Lord Mountbatten
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was a British statesman, naval officer, and member of the British royal family. A maternal uncle of Prince Philip and second cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II, he served in the Royal Navy during both world wars and rose to become Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, in the later stages of the Second World War. He subsequently oversaw the transition of British India to independence as the last Viceroy and the first Governor‑General of independent India.
Mountbatten later held senior posts in the post‑war armed forces, serving as First Sea Lord and then as Chief of the Defence Staff. He remained closely associated with the royal family throughout his life and acted as a mentor to his great‑nephew, the future King Charles III. Beyond his official duties, he was active in international education, naval and sporting organisations, and a range of charitable and cultural initiatives.
His career and reputation have been the subject of considerable debate. Admirers highlighted his energy, charm, and administrative ability, while critics accused him of vanity, self‑promotion, and flawed judgement, particularly in relation to the partition of India and his wartime assessments in South East Asia. His private life attracted scrutiny, and later allegations of sexual abuse were made; some were dismissed by official inquiries.
In August 1979, Mountbatten was assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army when a bomb exploded aboard his fishing boat at Mullaghmore, County Sligo. His death prompted widespread condemnation and international mourning, and he received a ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey.
Early life
Mountbatten, then styled Prince Louis of Battenberg, was born on 25 June 1900 at Frogmore House in the Home Park, Windsor, Berkshire. He was the youngest child and second son of Prince Louis of Battenberg and his wife Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. Mountbatten's maternal grandparents were Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, a daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. His paternal grandparents were Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine and Julia, Princess of Battenberg. Their marriage was morganatic, as Julia was not of royal lineage; consequently, Mountbatten and his father bore the style Serene Highness rather than Royal Highness, were ineligible for the title Princes of Hesse, and held the lesser Battenberg designation. His elder siblings were Princess Alice of Battenberg, Princess Louise of Battenberg, and Prince George of Battenberg.Mountbatten was baptised in the large drawing room of Frogmore House on 17 July by the Dean of Windsor, Philip Eliot. His godparents were Queen Victoria, Nicholas II of Russia and Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg. He wore the original 1841 royal christening gown at the ceremony.
Mountbatten's nickname among family and friends was "Dickie"; although "Richard" was not among his given names. His great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, had originally suggested "Nicky", but as the name was already widely used within the Russian imperial family, it was altered to "Dickie" to avoid confusion.
Mountbatten was educated at home for the first ten years of his life; he was then sent to Lockers Park School in Hertfordshire and later to the Royal Naval College, Osborne, in May 1913.
Mountbatten's mother's younger sister was the Russian Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. As a child he visited the imperial court at St Petersburg and became close to the Russian imperial family, harbouring romantic feelings for his maternal first cousin Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, whose photograph he kept at his bedside for the rest of his life.
Mountbatten adopted his surname as a result of World War I. From 1914 to 1918, Britain and its allies were at war with the Central Powers, led by the German Empire. To appease British nationalist sentiment, in 1917 King George V issued a royal proclamation changing the name of the British royal house from the German House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor. The King's British relatives with German names and titles followed suit, with Mountbatten's father adopting the surname Mountbatten, an anglicisation of Battenberg. His father was subsequently created Marquess of Milford Haven.
First World War
At the age of 16, Mountbatten was posted as midshipman to the battlecruiser in July 1916 and, after seeing action in August, transferred to the battleship during the closing phases of the First World War. In June 1917, when the royal family abandoned their German names and titles and adopted the more British-sounding "Windsor", Mountbatten acquired the courtesy title appropriate to a younger son of a marquess, becoming known as Lord Louis Mountbatten until he was created a peer in his own right in 1946. He paid a ten-day visit to the Western Front in July 1918.While still an acting-sub-lieutenant, Mountbatten was appointed first lieutenant of the P-class sloop HMS P. 31 on 13 October 1918 and was confirmed as a substantive sub-lieutenant on 15 January 1919. HMS P. 31 took part in the Peace River Pageant on 4 April 1919. Mountbatten attended Christ's College, Cambridge, for two terms from October 1919, studying English literature in a programme designed to augment the education of junior officers whose studies had been curtailed by the war. He was elected for a term to the Standing Committee of the Cambridge Union Society and was suspected of sympathy for the Labour Party, then emerging as a potential party of government for the first time.
Interwar period
Mountbatten was posted to the battlecruiser in March 1920 and accompanied Edward, Prince of Wales, on a royal tour of Australia. He was promoted lieutenant on 15 April 1920. HMS Renown returned to Portsmouth on 11 October 1920. Early in 1921, Royal Navy personnel were deployed for civil defence duties as serious industrial unrest appeared imminent, and Mountbatten was required to command a platoon of stokers in Northern England, many of whom had never handled a rifle before. He transferred to the battlecruiser in March 1921 and again accompanied the Prince of Wales, this time on a royal tour of India and Japan. Edward and Mountbatten formed a close friendship during the trip. Mountbatten survived the deep defence cuts known as the Geddes Axe; fifty-two percent of the officers of his year had left the Royal Navy by the end of 1923. Although he was highly regarded by his superiors, it was rumoured that wealthy and well-connected officers were more likely to be retained. He was posted to the battleship in the Mediterranean Fleet in January 1923.Pursuing his interests in technological development and gadgetry, Mountbatten joined the Portsmouth Signals School in August 1924 and then briefly studied electronics at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. He became a Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, now the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He was posted to the battleship in the Reserve Fleet in 1926 and became Assistant Fleet Wireless and Signals Officer of the Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Sir Roger Keyes in January 1927. Promoted lieutenant commander on 15 April 1928, Mountbatten returned to the Signals School in July 1929 as Senior Wireless Instructor. He was appointed Fleet Wireless Officer to the Mediterranean Fleet in August 1931 and, having been promoted commander on 31 December 1932, was posted to the battleship.
In 1934, Mountbatten received his first command, the destroyer. He was tasked with sailing the new ship to Singapore and exchanging her for the older destroyer. He successfully brought Wishart back to Malta and then attended the funeral of George V in January 1936. Mountbatten was appointed a personal naval aide-de-camp to King Edward VIII on 23 June 1936, and, having joined the Naval Air Division of the Admiralty in July 1936, he attended the coronation of George VI and Elizabeth in May 1937. He was promoted captain on 30 June 1937 and was given command of the destroyer in June 1939.
Within the Admiralty, Mountbatten was known as "The Master of Disaster" for his penchant for getting into difficult situations.
Second World War
When war broke out in September 1939, Mountbatten became Captain of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla aboard HMS Kelly, which soon became noted for its exploits. In late 1939 he brought the Duke of Windsor back from exile in France, and in early May 1940 Mountbatten led a British convoy through fog to evacuate Allied forces participating in the Namsos campaign during the Norwegian campaign.On the night of 9–10 May 1940, Kelly was torpedoed amidships by a German E-boat S 31 off the Dutch coast, and Mountbatten thereafter commanded the 5th Destroyer Flotilla from the destroyer. On 29 November 1940, the Flotilla engaged three German destroyers off Lizard Point, Cornwall. Mountbatten turned to port to match a German course change, a move described as "a rather disastrous" one, as the directors swung off and lost target, resulting in Javelin being struck by two torpedoes. He rejoined Kelly in December 1940, by which time her torpedo damage had been repaired.
Kelly was sunk by German dive bombers on 23 May 1941 during the Battle of Crete, an incident that later served as the basis for Noël Coward's film In Which We Serve. Coward, a personal friend of Mountbatten, incorporated some of his speeches into the film. Mountbatten was mentioned in despatches on 9 August 1940 and 21 March 1941, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in January 1941.
File:Mountbatten Short and Kimmel in Hawaii 1941.jpg|left|thumb| Walter Short, Mountbatten and Husband E. Kimmel Frederick Martin and Patrick Bellinger in Hawaii 1941
In August 1941, Mountbatten was appointed captain of the aircraft carrier, which was in Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs following action at Malta in January. During this period of relative inactivity, he paid a flying visit to Pearl Harbor, three months before the Japanese attack. Mountbatten was appalled at the US naval base's lack of preparedness and, drawing on Japan's history of launching wars with surprise attacks, the recent British success at the Battle of Taranto, and the demonstrated effectiveness of aircraft against warships, accurately predicted that the United States would enter the war after a Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-S68745, Konferenz von Casablanca.jpg|right|thumb|Clockwise from lower right, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Sir Hastings 'Pug' Ismay, Mountbatten: January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference
Mountbatten was a favourite of Winston Churchill. On 27 October 1941, Mountbatten replaced Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes as Chief of Combined Operations Headquarters and was promoted to commodore.
His duties in this role included devising new technical aids to support opposed landings. Noteworthy technical achievements by Mountbatten and his staff included the construction of "PLUTO", an underwater oil pipeline to Normandy; an artificial Mulberry harbour built from concrete caissons and sunken ships; and the development of tank-landing ships. Mountbatten also proposed Project Habakkuk to Churchill, an ambitious plan for an unsinkable 600-metre aircraft carrier made from reinforced ice. The project was never carried out due to its enormous cost.
As commander of Combined Operations, Mountbatten and his staff planned the highly successful Bruneval raid, which gained important intelligence and captured part of a German Würzburg radar installation, along with one of its technicians, on 27 February 1942. Mountbatten recognised that surprise and speed were essential to securing the radar and concluded that an airborne assault was the only viable method.
On 18 March 1942, he was promoted to the acting rank of vice admiral and given the honorary ranks of lieutenant general and air marshal to provide the authority required for his duties in Combined Operations. Despite the misgivings of General Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Mountbatten was placed on the Chiefs of Staff Committee. He was in large part responsible for the planning and organisation of the St Nazaire Raid on 28 March, which put out of action one of the most heavily defended docks in Nazi-occupied France until well after the war's end, a result that contributed to Allied supremacy in the Battle of the Atlantic.
After the successes at Bruneval and St Nazaire came the disastrous Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942. Mountbatten was central to the planning and promotion of the assault, which proved a marked failure, with casualties of almost 60%, the great majority of them Canadians. In the aftermath, he became a controversial figure in Canada, and the Royal Canadian Legion distanced itself from him during later visits. His relations with Canadian veterans, who blamed him for the losses, "remained frosty" after the war.
Mountbatten claimed that the lessons learned from the Dieppe Raid were necessary for planning the Normandy invasion on D-Day nearly two years later. However, military historians such as Major General Julian Thompson, a former Royal Marine, have argued that these lessons should not have required a debacle such as Dieppe to be recognised. Nevertheless, as a direct result of the failings, the British introduced several innovations, most notably Hobart's Funnies, specialised armoured vehicles which, during the Normandy Landings, undoubtedly saved many lives on the three Commonwealth beachheads of Gold, Juno, and Sword.