-based ballistic missiles and air-launched missiles or free-falling bombs. Deterrence depended upon guaranteed retaliation, and nuclear submarines patrolling for extended periods in the depths of the five oceans were well-nigh invulnerable to pre-emptive attack. Notwithstanding a residual scepticism re nuclear deterrence, senior staff inside the Admiralty and the Submarine Service closely monitored the work of the Special Projects Office: from mid-1958 a liaison officer provided regular reports on Polaris’s progress. The readiness of the SPO to share information with the Admiralty’s inter-service mission in Washington demonstrated clearly in which direction Burke was heading. He envisaged the Royal Navy embracing Polaris once the programme was operational in America. Mountbatten viewed that prospect with typical enthusiasm, but still saw it as a medium to long term objective.33 He promised ‘to keep the Polaris pot boiling’, but a prerequisite was maintaining the flow of information: a regularly updated Royal Navy would, ‘be in a position to take advantage of your suggestion to join in with you, without great loss of time’.34 Appointing one of Raborn’s trusted aides as his envoy, Burke fed Mountbatten an astonishing body of technical data. The more the CNO briefed him the more the First Sea Lord wanted to know. Although as early as May 1958 Burke gently insisted that

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Mountbatten rein back his demands, a year later he unhesitatingly provided drawings and design details for the USN’s prototype SSBNs.35 Timing was the key, and, with Blue Streak still the Government’s preferred option, Selkirk advised playing the long game. Mountbatten agreed, cultivating within the Service a favourable but seemingly detached view of the Americans’ Polaris programme, and discreetly encouraging press interest in alternatives to a land-based missile system. He kept the CNO apprised of his approach, stressing that the Royal Navy could only adopt Polaris if its capital and running costs were covered by the overall defence budget. This was no minor matter given that throughout the late 1950s contingency planning inside the Admiralty envisaged an eight-boat Polaris squadron, with a personnel requirement of up to two thousand men: in 1960 a revised estimate of the cost involved in commissioning all eight submarines was just short of £350 million, at a time when the entire naval budget averaged around £380 million. (The revised calculation was a consequence of Whitehall accountants questioning an original estimate of £400 million; the Royal Navy’s creative accounting, to which Mountbatten turned a blind eye, did little to satisfy Treasury and MOD sceptics.) The Admiralty’s procurement priority at the start of a new decade was modernization and expansion of the carrier fleet, not a massive expansion of the Submarine Service. Even the First Sea Lord acknowledged that in number and size the nation’s naval shipyards could not satisfy such an unprecedented peacetime demand. Polaris evangelists like the future First Sea Lord, Mike Le Fanu, were in a minority, albeit comforted by the fact that Mountbatten shared their enthusiasm.36 Astonishingly, Mountbatten secured an assurance from Burke, who had no authority to agree to anything, that Polaris missiles would be supplied at production cost, without the USN seeking to recover any of its R and D expenditure. A sceptical Sandys dismissed Burke’s promise as meaningless; but nearly four years later, in his Nassau negotiations with President Kennedy, Macmillan presumed from the outset that the price of Polaris was its ‘retail cost’; only when Downing Street decided in January 1963 to purchase the prototype A3 missile did Defense Secretary Robert McNamara insist the British share the expense of upgrade.37 It would be surprising if back in 1958 the Prime Minister was left ignorant that at least one chief of staff in Washington believed selling the British sea-launched missiles should be on the same terms as previous transatlantic weapons deals. On succeeding Mountbatten as First Sea Lord Charles Lambe mistakenly read a letter intended for his predecessor, prompting a note to Burke that, ‘it would be unfortunate if anyone else in the Ministry of Defence became aware of how closely you and Dickie are working together … ’ Lambe’s surprise is in itself surprising as extracts from the Mountbatten-Burke correspondence were circulated widely within the higher echelons of the Admiralty, and invariably referred to as the ‘Dear Dickie’ file. Nor were the letters strictly personal, as their content suggested a degree of expertise neither man possessed. As one reader of the correspondence has observed, ‘Both Mountbatten and Burke were writing for their audience with one eye on the main chance … Mountbatten’s view of the US relationship was realistic: his carefully cultivated friendships with such as Burke and Rickover were a means to the end of UK capabilities on the cheap … Mountbatten was an opportunist … ’ The same historian

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dismissed the idea that Mountbatten’s pursuit of Polaris was single-minded, even sinister, in its intensity, rightly pointing out that a remarkable range of procurement projects generated similarly high levels of energy and enthusiasm.38 Sir Charles Lambe’s letter to Arleigh Burke constituted an implicit warning that he and Mountbatten had presumed too much in granting the Royal Navy a deterrence role akin to that of the USN. This readiness to keep Burke at a distance demonstrated the new First Sea Lord’s political nous, and his wariness regarding Polaris. He shared Selkirk’s preference for a patient approach, waiting until Polaris was ‘a demonstrable success’, and Blue Streak’s failings were self-evident. Lambe advised colleagues that, notwithstanding the arguments for and against Polaris, the Royal Navy would be in a stronger position if it continued to liaise closely with the SPO, but at the same time ceased pushing the programme within Whitehall and further afield. This fresh approach would see the Admiralty avoid any political backlash, while leaving the service in a strong bargaining position should a future government turn to Polaris in the absence of any alternative. Privately the First Sea Lord questioned whether a case could still be made for any form of nuclear deterrent – one can only speculate as to the iconoclastic conversations shared with Mountbatten late into the night.39 At the start of the ’sixties the institutional forces defending Blue Streak were formidable. Especially vocal was the Ministry of Aviation, to which Duncan Sandys had moved in October 1959, four months after Mountbatten was made Chief of the Defence Staff. Opposition to Blue Streak’s continuation was similarly impressive, witness the CDS and the Minister of Defence’s principal scientist convincing Harold Watkinson to take on his predecessor, and thus call for the programme to end. The key to killing off Blue Streak was to have a ready alternative. When Watkinson met with his American counterpart in Paris in late 1959, he and Mountbatten found the Defence Secretary receptive to a British request for Polaris.40 This, however, was in sharp contrast to observers from the State Department, who swiftly vetoed the idea. For all Mountbatten’s efforts, Polaris was still on the back burner. Yet again the lesson was to play the long game. Zuckerman’s appointment as the minister’s Chief Scientific Adviser meant a sharp critic of Blue Streak had replaced an ardent admirer: Sir Frederick Brundrett was the antithesis of Lord Selkirk in that he was a Navy man through and through, and yet he was strongly supportive of a land-based deterrent. Sandys ensured Brundrett’s continued input to strategic decision-making, but his successor quickly negated the older man’s influence. A key forum for discussion as to the relative merits of respective systems was the high-powered British Nuclear Deterrent Group, of which Brundrett was originally a member. In late 1960 the Government’s most senior review body instructed Zuckerman to establish a technical advisory panel. Over the next eighteen months the chair of the science sub-committee brutally steered his colleagues towards a pro-Polaris position, silencing all dissenting voices when reporting back to the BNDG. Brundrett’s advocacy of Blue Streak had been overtaken by events, and he was very much yesterday’s man. Zuckerman’s star was clearly in the ascendant, much to Mountbatten’s satisfaction.41 Blue Streak was finally cancelled once Macmillan had secured a favourable deal on Skybolt at his Camp David meeting with Eisenhower in March 1960. At that point

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Skybolt was the preferred choice over Polaris as the RAF had already spent more than £500 million on adapting its Vulcan bombers to carry the missile (similar sums had previously been spent on the abortive Blue Steel 2 air-launched missile).42 Although the missile development programme was ostensibly going well, the Prime Minister raised the possibility of Polaris as a fall-back option. Macmillan received conflicting signals from the American, much to Arleigh Burke’s annoyance. He complained at the United States Navy’s absence from the American negotiating team, insisting that had he – and by implication Mountbatten – been present then both sides could have been steered towards Polaris and not Skybolt as a first choice delivery system.43 Despite – or perhaps because of  –  the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ Macmillan had secured at Camp David, several senior ministers and officials now looked to a sea-based nuclear deterrent dependent upon United States support: Solly Zuckerman became a key player in the purchase of Skybolt, but more and more he doubted whether the USAF could make it work – unlike the USN and its delivery system. Still in regular contact with Burke, but averse to Air Staff accusations of bias, Mountbatten chose to stay silent and let events unfold. Meanwhile, specialist staff inside the Admiralty started planning in detail how the Royal Navy would adopt and adapt Polaris should it be asked to do so. Debate still raged, within and without the Service, as to the validity of deterrence theory, nowhere more so than in the office of the First Sea Lord. In mid-1960 Caspar John was appointed Chief of the Naval Staff, a heart attack having forced Charles Lambe’s retirement (he died three months later, a second shattering blow to Mountbatten after Edwina’s death earlier that year). The new First Sea Lord viewed the prospect of Polaris with a distaste verging on despair. The bulk of Caspar John’s career had been spent in the Fleet Air Arm. Unsurprisingly, he feared a hugely expensive expansion of the submarine fleet would threaten the Navy’s ambitious carrier programme.44 In September 1960 the Cabinet acceded to the Americans’ request for a naval base in Scotland: Holy Loch would be home to a depot ship, a floating dock and the first generation of Polaris SSBNs. Mistakenly seen as a quid pro quo for acquiring Skybolt, the real reason for sanctioning the USN’s permanent presence in the Firth of Clyde was to further the case for acquiring Polaris on favourable terms. John was still only a few months into his new post, but his minister was already establishing a reputation for competence and calm assurance. The First Lord of the Admiralty had intelligence, authority, gravitas and an impressive CV, which included ten crowded years serving in the Grenadier Guards – first across the bridge at Nijmegen, Peter Carrington’s courage as a squadron commander in the Guards Armoured Division had earned him an MC. Lord Carrington chaired the Admiralty Board throughout Macmillan’s second administration. He enjoyed the confidence of the Prime Minister, had the measure of his admirals and of the CDS and was the last First Lord of the Admiralty to exert a meaningful influence over the future shape of the Royal Navy. Carrington had no illusions about the Chief of the Defence Staff (‘A brave man but flawed.’), but they got on well because he shared Mountbatten’s belief in reform of the MOD, carrier capability, the importance of amphibious operations, the need to regenerate the surface as well as the submarine fleet and the potential of Polaris to place the Royal Navy at the heart of all future strategic thinking.45 The CDS, while endeavouring to demonstrate his interservice credentials, considered his legacy as First Sea Lord to be in good hands: Caspar

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John lacked warmth but was exceedingly able, and Peter Carrington was a thoroughly decent chap with direct access to another ex-Grenadier, inside Number Ten (equally important, the Carrington family was viewed with great affection inside Buckingham Palace).46 By late 1961, with Carrington now two years in office, the Royal Navy had initiated designs for a British SSBN or a hybrid dual-purpose submarine. Potential bases were identified in the far north of Scotland or on the Firth of Clyde. With both Mountbatten and Zuckerman constrained by RAF charges of bias, the Admiralty Board took the initiative: Carrington submitted a detailed position paper to Harold Watkinson, requesting his colleague forward copies to members of the BNDSG. That autumn the First Sea Lord made a discreet visit to Washington, where the Chief of Naval Operations reiterated his no-strings approach to the provision of Polaris. Stung by his experience in Paris two years earlier, Mountbatten warned Caspar John and Carrington that, for whatever reason, Burke was deliberately ignoring State Department objections to any such deal.47 Meanwhile a sympathetic Harold Watkinson gently nudged the committee structure within the MOD towards concrete preparations for Polaris, in response to reports from America that the Skybolt test programme was in serious trouble. By December the Admiralty had mapped out available options for purchasing Polaris submarines from America or securing them as an interim measure while constructing a fleet of dual-purpose submarines. For the present there was little else the Board could do, which scarcely troubled those officers firmly of the opinion that the Royal Navy had better things to do than maintain a nuclear deterrent dependent upon American goodwill. This by no means inconsiderable number may even have included the First Sea Lord. If so, then Caspar John would have taken comfort from Peter Thorneycroft replacing Watkinson as Minister of Defence in July 1962. Ambitious, and keen to avoid accusations of disloyalty, Thorneycroft stoutly defended the Skybolt programme: he chose to ignore warnings from McNamara and Zuckerman  –  and, one must assume, Mountbatten  –  and did little to advance preparations for Polaris. To do otherwise risked publicly undermining Macmillan and generating an intense political debate as to where the Government had gone wrong. With a seemingly sanguine prime minister, Thorneycroft saw no cause to act until as late as the first week in December, when he sent Downing Street the options set out by the Admiralty twelve months earlier. The usually surefooted Macmillan wrongly presumed President Kennedy would warn of Skybolt’s impending demise; and in the absence of any such warning had seen no need to stoke cabinet discussion with discussion of a vastly more expensive alternative.48 Security scandals, internal divisions, growing unpopularity and a frightening escalation of the Cold War made 1962 an exceptionally difficult year for the Government, and for the Prime Minister in particular. Macmillan worked hard to prove he was still very much in control, but December brought a double blow. At Rambouillet, De Gaulle again aired his belief that Britain ‘was not yet ready’ to join the European Economic Community – a veto loomed. Soon after, during an interview on TV, Jack Kennedy arbitrarily ended the Skybolt test programme, scarcely giving a thought to the impact his announcement would have in Britain.49

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Macmillan moved fast to repair the damage, only a few days later meeting the President at Nassau in the Bahamas. Well briefed, resolute and drawing upon a deep well of rhetoric and controlled emotion, Macmillan adroitly exploited the President’s goodwill and embarrassment. In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis the British mission was in a stronger position to isolate those voices within the Administration and the Pentagon opposed to the sale of Polaris – if the British wanted to share the cost and take over Skybolt then fine. Briefly this did seem a possibility, but Zuckerman and his fellow sceptics saw the negotiations swiftly focus on the one system that was reliable and long-term. The Chief of the Defence Staff was absent from the Nassau talks, later insisting that this was a quid pro quo for Kennedy not inviting along Maxwell Taylor: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was no fan of Skybolt, but neither was he a great fan of the British – the legacy of commanding the 101st Airborne in NW Europe less than twenty years before.50 This reasoning made more sense than Mountbatten’s other explanation: that the Prime Minister thought he would be, ‘too conspicuous and make the public think they had come to talk of war and not peace’. Remember Macmillan’s diary entry from September 1960: ‘Poor Dickie M. talks all the time and has (with all his charm) a very limited mental capacity. I fear the Americans are finding this out.’ Certainly, David Bruce, Kennedy’s appointment to the London embassy, had no illusions, acknowledging Mountbatten’s organizational abilities but dismissing him as ‘excessively vain’.51 The Nassau summit was a crisis-led, extraordinarily tense exercise in hard bargaining, with Macmillan retaining a tight grip on every aspect of negotiation. In such an environment Dickie Mountbatten, the man who could charm every salon from the Hollywood Heights to Beacon Hill, was a loose cannon, best left at home. It was crucial for Macmillan to translate his weaknesses into bargaining tools: a possibility that the Government might fall and be replaced by a Labour Party less amenable to Washington’s wishes, a potential rupture in Anglo-American relations welcome to the Russians and the attraction of nuclear collaboration with France (no hint given of De Gaulle torpedoing the PM’s Common Market ambitions). Where necessary, concessions could be made, however disingenuous the promise, witness an apparent acceptance of United States proposals for a NATO multilateral force. The Americans needed to keep the British on side, while not alienating other key allies, but at the same time Macmillan needed to demonstrate that a British deterrence system based on Polaris would not constitute an erosion of national sovereignty. The result was a painfully drafted qualifying clause, which Zuckerman considered inconsequential: if London ordered a missile attack then contesting the decision was an unlikely priority once the – radioactive – dust had settled. Nevertheless, he and the MOD’s permanent secretary Sir Robert Scott placed on record their concern as to just how independent the new system would be: they heard nothing in reply from Thorneycroft, let alone the Prime Minister – or indeed the Chief of the Defence Staff back in London. The final agreement was sufficiently vague as to give the British Government ample opportunity for future negotiation over participation in a multilateral force. Mountbatten’s absence meant the question of leasing US submarines never arose, which was opportune as such an arrangement would have been a hard sell in both Congress and Parliament.

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With no USN personnel present, discussion at Nassau rarely encompassed technical detail; although in due course the Americans made clear their disapproval of the Royal Navy commissioning dual-purpose submarines, in other words fulfilling both a strategic and a tactical (attack) role. The missiles and the accompanying technology were secured for less than 2 per cent of the annual defence budget, notwithstanding the British misapprehension that the Americans would waive a share of development costs (the final cost was still a lot less than the £220  million over eight years Lord Carrington forecast for a UK equivalent). While Macmillan returned home to at best grudging approval and at worst scathing denunciation (why was Skybolt not rescued, and why such a large escalation in cost?), in due course the scale of his achievement was recognized – albeit tempered by De Gaulle’s declaration on 14 January 1963 that the Nassau agreement highlighted why an ‘Anglo Saxon’ presence at the heart of the EEC etait impossible.52 On Christmas Eve Macmillan wrote to Kennedy summarizing the reaction within Whitehall to the deal the two men had thrashed out the previous week. Few in the Cabinet were enthusiastic, with concern rightly focused upon the consequences of Nassau for Britain’s ambitions in Europe. The Chief of the Defence Staff was apparently, ‘unprepared for and unhappy about Polaris’. Had Macmillan read Mountbatten’s feelings correctly, or did the CDS simply feel that it had all come about a tad too quickly? Might Mountbatten have taken to heart Zuckerman’s and Scott’s fears that a deal which on the surface appeared a triumph of British diplomacy had in fact ‘put us in the American pocket for the next decade’? Were that the case then no one had contributed more to such a sad state of dependency than the Americanophile admiral who for the past seven years had so assiduously courted Arleigh Burke and Hyam Rickover.53 More likely Mountbatten was sensitive to a widely shared feeling of apprehension within the Naval Staff, not least in the mind of the First Sea Lord, whose antipathy towards the CDS dated back to before the war.54 Caspar John set about convincing everyone who felt like him to put aside their distaste for the Polaris programme in order to make it work. At the same time, he and Carrington stressed to Thorneycroft and Mountbatten that taking responsibility for Britain’s nuclear deterrent should not detract from the Royal Navy’s immediate priorities re procurement and personnel. The former First Sea Lord would readily concur, but Thorneycroft’s uncompromising defence of naval expenditure was by no means guaranteed: the Minister of Defence had his own agenda, with one eye on the leadership of his party, while his approach to government spending was instinctively monetarist, which explained his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer in January 1958.55 While Macmillan was drafting his seasonal despatch to President Kennedy, the Admiralty Board was resurrecting a project management scheme mapped out by Mike Le Fanu eighteen months before, as well as selecting members of a high-level mission set to visit the United States early in the New Year. Predictably, Solly Zuckerman played a key role in detailed discussions with the Special Projects Office, and with other agencies and contractors. To keep costs down and to complete the project as quickly as possible, there was a clear need for UK-US compatibility, in design and build, and in operational concepts: the multi-department mission recommended four or five purpose-built submarines each carrying sixteen of the new, longer range A3

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missile, intended for the next generation of American SSBNs. These detailed proposals were fully costed, and in due course submitted to the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, along with the Admiralty’s recommendation of Faslane  –  close to Holy Loch – as the Polaris squadron’s deep water shorebase. The Polaris Sales Agreement – far more detailed and carefully thought through than its Nassau predecessor – was signed in Washington on 3 April 1963. It was placed before Parliament three days later. That same week permanent representatives of the Admiralty’s Polaris Executive arrived at the SPO – a key moment in the creation of what was now formally titled the British Naval Ballistic Missile System. The speed is striking, as is the consequent timetable for construction, with four missile-carrying submarines built by the Vickers and Cammell Laird shipyards in just five years. This was despite multiple problems of engineering and supply, and a very real concern that prioritizing Polaris would adversely affect work on Warspite and subsequent hunter-killer nuclear submarines (SSNs). These worries, and a lingering antipathy towards the whole Polaris project, were made clear to Labour’s Denis Healey when he succeeded Thorneycroft as Defence Secretary in October 1964.56 For all its fears that Polaris would undermine the Navy’s integrity and identity, the Admiralty Board argued from the outset for five not four submarines: even the Americans were unsure how long each refitting would take, so a fifth boat provided an absolute guarantee of continuous deterrence  –  two SSBNs on station more than matched the V-bomber force’s capacity to destroy twenty Soviet cities, whereas just the one fell short by four. An extra boat meant stress levels for both crew and base staff would be significantly lower, although the demand for specialist personnel would be that much greater. In January 1963 ministers deferred a final decision on the squadron’s size. The Chiefs of Staff Committee accepted the military case for five SSBNs, but then focused on the opportunity cost; Caspar John found himself isolated, with Thorneycroft sympathetic to the budgetary fears of the Army and the RAF. Having resigned as Chancellor because his spending cuts were vetoed, he could scarcely ignore loud Treasury objections to the luxury of a fifth boat. Twelve months on from the deferred decision the Prime Minister was now Sir Alec Douglas-Home. In cabinet on 25 February 1964 Douglas-Home voiced his fear of an American freeze on nuclear technology, from which only the French would benefit. The slim possibility of a delivery system smaller than France’s trumped Treasury complaints, and the Government authorized construction of a fifth Polaris submarine.57 Central to the question of how many SSBNs should be built was what sort of deterrent Britain wanted. The case for a fifth submarine rested on the assumption that a future British government could at any time take unilateral action and authorize the destruction of twenty or more Russian cities, and crucially, that the Soviet authorities were cognizant of this fact. If, as the Kennedy and then the Johnson administrations preferred, Britain’s Polaris fleet was part of a larger NATO Multilateral Force (MLF) then that same requirement no longer applied. In late 1963 Carrington’s successor, Lord Jellicoe – the last First Lord of the Admiralty before the post was scrapped – wrote to Thorneycroft summarizing the choice faced by cabinet ministers.58 Mountbatten faced no such dilemma. Within the COSC he had to distance himself from the Navy’s call for a fifth submarine, but the logical consequence of a deep antipathy to any multilateral

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force was endorsement of a guaranteed deterrence – a forerunner of what came to be known as the ‘Moscow criterion’. As he pointed out to a sceptical Harold Wilson in a letter of congratulations following Labour’s return to office in October 1964, a British deterrent existed to convince the Kremlin that in the unlikely event of the United States delaying its ‘strategic nuclear response’ to a Soviet attack, ‘Our own Polaris force will be capable of inflicting on the Russian homeland damage which the most hard-headed gambler could not regard as anything but utterly unacceptable.’59 In his post-Christmas cabinet report on the Nassau conference Macmillan had dismissed the State Department’s desire for wider control of Polaris across NATO: ‘This concept was not wholly realistic since, even if it contributed to dissuading Germany from attempting to develop a nuclear capability, it was unlikely to be acceptable to the present French Government.’ As he had convinced President Kennedy to accept his advisers’ carefully crafted exemption clause, the Cabinet could with confidence endorse ‘a realistic compromise.’ Implicit in the official record of Macmillan’s remarks was an assumption that American insistence upon Polaris’s operation within ‘a multilateral system’ would soon fade away.60 The problem for the Macmillan and Douglas-Home governments was that loud voices within the State Department and the White House believed the British now had no option but to pool Polaris within an Alliance-wide Multilateral Force – and they would not let the matter rest. Under Secretary of State George Ball is the unsung hero of David Halberstam’s classic study of American involvement in Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, relentless in his opposition to any military intervention; but he was equally purposeful in promoting the MLF. Ball and his fellow ‘Europeanists’ in the State Department viewed the Nassau agreement as a setback in their plans to forestall a frontline Federal Republic ever contemplating nuclear weapons, by integrating West Germany into an Alliance-wide deterrence. He and his colleagues pursued their goal of bringing the British on board with an intensity which Kennedy was scarcely aware of, but which President Johnson deemed acceptable, at least in the short term.61 The Ministry of Defence questioned the necessity and operational capability of an MLF, highlighting its vaguely conceived structure of command and control. Ministers and officials anticipated a rise not a reduction in strategic weapons, and they blanched at the notion of contributing around a tenth of the Force’s total cost (crudely estimated at £150  million over a decade). Thorneycroft and Zuckerman plotted a positive response, recognizing how keen the Foreign Office was to compromise with an ever more impatient State Department, and to safeguard Britain’s increasingly fragile relations with the Common Market ‘Six’.62 Meanwhile Mountbatten fulminated, abandoning all the old charm and powers of persuasion whenever the subject of the Multilateral Force arose. He was especially intemperate during a visit to Washington in February 1963, insulting an admiral and directly challenging the President; all this only two months after Kennedy had ignored his advisers and responded so positively to Macmillan’s call for help. It’s unclear whether Lord Home (Douglas-Home prior to renouncing his peerage and becoming PM), as Foreign Secretary, knew what was going on, but his Permanent Under-Secretary clearly did: Sir Harold Caccia’s post-Suez tenure at the Washington Embassy was crucial to the restoration of good relations with the Eisenhower Administration, and

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his presence at Nassau had proved critical in translating the Skybolt fiasco into the Polaris triumph. More than once Caccia warned the Chief of the Defence Staff not to involve himself in matters best left to the politicians. Mountbatten, of course, had spent the previous two decades – arguably longer – involving himself in matters best left to the politicians, so good luck to any mandarin, however grand, who insisted he stay silent. Whether bending the ear of press barons, or berating the Belgian Prime Minister, the CDS maintained his discretion-free mission to kill off an ill-conceived concept.63 Macmillan’s resignation and Kennedy’s assassination meant new governments in Whitehall and Washington, but at the same time a continuity of personnel, and thus a continuity of policy. The State Department, now spurred on by the White House, became more dogged in its pursuance of a NATO Multilateral Force. The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence dutifully attended Alliance discussion groups, and sanctioned participation in the experiment of an American destroyer with a multinational crew. The MOD endeavoured to subvert or delay NATO’s adoption of the MLF by submitting the so-called ‘Thorneycroft proposals’. This alternative plan envisaged a joint force of strike aircraft and missiles in which the British would have a significant role but not a heavy financial outlay; crucially, Polaris would not be pooled, thereby protecting the integrity of Britain’s independent deterrent.64 Just how ‘independent’ this deterrent would be proved a salient issue before and during the 1964 general election campaign.

­Selling Polaris to the Labour Government: a pleasant surprise The Conservative Government’s strategy was clearly to play for time: ministers hoped that in due course Washington’s readiness to promote the MLF would flag, especially as the Johnson Administration had so many other matters to attend to, both at home and abroad. The Labour Party’s position regarding Britain’s nuclear weapons was so multi-faceted, opaque and at times contradictory, that identifying a clear-cut position over the MLF was well-nigh impossible. The Opposition’s one consistent message was the need to negotiate the Nassau agreement  –  but to what end? The key questions were whether Britain would press ahead with the Polaris programme, and if so, then how many boats would be built. The consequent answers would determine the nature of a future Labour Government’s response to the Americans’ deadline of December 1964 for NATO agreement on adoption of the MLF. The Douglas-Home Government sought an acceleration of the Polaris programme, endeavouring to make the cost of cancellation exorbitant. In the autumn of 1964 this was far from the case, but it provided a convenient cover should the Labour leadership prefer not to scrap Polaris.65 Prior to the election defence and lobby correspondents increasingly sensed Polaris was safe, a view not shared by the Chiefs of Staff. None of them, not even Mountbatten, knew very much about Harold Wilson – or the heir presumptive at the MOD, Denis Healey. They failed to recognize Major Healey, beach master at Anzio, as, by instinct and intellect, a convinced Atlanticist. Unfamiliar with Wilson’s reputation as the ultimate pragmatist, the Chiefs of Staff took him at his word, interpreting derisive

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references to an ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent as evidence of imminent cancellation. Mountbatten discreetly lobbied the Leader of the Opposition over Polaris, but Wilson to all intents and purposes told him to mind his own business.66 At a meeting of the COSC on 29  September a pessimistic Mountbatten advised a strategy akin to that of the present administration: to inform an incoming Labour government that there were significant obstacles to alleviating cancellation costs by converting the two SSBNs under construction into hunter-killer submarines. Ironically, many inside the Admiralty would have welcomed a conversion which, contrary to the impression given by the CDS, was perfectly feasible. Sir David Luce, Caspar John’s successor as First Sea Lord, would have known that feasibility studies submitted to the Admiralty Board and the Treasury had confirmed the relative ease with which removal of the missile section could facilitate a conventionally armed SSN. Mountbatten maintained the Chiefs were under a ‘moral obligation’ to draft and sign a paper which Wilson would read on assuming office, and which made explicit their view that maintaining their responsibility for defence of the United Kingdom was dependent upon ‘possession of a nationally controlled nuclear deterrent force, of such a capability that it could inflict upon any aggressor such a degree of damage as to outweigh any possible benefit which he might obtain from his aggression’: if the [Labour] Government wished to do away with our deterrent force, ‘they should formally absolve the Chiefs of Staff from further responsibility for the defence of the United Kingdom against attack.’67 This was a clear threat that within days of assuming office Harold Wilson could face a mass resignation of the Chiefs of Staff, led by the nation’s most famous serving officer – a member of the extended Royal Family, a former viceroy and an architect of victory in the Far East. Such a threat in effect demanded the Prime Minister ignore a manifesto commitment to revisit Polaris. It is safe to assume that, had he known in advance, Solly Zuckerman – who did know Wilson – would have warned Mountbatten that any such ploy was politically, and indeed constitutionally, toxic. It’s scarcely surprising that only a week later the service chiefs took advantage of Mountbatten’s absence in west Africa to park his proposal and to take more measured steps in the event of a Labour government: a new Defence Secretary would need to be properly briefed, and fully cognizant of the COSC’s unequivocal support for maintaining an independent nuclear deterrent – if this view, and its supportive evidence, were not then submitted to the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee then the COSC reserved the right to lobby the Prime Minister directly. Critical to these measures was adopting a suitably collegial and non-confrontational tone in the drafting of all relevant documentation.68 If anyone was painted into a corner then it was the CDS, who had no option but to comply with his colleagues’ initiative. Mountbatten’s enemies  –  most vocally Lord Beaverbrook  –  viewed the last viceroy as a traitor to his class, shamelessly ambitious and over-indulgent of his wife’s purported socialist leanings. Critics inside Brook’s or the Carlton saw Dickie’s perceived disloyalty over Suez as confirmation of closet Labour sympathies. In practice the CDS had minimal contact with the current Labour leadership, his knowledge of the party little more than what he learnt from the newspapers – with Edwina gone, the

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unilateralist New Statesman sat on the Broadlands breakfast table, swiftly skimmed and rarely read.69 In due course Mountbatten and Wilson developed an intriguing relationship, and the same might be said of the CDS’s dealings with Denis Healey. Back in the early autumn of 1964 Mountbatten could only make ill-informed comparisons with the titans of Attlee’s cabinet, displaying scant knowledge of the complexities and contradictions that marked Labour’s approach to nuclear weapons. There was a demonstrable absence of finesse and political nous in his abortive attempt to bludgeon Wilson into retaining Polaris – his chronic under-estimation of the putative premier would soon translate into a healthy respect. Mountbatten was saved by his colleagues’ decisiveness, and their respect for constitutional propriety. Still on a military mission to Nigeria when Labour took office with an overall majority of four seats, he returned home to engage in civilized debate, not premature confrontation. As so often, Solly Zuckerman orchestrated proceedings, setting up a post-election get-together for Healey and Mountbatten ahead of their formal introduction. Across the dinner table in Zuckerman’s Chelsea flat the new Defence Secretary established his credentials, and vice versa: ‘This was my first substantial encounter with Mountbatten. His charm, selfconfidence and good looks enhanced a reputation for radical independence which had already impressed me. I found him a formidable personality … ’ First impressions are important, and Healey might not have felt so generous had he known of Mountbatten’s thwarted effort at putting a gun to his head.70 For Mountbatten, his revised order of priorities was obvious: with Healey on side, convince Harold Wilson to retain Polaris; endeavour to retain five purposebuilt submarines but live with four if required; and, as with the ‘Thorneycroft proposals’, guide ministers in the creation of an alternative to the MLF  –  but this time ensure the alternative had credibility, squared with the Labour manifesto and was promoted by a powerful combination of cabinet heavyweights and senior civilian and military advisers. Healey could see what a good deal Macmillan had secured at Nassau, although the waters were muddied when he discovered the boats under construction could still be converted to hunter-killer submarines, with only modest resistance inside the Admiralty. By the time he raised this option with Wilson and the new Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, they were leaning heavily towards continuing the Polaris programme. The three men united behind the argument that cancellation was too costly an option; but that wasn’t the case, not least because the SSN alternative remained open, as Healey all but admitted when the Cabinet discussed post-devaluation defence cuts in early 1968.71 Remarkably, Wilson, Gordon Walker and Healey turned an informal agreement into a ministerial recommendation, when just the three of them met together as Cabinet Committee MISC 16 on 11 November 1964. They agreed that three submarines would be an acceptable minimum force if matched by the Americans: the members of MISC 16 already had in mind an alternative to the much despised MLF, an Atlantic Nuclear Force. The ANF would encompass the V-bombers on stand-by in Britain and the Polaris squadron, with a matching number of USN missile-launching submarines. Complementing this ‘nationally manned’ deterrent force would be a smaller, mixedmanned, multilateral element, which all NATO members – including France – would

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be welcome to join. All participating nations would sit on a body of command affiliated to NATO, and all would enjoy a power of veto; any operational impasse would be considered an acceptable reason for the withdrawal of British forces. The relative size of its contribution gave Britain a more powerful role within the ANF than would be the case inside the Multilateral Force, and at a far lower cost. The ‘Thorneycroft proposals’ clearly fed into this fresh initiative, with the Chief of the Defence Staff providing necessary continuity. For both Mountbatten and Healey three boats were acceptable only if the Americans ran with the ANF, which neither of them thought likely. Nor did Zuckerman, who rightly saw the Atlantic Nuclear Force as a clever ploy to push back the MLF deadline, thereby enmeshing the Johnson Administration in ever more complex negotiations – at some point an exasperated, distracted Oval Office would tell George Ball and the MLF advocates that the game was up, which was exactly what happened. More immediately, the ANF was a convenient cover for Wilson to persuade sceptics in the Cabinet that Labour’s questioning of the previous government’s deterrence strategy had not diminished: by the time prominent unilateralists like Frank Cousins and Barbara Castle started asking awkward questions it would be too late.72 Complementing the COSC’s policy recommendations was a personal initiative by the Chief of the Defence Staff. On the Sunday following the general election – hours before he dined at Zuckerman’s apartment with the new Defence Secretary – Mountbatten drafted a lengthy letter to the Prime Minister, congratulating Harold Wilson and advising him on the key issues of national security. A priority for discussion was the Chiefs of Staff ’s belief that the ­ nly practical defence in military terms against direct attack at home or indirect o blackmail abroad is the possession of our own nuclear retaliatory capacity … The part that the British deterrent has to play in this is to dispel in Russian minds the thought that they will escape scot-free if by any chance the Americans decide to hold back release of a strategic nuclear response to an attack.

In the early ’seventies Mountbatten made the dubious claim that he then spent three hours with the Prime Minister explaining why Britain must retain its capacity to strike back alone. Both Peter Hennessy and Philip Ziegler, Wilson’s official biographer, believe the Labour leader never took seriously the notion of unilateral nuclear retaliation; but he did appreciate any destabilizing element in his dealings with the Americans, and in its own strange way this supposedly independent deterrent constituted a handy form of leverage.73 MISC 16 morphed into a successor Cabinet Committee, MISC 17, which met at Chequers on the weekend of 21–22 November 1964. By this time Wilson was under huge pressure from a succession of American envoys – including Ball – to accept the MLF ahead of his visit to Washington in early December. At Chequers ten ministers were joined by senior officials and the Chiefs of Staff to discuss the most immediate matters of national security, not least the nuclear deterrent. The idea of an Atlantic Nuclear Force was recognized as an exemplar of political expediency, intended to give Wilson a counter proposal when strong-armed by LBJ, while fulfilling a manifesto pledge to revisit the Nassau agreement. However, MISC 16’s recommendation of three

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submarines was too much for those ministers insistent that Labour had campaigned on a pledge to cancel Polaris. Wilson remained above the fray, helped by the absence of cabinet heavyweights among the awkward squad. Healey made a powerful case for continuation. He was committed to a squadron of just three boats, but that was assuming the ANF proposal became a reality. Mountbatten and Luce were left to advise that four SSBNs – and ideally five – were an operational minimum, and a necessary insurance against any future disruption of the Western Alliance. When George Brown suggested a force of three boats was too small to warrant pressing on with Polaris, Healey turned his argument around, using it as justification for a fourth boat. The Prime Minister’s deft handling of his colleagues, and the fact that Healey’s unique blend of intellectual bullying and political calculation had ensured Polaris’s survival, gave the Chief of the Defence Staff cause to celebrate. He told his former press secretary, Alan Campbell-Johnson, that the new administration was demonstrably superior to the previous government. The honeymoon didn’t last, but neither did it end abruptly.74 When the full Cabinet convened four days later, the prospect of subsuming Polaris within an Atlantic Nuclear Force, plus the presumed high cost of cancellation, muted the veteran unilateralists. With a parliamentary majority of just four, and a fresh election on the horizon, it was vital for the Government to project an image of unity, denying the Conservatives an opportunity to resurrect the familiar charge that Labour was ‘soft’ on matters of national security. When just such a charge was made in Parliament a wellprepared Prime Minister disarmed his critics, adroitly using the retention of Polaris to his advantage. By the time Wilson saw off the Opposition front bench Healey had secured an increase from three to four submarines, irrespective of the ANL’s success or failure. Although a minority inside the Admiralty thought three boats were feasible, the First Sea Lord – urged on by Mountbatten – warned the Defence Secretary that excessively tight operating cycles would leave men and machinery continuously at risk. When the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee met on 29 January 1965 Healey secured unanimous agreement on four submarines as the minimum necessary force to sustain a credible deterrence. The cost of cancelling the fifth submarine was little more than £1 million, and the relief felt over the programme’s continuation ensured scant objection inside Whitehall or within the Royal Navy. In terms of damage limitation, the CDS was happy to see the survival of a credible force; even if a decade later some observers of the squadron’s refit schedule insisted the cancellation of the fifth boat had been a false economy.75 Equally satisfactory was the imminent demise of the MLF. A heavy investment of MOD staff time in drafting the Atlantic Nuclear Force proposal meant the British delegation that visited Washington in early December 1964 could speak with authority to a detailed, properly costed plan. This clearly made an impression on Lyndon Johnson, if not his State Department advisers. The ANF defused an imminent crisis in Anglo-American relations, and it gave an already sceptical Johnson an adequate reason for authorizing an easing of pressure on the United States’ most powerful allies, not least the UK. Swiftly overtaken by events, in due course the Multilateral Force was quietly dropped. The British mission’s success was helped considerably by Wilson’s adroit handling of affairs, reassuring the Administration, and at the same time redefining the ‘special relationship’ as a more balanced and more mature

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partnership. The deteriorating situation in south-east Asia constituted an obvious area of disagreement, but as yet the White House was reluctant to place undue pressure upon the British Government regarding military involvement. That situation would soon change, but Wilson and the CDS were similarly sceptical of American support for South Vietnam’s quasi-military regime; a view shared by the service chiefs, each of whom feared a further military commitment east of Suez. Recognizing harsh political reality, Mountbatten had urged the French to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh in 1945.76 Twenty years later that harsh political reality still prevailed. Mountbatten was a member of the British delegation, advising Healey and observing Wilson. He saw each man’s performance in dealing with the likes of Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Walt Rostow – let alone the President – as suitably cerebral and combative. Both Prime Minister and Defence Secretary continued to impress. By the time the British mission set off for home Mountbatten’s pre-election fears for Labour in office had all but disappeared.77

­6

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Dickie Mountbatten: admiral and politician Whitehall watchers presumed that if Mountbatten ever became a minister, then it would be in a Labour administration. Attlee gave serious consideration to the idea after Mountbatten arrived home from India to resume his naval career, and there was speculation ahead of the 1964 general election that Wilson might make a similar offer. Notwithstanding the CDS’s scarcely disguised fears for Polaris, this made no sense. As we’ve seen, Wilson and Healey scarcely knew Mountbatten, with the Prime Minister focused on convincing Solly Zuckerman to be his minister for disarmament. John Colville, career civil servant and Churchill’s late life consigliere, believed Mountbatten was available to the highest bidder, Labour or Conservative. Colville, who for two years after the war served as Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary, dismissed Mountbatten’s radical posturing as ‘arrant political nonsense’, and on Churchill’s return to office found him shamelessly two-faced: ‘ … he put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Without you, Jock, I should feel no confidence, but as you are back I know all will be well.” It was, of course, intended as a friendly remark, but flattery, especially when so exaggerated, makes one wonder why one should be thought so naïve.’1 The closest Mountbatten supposedly came to accepting office was in November 1962, when Macmillan sought to emulate Churchill by persuading an ex-supreme commander to join his cabinet. Field Marshal Lord Alexander’s two-year tenure as an ostensibly apolitical defence secretary was generally regarded as an unhappy experiment, which Mountbatten had no intention of repeating. As in 1949, he declined the Prime Minister’s invitation. Note that we only have Mountbatten’s word for this, so a healthy scepticism is warranted.2 Macmillan’s alleged offer came during a weekend break at Broadlands in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. The stay was scarcely restful given Mountbatten’s choice of film for the Saturday night: Otto Preminger’s White House thriller, Advise and Consent.3 The timing of what would have been a radical step for both prime minister and CDS is interesting. If such an offer was made, did Macmillan feel that Mountbatten’s relationship with the three service chiefs was more political than collegial; and that by dint of his unique service history, his personality and his priorities and preoccupations, he no longer fulfilled the operational role of a conventional chief of staff? As we shall see, by the autumn of 1962 the Chief of the Defence Staff was in the unique situation

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of having antagonized all three service chiefs: Caspar John remained as sceptical as ever; the CIGS, Sir Richard Hull, nursed ancient grievances; and Sir Thomas Pike, Chief of the Air Staff, was certain Mountbatten instinctively placed the interests of the Royal Navy above those of the RAF. Privately, John felt some sympathy with the CAS, assessing Mountbatten as, ‘50 per cent genius, 30 per cent dark blue, and 20 per cent boyish enthusiasm.’4 Macmillan stayed at Broadlands exactly a week after the world appeared on the brink of nuclear war. That previous weekend Mountbatten had stayed in Hampshire as Downing Street sought to dampen public alarm. The Chiefs of Staff Committee met in his absence to draft a sober briefing for senior ministers on the steps necessary to place the UK on a wartime footing. Thankfully, the Soviet Union backed down, and Sunday’s cabinet meeting was cancelled. Had it occurred then surely Mountbatten would have been present – after all Peter Thorneycroft, the Defence Secretary, did still meet his senior advisors that Sunday morning. Yet the same could be said of the COSC meeting the previous day: the service chiefs instructed their staff to draft a memo detailing for the CDS what decisions had been made, but nevertheless his absence is extraordinary.5 Had a less high-profile figure been Chief of the Defence Staff then his return to London would have occurred without comment, and he could have exercised overall operational control. Perhaps this was the reason why, once the crisis was over, Macmillan conceived the idea that Mountbatten could still oversee structural change if he vacated his service post and became the responsible minister – he would after all retain his rank as an admiral of the fleet, an appointment for life. Mountbatten, while flattered, clearly felt otherwise. Again, this all presumes such an offer was made in the first place – and the chances are that it wasn’t. On that critical Saturday afternoon in mid-October were the Chiefs of Staff and their advisers quietly relieved that they could formulate contingency planning for World War Three without direct intervention from the CDS? When the world wasn’t on the brink of nuclear self-destruction were the service chiefs delighted that Mountbatten spent so much of the year inspecting far-flung bases, glad handing heads of state, attending high-powered gatherings of the Western Alliance and socializing with the great, the good and the glamorous? By the late autumn of 1962 their relations with the CDS were adversarial, the ill-will rooted in an already heated debate over the future restructuring of defence management. As we shall see, the ensuing months marked a particularly low point in Mountbatten’s relations with his fellow chiefs of staff. His working and personal relationships with the other members of the COSC were at best lukewarm and at worst abysmal. There was no chief of staff with whom Mountbatten shared a genuine friendship other than Charles Lambe, his short-lived successor as First Sea Lord. Rank, formality, natural civility and bourgeois convention often disguised tension, irritation and outright dislike; an antipathy not always mutual, with Mountbatten drawing upon a generosity of spirit rarely evident among the English aristocracy  –  although the cynic would say that this cost him little.6 There were occasions when, deaf to the grinding of teeth, he genuinely believed things had gone well: after Edwina died he had no one to disabuse him of the notion that a weekend at Broadlands generated reconciliation, collegiality and a commonality of

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purpose. Such an assumption fed into the dominant trope in Mountbatten’s metanarrative of his life, namely that, whatever the differences and personality clashes, in the final analysis everyone got on remarkably well (except perhaps Jinnah) – the apotheosis of this inclusive life story was of course in 1969 and the televising of his highly selective memoirs (another occasion for multiple grinding of teeth, in the TV lounges of irreconciled one-time adversaries). Implicit, often explicit, in this sunny, solipsistic view of his life was that ultimate conviviality rested upon a tacit or even open acknowledgement that, whatever the original disagreement, he had been right. Throughout Mountbatten’s career of course he laboured hard to prove this to be the case, and in so doing, to put the historical record right. This unqualified insistence on infallibility amused, but more often annoyed, his most senior colleagues inside the Admiralty and the Ministry of Defence. Invariably Mountbatten projected himself as an agent of progress, battling with defenders of the obsolete and arcane. Thus, his TV memoirs portrayed reform of the MOD as a triumph of modernity: Once again I knew I would have a terrific struggle, because I would be up against tradition and vested interest  –  a formidable combination. In fact, one senior officer [Boyle – see below] told me quite frankly when I took over as C.D.S. that he regarded my appointment as “the greatest disaster which had befallen the British defence services within his memory.” I knew I was going to antagonise a lot of people – but I couldn’t help that.

Note that ‘Once again … ’  –  this was a man permanently in heroic mode, even in retirement.7 In the late ’seventies a well-connected Richard Hough interviewed Admiralty and MOD veterans, all of whom recalled Mountbatten’s obsession with youth (‘he told me everyone was finished when they had reached two stars’).8 It was as if he was somehow exempt from the ageing process, waging a ceaseless bureaucratic war against a host of geriatrics: flying the flag of youth and modernity justified methods mere mortals within the Whitehall machine would deem wholly unacceptable. Young officers on his staff were no threat, had the energy and ambition to work long hours, and were malleable, their principal – but not their only – purpose being to ensure the CDS was properly briefed for every occasion, not least meetings of the COSC. Their reward was career advancement, generous appreciation when deserved and invaluable experience of staff work at the very highest level. Middle-ranking officers’ mixed feelings towards Mountbatten were on balance positive. A crude assumption across his career was the lower the rank, the more effective his man management skills – seen most visibly in the affection and respect he enjoyed among survivors of the Kelly, not least the lower deck. Conversely, seniority and proximity brought deep suspicion of the man, and distaste for his disingenuity. It is surely too crude to describe Mountbatten as thick-skinned: his instinctive sense of social superiority left him short on empathy, albeit tempered by an instinctive sympathy for those subject to the harshest of circumstance, whether the bereaved families of the Kelly or the emaciated prisoners of Changi and the camps. That lack of empathy, outside of family and of obvious tragedy, meant Mountbatten too frequently

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failed to identify with the quotidian experiences of his ostensible peers. It scarcely needs stating that Earl Mountbatten of Burma was like no other chief of staff in postwar Britain. Indeed, other than his father, it’s hard to think of any chief of staff across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first with whom Mountbatten had much in common at all. With notable exceptions, like Slim, or sons of the Empire such as the future CDS ‘Sam’ Elworthy, the chiefs of staff ’s roots were largely upper middle class, whichever side of the Irish Sea they were born. These were self-made men, and any aristocratic connections were rare and tenuous (for example, Alan Brooke, whose father was an expatriate Anglo-Irish baronet). However varied their upbringings, they had little in common with a direct descendant of the Queen-Emperor whose childhood had ranged from hair-raising flights with Edwardian aviators to a Baltic cruise on the Romanov royal yacht. For fellow First Sea Lords, Osborne and Dartmouth was a shared experience, but not a first posting to the Grand Fleet’s flag ship, followed by a six-month spell at Cambridge with the Duke of York, and a two-year royal tour alongside the Prince of Wales. Critically, however auspicious their wartime records, no other chief of staff had served previously on the COSC, and had been appointed an Allied supreme commander. All this, without mention of the viceroyalty. For different reasons, neither Slim nor Montgomery felt intimidated by Mountbatten’s CV, but his younger colleagues were rarely so relaxed. They could scarcely ignore the preceding decade: the 1940s had seen a flotilla commander of questionable seamanship, by accident of war and by consequence of privilege, transformed into a powerful warlord and the architect of south Asia’s post-imperial future. Mountbatten was a shameless name-dropper  –  never more so than when referencing royalty – but in his case he really knew the people he named. He was in awe of almost nobody – Pandit Nehru and Andrew Cunningham possibly the exceptions; and he acted on the advice of just a handful of confrères, notably Peter Murphy at the start of his career and Solly Zuckerman at the end, and crucially, his long-serving naval secretary, ‘Ronnie’ Brockman.9 Driven, and at times impetuous, too often there was no one to temper his actions, question his motives and qualify his remarks. Invariably he believed he was right, and he failed to understand why anyone would question his judgement. Mountbatten was moulded by his past, including undoubted achievements – and disputed failures. With age there grew a hardening of views and a growing inflexibility in decision-making. If once he had been a good listener, that facet of his personality all but disappeared. Political nous was still in evidence, but too often the ends were tacitly seen to justify the means, for example, conveying to the Minister opinions and action points at odds with the reality of whichever COSC meeting he was reporting upon.10 Field Marshal Lord Bramall, himself a future Chief of the Defence Staff, served on Mountbatten’s staff as a half-colonel in the early ’sixties. Years later he recalled those occasions when the CDS promised the service chiefs his full support at an imminent meeting with the minister, but on the day conjured up an excuse for staying away – and then advised Thorneycroft to ignore his colleagues’ special pleas.11 Mountbatten exercised and enjoyed power and influence in a manner not seen since the war. Even the most eminent and experienced chief of staff found it wearying and frustrating to challenge him, not once but time and again. As we’ve already seen, Chiefs of the Naval Staff were by no means his natural allies once he became CDS;

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while successive CIGSs and Chiefs of the Air Staff were convinced that Mountbatten was instinctively biased towards the Royal Navy. He never shook off that charge, and too often events conspired to support the suspicion – and the antipathy – of budgetsensitive generals and air marshals. In this respect Mountbatten’s Achilles’ heel was the modernization and expansion of aircraft carriers, plus the requisite jets and helicopters required to fulfil their operational role. The great modernizer had a powerful strategic argument in favour of spending so much money, but the opportunity costs were huge, impacting severely on the other services’ procurement budgets. All this was the cause of deep tension within the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and fuelling a further clash of personalities was the costly creation of a nuclear-powered submarine fleet and the adoption of Polaris as the nation’s primary deterrent. For all their advantages of birth and education, the Chiefs of Staff owed their appointments to natural talent and native wit  –  most evident when under fire. Demonstrating competence and authority at each stage of their careers, they reached the summit of their respective professions in an era of proto meritocracy. Courtesy of Staff College, the Imperial Defence College and associated bodies, they were prepared for the highest commands. In some cases, of course, assuming responsibility for their service proved a promotion too far, but by the 1950s and 1960s the system largely worked. Since their formative years as junior officers, these men were used to giving orders, and  –  except when under direct operational command  –  were rarely countermanded or ignored. Being told to their face that their views were deeply flawed, or that they must accept a policy contrary to their wishes, was a novel experience, and as such deeply frustrating. In Dickie Mountbatten they came face to face with a supremely confident military commander who would not hesitate to tell the brightest, most bemedaled colleague that they were wrong, and should act according to his wishes and not their own. Those were the moments when, within Whitehall’s normally quiet confines, a roar of rage would echo down the corridors of power. As Viceroy, Mountbatten had sought to exude calm in the face of confrontation (‘Perhaps we can adjourn for half an hour … ’), but increasingly this readiness to take the heat out of a situation diminished. As one member of his staff shrewdly observed: ‘He was always creating crises. It was as if he had this need for constant achievement, and terror of showing that he might not be wanted.’12

Post-war defence management: the creation of a credible Chief of Staff Mountbatten was only the second Chief of the Defence Staff, bidding farewell to the Admiralty in May 1959. Nearly a year had passed since he was invited to become CDS. This meant he had plenty of time to consider what in his eyes the job should entail. The Prime Minister’s admiration for Mountbatten’s post-Suez efforts to repair AngloAmerican relations, when combined with his unique CV, made elevation to CDS wellnigh inevitable.13 Only six months into the job and Macmillan proposed the regular three-year tenure be extended to five, his argument being that if Mountbatten had an

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agenda for change then he needed time to complete an all-encompassing programme of reform. Surprisingly, perhaps, that offer was turned down, but the death of Edwina changed everything. In due course Macmillan tried again, and this time Mountbatten agreed to carry on until July 1964. For many within the defence establishment this was grim news, with the MOD’s most senior officials vetoing any suggestion that such a divisive figure stay longer than five years. Unsurprisingly, their opposition fell on deaf ears: in general, the CDS’s dealings with successive ministers, Conservative and Labour, were both cordial and productive. He had the measure of them; but then the likes of Denis Healey and Duncan Sandys had the measure of Mountbatten. They were neither intimidated nor irritated, and, unlike the Chiefs of Staff, they arrived in office without suspicion, prejudice or low expectation – indeed, quite the contrary.14 Duncan Sandys was the first Minister of Defence with the political muscle of a cabinet minister entrusted by Downing Street to initiate comprehensive change. In the early years after the war Lord Alexander was by no means unique in ceding executive power upwards to the Prime Minister and operational responsibility downwards to his service colleagues. Peacetime reorganization saw the four ministers attend a reconstituted Defence Committee, but for all policy-making decisions they deferred to the most senior members of Cabinet. In so far as a Ministry of Defence existed it was a bureaucratic minnow, dwarfed by the service ministries.15 The latter’s breadth of activities was reflected in the size of their budgets: when the Conservatives returned to power in October 1951 defence expenditure – boosted by the demands of the Korean War – accounted for a staggering 14 per cent of GDP (it quickly dropped to 10 per cent, but by the time the Tories left office thirteen years later it was a still sizeable 6.4 per cent). To take a single service: the scale of Admiralty operational, personnel and procurement responsibilities is reflected in the size of the Navy Estimates, which in 1952–3 totalled £332, 250,000 [the equivalent in 2020 of over £9.6 billion]. The Ministry of Defence acquired specific spheres of responsibility, notably in research and development, but its principal roles were solely that of coordination and of overall budgetary responsibility: if knowledge is power then the MOD demonstrably lacked the capacity to prioritize resource allocation, or to provide an effective buffer between the three services and the Treasury. Annual expenditure rows in the early ’fifties saw Alexander and his officials endeavouring to erode the fixed positions of seemingly irreconcilable service ministries. An enfeebled prime minister was in no position to exert control; and yet, according to Eden, Churchill never seriously recognized, ‘the position of a minister of defence divorced from his own authority. In impatient moments he would sometimes murmur that the post didn’t exist.’16 Eden fretted over the Defence Committee’s focus upon immediate issues at the expense of serious strategic discussion. His eagerness to initiate change was shared by Macmillan, who succeeded Alexander as Minister of Defence in the dog days of Churchill’s premiership. For Macmillan, his six months at the MOD revealed the true depths of inter-service rivalry, and the complete absence of an integrated management system. The prevailing structure was in no way designed to foster collaboration, costefficiency and a common sense of direction; indeed, exactly the opposite. A week into the job Macmillan noted in his diary, ‘This new Ministry of mine is a queer affair. I have no power; yet I am responsible for everything – esp. if it goes wrong … When

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I ask for a small meeting with the Service ministers, about 40 to 50 people turn up!’ It was the organization, not the personalities that Macmillan railed against (at NATO it was both). He got on well with his three Chiefs of Staff, and with the MOD’s senior officials. From SHAPE Headquarters in Paris Montgomery railed against the status quo, his ever more abrasive remarks rarely offending a receptive minister. Macmillan and the rebarbative field marshal were like-minded as to the need for change, albeit differing over what was realizable in the short-term.17 A critical requirement was the long-delayed departure of Churchill. Ideally, Eden’s elevation to the premiership would coincide with the arrival in Whitehall of a chief of staff eager to shake things up, and so it came to pass: in April 1955 the heir apparent at last inherited his Downing Street estate, and the same month the Royal Navy’s best known admiral rejoined the Chiefs of Staff Committee. By the end of the year the COSC had seen Gerald Templer appointed CIGS, and Dermot Boyle named Chief of the Air Staff when his predecessor, William Dickson, was elevated to Chairman. If the new First Sea Lord really was a catalyst for change, then a major handicap was the firm belief of both Templer and Boyle that any suggestion advanced by Dickie Mountbatten must surely have a hidden agenda.18 Always happy for an excuse to focus on foreign and security matters at the expense of urgent issues closer to home, Eden took a hands-on role in the 1955 Defence Review, which sowed the seeds for Sandys’s more ambitious reshaping of the armed forces two years later. One key decision was deliberately postponed: with British forces confronting their Warsaw Pact counterparts in West Germany, and containing political violence in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, an end to National Service remained a distant objective. Here lay a crucial paradox – Britain was seemingly a nation at peace, recovering from the harsh material and human cost of successive conflagrations, and yet at no time since 1945 had all three services not been on active duty, conducting counter-insurgency operations in a variety of environments, each with its own very specific requirements. Withdrawal from empire – or rather, remoulding of empire – was hugely expensive, yet dwarfed by the cost of countering a very real threat of Soviet aggrandizement, or lesser threats from hostile powers east of Suez. Ironically, Suez itself was briefly seen as a rare example of conflict resolution, with the last British troops leaving the Canal Zone in June 1956 – the Prime Minister would enjoy a miserly month of satisfaction with the deal Nasser had so speedily agreed to twenty months earlier.19 Like so many aspects of his brief premiership, Eden signalled his intention to take firm action in reforming the defence establishment, but he was soon distracted by multiple challenges at home and overseas. He appointed the ambitious Selwyn Lloyd as Minister of Defence and gave him a widened remit. What in due course became the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee replaced its predecessor, a decade old and no longer fit for purpose. Yet the momentum for reform swiftly slowed, as confirmed by Selwyn Lloyd making way for Walter Monckton, who viewed the MOD as a sinecure en route to becoming Lord Chief Justice. As we’ve seen, Monckton was a fringe figure throughout the Suez crisis. He was opposed to intervention, and found himself largely ignored by his service ministers, all three of whom were preoccupied with placing their departments on a wartime footing. In mid-October Monckton made way for the hawkish Anthony Head, in turn replaced by Duncan Sandys. Nor was Monckton’s mediocrity

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compensated for by Eden’s most significant initiative, the appointment of a designated service chief as Chairman of an expanded Chiefs of Staff Committee. The permanent chair of the COSC ‘and Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defence’ would present a collective viewpoint to the secretary of state and his cabinet colleagues, and serve as the UK’s sole representative on NATO’s Military Committee and any other significant international bodies. Threatening resignation, Templer had vehemently opposed Downing Street’s original suggestion of ‘Chief Military Adviser to the Government’: in the long term he envisaged Labour favouring a political appointee, and in the short term he feared Eden would see Mountbatten as the obvious choice. The size of the Chairman’s secretariat reflected the CIGS’s success in reducing the position to merely first among equals. Boyle’s predecessor as Chief of the Air Staff, Sir William Dickson, was a compromise appointment, placating Templer and leaving Mountbatten free to play the long game in securing  –  and then filling  –  an independent supra-position within the Chiefs of Staff Committee. With retirement looming, Dickson was a fading force, whose poor health explained his ineffectual role throughout the summer and autumn of 1956. Dickson found himself in the impossible position of conveying the service chiefs’ views to an unreceptive Sandys and implementing policies which two and sometimes all three of his colleagues were vehemently opposed to. Unlike Templer and Boyle, he saw the First Sea Lord as an ally, not a threat (‘he gave me every support throughout this difficult period’), asking Mountbatten to chair COSC meetings whenever he was indisposed.20 In late November 1956, with British forces still to quit Port Said, the Chancellor of the Exchequer gave Anthony Head a clear idea of a Macmillan government’s strategic and financial priorities. A former brigadier in the Life Guards, and loath to wield the axe if called on to do so, the Minister of Defence knew he was living on borrowed time. Within weeks Eden was gone, and so was Head.21 When, on 27 January 1957, the new Prime Minister outlined his thinking as to the future role and purpose of the Ministry of Defence, he stressed ministerial control in overall planning and inter-service coordination. Macmillan gave Sandys an overarching authority, seeking to extend and underpin that authority by strengthening the Chairman of the COSC’s status as ‘chief of staff to the Minister’. The Chairman could henceforth advance individual advice in the absence of collective agreement among the Chiefs of Staff, and then report back on what had finally been decided at ministerial level. As seen in Chapter 4, although Sandys initiated a watershed in post-war strategic thinking, there were traces of pragmatism in his personality. Thus, he regularly imposed his will via brutal exercises of authority, and yet he was capable of judging when the right time was right to rein back; and, as Mountbatten quickly appreciated, he was susceptible to the subtler forms of lobbying.22 In formulating and implementing the 1957 Defence White Paper Sandys made rare concessions when politically expedient. An unexpectedly bruising experience shaped the following year’s blueprint for organizational reform, The Central Organisation for Defence. The intention was to provide ‘institutional recognition’ for those powers which Sandys endeavoured to exercise at the expense of the service ministries, and which the Chairman of the COSC so demonstrably lacked. Macmillan and his reformminded Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, devoted the second half of 1957 to establishing what was feasible: Sandys sought the demise of the service ministries, and

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a ‘functionalist’ MOD focused on personnel, administration and procurement, but what went down well over brandy at Broadlands was an anathema to the other Chiefs of Staff and most Tory backbenchers. Brook advised the Prime Minister to focus on what was feasible, and in so doing instruct Sandys to toe the line. Butler, in charge during Macmillan’s trip to Australia, tested the cabinet waters. ‘Rab’ duly endorsed Brook’s view that centralizing defence decision-making powers in the hands of the Minister of Defence, advised only by an empowered Chief of the Defence Staff, would prompt testing questions re the Chiefs of Staff ’s constitutional position. Well aware of Sandys’s dire relationship with the COSC – other than Mountbatten, Macmillan told him of the need to compromise. Dealings between the two men were already strained, and Macmillan’s readiness, in Sandys’s eyes, to prioritize political expediency above efficiency of government, saw a souring of their relationship.23 A wary Macmillan initiated a process of consultation in March 1958, fully anticipating sparks would fly. In his memoirs he recalled a ‘kind of smouldering fire in Whitehall’ as spring turned into summer. Sandys, supported by Mountbatten, would have gone further in creating an integrated command structure had not the Cabinet rejected the original White Paper’s minimal role for the service ministers, just as Macmillan had anticipated. In the end the three ministers retained their right to attend relevant cabinet committees at the discretion of the Prime Minister, and they joined their Chiefs of Staff, the Minister of Defence, his scientific adviser and the MOD’s permanent secretary on a new, all-powerful Defence Board. The COSC’s Chairman was now redesignated Chief of the Defence Staff. As CDS Dickson was henceforth responsible for joint planning of the armed forces; yet he lacked adequate staff, and the Joint Planning Staff was still not under his autonomous control. As previously, he could only offer personal advice when his colleagues failed to agree on a common position. The MOD’s officials, from the permanent secretary down, were similarly handicapped, with no control over their counterparts in the service ministries. The Defence Board atrophied almost from the outset. Furthermore, an individual chief of staff ’s right to access the secretary of state, and the Prime Minister, remained, with later reforms respecting this privilege.24 This new arrangement was still far from a unified command structure, even if the creation of tri-service headquarters in Cyprus and Aden signalled a modest step forward. Mountbatten and Montgomery were old sparring partners, their differences dating back to the Dieppe raid. Over the succeeding sixteen years there had been little these two extraordinarily vain men had agreed upon, not least the future of the Royal Navy. However, in recent years they had sunk their differences and forged a friendship rooted in mutual advantage. They shared a common debt to NATO, the Alliance kickstarting Mountbatten’s career and extending Montgomery’s. Both men saw Sandys’s initiative as a flawed halfway house, with the field marshal insistent on an all-powerful CDS, by default the armed forces’ only five-star officer. While acknowledging the idea’s internal logic, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten passed on a scenario where all but a handful of his most distinguished colleagues would be denied a final promotion – even he could see the deep resentment such a radical step would cause. Ever sensitive to matters of rank and status, Mountbatten responded more positively to a plaintive request that he urge Macmillan to make Monty an earl.25

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The Prime Minister, shocked by the ferocity of opposition from Templer and his allies, deemed the changes ‘a Pyrrhic victory’, resolving to postpone further reform until more accommodating personalities were in situ. Prior to the 1959 election Sandys urged Macmillan to keep him at the MOD and sanction a ‘complete reorganisation, and centralisation of the Higher Ministerial control and commands’. Instead, the secretary of state was moved sideways, an acknowledgement of how highly Macmillan regarded him, while at the same time recognizing that he was consistently ‘disagreeable and cassant’ to everyone other than Mountbatten. From a grand gathering at Chequers in February 1958 through to the eve of polling almost a year later Macmillan regularly bemoaned the quarrelsome environment surrounding Sandys’s blueprint for reform: in a revealing diary note, Macmillan assumed his minister ‘must have German blood’ – a Teutonic zest for efficiency shared with his newly installed CDS, and in the old warrior’s mind just cause for suspicion.26 Mountbatten’s ability to woo opponents of the 1958 White Paper was scarcely helped by the Admiralty’s civil servants being resistant to change, this being common knowledge throughout Whitehall: the First Sea Lord and his minister were in the unenviable position of every admiral backing reform and every senior official clearly not. Over a decade later, Sir Michael Howard, a military historian with impeccable connections, maintained opponents of radical change were motivated by a keen awareness that the next CDS would be someone who when previously a supreme commander had shown scant respect for strict service autonomy. This consideration overrode all others, and it left the ‘pathological’ Boyle and Templer resistant to the familiar Mountbatten charm offensive  –  Broadlands’ many attractions may have seduced Duncan Sandys, but not the nation’s most senior soldier and airman. In the summer of 1958, they and their wives were in no rush to spend another weekend in Romsey with Dickie and Edwina, a tense and testing experience serving only to reinforce already deeply felt prejudices.27 The chances of a Test-side reunion rose lightly when Templer retired in September 1958. A more welcome weekend guest was the new CIGS, Sir Francis Festing, a man with little time for turf wars and squabbling apparatchiks, and whose disinterest in the finer points of dress, formalities and ceremony was beyond the First Sea Lord’s comprehension. Yet Mountbatten looked on ‘Frankie’ Festing with great affection and respect, never forgetting the general’s leadership and courage as a divisional commander in the Arakan and North Burma. The 36th Indian Division had relied on USAAF support, leaving its CO with a relaxed view of inter-service and inter-allied collaboration. Festing’s handson experience of SEAC left a legacy: contrary to the advice of his War Office staff, he sympathized with Mountbatten’s medium-term goal of strengthening the ‘Centre’.28 The new CIGS qualified his respect for Mountbatten’s leadership, shrewd insight lying beneath his robust, soldier’s soldier persona: ‘I always had a feeling that some of the peculiarities of the British set-up were never fully understood by him.’ ‘Frankie’ Festing was, of course, by no means the first to suggest an enthusiasm for Bismarckian efficiency at odds with – what? A presumed English preference for blurring the edges, maintaining the collegiality, circumventing the consequences of tough distinctions, avoiding strict codification and disguising a driven desire to come out on top? Throughout his career Mountbatten scarcely considered elite perception of his uncompromising

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professionalism; at a time when many among Britain’s governing class could still view the will to win, and not just play the game, as a decidedly alien – distinctly German? – trait. Whether leading the Bluejackets on a Malta polo field, or literally leaving the ‘Fighting Fifth’ in his wake, he had to be out front and first. Like his father before the First World War, the younger Prince Louis assumed a fine-tuned working environment, as if his grandfather the Prince Consort had lived another forty years and radically remoulded the collective mentalité of all servants of the British state. Yet the father was invariably more astute, more accommodating and more open than his calculating son. As a scion of Battenberg and Hesse Mountbatten loathed Prussian militarism, but to his harshest critics an unrepentant desire to centralize, and to question long-established service practices, had echoes of Germany on the eve of two world wars.29 Such fears were grossly exaggerated, and the dynamics of the COSC meant a short period in 1959–60 when advocates of change were in a majority: the new Chief of the Defence Staff found like-minded souls in Festing and Charles Lambe. However, Boyle’s successor, Sir Thomas Pike, maintained the Air Staff ’s antipathy towards Mountbatten, and Lambe’s early departure saw the arrival of an already disenchanted Caspar John. When in due course Festing retired, he made way for Sir Richard Hull, a ‘fighting general’ who scarcely hid his dislike of Mountbatten. Needless to say, the service chiefs’ deep suspicion of the CDS extended to Solly Zuckerman, clearly the cleverest man in the MOD. Later in life Mountbatten would no doubt insist, as he always did, that at the start of the ’sixties his colleagues were remarkably collegial and constructive. At the time, however, he was genuinely surprised how many meetings of the COSC proved ill-tempered affairs.30 The prejudices and grievances of half-forgotten – or wholly forgotten – admirals, airmen and generals may seem trivial, but these men were supported by large bureaucracies, and carried real clout. They headed well-funded services highly regarded by a country still grateful for their efforts less than two decades before. Without a clear demonstration of political will, starting with the Prime Minister, further centralization could be successfully resisted by chiefs of staff whose individual positions were rarely if ever under threat – as remained the case well into the following century. Nor were they tainted by failure: occasional questions had arisen concerning botched operations and alleged brutalities in Cyprus, and most especially, Kenya, but serious criticism of counter-insurgency tactics would only arise long after the troops had left. How the armed forces responded to major crises in the Gulf in 1961 and in the Far East eighteen months later reinforced a widely held respect, at odds with the crude triumphalism on display in more recent decades. If politicians of every party were tainted by Suez, the same could not be said of service personnel. Many NCOs and almost all middleranking or senior officers had fought in a world war still fresh in people’s memory, with the defeats and debacles mythologized or conveniently forgotten. The Chiefs of Staff had reached the top largely because each of them could claim to have had ‘a good war’. They knew their standing within a predominantly conservative nation, at a time when the UK and Northern Ireland remained a genuine entity; and thus, they knew the power that they still held. For a soldier like Dick Hull, the Chief of the Defence Staff was at best a chief executive in uniform, and at worst a political manipulator, wily and well-connected.31 Japan’s surrender had meant Hull’s division did

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not go east as intended. Consequently, he never saw the Supreme Commander standing on a jeep at a remote jungle air strip somewhere near the Irrawaddy demonstrating why the lower the rank the greater his popularity. Nor could chief executives in uniform be universally condemned – after all, George Marshall and Alan Brooke were lionized as architects of victory (admittedly, the latter could boast remarkable leadership as France fell, and a frustrated desire to return there as Supreme Allied Commander). Harold Watkinson’s appointment as Minister of Defence reflected Macmillan’s desire to consolidate. With such a crowded agenda at home and overseas, the Prime Minister was in no mood to initiate yet another draining confrontation with the service chiefs, their ministers and their permanent secretaries. He – and they – needed no distractions at such a dangerous time. Macmillan presumed Parliament would last a full five years, at the end of which he would fight and win the general election. In other words, he wasn’t going anywhere, so having Watkinson at Defence for a couple of years was a holding operation – further centralization would come when the time was right, not when the CDS deemed it necessary. Watkinson was in office from late 1959 until Macmillan’s radical reshaping of his cabinet in July 1962, the notorious ‘Night of the Long Knives’.32 When Watkinson died in 1995 Tory maverick Patrick Cosgrave identified an unfortunate brusqueness of manner and a readiness to delegate as character traits illsuited to a Minister of Defence intent on curtailing service autonomy.33 Not for the first time in his career, Cosgrave missed the point: leaving the armed forces alone was the key to restoring service stability and morale, while a brusque yet courteous approach to the business of the day marked a welcome alternative to Sandys’s confrontational style. Watkinson’s absence of charm did him no harm, whereas Mountbatten’s readiness to flatter and ingratiate simply fuelled suspicion. Yet in many respects the two men complemented each other, and they appear to have got on well. Engineering, sailing and shared stories of the war at sea ensured no awkward moments between CDS and secretary of state, with Watkinson keen to change the subject whenever Mountbatten called for further reforms. Change was incremental, with Mountbatten, true to form, significantly expanding the CDS’s personal staff. These were prestige postings, manned by ambitious officers who clearly bore no grudge towards their boss, and who calculated that their careers would remain on an upward trajectory when the time came to leave. Sceptics with long memories grumbled that it was Richmond Terrace and Kandy all over again. The idea of creating a Director of Defence Plans to chair committee meetings of the Joint Planning Staff, thereby mirroring the CDS’s chairing of the COSC, had an internal logic, but it was scarcely politic. In the end Mountbatten got his way, but the new post provided further ammunition for his critics. Boyle never came to terms with the new arrangement, even when a fast-track air commodore was deliberately chosen as the first Director. Obliged to attend yet another jolly weekend at Broadlands, Boyle’s impatience and indignation were all too obvious. With SEAC still fresh in his mind he declared Mountbatten’s elevation to CDS to be the ‘greatest disaster that has befallen the British defence establishment within memory’ – once a supremo, always a supremo.34 By coincidence or design, following Boyle’s retirement the CDS declared his entitlement to hold five-star rank in all three services: the crown had never rescinded his wartime Army and RAF commissions, so continuity and uniformity dictated that

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he now held commensurate ranks to admiral of the fleet.35 Here was Mountbatten at his worst, ego once more triumphing over common sense. This was a man who, at critical moments, as in India, could display suitable political deftness, and yet he invariably displayed a complete absence of empathy and sensitivity when realizing the ambitions of himself and his family. He deferred to Watkinson when a well-briefed minister pointed out the danger of setting a precedent; but at the next COSC meeting he still insisted on the correctness of his position.36 Meanwhile Mountbatten convinced Watkinson and his permanent secretary, Sir Edward Playfair, that a unified command structure could be created from the bottom up.37 This gradualist approach saw tri-service headquarters created in Cyprus in 1961, and in Aden the following year. Neither initiative generated a great deal of heat, but the CDS faced ferocious opposition when extending the integrated model to Singapore – this was where Mountbatten first clashed with Hull, who commanded Far East Land Forces prior to becoming CIGS. The CDS’s brief visit to Singapore in February 1961 was a tense affair, and only in November of the following year did he finally get his integrated command. Mountbatten argued that the creation of these tri-service commands necessitated a liaison and control directorate, hence the establishment of an Operational Executive inside the MOD. If the ultimate goal was a cost-effective streamlining of the decision-making process, then an obvious short-term risk was duplication. In any case, Operational Executive was a generous description as the quasi-command centre proved a rather rackety operation when first put to the test. By contemporary standards the facilities were primitive as the operations room dated back to the Second World War; it was not until the Ministry of Defence moved into its present accommodation that a purpose-built centre was established. In the summer of 1961 Iraq came close to invading Kuwait. Britain’s defence agreement with the oilrich kingdom necessitated rapid action to thwart an invasion which MI6’s Baghdad station anticipated at any moment. Yet again the Americans were not on board, but neither were they hostile. In the bowels of Whitehall Mountbatten bemoaned the resources at his disposal, but his working partnership with the service chiefs worked surprisingly well. Macmillan and his ministers were well advised by the Chiefs of Staff, who deployed an effective deterrent force in an admirably short space of time. Mountbatten and Carrington saw the Kuwait crisis as a vindication of the Royal Navy’s carrier-based Commando force, and of the tri-service commands in Aden and Cyprus. It was a high point of harmony and collaboration within the COSC. Furthermore, it forced Watkinson and his officials to turn away, however briefly, from nuclear matters, and to refocus on the operational effectiveness of the three services when faced with a specific emergency and not an existential threat.38 Aden was initially under the command of Sir Charles Elworthy, unique among the RAF’s array of battle-hardened Kiwi air marshals in having progressed effortlessly from Marlborough to Trinity College, Cambridge, and on to Lincoln’s Inn. Mountbatten saw ‘Sam’ Elworthy as ideally qualified to initiate the new Middle East command, and the C-in-C’s calm, resolute and adroit handing of the Kuwait crisis proved a model of tri-service collaboration. Not surprisingly, Mountbatten assumed Elworthy to be his man, which was anything but the case. Blessed with a formidable intellect, he was an obvious choice as Chief of the Air Staff. When appointed to the post in September

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Figure 11  First Sea Lord: Admiral Lord Mountbatten [briefly] defers to Field Marshal Lord Montgomery

1963 the new CAS defended the interests of his service every bit as doggedly as his immediate predecessors. The Air Ministry saw Mountbatten and Zuckerman as sharing responsibility for Skybolt’s demise, and for the Fleet Air Arm securing the Buccaneer and, in due course, the F-4 Phantom. Similarly, senior staff blamed the two men for every setback in TSR2’s stuttering development programme. Boyle and Pike perceived unashamed bias towards the Royal Navy, as did Elworthy: although calm and deliberate in demeanour, the barrister turned aviator was once so infuriated by Mountbatten’s behaviour that to his face he called him ‘a liar and a cheat’.39 The Air Staff nursed multiple grievances, with the loudest complaints reserved for TSR2.

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TSR2 was totemic for the RAF, but the design and construction of a state-of-theart multi-role aircraft proved an extraordinarily complex undertaking.40 Here was a programme demanding hands-on project management and strict budgetary discipline, yet the newly merged British Aircraft Corporation lacked the necessary power, structure and personnel  –  in due course the company introduced pioneering management systems, none of which mastered the budgetary consequences of rapid knowledge transfer and accelerating technological change. Cost escalation embraced every aspect of the programme, such that Rolls Royce allowed spending on its Olympus supersonic engine to rise nearly five-fold between 1959 and 1964. Cost plus contracts saw the Air Ministry and the Treasury faced with soaring procurement bills; and alarmingly, BAC and its partners were by no means unique. Solly Zuckerman was especially hostile to TSR2 as it was never subject to the rigorous process of project evaluation he had introduced after joining the MOD as Chief Scientific Adviser. His 1961 report on hitech procurement clearly had the aircraft in his sights when he recommended an earlystage re-evaluation of every project, and a break clause that allowed the Government to cut its losses and terminate a programme escalating in cost. As early as September 1960 Zuckerman had provided Watkinson with a short cost-benefit analysis, contrasting the utilitarian, cost-effective Buccaneer with the over-engineered, hugely expensive TSR2. While Zuckerman was compiling his comparative report, Mountbatten displayed a characteristic indifference to accepted procedure: he fed his friend classified information in support of the Buccaneer’s adoption by both the Navy and the RAF. Not for the first time – or the last – Mountbatten ordered the recipient of potentially embarrassing material to ‘BURN THIS’.41 That instruction was duly ignored. By not recommending the cancellation of TSR2, a pragmatic Zuckerman believed that somehow he had shielded Mountbatten from any Air Ministry accusation of bias.42 Watkinson played for time, as did his successor Peter Thorneycroft, a critic of TSR2 whose cost-cutting instincts were compromised by his having previously served as Minister of Aviation. Mountbatten privately agreed with Zuckerman – and Thorneycroft – that TSR2 was a budgetary black hole, which is why he viewed Labour’s criticism of costly civil and military aerospace programmes in a very different light from the rumbling controversy over Polaris. Publicly lobbying for TSR2’s cancellation was clearly a step too far, but successive Chiefs of the Air Staff noted the CDS’s reluctance to speak on the project’s behalf – his silence was deafening. Pike strongly suspected the CDS of privately petitioning the Minister, and he was right – Watkinson had been so appalled by Mountbatten’s underhand efforts to sabotage TSR2 and to promote the Buccaneer that he vetoed any further conversation (Macmillan had felt similarly exasperated over Mountbatten’s backstairs attempts to facilitate a transfer of Coastal Command from the RAF to the Royal Navy – a thwarted ambition from his prewar tenure at the Admiralty). In the House of Commons TSR2’s most vocal critic was Denis Healey, almost certainly Minister of Defence in the event of Labour winning the next election. Few senior airmen saw Mountbatten making the programme’s survival a point of principle, as he would Polaris.43 Peter Thorneycroft’s appointment as Minister of Defence was an important element in Macmillan’s dramatic attempt to kick-start his administration. Unlike several of his cabinet colleagues Watkinson went quietly, meaning Thorneycroft’s appointment

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attracted little adverse coverage in the press.44 From the Prime Minister’s point of view Thorneycroft was well suited to his new post, having served in the Royal Artillery before and during the Second World War, and then risen rapidly through the ministerial ranks to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thorneycroft was popular with the Tory grass roots (as Mrs Thatcher recalled two decades later when she appointed him party chairman). Thus, an abrupt departure from the Treasury in early 1958 did not end his career, and two years later he returned to government as Minister of Aviation (sending someone so appalled by excess spending to a notoriously extravagant department provided wry amusement inside Number Ten). Macmillan’s memoirs suggest no great warmth towards Thorneycroft, but the diaries indicate his proximity to the centre of power once he had moved to the MOD: he was heavily involved in nuclear negotiations with the Americans, and throughout the Cuban missile crisis he joined Macmillan’s most trusted senior ministers  –  Heath, Butler and Home  –  in an ad hoc advisory group. That same autumn, however, Thorneycroft belied his reputation as a safe pair of hands when for too long he failed to take seriously the scandal surrounding John Vassall, a gay civil servant blackmailed by Soviet agents to betray naval secrets – the furore surrounding the case led Lord Carrington to offer his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty. Weekending at Broadlands Macmillan lent a sympathetic ear to Mountbatten’s petitioning for Carrington to stay in post.45 Despite damaging press coverage of the Vassall scandal, Macmillan still saw Thorneycroft as the right man for the task in hand. At Defence he could respond firmly to dissenting chiefs of staff in a manner markedly different from the last minister appointed to initiate change, Duncan Sandys. Thorneycroft was tough, but he valued working within a team: he cultivated his permanent secretary, Sir Robert Scott, he valued Zuckerman’s advice, and he acknowledged Mountbatten’s unique capacity to see through a fundamental restructuring of the defence establishment. Nevertheless, he had to work hard to gain the CDS’s trust. Mountbatten lamented Watkinson’s departure, and saw Thorneycroft – a champion of defence cuts when Chancellor – as a minister with much to learn, not least regarding the future direction of the Royal Navy.46 Only three months into his new post, and Thorneycroft had to deal with growing evidence that Vassall had spent the past seven years feeding naval intelligence to the Russians, worrying reports from America which suggested Skybolt was in trouble, and clear evidence of Indonesia fomenting revolt in Brunei. To add to that, the world faced nuclear Armageddon once the Soviet Union had established missile launching sites in Cuba. Almost certainly this was not the best time for the Chief of the Defence Staff to hand the minister his twenty-two-page blueprint for a fully ‘functional’ model of service integration. Yet both Thorneycroft and Macmillan knew Mountbatten had spent the summer break at his Irish home Classiebawn working up his staff ’s initial submission. The memorandum, two months in the making, was drafted in consultation with Scott, Zuckerman and the CDS’s closest advisers. The other Chiefs of Staff knew what was taking place, not least as they were invited to submit their own ideas as to what changes were and were not acceptable. Mountbatten went for broke, on the basis that only partial adoption of his proposals would still facilitate major organizational change. Thus, in the first instance he adopted an all-or-nothing approach: ‘Both the PM and the Minister approve my preparation of such a paper and no-one can expect

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me to put up a half-baked wishy-washy compromise. I would sooner have a brave, drastic and “correct” paper turned down than a weak compromise accepted.’47 Clearly what constituted ‘weak’ defined the measure of final success. The key changes at the top of the MOD would be: a powerful secretary of state, and two ministers of state, responsible respectively for administration and equipment; the demise of service ministries and their boards to facilitate key functional groupings of administration, logistics, supply and equipment; a CDS with executive control of the three services, and of policy evaluation; and the service chiefs acting solely as the CDS’s main advisers, their present responsibilities being assumed by three C-in-Cs or Inspector Generals. Bemoaning a culture of waste, inefficiency and duplication, Mountbatten saw the creation of a single, all-powerful Ministry of Defence as the only means of moving forward in an era of budgetary constraint and unprecedented strategic and operational challenges. A freshly empowered secretary of state would rely heavily upon his or her most senior advisers, especially the CDS. The notion of concentrating so much power and influence in the Chief of the Defence Staff was contentious at the best of times, but positively toxic when the person concerned was Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten  –  only a ‘flamboyant colossus’ like the present CDS could draft a memorandum proposing he be elevated to a position of almost untrammelled authority. For the service chiefs, ‘three principles were sacrosanct and not matters for negotiation: corporate responsibility; independent single-Service management; and a firm linkage between power to advise and responsibility for implementation.’48 There was something of a precedent for this radical restructuring as the Canadians had tried  –  and failed  –  to create an integrated single service. Alarmists feared a fusion of the armed forces was on the CDS’s long-term agenda. Macmillan, whom Mountbatten rightly assumed to be a natural ally, knew enough about the Canadian experience to kill off any fear of an amorphous body in ‘mud-grey uniforms’ before the notion gained traction. One weekend the Prime Minister was preparing for World War Three, and the next he was at Broadlands vainly hoping to recharge his batteries before tackling the next in a seemingly ceaseless succession of crises.49 With Saturday set aside for shooting, dinner and screening a film, Mountbatten seized the earliest opportunity to extoll the virtues of his ‘great paper’ – late on the Friday night he convinced his weary guest that the moment had come to cease tinkering with the system and to engage in fundamental reform. Macmillan must have seen straightaway the need to seize control of events before all hell let loose. Service morale, from the top down, was vital, and Mountbatten appeared indifferent to tradition. For a man obsessed with ceremony, honours, hierarchy and uniform, this seemed the supreme irony – did he really envisage undermining, even destroying, everything that he revelled in? Mountbatten then, and later, ridiculed any notion of a top-down total merger. Nevertheless, Macmillan was as concerned with perception as with the reality of any intended outcome – and nowhere more so than in the Army, rooted as it was/is in a collective and individual identity of regiment and corps. He needed to dampen fears, and to distance a nuanced discussion of the proposals from a crude airing of prejudices concerning their author. Mountbatten wasn’t so self-centred that he was incapable of arriving at the same conclusion, so he could see virtue in the idea of an internal enquiry. This would require a suitably experienced figure of authority whose presumed endorsement of the need

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for change would be universally accepted, however begrudgingly. Macmillan said he would give careful thought to a suitable choice, and that the key advocates of change would congregate a week hence to plan their next moves.50 Burke Trend, Macmillan’s freshly appointed Cabinet Secretary, duly convened a meeting of the Prime Minister and the main protagonists  –  Thorneycroft, Scott, Zuckerman and Mountbatten – the next Sunday night. For Mountbatten this was a historic moment, but for Solly Zuckerman it was a sorry affair which highlighted the contrast between the Prime Minister’s flagging energy and his insistence on overriding institutional objections to change. (For Macmillan the sabbath was rarely a day free of the red boxes: ‘One longs for some days of continued rest, wh. is impossible. At sixty-eight I am not as resilient as when I was a young officer.’) Displaying a desultory approach to the matter in hand, Macmillan only perked up when gently mocking Mountbatten for believing everyone in uniform cared about what the Chief of the Defence Staff could or could not do: ‘Dickie was not amused.’ In Zuckerman’s mind this was a one-off meeting, but there was in fact a second Sunday gathering, in early December. On this occasion Macmillan informed Scott, Mountbatten and Thorneycroft that their ‘bold scheme’ required a period of consultation across the three services. In consequence he drafted a personal minute to the Minister of Defence, copying in the service ministers and their chiefs of staff, and making clear his sympathy for the main thrust of the CDS’s proposals.51 A copy of Macmillan’s minute was sent to the Queen, followed a few days later by a lengthy briefing letter. The importance of keeping Her Majesty on side is reflected in the time set aside to draft the letter, and its inclusion in Macmillan’s final volume of memoirs, At the End of the Day. While never sharing Eden’s deep suspicion verging on paranoia, Macmillan must surely have worried over whatever spin ‘Uncle Dickie’ might place on his grand vision for the future of the MOD. In a masterly despatch ‘Uncle Harold’ acknowledged a growing tension between the centre and the service ministries, identified the conflicting forces of full integration and of an exaggerated respect for service loyalties rooted in history and tradition, and concluded that, ‘Somehow we have got to meet the two needs. We must unify to be efficient and avoid waste. And we must diversify to keep alive the spirit of the men.’ With Lord Mountbatten in the vanguard, and his fellow Chiefs of Staff in their own way not averse to change [a big assumption], the moment was right ‘to centralise responsibility for planning, operations and weapon development’ within the MOD, giving the minister direct responsibility for these matters, and for a Common List of appointments above major general; promotion below that rank would remain a matter for the three services, albeit under the umbrella of the Minister of Defence, as would recruitment, training, pay, discipline and other more service-specific matters. Macmillan then detailed a multilayered structure of ministerial and departmental responsibility very different from Mountbatten’s streamlined system – the magisterial tone temporarily lost in repeated use of the conditional, but returning in a final reassurance that, ‘so far as the fighting units were concerned they would still be a member of Regiments and ships and groups which have a long history and tradition, and which are an essential part of the make-up of the morale of the Services.’ This was very much work in progress, and Her Majesty could expect further updates in due course.52

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December 1962 saw the Tories at a low ebb in the polls, their beleaguered leader dealing with a host of problems overseas, including the imminent collapse of the Central African Federation, the Indonesian assault on Brunei, the refusal of De Gaulle to accept Britain’s case for joining ‘The Six’, and the Kennedy administration’s cancellation of the Skybolt programme. Reorganizing the Ministry of Defence was important, but not an absolute priority, and Macmillan let Christmas pass before dealing with the service chiefs’ hostile response to his agenda for change. On New Year’s Eve the Prime Minister spent over two hours arguing with the service ministers, ‘who are putting up a strong reactionary fight (aided by Chiefs of Staff) against reform … ’. With the Government under fire on all sides, the resignation of one chief of staff, let alone two or even three, had to be avoided at all cost. The First Sea Lord had only agreed to sign the Chiefs of Staff ’s memo after it was redrafted to answer directly the Downing Street minute, thereby removing a highly personal attack on Mountbatten and his radical ideas. In this respect Caspar John displayed a residual, if heavily qualified, loyalty to his old patron. The same clearly could not be said of the Army’s Richard Hull, although the prospect of one day becoming CDS to some degree tempered his opposition. In consequence it was the RAF which led the way in countering Mountbatten’s key propositions: that the service chiefs no longer directly advised the Minister of Defence on operational matters, and no longer served as the professional heads of their respective armed forces. Tom Pike marshalled support from former Chiefs of the Air Staff, notably Sir John Slessor and Lord Portal. When letters of protest from the likes of Portal and Lord Harding (Templer’s forerunner as CIGS) landed in Thorneycroft’s in-tray, he warned Macmillan that support for the status quo was vocal and well organized – with much of the vitriol aimed at the minister and his most senior military adviser.53 Keen to take the heat out of the situation, Macmillan revived the idea of an internal enquiry, recruiting not one but two irreproachable authorities on the organization of defence and national security, whether in time of peace or war: General Lord Ismay, Churchill’s wartime Chief of Staff, and Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Jacob, who from 1940 to 1945 served as secretary to the COSC. Mountbatten thoroughly approved, even claiming sometime later to have put the idea into the Prime Minister’s head during his stay at Broadlands: ‘Macmillan looked at me quizzically and asked whether I was really prepared to let others take the credit for the greatest constitutional political change this century. I replied that I was not interested who got the credit for this great idea … I was interested in results and not credit.’ If any passage can be described as ‘classic Mountbatten’ then it’s this one, with suitable hyperbole and more than a hint of false modesty. Furthermore, Philip Ziegler noted that in November 1962, when Mountbatten dictated an immediate record of his conversation with Macmillan, he made no mention of Ismay and Jacob.54 Initially ‘Pug’ Ismay was reluctant to take on the job. In consequence Ian Jacob, who had co-authored the 1946 Defence White Paper, took responsibility for interviewing nearly thirty ministers and officials, and for drafting a preliminary document. Solly Zuckerman saw this as the green light to argue that scientists be given a more central role in decision-making, starting with Defence and then expanding across Whitehall – in his view the momentum of operational research maintained throughout the war,

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not least in Combined Operations, had stalled in the face of American hegemony.55 Zuckerman’s memo implicitly acknowledged C. P. Snow’s insistence on a ‘two cultures’ bifurcation at the heart of British society, and by implication Britain’s governing elite. Ismay endorsed Jacob’s recommendations, and the final report was on the Prime Minister’s desk within six weeks of its commission. Macmillan presented the IsmayJacob report to the service ministers and the Chiefs of Staff on 26 February 1963, having already circulated it to members of the Cabinet for discussion the following day – here was a model of compromise which placed opponents of change in a near impossible position, and allowed the Prime Minister to maintain a momentum for reform.56 Ismay and Jacob upheld most of Mountbatten’s criticisms, not least regarding interservice rivalry, but they seriously modified his most sweeping recommendations. They acknowledged – but implicitly dismissed – the case for retaining the system as it stood, other than ensuring the CDS was the best person for the job and not simply the next in line. Thus staying the same wasn’t really an option; but neither was the functionalist model of a fully integrated Ministry of Defence, in which all officers of two-star rank and above would share the uniform of an ‘Armed Forces Staff ’. Any such scenario was feasible, but it lay well into the future. Instead, the report urged all highranking officers to adopt a genuinely tri-service outlook, and to embrace the ethos of an MOD where tribal loyalty was obsolete and every appointment was solely on merit. Ismay and Jacob’s preferred option respected the service chiefs’ present powers and responsibilities. In contrast, the three ministries, and perhaps also Aviation, would be downsized to internal departments of the Ministry of Defence; but each would retain a junior minister to defend its interest. The Army and Air Councils, and the Board of the Admiralty, would be significantly downgraded in status and autonomy, and their successors rendered subordinate to a reconstituted Defence Council. The Minister or Secretary of State for Defence would have support from a beefed-up central staff, with a minister of state easing the burden of responsibility. Mountbatten welcomed such an elegant solution to a seemingly intractable problem, not least because he adopted a maximalist interpretation of Ian Jacob’s middle way. His fellow chiefs of staff naturally shared a minimalist interpretation, noting especially the report’s endorsement of the status quo regarding the powers of the Chief of the Defence Staff, five-star rank notwithstanding. In their view, despite his ever-more independent, assertive and superior approach, Mountbatten was again for all intents and purposes first among equals, primus inter pares – if anything was going to smooth ruffled feathers then it was a signal that Dickie might be brought down to size. Needless to say, both Ismay and Jacob were aware of – even shocked by – the depth of antagonism felt towards Mountbatten.57

Realizing Macmillan’s vision, and tempering Mountbatten’s radicalism: the road to Denis Healey Meeting with the service chiefs and their ministers on 26 February 1963, Macmillan was in no mood to make concessions. Momentum was the key, and only twenty-four hours later the Cabinet gave general approval for establishing a freshly empowered

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Ministry of Defence along the preferred lines of Ismay and Jacob’s report. A week later, in a Commons debate on defence, Thorneycroft announced a radical initiative to improve inter-service collaboration. This genuinely well-informed debate was conducted in a manner unimaginable today, with the minister’s opening statement matched by Denis Healey’s cerebral yet at the same time brutal assault upon both policy and policymakers, not least the Prime Minister. This was Healey’s debut as shadow Minister of Defence, his long and detailed speech making only brief reference to Thorneycroft’s announcement of profound changes at the centre  –  Macmillan rightly noted in his diary that Labour had been left wholly in the dark.58 Astonishingly, the Chief of the Defence Staff was out of the country in February and March 1963: a tour of South America  –  his first  –  had long been in the diary, and his confidence in Macmillan meant he saw no reason to cancel arrangements. In conversation with the Peronist puppet president in Buenos Aires, Mountbatten, mentioned my scheme for abolishing the Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry, and said I was quite glad to have been out of England while the actual decision was made as I might have been murdered by the reactionary Admirals and Generals. The President blanched at this … he lived in permanent fear of being bumped off by his Admirals and Generals.59

Figure  12 Chief of the Defence Staff: MOD board meeting with Peter Thorneycroft, Minister of Defence, attended by the Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, 1964

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As we saw in Chapter  4, Mountbatten then travelled to India in late April, joining Duncan Sandys in the UK’s abortive attempt to secure compromise over Kashmir. On both these trips he kept in touch with Downing Street, privately monitoring developments while publicly conveying the impression of complete indifference to the heated business at home. Here was the archetypal Whitehall warrior dictating events from halfway round the world, but journalists accompanying Mountbatten around South America were encouraged to cover the jaunt as a quasi-royal tour.60 Under the auspices of the MOD’s Defence Secretariat, innumerable committees were initiated to make the Ministry a multi-functional inter-service department of state. As always, the devil was in the detail, and it was mid-summer before the White Paper, Central Organisation for Defence, was presented to Parliament.61 In that time Mountbatten and his team endeavoured to secure the highest level of integration, while the service chiefs doggedly fought a holding operation. Macmillan brooked no opposition, advising Thorneycroft in April that, ‘between two possible courses of action we must always choose the radical’. By the end of the month the minister’s cautionary memo provoked indignation, Macmillan insisting on a radically streamlined organization with ‘a clear line of command’: ‘Anyone who raises any objection can go, including Ministers. The Service Ministers are not in a very strong position anyway, politically or in any other respect. I beg you to take an axe to all this forest of prejudice and interest.’ Throughout the spring a succession of minutes endeavoured to stiffen Thorneycroft’s resolve. The minister had Downing Street sensitive to any sign of backtracking, to a formidable opponent across the floor of the House of Commons and to a Chief of the Defence Staff largely a law unto himself.62 A reversal for Mountbatten, which irritated him enormously, was the decision not to adopt Ian Jacob’s suggestion of a ‘General List’, subject to the authority of the CDS. The idea was that, by removing the possibility of divided loyalties between the centre and respective service hierarchies, the MOD’s most senior appointments would provide ‘objective’ advice. More to Mountbatten’s taste was the creation of four integrated staffs covering crisis management (Defence Operations Executive), weaponry (Defence Operational Requirements), communications (Defence Signals) and intelligence (Defence Intelligence). It’s unlikely he wept tears when the head of the Army became Chief of the General Staff, the dropping of ‘Imperial’ being long overdue.63 In a crowded year the early summer of 1963 was unusually eventful, with the full force of Stephen Ward’s trial crashing down on the Prime Minister’s head and a presidential visit highlighting just how much the Nassau Agreement had failed to resolve. Lord Denning’s inquiry into the Profumo affair bought Macmillan time, and Kennedy provided his host with a succession of positive headlines regarding Polaris and the Partial Test Ban Treaty. On the afternoon of 11 July a cautiously upbeat Prime Minister found time to give Gaitskell’s successor his first security briefing (did Wilson really not know ‘C’ was the head of MI6?), his morning spent securing cabinet support for the forthcoming Defence White Paper. Five days later Central Organisation for Defence was published, in time for the Commons to debate its content before the recess. On the evening of 30 July Mountbatten and Thorneycroft joined Macmillan for celebratory drinks.64 The following day Thorneycroft outlined to MPs the case for fundamental reorganization; and later in the debate his predecessor enthusiastically endorsed the

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White Paper. Another long and detailed speech by Denis Healey attacked a host of easy targets, but deliberately avoided a clear rejection of the proposals under consideration. Healey’s gushing praise for Robert McNamara’s stewardship of the Pentagon, and his insistence on a more functional approach than the compromise carved out across the preceding seven months, would surely have earned Mountbatten’s approval: after all, a team was already in Washington learning how the Department of Defense utilized the latest advances in communications technology. With due prescience Healey identified obvious flaws, not least the possibility of the CDS and the service chiefs offering a future secretary of state conflicting advice; and a failure to establish clear ministerial responsibilities given conflicting loyalties between the centre and the services: the rationalization and functionalization of the MOD which the Defence Secretary would initiate in 1967 had its origins in his Commons address four years before. Back in the summer of 1963 Healey had no serious objection to what was on offer – he just didn’t think it went far enough; a view echoed by the handful of journalists in Fleet Street interested in such a seemingly arcane topic.65 The July debate was a dress rehearsal for the resulting bill’s smooth passage through Parliament in late November: MPs were more concerned with the actual decisions – not least the fate of TSR2  –  than they were the process by which those decisions were arrived at. Mountbatten had preferred to be out of the country when his grand scheme was first unveiled, and later in the year he was uncharacteristically relieved when no one at Westminster saw fit to mention his name. He was, however, much in evidence when the Privy Council met the following March for the reorganization bill to receive the royal assent, and for Thorneycroft to be sworn in as the first Secretary of State for Defence. On 1 April 1964 (cue numerous predictable jokes re April Fools’ Day) the service ministries disappeared into history, and an all-embracing, all-powerful Ministry of Defence, located at the heart of Whitehall, became a reality. Exactly a week later the Chiefs of Staff Committee convened for the first time in its new home. Mountbatten’s legacy through to the present day is multi-faceted, but the most visible  –  the most enduring – reminder of his thirty years at the heart of power is the stern stone edifice on the south side of Horse Guards Avenue.66 A project on this scale was a dream scenario for someone who delighted in fulfilling the grand vision and in overseeing the minutiae of implementation. The Main Building of the Ministry of Defence, located between Whitehall and the riverside gardens, is a huge mid-century office block with three courtyards and a history to delight even the most jaded student of architecture.67 Doubtless Mountbatten took quiet satisfaction from the building’s location adjacent to Richmond Terrace, wartime home of Combined Operations (‘great oaks from little acorns grow … ’). He surely derived enormous pleasure from the organizational structure of the building: vertical for the three services and the Central Staff, and horizontal for the integrated staffs (including a Joint Operations Centre), personnel, logistics and so on. Room was found for the Ministry of Aviation, the military side of which was only fully integrated in 1967.68 The focal point of this complex bureaucratic structure was the sixth floor, housing ministers, chiefs of staff, senior officials, science advisers and their support staffs – this really was the corridor of power. Of course, no detail of the planning process was too small for Mountbatten to have an opinion on. His presence was ubiquitous throughout

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the building, not least in the decor and communications technology designated for the fifth-floor Chiefs of Staff Conference Room: at the narrow end of a large coffin-shaped table (note, Burma teak) would sit the CDS, in a splendid high-backed chair, its black leather suitably embossed with the insignia of the Order of the Garter.69 A centralized Ministry of Defence at the expense of the service departments was a timely initiative, which advocates of reform saw as long overdue. Macmillan, keen to see clearer accountability and to save money, saw Duncan Sandys as having failed to force through radical reform six years earlier. In 1958 Mountbatten was still First Sea Lord, and thus unable to forge the same formidable partnership which he later enjoyed with Thorneycroft. Both men operated in a cleverer, cannier fashion than Sandys, evading rather than embracing bruising encounters with defenders of the status quo. This meant compromise, and playing the longer game: the service chiefs retained a right of access to the Prime Minister, and could advise directly the newly formed Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, but for how long? The creation of the Defence Council, the Defence Staff and its four constituent staffs, and a Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, plus the concentration of political, executive and military authority in the hands of the Secretary of State, his CDS, his Permanent Under-Secretary and his Chief Scientific Adviser, signalled how far the pendulum had swung away from service autonomy towards central direction and control. In practice, the new status quo did not always prove that different from the old. Thus, an unwieldy, all-embracing Defence Council leeched authority upwards and downwards: it operated in the shadow of the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, and it left the new Navy, Army and Air Force boards to make key decisions.70 Competent, confident secretaries of state like Denis Healey dealt directly with operational matters. In consequence, the Defence Council met less and less, and soon this became the new norm. Sceptics argued that an apparent vacuum at the highest level of policy formulation set the tone throughout this supposedly unified structure. They argued that the 1963 White Paper had, in Peter Hennessy’s words, ‘merely transferred inter-service rivalry, the bugbear of rational decision-taking and weapons procurement, to a different if tidier playing field’: fifty years of serial failure to exercise effective budgetary control over procurement suggests a systemic and structural failure of management.71 Enthusiastic admirers of the tidier playing field ignored the irrelevance of the Defence Council, arguing that a centralized MOD had hit the ground running, and that in any case the new set-up was still work in progress. Yet, for all Healey’s tweaking of the system in 1967, redefining ministerial responsibilities along the lines Mountbatten originally envisaged (downgrading the service ministers, and designating ministers of state for administration and procurement respectively, with similar changes for the second permanent secretaries), neither he nor his Tory predecessor maintained the impetus for managerial reform. Years later, MOD veterans like future permanent secretary Sir Frank Cooper complained that Healey had been too distracted by successive operational and budgetary crises to maintain the momentum for reform. In their view, tough decisions had been necessary to counter a clear drift away from Mountbatten’s ideal towards a distinctly ‘federal’ structure, where, ‘two virtually separate and mutually incompatible systems of organisation were being run in parallel’; namely, the service departments and the ‘troika’ of the CDS, PUS and Chief Scientific Adviser.72

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In his memoirs Healey rubbished complaints that he had not gone far enough, pointing to his ‘functionalizing’ of intelligence and signals. Beyond that, functionalism had made little sense in operational terms; and in any case the armed forces opposed further reorganization at a time, ‘when we were coping with massive reductions in our defence capability and commitments; I did not think it made sense to carry out an appendix operation on a man while he was lifting a grand piano.’ Writing just under a decade after Mountbatten’s death, Healey didn’t mince his words: the Chief of the Defence Staff had an ‘obsession with integrating the services’, because he sought ‘to establish central control of defence policy and operations under himself … In my opinion, it was the Secretary of State’s job to control defence policy, as an elected member of the British Cabinet, and I was determined to carry it out.’ Notwithstanding Mountbatten’s vaunting ambition, such sentiments are unconvincing. Even with a oneyear extension to his appointment, Mountbatten would be away by the summer of 1965. As if arguing against himself, Healey recognized that no successor could ever meet those requirements the present CDS deemed necessary to exercise complete control, adding acidly, ‘few other officers shared his confidence in his own qualifications for the job.’73 Thorneycroft was more appreciative in his assessment of Mountbatten: he insisted to Philip Ziegler that no one else could have generated such ambitious change. Solly Zuckerman said the same, as did Lord Bramall twelve years later.74 This seems a generous exaggeration, notwithstanding Mountbatten’s unique standing and status. More persuasive is Michael Howard’s insistence that this was a timely ‘administrative revolution’, and that the old way of doing things was no longer tenable. Bramall described a change of culture inside Main Building: turf wars had not wholly disappeared, but senior and middle-ranking staff across the armed forces became markedly less suspicious, and more relaxed, in their dealings with colleagues from other services.75 What’s striking about the Commons debates on reorganization is Thorneycroft’s confident advocacy of change, not least when dealing with hostile questions and interventions – he could stand on his own two feet, without any help from the likes of Dickie Mountbatten or Solly Zuckerman. Even as the new MOD was bedding down he set the agenda for further reform, advancing ideas every bit as radical as those of his CDS. Thorneycroft’s generous tribute also ignores the crucial contribution of a prime minister determined to drive through change. Ironically, in successive debates Denis Healey made great play of Macmillan’s absence from the Chamber; and yet in reality Downing Street maintained a hands-on role akin to, say, the negotiations to join the Common Market, or the process of decolonization in eastern and southern Africa. In his memoirs Macmillan devoted thirteen pages to the creation of today’s MOD, signalling that amid the multiple disappointments of his final years in office ‘there was at least one cause for satisfaction.’76 The only reason for regret was that he no longer resided in Downing Street when this long-desired objective became reality. Mountbatten’s contribution was properly acknowledged, but no more  –  in Harold Macmillan’s view of the world, no man or woman was indispensable, not least a royal arriviste he came to tolerate, and to work with constructively, but about whom he had no illusions.

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Sensitive to military and civil service opinion, it’s unlikely Macmillan would have sanctioned a one-year extension to Mountbatten’s tenure as CDS. He was thoroughly unpopular, and both Hull and Elworthy were well qualified to succeed him. With an extra year for Mountbatten, an eventual successor – almost certainly Sir Richard Hull – would lose twelve months of his tenure. Officials made their feelings clear to Thorneycroft, while active and retired officers discreetly voiced dissent courtesy of sympathetic defence correspondents. Douglas-Home, realistic re his chances at the general election, looked to ensure continuity at the fledgling MOD. Remarkably, the question of a further renewal arose after Denis Healey became Defence Secretary in October 1964. Both Wilson and George Brown were keen for Mountbatten to stay on, but Healey clearly wanted a clean break. The secretary of state was at the height of his powers, while the CDS was clearly flagging – colleagues agreed that a relentless workload had taken its toll, physically and mentally.77 Healey claimed to have consulted forty of the Ministry’s most senior staff, and only Sir Kenneth Strong, Director General of Intelligence and a close friend of Mountbatten, spoke in favour of yet another extension: ‘When I told Dickie of my decision not to reappoint him, he slapped his thigh and roared with delight; but his eyes told a different story.’ When Mountbatten questioned Dick Hull’s credentials as CDS, Healey ignored him. A remarkably forgiving Hull secured Mountbatten’s post-retirement appointment as a regimental colonel in the Household Cavalry: ‘He was like a little boy in his delight, since he could now wear the Life Guards’ helmet and uniform when he took part in Trooping the Colour, while the band played the Preobrajansky March, which had been composed for one of his Russian ancestors.’ Healey’s honest and insightful profile of Mountbatten in The Time of My Life acknowledged that here was a remarkable man boasting remarkable achievements, not least his contribution to Indian independence. Yet this was also a man who courted flattery, flaunted his royal connections at every opportunity, lacked the capacity to appreciate alternative perspectives and expected always to get his own way. Implicit in the future Chancellor and deputy leader’s account of their nine months working together – ‘a fascinating experience for me’ – was that Mountbatten had met his match, and close study of Healey’s career would suggest this to have been the case. Mountbatten was not a team player, and nor was the only person he would ever listen to, Solly Zuckerman. Healey liked Zuckerman but found his scheming intolerable, and in due course persuaded Wilson that the Chief Scientific Adviser could not retain his contiguous post at Defence. For all their differences Healey and Zuckerman struck up a lasting friendship. The thought of Healey and Mountbatten enjoying a similar closeness was inconceivable.78 Healey boasted a ferocious intellect, a powerful physical presence, a cultural hinterland and an impressive war record. When Harold Wilson gathered ministers and officials at Chequers over a weekend in late November 1964, decisions regarding Polaris overlapped with discussion as to how the defence budget could sustain a Treasury cut of 20 per cent in overall spending. The intention was that total expenditure would remain below £2 billion for the next financial year. Defence spending had slipped below 6 per cent of GDP, and Healey wasn’t interested in a rear-guard action – in his memoirs he took satisfaction in the fact that by the time he left office spending on education exceeded defence. Yet at the same time he had no intention of British forces

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going into action ill-equipped and under strength – he was after all a decorated veteran of North Africa and Italy. Healey therefore favoured big cuts over salami slicing.79 With little slack for a reduction in personnel following the end of National Service, and for the present a continuing presence east of Suez, the focus was upon equipment. The fledgling MOD had responded well to successive military challenges, whether in east Africa, Yemen or above all, Borneo (the de facto defeat of Sukarno’s Indonesia seen as a vindication of Mountbatten’s integrated command in Singapore, and of his Commando assault carriers); but a civilian challenge – namely a cost-cutting defence review – saw all the old inter-service rivalries and tensions re-emerge.80 Attention focused upon the CVA-01 next generation aircraft carrier, and upon a variety of aircraft at different stages of research and development. While the consequences of cancelled contracts for the British aerospace industry were severe, not least when compounded by retrenchment in the overall civil programme, their announcement was unlikely to inflict lasting damage on the Government – with TSR2 the obvious exception. Hawker Siddeley’s P1154 supersonic V/STOL strike fighter had been in development since the turn of the decade, but the continuing failure to build a prototype underlined the challenging nature of the project; even the most enthusiastic air marshal winced at the cost of creating an aircraft so far ahead of its time. Nor could the RAF complain loudly when a doomed project such as Armstrong Whitworth’s AW612 V/STOL transport plane was still at the design stage. Neither the P1154 nor the AW612 survived the winter of 1964–5, and a re-elected Conservative Government may well have followed the same course of action. Mountbatten derived deep satisfaction from the survival of his beloved CVA-01, but this was a project living on borrowed time – twelve months to be precise. Unaware that the Royal Navy would in due course suffer a similarly severe setback, the RAF seethed at their service shouldering the bulk of the spending cuts. With the CDS clearly in their sights, Sam Elworthy and his colleagues drew a line in the sand over the survival of TSR2. Tory MPs and newspapers saw the aircraft as a hi-tech symbol of national virility; that view was shared by several Labour backbenchers, and those unions representing workers at BAC’s Warton plant. In opposition Healey had voiced concern over the cost of TSR2, fearing that by the time it entered production the multi-purpose aircraft would be vulnerable to state-of-the-art Soviet air defences. That scepticism was shared by Solly Zuckerman, and by Roy Jenkins, who Wilson made Minister of Aviation pending a cabinet appointment. Ensconced in his grand second-floor office at Main Building, Jenkins enhanced Healey’s fearsome intellectual firepower whenever talk of budget cuts turned to TSR2.81 Jenkins and Zuckerman were friends, and the latter presumably didn’t hold back in his damning assessment of such a wildly expensive project; yet when it came to cancelling projects the new Minister of Aviation naturally played the long game. Healey charged his Chief Scientific Adviser with updating an earlier assessment of TSR2, and of whatever alternatives were available should the project be cancelled. When the Conservatives were in power, the CDS had generated deep resentment within the Chiefs of Staff Committee over his ceaseless criticism of TSR2, but now he could afford to step back. Zuckerman needed no further encouragement when it came to advising the minister that enough was enough.82

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Despite brief speculation that the Australians might be interested, an absence of overseas sales meant unit costs would remain extraordinarily high. In January 1965 Wilson told the Commons that by the time TSR2 went into production each aircraft could cost anything up to £5  million at contemporary prices. Even at the time this figure appeared considerably inflated, but with several years’ development work still in prospect the potential for cost escalation was huge.83 On paper the aircraft’s avionics system appeared a brilliant solution to the challenge of designing a multi-purpose combat aircraft, but a four-year development programme had seen Ferranti confronted by ever more complex and challenging problems. Zuckerman was more and more convinced that TSR2 would not be in service before the end of the decade, and that it could never satisfy all the RAF’s operational requirements. Forewarned of Zuckerman’s recommendation that Healey and Jenkins cut their losses, the Air Staff fought a fierce rear-guard action, but to no avail. Wilson’s mind was all but made up, and at two long and heated cabinet meetings on 31 March/1 April 1965 he secured cabinet approval for cancellation. That April’s budget statement confirmed TSR2’s demise, placating the RAF with the prospective purchase of General Dynamics’ interdictor and tactical strike aircraft, the swing-wing F-111. An order for fifty purpose-built F-111Ks was included in the 1966 Defence White Paper, the aircraft’s range and ostensible versatility used as an argument for cancelling the CVA-01 carrier and its successors.84 In due course Healey got what he had always wanted, while at the same time placating Elworthy, regularly rumoured to be contemplating resignation. Jenkins, Zuckerman and Mountbatten all questioned the over-engineered F-111’s credentials, but ultimately to no avail.85 In this respect the RAF could claim to have had the last laugh on Mountbatten, indignant but powerless in retirement; except that the escalating cost of each F-111K (perhaps as high as £3 million, following devaluation of the pound in November 1967) saw the order cancelled in early 1968: the RAF now had to make do with twenty-six new Buccaneers, plus transfers from the Fleet Air Arm following the Royal Navy’s adoption of the Harrier jump jet (in his memoirs – written when the Falklands war was still fresh in readers’ minds – Zuckerman claimed his cabinet lobbying had helped Hawker Siddeley retain the P1127 V/STOL prototype when Healey sought to cancel it in December 1966).86 The 1966 White Paper attracted extensive attention as the navy minister, Christopher Mayhew, resigned in protest at the demise of the carrier programme: the 53,000 tons CVA01 replacement for Victorious and Ark Royal, given cabinet approval in July 1963 to the quiet satisfaction of Mountbatten, and the fury of Elworthy and his Treasury allies. Cancelling the next-generation fleet carrier was for Healey, ‘by far my most difficult equipment decision’, but he was untroubled by the loss of a junior minister with few parliamentary or trade union allies. A second, more serious resignation was that of Sir David Luce, Caspar John’s successor as First Sea Lord; and in committee no match for the eloquent Elworthy.87 The resignation of a chief of staff is a rare and controversial occurrence, but the Wilson Government sustained surprisingly little damage in the months immediately prior to the 1966 general election. Sensitive to the charged electoral atmosphere, Zuckerman urged Mountbatten not to turn his maiden speech in the House of Lords into a highly personal attack on Denis Healey; at the same time Luce argued such action would be wholly counter-productive. No doubt

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Buckingham Palace was alarmed by the prospect of someone so close to the throne publicly denouncing a senior cabinet minister at such a sensitive time. As almost always the case, Mountbatten heeded Zuckerman’s advice: he limited his protest to sending the Prime Minister a copy of his intended speech.88 Not speaking out clearly troubled him, as three years later he did voice his disquiet over the scrapping of Eagle and Ark Royal well before the first of the Invincible-class carriers was commissioned. On 1  October 1969 Mountbatten spoke at a Foyle’s Literary Luncheon, where he was highly critical of Denis Healey. Again, he sent Wilson a draft of the speech, and it duly did the rounds of the MOD. Healey’s only comment was that Mountbatten had doubled the cost of the carriers’ refits, and the final text was duly amended. When the Daily Express insisted the revised figure was almost half the actual cost, Mountbatten felt vindicated. At Windsor in June 1970 Mountbatten urged the new prime minister, Ted Heath, to ensure both Eagle and Ark Royal would be reprieved; he confided in his diary that this was why he had wanted a change of government: ‘Denis Healey’s decision to abolish the carriers was such a blatantly dishonest step.’ The Defence Secretary was now Lord Carrington – former First Lord of the Admiralty – and Mountbatten was sure his ships were safe. He was duly disappointed, which perhaps explains his reassessment of Healey’s qualities as a minister later in the decade: at the height of the 1976 sterling crisis, a morale-boosting letter arrived from Broadlands congratulating the Chancellor on his endeavours to reassure the nation and to rally the markets.89 Mountbatten’s preoccupation, some might say obsession, with aircraft carriers dated back to his pre-war appointment at the Admiralty, supporting the then First Sea Lord, Ernle Chatfield, in re-establishing the Fleet Air Arm as an autonomous air service. In 1941 he was appointed captain of the Royal Navy’s most modern strike carrier, HMS Illustrious; but within weeks of his assuming command Churchill ordered him to take over Combined Operations.90 In his final months as Chief of the Defence Staff, Mountbatten’s prolonged absences abroad left him with little influence over day-to-day business within the MOD – his power was rapidly ebbing away. One minor success was to see the veteran air station at Lee-on-Solent, HMS Daedalus, regain its historic name after six woeful years as HMS Ariel. This was the fulfilment of a promise made when he was the wardroom mess’s guest speaker at a ‘Taranto dinner’ in November 1964. Across the whole of the 1960s the Fleet Air Arm had no better friend than the CDS, even in retirement. His advocacy of naval air power dated back almost half a century: as a cadet Mountbatten had flown with the pioneers of maritime aviation before the First World War. In tandem with Churchill, Prince Louis Battenberg had been a pivotal figure in the formation of the Royal Naval Air Service.91 In the mid-1930s Lord Chatfield fulfilled a similar role for the nascent Fleet Air Arm. On his retirement as First Sea Lord, Chatfield was appointed to the Order of Merit. The OM is a rare mark of distinction, restricted to only twenty-four appointees, each chosen by the sovereign. Remarkably, Chatfield was the ninth Chief of the Naval Staff to receive the award. In June 1965 his former protégé became the twelfth. Querying the reason for his unexpected invitation to Windsor, Mountbatten was genuinely surprised when the Queen told him why. True to form, he boasted in his diary that he was the

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only First Sea Lord to be awarded the Order of Merit in peacetime, thereby ignoring George VI’s recognition of how well Chatfield had readied the Royal Navy for war.92 Six weeks before Mountbatten added OM to the multiple acronyms after his name, events began to mark his retirement. He always knew how to stage a party, and an elaborate spectacle at Broadlands on 5 June 1965 marked the prelude to a succession of grand farewells, at home and abroad (in Paris, it was adieu – and certainly not au revoir  –  from the President of NATO’s Military Committee). Luce was the obvious (only?) choice to speak on behalf of the Chiefs of Staff, his remarks accompanied by champagne and a ‘Farewell CDS’ cake – in his diary Mountbatten stretched the truth by claiming to have ‘enjoyed every moment of the COSC’, on which, including the war, he had served for a total of twelve years (‘definitely a record’). Even as he shook hands for the last time with ministers and shadow ministers, a frustrated Mountbatten was still evangelizing for further and faster reorganization of the MOD. A blueprint for the next – radical – stage was intended for a lengthy farewell despatch, but the invitation to enlighten the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister on the necessity of further Whitehall reform never came; as Ronnie Brockman gently pointed out, the great game was finally over.93 But before the disappointment came the excitement: a grand departure from Main Building on 16 July, complete with an array of gold braid, the soaring sound of the Royal Marines’ massed bands, the CDS unhurriedly inspecting the serried ranks of all three services, the Daimler departing to the sound of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and the Chiefs of Staff throwing their hats in the air (doubtless for a variety of reasons). At Broadlands that night the now ex-Chief of the Defence Staff recorded in his diary: It was an emotional moment for me and I wondered whether ever before an officer had received three cheers from so many Flag, General and Air Officers in uniform. The whole of the Richmond Terrace side was packed with crowds, certainly several thousand of them and all the windows of the Ministry of Defence contained men and women waving as I left. The crowd even extended into Whitehall where the police were holding them back as I drove away.94

Especially delicious was the newsreel record of the farewell ceremony: filmgoers the following week saw the last of the wartime commanders  –  the victors of 1945 – surrendering his office with a splendour and grandeur that directly connected ’sixties Britain to its immediate imperial past. A cadet at Osborne from the age of thirteen, Mountbatten had spent almost his entire life in uniform. He had seen himself in a Pathé newsreel umpteen times, but this was especially satisfying as cinema audiences were offered a solemn yet celebratory reminder of his service to the nation across two world wars, and through two decades of a fractured yet lasting peace.95

Conclusion: Afterlife and assassination

Working for Wilson, 1964–7 From the start of his premiership Harold Wilson saw Lord Mountbatten as an asset. As we’ve seen, Mountbatten knew surprisingly little about the new prime minister. Of the two men, Wilson was therefore the better informed. After all the Chief of the Defence Staff was a public figure with a high profile. Furthermore, when working at the Board of Trade in 1947, Wilson had become close to Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps of course had known a great deal about the last Viceroy, while Lady Isobel knew Edwina well, despite their very different personalities. The Cripps and the Mountbattens were an unlikely combination, essentially brought together by their sharing successive missions to secure a lasting political settlement in India. As shown in Chapter 1, Mountbatten was Cripps’s choice to succeed Wavell in New Delhi, both men writing regularly to each other in the weeks leading up to independence.1 It’s almost inconceivable that Cripps didn’t talk to his junior minister about Mountbatten, and Wilson prided himself on his prodigious memory. Across the ’fifties and into the ’sixties Wilson was a rising star, while Mountbatten was already a fixture in the firmament. Election success in the autumn of 1964 saw Wilson now firmly in the ascendant, the zenith of his career coming two years later when Labour hugely increased its Commons majority. Ensconced in Downing Street, Wilson was careful to cultivate the CDS, their working relationship extending well beyond matters nuclear. Mountbatten was considered a useful intermediary when dealing with the Palace. Wilson labelled him the ‘shop steward of royalty’, and he revelled in the title.2 Mountbatten spent much of his last six months in uniform overseas. It’s safe to say his prolonged absences abroad were largely unlamented inside the MOD, not least within the Chiefs of Staff Committee. February and March were taken up with a farewell tour of the Far East and the Pacific. Solly Zuckerman went along for part of the trip, while Patricia, Lady Brabourne, stayed with her father for the full five weeks; the final fortnight was overshadowed by the death of Mountbatten’s elder sister Louise, consort of Sweden’s King Gustav VI. The tour ended in Los Angeles, with a round of socializing in old Hollywood haunts. In October 1941 Mountbatten had been tracked down by Downing Street in LA and ordered to return home forthwith. In March 1965 history repeated itself, although this time he was given a few days to visit Disneyland and to carry on cavorting with his favourite movie stars, not least Shirley MacLaine

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(‘she certainly is a very sweet girl’). Wilson’s Private Secretary, Derek Mitchell, had flown out to brief Mountbatten. The jet-lagged civil servant soon found himself tied up with Claudia Cardinale in an all-star party game – suitable reward for having travelled halfway round the globe with a proposal from the Prime Minister and a supporting letter from the Secretary of State for Defence.3 Mountbatten speculated on the nature of his task. Was it to be talks with LBJ concerning Vietnam, or even an inspection of the frontline similar to his recent experience in Borneo (he would have remembered Matt Ridgeway’s investigative mission to Indo-China in April 1954 – and the general urging Eisenhower not to send troops)? In fact, Wilson wanted Mountbatten to head a commission which would visit key Commonwealth nations, garner necessary information regarding their citizens’ entry into the UK and urge their governments to enforce necessary controls and health checks, in a concerted effort to stamp out illegal immigration. A battlefield tour of the Mekong delta might have been preferable, not least because the Chief of the Defence Staff knew next to nothing about immigration. However, his attention to detail meant that he could learn fast, and he could boast a unique standing in every member of the Commonwealth other than Pakistan (where a colleague on the commission would deputize). In his letter Healey agreed with Wilson that no one was better qualified to secure bipartisan support, and to ‘talk firmly but diplomatically to Commonwealth governments’. The CDS was needed at home, but ‘it is vitally important to the health of our national life that the very real problems which immigration presents should not become caught up in the day-to-day political battle and should not sour our relations with the rest of the Commonwealth.’ In any case, the MOD would keep Mountbatten fully apprised of day-to-day issues, not least the ongoing defence review. The cynic would view the Defence Secretary’s appeal as wholly disingenuous, but let’s show generosity of spirit and take it at face value.4 The CDS had a further reason for touring the Commonwealth talking to heads of government in that he and Healey shared the idea of an anglophone equivalent to the annual meeting of the Atlanticist Bilderberg Group. Bilderberg was popular with the Labour leadership as it offered a rare opportunity to meet Cold War movers and shakers when out of office. Prince Philip saw himself fulfilling a role akin to that played by Prince Bernhard, conference chair from 1954 to 1976; naturally, the chief executive would be Mountbatten, aided by Ronnie Brockman. Overseas interest was cool, as confirmed when Commonwealth leaders met in London that June and Wilson informally raised the prospect of a Bilderberg equivalent (‘Windsor Conferences’). High Commissioners around the world passed on their host governments’ indifference to Mountbatten’s hard sell. Soon Whitehall’s attention switched to how the now exCDS and his nephew could be told that both the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary no longer supported the project.5 In opposition the Labour Party had opposed what became the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, identifying flaws which became even more evident once the voucher entry scheme was implemented. Migrants from south Asia and the Caribbean believed Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians received preferential treatment. Crucially, the governments of India and Pakistan felt that in practice visitors from the ‘old dominions’ wishing to stay in Britain were made welcome but applicants from

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elsewhere in the Commonwealth were scrutinized far more rigorously by immigration officers. In its 1964 election manifesto Labour acknowledged a need to control immigration, in the first instance courtesy of the 1962 act, while at the same time promising to consult with other Commonwealth countries before any further action was taken.6 Alarmed by the large number of dependants entering Britain, the new Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, urged much tighter controls. Soskice’s belief that Labour’s core – white – working-class vote sought reassurance, and requisite action, was a view shared by most members of the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister: tighter immigration controls were acceptable so long as they were matched by tangible efforts to outlaw discrimination and improve race relations.7 This twin-track approach, with a keen emphasis on integration, demanded clear, enlightened leadership at the Home Office. For the moment Roy Jenkins was still at Aviation, hence Wilson’s hands-on role in policy formulation. A white paper was planned for the summer of 1965, and the success or failure of subsequent legislation would clearly influence the Government’s chances of re-election sometime over the next eighteen months. As early as February 1965 the Home Office announced a tightening up of immigration rules, including the intention to deport illegal immigrants. Ideally Commonwealth governments would collaborate in future efforts to control migration into Britain, but the first requirement was a recognition that changes to the 1962 act were necessary. In October 1961 Downing Street and the Foreign Office had failed to advise Nehru’s government of an imminent bill to control immigration – India’s politicians and opinion makers saw legislation as institutionalizing racial discrimination within the Commonwealth. Aware that South Africa, Vietnam and above all Rhodesia, were potentially divisive issues at the forthcoming Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, Wilson was keen to avoid any heated discussion of immigration and perceived discrimination. As conference host, the Government could to some extent determine the agenda, but a safer approach was to neutralize the issue  –  and who better to placate suspicious and sensitive heads of government than the last Viceroy? Mountbatten’s mission was essentially fact-finding and advisory, but its secondary purpose was to smooth ruffled feathers and reassure first-generation post-colonial leaders that the current Government was determined to end undisguised prejudice and a de facto two-tier immigration process.8 The schedule, spread out across twelve weeks, was gruelling, but Mountbatten had the usual battery of officials and servants to ease the burden, and he found time to enjoy himself. He also took the opportunity to liaise with fellow chiefs of staff, and to make his formal farewells. Thus, in Ottawa Mountbatten spoke only briefly with Lester Pearson, and the real business took place the next day when he compared notes on reorganization with the Defence Minister and the CDS: ‘I gave them a very brief description of how far we had gone, and, … admitted that after I had gone in July the forces of reaction would almost certainly be able to slow up any further advance.’ While in North America Mountbatten stayed with friends in Washington and in New York, where his Burmese connections ensured a meeting with U Thant: the SecretaryGeneral was told how he could make the UN’s peace-keeping forces more effective, after which the American Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, was enlightened as to the ineptness of American forces policing postwar Hanoi.9 Feedback from the Caribbean

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Figure 13  Chief of the Defence Staff: Admiral of the Fleet Mountbatten leaves the Ministry of Defence for the last time, 16 July 1965

could quite easily have been secured in London from high commissioners and visiting premiers, but to cut out the West Indies would clearly cause offence, and so duty called. The visit to Valetta saw Borg Olivier and his ministers point out that closure of the naval base meant Maltese dock workers seeking employment in Britain. Not surprisingly, Mountbatten was sympathetic to their dilemma, and he later urged the Government to allow unfettered entry for migrants from Malta. While on the island he slipped away ‘to poke my nose into all my old haunts’; an experience he found, ‘not only nostalgic, but painfully disturbing.’ The loss of Edwina still cut deep.10 The visit to Delhi – his first since Nehru’s death – was another emotionally draining experience for Mountbatten. For all the good wishes and goodwill among those closest to the former governor-general, formal discussions with Lal Bahadur Shastri, his ministers and his chiefs of staff were overshadowed by a consensus within the Indian political elite that the British had let them down. Why, Mountbatten’s hosts asked, had Her Majesty’s Government not condemned Pakistan’s military incursion into the Rann of Kutch (‘which I turned over to India at the time of partition’)? Mountbatten understood their keen sense of grievance, and he promised to pursue the matter on his return to London. A meeting with India’s Military Committee saw Mountbatten and Solly Zuckerman treated no differently from any other overseas visitors; the contrast with his last two visits was striking: ‘the feeling towards the British has undergone a sharp and sad decline … How sad the situation is since Jawaharlal’s death.’ Yet, with Indira Gandhi expected to succeed an ailing Shastri as PM sooner rather than later, the High Commission in Delhi and the Commonwealth Relations Office still

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valued the CDS’s role as an ‘imperial intermediary’. That role was in practice all but exhausted. Needless to say Mountbatten never properly recognized just how much his influence waned across the following decade. Rakesh Ankit has detailed Mountbatten’s minimal influence over Gandhi regarding the abolition of the Princes’ privileges and privy purses, the two-year banning of BBC correspondents and the imposition in 1975 of emergency rule. Downing Street, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and arguably even Buckingham Palace, increasingly viewed Mountbatten’s not infrequent intervention in Anglo-Indian affairs as an unnecessary complication, even an embarrassment: in both London and Delhi, ‘ … he stood out as a remaining relic of empire in post-imperial exchanges. He was either heard but not listened to or he was altogether held back from holding forth, seen as an inconvenience, even a hindrance.’11 The meeting with Nigeria’s prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, took place only eight months after Mountbatten’s last visit to Lagos. The number of Nigerian migrants to Britain was still small, and many of them were students intent on returning home. Only after successive coups and the Biafran war did Nigerians move permanently to Britain in significant numbers. Not surprisingly, therefore, migration was not a source of tension between the two nations. The only complication was prime minister Tafawa Balewa’s fears concerning the Labour Party, which Mountbatten had sought to allay back in October. A strong bond had clearly been established between the two men, as confirmed by Mountbatten’s diary entry for his stay in Lagos. The separatist conflict was two years away, and the spring of 1965 was a high point in Nigeria’s democratic experiment, and its relations with the one-time colonial power. The CDS made a courtesy call on his Nigerian counterpart, Johnson Aguiyi Ironsi. Mountbatten was clearly oblivious to the fact that, as the one-time C-in-C of the UN’s peace-keeping force in the Congo, Aguiyi Ironsi needed no more lectures from patrician British officers. The general was amiable and courteous, but Mountbatten clearly disliked him. Confirmation of the CDS’s character assessment came the following January when Balewa was killed in a military coup, and the head of the Nigerian Army became head-of-state – within six months Aguiyi Ironsi had himself been deposed and murdered. One assumes that when the news reached Broadlands no tears were shed.12 Unsurprisingly, Commonwealth leaders were blunt in pointing out to Mountbatten that it wasn’t their job to solve Britain’s problems of mass migration and poor race relations. Nor did they have the means to eliminate illegal immigration. In the Midlands and the north, attention focused upon the significant number of unskilled or semi-skilled workers arriving from Pakistan. With their voucher allocation all but exhausted, there was considerable potential for illegal activity. Thus, a frank conversation with Ayub Khan had to be high on Mountbatten’s priority list; and yet this was the one meeting he couldn’t attend. As a Midlands MP Dick Crossman had a keen interest in the forthcoming white paper on immigration: sitting on the relevant cabinet committee, the Minister of Housing judged the Mountbatten mission, ‘a skilful move politically because we could switch our policy once we had demonstrated that it was no good relying on the Indian and Pakistani Governments.’ The problem was that this refusal to collaborate could only be inferred, the Government resisting every demand for Mountbatten’s final report to be published. Wilson insisted that all discussions had

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been undertaken in the strictest confidence, and he maintained this line even after the Commonwealth conference in June 1965. Pressure to release a full or redacted report came more from the Lords than the Commons, where Douglas-Home never seriously challenged the Prime Minister on the issue – he was probably given access to the document under Privy Council rules.13 The report was drafted by Philip Woodfield, a former Private Secretary inside Downing Street who had recently returned to the Home Office. Woodfield was not just another career civil servant fast-tracking to permanent secretary. Mountbatten would have noted his five years as a Gunner subaltern, and his two-year secondment to help draft the Nigerian constitution. Add to this the experience of having served not one but three prime ministers, and Woodfield was ideally qualified to mastermind the mission. He was always at Mountbatten’s side, except in Lahore where he deputized for the CDS. Mountbatten always insisted that he be given access to the head of government, and his chef de cabinet facilitated audiences which were either disconcertingly brief or unnecessarily long. Woodfield indulged his master, not least in the insistence on due ceremony, most especially in India, and the shameless showing-off at parties and receptions. A master of tact, circumspection and discretion it’s scarcely surprising that the future Sir Philip spent the latter part of his career keeping contact with the Provisional IRA and scrutinizing the work of the Security Services. When Mountbatten was killed in August 1979 Woodfield, who earlier in the decade had met most of the PIRA leadership, would have had a direct interest in the assassination. In the spring of 1965, as the mission drew to an end, Woodfield drafted a sixty-page report: a somewhat ungrateful Mountbatten labelled it ‘very learned and rather verbose’.14 Not unsurprisingly, on the flight back from Nicosia, his final port of call, the CDS drafted his own memo to Wilson, with a short list of recommendations. Mountbatten’s readiness to talk to Makarios and to a spokesman for the Turkish Cypriots generated newspaper coverage at home, as did his memorandum when its contents were leaked to the Evening Standard: Beaverbrook had died a year earlier, so this was an oldfashioned scoop with no scarcely disguised charge of post-imperial perfidy. Inside Whitehall, ministers noted Woodfield’s observations and advice, but the full document never progressed to a meeting of the whole Cabinet. The message at Westminster was that the unpublished report would doubtless inform the eventual white paper; but in the short term it was Mountbatten’s leaked conclusions which had the greater impact. His liberal sentiments struck a chord with ministers like Crossman who were uneasy that the voucher allocation had been slashed even while the mission was under way, and who were alarmed by Soskice’s support for a sustained programme of deportation: immigration needed to be brought under control, but by fair means not foul.15 Mountbatten started from the premise that by dint of their historic ties to Britain all Commonwealth citizens must be treated fairly, and when appropriate preferentially. Genuine students from the Commonwealth would always be welcome, and the right of entry for wives and children respected. Nevertheless, there was a case for halving the number of immigrants arriving year on year, to a figure of around 7000, with Britain’s indebtedness to Malta GC rendering it a special case. The key difference between Mountbatten’s approach to stricter immigration controls and that of the Government was that he saw such measures as only temporary, to provide the ‘breathing space needed

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for assimilation’. Conveying this message clearly to Commonwealth governments would generate a degree of sympathy and cooperation, but if the real intention was to make these sanctions permanent, ‘I consider there will be a real risk that this could do lasting damage to Commonwealth relations.’ Making such sanctions permanent was, of course, exactly what governments of both major political parties were intent on implementing.16 In August 1965 the Home Office published Immigration from the Commonwealth. The White Paper proposed controls tougher – and more permanent – than anything Mountbatten had envisaged. Malta was recognized as a special case, but the aggregate number of remaining vouchers was more than halved, with 5,500 of the 7,500 annual allocation reserved for highly skilled and well-educated workers and professionals, and the residue set aside for entry applicants already offered work, ideally in hospitals or public transport. The overall number was in line with Mountbatten’s recommendation, but not the strictness of definition. Rules on dependencies were significantly tightened, and immigration officers given powers to treat Commonwealth citizens as de facto aliens, albeit without the same immediacy of deportation. The latter concession was to forestall Commonwealth objections, but in all other respects Labour’s tough talking contrasted sharply with the tone adopted by the CDS in both his formal and informal submissions to the Government. For all his faults Mountbatten was genuinely colour-blind in his approach to the problem. Yet the discourse surrounding the 1965 White Paper was conducted almost entirely in terms of ‘coloured immigration’, and its impact upon what the Home Office labelled, ‘this small and over-crowded island’. The 1965 Race Relations Act was intended to appease critics of the prevailing policy on immigration, both at home and abroad; but workplace discrimination was not made a criminal offence, and housing discrimination was exempt. The act was ostensibly a counterweight to tougher migration control, and yet the language employed in Westminster and Whitehall was rarely inclusive. Thus, non-white immigrants were scarcely seen in terms of their newly embraced, or even well-established, Britishness.17 Mountbatten knew precious little of the everyday experience of non-white families in Bradford or Birmingham, and a de haut en bas view of urban life allowed him the luxury of universal goodwill, but three years with the Fourteenth Army ensured a readiness to recognize new arrivals as his fellow citizens, loyal to Queen and country. Mountbatten had undertaken a Commonwealth-wide mission, but almost inevitably the principal focus of his attention was south Asia. India’s professional and managerial class gained disproportionately from the redefinition of the voucher scheme in 1965, as did young wives and children from across the subcontinent. For this reason, if no other, Mountbatten was unlikely to look back on his globe-trotting in the spring of 1965 as a waste of time (and he did after all make every effort to enjoy himself). Nor was he likely to look on the much tougher restrictions that followed in 1968 with any great apprehension or concern. If tensions later arose in his personal dealings with the Prime Minister, then it certainly wasn’t over the issue of immigration.18 From early in his premiership Wilson saw Mountbatten as a means of putting pressure on Ian Smith, the uncompromising leader of the Rhodesian Front. Smith and his all-white party refused to accept Southern Rhodesia’s transition to a multi-racial sovereign state, threatening a Unilateral Declaration of Independence and making

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real their threat on 11 November 1965 (the date not coincidental given the number of white Rhodesians, including Smith, who had fought in the war). When the notion of UDI was first mooted the Chief of the Defence Staff and his advisers were called to a much-publicized conference with Wilson ahead of an emergency Cabinet meeting. Newspapers sympathetic to Labour were told to anticipate firm action on the part of the new Government. Token forces were deployed in Zambia and in the Indian Ocean, but beyond that nothing – Healey was loath to test the loyalty of those officers ordered to confront the Rhodesian Security Forces.19 If armed intervention in Rhodesia was seriously contemplated, then it was soon rejected as impractical. Also, while military action might go down well with newly independent members of the Commonwealth, at Westminster it would shatter a fragile bipartisan consensus over the need to continue negotiating – too many right-wing MPs on the Tory backbenches were tacit or open supporters of the white minority regime in Salisbury, and Labour’s narrow majority highlighted the importance of shadow cabinet support.20 On the eve of UDI the Prime Minister categorically ruled out the use of force, thereby removing any serious leverage in future talks with Smith (by the autumn of 1965 the two men were already veteran sparring partners): Denis Healey wasn’t the only cabinet member to consider this a ‘classic strategic blunder’.21 On Smith’s two visits to London, in January and October 1965, he proved remarkably impervious to threats, let  alone entreaties. With Mountbatten recently retired, the idea was floated that he lead a diplomatic mission to Salisbury, or even replace the beleaguered Sir Humphrey Gibbs as Governor. At Balmoral Wilson secured the Queen’s cautious approval, before changing his mind and going himself. In any case, Mountbatten had declined the invitation to play viceroy second time around, pleading age, a lack of local knowledge and the absence of Edwina to steady the ship – Solly Zuckerman had advised him not to go.22 Wilson’s closest colleagues warned him against visiting Salisbury, and the trip duly proved disastrous.23 Smith was characteristically intransigent, and his ministers deliberately offensive. A painful encounter with the imprisoned black nationalist leaders, Joshua Nkome and Ndabaningi Sithole, brought home to Wilson the brutal nature of white supremacism. Smith and Wilson would have further meetings post-UDI, with no positive gain for the Labour leader other than admiration for his TV and parliamentary performances when imparting bad news re white Rhodesia’s capacity to survive sanctions and global condemnation.24 Mountbatten was useful because of his royal connection. Ian Smith’s party made much of Rhodesia’s readiness to fight for king and country in the Second World War, and this went down well with older Conservative supporters in Britain, especially readers of the Daily and Sunday Express. Smith made a point of attending Churchill’s funeral, and the Queen overrode government efforts to exclude him from a royal reception. ‘Rhodesia’ only became a republic in 1970, previously declaring itself a sovereign entity of which Elizabeth II was head of state. The City, including the Bank of England, was surprisingly supportive of the Smith regime immediately before and after UDI, much to Wilson’s chagrin.25 The bankers’ initial reluctance to support sanctions reflected a widely shared conservative view that white Rhodesians were ‘kith and kin’ loyal to the Crown, and their views and wishes should be respected. This was exactly

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the propaganda message emanating from Salisbury, drowning out black expatriate demands for equal rights. Insisting that the Smith administration had in fact defied the authority of the sovereign was a challenging task for the Government, which is why Wilson saw Mountbatten as a useful tool – a close relative of Her Majesty intervening when appropriate to support British authority over a recalcitrant and rebellious regime. As the Prime Minister later recalled, ‘It was not only that his [Mountbatten’s] authority and personality would be of vital importance in influencing the opinions of, at any rate, the moderate Rhodesians, and perhaps many others whose loyalty to the Crown might give them pause when presented with illegal independence.’26 Wilson reckoned that anyone who could bring Congress on side wouldn’t blanch at dealing with Ian Smith and his truculent tobacco farmers. Yet, for all his vanity, Mountbatten was a realist. As a serving officer (admirals of the fleet never retire) he argued strongly against military intervention, and as a veteran negotiator he recognized the Rhodesian Front would be singularly unimpressed by someone so ignorant of local conditions – in Bulawayo or in the bush, blue blood and gold braid counted for nothing.27 However, Mountbatten could scarcely resist playing the role of Her Majesty’s personal envoy, descending on Salisbury in his beloved Comet 4, the aircraft purposely redecorated in the colours of the Queen’s Flight. With UDI declared, Downing Street sought to stiffen Sir Humphrey Gibbs’s resolve: the Governor would be made a Knight Commander of the Victorian Order, the honour bestowed on him by the Queen’s eminent and well-beloved emissary (who, unknown to Gibbs, had only a few weeks before been offered his job). The surprise visit was intended to raise morale among loyalists opposed to UDI, and to confirm Smith’s traitorous intent should he prevent Mountbatten and his retinue from landing at Salisbury Airport. Philip Ziegler, official biographer of both Mountbatten and Wilson, maintained the idea had royal approval, the Duke of Edinburgh encouraging his uncle to undertake the task. The whole episode sounds like a discarded story line from The Crown. No doubt Mountbatten would have been severely embarrassed had the charade gone ahead as planned. Thankfully, Wilson and his advisers came to their senses, and the proposal was quietly dropped.28 Soon Wilson would have a real job for Mountbatten to take on. On 22  October 1966 the double agent George Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs, with the help of two anti-nuclear campaigners whom he met while they were in prison. Within days he had crossed Europe and was safe with his handlers in East Germany. Recruited by the KGB while a POW in North Korea, Blake’s successful infiltration of MI6 had resulted in the death of several undercover agents prior to his arrest and confession in 1961. In the autumn of 1966 Blake was five years into a sentence of forty-two years.29 The ease with which he had absconded generated several awkward questions for the Wilson Government, not least its liberal-minded Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins. The Opposition secured a debate on Blake’s escape, scheduled for the last day of the month. Ted Heath had for whatever reason been infuriated by Jenkins informing the Commons just two days after Blake’s escape that Lord Mountbatten would undertake a speedy inquiry into the current state of prison security. The idea of securing Mountbatten’s services had come from the Home Office’s Permanent Secretary, and initially it had not been well received. However, after a few hours’ contemplation Mountbatten had changed his mind, not least because the Queen agreed with her Home Secretary that he would

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Figure  14 Commonwealth Immigration Mission: Archbishop Makarios welcomes the CDS and his chef de cabinet Philip Woodfield, 3 June 1965

do a good job. In practice there were fewer escapes year on year than earlier in the decade, but the then Prison Board clearly had a problem with the robust incarceration of high-security prisoners – as Mountbatten would in due course confirm following his visit to Wormwood Scrubs. The inquiry’s remit could have been interpreted quite narrowly, but Mountbatten deliberately sought a more wide-ranging appraisal of prison conditions. He could do this given the quality of the support team put together by Philip Woodfield, the high-powered bureaucrat who had masterminded the Commonwealth mission. The assessors comprised a Farnborough signals specialist, a retired prison governor and Leicester’s uncorruptible and reforming chief constable, Robert Mark. The inquiry would be the making of Mark as he attracted the attention of the Home Secretary, who duly secured his services for the Metropolitan Police, of which in due course he became Commissioner. It also marked the beginning of a close friendship between Mark and Mountbatten, the latter providing discreet support whenever the Commissioner’s frank views on contemporary policing attracted fierce criticism from lawyers and former members of the Met.30 Unlike the immigration inquiry Mountbatten’s report on prison security was published in full, just before Christmas. The document’s timely release enabled Mountbatten to send his royal relatives a further festive gift. The pleasure of reading Uncle Dickie’s reflections on the state of the nation’s gaols was spoilt by prior knowledge of his conclusions – they had been leaked to the Daily Express a month before. Given

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the speed with which the inquiry was conducted it’s remarkable that it generated such a sensible, evidence-based report. Woodfield drafted the document, but he liaised more closely with Mountbatten than in the spring of 1965. Almost all its recommendations were speedily adopted by the Government, although Mountbatten’s idée fixe of an all-powerful Inspector General was discreetly dumped.31 When Roy Jenkins made a lengthy statement in the Commons on the Home Office’s positive response to Lord Mountbatten’s report, his shadow, Quintin Hogg, displayed an enthusiasm for penal reform few Tory backbenchers or party members were likely to endorse. The Home Secretary insisted the investigation had been as rigorous as a judicial inquiry, and no one on either side of the House demurred. The unusual degree of consensus between the two front benches confirmed the Commons’ view that the measures Woodfield and his team deemed necessary to enhance security, address the legitimate complaints of long-term prisoners and boost staff morale were largely uncontentious. Not all MPs shared this view, most notably the Labour backbencher Leo Abse, a vocal critic of Britain’s antiquated prisons. Beyond Westminster fellow advocates of penal reform echoed Abse’s concerns.32 Escapes from prison dropped notably in the years following the publication of Mountbatten’s report. They only started to rise a decade later. Enhanced security was largely attributable to the practical measures Mountbatten proposed, many of which should surely have been introduced years before. For all the Home Secretary’s enthusiasm, not every recommendation was implemented, notably the call for a single maximum-security gaol for ‘Category A’ prisoners. ‘Vectis’ (the Latin name a clear indication of the prison’s preferred location – the Isle of Wight) was very much Mountbatten’s proposal. Ironically, he was later  –  mistakenly  –  associated with the Home Office’s preferred alternative of adding maximum-security wings to existing prisons: in 1968 the Advisory Council on the Penal System’s follow-up investigation convinced the Home Office not to emulate an American system of incarceration and instead adopt a dispersal system. Mountbatten, who for the rest of his life maintained a keen interest in prison security, was damning of Sir Leon Radzinovicz’s advisory committee. Whenever he encountered a Home Secretary, Labour or Conservative, he denounced the dispersal system as a fallacious alternative to his preferred solution for housing long-term prisoners. In his view, maximum-security wings maintained close confinement, whereas a single purpose-built institution could provide greater physical space, and thus greater freedom of movement.33 It clearly pained Mountbatten that what he perceived as a generally progressive package of measures was seen by its critics as profoundly illiberal. Penal reformers were – and are – equally hostile towards the most enduring feature of the Mountbatten report, the system of categorization. The Prison Service still categorizes prisoners as A, B, C or D thereby determining the nature of their confinement. Critics see such labelling as crude, inflexible and selffulfilling.34 George Blake’s escape could have escalated into the kind of controversy which triggers further scandals and seriously erodes public confidence in the Government, as Harold Macmillan had found to his cost. Jenkins’s speedy action forestalled such a possibility, as did Mountbatten, by carrying out his investigation in such a short space of time. Both men depended upon the quality of advice and administrative support

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provided by senior officials within the Home Office and the police, not least Philip Woodfield and Robert Mark. As with the Commonwealth mission eighteen months earlier, Wilson had good cause to thank Mountbatten. At the same time Mountbatten had good cause to thank Wilson, in that the prison inquiry kept him firmly in the public eye.35 Mountbatten’s relationship with Harold Wilson has over the years been subject to intense speculation and investigation, not least the notorious episode on 8 May 1968 when he foolishly hosted a meeting with the Daily Mirror’s editorial director Hugh Cudlipp, and Cecil King, the chair of the newspaper’s parent company, IPC. Joined by Solly Zuckerman, the Fleet Street veterans and the Queen’s uncle lamented the state of the nation four years into Wilson’s premiership. The discussion quickly turned to how easily a ‘National Government’ might be formed, at which point an irate Zuckerman rose to leave, and urged Mountbatten to do the same. The two newspaper men later insisted that Mountbatten followed his friend out of the room after only a short delay.36 Mountbatten’s quarrel with Cudlipp seven years later was about just how short that delay was; and it was left to Zuckerman in March 1981 to contest King’s claim that discussion had in fact continued for quite a while, focusing upon whether at some point soon a concerned Queen would have to intervene. Cecil King also claimed that it was Mountbatten who initiated the meeting, which was why it took place at his flat. Both Cudlipp and Zuckerman disputed this suggestion. King and Hugh Cudlipp were unlikely to arrive at an agreed account of events given that the latter had orchestrated his chairman’s dismissal on 30  May 1968. King’s sacking had followed his ferocious attack on Wilson in the Daily Mirror just two days after the meeting with Mountbatten. Both King and Cudlipp were hostile to the Prime Minister, but where they differed was in the brazenness of their plotting. Tony Benn’s diary entries from this period confirm the difference between King openly making the case for coalition to assorted cabinet ministers and Cudlipp’s discreet manoeuvrings.37 Benn of course knew nothing of Cudlipp’s late April visit to Broadlands, where Mountbatten unwisely talked of emergency measures to reassure industry and the City. However, Benn did record how well-informed Wilson was, and how seriously Downing Street took the IPC executives’ efforts to erode support for him within the Cabinet – and by implication further afield, extending as far as the Palace.38 It’s hard to believe Wilson did not have some idea of Mountbatten’s flirting with the Mirror men’s ideas  –  wild on King’s part, calculated on Cudlipp’s  –  to bring about regime change inside Downing Street. One can only speculate as to how Wilson felt six years later when subject to Mountbatten’s fulsome advice as to how he should lead the nation in a time of acute economic crisis and industrial strife.39 Mountbatten’s flirting with Fleet Street powerbrokers keen to flex their muscles is a story which investigative journalists have returned to time and again. Biographers can scarcely ignore the significance of the Queen’s second cousin spending time, however brief, with men who were seriously plotting to bring down Her Majesty’s Government. In this respect, Philip Ziegler was unduly dismissive of the incident, albeit lamenting Mountbatten’s poor judgement and his susceptibility to malevolent flattery. To his credit, Andrew Lownie pulled no punches, providing a more thorough, a more up-to-

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date, and above all, a more critical coverage of a continuing cause célèbre.40 Arguably, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, it’s the one moment in a crowded life that ensures Mountbatten’s notoriety among a generation which otherwise would know him solely as a distant relative of the Queen who the IRA killed long before they were born. When Netflix screened the third series of The Crown in November 2019 viewers were presented with an episode rooted firmly in actuality  –  on the tragedy at Aberfan in October 1966  –  and episodes which were almost wholly fictitious or scarcely relatable to real events. The latter description certainly applies to ‘The Coup’, in which scriptwriter Peter Morgan inflated Mountbatten’s misguided meetings with King and Cudlipp into an ambitious City-backed endeavour to destroy Harold Wilson, which only the Queen can forestall. Ostensibly dismissed as CDS for opposing defence cuts, Mountbatten addresses a meeting of the Burma Star Association in a manner reminiscent of Mosley, displaying Gaullist ambitions in his abortive attempt to convince Her Majesty that the nation’s parlous state demands a rallying figure in Number Ten. This is all dismissed as the foolish ambitions of an old man irreconciled to his diminished status within the British state, and Charles Dance plays the role extremely well. Much is made of Mountbatten’s advancing years, and Dance looks suitably lined and world-weary. Yet, for all the remarkable similarity in long shots, Mountbatten in real life looked considerably younger. In 1968 he was only as old as the century, still fit enough to fulfil a variety of demanding roles – more Pericles than Polonius. In 2020 controversy surrounded series four of The Crown, not least regarding Mountbatten’s relationship with Prince Charles, but the previous year’s streaming of the ‘The Coup’ left a highly damaging impression, unlikely to wane so long as the episode remained easily accessible. Pleas of dramatic licence and an entitlement to rewrite history can’t hide the fact that a persuasive, audience-appealing, counter-factual version of events suggested fascistic tendencies wholly at odds with a man who opposed appeasement and championed a withdrawal from empire.41 In Mountbatten’s diary entry for 8  May1968 it’s striking where he went after ostensibly leaving Cudlipp and King to find their own way out of his house: after dining with Zuckerman in Lincoln’s Inn, they drove ‘to 39 Montpellier Walk to discuss with John and Patricia meeting which Solly and I had with Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp. Dangerous nonsense.’ The latter sentiment presumably reflected the serious impression made on Mountbatten by Zuckerman’s comments during and after the meeting. Solly Zuckerman’s own diary entry made clear the degree to which his friend had been wading in dangerous waters. Zuckerman’s reality check presumably left even Dickie Mountbatten concerned as to the repercussions, hence his confiding in the two people he trusted more than any others, his eldest daughter, Patricia, and her husband John Knatchbull, Lord Brabourne.42 John Brabourne had urged Mountbatten not to meet King and Cudlipp, but in May 1968 he had his own grievance with the Wilson Government, a grievance which he shared with his father-in-law, and which goes some way to explaining Mountbatten’s jaundiced view of the administration. Both men had invested time, money and effort in an initiative to revolutionize the nation’s television viewing, but in the spring of 1968 the auspices for their ambitious enterprise did not look good.43

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Growing old gracefully – there’s life beyond Whitehall On the evening of 16 November 1964, as guests waited to take their places at the City of London’s most prestigious event, the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, the Chief of the Defence Staff buttonholed Labour’s newly appointed Postmaster General. Mountbatten namedropped shamelessly, wouldn’t stop talking and left the then Anthony Wedgewood Benn aghast that one of the most powerful men in Britain should be so keen to impress.44 The chances are that John Brabourne had suggested his father-in-law make himself known to someone seen as a rising star in the Labour Party, and as a radicalminded minister intent on disrupting the cosy, well-established world of broadcasting and telecommunications. Regrettably for Brabourne, the encounter set the tone for subsequent meetings between Mountbatten and Wedgewood Benn. In due course Tony Benn would become Minister of Technology, retaining many of his previous departmental responsibilities. This meant that for six years his interests overlapped with those of Brabourne and Mountbatten, the latter invariably infuriating Benn whenever they met. At their first – unhappy – encounter Mountbatten invited Benn and his partner, Caroline, to a party later that week at Wilton Crescent, his London home. There he introduced the couple to John Brabourne. Benn noted later that night: ‘I had heard of this man and thought I would not like him but in fact he was intelligent and had some ideas on pay-TV which may be worth considering.’45 An independent producer boasting a succession of big-budget, high-return films, John Brabourne was a key figure in promoting the British film industry at home and abroad. Always close to his father-in-law, he made good use of the family connection, but was never at any time

Figure 15  The Report into Prison Escapes and Security: Lord Mountbatten and his three assesors outside HMP Wormwood Scrubs, December 1965

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dependent on Mountbatten. If anything, it was the reverse as Brabourne’s financial acumen proved invaluable in Mountbatten maintaining his hugely expensive life style.46 Brabourne saw obvious advantages for the British film industry in a close connection with the Royal Family, most visibly through royal premieres, and the presidency of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which passed from Prince Philip to his uncle in 1966.47 Brabourne and Mountbatten both saw television and cinema, not as rivals but as potential collaborators, that synergy having provided momentum for the creation of BAFTA. Mountbatten’s lifelong love of films and of film-making scarcely flagged, even in his final years. This after all was a man who could think of only one career alternative to the Royal Navy – film production.48 Brabourne pioneered the commercial interface between cinema and the small screen, working primarily with Rediffusion. His move into mainstream terrestrial television followed the premature launch of a subscription service in the mid-sixties. Brabourne sought an early introduction to the Postmaster General because Benn had come into office keen to expand the provision of public service broadcasting. Drawing heavily upon Mountbatten’s direct line to the great and the good, Brabourne and his partner Anthony Havelock-Allan created British Home Entertainment, a consortium of corporate investors and glittering patrons, the latter embracing Lawrence Olivier and Margot Fonteyn and Field Marshal Lord Slim.49 Boosted by the endorsement of Mountbatten’s eminent contacts, Brabourne and Allan secured approval for an experimental subscription service in London. There’s a suspicion that authorization of the pilot scheme was a quid pro quo for Mountbatten agreeing to undertake the Commonwealth mission on immigration.50 Pay-TV Limited was launched as a fresh revenue stream for the British film industry and the Jockey Club, but its greatest success was screening the heavyweight title fight between Muhammed Ali and his challenger, Britain’s Henry Cooper, on 21 May 1966. Arrangements for transmitting the contest attracted Benn’s close attention; just as his successor, Ted Short, took a direct interest in extending the pilot scheme to Sheffield. Short gave Brabourne good reason to believe that the quota of subscribers would rise dramatically, with the licence extended to 1976  –  a scenario viewed unsympathetically by his successors or more senior ministers.51 Rediffusion’s earlier experimentation with paid television fed into the Pay-TV system, but the coin-slot/timer technology remained primitive and vulnerable. This was an idea too far ahead of its time, and in October 1968 the Government chose not to renew the consortium’s broadcasting license. Prescient ministers on the Cabinet’s Home Affairs Committee feared future subscription services would undermine public service broadcasting: they anticipated the BBC and the ITV companies being outbid for broadcasting rights, especially in the coverage of major sporting events.52 The Cooper-Ali contest had signalled the problems that lay ahead for terrestrial television, as Benn himself had perceived. Following the title fight, Lord Brabourne (now deemed ‘an aristocratic and well-connected front man for a powerful pressure group’) had urged the Postmaster General to make Pay-TV the nation’s fourth television channel. No doubt advised by his father-in-law, Brabourne had already lobbied potentially sympathetic cabinet ministers, notably George Brown. Benn made clear his belief that, ‘the case for a private business monopoly is extremely weak’.53

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In the summer of 1968 Mountbatten sent Wilson a detailed memo urging that he intervene, or risk severely damaging the British film industry. When the twin-city pilot scheme ended three months later, Pay-TV wrote off a £1 million investment. On hearing the calamitous news Mountbatten protested loudly, but to no avail. Wilson distanced himself from the decision, leaving officials to take the flak. ‘Shaken to the core,’ Mountbatten insisted the Prime Minister had gone back on his word, having only recently assured him that all was well; like King and Cudlipp six months earlier, he was left ‘wondering who was in fact in charge of the Government’.54 Nor could Mountbatten expect any sympathy from Benn, by now Minister of Technology with a seat in the Cabinet. Warned to be wary of Solly Zuckerman (‘a man without any sense of loyalty whatsoever’), Benn was similarly suspicious of Patrick Blackett, his scientific adviser at ‘Mintech’. Blackett argued for a pragmatic concentration of pure research in elite institutions, with the bulk of the academic community focused upon the direct application of laboratory science. This was a view which made him deeply unpopular in India when applied to the nation’s entire scientific endeavour  –  the British were seen as having subverted and co-opted a rich native tradition of scientific enquiry, most notably in theoretical physics. If the minister was unawed by the Nobel Prize winner whose strategic thinking had spawned the Ministry of Technology – and who considered himself an old friend and campaigner, it’s scarcely surprising that Benn dismissed Mountbatten’s efforts to influence government policy. Little more than a year after retiring the ex-CDS was yesterday’s man inside Whitehall: while Benn’s permanent secretary – no less a figure than the embodiment of applied Keynesianism, Sir Richard ‘Otto’ Clarke  –  was keen on harnessing Mountbatten’s multiple connections, the minister dismissed any notion of his department taking over the National Electronics Research Council.55 Mountbatten had created the NERC as what today we would deem a proto-think tank for the promotion of applied science, but he also saw it as a potential source of income should the Government assume control. Mountbatten’s secretary, Ronnie Brockman, had rightly perceived that seeking a salary of £12,000 a year would not endear him to Frank Cousins, the Transport Workers’ leader and the first Minister of Technology, and the same proved true for his successor. More significantly, Mintech had no need for yet another research-focused agency, when the emphasis was more and more on the commercial application of Britain’s disparate R and D operations.56 Without government patronage the NERC was little more than a lobby group boasting an impressive list of patrons. The organization’s potential to exert influence was hampered by the attitude and behaviour of its chairman, witness a disastrous encounter with Benn six months after the plug was finally pulled on Pay-TV. By the summer of 1969 Tony Wedgewood Benn was generally deemed to be doing a good job, but Mountbatten clearly made little effort to cultivate a minister still on the rise. Thus, Benn in that night’s diary entry duly recorded, ‘ … he is a quite intolerable man, I don’t know how anyone puts up with him. He dominates it [the NERC], he bullies people, he puts his own items on the agenda.’57 The final observation highlights the now former Chief of the Defence Staff ’s inability to recognize that behaviour which he previously could get away with, notwithstanding his colleagues’ antipathy and resistance, was neither efficacious nor acceptable in civilian life, at a time when deference was most demonstrably on the wane.

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The NERC morphed into the National Electronics Council. A lasting legacy is the Mountbatten Memorial Lecture, an annual event initiated by the man himself in 1978; Zuckerman followed a year later. Then there was the prestigious Mountbatten Medal for outstanding young electronics engineers and theoretical scientists: the Institution of Engineering and Technology initiated its annual award, acknowledging Mountbatten’s long-standing membership of the IET’s predecessor, the Institute of Electrical Engineers. In 1957 the British Computer Society was founded, and in due course Mountbatten became President. Today the BCS is a chartered institution with a powerful global presence and continuing close connections with the Royal Family – the parallel with BAFTA is striking. Mountbatten believed royalty needed to embrace the scientific community, with interest and enthusiasm; as opposed to mere acknowledgement courtesy of obligatory visits to research labs, factories, observatories and so on. Thus, he viewed the hands-on approach of the Duke of Edinburgh approvingly, and he made sure the Duke of Kent succeeded him as President of both the NEC and the BCS.58 Universities like Southampton and Heriot-Watt still recognize Mountbatten’s aggressive post-retirement promotion of British science and technology, not least in his specialist field of telecommunications. In his lifetime recognition came in a variety of forms, not least honorary degrees, but the award he valued most was his Fellowship of the Royal Society. When in 1965 Patrick Blackett became President of the Royal Society, he encouraged Solly Zuckerman to sponsor Mountbatten as an FRS. This was no token gesture, but an acknowledgement by the nation’s top scientists that Mountbatten was more than just a gadget man – that the author of the definitive Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy was a genuine pioneer in his field.59 At Cambridge in 1919 Lieutenants Blackett and Mountbatten moved in dramatically different directions, but throughout their lives they always had the Royal Navy in common. Yet both men shared far more than wartime memories of the Grand Fleet, not least a sharp focus upon the practical application of scientific theory, a scepticism re deterrence theory and a deep suspicion of tactical nuclear weapons, and above all, an emotional engagement with India and a readiness to assist and enhance what they each conceived as a grand democratic experiment. The two men were close to Cripps during and after the war, and, as we saw in Chapter 1, in the build-up to Indian independence a mutual friendship with Nehru formed the basis of their own close relationship. An uncomfortable fact for Mountbatten was that Blackett’s dual roles as scientific advisor and military consultant from 1947 to 1972 (during which time he visited south Asia twelve times) meant his influence among India’s political and military elite was far greater than that of the former governor general. Indeed, as Blackett conceded in a 1967 interview, his advice prevailed over Mountbatten’s on defence issues, not least the need to avoid buying from Britain expensive and over-engineered ships and aircraft.60 Blackett’s advisory role transcended Nehru’s death in May 1964, whereas  –  as the British High Commission noted at the time  –  Mountbatten had minimal influence over Congress’s power brokers, not least Indira Gandhi.61 This was a painful lesson to learn, brought home to him when Gandhi ended the princely states’ surviving privileges in 1971 and declared a state of emergency four years later. Mountbatten’s protests over these and other perceived abuses of power generated polite replies and an emollient response whenever Indira Gandhi and her father’s old friend reminisced over the good old days in a London hotel or the Prime Minister’s bungalow.62

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Visits to India brought diminishing returns, but in most places around the world Lord Mountbatten was feted by heads of state and their supernumeraries, royal and aristocratic friends or relations, local dignitaries eager to impress and an array of casual acquaintances, old comrades and long-standing chums. He was, literally, royally entertained, the hospitality proving especially generous whenever Uncle Dickie represented Her Majesty at a grand occasion in Europe or further afield. Mountbatten’s retirement diaries are full of packed and eventful tours, society weddings, state funerals, grand opening ceremonies and commemorative reunions. The latter signalled genuine affection, not least among the lower deck of HMS Kelly and the holders of the Burma Star. Less sentimental were veterans of Dieppe, not least in Canada, where a healthy indifference to deference meant Mountbatten’s defence of the raid was increasingly called into question. As with India, Mountbatten countered criticism of his conduct by fair means or foul.63 Whether SEAC or Suez, partition or Polaris, he set out to make his version of events the definitive historical narrative. The assiduous acquisition of archival material, in whatever form, was an essential element in the process. He eschewed an official biography in his lifetime, but not the cultivation of sympathetic historians such as John Terraine and Richard Hough. In the final years of his life he anticipated Broadlands opening to the public as a repository of Battenburg/Mountbatten memorabilia, and as a monument to the home’s best known and most glamorous couple. In due course his wish would be fulfilled, but with the family papers housed in a more accommodating environment at the University of Southampton.64 For Mountbatten the process of myth-making was a lifelong project, and never more so than in the years following his retirement. John Brabourne was an invaluable ally, adroit in steering his father-in-law away from excess and embarrassment and invaluable in facilitating a domestic, and then an international, audience for his life story. Brabourne’s involvement with ABPC and Rediffusion led, through a succession of mergers, to his close involvement with Thames Television, from 1968 to 1992 ITV’s weekday station in London. In due course he became a director of the company, and then the chairman. Brabourne’s considerable influence, and the project’s commercial potential at home and abroad, ensured Thames’s support for The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten.65 This was a big budget, visually attractive series aimed at a prime-time audience. It was broadcast over twelve weeks across the ITV franchises early in 1969. The independent television stations were keen to match the BBC’s capacity to create ambitious and well-received series in the style of Sir Kenneth Clark’s much anticipated Civilisation: A Personal View. The two blockbusters were broadcast simultaneously, with Civilisation intended as a flagship programme for BBC2, hence its attracting a smaller audience. Masterminded by Brabourne, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten was essentially an independent production, witness the choice of Peter Morley as director. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and a lone operator in commercial television, but a man whose establishment credentials included a commission in the 8th Hussars and a BAFTA for his outside-broadcast coverage of Churchill’s funeral. In other words, Morley was exactly the sort of chap who could travel the world with Lord Louis, cater for his idiosyncrasies, keep him and the crew happy and complete the project on time and within budget.

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Equally inspired was the choice of John Terraine to work with Mountbatten in creating a credible script, which then formed the basis of a book.66 Terraine was a freelance historian and screenwriter capable of advancing controversial but scholarly views, not least regarding the quality of leadership on the Western Front (he debunked the ‘lions led by donkeys’ dismissal of Sir Douglas Haig and his fellow generals popularized by Alan Clark, son of Sir Kenneth). Although no longer employed by the BBC, Terraine had been co-screenwriter with Corelli Barnett for the ground-breaking 1964 series The Great War. Mountbatten trusted John Terraine, and he envisaged their working together in the future, reminding the world how time and again he had made the right call. For Terraine, Mountbatten had displayed a ‘curious mix of boastfulness and diffidence’, the latter trait an implicit acknowledgement that here was a formidable intellect indifferent to rank and reputation.67 For most of 1967 Peter Morley and his crew filmed Mountbatten in a succession of exotic settings, and John Terraine was invariably present. His job was made that much easier by the various VIPs who agreed to be interviewed, of whom the most unexpected was Lord Avon – Anthony Eden. Not so surprising was the Duke of Windsor, who in retirement Mountbatten saw frequently as a friend and as a royal intermediary. However, when compared to the twenty-six episodes of The World At War, which Thames commissioned in 1969, what’s striking is how many prominent figures from the recent past did not feature in Mountbatten’s story of his life (he of course appeared in both series).68 Thames’s decision to commission a multi-episode history of the Second World War was justified given the success of The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten. On balance reviewers liked it, and – sometimes through gritted teeth – they applauded Mountbatten’s performance. It is estimated that around 38  million people watched some or all of the series. Across the world around seventy countries screened the series. In America the Public Broadcasting Service picked the series up cheap when the big three TV channels showed no interest. Mountbatten had been the subject of a CBS special six years before, and he regularly appeared in documentaries about the Second World War; clearly schedulers in the States thought you could have too much of a good thing.69 Back in Britain, faithful viewers every Wednesday night included the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who attended a televised ‘Royal Preview’ at the Imperial War Museum on 19 December 1968, and in the New Year set aside every Wednesday night to view the entire series. Mountbatten joined the royal couple to watch the final episode, in which Prince Philip paid tribute to his uncle; he noted with pleasure how impressed ‘Lilibet’ was with the high standard of the production – and presumably also the viewing figures. Brabourne was no doubt relieved by the Queen’s delight in seeing Mountbatten portrayed in such a positive light as a more sensitive project, The Royal Family, was at an advanced stage of production; what would prove a ground-breaking documentary was largely his brainchild.70 John Terraine was never the easiest of men to deal with, often hyper-sensitive to criticism. Yet Mountbatten liked and trusted him, drawing on his literary talents when refuting Canadian criticism of the Dieppe debâcle.71 Terraine was reunited with Morley’s film crew at Broadlands for two weekends in May 1972: at Brabourne’s request they reconvened to shoot further footage. Once more Terraine provided a listening ear, but without the editorial discipline of four years earlier.72 Old men tend to forget,

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but they also tend to talk too much about the past, and too much about themselves. Mountbatten had always lacked the capacity to self-censor and hold back, but by the early 1970s he had become garrulous and self-mythologizing. He always had been, albeit to a lesser degree, but now he had one eye on posterity. This time the story had to be exactly right, unconstrained by shooting scripts, libel lawyers and the fear of offending friends and relatives. Mountbatten spent months preparing detailed prompt cards, in the process seeking endorsement of his actions from former colleagues, including even Eden.73 As recounted in Chapter 3, the interviews gained a public airing eight years later when BBC2 screened the posthumous six-part series Lord Mountbatten Remembers, introduced by a brusque but respectful Ludovic Kennedy. The controversy surrounding Suez was by no means unique. For example, Mountbatten’s reflections on SEAC generated a flurry of complaints. Stephen Roskill, official historian of the war at sea, readily supported those former colleagues and their families indignant over Mountbatten’s version of events.74 A cautious BBC’s second channel screening of Lord Mountbatten Remembers contrasted sharply with the prime-time celebration of Mountbatten’s life staged only two years before: at Brabourne’s instigation ITV screened an exceptionally elaborate, extravagant and expensive episode of This Is Your Life. The long-running series and its presenter, Eamonn Andrews, had transferred from the BBC, and in April 1977 the Thames production team assembled ageing Hollywood stars, Kelly survivors, Burma veterans, family members scattered far and wide, and Dame Vera Lynn to narrate a now familiar story, heavy on wartime nostalgia and light on controversy. This was the programme’s first hour-long transmission, and it required extraordinarily complex planning, as detailed by the principal protagonists on a dedicated website  –  most definitely one for the aficionados.75 John Terraine had no hand in shaping Eamonn Andrews’s big red book, but back in the spring of 1970 he had scripted a Variety Club presentation to his de facto patron. Mountbatten received a rare accolade, the Humanitarian Award, at a grand and glitzy occasion in Puerto Rico where old chums from Hollywood and Denham heaped praise on him as a fund-raiser extraordinaire. Introducing Rocky Wilkins, the Kelly’s keeper of the flame, to Cary Grant and ‘Johnny’ Mills, while at the same time encouraging Mike Frankovich – fresh from masterminding that year’s Oscars – to book Leonard Bernstein for a benefit concert at the Albert Hall, was a classic Mountbatten scenario. Yet it paled into comparison with the quasi-state banquet Richard Nixon held at the White House five months later, where the guest of honour resisted all pleas for brevity, extolling at length the virtues of a cause for which he became almost obsessional in his fund-raising activities on both sides of the Atlantic: United World Colleges. (The President’s readiness to agree with everything his guest said made the Watergate revelations that much more astonishing, but in the final analysis Mountbatten found Nixon’s behaviour ‘unforgiveable’, declaring him to be to be ‘a real crook.’)76 Mountbatten was President of UWC from 1967 to 1978, during which time the original Atlantic College was joined by partner institutions in Canada and Singapore. Today United World Colleges is a global network, while still subscribing to the educational principles of its creator, Kurt Hahn, best known as the founder of Gordonstoun School. Ironically, in the light of the heir to the throne’s unhappy

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experience at Gordonstoun, Prince Charles succeeded Mountbatten as the keeper of Hahn’s legacy. The upkeep of Atlantic College, established at St Donat’s Castle on the Welsh side of the Severn estuary in 1962, and the considerable cost of the scholarship scheme  –  intended to support 70 per cent of the students  –  demanded a ceaseless search for generous patrons. From the outset Atlantic College had close connections with thinking members of the military establishment, and John Brabourne pointed his father-in-law in the school’s direction. Mountbatten was an obvious choice to chair the college council, and to promote a genuinely cross-border, post-colonial initiative. Like Peter Morley, Hahn had fled Nazi Germany, embracing the religion of his adopted home; but there the similarities ended – the older man was a serial school founder, his stern principles as an educationalist rooted in Plato and nineteenth-century German ideas concerning exercise and the cultivated health of both mind and body. Mountbatten shared Hahn’s energy and enterprise, his educational philosophy rooted in physical and mental toughness, his internationalism and his determination to see bright boys and girls fulfil their potential, whatever their personal circumstances. An instinctive meritocrat, at a time when, for all Michael Young’s forebodings, meritocracy was championed as the solution to everything from economic inertia to world peace, Mountbatten devoted a decade to promoting UWC. No one was too grand that they could not be asked to support Hahn’s global endeavour – and then to make out a second cheque in support of the Variety Club.77 Bernard Fergusson, Chindit half-colonel and Combined Ops chronicler, colourfully described the irresistible charm: ‘I have always claimed for Lord Mountbatten that if he put his mind to it he could charm a vulture off a carcass.’78 Year on year from 1965 through to the summer of 1979 Mountbatten’s diary was packed with events, formal and informal. He lived an extraordinarily crowded – and, let’s be honest, pampered – life. It’s little wonder that he travelled so much given that everything was done for him, whether organizing super-executive travel or facilitating en-suite accommodation literally fit for a king. The Broadlands’ support staff were dedicated and devoted, always sensitive to Mountbatten’s idiosyncrasies and strict routines, and his fearsome attention to detail. The same was true at Classiebawn, despite the castle being free for family use only in August, after the estate was leased out in 1976 (having failed to generate a profit year on year since Edwina’s death). Whether Romsey, Belgravia or Mullaghmore, Mountbatten’s guests and extended family enjoyed the same level of loyalty, service and support.79 The Mountbatten archives in Southampton contain voluminous correspondence related to retirement activities. No charity or association was too humble or too banal to support, and no enterprise too small to open – or to inspect: in 1971 Cecil Beaton was furious when accused of improperly displaying Edwina’s dresses at his one-man Victoria and Albert exhibition, Fashion.80 Five years earlier, although applauding Mountbatten as a man who like Beaton could effortlessly put on a show, the American Ambassador was appalled by his outrageous display of vanity.81 The closer to home the greater the pleasure in lending name and patronage  –  as listed in Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight have countless buildings, roads and institutions named after Lord or Lady Mountbatten, many of which predated 27  August 1979.82 Of all Mountbatten’s many titles and ceremonial responsibilities,

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the two most prized were his royal appointment as Lord-Lieutenant of the Isle of Wight and his colonelcy of the Life Guards. Both roles were taken very seriously, with frequent crossings of the Solent, and a starring role every second Saturday in June at the Trooping of the Colour. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was never allowed to forget that an admiral of the fleet remains a serving officer for life.

The unexpected end – final thoughts Too often Mountbatten in retirement is portrayed as a somewhat pathetic figure.83 Nothing could be further from the truth, or at least until the last years of his life. What’s striking is the continuity. Surveying his career, successive commentators have recognized a ruthless ambition, a refusal to play by the rules and an insecurity in the light of his German ancestry and Prince Louis’s enforced resignation as First Sea Lord. Time and again supreme self-confidence is seen as triumphing over subliminal self-doubt, not least the recognition that both Edwina and his elder brother boasted sharper minds.84 All these aspects of Mountbatten’s personality have of course been seized on by his fiercest critics, none more so than Andrew Roberts and A. N. Wilson.85 Andrew Lownie rightly rolled these character traits on into Mountbatten’s later years: ‘Having achieved his lifetime’s ambitions, even when he retired, he was driven partly by a strong sense of public duty and noblesse oblige, partly by loneliness and a need to keep himself busy and wanted.’86 The key word here is ‘wanted’, and what pained Mountbatten in his eighth decade was that he remained well known – how could he not given his frequent appearances in camera shot of the Queen? – but demonstrably he was no longer a player. For all the occasional word in the minister’s ear at a reception or royal occasion, telephone calls were rarely returned, and advice invariably ignored. By the 1970s the world had moved on, and Dickie Mountbatten was no longer one of the most powerful figures in the British state apparatus. Tony Benn was not alone in presuming that the nation’s most distinguished, most decorated former chief of staff had scarcely anything left to say regarding the great matters of state. Yet, in tandem with Solly Zuckerman, Mountbatten still had a great deal to say when it came to nuclear proliferation and escalation. The irony is that these very real fears for the future only gained traction after his death when the European disarmament movement revived in response to NATO’s deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles – that irony was compounded by Zuckerman’s obvious discomfort at the elevation of the former CDS into an icon of unilateralism.87 The grey-haired patrician in full-dress uniform on the balcony of Buckingham Palace appeared an anachronism, but his enthusiasm for engaging with the wider world had scarcely diminished. In reality, Hampshire now formed the epicentre of his events diary. Like his nephew, ‘Lord Louis’ could prick the bubble of pomposity (irony of ironies), roll back the barrier of ingrained deference and foster a more relaxed atmosphere. He retained the nous and knowledge to ask the right questions – a skill passed on to Prince Philip. Too often for those in close proximity the effect was undermined by an act or expression of shocking conceit, but then that was the story of his life in uniform: loathed or distrusted in the wardroom, and yet loved on the

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lower deck. But, as we’ve seen, by no means everyone who worked for or alongside Mountbatten ended up wary and hostile. He could inspire deep personal loyalty, even affection, although usually if the person in question boasted deep reserves of patience and good humour. Just occasionally the strength of the relationship rested on mutual respect of the highest order, with obvious examples in Charles Lambe, Bill Slim, Pandit Nehru and John Brabourne (whose wife, Patricia, deserves a category all her own). In private Mountbatten deferred to few other than Edwina and his sovereign (creeping senility shredded any lingering warmth towards Churchill).88 Over time circumstance and intent drove the overlapping and the interaction of extended and immediate family circles, with Uncle Dickie a residual if no longer formidable presence at the heart of the Royal Family. Informal cross-generational ties between the Windsors and the Knatchbulls and Hicks had strengthened across the years, to Mountbatten’s great pleasure and satisfaction. ‘Mountbatten’ had not supplanted ‘Windsor’ in the royal nomenclature, nor had it as yet become a fixed adjunct, but the Battenbergs’ centrality to whatever constituted a court in the final quarter of the last century was assured; as were familial links to Mountbatten’s siblings: he would have been delighted to see that the select group of mourners at his nephew’s interment included the Head of the House of Hesse and the Princes of Baden and Hohenloe-Brandenburg, as well as the present Countess Mountbatten. Prince Philip’s funeral was in many respects the realization of an obsessive genealogist’s dynastic fantasies.89 Family was everything to Mountbatten in old age. His role as an active and caring grandfather was never more evident than in the summers spent in County Sligo at Classiebawn Castle. Here at last was someone at ease with himself, in the twilight years of a crowded, eventful, often restless life. Yet could a man like Mountbatten ever feel wholly content? Was there always one more argument to address, one more charge to contest? Clearly, maintaining the narrative was a lifelong mission, and yet family photographs, film and memories suggest a satisfied mind.90 Then suddenly, in Mullaghmore harbour on the morning of 27 August 1979, it was all over. Twenty-one others died that day, wreaking havoc on the Knatchbull family, and on the friends and families of the eighteen British soldiers killed at Warrenpoint. As has been said so many times, Earl Mountbatten of Burma died not because of what he believed, but because of who he was. This so-called ‘legitimate target’ was the advocate if not the architect of post-war decolonization, the cruel irony compounded by his belief in bringing about an island of Ireland sooner not later.91 Mountbatten’s experience with Aung San had convinced him that at some point armed nationalists must be brought in from the cold. Tragically for him and his family militant Republicans were still twenty years distance from the negotiating table. In April 2021 Sinn Féin’s President, Mary Lou McDonald, described Mountbatten’s murder as ‘heart breaking’. While Sinn Féin held back from a formal apology, McDonald did feel able to say ‘sorry’. However qualified the party leader’s remarks, they carried more substance than her predecessor’s grudging expressions of regret: Gerry Adams encouraged the assumption that an autonomous active service unit of the Provisional IRA had exploited lax security to assassinate someone for whom the crude label of colonial oppressor was singularly inappropriate. The security forces both sides of the border

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continue to believe otherwise. They certainly thought so at the time: MI5’s concern over Mountbatten’s safety repeatedly clashed with a stubborn belief that sufficient measures were already in place to protect his life when staying in Sligo – demonstrably, they were not.92 Back in 1985 Philip Ziegler asked if Mountbatten was a great man.93 Ziegler concluded that, for all his flaws, he probably was. Forty years later any consideration of ‘greatness’ is problematic, especially when applied to a white mid-century male aristocrat with a strong predilection for self-aggrandizement. In the years following publication of the official biography a succession of revelations, not least concerning Mountbatten’s viceroyship, saw Ziegler less forgiving of the flaws. Andrew Lownie’s intimate biography of Dickie and Edwina almost certainly told Ziegler nothing that he didn’t know already  –  writing an authorized biography necessitates a degree of discretion, albeit ensuring self-censorship never compromises authorial integrity. This volume, unlike its predecessor, has focused almost solely on Mountbatten’s public persona, albeit still acknowledging the interface of public and private (most obviously, the influence of Edwina, his eldest daughter and his favourite son-in-law, while not ignoring female confidants like old flame Yola Letellier and SEAC infatuation Janey Lindsay). Deciding whether Earl Mountbatten was or was not great is an irrelevancy. As, arguably, is the question of whether he was or wasn’t a force for good. An assessment of Mountbatten’s career is clearly not an either/or, zero-sum game.

Figure 16  Filming of the Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten: Lord Mountbatten riding for camera on the beach at Classiebawn, Co. Sligo, with his daughters Lady Pamela Hicks and Lady Brabourne, late 1968

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Britain’s still best-known Chief of the Defence Staff is surely the definitive case study of mid-twentieth-century civil-military relations. Over four decades Mountbatten clearly had a huge presence in British public life, and he was a genuinely unique figure. It’s hard to identify any member of the armed forces since the Duke of Wellington who for good or ill exercised so much influence – and in specific instances real power  –  in so many different fields of policymaking. To put it crudely, he was consistently at the heart of the action; and he passed the acid test in that he left a legacy: the modern MOD, a nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarine fleet, and an independent India and Pakistan. Of that list, two perhaps even all three of his supposed achievements are wreathed in controversy. Equally contentious is Mountbatten’s role in the Dieppe raid, his contribution to SEAC’s eventual triumph and his captaincy of the Kelly – did any man ever so adroitly, and so ruthlessly, over-ride challenges to his record and his reputation? It’s easy to be appalled by a man like Mountbatten, and yet when researching his life there are those moments, like his hands-on support for freed POWs and his yearly letters to the families of those who lost their lives on the Kelly, when humanity and humanitarianism come together in a demonstrably sincere fashion. The vanity and ambition seemed overarching, and yet there was a warmth and decency which, if near tested to destruction in his final years, nevertheless still shone through. No of course Mountbatten wasn’t a great man, but for all his many faults and flaws he was a remarkable man. Narratives of Britain across the post-war decades are inconceivable without placing centre stage the person who portrayed the partition of India as a triumph while lamenting the outcome, who masterminded an invasion of Egypt while opposing its objective, who facilitated a submarine-based deterrent while bemoaning nuclear proliferation, and who promoted a functionalist, inter-service model of defence management while safeguarding the interests of the Royal Navy. Were these wholly unprincipled actions or a strangely paradoxical demonstration of the public servant’s capacity to reconcile policy implementation and personal belief? They are perhaps both, and as such the career of Earl Mountbatten offers a unique insight into the working of the British state at the moment of its greatest challenge, and in the ensuing years of accommodation to harsh geopolitical reality.

Notes Introduction Andrew Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves (London: Blink Publishing, 2019), and The Crown, series 1–4 (Peter Morgan, Left Bank Pictures/Sony Television Pictures, UK/USA, 2016–20). 2 Other actors to play Mountbatten on screen include Nicol Williamson, Christopher Owen, Peter Harlowe (twice) and James Fox – the last two in respective biopics of Gandhi and Jinnah. ­3 Viceroy’s House (Gurinder Chada, Pathé UK et al, UK/USA, 2017). Re the film’s flaws, see Chapter 1. Note that throughout the book place names, including countries, are given as at the time of reference. 4 For example, the inflated claims Mountbatten made regarding his supreme command of South-East Asia which producer Jeremy Isaacs excluded from Thames Television’s 1974 The World at War documentary series: Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten contributions re SEAC 1943–6 in Richard Holmes, ed., The World At War The Landmark Oral History from the Unpublished Archives (London: Ebury Press, 2007), 498, 588–9, 591, 611 and 612. 5 ‘the imperial undertaker who never wore black’: David Cannadine, ‘Lord Mountbatten’, in David Cannadine, The Pleasures of the Past (London: Fontana, 1990), 67. 6 Henry Fairlie, ‘Political Commentary’, Spectator, 23 September 1955. 7 Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass Britain and its Monarchy (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1988), pbk. edn., 10 and 243. 8 Cannadine, ‘Lord Mountbatten’, 66. 9 ‘The Day Mountbatten Died’, 19 August 2019, BBC2 (Sam Collyns, BBC NI, UK, 2019). 10 Christopher Clark, Prisoners of Time Prussians, Germans and Other Humans (London: Allen Lane, 2021), 5. 11 Clark, Prisoners of Time, 6. 12 Ronald Lewin, Slim The Standardbearer A Biography of Field Marsh the Viscount Slim (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1999), pbk. edn., 246, and Admiral Lord Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten Supreme Allied Commander South-East Asia, 1943–1946, ed. Philip Ziegler (London: Collins, 1988), 24 and 25 July 1945, 231. 13 Andrew Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, in Eminent Churchillians (London: Phoenix, 1995), 55–136, Nigel Hamilton, The Full Monty Volume I: Montgomery of Alamein, 1887–1942 (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2001) and Brian Loring Villa, Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid (Ontario: Oxford University Press Canada, 1989). ­14 Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission With Mountbatten (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), pbk. edn. [first published 1951], and John Terraine, The Life and Times of 1

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Lord Mountbatten An Illustrated Biography Based on the Television History (London: Hutchinson, 1968). 15 See Chapter 1. 16 On the mystery that always surrounded Peter Murphy, and his multiple roles in Mountbatten’s private and public lives, see Adrian Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 73–4. Lord Mountbatten Remembers, ‘Relationships’, episode 6 (Ronald Webster, BBC, UK, 1980). Re Mountbatten’s 1972 video recordings, see Conclusion. 17 Report of Russell Page, Political Warfare Executive (POE) representative SEAC, in Robert Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two 1939–1965, ed. Kenneth Young (London: Macmillan, 1980), 27 March 1945, 411. 18 Lord [Solly] Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles An Autobiography 1946–1988 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), and ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten’, in Lord Zuckerman (ed.), Six Men Out of the Ordinary (London: Peter Owen, 1992), 131–68. 19 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord; republished in paperback by Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 20 My thanks to Andrew Lownie for his kind words, in print and in person. I have had no involvement in Dr Lownie’s ongoing legal dispute with the University of Southampton and the Cabinet Office re access to Mountbatten documents and diaries not in the public domain. Thank you as always to Karen Robson and her colleagues in the University Library’s Special Collections for their assistance and advice re accessing the Broadlands Archives, including the Mountbatten papers. 21 Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten The Official Biography (London: Collins, 1985). For a discussion of literature re Mountbatten, including biographies prior to The Mountbattens, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 8–26. 22 Ziegler drew heavily on Christopher Thorne’s pioneering (‘formidable’) study of Anglo-American wartime relations in the Far East, not least its overview of SEAC’s creation, prevailing trans-Atlantic tensions, and the challenges facing Mountbatten in the autumn and winter of 1943–4: Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind The United States, Britain and the war against Japan, 1941–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 297–302 and 332–9. 23 Max Hastings, Nemesis The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (London: William Collins, 2016), pbk. edn., 63–70. David Fraser, Alanbrooke (London: Harper Collins, 1997), pbk. edn, 352–60 and 465–6, Lewin, Slim The Standardbearer, 188, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 260–7 and 276–7. 24 When especially exasperated the CIGS saw Mountbatten as, ‘quite irresponsible, suffers from the most desperate illogical brain, always produces red herrings’ and, ‘a constant source of trouble to us and will never really fit the bill as Supreme Commander’: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945, eds Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), 8 January 1943 and 31 May 1944, 357 and 552. 25 Over the following twelve months Mountbatten surely regretted that his capacity to charm Madame Chiang helped save Stilwell from dismissal as her husband’s military adviser in October 1943. Rana Mitter, China’s War With Japan 1937–1945 The Struggle for Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 304–5, 319–20 and 343. 26 Robert Lyman, Slim, Master of War Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare (London: Constable, 2004), 159–60 and 201–3, and Field Marshal Sir William Slim, Defeat Into Victory (London: Cassell, 1956), 444. 27 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 230–6.

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28 For example, Brooke found Mountbatten’s turf wars with his fellow admirals especially annoying, and a clash over the appointment of Pownall’s successor saw the CIGS despatch a succession of testy telegrams: Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945, 21 June 1944 and 8 August 1945, 561 and 715–6, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 286–7. In its first two months SEAC HQ grew to 4,700 staff, and it was around double that figure after moving from New Delhi to Kandy. Mountbatten congratulated himself on keeping the numbers low! Lownie, The Mountbattens, 154 and 159, and Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 16 April 1944, 99–100. 29 Slim, Defeat Into Victory, 36–7, 180–2 and 192. Slim linked visible evidence of high morale to countering ‘malicious’ American criticism in Washington and Chunking of the ‘excellent’ Indian troops under his command: Lieutenant-General W.J. Slim to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, 19 September 1944, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ C247C. Mountbatten’s capacity for languages meant he could communicate, albeit very simply, in Urdu. 30 Slim, Defeat Into Victory, 189–90, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 356–7 and Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 14–17 January 1943, 57–8. Noel Coward and Russell Page (PWE SEAC) testimonies to Mountbatten’s popularity in the ranks: Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two 1939–1965, 18 September 1944 and 27 March 1945, 354 and 411. 31 Orchestrated by Wardell, on his return from Potsdam Mountbatten spoke at the Mansion House, liaised with the BBC, and briefed editors and special correspondents (‘I was able to enlarge on our policy in Burma, which [unsurprisingly] was very well received.’): Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two 1939–1965, 10 August 1945, 487 and Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 9 August 1945, 236. Wardell made similar arrangements for Slim on leave in London: General Sir William Slim to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, 14 July 1945, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ C247C. 32 Eric Hitchcock, Making Waves: Admiral Mountbatten’s Radio SEAC 1945–1949 (Warwick: Helion, 2014), and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 258. 33 Slim, Defeat Into Victory, 28–7 and 177–80, Lyman, Slim, Master of War, 138–45, 140–4 and 126 and Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 22 October 1943, 19–20. 34 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 345–6. Equally contentious was the Supreme Commander’s commissioned documentary Burma Victory (Roy Boulting, British Army Film Unit, UK, 1946), which Cunningham said made him feel ‘physically sick’ when he saw Mountbatten and Slim ‘doing film-star work’: Admiral Sir John Cunningham quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 255. 35 Lyman, Slim, Master of War, 255–9, Lewin, Slim The Standardbearer, 237–45 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 293–5: all three accounts give Mountbatten the benefit of the doubt, unsurprisingly given his input to Lewin’s original 1976 edition. Slim made no mention of the incident in Defeat Into Victory. 36 Postwar Slim-Mountbatten correspondence held in files MB1E60A and MB1/J411, Mountbatten papers. Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Ronald Lewin, 6 May 1975, and testimony of Lady Slim, quoted in Lewin, Slim The Standardbearer, 129 and 128. 37 Ibid., 204–5. 38 Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–45, 8 September 1943, and postwar commentary, 451. Re Ismay, see Chapter 1.

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39 Sir Henry Pownall, Chief of Staff The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall Volume Two 1940–1944, ed., Brian Bond (London: Leo Cooper, 1974), 14 September and 17 October 1943, 108–9 and 110–3, and Brian Bond, ‘Introduction’, ibid., xiv. 40 Janet Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten A Life of Her Own (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 479–80. 41 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 309–10, and Lownie, The Mountbattens, 181–2; Vincent Porter, ‘Knatchbull, John Ulick, seventh Baron Brabourne of Brabourne [known as John Brabourne] (1924–2005)’, 2011, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/96042. 42 Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 11–12 December 1943, 118. 43 ‘I cannot tell you how much I am going to miss Wingate … he was such a fireeater … I loved his wild enthusiasm’ and ‘I can testify that I have found you both easy and helpful in all matters which I raised direct with you’: Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten to Lady Mountbatten and to General Joseph Stilwell, 2 April and 7 August 1944, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 276 and 285. 44 Pownall, Chief of Staff, 17 October 1943, 111–3. 45 Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 13–14 July 1945, 223–4. ‘The Americans … are seeking not only to belittle the efforts which we have hitherto made in that theatre of war, but also to keep us in a humiliating and subsidiary role in the future.’: John Sterndale Bennett, Head of the Far Eastern Department, Foreign Office, [?] 1945, quoted in Hastings, Nemesis, 468. For a contrary view – that MacArthur was sincere in informing British colleagues of his goodwill towards the British Empire, and readiness to incorporate British forces – see Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 649–50. 46 Ibid., 24–5 July 1945, 229–33. 47 On MacArthur’s clash with Mountbatten, August 1945, see Hastings, Nemesis, 582–3. 48 Re the eccentric scientist Geoffrey Pyke, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 276–86. Slim was less generous towards Wingate and Stilwell: post-war correspondence reveals how well he disguised his poor opinion of them. Lewin, Slim The Standardbearer, 141–4. 49 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 179–81. 50 Ibid, 48–52 and 196–214, and Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005), pbk. edn., 419–22. 51 Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 23–28 January and 29 January–1 February 1946, 288–9, Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 207–8 and John Springhall, ‘Mountbatten Versus the Generals: British Military Rule of Singapore, 1945–46’, Journal of Contemporary History, 34, no. 4 (2001): 335–52. 52 As well as the C-in-C, four corps and division commanders in the Fourteenth Army were drawn from Gurkha regiments, including the 17th Division’s formidable ‘Punch’ Cowan – the general and his Indian Army veterans were seen by Mountbatten and Slim as the best of the best, and pushed to the limit: Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 2 July 1944, 118, and Lewin, Slim The Standardbearer, 223–4. 53 Louis Allen, The End of the War in Asia (London: Hart Davis, MacGibbon, 1976), 124–5, Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, 27 September 1945, Mountbatten papers, MB1/C10/5, and Peter Dennis, Troubled

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Days of Peace Mountbatten and South East Asia Command, 1945–46 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 172–7. For an argument that all parties on the British side wanted to see France permanently reinstated in Vietnam, see John Springhall, ‘Kicking out the Viet Minh: How Britain allowed France to Reoccupy South Indochina’, Journal of Contemporary History, 40, no. 1 (2005): 115–30. 54 F.S.V. Donnison, British Military Administration in the Far East 1943–46 (London: HMSO, 1956), 408–9. In contrast to the official account: Vice-Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Post Surrender Tasks Section E of the Report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff by the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia 1943–1945 (London: HMSO, 1968), para. 26, 287. Keen for his prescience re the strength of nationalist sentiment to be recognized, Mountbatten eventually secured publication of his 1946 report’s final section, withheld when the previous four sections entered the public domain in 1951. 55 ‘Boy’ Browning, COS SEAC, previously GOC 1 Airborne Corps and dismissed by Ismay as being, ‘as wild and disorganised as Mountbatten himself ’: Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two 1939–1965, 21 February 1946, 527. Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, 19 September 1945, Mountbatten papers, MB1/C158/6, and Adrian Smith, ‘The Free Frenchman’, History Today, August 2019, 43–7. 56 In despatches, if not in direct negotiation, Mountbatten was too eager to accommodate and to take the heat out of any disagreement with the stern and distant Leclerc and with d’Argenlieu, an old family acquaintance from early in the war: see the Supreme Commander’s correspondence with General Philippe Leclerc and Admiral Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, August 1945–May 1946, Mountbatten papers, MB1/C158 and MB1/C10/1. 57 Mountbatten increasingly found himself closer to Washington’s position on the DEI than that of Bevin and Attlee, both uneasy over advice accepted in September 1945 by a civil authority ready to negotiate with Sukarno, and which the Dutch Government repudiated. From then on ministers in The Hague and officials in Batavia were equally intransigent, and resistant to a SEAC offer of enhanced policing if they offered Sukarno and his supporters dominion status: Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 10 October and 6 December 1945, 259 and 268, Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 612–4 and 681–3 and Allen, The End of the War in Asia, 94. 58 As many as 130,000 Dutch civilians were interned in the DEI in appalling conditions, and upon their release they had found Japanese troops keeping order. 59 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 302–3, and Slim, Defeat Into Victory, 533–4 and 537–8. 60 Other senior American officers in SEAC were seen as supportive, but the Foreign Office complained of a hostile propaganda campaign emanating out of Washington: Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 590–1. 61 Ibid., 588–9 and 621–33. On Wedemeyer’s relationship with Mountbatten before and after his appointment as SEAC DCOS, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 195 and 200, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 285. ‘In my speech I said that could not believe Eisenhower or MacArthur had an Englishman who meant so much, or had been of such loyal help, as Al Wedemeyer had been to me …’: Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 26–30 October 1944, 148. 62 ‘Wedemeyer was supposed to be pro-British. Dicky Mountbatten had fallen completely for him. Yet he had proved himself a snake in the grass …’: General Sir

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William Slim quoted in Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two 1939–1965, 10 April 1946, 542. 63 Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 606–12, Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 399–401, 428–34 and 442–3, Slim, Defeat Into Victory, 484–5 and 515–20 and Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 17–21 July 1945, 227. 64 On Dorman-Smith and the Burma Civil Affairs Service at first begrudgingly backing down in the face of the Supreme Commander’s insistence on their accommodating Aung San and the BNA and accepting future dominion status for Burma, see Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis ­Mountbatten, 16 June and 15 and 17–21 July 1945, 215–6 and 226–7, Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 445–6 and Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 611–2; S. R. Ashton, ‘Mountbatten, the royal family, and British influence in post-independence India and Burma’, Journal of Imperial and Colonial History, 33, no. 1 (2005): 80–2. For the view that Dorman-Smith was in due course shabbily treated by Mountbatten and his political masters, see Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 684–5, and Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, 76–8. 65 ‘I could not help getting a certain thrill … that it had fallen to me to be the outward and visible symbol of the British Empire’s intention to return to the attack in Asia and regain our lost Empire.’ Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 6 October 1943, 6. 66 On Driberg’s relationship with Mountbatten, with its distinct homo-erotic undertones, see Francis Wheen, Tom Driberg His Life and Indiscretions (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), 211–5; and on his experience at SEAC see ibid., 215–21, and Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 213–23. For Driberg’s view of his relationship with Mountbatten, not least its relevance to Beaverbrook’s acquired hostility towards both men, see ibid., 223–7. 67 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 336, Fraser, Alanbrooke, 480–1 and Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 188. 68 Ibid., 190. Deployment of Indian troops in the DEI was constrained by Auchinleck’s insistence that potentially ‘grave political repercussions’ at home rendered their use against Indonesian nationalists out of the question: General Sir Claude Auchinleck to Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, [?] September 1945, quoted in Allen, The End of the War in Asia, 86. 69 Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 22 January 1944 and 17–22 March 1946, 58 and 303–5.

Chapter 1 1

2

The most focused, most detailed account of the last Viceroy’s tenure remains Ziegler, Mountbatten, chapters 28–37. Detailed but dry as dust is R.J. Moore, ‘Mountbatten, India, and Commonwealth’, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 19, no. 1 (1981): 5–43. There is also, of course, the Viceroy’s own version of events, published fifty-four years after its circulation in Whitehall and – to Attlee’s displeasure – among former staff members as well as the King: Rear-Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Mountbatten’s Report on the Last Viceroyalty 22 March-15 August 1947, ed. Lionel Carter (New Delhi: Monohar, 2003). Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, 78–132, Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford

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University Press, 2006), Perry Anderson, ‘Why Partition?’, London Review of Books, 19 July 2012, 11–9, and Professor Miles Taylor interviewed in Lord Mountbatten Hero or Villain? (Jane Hosking, Sarah-Jane Cohen and Ian Rumsey, Channel 5/ITN Productions, UK, 2020). H. V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain – India – Pakistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), and Rakesh Ankit, ‘Mountbatten and India, 1964–79: after Nehru’, Contemporary British History (2021), www.doi.org/10.1080 /13619462.2021.1944113, 5–6. Other hostile assessments of Mountbatten’s tenure as Viceroy, focused upon his presumed character flaws, include Leonard Moseley, The Last Days of the British Raj (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961) and Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (London: Routledge, 1997): Moseley previously worked for Express Newspapers so his hostility was predictable, whereas Akbar Ahmed is a highly distinguished academic-diplomat whose critique of the Viceroy’s relationship with Jinnah was rooted in scholarship not crude prejudice. 3 For example, ibid., and Muhammad Iqbal Chawla, ‘The Radcliffe Award of August 1947: A Reappraisal with a Focus on the Role of Viceroy Mountbatten in its Deliberation and Implementation’, FWU Journal of Social Sciences, 12, no. 1 (2018): 172–9. Chawla provides a comprehensive bibliography of Pakistan literature hostile to Mountbatten. 4 Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Game The Untold Story of India’s Partition (London: Constable, 2006). 5 Shashi Tharpoor, Inglorious Empire What the British Did to India (London: Penguin, 2016), pbk. edn., 146–8, and Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2017), pbk. edn., 7, when quoting Mountbatten in June 1947 on the value of violence in Gurgaon for concentrating minds re his partition plan. 6 Similarly, a continuity of British malpractice and malevolence from first contact to final departure is the theme of Walter Reid, Keeping the Jewel in the Crown: the British Betrayal of India (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2016). 7 ‘Viceroy’s House’, IMBb, [?] 2018, www.imdb.com/title/tt4977530/. 8 Philip Ziegler, ‘Mountbatten Revisited’, in More Adventures with Britannia Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain, ed. Wm. Robert Louis (Austin/London: University of Texas Press/I.B. Tauris, 1998), pbk. edn., 194–6. 9 Richard Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), 225 and 229–30, and Richard Hough, Edwina Countess Mountbatten of Burma (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), 186–97. 10 Vice Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, The Princely Sailor Mountbatten of Burma (London: Brassey's, 1999), 185–7. 11 Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten, 382–432. 12 Brian Hoey, Mountbatten The Private Story (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994), 187–207. 13 Lownie, The Mountbattens,189–241. 14 Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer The Secret History of the End of an Empire (London: Simon Schuster, 2007), and Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Path to Independence and Division (London: HarperCollins, 1997). 15 Ibid., 287–8. 16 Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, pbk. edn.: first published by Robert Hale in 1951, and reissued with a ­foreword by Earl Mountbatten of Burma in 1972. 17 Alan Campbell-Johnson, ‘Mountbatten: the Triple Assignment, 19421–1948. A Recorder’s Reflections’, in Mountbatten On The Record, ed. C. M. Woolgar

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(Southampton: University of Southampton, 1997), pbk. edn., 14, and quoted in French, Liberty or Death, 286. 18 In 1972–3 Mountbatten provided the authors with full access to his archive, and was interviewed fifteen times, totalling over thirty hours of conversation: Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight How Britain Gave Away an Empire (London: William Collins, 1975), 469. For a contemporary review insisting that, for all their numerous interviews, Collins and Lapierre relied excessively on Mountbatten’s fading or false recollection of events, see Jayantunuja Bandyopadhyaya, ‘Review of Freedom at Midnight’, India Quarterly, 33, no. 3 (1977): 344–9. 19 French, Liberty or Death, 287. 20 Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945, 7–8 August 1945, 715–6. 21 John Colville, The Fringes of Power Downing Street Diaries 1939–1945 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), 612–3, and Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 7–12 August 1943, 235–7. Peter Murphy, anticipating a change of government, made sure Mountbatten was properly briefed re the Labour leadership before returning home: Ziegler, Mountbatten, 298–9. 22 Clement Attlee, ‘Churchill on Balance’ in Churchill A Profile, ed. Peter Stansky (London: Macmillan, 1973), 188–90. On Churchill’s conception of the COSC, in theory and in practice, see Alex Danchev, ‘Waltzing with Winston: Civil-Military Relations in Britain in the Second World War’, in Government and the Armed Forces in Britain 1856–1990, ed. Paul Smith (London: The Hambledon Press, 1996), 191–216. 23 Lewin, Slim The Standardbearer, 260 and 264. Slim similarly admired Attlee’s ‘modesty, his dignity and his simple straightforwardness free of all bombast’: Field Marshal Lord Slim quoted in John Bew, Citizen Clem A Biography of Attlee (London: Riverrun, 2016), 557–8; 422. ­24 Ibid., 421–4, and Sean Greenwood, Britain and the Cold War 1945–91 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pbk. edn., 33–7. 25 Lord Wavell, Wavell The Viceroy’s Journal, ed. Penderel Moon (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 24 December 1946, 399. 26 Wm. Roger Louis, In The Name of God Go! Leo Amery and the British Empire in the Age of Churchill (New York: Norton, 1992), 168–70, R. J. Moore, Churchill, Cripps, and India 1939–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 138–9 and Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible The Memoirs of Lord Butler (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), 104; McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 158–9. 27 Leo Amery told his son Julian that Mountbatten was never high on Churchill’s list of candidates: Lownie, The Mountbattens, 191. 28 Vice-Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Lady Edwina Mountbatten, 15 or 16 April 1945, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 346. 29 Moore, Churchill, Cripps, and India 1939–1945, 138–42. 30 ICS officials and Indian Police officers planned an early return to Britain, with recruitment of their replacements suspended: Khan, The Great Partition, 14 and 28, and Nicholas Owen, ‘War and Britain’s Political Crisis in India’, in What Difference Did The War Make?, eds Brian Brivati and Harriet Jones (London: Leicester University Press, 1993), pbk. edn., 123. 31 Ibid., 116–7, Yasmin Khan, The Raj at War A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015), 180–6 and 216–9, and Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 253–8, 322–7, 371–4, 377–8 and 401–2.

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32 Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party in early 1939 for urging participation in a British Popular Front, which would include the Communist Party. He was readmitted in time to become President of the Board of Trade in July 1945. 33 Re Cripps’s mid-war popularity, see Steven Fielding, ‘The Second World War and Popular Radicalism: The Significance of the “Movement away from Party”’, History, 80, no. 258 (1995): 38–58. 34 Re the Cripps mission, see Peter Clarke, The Cripps ­Version The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps 1989–1952 (London: Penguin, 2003), pbk. edn., 276–354, and Moore, Churchill, Cripps, and India 1939–1945, 45–131. 35 Owen, ‘War and Britain’s Political Crisis in India’, 117 and 119, and Clarke, The Cripps Version, 339–40; telegram from the Viceroy to the Prime Minister and India Secretary, 9 February 1944, in Wavell, Wavell The Viceroy’s Journal, 54. 36 Nick Owen, ‘“Responsibility without Power”. The Attlee Governments and the End of British Rule in India’, in The Attlee Years, ed. Nick Tiratsoo (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), pbk edn., 169–70. 37 Clarke, The Cripps Version, 299–301 and 340, and Moore, Churchill, Cripps, and India 1939–1945, 85. 38 Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pbk edn., 34–5, Khan, The Great Partition, 18–22 and French, Liberty or Death, 131–5 and 198–200. Wavell, Wavell The Viceroy’s Journal, 27 June-14 July 1945, 148–56. 39 Over 2,500,000 served in the Indian Army. The largest ever volunteer army saw 24,000 killed and 64,000 wounded. Figures quoted in Khan, The Great Partition, 17. 40 Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson, ‘Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill? Evidence from Ethnic Cleansing during the Partition of South Asia’, The American Political Science Review, 106, no. 4 (2012): 883–907. 41 Khan, The Raj at War, ix-x and 304–5 and The Great Partition, 68 and 77, and Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 89 and 71–4. Wavell, Wavell The Viceroy’s Journal, 12–13 February 1946, 210–1, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 372 and 364. 42 Owen, ‘“Responsibility without Power”’, 174–5. Wavell, Wavell The Viceroy’s Journal, 26 August-11 September 1945, 165–71. 43 Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 40 and 35, and Khan, The Great Partition, 30–45. 44 Clarke, The Cripps Version, 396–457, and Khan, The Great Partition, 55–62. 45 Owen, ‘“Responsibility without power”’, 176–7. Wavell, Wavell The Viceroy’s Journal, 2–24 December 1946, 386–99. 46 Ibid., 20 and 24 December 1946, 398–9. 47 Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), 372–3; Lownie, The Mountbattens, 191. Re Menon and the India League, see Khan, The Raj at War, 175–6 and 195–6. Labour considered Menon a potential parliamentary candidate, but by 1947 the Government viewed unfavourably his appointment as India’s High Commissioner in London: ibid., 316–7. 48 Khan, The Great Partition, 77–81 and 83, Clarke, The Cripps Version, 467–71 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 356. 49 Ibid., 326–8. 50 ‘Dickie Mountbatten stood out a mile. Burma showed it. The so-called experts had been wrong about Aung San, and Dickie had been right’: Lord Attlee in interview, quoted in Harris, Attlee, 373. 51 Cripps endorsed the Chancellor’s mid-January proposal to cut defence spending by 10 per cent, but the Cabinet could only agree on five. Montgomery and Dalton

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loathed each other; while both were keen to bring troops home, the CIGS presumed that the Indian Army post-independence would constitute a residual British military presence, with Auchinleck still C-in-C. Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), 480–1, Bew, Citizen Clem, 412–3 and 436–7 and Nigel Hamilton, Monty The Field-Marshal 1944–1976 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986), 661 and 637–8. 52 Wavell, Wavell The Viceroy’s Journal, 13 February 1947, 419. 53 Ibid., 21 February, 22 and 27-8 March, 423, 432–4. 54 For aristocratic disdain towards Edwina (in the eyes of Curzon’s daughter Lady Ravensdale, ‘more left than the Leftist Labourite!’), see Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two, 1939–1965, 21 February 1947, 586. Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, dismissed Dickie as ‘a child of the new world’: ibid., 585. 55 Lord Attlee in Francis Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers: The War and PostWar Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Earl Attlee (London: William Heinemann, 1961), 210, and Clement Attlee, As It Happened (London: William Heinemann, 1954), 184; Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten, 383–6. 56 Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Lady Mountbatten, 18 August 1947, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 427. 57 Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten, 385, Lord Ismay, The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay (London: William Heinemann, 1960), 410 and Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two, 1939–1965, 21 February 1947, 585. 58 Erskine-Crum’s authorial role is evident from Mountbatten’s 1949 correspondence with Attlee [PREM8/1002]: Lionel Carter, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in Mountbatten, Mountbatten’s Report on the Last Viceroyalty, 12 fn.13. 59 Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten, 385, Ismay, The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay, 410, and Campbell-Johnson, Mission With Mountbatten, 17 February 1947, 20–1. Mountbatten quoted in Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two, 1939–1965, 2 January 1942, 133. 60 The accession of a new monarch, and concerns at court and in Downing Street over the capacity of Prince Philip and his uncle to influence the Queen had seen MI5 take an uncomfortably eager interest in the Mountbattens’ confidants, particularly Murphy: Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac, The Secret Royals Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana (London: Atlantic Books, 2021), 346–7. 61 Correspondence of Vice-Admiral Sir Ronald Brockman and Admiral Lord Mountbatten, November 1968-January 1969, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 355, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten in Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, 148, and Lord Mountbatten Remembers, ‘India’, episode 2 (Ronald Webster, BBC, UK, 1980); Harris, Attlee, 378–9. 62 Ibid., 374–5 and 379, Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Clement Attlee, 3 January 1947, and Clement Attlee to Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten 18 March 1947, Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power Volume IX The Fixing of a Time Limit,4 November 1946–22 March 1947, eds Penderel Moon and Nicholas Mansergh (London: HMSO, 1980), 451–2 and 973. 63 Clement Attlee to Tom Attlee, 1 February 1947, quoted in Bew, Citizen Clem, 438. Haileybury was founded as the East India College in 1806. 64 Patrick Blackett to Sir Stafford Cripps, 7 March 1947, quoted in Robert Anderson, ‘Blackett in India: Thinking Strategically about New Conflicts’, in Patrick Blackett Sailor, Scientist and Socialist, ed. Peter Hoare (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 231 and 235. 65 Ibid., 217–37, and Mary Jo Nye, Blackett Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 161–5. On the

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relationship between Blackett and Mountbatten, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 65–6 and 268–9, and Conclusion. 66 ‘Indian Policy’, House of Lords Debate, 20 February 1947, vol. 145 cc835–41, www. api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1947/feb/20/indian-policy. Butler, The Art of the Possible, 104. Bracken quoted in Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two, 1939–1965, 20 March 1947, 591. 67 Cripps remained a key figure on the India and Burma Committee, receiving one of the Viceroy’s five personal reports, corresponding with Mountbatten and Nehru, and helping draft India’s independence bill: Clarke, The Cripps Version, 472–5. 68 ‘India (Government Policy)’, House of Commons Debate, 6 March 1947, vol. 434 cc663–736, Hansard, www.api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1947/ mar/06/india-government-policy. Campbell-Johnson, Mission With Mountbatten, 26 February and 6 March 1947, 25–6 and 29. 69 ‘Mountbatten Takes Over’, British Pathé, 3 April 1947, www.britishpathe.com/video/ mountbatten-takes-over. Campbell-Johnson simply carried on where he had left off on the day he quit SEAC. 70 Pamela Mountbatten, India Remembered A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power (London: Pavilion, 2007). 71 A bare outline indebted primarily to Khan, The Great Partition, 80–155, French, Liberty or Death, 289–341 and von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 161–244. 72 Viceroy’s Staff Meeting, 11 April 1947, Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power Volume X The Mountbatten Viceroyalty: Formulation of a plan 22 March-30 May 1947, ed. Nicholas Mansergh (London: HMSO, 1981), 192. 73 Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, 28 April 1947, 74–5. The mob noted that the saluting Mountbatten’s ‘green bush-shirt of Burma provenance’ was the appropriate colour for a devout Muslim on pilgrimage to Mecca: Sir Olaf Caroe [Governor, NW Frontier], unpublished memoir, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 376–7. 74 Moore, ‘Mountbatten, India and the Commonwealth’, 27–33, Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 420–1, Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, 11 May 1947, 89, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten in Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, 153–4 and Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, 124–8. 75 Y. Krishan, ‘Mountbatten and the Partition of India’, History, 68, no. 222 (1983): 32–3, and French, Liberty or Death, 299. 76 Ibid., 300–1, Khan, The Great Partition, 85–7 and Moore, ‘Mountbatten, India and the Commonwealth’, 27–33. 77 Ibid., Ziegler, Mountbatten, 381–4 and Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 421. 78 ‘India (Transfer of Power)’, House of Commons Debate, 3 June 1947, vol. 438 cc35–46, Hansard, www.api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1947/jun/03/ india-transfer-of-power. 79 Khan, The Great Partition, 1–4, Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 424–5 and Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, 4 June 1947, 108–9. Lord Mountbatten, ‘Lord Mountbatten on his Viceroyalty’, Asiatic Review, 44, no. 4 (1948), 353, Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, 165–6 and Ian Talbot, ‘The Mountbatten Viceroyalty Revisited: Themes and Controversies’, in Mountbatten On The Record, 59. 80 Attlee later acknowledged the considerable influence Halifax exercised as the only former Viceroy sitting in the Lords: Bew, Citizen Clem, 438–9.

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81 Khan, The Great Partition, 104–27, Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 425–8 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 389–90. Pre-independence the Viceroy, at Nehru’s behest, sought Slim as the Indian Army’s first C-in-C. Auchinleck stayed on as Slim envisaged divided loyalties, while also questioning the need for dominion status rather than full sovereignty: General Sir William Slim to Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten, 17 July 1947, and Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten to General Sir William Slim, 28 July 1947, Mountbatten papers, E160A. 82 On Mountbatten’s bitter dispute with Sir Conrad Corfield, responsible for liaison with the Princes and self-appointed defender of their interests, see French, Liberty or Death, 310–3. 83 Lord Attlee quoted in Harris, Attlee, 384; Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 430. Cripps was alone in arguing Mountbatten’s reputation would suffer by being solely Governor General of India, and of course most Pakistanis would say he was right: Ziegler, Mountbatten, 399. By early 1948 Ismay thought, ‘Mountbatten has stayed too long’: Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two, 1939–1965, 26 February 1948, 649. 84 Lownie, The Mountbattens, 218. 85 ‘My dear Dickie … We are all very grateful to you for carrying on for this next stage. I am very conscious that I put you in to to bat on a sticky wicket to pull the game out of the fire.’: C.R. Attlee [parodying himself] to Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten, 17 July 1947, replicated in Mountbatten, India Remembered, 126–7. 86 Rear-Admiral Lord Mountbatten, [?] August 1947, quoted in Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, 202. 87 Harold Nicolson, Harold Nicolson’s Diaries and Letters 1945–1962, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Collins, 1968), 3 June 1947, 100. 88 ‘Indian Independence Bill – second reading’, House of Commons Debate, 10 July 1947, vol. 439 cc2441–550, Hansard, www.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/ commons/1947/jul/10/indian-independence-bill. When Mountbatten regretted the absence of any reference to a ‘New Deal’ for India, Attlee defended his approach as necessary for disarming the Opposition and courting public opinion: Nicholas Owen, ‘More Than a Transfer of Power’: Independence Day Ceremonies in India, 15 August 1947’, Journal of Contemporary British History, 6, no. 3 (1992): 423. 89 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten in Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, 158; David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 226–7 and Peter Hennessy, Never Again Britain 1945–1951 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 303–5. 90 von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 214, and Owen, ‘More Than a Transfer of Power’: Independence Day Ceremonies in India, 15 August 1947’, 425–31. 91 Ibid., 438. 92 Cambell-Johnson sweet-talked the newsreel companies when back home a month ahead of independence. ‘John Turner of Gaumont British (representing all the News Reels under the Rota agreement)’ attracted only a single mention in CampbellJohnson’s published journal: Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, 18 July 1947 and 11 March 1948, 136 and 300. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Turner became the rota cameraman for royal tours in 1952: John Turner, Filming History: The Memoirs of John Turner, Newsreel Cameraman (London: BUFVC, 2001). Paramount and Movietone each had a cameraman in India when Mountbatten arrived, but not British Gaumont, with Campbell-Johnson sent home to put pressure on the Newsreel Association. Mission with Mountbatten makes no mention of Campbell-

206

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Johnson’s negotiations with the influential film producer Arthur Jarratt, a close friend of Mountbatten, and British Gaumont managing director/NRA chairman, Castleton Knight, as revealed in correspondence among the Mountbatten Papers [MS350/A3002]. Those negotiations are detailed in Amanda McAllen’s excellent University of Southampton MA dissertation, ‘Mountbatten on screen: British newsreels and the transfer of power in India’ (2010). See also Philip Woods, ‘“Business as Usual” in “British Newsreel Coverage of Indian Independence and Partition, 1947–48”’ in Media and the British Empire, ed. Chandrika Kaul (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 145–59, and the published research of Chandrika Kaul, notably ‘“Operation Seduction” Mountbatten, the Media and Decolonisation in 1947’, in Chandrika Kaul (ed.), Communications, Media, and the Imperial Experience Britain and India in the Twentieth Century ­(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 172–218. 93 ‘India’s Great Day’, British Pathé, 18 August 1947, www.britishpathe.com/video/ indias-great-day, and ‘End of an Empire?’, March of Time, 30 October 1947 [included in the ‘End of Empire’ episode of Murray Sayle’s late 1980s C4 series The March of Time – no further information surviving]. 94 Cambell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, 18 June and 18 July 1947, 119 and 135, and Steve Fielding, ‘“Don’t know and don’t care”: popular political attitudes in Labour’s Britain, 1945–51’, in The Attlee Years, 115–6. 95 Cambell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, 18 June and 18 July 1947, 118–9 and 136, Owen, ‘More Than a Transfer of Power’: Independence Day Ceremonies in India, 15 August 1947’, 449 fn. 99 and Khan, The Great Partition, 132. 96 Chandrika Kaul, Indian Independence, the British Media and Lord Mountbatten, IIC Occasional Publication 26 (New Delhi: India International Centre, 2011), 15–6. Martin’s friendship with both Nehru and Gandhi (he was in New Delhi at the time of the latter’s assassination), and with Patrick Blackett, led to an unlikely, albeit never close, friendship with Mountbatten: C. H. Rolph, Kingsley The Life Letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 175 and 295. 97 A title suggested by George VI: Lownie, The Mountbattens, 450 fn. 458. 98 Lucy Chester, ‘The 1947 Partition: Drawing the Indo-Pakistani Boundary’, American Diplomacy, February 2002, www.INetCache/Content.Outlook/ VUJLM3S6/The%201947%20Partition_%20Drawing%20the%20IndoPakistani%20Boundary%20_%20American%20Diplomacy%20Est%201996, and French, Liberty or Death, 321–2. 99 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 403, Campbell-Johnson, Mission With Mountbatten, 9 August 1947, 152, and French, Liberty or Death, 321–2. 100 Ibid, 324–5, Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 45–6, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 417–8 and Campbell-Johnson, Mission With Mountbatten, 9 and 12 August 1947, 151–2 and 153. 101 Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, 92–3. 102 Ibid., 93–101. 103 For example, Chawla, ‘The Radcliffe Award of August 1947: A Reappraisal with a Focus on the Role of Viceroy Mountbatten in its Deliberation and Implementation’, 175–6. 104 Wolpert, Shameful Flight, 167, and Alastair Lamb, ‘Mountbatten’s escape device’, letter to the editor, Daily Telegraph, 25 February 1992 and Kashmir – A Disputed Legacy 1846–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 111–7; Anderson, ‘Why Partition?’, 16, and Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, 105.

Notes

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Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 53. Lord Mountbatten quoted in Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, 103. 105 Mountbatten knew Bikaner and its Maharaja very well: ‘Hiru is probably my oldest friend among the Indian Princes …’: Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 13 April 1945, 200–1 106 Lucy Chester, Borders and Conflicts in South Asia The Radcliffe Boundary Commission and the Partition of Punjab (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 106–28 and 140–9, and ‘The 1947 Partition: Drawing the Indo-Pakistani Boundary’. Close scrutiny of Radcliffe’s surviving maps suggests his five alternative divisions would have been far more disruptive: Lucy Chester, ‘A political decision and not a judicial one: the creation of the Radcliffe Line’, ‘The Independence of India and Pakistan: Sixtieth Anniversary Reflections’ conference paper, University of Southampton, 17 July 2007. Alastair Lamb quoted in French, Liberty or Death, 322. 107 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 419–21; Christopher Beaumont, ‘The truth of the partition of the Punjab in August 1947’, lodged at All Souls College Oxford and quoted in ‘How Mountbatten bent the rules and the Indian border’, Daily Telegraph, 24 February 1992. 108 Ibid.; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 422 and 701–2 and ‘Mountbatten Revisited’, 195–6. Ziegler again acknowledged the Viceroy’s intervention nine years later: Philip Ziegler, ‘Mountbatten and India’, plenary lecture of ‘Earl Mountbatten and Constitutional Monarchy in the Twentieth Century’ conference, University of Southampton, 12 July 2004. 109 W. H. Auden, ‘Partition’, 1966, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1984), 803–4. 110 Bruce Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart Volume Two, 1939–1965, 26 August 1947, 623–4. Labelling Churchill ‘a most dangerous man to world peace,’ Radcliffe had enthusiastically supported Labour during the 1945 election campaign: ibid., 7 July 1945, 466. 111 Attlee, ‘Churchill on Balance’ [originally published in Churchill: An Observer Appreciation, 1965), 201–2. 112 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Captain Stephen Roskill, 4 October 1976, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K208. Re Churchill and Mountbatten at the Admiralty, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice Warlord, 88–90. 113 Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, 148–50, and Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Game, 295–6. 114 Record of meeting of the Viceroy and the Leader of HM Opposition, 21 May 1947, Constitutional Relations Between Britain and India: The Transfer of Power Volume X, 513, and Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 422; Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Game, 296. 115 Nicholas Owen, ‘The Conservative Party and Indian Independence, 1945–1947’, The Historical Journal, 42, no. 2 (2003): 403–36. Ziegler quoted a letter from Albert Wedemeyer on a visit to London in June 1947 telling Mountbatten that the Government’s opponents still resented his role in India, believing him to be ‘slightly pinko or at least a Leftist Liberal.’: Ziegler, Mountbatten, 385. 116 Owen, ‘The Conservative Party and Indian Independence, 1945–1947’, 408–10 and 425–6. Lord Butler, quoted in Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time, 210–1, and Butler, The Art of the Possible, 104, 111 and 131. Harold Macmillan, Tides of Fortune, 1945–1955 (London: Macmillan, 1969), 238–9, 246 and 248–9. Cripps was ‘mad’ and ‘despised the workers’: Harold Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries

208

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The Cabinet Years 1950–1957, ed. Peter Catterall (London: Pan, 2003), pbk. edn., 5 October 1950 and 7 January 1955, 22 and 378. Alastair Horne, Macmillan 1894–1956 Volume I of the Official Biography (London: Macmillan, 1988), 310–2, and ‘Indian Independence Bill – second reading’, House of Commons Debate, 10 July 1947, vol. 439 cc2441–550, Hansard, www.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/ commons/1947/jul/10/indian-independence-bill. 117 Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 21 October 1944, 144. 118 Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), 321–2, and D. R. Thorpe, Eden The Life and Times of Anthony Eden First Earl of Avon, 1897–1977 (London: Pimlico, 2004), pbk. edn., 349. 119 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Lord Avon, 12 and 25 May 1972, Mountbatten papers, MB1/L149. Rhodes James, Eden, 272–3, Butler, The Art of the Possible, 104 and Owen, ‘The Conservative Party and Indian Independence, 1945–1947’, 412–5. Re emotional engagement, the roughly 150,000 British residents in India, although fearful for their safety and security, did not campaign loudly and passionately in favour of the status quo; and neither did Wavell and Linlightgow. The Conservatives were thus denied valuable ammunition: ibid., 430–1 120 Corfield’s complaints were carefully considered in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 408, and predictably dismissed in Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, 203. 121 Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, 430, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 413–5. 122 Alastair Lamb speculated that Mountbatten delayed the announcement of Radcliffe’s arbitration so that he could coerce the Maharajah into Kashmir acceding to India: Chester, ‘The 1947 Partition: Drawing the Indo-Pakistani Boundary’. 123 Ian Talbot, ‘Safety First: The Security of Britons in India, 1946–1947’, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Volume 23, ed. Andrew Whitehead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 215–9, Rakesh Ankit, The Kashmir Conflict From Empire to the Cold War, 1945–66 (London: Routledge, 2016), 31–2 and 44–6 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 442–51. Nehru took advantage of the Mountbattens’ attendance at the royal wedding to make a provocative visit to Kashmir, meanwhile intensifying India’s propaganda war against its neighbour. Prior to their departure, the editor of Calcutta newspaper The Statesman dined at Government House, and he was shocked by the Mountbattens’ confrontational approach towards Jinnah’s and the Pakistan Government’s claims regarding Kashmir – as was Attlee repeatedly in the winter of 1947–8: Ian Stephens quoted in Lownie, The Mountbattens, 231; von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 303 and 317–8. 124 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice Warlord, 45 and 49; Owen, ‘The Conservative Party and Indian Independence, 1945–1947’, 416 and 432, von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 222–3, 319 and 325 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 411–3 and 415. On Mountbatten’s continued belief that Monckton was acting in the Governor General’s interests, see Cambell-Johnson, Mission With Mountbatten, 29 May 1948, 344, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 451–6. Harris, Attlee, 386. 125 Andrew Roberts, ‘Walter Monckton and the “Retreat from Reality”’ and ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, in Eminent Churchillians, 243–86 and 124–8. Lownie, The Mountbattens, 225–6. 126 Roberts, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, 90–1 and 124–8. Khan, The Great Partition, 96–7 and French, Liberty Or Death, 342–3 and 346–8 127 Talbot, ‘The Mountbatten Viceroyalty Revisited: Themes and Controversies’, 60–3, and Daniel Haines, ‘“A Commonwealth Moment” in South Asian Decolonisation’, in Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence, eds Lesley James

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and Elizabeth Leake (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 185–203, and von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 252–7. 128 Talbot, ‘The Mountbatten Viceroyalty Revisited: Themes and Controversies’, 60–3. For an earlier exposition of the same argument, see I. A. Talbot, ‘Mountbatten and the Partition of India: A rejoinder’, History, 69, no. 225 (1984): 29–35. Khan, The Great Partition, xxvi: ‘1947 was a perfect storm of hope and disaster, leadership and blunder.’ 129 Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 146–8, and Yasmin Khan quoted in ibid., 147. Ian Talbot to the author, 4 May 2021 – my thanks to Professor Talbot for his valuable feedback on the first draft of this chapter. 130 Talbot echoed an early insistence that troop deployment would exacerbate the situation: Mountbatten, Mountbatten’s Report on the Last Viceroyalty, 265–6 and 283–4. 131 Talbot, ‘The Mountbatten Viceroyalty Revisited: Themes and Controversies’, 70, Jha and Wilkinson, ‘Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill? Evidence from Ethnic Cleansing during the Partition of South Asia’, 902–5 and Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, 1 and 8. 132 For a similar conclusion to Talbot, if more sympathetic to Mountbatten, see Moore, ‘Mountbatten, India, and the Commonwealth’, 5–43. Ziegler, ‘Mountbatten Revisited’, 199. 133 Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari quoted in ibid., 200; Ian Talbot, ‘Partition 1947’, review of Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight, H-Asia [H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online], July 2010, www.INetCache/Content.Outlook/VUJLM3S6/HNet%20Reviews%20Partition%201947. 134 Lownie, The Mountbattens, 236–7. 135 Francis Ingall [founder commandant of the Pakistan Military Academy] recalled an off-guard Mountbatten explaining how to surprise ‘the enemy’, implicitly Jinnah: ibid., 208. Khan, The Great Partition, 208 and 185 and Chester, ‘The 1947 Partition: Drawing the Indo-Pakistani Boundary’. 136 Mountbatten, ‘Lord Mountbatten on his Viceroyalty’, 354–5 [his autumn 1948 speech to the East India Association], and testimony to Edwina recorded twentyfour years later for Lord Mountbatten Remembers, ‘India’. 137 Lownie, The Mountbattens, 241–3. 138 John Strachey to Clement Attlee, 11 December 1950, quoted in Wm. Roger Louis, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, in Wm. Roger Louis Ends of British Imperialism The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization Collected Essays (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 451–502, fn. 68. 139 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 521–4.

Chapter 2 1 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 301, 98–9 and 298–300. 2 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 3 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to General Lord Ismay, 10 September 1964, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J246M. On Mountbatten’s February 1938 meeting with Eden and Lord Cranborne [the future Lord Salisbury], see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 98. Mountbatten is wholly absent from Eden’s memoirs other than a brief mention in the wartime volume.

210 4

Notes

See correspondence of C-in-C SEAC and Mediterranean Fleet with Sir Anthony Eden, Mountbatten papers, MB1/C96 and MB1/H87. Mountbatten, Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, 15 and 25 July 1945, 225–6 and 231, and Rhodes James, Anthony Eden, 303 and 370. 5 Diary of Sir Anthony Eden, 6 February 1955, quoted in Thorpe, Eden The Life and Times of Anthony Eden First Earl of Avon, 1897–1977, 458; Evelyn Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez Diaries 1951–56, ed. John Charmley (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986), 30 April 1952, 42. 6 Eric Grove and Sally Rohan, ‘The Limits of Opposition: Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma, First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff ’, in Whitehall and the Suez Crisis, eds Sean Kelly and Anthony Gorst (London: Routledge, 2000), 103–4. On Edwina’s politics in the 1950s, including her dealings with Eden, see Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten, 458–72. 7 ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106; the transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention [FoI access], CAB164/1501. 8 Photograph taken at the PM’s official country residence replicated in Thorpe, Eden. 9 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 7 or 8 September 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 10 Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 276–8. Did Mountbatten know of Crabbe’s unauthorized spying activities in the murky depths of Portsmouth harbour? Lownie accepts that any evidence is wholly circumstantial, but intelligence specialists insist that he did: ibid., 274–5, and Aldrich and Cormac, The Secret Royals, 353–4. 11 Re criticism of collusion, see 1972 comments in the transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; and re removing Royal Navy evidence, see Chapter 3. 12 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 537–8; W. Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1991), 143; Jonathan Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis: Reluctant Gamble (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 24; the transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 13 John Cloake, Templer Tiger of Malaya The Life of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer (London: Harrap, 1985), 337–40. 14 Re the 1950 Tripartite Guarantee to Jordan and Operation Cordage see Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), pbk. edn., 90–6, 103–5, 263–6, 291–5 and 299. 15 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 16 Anthony Gorst, ‘“A Modern Major General” General Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the Imperial General Staff ’, in Whitehall and the Suez Crisis, 35. 17 Hugh Thomas, The Suez Affair (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), 51–2, and Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, 143. 18 Ibid., 138. 19 Keith Kyle, ‘Britain and the Crisis’ in Suez 1956 The Crisis and its Consequences, eds W. Roger Louis and Roger Owen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 114–5; minutes of the Egypt Committee, 9 August 1956, CAB134/1216, quoted in David Dutton, Anthony Eden A Life and Reputation (London: Hodder Arnold, 1997), 395–6.

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20 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries The Cabinet Years 1950–1957, 9 and 18 August 1956, 586–7; 14 August 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, National Archives (NA), CAB195/15/CM59(56); Sir Walter Monckton quoted in Dutton, Anthony Eden, 388. 21 William Clark, From Three Worlds: Memoirs (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986), 26–7 July 1956, 166; Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 172–81; 27 July 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM54(56). 22 Clark, From Three World, 26–7 July 1956, 166; Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 172–81 and 20–9; David Dutton, ‘Living with Collusion: Anthony Eden and the Later History of the Suez Affair’, Contemporary Record, 5, no. 2 (1991): 201–16. 23 Sir Frank Cooper quoted in Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 24, and Kyle, Suez, 137. 24 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 541; Kyle, Suez, 90–1. Re Templer’s visit to Jordan, see James Barr, Lords of the Desert Britain’s Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East (London: Simon and Schuster, 2019), pbk. edn., 203–4; and re his subsequent defence of military intervention and refusal to criticize Eden, see Cloake, Templer Tiger of Malaya, 382–3. 25 For Boyle’s recollection of Templer and Mountbatten, and that of the COSC’s secretary, see Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good Britain in the Fifties (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 432 and 451, and 431. 26 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 511; Barr, Lords of the Desert, 189–90; Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez, 25 February 1956, 337. 27 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, and draft letter to the Prime Minister, 1 August 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 28 Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, 147, 163 and 266. 29 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 535–6; miscellaneous correspondence between Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten and Viscount Cilcennin, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I71 and I49. 30 ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106; Andrew Roberts, ‘Walter Monckton and the ­“Retreat from Reality”’ in Eminent Churchillians, 244–51 and 277–8, and ‘Betrayal of the brave at Suez’, Sunday Times, 20 October 1996. 31 Dowager Viscountess Monckton to Lord Birkenhead, and 1st Viscount Monckton recollection of Suez, quoted in Lord Birkenhead, Walter Monckton The Life of Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 307. 32 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. Sir Walter Monckton to David Astor, quoted in Roberts, ‘Walter Monckton and the “Retreat from Reality”’, 277. See also, Anthony Nutting, No End of a Lesson The Story of Suez (London: Constable, 1967), 107 and 138. 33 Nutting, No End of a Lesson, 138; ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 34 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries The Cabinet Years 1950–1957, 5, 6 and 7 August 1956, 584–5. Re the content and planning of Musketeer see Kyle, Suez, 167–74. 35 Re the previously established Defence (Transition) Committee, see Kyle, Suez, 202–6 and 210–2. For cabinet colleagues’ response to what Lord Salisbury described as Monckton’s ‘outburst’, see Anthony Gorst and W. Scott Lucas, ‘Suez 1956: Strategy and the Diplomatic Process’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 11, no. 4 (1988): 408–11, and Kyle, Suez, 203–6.

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36 28 August 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM62(56); Kyle, Suez, 213–5; minutes of COSC 80–94, August-September 1956, COS (56), Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106; Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, 102–3, 115, 116–8 and 141. 37 Peter Lyon, ‘The Commonwealth and the Suez Crisis’, in Suez 1956 The Crisis and its Consequences, 272. On Templer and Mountbatten’s earlier differences inside the COSC over the Middle East and withdrawal from empire, see Gorst and Scott Lucas, ‘Suez 1956: Strategy and the Diplomatic Process’, 392–6. 38 Menon, ‘the putative conciliator, antagonised in turn everybody in sight’ when representing India in London and New York negotiations. He had been advised by Mountbatten to seek out Monckton as a back channel for negotiation. ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, and ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. Kyle, Suez, 575; Sarvepalli Gopal, ‘India, the Crisis and the Non-Aligned Nations’, in Suez 1956 The Crisis and its Consequences, 173–87; Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, 213 and 221; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 541. 39 Minutes of COSC 95–97, September-October 1956, COS (56), and Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson, 27 September 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. On Dickson’s favourable view of Mountbatten’s contribution to COSC discussion, and his brutally frank assessment of the crisis as a whole six months later, see Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson to Mollie Travis, 27 September 1976, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N99 and Colville, The Fringes of Power, 723–4. 40 Minutes of COSC 97–105, October 1956, COS (56), and DEFE4/91 ‘Military Implications of Mounting Operation Musketeer’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106; Kyle, ‘Britain and the Crisis’, 120–2. 41 Dickson quoted in Colville, The Fringes of Power, 723; note by Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 26 June 1958, and Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson to Mollie Travis, 27 September 1976, Mountbatten papers, MB1/106 and N99. 42 ‘Naval responsibility for inflicting civilian casualties’, mid-November 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N1 06. At the same time the VCNS agreed to produce his own supportive brief. Admiral Sir William Davis [VCNS] to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 20 November 1956, ibid. 43 Admiral Sir Guy Grantham to Admiral Lord Mountbatten, 24 September 1956, BA, MB1/I06; Analysis of CAS paper in RN Director of Plans to First Sea Lord, 25 September 1956, NA, ADM205/132; Vice Admiral Manley Power to Admiral Sir Guy Grantham, 16 September 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I06. 44 Kyle, Suez, 375. 45 Geoffrey Lewis, Lord Hailsham A Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), 154. 46 Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 114–5; Kyle, Suez, 213–4, 390–1 and 407 and ‘Britain’s Slow March to Suez’, in The 1956 War Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East, ed. David Tal (London: Routledge, 2001), 103. Sir Frank Cooper claimed Selwyn Lloyd deliberately thwarted wider ministerial access to FO legal advice: Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 114–5. 47 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Vice Admiral [rtd] Maxwell Richmond, 30 March 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N108. 48 Draft letter from the First Sea Lord to the Prime Minister, 20 August 1956, and Lord Cilcennin to Admiral Lord Mountbatten, 21 August 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106.

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49 Account of meeting at Lord Cilcennin’s house on 1 September 1956 in ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, and Sir Walter Monckton to Admiral Lord Mountbatten, 22 August 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 50 Sir Walter Monckton, memorandum, 7 November 1956, in Birkenhead, Walter Monckton, 309–10. 51 Lord Mountbatten was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet on 22 October 1956. 52 Memorandum of Lord Hailsham, 16 January 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; Lord Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight (London: Collins, 1990), 288. 53 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106; Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight, 288–9. In his diary the PM’s press secretary supported Mountbatten’s claim that Hailsham was horrified by Musketeer’s anticipated air assault: ‘He feared that had it been carried through the wrath against us would never have been assuaged.’ Clark, From Three Worlds: Memoirs, 19 September 1956, 190. 54 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, BA, MB1/N106. Re the content and planning of Musketeer Revise see Kyle, Suez, 234–8. 55 Hailsham clearly confused two conversations with the Prime Minister as he claimed he was three weeks into the job before seeing Eden. Memorandum of Lord Hailsham, 16 January 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; Lewis, Lord Hailsham, 155. ­56 Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, 189–97; Kyle, Suez, 236–7 and ‘Britain’s Slow March to Suez’, 102–3; Admiral Sir Guy Grantham to Admiral Lord Mountbatten, 24 September 1956, ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, and ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ N106. 57 Grove and Rohan, ‘The Limits of Opposition’, 109. 58 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 543. 59 11 September 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM64(56); the transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; Gorst and Scott Lucas, ‘Suez 1956: Strategy and the Diplomatic Process’, 416–9. 60 For an example of [banal] Admiralty business as usual, see Agenda and briefing papers, Sea Lords’ Meeting, 2 October 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I396 (56–7). 61 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Lord Cilcennin, 19 September 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I71; the transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 62 18 October 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM71(56); First Sea Lord to C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet, 18 October 1956, NA, ADM205/137. 63 First Sea Lord at COSC, 10 October 1956, quoted in Kyle, Suez, 295. 64 ‘Amendments Required to C.O.S. 1367/4/10/56’, 9 October 1956, NA, ADM205/137; Memorandum of Lord Hailsham, 16 January 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 65 Monckton recollection of Suez, quoted in Birkenhead, Walter Monckton, 307. For the view that Macmillan’s belligerency was a consistent factor in Monckton’s opposition, culminating on 24 September in a decision to go, see: Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 47 and 102. As Paymaster General he was conspicuous by his silence in the very full (but for most ministers uninformed) cabinet discussion over military intervention should Israeli attack Egypt. 24 October 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM73(56). ­66 Re Nutting and Foreign Office officials’ opposition to Anglo-French collaboration with Israel, see Nutting, No End of a Lesson, 96–7 and 138, Kyle, Suez, 301 and 306–9,

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and Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989), 164–8. For a future permanent secretary’s recollection of open dissent within the FO, see Paul Gore-Booth, With Great Truth and Respect (London: Constable, 1974), 226–32. 67 Prime Minister to First Lord of the Admiralty, 23 October 1956, quoted in Gorst and Scott Lucas, ‘Suez 1956: Strategy and the Diplomatic Process’, 424. 68 Kyle, Suez, 309; signals between First Sea Lord and VCNS and C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet in ‘Israeli aggression in connection with Musketeer’, October 1956, NA, ADM205/137; Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Admiral Sir Guy Grantham, 23 October 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I06. 69 Kyle, Suez, 340–2 and 374; Admiral Sir M.L. Power, unpublished memoirs, 1973, 100–1, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N105. 70 Kyle, Suez, 562. 71 Thorpe, Eden, 516–9. 72 Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, 252–3 and 250–1; Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 224 ft. 78; Selwyn Lloyd, Suez 1956: A Personal Account (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 188. 73 Kyle, Suez, 561; First Sea Lord to Prime Minister, 2 November 1956, NA, PREM11/90. 74 Former JIC chair Sir Percy Craddock quoted in Hennessy, Having It So Good, 439. 75 The transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; ‘File on the Suez Affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ NI06. For an example of feigned ignorance and condemnation of collusion, see Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Vice Admiral Maxwell Richmond, 30 March 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N108. 76 General Sir Charles Keightley to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 7 January 1957, correspondence of First Sea Lord with Admiral Sir Guy Grantham and Vice Admiral Robin Durnford-Slater, December 1956-January 1957, and ‘File on the Suez Affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/NI06; Kyle, Suez, 371–2. 77 Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, 272; Kyle, Suez, 394–5 and ‘Britain’s Slow March to Suez’, 113 and 108. 78 Clark, From Three Worlds: Memoirs, 29 October 1956, 197; Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez, 1 November 1956, 363. 79 Kyle, Suez, 181, and Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis, 147, 163 and 266. 80 Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Sir Walter Monckton, 2 August 1956, and ‘very pleasant message’ from Admiral Burke USN quoted in First Sea Lord to RN C-in-Cs UK, signal, SZ13, 16 August 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N07. 81 Kyle, Suez, 411–3; Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 165–9. Admiral Sir Manley L. Power, unpublished memoirs, 1973, 101–2, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ N105 and Appendix I ‘Diary of Events’ in ‘Naval Report on Operation Musketeer’, 175, 15 February 1957, NA, ADM116/6209, confirm the scale and intensity of the disruption inflicted by the USN Sixth Fleet, and the level of alarm within Power’s carrier force and the rest of the taskforce. 82 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 305. 83 Kyle, Suez, 415–6, 402–4 and 392–5. R.G. Casey, Australia’s External Affairs Minister, knew Mountbatten from India and had been a fellow anti-appeaser, hence his credentials when similarly articulating the case against force in cabinet. PM Robert Menzies had since 1940 endeavoured to obscure his Chamberlainite support for appeasement, in 1956 echoing Eden’s rhetoric re the Nasser-Mussolini

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similarities; a parallel viewed sceptically by the ‘Suez Group’, many of whom pointed to the Rhineland crisis when questioning the Tory leader’s standing second only to Churchill as an anti-appeaser. Casey made life difficult for the freshly arrived British High Commissioner as he realized Lord Carrington had views not that dissimilar from Mountbatten’s but was obliged to defend doggedly the actions of his government. J. D. B. Miller, ‘Australia and the Crisis’ and Lord Beloff, ‘The Crisis and its Consequences for the British Conservative Party’, in Suez 1956 The Crisis and its Consequences, 80–2 and 328–9, and Christopher Lee, Carrington An Honourable Man (London: Penguin, 2018), 156–7. 84 Gorst and Scott Lucas, ‘Suez 1956: Strategy and the Diplomatic Process’, 425–6; ‘Naval responsibility for inflicting civilian casualties’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ N106. 85 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Sir Anthony Eden, 2 November 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 86 ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 87 ‘Naval responsibility for inflicting civilian casualties’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ N106; Kyle, Suez, 423–4 and 435. For a summary of the debate within the COSC, and British military and political objections to ‘Omelette’, the French-inspired plan to speed up the landings, see Gorst and Scott Lucas, ‘Suez 1956: Strategy and the Diplomatic Process’, 426–8. 88 ‘Naval responsibility for inflicting civilian casualties’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ N106; 4 November 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM79(56); Kyle, Suez, 441–3. 89 Hailsham claimed Churchill’s experience as the precedent he drew upon in taking a firm line towards Mountbatten: Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight, 291. 90 ‘Naval responsibility for inflicting civilian casualties’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ N106. 91 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Lord Hailsham, 4 November 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 92 Ibid. 93 Mountbatten painfully recorded that for once his long serving secretary Rear Admiral Ronald Brockman profoundly disagreed with his views and actions throughout the crisis. ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, and Admiral Sir William David [VCNS] to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 20 November 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 94 Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight, 291. 95 Lord Hailsham to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 5 and 6 November 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106; Lord Hailsham to Sir Anthony Eden, NA, PREM11/1090. ­96 Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight, 292; diary entry for 5 November 1956 quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 545; Thorpe, Eden, 531. 97 Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 165; Lewis, Lord Hailsham, 160–1. A surprise and indignation shared by Head: 6 and 7 November 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM80 and 81(56). 98 Re Mountbatten blaming Macmillan to his face for the Canal’s blockage, and his supposed fear that Eden’s successor would sack him, see the transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; Lewis, Lord Hailsham, 160–1; 13 November 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM83(56).

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99

Lord Hailsham to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 12 November 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I149; Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight, 292. 100 On 9 October 1956 Hailsham was sworn in as a privy councillor. Lewis, Lord Hailsham, 155 and 157; Memorandum of Lord Hailsham, 16 January 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; Lord Hailsham, The Door Wherein I Went (London: Collins, 1975), 133 and A Sparrow’s Flight, 285 and 288; Lord Hailsham to D. Dutton, 10 December 1992, quoted in Dutton, Anthony Eden, 428; Richard Crossman, The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, ed. Janet Morgan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 7 November 1956, 542. 101 Hailsham, The Door Wherein I Went, 134–5 and A Sparrow’s Flight, 289–90; Lewis, Lord Hailsham, 156–7; 4 November 1956, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, NA, CAB195/15/CM79(56). 102 Hailsham, The Door Wherein I Went, 135 and A Sparrow’s Flight, 289; Crossman, The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman, 7 November 1956, 542; Dutton, ‘Living with Collusion’, 274. 103 Hailsham, A Sparrow’s Flight, 286 and 292. 104 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 105 ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, and ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. 106 David Carlton, Britain and the Suez Crisis (London: Blackwell, 1988), pbk. edn., 36; Anon., ‘Sir Henry Leach’, obituary, Daily Telegraph, 27 April 2011; Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice Warlord, 26–7. 107 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, note on Eden’s health, 12 May 1972, BA, MB1/N108; for former MOD permanent secretaries’ differing views re a [nuclear] worst case scenario where the CDS suspects the PM is mentally ill, or vice versa, see Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945–2010 (London: Penguin, 2010), pbk. edn., 356–9. 108 Deborah Haynes, ‘Forces Chiefs Lose Battle for Control of Defence’, The Times, 27 June 2011; Lord Levene of Portsoken, Defence Reform An Independent Report Into the Structure and Management of the Ministry of Defence (London: HMSO, 2011); interview with Rt Hon Liam Fox MP, Today, Radio 4, 27 June 2011.

Chapter 3 1

2 3 4

Fourteen years on a sceptical assessment of ‘liberal internationalists’ like Mountbatten highlighted the universality of the appeasement analogy in July 1956, embracing both Eden and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell: Robert Skidelsky, ‘The Lessons of Suez’ in The Age of Affluence 1951–1964, eds Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (London: Macmillan, 1970), pbk. edn., 174–5. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, 1966, and ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. Note by Lord Mountbatten on 15 September 1965 visit of Lord and Lady Avon, [1966 or 1967?], Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. ‘Full Circle (1955–65)’, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, episode 11 (Peter Morley, Rediffusion, UK, 1969); Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten in Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, 176.

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Lord Mountbatten Remembers, episodes 1–5 (Ronald Webster, BBC, UK, 1980) – repeated BBC2, 1982; ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers’ file of correspondence and press cuttings, 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 6 Eden’s January 1976 complaint to the Queen’s secretary that Mountbatten was ‘ga-ga [and] a congenital liar’, quoted in Rhodes James, Anthony Eden, 620. For a further narrative of the 1968–76 quarrel see Thorpe, Eden, 585–8. 7 Ibid., 313–5, and 458. For an authoritative account insisting the Queen was fully informed, not least from talking to Mountbatten and intelligence briefing, and thoroughly disapproved of collusion and military action, see Aldrich and Cormac, The Secret Royals Spying and the Crown, 421–6. 8 Christian Pineau quoted in Thomas, The Suez Affair, 165. See also David Harvey, ‘Postscript’, in Clark, From Three Worlds: Memoirs, 284. D.R. Thorpe argued that PREM 11/1163 ‘1956 The Queen’ confirms the monarch was kept fully informed: Thorpe, Eden, 500–1. 9 Lord Avon quoted in ibid., 486; Lord Charteris quoted in Ben Pimlott, The Queen A Biography of Elizabeth II (London: Harper Collins, 1996) and Hennessy, Having It So Good, 439. 10 Lord Avon to Robert Lacey [?] January 1976, quoted in Thorpe, Eden, 585; David Carlton, Anthony Eden A Biography (London: Viking, 1981), 364–5; Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years The Diaries of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, 1953–1979, ed. Philip Ziegler (London: Collins, 1989), 13 June 1976, 340–1; Robert Lacey, Majesty Elizabeth II and the House of Windsor (London: Hutchinson, 1977), 238. 11 Sarah Bradford, Elizabeth A Biography of Her Majesty (London: Heinemann, 1996), 234; Pimlott, The Queen A Biography of Elizabeth II, 254 and 255; Thorpe, Eden, 585–8. 12 Ibid., 588. 13 ‘Misadventure’, The Crown, series 2 episode 1 (Philip Martin, Netflix, UK, 2017). 14 Lynne Olson, Troublesome Young Men The Churchill Conspiracy of 1940 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), pbk. edn., 85–8. For the frustration backbench anti-appeasers felt regarding Eden, see Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930–39, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Collins, 1966), 24 November 1938 and 18 July 1939, 380–1 and 406. 15 Robert Skidelsky, ‘Anthony Eden’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), Interests and Obsessions Historical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1993), 335. 16 Carlton, Anthony Eden A Biography, 454–5; Dutton, Anthony Eden, 7, 12–5 and 462–4. 17 Oliver Harvey quoted in Dutton, Anthony Eden, 465; Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez, 2 March 1956, 340. 18 Interviewed by Richard Hough, Lords Butler, Longford and Wilson all commented on Mountbatten’s keen sense of intellectual insecurity: Hough, Mountbatten: Hero of Our Time, 244–5. 19 Thorpe, Eden, 493–4. 20 Ibid.; Rhodes James, Anthony Eden, 495–6. 21 Ibid., 496. 22 Ibid., 494 and 498–9; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 541 and 546–7. 23 Grove and Rohan, ‘The Limits of Opposition’, 113–4; Kyle, Suez, 420. 24 Kyle, Suez, 136. 25 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 231–56. 26 ‘File on the Suez affair of 1956’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106. ­5

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27 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, and Admiral Sir William Davis to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 20 November 1956, ibid. 28 ‘Full Circle (1955–65)’, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, episode 11 (Peter Morley, Rediffusion, UK, 1969); Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten in Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, 176; the transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 29 Geoffrey Till, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1955–1959)’, in From Fisher to Mountbatten, ed. Malcolm H. Muffett (Westport CT: Praegar, 1995), 277–9. 30 Lord Beaverbrook to Tom Driberg, 1 August 1952, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 489, and quoted in Driberg, Ruling Passions, 229. 31 Re the Mountbatten-Beaverbrook quarrel, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 11–4, and Lownie, The Mountbattens, 252–3. Lord Mountbatten Remembers, ‘The Beaverbrook Press’, episode 4 (Ludovic Kennedy, BBC, UK, 1980). Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie, Lord Beaverbrook A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 493–4, and Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time, 141–2. Part of Eden’s post-crisis convalescence was spent at Manor Farm, Beaverbrook’s country house at Cricket Malherbie in rural Somerset: Chisholm and Davie, Lord Beaverbrook, 495. 32 Till, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1955–1959)’, 276–7, and Richard Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 15–9. 33 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 257. 34 Bernard Fergusson [Lord Ballantrae], The Watery Maze The Story of Combined Operations (London: Collins, 1961), 399–400. 35 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 244. 36 Fergusson, The Watery Maze, 402 and 404. 37 Mountbatten blamed the Foreign Office not Downing Street: Peter J. Beck,‘“The Less Said about Suez the Better”: British Governments and the Politics of Suez’s History, 1956–67’, English Historical Review, 124, no. 508 (2009): 615. 38 ‘Briefing from First Sea Lord for Chiefs of Naval Staff and Commanders-in-Chiefs’, Taranto Day [11 November] 1956, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N108, 1–4, particularly para. 21. 39 Re Mountbatten’s defence of the Dieppe raid, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 242–7 and 134–5. 40 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Professor Michael Howard, 16 February and 1 March 1973, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N108. Michael Howard, Grand Strategy, August 1942-September 1943, History of the Second World War, Vol. IV, Grand Strategy series (London: HMSO, 1970). Sir Michael Howard had in common with Mountbatten membership of the Order of Merit. ­41 Ian Curteis to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 24 November and 22 December 1977, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N108. Curteis’s play was finally broadcast three months after Mountbatten’s death: Suez 1956 (Michael Darlow and Peter Brookes, BBC, UK, 1979). 42 ‘Naval Report on Operation Musketeer’, 15 February 1957, NA, ADM116/6209, 1, 5, and 11–5. 43 Re the Army’s evaluation of HMS Tyne’s signals deficiencies see Kyle, Suez, 474. Ziegler, Mountbatten, 530–32. 44 For a succinct account of the fighting in Ports Said and Fuad on 5–6 November 1956, see Kyle, Suez, 444–52, 461–4 and 473–6. Fergusson, The Watery Maze, 399 and 403; ‘Naval Report on Operation Musketeer’, 1, para. 5. 45 2nd Parachute Battalion and 45 Commando were both on an extended deployment in Cyprus. Fergusson, The Watery Maze, 403.

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46 Re the structure of the French Army in the 1950s see Martin Windrower, The Last Valley Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam (London: Cassell, 2005), 164–82. RAF Transport Command’s lack of tail-loading aircraft meant no artillery could be dropped and British paratroopers jumped carrying too much kit. 47 Merry and Serge Bromberger, Secrets of Suez [Les Secrets de l’Expedition d’Egypte] (London: Pan, 1957), pbk. edn., 66, 102 and 114; Kyle, Suez, 444–7 and 463. Veterans of Indo-China commanded the regiments making up ‘Force A’, most notably 3 RPC’s colonel, Marcel Bigeard. 48 ‘Action against Egypt’, 1 August 1956, NA, CAB134/126, quoted in Richard Lamb, The Failure of the Eden Government (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987), 199. 49 Paul Gaujac, ‘France and the Crisis of Suez: An Appraisal Forty Years On’, in The 1956 War Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East, 50, 52 and 57; Général d’Armée André Beaufre, The Suez Expedition 1956 [L’Expédition de Suez] (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). 50 Kyle, Suez, 449. Yet Massu also told Randolph Churchill, ‘that the greatest regret of his life was not to have disregarded orders and marched to Cairo, or at least to Ismailia.’ Alastair Horne, ‘Collusion The Suez Crisis: Part 2’, Daily Telegraph, 13 September 1986. 51 First Sea Lord’s press cuttings re the Suez crisis, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N108; Bromberger, Secrets of Suez; Terence Robertson, Crisis: The Inside Story of the Suez Conspiracy (London: Hutchinson, 1967). 52 Beaufre, The Suez Expedition 1956, 16, 18, 70, 80–1 and 92–4. 53 Motti Golani, ‘The Sinai War, 1956: Three Partners, Three Wars’, in The 1956 War Collusion and Rivalry in the Middle East, 171–2 and 179; ‘Naval Report on Operation Musketeer’, 162; ‘Israeli aggression in connection with Musketeer’, October 1956, NA, ADM205/137. 54 Beaufre, The Suez Expedition 1956, 132–8, 143 and 150. 55 For his public justification of the force de frappe, see Général d’Armée André Beaufre, Deterrence and Strategy (London: Faber, 1965). Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France The Life of Charles de Gaulle (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 600. 56 ‘First Sea Lord’s part in the Suez crisis’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N106; Kyle, Suez, 145. 57 Maurice Vaisse, ‘Post-Suez France’, in Suez 1956 The Crisis and its Consequences, 335–40; Kyle, ‘Britain and the Crisis’, 115–6. Although France left NATO’s integrated military command in 1966, tensions were evident prior to Mountbatten’s retirement a year earlier. Jackson, A Certain Idea of France The Life of Charles de Gaulle, 580–2, 592 and 672–3. 58 Gaujac, ‘France and the Crisis of Suez’, 49–50. Mountbatten himself signed off a typically inflexible, over-cautious and contingency-driven planning document that required frequent amendment, on 27 September 1956: ‘Anglo-French Intervention in Suez Canal Dispute, 1956 (Operation Musketeer): Military Action – Preparation and Plans’, NA, ADM116/6100. 59 As late as 26 September 1956 Mollet and his Foreign Minister Christian Pineau were urging Eden to accept France’s preference for a surprise coup de main from the air. Kyle, Suez, 261–2. 60 Robert Henriques, ‘The Ultimatum: A Dissenting View’, Spectator, 6 November 1959; Fergusson, The Watery Maze, 389. Re Henriques at COHQ, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 180, 182 and 262. 61 Head blamed a Machiavellian Macmillan for the ceasefire. In the Commons Head was obliged to defend the operation’s termination by claiming that it would have

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taken eight days to reach Suez, despite Sir Hugh Stockwell having already told reporters that he could have been there in two – for which he was reprimanded by the Minister of Defence, despite Head’s personal conviction that the Canal Zone could have been secured. Sir John Colville, ‘Head, Antony Henry, first Viscount Head (1906–1987)’, in ed. Brian Harrison, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-31214?rskey=UMT YUf&result=1; Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 187, 219, 262–3; Clark, From Three Worlds, 31 July and 2 August 1956, 167 and 169; Sir Anthony Eden, The Memoirs of the Rt Hon. Sir Anthony Eden: Full Circle (London: Cassell, 1960), 519–20; Kyle, Suez, 304, 388, 415, 435 and 465; Horne, Macmillan, 441–2; Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand, 296. 62 Correspondence between Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten and Rt Hon Antony Head MP re the Fleet Air Arm and the assault on Port Said, December 1958, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N07. 63 Henriques, ‘The Ultimatum: A Dissenting View’. Re deep-water facilities in Cyprus, Eden noted on 9 June 1975 for a future authorised biographer: ‘I had to admit that I had not thought of it, and Admiralty never suggested it.’ Quoted in Dutton, Anthony Eden, 438. 64 Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, 204–5; Henriques, ‘The Ultimatum: A Dissenting View’. 65 Although a one-nation Conservative, owner-editor Ian Gilmour argued that Macmillan had not publicly apologized for his role in the Suez invasion, and therefore he did not deserve to win the 1959 election. Erskine Childers, ‘The Ultimatum’ and letter to the editor, Spectator, 30 October and 20 November 1959; Henriques, ‘The Ultimatum: A Dissenting View’ and letter to the editor, Spectator, 6 November and 4 December 1959, and A Hundred Hours An Account of Israel’s Campaign in the Sinai Peninsula (New York: Pyramid Books, 1957), 20, 39, 41–5 and 157. Simon Courtauld, To Convey Intelligence The Spectator 1928–1998 (London: Profile Books, 1999), 46–51. 66 ‘The Government’s War The Fallacy’, Observer, 4 November 1956; Richard Cockett, ‘The Observer and the Suez Crisis’, Contemporary Record, 5, no. 2 (1991): 19. 67 ‘Eden’ and ‘The Government’s War The Facts’, Observer, 4 November 1956. 68 Richard Cockett, David Astor and the Observer (London: Andre Deutsch, 1991), 223. 69 Astor-Monckton correspondence quoted in ibid., 217. 70 Baroness Stocks quoted in Russell Braddon, Suez Splitting of a Nation (London: Collins, 1973), 91. Stocks, who accepted the resignation from the trust of Mountbatten’s wartime colleague on the COSC Air Chief Marshal Lord Portal, applauded Astor’s indignation. Stocks saw ‘November 1956 as the Observer’s finest hour.’ Ibid., 117. 71 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 233. 72 David Astor to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 1 June and 7 July October 1957, and mutual correspondence re the Observer 1957–65, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I11 and J317. Mountbatten wanted Nehru to meet likeminded critics of Eden such as Astors. Cockett, David Astor and the Observer, 247–8 and 230. 73 David Astor to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 9 October 1956, and Mountbatten correspondence with Admiral J. Wright 1954–7, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I11 and I588. Kyle, Suez, 181; Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand Britain, 147, 163 and 266.

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74 Pearson, Sir Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, 200 ft. 130; Barnett, The Verdict of Peace, 491; Scott Lucas, Divided We Stand, 254; Sir Anthony Nutting, No End of a Lesson The Story of Suez (London: Constable, 1972), 107–8. 75 ‘The Question of Collusion’, Observer, 11 November 1956; David Astor to Iain Macleod, 14 November 1956, and to Richard Lamb, [nd], quoted in Lamb, The Failure of the Eden ­Government, 301. 76 Cockett, David Astor and the Observer, 143–4, 211–2 and 221. 77 Clark, From Three Worlds, 3 November 1956, 208. 78 Ibid., 5 and 6 November 1956, 210 and 211–2. 79 Most obviously Hailsham’s claim that in September 1956 he was at the Admiralty three weeks, and not in fact three days, before Eden authorized his briefing re Musketeer. Memorandum of Lord Hailsham, 16 January 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 80 Correspondence of Lord Mountbatten and Lord Brabourne re filming at Broadlands 6–8 and 12–15 May 1972, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I85. 81 The transcript of ‘Lord Mountbatten Remembers: 2 Suez’, CAB164/1501; ‘Suez Fiasco’ cue cards, 1972, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I85. 82 Ludovic Kennedy, ‘Mountbatten’s filmed memoirs ‘On what grounds is this important programme not to be shown?’, Listener, 23 October 1980; Cabinet Secretary to the Prime Minister, ‘Lord Mountbatten’s Memoirs’, 23 July 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 83 Kennedy, ‘Mountbatten’s filmed memoirs’; Shaw, ‘Eden and the BBC During the 1956 Suez Crisis’; author’s conversation with Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, 15 November 2011; Cabinet Secretary to the Prime Minister, ‘Lord Mountbatten’s Memoirs’, 23 July and 6 November 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 84 Ludovic Kennedy, letter to the editor and ‘Mountbatten’s filmed memoirs’, Listener, 30 and 23 October 1980; Bernard Levin, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Suez fiasco: how the truth was suppressed’, The Times, 5 November 1980; [Ratcliffe] Committee of the Privy Counsellors on Ministerial Memoirs, Report of the Privy Counsellors on Ministerial Memoirs, January 1976, Cmnd 6836 (London: HMSO, 1976). 85 Author’s conversation with Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, 15 November 2011; Cabinet Secretary to the Prime Minister, ‘Lord Mountbatten’s Memoirs’, 23 July and 6 November 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 86 Peter Dunn, ‘Mercury Arts Notebook’, Sunday Times, 29 June and 19 October 1980; Lord Hailsham, letter to the editor, The Times, 7 November 1980; P. J. Wright to Sir Robert Armstrong, 5 November 1980 and Cabinet Secretary memo on ‘Lord Mountbatten’s memoirs’, 11 November 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501; Ludovic Kennedy, letter to the editor and ‘Mountbatten’s filmed memoirs’, Listener, 30 and 23 October 1980. 87 Bernard Levin, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Suez fiasco’ and ‘A desperate plea to Eden: “I beg you to turn back”’, The Times, 5 and 11 November 1980. 88 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 546; author’s conversation with Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, 15 November 2011; Cabinet Secretary, memo on ‘Lord Mountbatten’s memoirs’, 11 November 1980, and correspondence with Countess Avon and Earl of Selkirk, November 1980, Cabinet Office retention, CAB164/1501. 89 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Lieut. Colonel the Rt. Hon. Sir Michael Adeane [HM Queen’s secretary], 21 April and 27 June 1967, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N108.

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Chapter 4 1

‘The Ceremonial Funeral of Earl Mountbatten of Burma’, 6 September 1979 (British Movietone, UK, 1979), AP Archive: British Movietone. 2 Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 342–4, and Timothy Knatchbull, From a Clear Blue Sky Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb (London: Hutchinson, 2009), 141–6. In January 1965 Mountbatten had claimed he was the only surviving ‘original pallbearer’, in that Churchill had nominated him when dictating his funeral arrangements early in the war; this justified his presence on the steam train and funeral cortege conveying Churchill’s body to its final resting place at Bladon parish church, near Blenheim Palace: Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time, 258. 3 Alistair Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986 Volume II of the Official Biography (London: Macmillan, 1989), 617–9 and 624–7, and D. R. Thorpe, Supermac The Life of Harold Macmillan (London: Pimlico, 2011), pbk. edn., 603–4. 4 Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister The Office and its Holders since 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 105–6 and 258, and Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 619–20. 5 Early in his premiership Macmillan made a favourable impression on Mountbatten by facilitating a de facto apology for Churchill’s scapegoating of Admiral North in the House of Commons after the Dakar expedition went disastrously wrong in September 1940. Having known Dudley North since 1920, the First Sea Lord had long sought his exoneration. The imminent publication of Noel Monks’s That Day at Gibraltar (London: Frederick Muller, 1957) prompted action by the Admiralty and Downing Street to mute a potentially embarrassing attack on Churchill. A careful redrafting of Their Finest Hour in 1948 had seen off North’s threat of a libel action; the embittered admiral had warned Churchill – and Mountbatten – that he was not afraid to sue. Ziegler, Mountbatten, 555, and Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time, 247–8; David Reynolds, In Command of History Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 196–8, 503 and 569 ft. 60. 6 Mountbatten quoted in Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, 179. 7 Hennessy, Having It So Good Britain in the Fifties, 572–3. 8 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 608 and 622; Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten, 479–81. Nehru despatched a frigate, INS Trishul, to escort out of Portsmouth HMS Wakeful, the veteran destroyer from which Edwina was buried. 9 Adrian Smith, ‘Macmillan and Munich: The Open Conspirator’, Dalhousie Review, 68, no. 3 (1989): 235–47. 10 On the PM’s instinctive hostility towards the Federal Republic and fundamental goodwill towards the fledgling Fifth Republic, see Peter Hennessy, Winds of Change Britain in the Early Sixties (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 44–50. 11 Macmillan applauded De Gaulle’s ‘extraordinary dignity and charm’, but he complained of the French leader’s failure to listen and to develop an argument, not least as his ‘doctrine – ­almost a dogma’ was ‘based on intuition, not ratiocination’: Harold Macmillan, diary, 29 November 1961, quoted in Peter Catterall, ‘The Prime Minister and his Trollope: Reading Harold Macmillan’s Reading’, Cercles, Occasional Papers series, No. 1, 2004, 15. 12 On Express Newspapers’ anti-EEC stance, see Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 35–6 and 262. 13 Smith, ‘Macmillan and Munich: The Open Conspirator’, 242–6. On Attlee’s view that Macmillan could have led the Labour Party, see Hennessy, The Prime Minister The Office and its Holders Since 1945, 254.

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14 According to Macmillan’s official biographer, his dislike of Gaitskell contrasted with a slightly more generous view of the next Labour leader; yet the Profumo affair saw him damning of the ‘blackmailing … absolutely untrustworthy’ Wilson: ‘No-one has ever trusted him without being betrayed.’ Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 156–7, and Harold Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Vol II Prime Minister and After 1957–1966, ed. Peter Catterall (London: Pan Books, 2011), pbk. edn., 30 May 1963, 569. 15 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries The Cabinet Years 1950–1957, 9 August 1951, 8 February and 6 March 1952, 93, 141–2 and 150. 16 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Vol II, 30 July 1957, 15 September 1960, and 20 May 1963, 52–3, 327 and 564. The Macmillans’ first visit to Broadlands was in November 1958, along with the defence secretary, Duncan Sandys, and his wife. The CDS had a clear agenda for the weekend, leaving Edwina to play the naïve country house hostess: ‘… I chatting madly about nonsenses as though I knew nothing about all the machinations!! And watching Lady Dorothy doing her embroidery! What extraordinary things one does …’ Lady Mountbatten to Jawaharlal Nehru, [?] November 1958, quoted in Morgan, Edwina Mountbatten, 477. 17 Ibid., 15 and 22 March 1963, 548–9 and 552–3. 18 Douglas Fairbanks jnr. to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 29 and 30 July 1963, and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Douglas Fairbanks jnr., 31 July 1963, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J161. Fairbanks’ dealings with the Duchess of Argyll were revealed in a Channel 4 documentary Secret History: The Duchess and the Headless Man, broadcast on 10 August 2000. 19 Adrian Smith, ‘Admiral Lord Mountbatten: Man of Science and Royal Role Model’, The Historian, no. 131 (2016): 20–3. 20 The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, Twentieth Century Fox, Italy/USA, 1963), based on G. T. di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel of the same name [Il Gattopardo]. Catterall, ‘The Prime Minister and his Trollope: Reading Harold Macmillan’s Reading’, 1–20. 21 Cannadine, ‘Lord Mountbatten’, in The Pleasures of the Past, 67. 22 The necessity of collaboration with the United States in any future military intervention was a view shared by Downing Street and the Chiefs of Staff, the latter endorsing the main conclusion of the task force’s C-in-C, General Sir Charles Keightley, in his final report: Hennessy, Having It So Good, 468–71. 23 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Jawaharlal Nehru, 28 February 1957, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I225. 24 Correspondence of Harold Macmillan and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, July 1957-January 1959, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I267. 25 Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 84–5. 26 Visiting Karachi after New Delhi was, ‘like going from Hampstead or North Oxford to the Border Country or the Highlands’: Harold Macmillan, diary, 19 January 1958, quoted in ibid., 85. 27 Harold Macmillan, Riding The Storm 1956–1959 (London: Macmillan, 1971), 390; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 603; Kyle, Suez, 56–60 and 571; John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), pbk. edn., 302–3. 28 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Harold Macmillan, 14 February 1958, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I267. 29 Diary of Sir Anthony Eden, 6 February 1955, quoted in Thorpe, Eden, 458. 30 Paul Gore-Booth to R.H. Belcher, 8 May 1963, quoted in Ankit, The Kashmir Conflict, 182.

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31 Re the centrality of Kashmir to the United States’ and the UK’s bilateral relations with Pakistan and India, and the deep tensions between the two western powers in their abortive attempt to secure a settlement, see ibid., 164–202. 32 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 601, and ‘Record of conversation between the Honourable Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and Lord Mountbatten, Chief of the Defence Staff, in India between 30th April and 2nd May 1963’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J302. This was not the first report typed up and circulated to relevant departments in Whitehall, as the same file contains a similar record of informal conversations for Nehru’s stay at Broadlands, 13–15 May 1960. Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, ed. Philip Ziegler (London: Collins, 1989), 1 and 2 May 1962, 83–4, and 85. 33 Ankit, The Kashmir Conflict, 180–1. For the argument that Mountbatten was a realist, and – like the Foreign Office – privately recognized how little influence he enjoyed in New Delhi after leaving in 1948, see Ashton, ‘Mountbatten, the Royal Family, and British Influence in Post-independence India and Burma’, 73–92. 34 Ibid., 81–2. On a visit to receive Burma’s highest decoration in 1956 Mountbatten claimed President Ba U blamed the immediate post-war administration for the end of Commonwealth membership: Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 22 March 1956, 18. 35 Ashton, ‘Mountbatten, The Royal Family, and British Influence in Post-independence India and Burma’, 82–6. Immediately after seeing Ne Win Mountbatten somehow convinced himself that his advice might have been welcome: Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 31 January 1964, 89. 36 Ibid., 24 February-22 March and 26 April-3 May 1963, 70–86, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 619; David Young, ‘de Havilland Comet DH106 – RAF Comets’, 2018, www.cometra.uk/?page_id=19802; William Evans, My Mountbatten Years In the Service of Lord Louis (London: Headline, 1989), pbk. edn., 108–13, and recollections of Wren [Women’s Royal Navy] secretaries, in Hough, Mountbatten: Hero of Our Time, 251. 37 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 15–16 September 1964 and 2 June 1965, 94–7 and 125–6, and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, quoted in Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time, 248. 38 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 6–12 March 1962, 63–7. 39 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire The Road to Decolonisation 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pbk. edn., 282–8; John Turner, Macmillan (Harlow: Longman, 1994), pbk. edn., 181–5. 40 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 20 September-14 October 1960, 42–8; Sir Roy Welensky to Harold Macmillan, 22 September 1960, quoted in Thorpe, Supermac, 481. Re the Monckton Commission’s report, and the fate of the CAF fuelling Lord Salisbury’s antipathy towards both Macleod and Macmillan, see Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 208–11, 388–91 and 396–7, and Thorpe, Supermac, 478–82. 41 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 647 and 603–4. For Mountbatten’s account of his abortive appointment as Southern Rhodesia’s governor-general post-UDI, see Lord Mountbatten, briefing card on jobs offered, 1972, Mountbatten papers, MB1/L149. 42 Harold Macmillan, ‘Address to the South African Parliament, 3 February1960’, in Harold Macmillan (ed.), Pointing The Way, 1959–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1972), 472–82. 43 Ankit, The Kashmir Conflict, 148; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 584–5. 44 Till, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1955–1959)’, 271–2 and 277–8.

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45 By 1955 Sandys was arguing that the Fleet Air Arm’s fixed-wing role be reduced to a handful of escort carriers, with Bomber Command enjoying a unique strike capacity. Eric J. Grove, The Royal Navy since 1815 A New Short History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 222 and 224. 46 On Macmillan’s thinking behind the choice of Sandys for Defence and the moving of Lord Hailsham from the Admiralty, see Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries The Cabinet Years, 3 February 1957, 614. 47 HMG, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, Cmnd. 124 (London: HMSO, 1957). ­48 Till, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1955–1959)’, 268–70. 49 Hennessy, Having It So Good, 465–6, Turner, Macmillan, 227–38 and Martin S. Navias, ‘“Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams”: Duncan Sandys, the Chiefs of Staff and the 1957 White Paper’, in Government and the Armed Force in Britain 1856–1990, ed. Paul Smith (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 220–2; Simon J. Ball, ‘Harold Macmillan and the Politics of Defence’, Twentieth Century British History, 6, no. 1 (1995): 82–4. 50 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Commanders-in-Chief and others, ‘The Ides of March 1957’, March 1957, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I106. 51 Macmillan later insisted that Sandys was a well-briefed advocate of Blue Streak, who fought hard in late 1959 to retain its development programme; a view endorsed by the most detailed study of the Defence Secretary’s policy making and implementation: Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 251, and Lewis Betts, Duncan Sandys and British Nuclear Policy-Making (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). By 1958–9 the Air Ministry calculated that replacing free-fall bombs with an upgraded Blue Steel, still very much in the development stage, would see the number of priority Soviet targets drop from around thirty to eleven (the V-bombers would launch their glide-missiles 100 nautical miles outside Soviet air space): Ian Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship Britain’s Deterrent and America, 1957–1962 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 133–4. Navias, ‘“Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams”: Duncan Sandys, the Chiefs of Staff and the 1957 White Paper’, 224–6. 52 Ibid., 226–32. On Sandys’s ill-tempered encounter with the C-in-C, Mediterranean Fleet, see Till, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1955–1959)’, 270. 53 Multiple iterations of the white paper culminated in the PM over a weekend at Chequers rewriting the text in a form acceptable first to Sandys, and then to the Chiefs of Staff: Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Vol II, 16–17 March 1957, 19–20. 54 Navias, ‘“Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams”: Duncan Sandys, the Chiefs of Staff and the 1957 White Paper’, 232–3 and Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 28 July 1969, 187. 55 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, ‘Quarterly News Letter’, 28 September 1957, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 548–9. HMS Bulwark was commissioned in 1960 and HMS Albion in 1962, both Commando carriers fulfilling their designated role during the Indonesian-Malaysian confrontation. 56 Andrew Dorman, ‘Crises and Reviews in British Defence Policy’, in Britain and Defence 1945–2000 A Policy Re-evaluation, eds Stuart Croft, Andrew Dorman, Wyn Rees, and Matthew Utley(Harlow: Longman, 2001), 13; ‘The need to prevent the RAF from sinking the Navy’s carrier programme was an important factor in Mountbatten’s reluctance to challenge the Air Ministry over responsibility for the strategic deterrent …’; or to contest the RAF’s retention of Coastal Command: Till, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1955–1959)’, 272 and 273–4.

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57 Ibid., 273; James Hamilton-Paterson, Empire of the Clouds When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 182 and 232–9. 58 Navias, ‘“Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams”: Duncan Sandys, the Chiefs of Staff and the 1957 White Paper’, 232–3 and 223, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 553 and 528. The private letters of Templer and Mountbatten suggest a surprising degree of mutual respect. See Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten’s 1950s correspondence with the CIGS, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I433. 59 ‘Way Ahead’ was closely associated with Mountbatten’s radical reforming instincts, but it preceded his appointment, and was created by the Admiralty’s Director of Plans and its ‘formidable’ Permanent Secretary, Sir John Young, an admirer and ally of the new First Sea Lord. McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 203–4. 60 Pressurized by the Ceylon [Sri Lanka] Government to quit its Trincolamee naval depot, the East Indies Squadron was incorporated into the Far East Fleet, based in Singapore: Grove, The Royal Navy since 1815, 230. 61 Ibid., 226–7 and 228–30, Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 133, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 530–1 and 553–4. 62 David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation A Twentieth Century History (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 344. 63 ‘County Class Guided Missile Destroyer’, seaforces-online Naval Information: www. seaforces.org/marint/Royal-Navy/Destroyer/County-class. 64 As an illustration of continuity, and involvement in grand policymaking at the highest level, Mountbatten as CDS was involved from the outset in the preparation and planning of the ‘Future Policy Study 1960–70’, a densely argued, evidence-based reality check which Macmillan commissioned in mid-1959 and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, submitted eight months later. Sandys, although still highly regarded by the PM, had minimal involvement in the process, from the opening conference at Chequers to the concluding discussion by a small and select ad hoc cabinet committee on 23 March 1960. Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Volume II, 7 June 1959, 221–2, and Hennessy, Having It So Good, 576–92. 65 Peter Nailor, ‘The Ministry of Defence, 1959–70’, in Government and the Armed Force in Britain 1856–1990, 236–7 and 240–1. 66 Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Air Chief Marshal Sir Dermot Boyle, 11 June 1956, quoted in ibid., 118, and address to the ‘Fairlead’ conference, Greenwich, [?] April 1957, quoted in Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 133. For a detailed account of the First Sea Lord’s agonizing within the COSC over Britain’s nuclear strategy, see Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 117–20. 67 Minutes of COSC meeting with the Minister for Defence, 28 October 1958, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 561. On the close collaboration and shared thinking of Mountbatten and Templer in the summer and autumn of 1958, see Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 117–20, and Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 134–5. 68 The Deputy Chief of Naval Staff oversaw the Navy’s nuclear planning, but ultimate responsibility lay with the First Sea Lord and the Admiralty Board. There is no evidence of a Buccaneer having taken off or landed on an aircraft carrier while carrying a ‘Red Beard’ free fall bomb. Plans for the NA39’s predecessors – the Scimitar and Sea Vixon – to carry the bomb externally suggest an alarming readiness to tolerate a high risk of on-board catastrophe. From 1959 individual fleet carriers may have carried ‘Red Beard’ on specific tours, but not actually armed their aircraft.

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The focus was east of Suez, as the prevailing assumption was that, for fear of Soviet escalation, naval tactical weapons would only be used in a conflict with China. In due course Charles Lambe questioned any use of carrier-based aircraft in doomsday nuclear operations. Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 99–115, 138–41, 145–6 and 172–6. 69 Conversation over lunch with Churchill on 30 July 1946: Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 337. 70 On the partnership of Zuckerman, Bernal and Max Perutz at Combined Operations, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 268–76 and 284–6. 71 The principal forum for discussing a strategy of massive retaliation, and its alternatives, was the Naval Review. In 1962–3 the journal carried a ferocious inservice debate on whether the Royal Navy should assume the principal deterrent role given the unsuitability of Polaris-carrying SSBNs to fulfil a conventional operational role in any future war: Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 125–7, 130 and 162–3. 72 The consequences of Churchill’s visit to Washington in January 1952 were the drafting of that autumn’s COSC paper on the need for a credible nuclear deterrent in the face of an enhanced Soviet-Sino threat, and a fledgling programme to build a hydrogen bomb (belatedly authorized by cabinet in the early summer of 1954). The roots of the Global Strategy Paper lay in the Chiefs of Staffs’ ‘away day’ conference at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 28 April-2 May 1952. John Bayliss, AngloAmerican Defence Relations 1939–1984 (London: Macmillan, 1984), pbk. edn., 67–9, and Peter Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb (Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2007), 87–125. 73 Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 81–6, and Duncan Redford and Philip D. Grove, The Royal Navy A History Since 1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 238; Bernard Brodie, ‘Implications of Nuclear Weapons in Total War’, Rand Corporation, 8 July 1957, www.apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/606443.pdf. 74 On the evolution of what the investigative journalist Chapman Pincher labelled the ‘Zuckbatten Axis’, see Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten’, 142–3, 146–7 and 148. 75 Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 166–86. Zuckerman also consulted his new colleague at Birmingham University, Mark Oliphant, Australia’s principal physicist on the Manhattan Project. Oliphant shared Blackett’s and Tizard’s scepticism, but said that if it had to be built then an atom bomb should be a Commonwealth and not an overwhelmingly British project – ironically, Mountbatten’s view in the first flush of excitement after Japan’s surrender: ibid., 183, and Wayne Reynolds, Australia’s Bid for the Bomb (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), pbk. edn., 39. For the essence of Blackett’s opposition see his memorandum to GEN75, the first cabinet sub-committee to discuss a British nuclear deterrent: P. M. S. Blackett, ‘Atomic Energy: an immediate policy for Great Britain’, February 1947, in Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence Britain and Atomic Energy 1945–1952 (London: Macmillan, 1974), 194–206. On Tizard’s last attempt as the MOD’s Chief Scientific Adviser to kill the project, in 1949, see ibid., 229–31. 76 HMG, Agreement for Co-operation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence Purposes, Cmnd. 537 (London: HMSO, 1958); Macmillan, Riding The Storm, 323, and Bayliss, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984, 17–9 and 30–4. 77 Thorpe, Supermac, 167–8, 170, 186–7 and 286. Macmillan had been British Minister at Allied HQ in Algiers and Eisenhower was Supreme Commander in North Africa.

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78 ‘The UK’s “special relationship” with the United States is not an institutional arrangement, but a reflection of the personal ties that exist between individuals, particularly in the US and UK nuclear and intelligence communities. Without these links, the “relationship”, whatever its political significance, would, I imagine, simply fade away.’ Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 437. 79 From the late 1950s Zuckerman chaired the Air Ministry Strategic Scientific Policy Committee and the Committee on the Management and Control of Research, with full authority over each body’s support staff. On becoming the Defence Secretary’s scientific adviser in 1960 he resigned from the AMSSPC to chair the powerful, interservice Defence Research Policy Committee. Ibid., 187–8, 160–3, 197 and 270–91. 80 Ibid., 186, 206–7; Maguire, ‘An Enlightenment Scientist in an Irrational World. Lord Zuckerman and the British Government’s Nuclear Weapons Establishment’; Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Lord Mountbatten’, 156–7 and Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 292–304. 81 Edward Teller, 27 August 1958, quoted in Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb, 124. ‘The father of the H bomb’ is portrayed in his arch critic’s second volume of memoirs as a ‘blinkered’ and irresponsible scientist wholly indifferent to the consequences of nuclear devastation: Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 271. Ziegler, Mountbatten, 600. 82 Ibid., 647, and Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 299. 83 ‘… I pointed out if tactical nuclear weapons were ever used it could only end in escalation to total global nuclear destruction, and for this reason nobody in their senses would ever use them.’ Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 16 February 1970, 190. 84 Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 467–8, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 694–6, Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 176 and Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Lord Mountbatten’, 162–3. 85 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, address to the Foundation of France on behalf of the SIPRI, Strasbourg, 11 May 1979, replicated in William Pattinson, Mountbatten and the Men of the ‘Kelly’ (Wellingborough: Patrick Stephens, 1986), 204–7; Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Lord Mountbatten’, 163.

Chapter 5 1

2 3 4 5

In both the Royal Navy and the United States Navy many senior officers accepted the strategic argument for nuclear ­deterrence while questioning the need for massive retaliation, whereby military and civilian targets were granted equivalent status. Their RAF and USAF counterparts complained of naval fastidiousness, and a refusal to acknowledge harsh reality: Ken Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby, 1955–62’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 25, no. 3 (2002): 71. Peter Hennessy and James Jinks, The Silent Deep The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 140. Ibid., 54–8 and 132. Ibid., 132–8. David Alan Rosenberg, ‘Arleigh Burke: The Last CNO’, Naval History and Heritage Command, www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/onlinereading-room/title-list-alphabetically/a/arleigh-burke-the-last-cno.html; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 557–8.

Notes 6

229

Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten and Admiral Arleigh Burke USN, 1957–59, Mountbatten Papers, MB1/I447, Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 142 and Admiral Arleigh Burke to Philip Ziegler, 20 December 1983, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 558. 7 In this first instance it appears to be a compliant Deputy Secretary of the Navy who took the initiative following a conversation with Mountbatten: Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 155. 8 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 139 and 112–5, Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby, 1955–62’, 66–7 and John Coote, Submariner (London: Leo Cooper, 1991), 197–8. Mountbatten later claimed the nuclear liaison officer was his suggestion in November 1955, whereas it appears to have been Burke’s nearly three years later: Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 177 ft. 9. 9 Coote, Submariner, 204–5, Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 143–4, 146–8 and 160 and Coote, Submariner, 202. 10 SSN – Nuclear-Powered Attack Submarine; SSBN – Nuclear-Powered Ballistic Missile Submarine. 11 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 141, Coote, Submariner, 201–3 [including extract from 1955 profile of Rickover], Lord Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’, in Six Men Out of the Ordinary, 171–4 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 558. 12 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 189–91, and Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Hyman G. Rickover’, 188–91. Rickover was a great admirer of Zuckerman from their first meeting in the summer of 1962, and the two men were close friends until the former’s death in 1986. Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 436–7. 13 Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 98. 14 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 144–5. In 1979 Mountbatten recounted in a letter an elaborate, self-congratulatory story of how he secured the necessary funding for HMS Dreadnought, by tapping into Derick Heathcoat Amory’s close ties to the Navy. Neither he nor his official biographer recalled that Heathcoat Amory did not become Chancellor of the Exchequer until January 1958: Ziegler, Mountbatten, 557. 15 On Woods’s August 1956 paper, ‘The Role of the Submarine’, see Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 154–60. 16 Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 98 and 100. 17 20–31 August 1956. 18 Coote, Submariner, 203, Admiral Lord Mountbatten, ‘Meeting with Admiral Rickover at Broadlands on Monday 20 August 1956, NA, ADM205/112, partially replicated in Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 150–2, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 558. For the attention to detail in hosting Rickover see relevant Admiralty correspondence, 1958–9, including correspondence between a very hands-on First Sea Lord and a very high maintenance Vice Admiral Rickover, Mountbatten papers, MB1/N104. 19 Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 38–45 and 98–100. Clark argues persuasively that Britain’s hydrogen bomb test in May 1957 was not a significant factor in the Eisenhower Administration, and in particular Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, becoming more amenable to the transfer of nuclear technology; but the desire to learn far more about Calder Hall – as shared by all members of the AEC, including of course Rickover – certainly was: ibid., 104–6. 20 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 167–8, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, ‘First Sea Lord Newsletter’, August 1957, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I300, Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 100–1 and Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 169–70.

230

Notes

21 Ibid., 170–1, Admiral Sir John Eccles to Sir John Young, Secretary of the Admiralty, 30 October 1957, quoted in Coote, Submariner, 213, and Rear Admiral W.J. Woods to Sir John Young, Secretary of the Admiralty, 9 November 1957, quoted in Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 169–70. 22 Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 102–3. 23 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 175–9, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 558–60 and Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 103. 24 Ibid., 103–4. A refusal to give the Americans technical information re Britain’s civil nuclear programme occurs repeatedly in Macmillan’s diary entries, for example, Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Vol II, 1 January 1959, 101. 25 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 180–1, 184–6 and 196–8, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 559. 26 Henceforth Rickover was a problem not an asset, notably in the winter of 1963–4 when he sanctioned the supply of American replacements for flawed reactor components in Valiant and Warspite only if no further help was sought, and a proposal withdrawn for the future monitoring of radiation levels in USN nuclear submarines based at Holy Loch. Notwithstanding his trust and liking of Zuckerman, an embittered Rickover effectively ended cooperation: Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 226–7 and 230–2, and Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 436–7. 27 John Peyton, Solly Zuckerman A Scientist Out of the Ordinary (London: John Murray, 2002), 14–5, 156–7 and 160–1, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 560–1. The centrality of Mountbatten to the Polaris story was re-emphasized early this century in Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 56–86. 28 Given that Lord Selkirk was a retired Group Captain, albeit commissioned in the Auxiliary Air Force, one wonders how the Air Ministry viewed his endeavours to ensure the Royal Navy took over the RAF’s deterrent role. On Selkirk’s energetic lobbying in 1957–8 for Polaris as an alternative to Blue Streak, see ibid., 60–2. 29 Ibid., 66. 30 Ibid., 63–4, Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 120–1 and Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 135–6. 31 Lieutenant Commander Joel Harris USN, ‘High Velocity Outcomes: People, Not Process’, Naval History and Heritage Command, 3 December 2018, www.history.navy. mil/content/history/nhhc/get-involved/essay-contest/2018-winners/high-velocityoutcomes–people–not-process.html. 32 Ibid., Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 66–7 and Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 154–5. Tellingly, Mountbatten’s personal papers contain no correspondence with Raborn. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Vice Admiral [Rtd.] Sir Ian McGeoch, [?] 1973, in McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 206. 33 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 201–3, and Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 157. 34 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Admiral Arleigh Burke, 8 May 1958, quoted in Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 203. 35 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Admiral Arleigh Burke, 24 April 1959, and Admiral Arleigh Burke to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 20 May 1959, Mountbatten Papers, MB1/I447 and MB1/J40. 36 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 560–1, Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 157–9, 160 and 164–5 and Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 66. Polaris estimate excluding manpower costs, and annual naval expenditure: ibid., 65, and Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 164.

Notes

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37 Admiral Arleigh Burke to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 28 February 1959, in McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 236–7, Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 204, and Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day 1961–1963 (London: ­Macmillan, 1973), 363. By December 1962 Polaris’s historic R and D costs totalled approximately $800 million dollars, to which the British Government contributed nothing: Donette Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 90–1. 38 Admiral Sir Charles Lambe to Admiral Arleigh Burke, 11 May 1959, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 560–1; McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 206 and Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 168. 39 Admiral Sir Charles Lambe to Admiral Arleigh Burke, 11 May 1959, and to senior members of the Admiralty Board, 25 May 1959, quoted in Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 204–5. Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 159–60, and Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 68 and 63. 40 Ibid., 72. 41 Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 167–84, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 233–5 and Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 69–76. 42 Skybolt was partly a successor to Blue Steel 2: the over-engineered, over-ambitious air-launched missile had been cancelled in 1960, with resources concentrated upon rendering Blue Steel 1 operational. Although highly unreliable, Blue Steel missiles were first fitted to V-bombers in September 1963, and finally withdrawn in 1969; adapted for low-level attack following the purchase of Skybolt, they did not constitute an effective deterrent if nuclear-armed, and were withdrawn once the Royal Navy’s SSBNs entered service. 43 Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 72–3. 44 Ibid, 73, Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 291–2, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 235–49, Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 205, Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 161–2 and Rebecca John, Caspar John (London: Collins, 1987), 197. 45 Lee, Carrington An Honourable Man, 169–70, Lord Carrington quoted in ibid., 169 and Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 250. On Carrington’s efforts to overturn the Camp David agreement, challenge Sandys’s championing of Skybolt, and ­convince Watkinson to buy a small number of American SSBNs, see Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 74. 46 A further connection was the shared experience of performing professional duties throughout the Suez crisis while privately dissenting from official policy: Lee, Carrington An Honourable Man, 155–7. 47 Young, ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby’, 85, fts. 128 and 117. Accusations then and since of Mountbatten and Zuckerman conspiring to secure Polaris for a Senior Service in rapid decline are clearly wide of the mark. Nevertheless, in 1960–1 the CDS was in detailed discussion with Burke re future options for securing Polaris; and late in life Zuckerman was disingenuous when suggesting Mountbatten never considered a Skybolt substitute before November 1960. Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 379–82, and Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma’, 149–50 and Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 266. 48 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 206–10, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 594 and Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, 75–8. Murray suggests Macmillan was reluctant to create an informal group, including the CDS, to discuss Skybolt given that confidentiality was crucial and he didn’t trust Mountbatten to stay silent; but she offers no supporting evidence: ibid., 78.

232

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49 Ibid., 81–2, and Hennessy, Winds of Change, 119–20 and 307–8. 50 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Mrs Sybilla O’Donnell, [?], in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 594, and Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 256–7. 51 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Mrs Sybilla O’Donnell, [?], in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 595, Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Vol II, 15 September 1960, 327, and David Bruce, Ambassador to Sixties London The Diaries of David Bruce, 1961–1969, eds Raj Roy and John W. Young (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Republic of Letters Publishing, 2009), 22 March 1966, 252. 52 Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 356–66, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 256–65, Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, 81–104 and Hennessy, Winds of Change, 308–16. The First Lord of the Admiralty’s forecast was for four SSBNs, each with sixteen missiles, by 1970; an alternative projection, favoured by Thorneycroft, anticipated the completion by 1973 of eleven hybrid submarines, each with eight missiles, at a cost of £290 million: Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 471. The 5 per cent of development costs conceded by Macmillan in January 1963 ($14 million by 1966) was waived as part of the 1966 secret agreement to give the United States full access to the new refuelling and telecommunications base on Diego Garcia, the British Overseas Territory in the Indian Ocean: ‘U.S.-British Deal On Diego Garcia In ’66 Confirmed’, New York Times, 17 October 1975. 53 Harold Macmillan to John F. Kennedy, 24 December 1962, and to Sir Robert Scott, quoted in Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship, 418. 54 ‘Caspar John … never referred to him as ‘Dickie’ or ‘Mountbatten’ but always as ‘That bloody fellow Burma.’: Lord Carrington quoted in Lee, Carrington An Honourable Man, 168–9. John quickly formed a strong bond with Carrington, unlike his initial experience of working with Mountbatten, inside the Air Division of the Admiralty in 1937–8. As VCNS he enjoyed a more positive working relationship, seen within the COSC to exercise a ‘stabilizing influence’ over the First Sea Lord. John, Caspar John, 187, 122 and 179. 55 John, Caspar John, 197, and Thorpe, Supermac, 399–406. 56 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 216–33, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 266–7, and Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), 302. 57 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 233–6, and Moore, The Royal Navy and Nuclear Weapons, 170. 58 Lord Jellicoe to Peter Thorneycroft, 2 December 1963, in Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 234–5. 59 Lawrence Freedman, Britain and Nuclear Weapons (London: Macmillan, 1980), 46–7, and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Harold Wilson, 19 October 1964 [initial draft, unsent], Mountbatten papers, MB1/J61. 60 ‘Cabinet Minutes, CC (63) 1st Conclusions’, 3 January 1963, NA, CAB128/37, in Hennessy, Cabinets and the Bomb, 159–61. 61 For a profile of Ball see David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1973), pbk. edn., 214–6. Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, 109–14, and Bayliss, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984, 138–9. 62 Ibid., Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, 123–5 and Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Vol II, 9 and 20 May 1963, and 19 September 1963, 562–3, 565–6 and 595–6.

Notes

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63 Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 269, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 596–7 and Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 2–3 December 1964, 103–4. Previously, Caccia could take advantage of several meetings at Chequers on nuclear matters in the spring of 1963 to have a quiet word with Mountbatten, familiar from frequent stays at the Washington Embassy when the permanent secretary had been ambassador: Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 469, and correspondence of Sir Harold Caccia and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 1959–61, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J48. 64 Bayliss, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984, 139–40, and Murray, Kennedy, Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons, 123–5 and 132–4. 65 Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 237–8. 66 Bayliss, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984, 134–5, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 373 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 626. 67 Philip Ziegler, Wilson The Authorised Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), 208, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 373–4, Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 239–40, and COS 58th Mtg/64(2) (Confidential Annex) (SSF), 29 September 1964, NA, DEFE32/9, quoted in ibid., 240. 68 Ibid., 240–1. 69 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 625–6. Ziegler underestimated how seriously Mountbatten viewed a change of government, implying that his only concern was a possible ban on shooting game: ibid. 70 Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 366–70, and Healey, The Time of My Life, 251. 71 Healey, The Time of My Life, 302, and Barbara Castle, ­diary, 12 January 1968, quoted in Peter Hennessy, Cabinet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pbk. edn., 146. Two decades later the net cost of cancelling Polaris was estimated at £35–40 million, which, even at 1960s prices, was not the ‘inordinate cost’ Wilson claimed in his prime ministerial memoir: Freedman, Britain and Nuclear Weapons, 32, and Harold Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–1970 A Personal Record (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 68–9. 72 Healey, The Time of My Life, 304–5, Bayliss, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984, 148–9, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 597, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 374–5 and Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 244. 73 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Harold Wilson, 19 October 1964 [initial draft, unsent], Mountbatten papers, MB1/J61; Ziegler, Harold Wilson, 208, and Hennessy, The Prime Minister The Office and its Holders Since 1945, 290. The CDS’s claim that an extraordinarily busy Harold Wilson gave him three hours to make his case was made in 1973, in correspondence with former Flag Officer Submarines Vice-Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 242. 74 Bayliss, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984, 146, Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 244 and 246, Healey, The Time of My Life, 302–4 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 628. The awkward squad at Chequers constituted the Paymaster General, George Wigg, and the recently ennobled Lord Chalfont, The Times defence correspondent appointed as Minister of Disarmament after Zuckerman repeatedly refused the post, prompting Wilson to promote him to Chief Scientific Adviser. 75 Ziegler, Wilson The Authorised Life, 210, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 375–6, Healey, The Time of My Life, 303–4, Hennessy, The Prime Minister The Office

234

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and its Holders Since 1945, 290, Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 244–5 and 247 and Freedman, Britain and Nuclear Weapons, 33–6. 76 Bayliss, Anglo-American Defence Relations 1939–1984, 148–9 and 151–2, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 374–5, Ziegler, Wilson The Authorised Life, 209 and 221–2, Max Hastings, Vietnam An Epic Tragedy 1945–1975 (London: William Collins, 2018), 199, Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall, The Chiefs The Story of the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff (London: Brassey’s, 1992), 363; and Smith, ‘The Free Frenchman’, 42–7. 77 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Denis Healey, 20 March 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J215, and Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 7–8 December 1964, 105–6.

Chapter 6 1 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 608–9, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 370–2, Lord Mountbatten, briefing card on jobs offered, 1972, Mountbatten papers, MB1/L149, and Colville, The Fringes of Power Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955, 15 August 1945 and 31 January 1951, 612 and 637. 2 Lord Mountbatten, briefing card on jobs offered, 1972, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ L149; Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 282–3. Re the healthy scepticism, see footnote 49. ‘Pug’ Ismay repeatedly insisted to Mountbatten, ‘that he would be mad’ to accept an invitation to join Attlee’s administration: Lockhart, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart 2: 1939–1965, 26 February 1948, 649. 3 In Advise and Consent (Columbia, USA: Otto Preminger, 1962), the President chooses a deeply unpopular Secretary of State, and the subsequent melodrama revolves around blackmail and suicide. 4 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to M.J. ‘Mike’ Frankovich, 8 November 1962, Mountbatten Papers, MB1/L156. Admiral Sir Caspar John quoted in John, Caspar John, 190. 5 On Mountbatten’s absence from London on the weekend of 26–27 October 1962, see Hennessy, Winds of Change, 267 and 272. Thorneycroft’s civilian and military advisers, including Zuckerman, sat in silence, and they remained so, after the CDS posed the question, ‘“What would we have done if the Russians had not caved in?”’: Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Lord Mountbatten’, 157. 6 Interview with Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Elworthy, in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 616–7. ­7 Lord Mountbatten quoted in Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, 181. 8 Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time, 250. 9 Brockman, promoted to rear-admiral, effectively headed the CDS’s secretariat. ‘… he was very charming, very nice, very good looking, and very ordinary – and absolutely terrified of Mountbatten’: anonymous senior staff officer quoted in ibid. 10 Interviews with Field Marshal Sir Richard Hull and Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Elworthy, in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 616–7. 11 Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 339. Bramall confirmed that Mountbatten fed the service chiefs outrageous claims about how keen the Queen was to see his proposals re the MOD implemented. Ibid. Internal off the record briefings that the CDS was duplicitous, but ironically not a very good intriguer, fed into an unflattering Sunday

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Telegraph profile on the eve of Mountbatten’s retirement: Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 305. 12 Quoted in Hough, Mountbatten Hero of Our Time, 250. 13 In May 1958 a surprising number of serving and retired officers questioned the inevitability of Mountbatten’s appointment: Lieutenant-Commander Peter Kemp’s recollection of collective opinion within the United Services Club, in ibid., 248. 14 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 564, 608 and 617; Lord Mountbatten, ‘Reorganisation of Defence’, undated memorandum, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K96, 9. 15 Ball, ‘Harold Macmillan and the Politics of Defence’, 92. 16 Paragraph based on Adrian Smith, ‘Command and Control in Postwar Britain Defence Decision-making in the United Kingdom, 1945–1984’, Twentieth Century Britain, 2, no. 3 (1991): 300–3; Eden, Full Circle, 274. 17 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries The Cabinet Years, 29 October 1954, 363, Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 292–3, Thorpe, Supermac, 288–91 and Horne, Macmillan 1894–1956, 344–5. 18 Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 293–4. 19 Barr, Lords of the Desert, 182–5. ­20 Smith, ‘Command and Control in Postwar Britain’, 303, Rhodes James, Anthony Eden, 424, Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 295–7 and 321–2 and Air Chief Marshal Sir William Dickson quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 532. 21 Anthony Head soon became chair of the Conservative Defence Committee, made up of around thirty MPs, the majority of whom were opposed to enhancing the power of the MOD at the expense of the service ministries. Wary of a Commons rebellion Macmillan held back from unduly antagonizing them. Ball, ‘Harold Macmillan and the Politics of Defence’, 88. 22 Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 45–8. On Sandys’s contemptuous treatment of individual chiefs of staff, other than Mountbatten, see Ball, ‘Harold Macmillan and the Politics of Defence’, 85–6. 23 Ibid., 86–8, 93, and 95–6. 24 Smith, ‘Command and Control in Postwar Britain’, 304–5; HMG, The Central Organisation for Defence, Cmnd. 476 (London: HMSO, 1958). 25 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 246–7. Admiral Lord Mountbatten to Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, 1 May 1958, and Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery to Admiral Lord Montgomery, 7 May 1958, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ I164. 26 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Prime Minister and After, 16 September 1959, 23 February, 24 June and 11 April 1958, 9, 247, 110–1, and 129. Needless to say, Sandys’s family had no German connections, hailing on both sides from Scotland! 27 Tensions within the COSC and in their dealings with the Minister of Defence are all too evident in relevant memoranda and correspondence archived as ‘Defence Committee Ministers of Defence, 1955–9’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/I106. Macmillan, At the End of the Day 1961–63, 411–2, Michael Howard, The Central Organisation of Defence (London: RUS, 1970), 10 and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, diary, 9 July 1958, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 565. 28 Slim, Defeat Into Victory, 465, and Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 326. 29 Field Marshal Sir Frederick Festing, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 580, Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 32–6 and Howard, The Central Organisation of Defence, 10

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30 Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 326–8, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 581, 585, 591, 586 and 568, and McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 244–5. 31 Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten’, 152. 32 ‘… Sandys and Macmillan had to accept defeat and reculer pour mieux sauter on some of their more dramatic schemes for integrating the three services’: Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 500. Macmillan’s diary entries are consistently complimentary of a competent and well-regarded Watkinson, clearly a victim of political expediency in July 1962. 33 Patrick Cosgrave, ‘OBITUARY: Viscount Watkinson’, Independent, 21 December 1995. 34 On the experience of naval officers seconded to the MOD, see McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 242–3. Lord Mountbatten, ‘Reorganisation of Defence’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K96, 20–1, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Dermot Boyle, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 582. 35 Mountbatten claimed his holding parallel five-star ranks in peacetime would be the realization of George VI’s wish. Julian Amery claimed that he and John Profumo dissuaded the CDS from pursuing the matter further: Julian Amery, in Hough, Mountbatten: Hero of Our Time, 253. 36 A memo to Watkinson from Richard Way, the War Office’s permanent secretary, described the CDS as, ‘probably the most mistrusted of all senior officers in the three services’: quoted in Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten’, 146. 37 According to Mountbatten, Macmillan was persuaded by the MOD’s ignorance of local commanders’ unauthorized intervention on the troubled Gan atoll in the Indian Ocean in August 1959: ‘He was furious and said that the only shooting he would permit this August was grouse … This breakdown gave me the excuse to start work on getting a “unified Commander-in-Chief ” appointed over the other three.’ Lord Mountbatten, ‘Reorganisation of Defence’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/ K96, 7–8. 38 In 1961 Kuwait supplied nearly 50 per cent of the UK’s oil needs, and the crisis was triggered by a Commons announcement on 19 June that the 1899 treaty would be updated. Ziegler, Mountbatten, 584–5, Barr, Lords of the Desert, 292–4, Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 332–3 and Lee, Carrington An Honourable Man, 186. On the stark contrast with Eden’s handling of the Suez crisis, see Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Prime Minister and After, 8 July 1961, 398. 39 Henry A. Probert, ‘Elworthy (Samuel), Charles, Baron Elworthy’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 25 May 2006, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/51868, Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten’, 152, Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 357 and 365, and interview with Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Elworthy, in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 616–7. 40 Re TSR2’s cancellation, see Sean Straw and John W. Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Demise of the TSR-2, October 1964-April 1965’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 20, no. 4 (1997): 18–44. 41 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Sir Solly Zuckerman, 2 September 1960, The Zuckerman Archive, University of East Anglia, SZ/CSA/95/6. The use of home addresses circumvented departmental scrutiny of mutual correspondence; and the CDS extended the practice to lobbying the Defence Secretary on the superior merits of the Buccaneer, while maintaining his impartiality at the COSC: Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Harold Watkinson, 14 September 1960, ibid., SZ/ CSA/95/9. Thank you to Dr Richard Maguire for copies of these letters.

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42 Peyton, Solly Zuckerman, 126–8, and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Sir Solly Zuckerman, 3 September 1960, quoted in Maguire, ‘An Enlightenment Scientist in an Irrational World. Lord Zuckerman and the British Government’s Nuclear Weapons Establishment’. Zuckerman later denied any collusion with the CDS over his final recommendations re the respective aircraft: Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 214–6. 43 A visit to America in early 1965 left Mountbatten a great fan of the McDonnell Douglas F-4, with the Air Staff exasperated by his suggestion that the Phantom might substitute for the TSR2: Straw and John W. Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Demise of the TSR-2, October 1964-April 1965’, 28. Keith Hayward, The British Aircraft Industry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 86–90, Hamilton-Paterson, Empire of the Clouds When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World, 132–42, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 211–9 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 586–9. On Macmillan’s irritation with Mountbatten’s two-year campaign to create an integrated maritime air force, including Coastal Command, see Till, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1955–1959), 273–4, and Ball, ‘Harold Macmillan and the Politics of Defence’, 94–5. Macmillan learnt of the First Sea Lord’s master plan courtesy of Chapman Pincher in the Daily Express (infuriating an embarrassed Mountbatten as it echoed an earlier leak, in 1956); in January 1959 the Prime Minister told Sandys that all relevant discussion must cease, to ensure the future of Coastal Command did not become an election issue later that year. Ibid., 94. 44 In July 1962 Watkinson agreed to make way for a younger man, but Macmillan then appointed the older Thorneycroft. Thorpe, Supermac, 523. 45 Horne, Macmillan 1957–1986, 243–4 and 377, Thorpe, Supermac, 540, Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Prime Minister and After, 15 November 1962, 518–9, Hennessy, Winds of Change, 364–5 and Harold Macmillan to Lord Carrington, [?] November 1962, in Lee, Carrington An Honourable Man, 201. Carrington twice offered to resign, following an official inquiry into the Portland spy ring, and then the conviction of Vassall. Like Mountbatten, he was libelled by the Daily Express, but advised by Macmillan not to take legal action: ibid., 188–99 and 202. 46 Over a getting-to-know-each-other lunch Thorneycroft confidently predicted that soon there would no longer be a role for aircraft carriers: Ziegler, Mountbatten, 609. 47 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, diary, 17 August 1962, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 610. 48 Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 359–60, Lord Mountbatten, ‘Reorganisation of Defence’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K96, 10–1 and appendix, i-xxii, and Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 335. ­49 Macmillan was clearly still preoccupied with Cuba as on returning to Downing Street from Romsey he wrote in his diary a lengthy analysis of the crisis, relegating his Broadlands visit to a passing mention. This was the weekend when, according to Mountbatten, the PM invited him to become Minister of Defence, and yet the diary entry is silent on the subject. Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Volume II, 4 November 1962, 514–8. 50 Typically, Mountbatten translated his late-night chat with the PM into, ‘many hours of intense discussion of my proposals’: Lord Mountbatten, ‘Reorganisation of Defence’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K96, 12. 51 Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 360–1, Ziegler, Mountbatten, 612 and Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Prime Minister and After, 4 November and 9 December 1962, 514 and 523–4.

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52 Harold Macmillan to HM Queen Elizabeth, 13 December 1962, replicated in Macmillan, The End of the Day, 412–5. 53 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Prime Minister and after, 31 December 1962, 529, Lord Mountbatten, ‘Reorganisation of Defence’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K96, 11, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 613. 54 Lord Mountbatten, ‘Reorganisation of Defence’, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K96, 13, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 614. 55 Ibid., 615, Smith, ‘Command and Control in Postwar Britain’, 309 and Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 361–2. Re the wartime pioneering of operational research by Patrick Blackett, Solly Zuckerman, and J.D. Bernal, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 268–78. 56 General Lord Ismay and Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Jacob, ‘Higher Direction of Defence: report to Minister of Defence by General Lord Ismay and LieutenantGeneral Sir Ian Jacob’, February 1963, NA, DEFE7/1898. 57 Ibid., and Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 339. Re the service chiefs being ‘at loggerheads’ with Mountbatten, ‘They seemed to hate him.’: Sir Ian Jacob to Philip Ziegler, [?] 1982, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 615. 58 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Volume II, 27 February 1963, 543, Macmillan, At the End of the Day 1961–63, 416–7, House of Commons Defence Debate, 4 March 1963, Hansard, vol. 673, www.api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1963/ mar/04/defence, and Macmillan diary entry, 4 March 1963, quoted in Macmillan, At the End of the Day 1961–63, 417. 59 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 14 March 1963, 78. 60 Ibid., 24 February-22 March and 26 April-3 May 1963, 70–86. 61 HMG, Central Organisation for Defence, Cmnd. 2097 (London: HMSO, 1963). 62 Harold Macmillan to Peter Thorneycroft, 8, 29 April, and 14 May 1963, quoted in Macmillan, At the End of the Day 1961–63, 417–9. The service ministers were in real terms powerless: at the War Office John Profumo was already tainted by scandal, his downfall imminent; as a peer Lord Carrington was in a weak position to oppose the Admiralty losing its minister, even assuming that he wanted to; and after eighteen years in parliament the Secretary for Air, Hugh Fraser, remained a political minnow. Thorpe, Supermac, 343. 63 Smith, ‘Command and Control in Postwar Britain’, 310, and Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 362–3. Mountbatten ensured the title ‘Chief of the Imperial General Staff ’ was sacrificed in the name of modernity; but he insisted that the Royal Navy retain its ‘First Sea Lord’ and its ‘Second Sea Lord’. The Navy minister’s historic title of ‘First Lord of the Admiralty’ now became ‘Lord High Admiral’, and it was bestowed upon the sovereign – a masterly move by a master of invented tradition. 64 Macmillan, The Macmillan Diaries Prime Minister and after, 11 July 1963, 575, Macmillan diary entry, 11 July 1963, quoted in Macmillan, At the End of the Day 1961–63, 419, and Mountbatten diary entry, 30 July 1963, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 620. 65 In the Upper House Lord Carrington had a tougher time defending the White Paper when interrogated by one-time Minister of Defence, Field Marshal Lord Alexander. House of Commons, Defence (Central Organisation), 31 July 1963, Hansard, vol. 682, www.api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1963/jul/31/ defence-central-organisation; House of Lords, Defence Reorganisation, 31 July 1963, Hansard, vol. 252, www.hansard.parliament.uk/lords/1963-07-31/debates/a1d1fa593152-46f9-8651-03cec0b9db20/DefenceReorganisation; Smith, ‘Command and Control in Postwar Britain’, 313–5.

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66 House of Commons, Defence (Transfer of Functions) Bill, second reading, 21 November 1963, Hansard, vol. 684, www.api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/ commons/1963/nov/21/defence-transfer-of-functions-bill; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 620. 67 Historic England, ‘Ministry of Defence Containing Sixteenth-century Undercroft and Historic Rooms Number 13, 24, 25, 27 and 79’, 17 August 2020, www. historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1278223. 68 Separate from the Air Ministry, the Ministry of Aviation, 1959–67, focused upon aerospace research and development and production as well as aviation regulation. It was an organizational headache for Thorneycroft, hence its survival in 1964. 69 Re the organizational structure of Main Building in 1964 and the Chiefs of Staff Conference Room’s original layout and décor, see Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 340–1 and xvii-xviii. 70 Smith, ‘Command and Control in Postwar Britain’, 311–12. 71 Ibid., 312, and Hennessy, Whitehall, 417. 72 Howard, The Central Organisation of Defence, 21, and R. M. Hastie-Smith, The Tin Wedding: A Study of the Evolution of the Ministry of Defence (London: Seaford House, 1975), 32. Sir Frank Cooper told Zuckerman’s biographer of his admiration for the Chief Scientific Adviser, while observing how for many in the defence establishment, not least members of the COSC, Mountbatten’s flawed personality generated an instinctive opposition: Peyton, Solly Zuckerman, 139. 73 Healey, The Time of My Life, 261–2, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 622. 74 Lord Thorneycroft in ibid., Solly Zuckerman, ‘Working with a Man of Destiny’, Observer, 2 September 1979, and Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 341. 75 Howard, The Central Organisation of Defence, 19, and Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 341–2 76 Peter Thorneycroft, MOD memorandum, 17 September 1964, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J112, and Macmillan, At the End of the Day 1961–63, 408. 77 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 622–3 and 637. 78 Healey, The Time of My Life, 257–60. Zuckerman claimed to have left the MOD because he insisted on speaking his mind, but he did confirm that Healey (‘a powerful character’) had refused to follow precedent and accept minutes which Mountbatten had drafted in his name: Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 365, and ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten’, 155. 79 Healey, The Time of My Life, 271. 80 Multiple commitments east of Suez, with escalating operational costs, saw the COSC support Wilson’s refusal to send military personnel to Vietnam when urged to do so by President Johnson during the Prime Minister’s inaugural visit to Washington. Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 363. 81 Hayward, The British Aircraft Industry, 93, and Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (London: Macmillan Papermac, 1994), pbk. edn., 171–2. 82 Straw and Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the demise of the TSR-2’, 26, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 219–20 and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 587. 83 Mountbatten was accused of privately advising his Australian counterpart to reject TSR2: ibid., 578. BAC calculated R and D costs had risen to £272 million by the start of 1965, with a further £469 estimated expenditure in order to meet a contract for 158 aircraft. An aggregate figure of £741 million produced an individual cost of nearly £5 million: Straw and Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the demise of the TSR-2’, 20. 84 Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, 172–3. Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 217–22, Healey, The Time of My Life, 272–3 and Hayward, The British Aircraft Industry, 93–5.

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The RAF was further placated by orders for the F-4 fighter and the C-130 Hercules transport, both aircraft becoming mainstays of the service (although a Britishpowered version of the Phantom proved far more expensive than buying straight from America). Yet TSR2 had caught the popular imagination, its cancellation an issue which haunted campaigning Labour ministers like Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, and which exemplified, ‘a techno-nationalist plea for technological supremacy still stuck in an Edwardian mind-set.’ David Edgerton, Warfare State Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pbk. edn., 242–3, and England and the Aeroplane Militarism, Modernity and Machines (London: Penguin, 2013), revised pbk. edn., 145–6. For a very different view of TSR2, see Hamilton-Paterson, Empire of the Clouds, 232–41. 85 In the winter of 1964–5 Jenkins refrained from endorsing TSR2’s cancellation because he opposed the F-111 alternative and supported an accelerated European collaboration. At the 31 March/1 April 1965 cabinet meetings he – and several other ministers – voiced fierce opposition to an early order for F-111s, forcing Healey to compromise in order to secure TSR2’s cancellation. Straw and Young, ‘The Wilson Government and the Demf of the TSR-2’, 25, 26, 30–1, 36 and 38. 86 Cancellation of the F-111 order two years later saw the Defence Secretary contemplate resignation to forestall Elworthy resigning as CDS in protest at a second ‘betrayal’ of the RAF: Healey, The Time of My Life, 273–4; Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 222–7. 87 Healey, The Time of My Life, 275–7, and Jackson and Bramall, The Chiefs, 366–8. The establishment of an integrated Defence Secretariat inside the MOD meant the Royal Navy could no longer draw on the advice of senior Admiralty officials, and its staff officers lacked the preparation of their RAF counterparts ‘to sell the service in high places’; but, contrary to Mountbatten’s belief, cancellation of the costly CVA01 was not universally condemned within the RN, for example, among submariners: Grove, The Royal Navy Since 1815, 234–5. 88 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 644–5, Zuckerman, ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten’, 155, interview with Lord Wilson, in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 645 and Edward Hampshire, ‘The Battle for CVA01’, in British Naval Aviation The First 100 Years, ed. Tim Benbow (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 177–96. 89 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 1 and 2 October 1969, and 19 June and 17 July 1970, 188, 195 and 201, and Healey, The Time of My Life, 427. 90 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 44, 77–9, 88–91, 165 and 169. 91 Captain R.W. Garson [president of HMS Daedalus wardroom mess, November 1964] to Vice-Admiral Sir Ian McGeoch, 18 March 1994, quoted in McGeoch, The Princely Sailor, 254–5. Daedalus closed in 1995. 92 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 15 July 1965, 131. 2 January 1939 marked Chatfield’s appointment to the Order of Merit, bestowed by a fellow veteran of Jutland (George VI’s battle honour much envied by Mountbatten); he was in fact one of seven First Sea Lords awarded the OM in peacetime. 93 Ibid., 5 June, 13 July, and 15 July 1965, 127–32, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 639–40. 94 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 16 July 1965, 132. 95 The unedited footage lasts over ten minutes, concluding with Hull as the new CDS taking the salute when the band and the detachments of the three services march off the parade ground: ‘Mountbatten farewell’, [?] July 1965, British Pathé, www. britishpathe.com/video/VLVAC2WP051TWX3IYWN4BE89BIXAF-ENGLANDMOUNTBATTEN-FAREWELL/query/Mountbatten.

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Conclusion 1 Clarke, The Cripps Version The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps 1889–1952, 466–75. On Wilson’s closeness to Cripps, see Ziegler, Wilson, 55–6. 2 Hoey, Mountbatten The Private Story, 160. 3 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 8 February-20 March 1965, 107–18, Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 168–9 and Healey, The Time of My Life, 260–1. See correspondence of the PM, Defence Secretary, and CDS re the proposed mission, March 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J215. 4 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 19 March 1965, 116–7, and Denis Healey to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, 18 March 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J215, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 634. 5 In April 1965 Healey, Mountbatten and the Duke of Edinburgh all attended that year’s Bilderberg Meeting at Como. Healey, The Time of My Life, 194–5 and 414, and Philip Murphy, ‘By Invitation Only: ‘Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip, and The Attempt to Create a Commonwealth “Bilderberg Group”, 1964–1966’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 33, no. 2 (2005): 245–65. 6 Tony Benn insisted the Labour manifesto address concerns over immigration and thereby prevent it from becoming an election issue: Tony Benn, Out of the Wilderness Diaries 1963–67 (London: Arrow Books, 1988), pbk. edn., 8 September 1964, 138. 7 Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 173–4. 8 Arun Kumar Banerji, ‘Unburdening an Imperial Legacy: Colour, Citizenship and British Immigration Policy’, India Quarterly, 32, no. 4 (1976): 434–5. 9 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 20–26 May 1965, 123–5. 10 Ibid., 27 and 21 April 1965, 119 and 118–9. 11 Ibid., 3–7 May 1965, 119–22; Ankit, ‘Mountbatten and India, 1964–79: After Nehru’, 1–28, and ibid., 21. 12 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 14–15 October 1964 and 13 May 1965, 101–3. 13 Banerji, ‘Unburdening an Imperial Legacy’, 435–6; Ian Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939 (London: Routledge, 1997), 135–6; Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister Volume One Minister of Housing 1964–66 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 8 July 1965, 270, House of Commons, Immigration (Report of Lord Mountbatten’s Mission), 15 June and 13 July 1965, Hansard, HC Deb, vol. 682, cc247–9 and vol. 716, cc278–80, and House of Lords, Commonwealth Immigrants, 15 June 1965, Hansard, vol. 267, www. hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1965-05-15/debates/f49d88de-6f0d-42f3-93c14e3ed071dbad/CommonwealthImmigrants. ­14 Robert Armstrong, ‘Sir Philip Woodfield’, obituary, The Independent, 28 September 2000. Interview with Sir Philip Woodfield, and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten quoted, in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 635, and Mountbatten Mission of Inquiry to Commonwealth Countries on Immigration: report, 1965, NA, HO344/175. 15 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 3 and 4 June 1965, 126–7, Matthew Cooper, ‘The Labour Governments 1964–1970 and the Other Equalities’. PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London, 2013, 126, and Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister Volume One, 8 July 1965, 270.

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16 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to the Prime Minister, minute, 13 June 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/J229, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 635 [correspondence not listed in the archive’s catalogue]. 17 Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era, 174–6. 18 Ibid., and Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, 137–8. 19 Healey, The Time of My Life, 223 and 332, and Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London: Harper Collins, 1993), pbk. edn., 371 and 373–5. 20 For analysis of the nature of possible military intervention, and whether it could have been successful, see Carl Watts, ‘The Rhodesian Crisis in British and International Politics, 1964–1965’, PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2006, 108–54. 21 Ibid., 332. 22 ‘Possible visit by Lord Mountbatten to Rhodesia’, 1965, NA, PREM13/553, and Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Harold Wilson, 20 October 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K243, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 648, but missing from the relevant file. 23 Wilson feared serious economic and strategic consequences for the UK, but not all cabinet colleagues were convinced, including Dick Crossman: Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister Volume One, 21 October 1965, 356. 24 Pimlott, Harold Wilson, 369–70. ­25 Ziegler, Wilson, 235–6. 26 Wilson, The Labour Government 1964–70 A Personal Record, 150–1. 27 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Harold Wilson, 20 October 1965, Mountbatten papers, MB1/K243, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 648, but missing from the relevant file. As early as February 1962 the then CDS had advised against military intervention in Southern Rhodesia: Watts, ‘The Rhodesian Crisis in British and International Politics, 1964–1965’, 109–10. 28 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 648–9, and Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 307. Mountbatten’s retinue would for whatever reason include his son-in-law, John Brabourne, and Solly Zuckerman. Ibid. 29 David Price, ‘The Origins and Durability of Security Categorisation: A Study in Penological Pragmatism or Spies, Dickie and Prison Security’, in British Criminology Conference: Selected Proceedings Vol 3, 2000, www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ss/bccsp/ vo103/price, 1–2. 30 Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, 201–2, and Robert Mark, In the Office of Constable (London: Fontana, 1979), pbk. edn., 79–83. Interview with Sir Robert Mark, quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 652. Andrew Lownie found that most papers from the National Archives file on the Mountbatten investigation, MEPO10/30, are closed, noting that the catalogue for Mountbatten’s papers makes no reference to relevant material: Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 463 fn. 696. 31 Home Office, Report of the Inquiry into Prison Escapes and Security, Cmnd. 3175 (London: HMSO, 1966); Ziegler, Mountbatten, 650, and interview with Sir Philip Woodfield, quoted in ibid. 32 House of Commons, Prison Security, 16 February 1967, Hansard, HC Deb, vol. 821, cc828–77, www.api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1967/feb/16/prisonescapes-and-security. 33 Price, ‘The Origins and Durability of Security Categorisation’, 5–6, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 651.

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34 Ibid.; The Howard League for Penal Reform, High ­Security Prison: Prisoners’ Perspectives (London: HLPR, 2008), 8, and Price, ‘The Origins and Durability of Security Categorisation’, 7–9. 35 The prison inquiry overlapped with discussion inside Whitehall regarding Mountbatten’s suitability as the last High Commissioner for Aden and the South Yemen protectorate, a singularly tough posting. However, the Foreign Office was wary of the former CDS being seen as Labour’s only available choice in an emergency, and his name was quietly dropped. In 1964 the CDS had clashed with the Colonial Office over his shamelessly manipulating COSC minutes to suggest the Chiefs of Staff all supported early independence for Aden: Ashton, ‘Mountbatten, the Royal Family, and British Influence in Post-independence India and Burma’, 74–5, and Joseph Higgins, ‘Empire and Federation in South Arabia, 1952–1967’, PhD thesis, University of Southampton, 2021, 125–6. 36 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 659–62, and Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 317–26. 37 Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 322, Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 463–6, and ‘Admiral Earl Mountbatten of Burma’, 161–2, and Benn, Out of the Wilderness Diaries 1963–67, 28 November 1967, 513, and Office Without Power Diaries 1968–72 (London: Arrow, 1989), pbk. edn., 6, 11, and 17 February 1968, 29–31, 33 and 36–7. 38 Hugh Cudlipp to Cecil King, 29 April 1968, quoted in Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 318–9 and Benn, Office Without Power Diaries 1968–72, 9 and 10 May 1968, 65–6. 39 Mountbatten talked to (or at?) the Prime Minister for 75 minutes when flying from Dublin to Northolt. Remarkably, he resurrected the notion of National Government, but then in an act of outrageous flattery insisted that Wilson was the obvious choice to head it. To be fair, when the PM resigned in March 1976 Mountbatten believed he, ‘will be sadly missed, as I think he has done a good job.’ Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore The Final Years, 21 November 1974, 296–7, and quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 662. ­40 Ibid., 659–62, and Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 317–26. 41 Vanessa Thorpe, ‘How Filming the Agony of Aberfan for The Crown Revealed a Village still in Trauma’, The Guardian, 17 November 2019; ‘The Coup’, The Crown, series 3 episode 5 (Christian Sochwochow, Netflix, UK, 2019). 42 ‘I never gave way to him if I believed I was right, and to his credit, if he saw the sense of an argument he would eventually come round and never sulk.’: Lord Brabourne on advising Mountbatten, quoted in Hoey, Mountbatten The Private Story, 245. 43 Diary entry contained in Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten to Lord Brabourne, 6 November 1975, and Lord Zuckerman, diary entry supplement, 17 November 1975, quoted in Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 320 and 323, and Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles, 463. 44 Benn, Out of the Wilderness Diaries 1963–67, 16 November 1964, 187–8. 45 Ibid., 19 November 1964, 190. 46 Porter, ‘Knatchbull, John Ulick, Seventh Baron Brabourne of Brabourne [known as John Brabourne] (1924–2005)’, and Hoey, Mountbatten The Private Story, 251–4. 47 Mountbatten was BAFTA President from 1966 to 1972; and since 1959 Richard Attenborough has been the only non-member of the Royal Family to hold the

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honorary appointment: ‘The Royal Family and the Academy’, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, www.bafta.org/about/organisation/the-royal-family-andthe-academy. 48 Adrian Smith, ‘Mountbatten Goes to the Movies: The Cinema as a Vehicle for Promoting the Heroic Myth,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26, no. 3 (2006): 395–416. ‘ … a producer needs to be able to persuade other people to put up the money and he [Mountbatten] could always do that, and also choose the right people for various jobs, and he was pretty good at that also’: Lord Brabourne, quoted in Hoey, Mountbatten The Private Story, 251. 49 ‘Pay-TV Ltd’, 7 January 1966, www.TerraMedia.co.uk, accessed 24 February 2004 but website no longer active. Anthony Havelock-Allan’s many productions included In Which We Serve. 50 During a heated discussion in LA Mountbatten and Brabourne insisted that Derek Mitchell brief Wilson on ‘the virtues of pay-TV’, and facilitate a meeting with the PM (‘I feel a little uncomfortable in having been put in a position to write this letter by Lord Mountbatten’s lobbying methods. But he is an honourable man, and so is Lord Brabourne … ’): D.J. Mitchell [PM’s principal private secretary] to D. J. Trevelyan [Lord President of the Council’s Office] 25 March 1968, NA, PREM 13/1951. 51 David Laine, ‘Pay-tv 1960s style’, 23 November 2006, Transdiffusion Broadcasting System, www.transdiffusion.org/2006/11/23/paytv_1960s_sty, Benn, Out of the Wilderness Diaries 1963–67, 8 May 1966, 409; Edward Short, video address to Sheffield Pay-TV subscribers [?] 1966, in Laine, ‘Pay-tv 1960s style’, and J. J. Nunn [Home Affairs Committee] to the Prime Minister, 23 October 1968, NA, PREM 13/1951. 52 Ibid. 53 Benn, Out of the Wilderness Diaries 1963–67, 25 May 1966, 419. 54 Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten, ‘PAY TV’ memorandum to Harold Wilson, 18 July 1968, and Note of a conversation between Mr Halls [No. 10] and Lord Mountbatten on Friday, October 25, 1968, NA, PREM 13/1951. 55 Lord Shackleton quoted re Zuckerman in Benn, Out of the Wilderness Diaries 1963–67, 8 July 1966, 448. Ibid., 16 September and 22 September 1966, 474 and 476, Nye, Blackett, 166–7, and Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 200. Re Benn’s dismissal of ‘Pat’ Blackett’s perceived elitism, despite a shared political perspective: Benn, Office Without Power Diaries 1968–72, 23 June 1969 and 12 February 1970, 188 and 238, and Edgerton, Warfare State Britain, 1920–1970, 238–9, 247 and 250. 56 Benn, Out of the Wilderness Diaries 1963–67, 22 September 1966, 448, and Ziegler, Mountbatten, 674. On Patrick Blackett, Frank Cousins and the creation of Mintech, see Edgerton, Warfare State Britain, 1920–1970, 246–56; and on Benn and Zuckerman’s focus upon profitability, see ibid., 251–6 57 Benn, Office without Power Diaries 1968–72, 9 July 1969, 190. 58 In 1976 Prince Philip helped initiate the Fellowship of Engineering, forerunner of today’s Royal Academy of Engineering. 59 Smith, ‘Admiral Lord Mountbatten: Man of Science and Royal Role Model’, 22–3, and Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 269. On the origins of Mountbatten’s outstanding ability as a signals officer, see ibid., 71–2. 60 Anderson, ‘Blackett in India: Thinking Strategically about New Conflicts’, 217–37, and ‘Patrick Blackett in India: Military Consultant and Scientific Intervenor, 1947–72’, Notes and Records The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 53, no. 2 (1999): 253–73

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61 Report of Acting British High Commissioner in India, 17 June 1964, quoted in von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer, 357. 62 Ibid., 360–1 and 363–5, and Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore, 2 February 1971 and 9 October 1976, 206 and 352–3. The latter entry, when by coincidence Mountbatten met Gandhi in Mauritius, and urged a relaxation of press censorship, suggests that delusion was replacing his earlier frank assessment of how much influence he could exercise. 63 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 242–7. 64 On biographers, official and unofficial, and the creation of a properly organized archive, see ibid., 8–27, and Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 309–14. Lownie noted the extensive autobiographical recording Mountbatten undertook at Broadlands, often with guests such as Zuckerman: ibid., 309. 65 The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten (Peter Morley, Thames Television, UK, 1969), episodes 1–12. Brabourne first approached the BBC, and later had to convince Thames to screen twelve not six episodes: Rebecca Coll, ‘Autobiography and History on Screen: The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten’, Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 37, no. 4 (2017): 668 and 672. 66 John Terraine, The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten (London: Hutchinson, 1968) – over 30,000 copies were sold in hardback. It’s been suggested that another historian with a background in television (and the RN), Ludovic Kennedy, turned the job down: Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 465 fn. 724. 67 Gary Sheffield, ‘John Alfred Terraine (1921–2003)’, 2011, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-93035, and ‘John Terraine’, obituary, Daily Telegraph, 31 December 2003, quoted in ibid. 68 On the modus operandi Terrraine and Morley adopted for working with their subject, see Smith, Apprentice War Lord, 14–5, and Coll, ‘Autobiography and History on Screen: The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten’, 671. Re the series’ inspiration for Jeremy Isaacs’ The World at War, see ibid., 675 and 677–8 69 Ibid., 673–4 and 676. The Broadlands Trust, set up to support Mountbatten’s children and grandchildren, held the subsidiary rights, and benefited substantially from the series eventually being shown in over seventy countries. Ibid., 667. 70 On the integral role of the IWM in the project, see ibid., 665–82. Her Majesty’s favourite episode was number eight, on India: Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore, 19 March 1969, 171. The Royal Family (Richard Cawston, BBC/ ITV, UK, 1969) was 110 minutes long, and screened on both the BBC and ITV in June 1969, with a combined viewing figure of over 30 million. 71 ‘John Terraine’, obituary, The Times, 31 December 2003, and Brian Bond, ‘John Terraine’, obituary, Guardian, 1 January 2003; Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 245. 72 Admiral Lord Mountbatten, Memorandum: Mountbatten Archives Films, 5 January 1972, and to John Terraine, 26 May 1972, Mountbatten papers, MB1/L149. 73 Admiral Lord Mountbatten, correspondence with Lord Avon, spring 1972, ibid., and notes on the Suez crisis, 1971–2, Mountbatten papers, MB1/L150; Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 298. 74 Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 371–2. 75 The filming lasted ninety minutes, edited down to sixty for transmission: Pattinson, Mountbatten & the Men of the ‘Kelly’, 155–8, and Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore, 19 April 1977, 363–5. The episode was Eamonn Andrews’s all-time favourite,

246

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a­ lthough the Queen Mother had been the series editor’s first choice: Tony Lee, ‘The Earl MOUNTBATTEN of Burma’, series 17, Big Red Book Celebrating Television’s This Is Your Life, www.bigredbook.info/louis_mountbatten. 76 Mountbatten, From Shore to Shore, 8 May and 5 November 1970, 192–3 and 203–5. Wilkins presumably already knew Mills, the voice of the lower deck in In Which We Serve. Nixon and his Secretary of State listened patiently to Mountbatten’s lengthy plea that Greece’s King Constantine be restored to the throne, as did countless other politicians between the 1967 coup and the referendum on a republic seven years later (the Spanish royal family was another preoccupation). Wilson would be invited to Wilton Crescent for meetings with Constantine: ibid., 204. Admiral Lord Mountbatten quoted in Ziegler, Mountbatten, 665, and Hoey, Mountbatten The Private Story, 131. 77 ‘UWC History founding ideas’, United World Colleges, 2020, www.uwc.org/history; Kurt Hahn, ‘Writings’, Kurt Hahn. Org, 2020, www.kurthahn.org/writings. Ziegler, Mountbatten, 663–6. Mountbatten brushed aside criticism that Atlantic College was an elite institution or that some of its teaching was poor [Zuckerman]: ibid., 664. 78 Bernard Fergusson [Lord Ballantrae], The Trumpet in the Hall (London: Collins, 1970), 176. 79 Hoey, Mountbatten The Private Story, 12–3. 80 As with Noel Coward, Beaton’s loathing of ‘my hated Lord Louis Mountbatten’ had its roots in India, 1944: Cecil Beaton, Beaton in the Sixties More Unexpurgated Diaries, ed. Hugo Vickers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), 21 January 1965, 15, and Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton The Authorised Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), pbk. edn., 276, 289–90, 606–9 and 553. 81 Bruce, Ambassador to Sixties London The Diaries of David Bruce, 1961–1969, 22 March 1966, 252. 82 Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 6–8. 83 For example, the 2020 Channel 5 documentary Lord Mountbatten Hero or Villain? and Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer. Von Tunzelmann notes his successful stewardship of the Nehru Memorial Trust and the Nehru Memorial Lecture, but otherwise portrays the aging Mountbatten as a rather pitiful figure: ibid., 357. 84 Re Mountbatten as a Battenberg, and the impact on him of his father’s 1914 resignation as First Sea Lord, see Smith, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord, 32–8. 85 Re Philip Ziegler’s efforts to defend Mountbatten against the criticism of Roberts, Cannadine, A.N. Wilson et al, see ibid., 23–7. 86 Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 382. 87 See Chapter 4. 88 For an unflattering but credible portrait of Mountbatten in his final months – a man dismissive of Churchill and obsessed with ensuring that the Royal Family was henceforth named Mountbatten-Windsor – see Hugh Massingberd, Daydream Believer Confessions of a Hero-Worshipper (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 147–51. 89 Ibid. 90 Knatchbull, From a Clear Blue Sky Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, 17–37. 91 In April 1972 the Irish Ambassador reported back to Dublin an indiscreet Mountbatten’s endorsement of reunification and offer to act as a middleman negotiator: ‘Royal blown up by IRA “backed united Ireland”’: Henry McDonald, Guardian, 29 December 2007, and interview with former envoy Donal O’Sullivan in Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 347.

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92 Brian Hutton, ‘Mary Lou McDonald “sorry” over IRA killing of Lord Mountbatten’, Irish Times, 18 April 2021, and Aldrich and Cormac, The Secret Royals, 513–5. For implicit acknowledgement of PIRA’s tactical error, see interviews with former members in The Day Mountbatten Died, 18 June 2004, BBC2 (Timewatch Team, BBC, UK, 2004), and The Day Mountbatten Died, 19 August 2019, BBC2. On the belief of both police and investigative journalists that the attack was ordered by Martin McGuiness, see Lownie, The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves, 345–7. 93 Ziegler, Mountbatten, 701–2.

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Springhall, John. ‘Kicking out the Viet Minh: how Britain allowed France to reoccupy south Indochina’, Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 1 (2005): 115–30. Straw, Sean and Young, John W. ‘The Wilson Government and the demise of the TSR-2, October 1964-April 1965’, Journal of Strategic Studies 20, no. 4 (1997): 18–44. Talbot, I. A. ‘Mountbatten and the partition of India: A rejoinder’, History 69, no. 225 (1984): 29–35. Young, Ken. ‘The Royal Navy’s Polaris Lobby, 1955–62’, Journal of Strategic Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 56–86.

Film, radio and television Burma Victory. UK: Roy Boulting, British Army Film Unit, 1946. The Crown, series 1–4. UK/USA: Peter Morgan, Left Bank Pictures/Sony Television Pictures, 2016–20. The Day Mountbatten Died. UK: Timewatch Team, BBC2, 2004. The Day Mountbatten Died. UK: Sam Collyns, BBC NI, 2019. The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, episodes 1–12. UK: Peter Morley, Rediffusion, 1969. Lord Mountbatten: Hero or Villain? UK: Jane Hosking, Sarah-Jane Cohen and Ian Rumsey, Channel 5/ITN Productions, 2020. Lord Mountbatten Remembers, episodes 1–6. UK: Ronald Webster, BBC, 1980. Viceroy’s House. UK/USA: Gurinder Chada, Pathé UK et al, 2017.

Index Abell, George 29–30, 39, 42, 44 Abse, Leo 179 Active Flag List 27, 51 Adams, Gerry 191 Aden, Yemen 147, 151, 243 n.35 The Administrative Consequences of Partition 33–4 Admiralty 25, 44, 51–4, 60, 63, 66–7, 72, 74, 82–5, 89, 106–11, 116, 118–20, 122–8, 132, 134–5, 137, 141, 143–4, 153–4, 158, 167, 213 n.60, 220 n.63, 221 n.79, 222 n.5, 238 n.62, 240 n.87 Admiralty Board 110, 119–20, 123–4, 127–8, 130–1, 134 Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy 185 Advisory Council on the Penal System, 1968 179 Afghanistan 61 Africa 13, 90, 105–6 Algeria 85–6 Congo 173 Kenya 106, 145, 149 Nigeria 135, 173–4 Uganda 106 Zambia 176 Aguiyi Ironsi, Johnson 173 Aldrich, Winthrop 91 Alexander (Field Marshal Lord) 139, 144 Alexander, A. V. (Lord) 25 Anderson, Gillian 16 Anderson, John (Lord) 21 Anderson, Perry 15, 41 Andrews, Eamonn 188, 245 n.75 Anglo-American 103, 113, 118–19, 129, 138, 143, 195 n.22 Anglo-French 54, 61–2, 65, 70, 73, 99, 102, 213 n.66 Anglo-Indian 51, 101, 103, 173 Anglophobes 113 Anglo Saxon 85, 130

Ankit, Rakesh 173 antagonistic/antagonism 6, 46, 74, 111, 158 anti-appeasement/anti-appeaser 53, 60, 79, 99, 214–15 n.83, 217 n.14 ­anti-Atlanticism 87 anti-colonial/anti-colonialists 10, 13, 26, 38, 54, 61, 90, 105–6 Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (APFL) 12, 104 anti-Semitism 86, 118 apartheid regime 106 Arabs 60, 73, 90, 93–4 Archbishop Makarios 105, 174, 178 Armstrong, Robert (Lord) 92–4 Astor, David 60, 88–91, 220 n.70, 220 nn.72–3 Atlantic College. See United World Colleges (UWC) Atlanticist Bilderberg Group 170 Atlantic Nuclear Force (ANF) 136–7 Atomic Energy Act, 1954 115, 122 Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) 116 Attenborough, Richard 243 n.47 Attlee, Clement (Lord) 4, 6, 15, 17, 19–20, 23–4, 26–31, 33–6, 38, 44–7, 51–2, 55, 103, 113, 135, 204 n.80, 205 n.83, 205 n.88, 208 n.123 Auchinleck, Claude 9, 23, 25, 34, 48, 199 n.68, 205 n.81 Auden, W. H., ‘Partition’ 43 Aung San 12–13, 104, 191, 199 n.64, 202 n.50 Australia/Australians 71, 122, 147, 166, 170, 239 n.83 autonomy/autonomous 30, 51, 81, 107, 147–8, 150, 158, 162, 167, 191 Ayer, Rao Sahib V. D. 42 Baghdad Pact 102 Baldwin, Stanley (Lord) 79

258

Index

Ball, George 132, 136 Banda, Hastings 106 Barnard, Geoffrey (Lord) 70 Barnett, Corelli 187 Ba U 224 n.34 BBC 82, 93–4, 173, 183, 186–8 with All India Radio (1947) 38 BBC2 186, 188 Lord Mountbatten Remembers 92, 188 Northern Ireland documentary 2 Beaton, Cecil 189, 246 n.80 Beaufre, André 68, 85–7 L’Expédition de Suez 86 Beaumont, Christopher 42 Belgravia, London 28, 70, 97, 189 Ben-Gurion, David 67, 69, 89 Benn, Caroline 182 Bennett, John Sterndale 197 n.45 Benn, Tony. See Wedgewood-Benn, Anthony Bernal, J. D. 112, 227 n.70 Bevin, Ernest (Ernie) 13, 20–1, 23, 25–6, 46, 198 n.57 bipartisan 26, 45, 170, 176 Blackett, Patrick (Lord) 31, 112, 184–5, 206 n.96, 227 n.75 Blake, George 177, 179 ­Boathook 68–9 Bonneville, Hugh 1, 16 Boothby, Bob (Lord) 101 Borneo 8, 83, 98, 165, 170 Bose, Subhas Chandra 22–3, 25 Boundary Commission 19, 35, 39 Boyle, Dermot (Lord) 57–8, 75, 145–6, 148–50, 152 Bracken, Brendan (Lord) 31 Bradford, Sarah 78 Bramall, Edwin (Field Marshal Lord) 142, 163, 234 n.11 Britannia 60, 66 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) 101, 183, 185–6 British Aircraft Corporation 152 British Computer Society 185 British Empire 38–9, 82, 197 n.45, 199 n.65 British film industry 182–4 British High Commission 52, 185, 215 n.83 British Home Entertainment 183

British Movietone 97, 205 n.92 British Naval Ballistic Missile System 131 British Nuclear Deterrent Group (BNDG) 126–8 British Pathé 37, 168 British Raj (surrender of) 3, 20–1, 32, 36, 44–8, 99 Broadlands Archives 92–3, 195 n.20 Broadlands, England 8, 15, 28, 45, 53, 78, 90, 92–3, 99–101, 103–4, 109, 139–40, 147–8, 150, 154–5, 157, 167–8, 173, 180, 186–7, 189, 223 n.16, 237 n.49 Brockman, Ronald (Ronnie) 29–30, 142, 168, 170, 184, 215 n.93, 234 n.9 Brodie, Bernard 112 Bromberger (Merry and Serge), Les Secrets de l’Expédition d’Egypte 86 Brooke, Alan (Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke) 6, 9, 13, 19–20, 52, 135, 150, 196 n.28 Brook, Norman (Lord) 63, 146–7, 226 n.64 Brown, George (Lord) 137, 164, 183 Browning, Frederick ‘Boy’ 11, 198 n.55 Bruce, David 129 Bruce Lockhart, Robert 44 Brundrett, Frederick 126–7 Buckingham Palace 2, 44, 78–9, 93, 173, 190 Burke, Arleigh 70, 116–18, 121, 124–8, 130, 229 n.8, 231 n.47 Burma 4, 6, 10–12, 22, 27–8, 53, 103–4, 118, 171 Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League 12, 104 Burmese National Army 12 Burma Star Association 181, 186 Burma Victory documentary (Roy Boulting) 196 n.34 Buster Crabbe 54 Butler, Rab (Lord) 21, 31, 46–7, 58, 66, 147, 154 Caccia, Harold (Lord) 133, 233 n.63 Cadogan, Alex 79 Calder Hall nuclear power station 116, 119–20, 122, 229 n.19 Cameron, David 75

Index ­Cammell Laird shipyard 131 Campbell-Johnson, Alan 4–5, 17, 29, 31, 33–4, 37–8, 40, 48–9, 137 Mission with Mountbatten 204 n.73, 205 n.92 Canada 186, 188 Cannadine, David 2, 17, 101 Cardinale, Claudia 170 Carlton Club 38, 89 Carlton, David 75, 80, 135 Carrington, Peter (Lord) 123, 127–8, 130, 132, 151, 154, 167, 215 n.83, 238 n.62 Casey, R. G. 214–15 n.83 Cassell, Ernest (Lord) 86 Castle, Barbara 136 casus belli 58, 75, 86 Central African Federation 106, 156 The Central Organisation for Defence Reform 146, 160 Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) 102 Chamberlain, Neville 53, 79, 99 Chancellor of the Exchequer 58, 98, 118, 120, 130, 146, 153 Charteris, Martin (Lord) 78–9 Chatfield, Ernle (Lord) 167–8, 240 n.92 Chester, Lucy 39, 42, 51 Chetty, Shanmukam 55 Chiang Kai-Shek 9–10, 12 Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) 116–17, 124–5, 128 Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) 4, 77, 79, 82–3, 87, 98–101, 104, 113, 115, 124, 126–30, 133–40, 142–3, 147, 149–50, 154–6, 158–60, 162–3, 167–70, 172–6, 178, 181–2, 184, 193 Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) 4, 6, 13, 19–20, 57, 59, 61, 65, 105, 108–9, 238 n.63 Chief Scientific Adviser 112–13, 126, 153, 159, 162, 164–5, 239 n.72 Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) 4, 7, 10, 19–20, 29, 52, 56–8, 61–2, 66, 68–9, 72, 77, 82–3, 108–9, 111, 131–2, 134, 136–7, 140, 142–3, 145–6, 148–9, 159, 165, 169, 201 n.22, 212 n.39, 226 n.67, 227 n.72, 235 n.27, 236 n.41, 243 n.35

259

Childers, Erskine 89 Chilver, Richard 108 China/Chinese 10–12, 102–3 Chittagong Hill Tracts 41 Churchill, Winston 2–4, 6, 9, 19–21, 23, 26–7, 29, 31–3, 36, 49, 52, 72, 79, 97, 105, 107, 112–13, 116, 139, 144–5, 157, 167, 176, 186, 215 n.89, 222 n.2, 227 n.72, 246 n.88 and Macmillan 99–100 and Mountbatten 44–8 civil authority 10, 198 n.57 civilian casualties 60, 62–3, 65, 70–2, 75, 88 civil-military relations 3, 56, 193 Clark, Alan 187 Clark, Christopher 2–3 Clark, Ian, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship 229 n.19 Clark, Kenneth (Lord), Civilisation: A Personal View television series 186 ­Clark, William 58, 70, 91 Clarke, Richard ‘Otto’ 184 Clive, Robert 35 Cochrane, Phil 9 Cockcroft, John 119 Cockett, Richard 90 Collins, Larry 45, 49 Freedom at Midnight How Britain Gave Away an Empire 18, 201 n.18 colonial power 10, 12, 23, 28, 50, 59, 173 coloured immigration 175. See also immigration/immigrants Colville, John ‘Jock’ 20, 62, 139 Combined Operations 1, 4, 6–7, 12, 31, 39, 41, 57, 87, 94, 99, 112, 189 operational research 4, 7, 31, 112 and Suez Fleet Street connection 88–91 French connection 81–8 Comet 4s 104, 177 Common Market 99, 129, 132, 163 Commonwealth 12–14, 19, 25, 31–3, 45–6, 50, 54, 59–61, 70–1, 75, 90, 94, 98–9, 101–6, 170–6, 180, 227 n.75 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962 170 Commonwealth Immigration Mission 178, 183

260

Index

communal violence 16, 25, 38, 47 Conservative Government 64, 123, 133, 165 Conservatives/Conservative Party 3–4, 19, 23, 28, 31, 38, 46, 97, 98, 100, 108, 114, 137 and surrendering the Raj 44–7 Cooper, Frank 58, 162, 239 n.72 Cooper, Henry 183 Coote, Johnnie 117, 120 Corfield, Conrad 47, 49, 205 n.82, 208 n.120 Cosgrave, Patrick 150 coup de main 55–6, 75, 85, 88, 219 n.59 Coward, Noel 7, 30, 82 Craddock, Percy 69 Cripps, Lady Isobel 27, 100, 169 Cripps, Stafford 19–20, 22–8, 30–1, 36, 45–6, 52, 60, 100, 169, 185, 202 n.32, 202 n.51, 204 n.67, 205 n.83 All-India Union/Cripps Mission 22–3, 25 Cristison, Philip 9–11 Crossman, Dick 173–4 Crossman, Richard 93 The Crown Netflix series 1–3, 79, 177, 181 Cuban missile crisis 129, 139, 154 Cudlipp, Hugh 91, 180–1, 184 Cunningham, Andrew (Admiral Lord) 52, 142 Cunningham, John 6, 20 Curteis, Ian 84, 218 n.41 cynicism 2, 13, 28, 37, 66 Cyprus 55–6, 58, 67–9, 71, 85, 88–9, 105, 145, 147, 151 Dalton, Hugh (Lord) 44, 100 ­Dance, Charles 1, 181 d’Argenlieu, Thierry 11, 198 n.56 Davis, William (Lord) 68, 72, 81 Dayan, Moshe 69 Dean, Patrick 69 Declaration of London, 1949 103 decolonization 46, 86, 90, 98, 163, 191 Defence and Overseas Policy Committee 110, 122, 131, 134, 137, 162 Defence Committee 19, 58, 144, 211 n.35 Defence Council 47, 103, 158, 162 defence management 3, 98, 140 post-war 143–58

Defence Review, 1955 145 Defence Secretary 109–12, 126, 131, 134–40, 161, 164, 167, 170, 225 n.51, 228 n.79, 236 n.41, 240 n.86 Defence White Paper 1946 157 1952 112 1957 106–11, 146 1966 166 de Gaulle, Charles 11, 87, 99, 129–30, 156–7, 222 n.11 democracy 3, 20, 37, 61 Dickson, William (Lord) 56–7, 61–2, 71, 145–7, 212 n.39 Dieppe raid (1942) 3–4, 54, 81, 147, 193 di Lampedusa, G. T., The Leopard 101 diplomacy 3, 15, 35, 59, 63, 77, 79, 86, 130 Dixon, Pierson 79 Donnison, F. S. V., British Military Administration in the Far East 1943–46 198 n.54 Dorman-Smith, Reginald 12, 104, 199 n.64 Douglas-Home, Alec (Lord) 103, 131–3, 174 Driberg, Tom 13, 199 n.66 Duchess of Argyll 101, 223 n.18 Duke of Wellington 193 Durnford-Slater, Robin 68–70 Dutch East Indies 9–10, 28 Dutton, David 58, 80 Dykes, Tom 47 East India Company 36 Eden, Anthony (Lord Avon) 3, 6, 43, 46–9, 53–73, 83, 86, 88–94, 98–9, 101–3, 108, 117–18, 144–6, 156, 187–8, 215 n.98 and Dickie 54, 56, 59–60, 74–81, 98 Eden, Clarissa (Lady Avon) 53–4, 77–8, 94 Edgerton, David 110 Edward VIII 28, 48, 60 egalitarianism 2, 91 Egypt 57–8, 62, 66–8, 73, 79, 83, 87, 89, 101–2, 108, 193 Alexandria 61–2, 65 Cairo 59, 65, 219 n.50 Egypt Committee 58, 61–3, 65, 67, 69, 74, 80, 86, 88

Index ­invasion of 3, 43, 54 Port Fouad/Fuad 61, 65, 85, 87 Port Said 55–6, 61–3, 65, 69–71, 73–5, 83–5, 87, 94, 102, 109, 117 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Eisenhower Administration) 60, 70, 82, 87, 90, 99, 112, 117–19, 127, 133, 170 Elworthy, Charles (Lord) 151 Elworthy, Sam 142, 152, 164–6 Emperor Hirohito 11 Erskine-Crum, Vernon 29, 203 n.58 The Establishment 1–2, 82, 94 Europe 46, 99–100, 104, 111, 130, 177, 186, 190. See also specific countries European Economic Community 129 Evans, William 104 Expeditionary Corps’ 85 Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr. 101 Fairlie, Henry, ‘The Establishment’ 1–2 Falklands conflict 75, 98, 166 Far East 23–4, 52, 83, 105, 134, 149, 151, 169 Fellowship of the Royal Society 185 Fergusson, Bernard, The Watery Maze The Story of Combined Operations 83, 85, 88–9 Festing, Francis 148–9 Fifth Republic 87, 222 n.10 First Lord of the Admiralty 25, 54, 60, 63–4, 72, 92, 107, 119, 123, 127, 132, 154, 167, 232 n.52, 238 n.63 First Sea Lord 3, 5–6, 8, 12, 48, 52–4, 56–7, 59–62, 64–76, 79–80, 82–3, 85, 87–91, 94–5, 98, 100, 104, 107–12, 116–20, 122–8, 130, 134, 137, 140, 142, 145–6, 148, 152, 157, 162, 166–8, 190. See also Second Sea Lord Firth of Clyde, Scotland 127–8 Fisher, Jackie 71 Flag Officer Submarines 119–20, 124 Fleet Air Arm 62, 65, 83, 85, 109, 111, 127, 152, 166–7, 225 n.45 Fonteyn, Margot 183 Force Commanders’ Outline Plan 61, 65 force de frappe 87 Foreign Office 9, 59, 61, 63, 80, 94, 104, 118, 120, 132–3, 171

261

Foreign Secretary 13, 20–1, 46, 53, 133, 135 Formby, George 7 Forster, E. M. 101 Fort Belvedere 97 Foster Wheeler company 116 Fourteenth (‘Forgotten’) Army 4, 7–8, 11, 27, 175 Fourth Republic 70, 85 Fourth Sea Lord 51 France/French 13, 43, 58, 61, 66–71, 73, 78, 80, 86–90, 94, 129, 131–2, 136 Francophile 70, 87, 99 The Free French 10–12, 87, 99 French Army 69, 85, 87 French-Israeli collaboration 86 Paris 11, 67–8, 86, 126, 128, 168 ­Strasbourg 114 Suez and Combined Operations 81–8 Frank Cousins 136, 184 Frankovich, Mike 188 French, Patrick 17–19, 33, 39 Gaitskell, Hugh 100, 160, 223 n.14 Gandhi, Indira 172–3, 185 Gandhi, Mahatma 24, 31, 33, 245 n.62 assassination of 50–1 Mountbatten and Edwina meeting with 40 Geneva Conference 79 geopolitical reality 2, 13, 193 German/Germany 6, 8–9, 99, 114, 132, 148–9, 177, 189 Gibbs, Humphrey 176–7 Giffard, George 8 Gilmour, Ian 220 n.65 Global Strategy Plan, COSC’s 112 Gordon Walker, Patrick 135 Gore-Booth, Paul 103 Gracey, Douglas 9–10 Grand Fleet 142, 185 Great Calcutta Killing, 1946 25 The Great War series 187 Grenadier Guards 127 Grove, Eric 65, 81, 101 The Gulf 108, 110, 149 Gurkha/Gurkha regiments 10, 50, 197 n.52 Hahn, Kurt 188–9 Haig, Douglas (Lord) 187

262

Index

Halberstam, David, The Best and the Brightest 132 Haley, William 38 Hamilton, Nigel 4 Harris, Kenneth 90 Harvey, Oliver 80 Hashemite rule 102 Hastings, Max 6 Hastings, Warren 35 Havelock-Allan, Anthony 183 Haydon, Charles 88–9 Head, Antony 64, 69, 71, 73, 81, 88–9, 145–6, 235 n.21 Healey, Denis (Lord) 3, 114, 131, 134–9, 144, 153, 159–67, 170, 176 The Time of My Life 164 Heath, Ted 97, 154, 167, 177 Hennessy, Peter (Lord) 136, 162 The Silent Deep 229 n.14 Henriques, Robert 88–9 Hindu 23–4, 27, 37, 41, 48. See also Muslim; Sikhs Hitler, Adolf 44, 77 HMP Wormwood Scrubs 177–8, 182 ­Ho Chi Minh 13, 138 Hodson, H. V. 15 Hoey, Brian 17 Hogg, Quintin (Lord Hailsham) 54, 63–5, 67, 72–4, 78, 81, 92–3, 95, 179, 212 n.53, 212 n.55, 215 n.89, 221 n.79 Home Office 171, 174–5, 177, 179–80 Home Secretary 171, 177–9 Hough, Richard 16–18, 105, 141, 186 House of Commons 4, 26, 31, 44, 153, 160 House of Lords 45, 60, 112, 166 Howard, Michael 84, 148, 163 Howe, Geoffrey 97 Hull, Dick 150–1, 164, 240 n.95 Hull, Richard 140, 149, 157, 164, 240 n.95 immigration/immigrants 170–1, 173–5, 178, 183, 241 n.6. See also migration/migrants imperial policing 28 India 1, 11–12, 15–16, 18–20, 22–4, 26–32, 35, 37, 47, 60, 73, 98, 100, 102, 169, 171, 173, 193. See also Pakistan Bengal 20, 22–4, 32–4, 38–9 Bombay 22, 25, 28

British residents in 208 n.119 Calcutta 7, 22–3, 25, 42 Constituent Assembly 26–7, 43 Darjeeling 41 defence policy (Blackett-NehruMountbatten) 31 Dominion of India in Constituent Assembly Council Chambers 43 Garhmukhteshwar 25 Hyderabad 48 India Committee 25–6, 28, 30, 32–3 Indian Army 10, 24–5, 31, 34, 48, 202 n.39 C-in-C (Commander-in-Chief) of 9, 25, 52, 197 n.52, 205 n.81 Muslims in 24 Indian independence 1–2, 4, 15–17, 22, 33, 36–8, 40, 45, 82, 100, 185 Indian Independence Bill 34, 36, 45–6, 205 n.88 Indian National Army (INA) 22–3, 25 Indian National Congress (Congress leadership) 13, 15, 21–4, 26–7, 31–4, 36, 42, 46–7, 49–50 Congress Working Committee 22, 31 Intelligence Bureau 49 Military Committee 172 New Delhi 1, 4, 6, 17, 26–8, 33–6, 39, 44, 46–7, 50, 52, 102–3, 169 partition of 3–4, 15–18, 24, 32–9, 41 political elite 28, 172 Punjab (see Punjab, India) Rann of Kutch 172 India and Burma Committee 23, 204 n.67 India League (London-based) 27 Indian Ocean 106, 176, 236 n.37 Indo-China 10–12, 28, 85, 87, 170 ­Indonesia 10, 13, 154, 156, 165 Indo-Pakistan 14, 47 Ingall, Francis 209 n.135 Institution of Engineering and Technology 185 Intelligence Corps 27 inter-service 56, 87, 98, 106, 124, 144, 148, 158, 160, 162, 165, 193 Iraq 61, 98, 102, 151 Isaacs, Jeremy 194 n.4 Isle of Wight, England 179, 189–9

Index Ismay, Hastings ‘Pug’ (Lord Ismay) 8, 29–31, 32–3, 35, 41–5, 157–8 Israel/Israelis 43, 56, 67–9, 71–3, 78, 86, 90, 94 French-Israeli collaboration 86 Henriques’s visit to 89 Israeli aggression 66 Israeli Defence Forces 67 Tel Aviv 68, 86, 89 ITV television network 183, 186, 188, 245 n.70 Jacob, Ian 157–8, 160 Jagan, Cheddi 105 Jammu and Kashmir 41 Japan/Japanese 11–13, 20, 22–4, 87 defeat of 1, 7 Hiroshima and Nagasaki 9, 112 humiliation 11–12 surrender in Singapore 18, 21, 105 Jarratt, Arthur 206 n.92 Jenkins, Evan 39, 42, 48, 51 Jenkins, Roy (Lord) 165–6, 177, 179 Jews/Jewish 67, 86, 118, 186 Jinks, James, The Silent Deep 229 n.14 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 14, 18, 22–4, 26–7, 33, 35–6, 38, 46–7, 183 Islamic movement 24 two nations doctrine 24 Jockey Club 183 John, Caspar 111, 127–8, 130–1, 134, 140, 149, 157, 166, 181, 232 n.54 Johnson, Lyndon (LBJ) 131–3, 137–8, 170 Joint Intelligence Committe 61 Joint Planning Staff (JPS) 56–7, 61, 66, 147, 150 Joint Services Mission 70 Jordan 56, 66–7, 86, 89 Kashmir 14, 16, 47–8, 103, 159, 208 n.123, 224 n.31 Kaul, Chandrika 38 Indian Independence, the British Media and Lord Mountbatten 206 n.96 Kaunda, Kenneth 106 Keeler, Christine 101 Keightley, Charles 61–2, 65–6, 68–9, 71, 84–5, 87–8 Kennedy, John F. (Jack) 125, 128–33

263

Kennedy, Ludovic 92–4, 188 Keynes/Keynesian/Keynesianism 45, 97, 99, 184 ­Khan, Ayub 102–3, 173 Khan, Yasmin 49 The Great Partition 16 King, Cecil 91, 180–1, 184 King George VI 1, 27, 168, 236 n.35, 240 n.92 King Gustav VI 169 King Hussein 67, 86 Kirkpatrick, Ivone 63, 67 Knatchbull, John (Lord Brabourne) 8–9, 78, 84, 92–3, 181–3, 186–9, 191 Knight, Castleton 206 n.92 Korean War 112, 116, 144 Kuwait (Kuwait crisis) 98, 151–2, 236 n.38 Kyle, Keith 69, 81 Labour Government (1945–51) 15, 25, 46, 100, 114 selling Polaris to 133–8 Labour Party 4, 6, 12–13, 19–36, 45–7, 100, 129, 133, 170, 173, 182 Lacey, Robert 78 Lady Brabourne. See Mountbatten, Patricia Lamb, Alastair 41–2, 208 n.122 Lambe, Charles 8, 72, 74, 111, 125–7, 140, 149, 191, 227 n.68 land-based deterrent system 123–6 Lapierre, Dominique 45 Freedom at Midnight How Britain Gave Away an Empire 18, 201 n.18 Laycock, Robert 88 LBJ. See Johnson, Lyndon Leach, Henry 75 Leader of the Opposition 44–5, 78, 134 Leclerc, Philippe 11, 198 n.56 Leese, Oliver 8 Le Fanu, Mike 125, 130 legitimate target 191 Letellier, Yola 192 Levin, Bernard 93–4 Lewin, Ronald, Slim The Standardbearer 201 n.23 liberal internationalism 60 Lindsay, Janey 192

264 Lloyd, Selwyn (Lord) 63, 67–8, 91, 145, 212 n.46 Lord Beaverbrook 19, 44, 49, 82, 99, 135, 174, 199 n.66 Lord Denning 160 Lord Grantham (fictional) 62–3, 67–9, 85 Downton Abbey 16 Lord Halifax 31, 34, 204 n.80 Lord Jellicoe 132 Lord Kilmuir 63 Lord Linlithgow 20–4 Lord Listowel 27, 30, 34 Lord Mollet 65, 86–7 Lord Mountbatten Hero or Villain? documentary 246 n.83 Lord Mountbatten of Burma (‘Dickie’) ­admiral and politician 139–43 assassination/death of 2, 92–3 and assessors 182 and Brabourne 182–3 and Burke 117, 121, 125–6 charged in India 48–52 and Churchill 44–8 controversy 15–19 and Driberg 199 n.66 and Eden 54, 56, 59–60, 74–81, 98 as Francophile 70, 87 with Gandhi 40, 245 n.62 Humanitarian Award 188 informal photograph of 54 inspection of riot devastation in Lahore 41 and Labour 19–35 leaves Ministry of Defence, 1965 172 letter to The Times 114 love for films/film-making 183 with Nehru in Singapore 34 in nuclear age Defence White Paper, 1957 106–11 doubts about bomb 111–14 Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten 197 n.45 Post Surrender Tasks Section E of the Report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff by the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia 1943–1945 198 n.54 and Radcliffe 38–44

Index retirement of 1–2, 4–6, 30, 45, 54–5, 84, 190 revolution in submarine design 115–22 and Thomas 60 visit to Cyprus 105 visit to India 57, 103, 186 visit to Nyasaland/Rhodesia 106 visit to South America 105 vs. Wavell 32 and Wilson 169–81 Lord Salisbury 53, 209 n.3, 211 n.35, 224 n.40 Lord Selkirk 107, 123–6, 230 n.28 Lownie, Andrew 54, 180, 190, 195 n.20, 242 n.30 The Mountbattens Their Lives and Loves 1, 5, 17, 210 n.10 Lucas, Scott 69 Luce, David 134, 166, 168 Lynn, Vera 7, 188 MacArthur, Douglas 6, 9, 11, 197 n.45 MacLaine, Shirley 169 Macleod, Iain 101, 105 Macmillan, Dorothy 99, 101–2 and Boothby 101 ­Macmillan, Harold (Lord Stockton) 3, 14, 46–7, 49, 58, 61, 73–4, 87, 93, 97–103, 105, 108, 111–12, 115, 118–19, 122, 125, 127, 129–30, 132–3, 139–40, 143–8, 154–5, 163, 179, 215 n.98, 222 n.5, 222 n.11, 223 n.14, 225 n.46, 225 n.51, 236 n.32, 236 n.37 at Camp David 127 Central African Federation 106 and Churchill 99–100 with Cuba 237 n.49 At the End of the Day 156 great prize 112, 115 Ismay-Jacob report 158 to Kennedy 130 to Mountbatten’s funeral 97 and Nehru 102–3 speech to African Parliament 106 vision 158–68 visit to India (early 1947) 102 MacNeice, Louis 38 Madame Chiang 6, 27, 195 n.25

Index Maharajah of Bikaner 42 Maharaja of Kashmir 47 Main Building (structure) of Ministry of Defence 161–3, 165, 168, 239 n.69 Malaya 9–11, 61 ‘Malayan Spring’ of 1946 10 Malaysia 106 Malta 51, 55, 68–9, 89, 149, 172, 174–5 Manley, Norman 105 Mark, Robert 178 Marshall, George 9, 150 Martin, Kingsley 38 mass communication, power of 7, 37 Massu, Jacques 85, 219 n.50 Mau Mau 58 Mayhew, Christopher (Lord) 166 McAllen, Amanda 206 n.92 McDonald, Mary Lou 191 McGeoch, Ian 17 McGrigor, Roderick 107 McMahon Act, 1946 112, 115 McNamara, Robert 125, 128, 138, 161 Mediterranean Fleet 51–3, 55–6, 62, 67–8, 85 Menon, Krishna 27, 35, 37, 55, 60 Menon, V. P. 33, 37, 42 Menzies, Robert 214 n.83 meritocracy 2, 143, 189 Messervy, Frank 9–10 Metropolitan Police 178 The Middle East 54, 61, 66–7, 83, 90, 93–4, 152 Miéville, Eric 29, 33 migration/migrants 170–3, 175. See also immigration/immigrants ­Military Committee 102–3, 113, 146, 168, 172 military intervention 60, 64, 78, 88, 90, 94–5, 106, 132, 177, 211 n.24, 213 n.65, 223 n.22, 242 n.20, 242 n.27 MISC 16/MISC 17 135–7 Mitchell, Derek 170, 244 n.50 modernization 1, 110, 125, 143 Monckton, Walter (Lord) 48, 58, 60–1, 63–7, 74, 81, 88–91, 106, 145, 213 n.65 Monks, Noel, That Day at Gibraltar 222 n.5 Montgomery, Bernard (Field Marshal Lord) 20, 28, 147, 152

265

Morgan, Janet 17, 30 Morgan, Peter 79, 181 Morley, Peter 186, 189 Morrison, Herbert (Lord) 21, 45 ‘The Moscow criterion’ 132 Mountbatten, Dickie. See Lord Mountbatten of Burma (‘Dickie’) Mountbatten, Edwina (Edwina, Countess Mountbatten of Burma) 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 12–13, 16–17, 20–2, 27–33, 35, 37, 51, 54–5, 79, 82, 90, 99–101, 118–19, 135, 144, 172, 176, 189–92 death of 77, 98, 106 first visit back to India (1956) 57 with Gandhi 40 humanitarian 17, 37, 51 inspection of riot devastation in Lahore 41 during Japanese surrender in Singapore 21 leaving India in 1948 51 and Nehru 29 Mountbatten Memorial Lecture event 185 Mountbatten, Pamela (Hicks) 8, 17, 32, 104, 191–2 Mountbatten, Patricia 8, 32, 104, 169, 181, 191–2 Mountbatten, Philip. See Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh Mullaghmore, Ireland 43, 92, 189, 191 Multilateral Force (MLF), NATO 132–3, 135–8 Murphy, Peter 4–5, 8, 13, 29–30, 142, 195 n.16, 201 n.21 Muslim 22, 24–5, 27, 37, 41–2, 46, 48, 51. See also Hindu; Sikhs Muslim League 22–6, 32–6, 46 Mussolini, Benito 44, 77 mutually assured destruction (MAD) 115 Nairn, Tom 2 Nassau Agreement 130, 132–3, 137, 160 Nassau, Bahamas 125, 129–33, 135 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 54, 56–7, 59, 68–9, 77–9, 98, 145 National Electronics Research Council (NERC) 184–5 National Government 99, 180, 243 n.39 nationalism 10, 23, 25, 50, 52, 61, 106

266

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nationalist movements 12, 26, 28 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) 5, 9, 52, 70, 86, 90, 107, 110, 113–14, 116, 129, 132, 136, 190 Multilateral Force (MLF) 132–3, 135–8 Nazi Germany 186, 189 ­Nehru, Jawaharlal 13, 15, 17, 22–7, 30–2, 36–7, 39, 42, 46–7, 49, 51, 53, 60–1, 90, 142, 172, 185, 191, 208 n.123, 224 n.32 death of 172, 185 with Dickie and Edwina 28 and Macmillan 102–3 partition plan 32–3 relationship with Edwina 29 in Singapore with Mountbatten 34 and Sir Stafford Cripps 23 The Netherlands 13 Arnhem 57, 85, 88 Ne Win 103–4, 224 n.35 newsreels/newsreel company 7, 32, 36–8, 82, 118, 168, 205 n.92, 206 n.92 New Zealand 69, 71 The Next Five Years policy planning 99 Nicolson, Harold 35–6 Night of the Long Knives, 1962 150 Nixon, Richard 188, 246 n.76 Nkome, Joshua 176 non-cooperation policy 24, 50 North Africa 64, 85, 165. See also South Africa North America 104, 171. See also South America Northam, Jeremy 79 North Atlantic 107, 111 North Korea 177 North West Frontier Province (NWFP) 32 Norton, Jean 82 Nott, John 75 nuclear deterrent 87, 107–8, 111–13, 115, 123–4, 126, 128, 130, 134, 137, 227 n.72, 227 n.75 nuclear stalemate 111–12 nuclear technology 3, 116, 119, 122, 131, 229 n.19 nuclear weapons/submarine warships/ aircrafts 56, 107, 111–15, 132–3, 135, 185, 228 n.83

Albacore 117 A3 missile 125, 131 anti-submarine warfare (ASW) 107, 109, 111 Autumn Naval Rethink signal 110 AW612 V/STOL transport plane 165 Blackburn’s NA39 109 Blue Steel missile 108, 127, 225 n.51, 231 n.42 Blue Streak liquid-fuelled missile 108, 124–7, 225 n.51, 230 n.28 Bomber Command 113, 225 n.45 Buccaneer 109, 111, 152–3, 166, 226 n.68, 236 n.41 CVA-01 aircraft carrier 165–6 Fleet Ballistic Missile 124 General Dynamics’ F-111K 109, 166 Georges Leygues cruiser 86 HMNZS Royalist cruiser 69 HMS Albion 225 n.55 ­HMS Bulwark 225 n.55 HMS Crane 86 HMS Daedalus 167 HMS Dreadnought 87, 119–20, 122 HMS Illustrious 167 HMS Jamaica 69 HMS Kelly 141, 186, 188, 193 HMS Tyne 84 HMS Valiant 122, 230 n.26 HMS Warspite 131, 230 n.26 hydrogen bomb 112, 227 n.72, 229 n.19 Nautilus submarine 116–20 Pershing missiles 114, 190 Polaris submarine 113, 115, 143, 153, 160, 164, 186, 231 n.37, 231 n.47, 233 n.71 Polaris Sales Agreement 131 Royal Navy and 123–33 selling to Labour Government 133–8 P1154 supersonic V/STOL strike fighter 165 Red Beard nuclear ordnance 111, 226 n.68 sea-based deterrent system 123–4, 127 Sea Slug missile 110 Skybolt test programme 127–30, 132, 152, 154, 157, 231 n.42, 231 n.48

Index SSBN (Nuclear-Powered Ballistic Missile Submarine) 115, 118, 122, 124–5, 127–8, 131, 134, 137 SSNs (subsequent hunter-killer nuclear submarines) 118, 122, 131, 134–5 Striking Fleet 110 Submarine Service 115, 117, 119, 124–5 TSR2 109, 152–3, 161, 165–6, 237 n.43, 240 nn.84–5 twin graphite-moderated reactors 116 USS George Washington 124 USS Skipjack 122 Vanguard-class nuclear submarine 115 V-bombers 108, 124, 136 Vulcan bombers 127 Nuremberg trial 63 Nutting, Anthony 58, 67, 69, 91 Official Secrets Act 91 Olivier, Borg 172 Olivier, Laurence (Lord) 183 One Nation Tories 97 Operational Executive 151 Operation Cordage 56, 66–7, 86 Operation Musketeer 61–2, 64, 84–5, 87, 98, 119 Operation Musketeer Revise 65–6 Operation Scuttle 31 Operation Zipper 10 Opposition, HM 33, 38, 44–6, 49, 100, 133–4, 137, 177 Owen, Frank 7, 13 Owen, Nicholas 36, 46 ­Page, Russell 195 n.17 Pakistan 14–15, 18, 24–5, 27, 33, 35, 41, 45–7, 49, 103, 170, 172–3, 193. See also India East Pakistan 14, 41 Karachi 25, 35–6, 102 Lahore 103, 174 Lahore Resolution/Pakistan Demand 24 Mountbattens’ inspection in Lahore (riot devastation) 41 Peshawar 102 Palestine 13, 26, 50, 67 Palliser, Michael 92–3

267

Parachute Regiment 85 Partial Test Ban Treaty 160 Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai 27, 33, 51 Pay-TV Limited 183–4 Pearson, Jonathan 58 Pearson, Lester 171 Penney, William 116 Perisher Submarine Command Course 115 Pethick-Lawrence, E. G. (Lord) 25, 27 Pike, Thomas 140, 149, 152–3, 157 pilot scheme 183–4 Pimlott, Ben 78 PIRA 174, 247 n.92 Playfair, Edward (Lord) 151 political violence 10, 12, 22, 145 Portal, Charles (Marshal of the RAF Lord) 20, 157 post-independence 31, 35, 37–8, 47, 49, 105, 199 n.64, 203 n.51 post-war defence management 143–58 Potsdam Conference 10, 20 Powell, Enoch 47 Powell, Richard 107–8 power and influence 3–4, 82, 142, 155 Power, Manley 62, 68 Pownall, Henry 8–9, 11, 196 n.28 pragmatism 27, 56, 146 Preminger, Otto, Advise and Consent 139 Prince Bernhard 170 Prince Charles, Prince of Wales 2, 92, 181, 189 Prince Consort 149 Prince Louis Battenberg 3, 52, 99, 167 Princely States 32, 37, 42, 47–8, 185 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 29, 44, 47, 55, 60, 170, 174, 177, 183, 185, 187, 190–1, 203 n.60 principles for service chiefs 155 Prison Board/Prison Service 178–9 Privy Council 44, 161, 174 Profumo, John 101, 160, 223 n.14, 236 n.35, 238 n.62 Provisional IRA 2, 174, 191 Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs 123 ­Punjab Boundary Force 39, 48–9 Punjab, India 24, 26, 32–5, 38–9, 42, 44, 49–50

268

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Ferozepore 42–3 Gurdaspur 41–2 Unionist Party 25 Zira 42 Pyke, Geoffrey 9 Queen Elizabeth II (Her Majesty) 1, 29–30, 44, 63, 78, 122, 139, 156, 172, 176–7, 180–1, 186, 245 n.70 Quit India campaign (1942) 22, 24 Raborn, William 124–5, 230 n.32 Race Relations Act, 1965 175 racial discrimination 171 Radcliffe, Cyril (Lord) 16, 35, 37, 50–1, 93 and Mountbatten 38–44 radicalism 38, 158–68 Radzinovicz, Leon 179 Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti 27, 48, 50 Rangoon 102, 104 Rasputin, Grigori 118 Raswa 87 real politick 43, 60, 110 Rediffusion 183, 186 Rees, Pete 48 Régiments Parachutistes Coloniaux 86 The Review of Naval Policy 112 Rhineland crisis 215 n.83 Rhodesia/Rhodesian 106, 171, 175–7 Rhodesian Front 175, 177 Rhodesian Security Forces 176 Rhodes James, Robert 80–1 Rice-Davies, Mandy 101 Richmond Terrace 4, 29, 52, 88, 112, 150, 161 Rickover, Hyam (‘Father of the Nuclear Navy’) 117–22, 126, 130, 230 n.26 Roberts, Andrew 4, 17, 40–2, 49, 60, 190 Eminent Churchillians 15, 48 Robertson, Terence 86 Rohan, Sally 65 Rolls Royce 116, 119–20, 122, 153 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 12, 23, 105 Rostow, Walt 138 Royal Air Force (RAF) 9, 53, 55, 62, 65, 85, 107–9, 127, 140, 240 n.84 Royal Family 2, 13, 31, 44, 47, 82, 100, 104, 134, 183, 185, 187, 191, 246 n.88 Royal Fleet Auxiliary 84

Royal Marines 55–7, 74–5, 83, 85, 110, 168 Royal Navy 3, 8, 52, 54–5, 57, 62–3, 66–7, 70–1, 74, 81, 83–7, 90–1, 94, 102, 106–12, 116–22, 137, 154, 185, 190, 193 and Polaris 123–33 Rusk, Dean 138 ­Russians 129, 131–2, 154, 164 Sabin, Lorenzo 121 Sandys, Duncan (Lord) 101, 103, 107–12, 119–20, 123, 125–6, 144–6, 154, 159, 223 n.16, 225 n.45, 225 n.51, 226 n.64, 236 n.32 and COSC 147 Defence White Paper (1957) 146–8 Sarila, Narendra Singh 15–16, 45 scepticism 1, 7, 37, 56, 64–6, 105, 109, 111, 123–4, 139, 150, 162, 165, 185 Scott, Robert 129–30, 154, 156 Second Sea Lord 72. See also First Sea Lord Second World War 1, 22, 83–4, 117, 151, 153, 176, 187 sectarian 26, 44, 49–51 Senior Officers Technical Course 27 Sèvres protocol 43, 55, 68–9, 73, 86 Shastri, Lal Bahadur 172 shop steward of Royalty 2, 169 Short, Edward (Ted) 183 Shuckburgh, Evelyn 70 Sikhs 24, 26, 37, 39–40, 49. See also Hindu; Muslim Simla summit 7, 24 Sinai peninsula 73, 89 Singapore 4, 10–11, 13, 28, 106, 110, 151, 165, 188 Japanese surrender in 18, 21 Mountbatten and Nehru in 34 Sithole, Ndabaningi 176 Skidelsky, Robert (Lord) 79 Slessor, Sir John 157 Slim, William (‘Uncle Bill’) (Field Marshal Lord) 4, 6–9, 11–12, 20, 142, 183, 191, 205 n.81 Defeat Into Victory 196 n.29 Smith, Ian 175–7 Snow, C. P., ‘two cultures’ 157 Soskice, Frank (Lord) 171, 174

Index South Africa 106, 171. See also North Africa South America 104–5, 159–60. See also North America south Asia 12, 15–16, 18, 23, 25, 28–9, 36, 39, 45, 49, 51, 54, 59, 98, 101–2, 138, 142, 170, 175, 187 South-East Asia Command (SEAC) 2, 4–14, 25, 27, 30, 37, 53, 84, 87, 105, 186, 188, 198 n.57 Japanese surrender in Singapore 18, 21 sovereign/sovereignty 3, 6, 11, 22–5, 31, 39, 47, 71, 73, 103, 129, 167, 175–7, 191, 205 n.81, 238 n.63 Soviet-Sino threat 227 n.72 Soviet Union 102, 106, 112–13, 140, 154 special nuclear committee 121 Special Projects Office (SPO) 124, 126, 131 special relationship (UK with US) 3, 70, 113, 138, 228 n.78 Spens, Patrick (Lord) 39 Sri Lanka Ceylon 226 n.60 ­Colombo 102 Kandy 6, 12–13, 29, 52, 150 Stalin, Joseph 9 Stanhope, Mark 75 State Department 120, 122, 126, 128, 132–3, 137 state-of-the-art technology 87, 101, 109, 122, 165 Stevenson, Adlai 171 Stilwell, Joseph (Joe) 6, 9, 12, 27, 195 n.25, 197 n.48 St John Ambulance 29, 98 Stockholm Peace Research Institute 114 Stocks, Mary 90, 220 n.70 Stockwell, Hugh 65, 68–9, 85, 87, 220 n.61 Strong, Kenneth 164 Suez crisis 3, 5, 46, 53–5, 77, 98–100, 101, 107, 123, 145 during 1956 56–9 and Combined Operations Fleet Street connection 88–91 French connection 81–8 Government Property 94 invasion and resignation 59–74 nationalization of 53–4, 57–8, 98

269

Suez Group 215 n.83 Sukarno 13, 165, 198 n.57 Supreme Commander 4, 6–13, 19, 27, 35, 70, 90, 142, 148, 150, 196 n.34, 199 n.64, 227 n.77 Tafawa Balewa, Abubakar 173 Talbot, Ian 49–50, 209 nn.129–30 Taylor, A. J. P. 4 Taylor, Maxwell 129 Taylor, Miles 15 Teller, Edward 113 Templer, Gerald (Lord) 56–9, 61, 65, 71, 75, 85, 88, 105, 108–9, 123, 145–6, 148 Terraine, John 4, 186–8 The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten 186–7, 192 Thames Television 186–8, 245 n.65 Tharoor, Shashi 15, 49 Thatcher, Denis, privatization programme 97 Thatcher, Margaret (Lady) 75, 93, 97–8, 114, 154 This Is Your Life TV series 188 Thomas, Jim (Lord Cilcennin) 60, 63–4, 66, 74, 119 Thorne, Christopher 195 n.22 Thorneycroft, Peter (Lord) 3, 108, 120, 128, 130–2, 140, 142, 153–4, 158–61, 163 Thorneycroft proposals 133, 135–6 Thorpe, D. R. 78, 80 Supermac The Life of Harold Macmillan 101–6 Tizard, Henry 112, 227 n.75 Tory/Tories 3, 6, 26, 45, 48, 53, 97, 99, 101, 176, 179 trans-Atlantic relations 46, 103, 107, 112, 122 transfer of power 25, 29–31, 36–7, 43–5, 47–8, 50–1, 87 ­Transfer of Power document series 30 The Treasury 61, 97–8, 102, 108, 111, 118, 120, 125, 131, 134, 144, 153–4, 164, 166 Trend, Burke (Lord) 94, 156 Trethowan, Ian 93 Tripartite Agreement 67

270

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Truman, Harry S. 9, 12, 113 Turkish Cypriots 105, 174 Turner, John 37–8, 205 n.92 twin-track approach 123, 171 two nations doctrine 24, 37, 173 UK-US Mutual Defence Agreement 112 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) 175–7 The United Nations 55, 63–5, 71, 73 ceasefire 73, 87, 102 peace-keeping force 171, 173 The United States of America (USA) 59, 87, 91, 111, 117, 120, 129, 131–2, 138 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) 116–19 California 15 Joint Chiefs of Staff 6, 9, 70, 129 The Manhattan Project 9, 227 n.75 nuclear policymaking in 117 Oval Office 124, 136 Pentagon 124, 129, 161 Public Broadcasting Service 187 special relationship with UK 3, 70, 113, 138, 228 n.78 United States Army Airforce (USAAF) 9, 127 United States Navy (USN) 59–60, 70, 73, 87, 90, 116–19, 122, 124–7, 129, 136 Washington DC 6, 21, 59, 70, 73, 99, 106, 112–13, 117, 123–4, 128–9, 131–3, 137, 171 The White House 12, 21, 23, 119, 122, 124, 132–3, 138–9, 188 United World Colleges (UWC) 188–9 U Thant 171 Variety Club 188–9 Vassall, John 154, 237 n.45 Vaughan-Thomas, Wynford 38 Vice Chief of the Naval Staff (VCNS) 68, 72, 81, 212 n.42, 232 n.54 Viceroy’s House film 1, 16, 194 n.3 Vickers-Armstrong 116, 122, 131 Viet Minh 10–11, 85 Vietnam/Vietnamese 10–11, 85, 132, 138, 170–1, 198 n.53, 239 n.80 Saigon 10 Villa, Brian Loring 4

violence 11, 13, 37–8, 49–51, 100 communal 16, 25, 38, 47 genocidal 25 political 10, 12, 22, 145 von Tunzelmann, Alex 17, 36, 49 Indian Summer The Secret History of the End of an Empire 17, 246 n.83 War Cabinet 23, 98 Ward, Elizabeth 30 ­Wardell, Mike 7, 13, 196 n.31 Ward, Stephen 160 Warsaw Pact 145 Watkinson, Harold (Lord) 111, 126, 128, 150–1, 153–4, 231 n.45 Watson, Muriel 30 Wavell, Archie (Field Marshal Lord) 9, 12, 20, 22–3, 25–32, 46–7, 169 Way Ahead Committee 85, 110, 117, 226 n.59 Wedemeyer, Albert 12, 198 nn.61–2, 207 n.115 Wedgewood-Benn, Anthony 180, 182, 184, 190, 240 n.84, 241 n.6 Welensky, Roy (Lord) 106 Western Alliance 137, 140 Western Front 97, 99, 187 West Indies 105, 172 Westinghouse company 116, 119, 122 Whitehall, London 1, 3–4, 15, 56, 60, 67, 87, 93, 108, 113, 119–20, 125–6, 130, 133, 137, 170, 174–5, 184 white supremacy 106, 176 Whitworth, Armstrong 165 Williams, Francis (Lord) 38 Wilson, A. N. 190 Wilson, Harold (Lord) 3, 98, 100, 106, 132, 134–8, 139, 164–6, 169–81, 184, 243 n.39 Windsor Conferences 170 Wingate, Orde 9, 197 n.43, 197 n.48 Wise, Greg 1, 79 Wolpert, Stanley 15, 41, 50 Woodfield, Philip 174, 178–80 Woods, Wilfred 119 The World At War The Landmark Oral History from the Unpublished Archives series 187, 194 n.4 Wright, Jerauld 70, 90–1

Index Young, Michael 189 Zeigler, Philip 4–5, 16–17, 30, 33, 42, 50, 81, 136, 157, 163, 177, 180, 192, 195 n.22, 207 n.115 Mountbatten 196 n.34, 199 n.1, 221 n.88, 224 n.32, 224 n.41, 233 n.69

271

Zuckerman, Solly (Lord) 4–5, 101, 111–15, 118, 123, 126–32, 134–6, 139, 142, 149, 152–4, 156–7, 159, 163–6, 169, 172, 176, 180–1, 184–5, 190, 228 n.79, 231 n.47, 239 n.72 Monkeys, Men, and Missiles 227 n.75

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