Louis Mountbatten: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · HMS Kelly

A royal cousin who wanted to be a sailor

1900 – 1941 · Windsor · The Mediterranean · Crete

Louis Mountbatten was born in 1900, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and son of Prince Louis of Battenberg, who was First Sea Lord until 1914 and was forced out because of his German name and origins. The family anglicised the name to Mountbatten in 1917. The humiliation of his father is the fixed point of his childhood and he referred to it all his life.

He joined the Royal Navy and specialised in signals — an unglamorous branch he chose deliberately because it was technical and because promotion there could be earned. He was energetic, inventive and extremely conscious of his own advancement; contemporaries found him charming and were divided about whether he was serious.

In command of the destroyer HMS Kelly he was bombed, torpedoed and mined in turn, and in May 1941 the ship was sunk by dive-bombers off Crete with the loss of more than half the crew. Mountbatten survived in the water and was picked up. The episode was made into a film, In Which We Serve, with Noël Coward playing a character modelled on him — which tells you how his reputation was being managed even during the war.

He was then made Chief of Combined Operations, and the raid on Dieppe in August 1942 was mounted under his authority: over three thousand casualties from a force of about six thousand, most of them Canadian, in a single day.

Why this matters

Mountbatten's career combined real courage, real technical ability and a talent for publicity, and the three are difficult to separate in any account of him.

A sunk destroyer and a raid on Dieppe. What would you ask him?

Ask Mountbatten

• “What did what happened to your father teach you?”
• “Why specialise in signals?”
• “What happened when the Kelly went down?”
• “What was Dieppe for, and was it worth it?”
• “Did being royal help or hinder you in the navy?”

Chapter 2 · South East Asia Command

A theatre that had been losing

1943 – 1946 · Kandy · Burma · Singapore

Mountbatten was made Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia in 1943, at forty-three, over the heads of a great many more experienced officers. The theatre had a reputation for defeat, disease and neglect, and its soldiers called themselves the forgotten army.

What he did there is generally counted his best work. He moved his headquarters to Kandy, took the medical situation seriously — malaria was causing far more casualties than the Japanese — and enforced the anti-malarial discipline that changed the campaign's arithmetic. He backed the decision to fight through the monsoon rather than pause, which the Japanese did not expect. He worked with an army of many nationalities, the great majority of it Indian, and he was noticeably better than most British officers of his generation at treating Indian officers as colleagues.

The fighting itself — Imphal, Kohima, the reconquest of Burma — was directed by William Slim, and Mountbatten was careful to say so, though not always careful enough for Slim's admirers.

He accepted the Japanese surrender at Singapore in September 1945 and then spent a difficult year presiding over the return of European colonial powers to territories that had no intention of accepting them, in Indochina and the Dutch East Indies. He came out of it convinced that the age of European rule in Asia was finished, which is the view he took to Delhi.

Why this matters

Mountbatten arrived in India already convinced that European rule in Asia was over, and he had spent a year watching what happened where that was not accepted.

The forgotten army, and a year watching empires return. What would you ask him?

Ask Mountbatten

• “Why was malaria discipline the thing you attacked first?”
• “How much of the Burma campaign was Slim's?”
• “What did you learn from Indochina and the Dutch East Indies?”
• “How did you handle an army that was mostly Indian?”
• “Were you given the theatre because it could not get worse?”

Chapter 3 · The Date

Fourteen months brought forward to five

March – June 1947 · Delhi · Simla · London

Attlee appointed Mountbatten Viceroy in March 1947 with instructions to transfer power by June 1948. He accepted on condition of plenipotentiary powers — the authority to decide on the spot rather than refer to London.

What he found was a country in which communal violence was already running, the administration was dividing on communal lines, and the Cabinet Mission's federal plan was dead. Within ten weeks he had concluded that partition was unavoidable and that delay would make it worse, and on 3 June he announced the plan for two dominions. At the press conference that followed he was asked when, and named 15 August 1947 — ten months earlier than his instructions.

His reasoning was that authority was draining away by the week, that a lame-duck administration presiding over a country in communal breakdown was the most dangerous possible arrangement, and that the sooner Indian governments were responsible for order the sooner order might be restored.

The counter-argument is that nothing was ready. The division of the army, the civil service, the railways, the treasury and the archives of a subcontinent was compressed into ten weeks. No arrangements were made for population movement, because officially none was expected. Nehru and Patel accepted the date; Jinnah wanted longer.

Whether haste caused the killing or merely accompanied it is the central question about Mountbatten, and it cannot be settled by anything either side can produce.

Why this matters

Everything about the partition of India — the boundary, the migration, the unpreparedness — follows from a date named at a press conference.

A date named in answer to a question. What would you ask him?

Ask Mountbatten

• “Why did you name a date at a press conference?”
• “What convinced you that partition could not be avoided?”
• “What could have been prepared in fourteen months that was not in ten weeks?”
• “Why did you demand plenipotentiary powers?”
• “Did Nehru and Patel accept the date because they wanted it?”

Chapter 4 · The Line

A boundary drawn in five weeks and published in two days

July – August 1947 · Delhi · The Punjab · Bengal

Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never been to India, arrived in July 1947 and was given about five weeks to draw the boundaries through the Punjab and Bengal. He worked from out-of-date census returns and maps, with two Congress and two Muslim League nominees on each commission who disagreed on everything, and he had no time to visit most of the ground.

The awards were finished by around 12 August. Mountbatten did not publish them until 17 August — two days after independence.

The stated reason was that publishing beforehand would have made the transfer ceremonies impossible and would have handed the departing administration responsibility for the disorder. The effect was that on the morning of independence millions of people in the Punjab did not know which country they were in, and that the largest migration in modern history began without either new government knowing where its border was.

There is a further and disputed charge: that Mountbatten intervened over the Ferozepur salient, which was in a draft award to Pakistan and appeared in the final award to India. Radcliffe destroyed his working papers, so the allegation rests on circumstantial material and is neither proved nor disproved.

Mountbatten stayed on as Governor-General of India at Nehru's invitation until June 1948. Pakistan chose Jinnah instead, which meant the man who had drawn the line remained the head of state of one of the two countries it divided — an arrangement that has never been easy to defend.

Why this matters

The boundary was completed before independence and published after it, and the two days between are where much of the argument about Mountbatten sits.

A line finished on the twelfth and published on the seventeenth. What would you put to him?

Ask Mountbatten

• “Why hold the boundary awards back until after independence?”
• “Was five weeks ever enough for that boundary?”
• “Did you intervene over Ferozepur?”
• “Why stay on as Governor-General of one of the two countries?”
• “What plans were made for people who found themselves on the wrong side?”

Chapter 5 · The Argument After

Thirty years of defending it, and a boat at Mullaghmore

1948 – 1979 · London · Broadlands · County Sligo

Mountbatten returned to the navy and rose to First Sea Lord — the post his father had been forced out of — and then Chief of the Defence Staff. He was a considerable public figure for the rest of his life and an assiduous manager of his own reputation, cooperating extensively with biographers and film-makers.

He defended the 1947 timetable to the end. His argument was consistent: the violence was already under way before he arrived, the alternative was a British administration presiding over a civil war it could not stop, and nobody has ever produced a plan that would have divided the subcontinent peacefully at any speed.

The case against him is equally consistent: that a man with no knowledge of India was given plenipotentiary powers, made the largest decision of the century in ten weeks, and then withheld the boundary for reasons of ceremony while a migration of ten to fifteen million people began. The deaths are estimated in the hundreds of thousands to a million and cannot be stated as a figure.

On 27 August 1979 a bomb placed by the Provisional IRA on his boat at Mullaghmore in County Sligo killed him, his fourteen-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, and Paul Maxwell, a fifteen-year-old local boy working on the boat. On the same day eighteen British soldiers were killed at Warrenpoint.

He is the only figure on this course whose central decision is still, seventy-five years later, argued about in the two countries it created.

Why this matters

Both the defence and the charge against Mountbatten are coherent, which is why partition remains a genuinely open historical question rather than a settled verdict.

Thirty years of defending one decision. What would you ask him?

Ask Mountbatten

• “Would a slower partition have been a less violent one?”
• “How much did you know about India when you arrived?”
• “Why cooperate so much with your own biographers?”
• “What would you have done differently in 1947?”
• “Who should be held responsible for what happened in the Punjab?”

What Mountbatten changed

Mountbatten brought the transfer of power in India forward by ten months and published the boundary two days after it, and everything that followed — the migration of ten to fifteen million people, the killing in the Punjab and Bengal, the Kashmir war — happened inside the timetable he set. Whether that timetable caused the catastrophe or merely failed to prevent one already under way is the question, and it has not been settled in either country.

A debate that continues

Was the speed of the transfer of power a rational response to a collapsing administration, or the decision that made the violence unmanageable? Serious historians hold both positions and use much of the same evidence.

Keep exploring — ask Mountbatten

• “Is it better to leave quickly or to leave well?”
• “Should somebody with no knowledge of a country be given power over its future?”
• “How should a historian handle a death toll that cannot be established?”

Related lives

• Muhammad Ali Jinnah — The Ambassador Of Unity, Until He Was Not
• Jawaharlal Nehru — One Press Conference, In July 1946
• Subhas Chandra Bose — Elected Twice, Pushed Out Twice
• Winston Churchill — Prime Minister of Great Britain

Related themes

Partition and independence · The end of the British Empire · Decolonisation in Asia