Great Britain's Uncle Dickie Mountbatten

By John Skow

His great-grandmother was Queen Victoria, who was photographed holding him on her lap in the last year of her life. The children of Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia were his cousins. So was Edward, Prince of Wales, later briefly King Edward VIII of England and interminably the Duke of Windsor, who was best man at his wedding. As a young man, Prince Philip, penniless but promising, married his adored young cousin Lilibet. His sister was the Queen of Sweden. Louis Mountbatten himself--and how he loved it all--was wealthy, flashingly handsome, a polo-playing friend of rajas and movie stars, a somewhat too fearless naval commander, an unsubtle, decent, enormously energetic man, grand if not great, whose immense, childish vanity was only just outweighed by his good sense and charm.

It was a comment on his expansive style that he was nicknamed "Supremo" by staffers during World War II, when he served as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia. To the royal family he was "Dickie" (though Richard was not one of his string of given names, which were Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas). He was the last Viceroy of India, who in 1947 presided over the fade-out of the British raj. He went out of this world at 79 (blown up in 1979 by I.R.A. terrorists while boating in Donegal Bay) as Admiral of the Fleet, the Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

Granted that it would be hard to write a dull account of such a personage, Philip Ziegler, author of biographies of Lord Melbourne and Diana Cooper, offers a remarkably lively and human portrait. His research was authorized by the Mountbatten family, but in this case, he says, the term does not mean that the book was distorted to fit the demands of the survivors. Ziegler's tone is generally admiring but not adulatory, as when he compares Mountbatten with Douglas MacArthur, his fellow Supreme Commander in the Pacific during World War II. The two Supremos were equally and supremely vain, is Ziegler's assessment, but Mountbatten lacked MacArthur's cold arrogance and "was endearingly able to laugh at himself." Like other congenital optimists, Mountbatten seems to have had a vividly accurate memory for events as they should have happened, but, says Ziegler, "though the truth in his hands often suffered a sea-change, he was genuinely surprised and upset when instances of this were pointed out to him."

This amiable grandee was born with the century, to English parents of solidly Germanic background, Prince Louis of Battenberg and his wife Princess Victoria of Hesse, granddaughter of the English Queen. Prince Louis, who had switched nationality at 14 to join the English navy, never lost his slight German accent, and in 1914, despite an illustrious naval career, was hounded from his post as First Sea Lord by anti-German public frenzy. Mountbatten, his second son (the family name was anglicized in 1917 at the direction of King George V), never forgot the injustice, and counted his own posting as First Sea Lord in 1954 as a vindication of his father.

He was considered lacking in intellectual brilliance, but he was quick- minded and receptive to other people's ideas. The result, with a little help from his social connections, was an unending series of promotions. There was never a way to treat Dickie Mountbatten as if he were just another lieutenant. He had money of his own, and he had married the beautiful and exceedingly wealthy Edwina Ashley. It was a stormy union, marked by his many affairs and her infatuations, including one with Jawaharlal Nehru, but it lasted until Edwina's death in 1960. Stationed in Malta in the late '20s, the couple kept a 66-ton yacht in the harbor. Noel Coward, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and an assortment of royals were their houseguests.

As a commander of destroyers early in World War II, says Ziegler, Mountbatten was popular but reckless: "If a destroyer could leave skid-marks, (H.M.S.) Kelly would have disfigured every sea in which she sailed." Even so, the author largely absolves Mountbatten of responsibility for the failure of the bloody 1942 raid on Dieppe, a sacrifice made inevitable by pushing and shoving between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. And Ziegler argues convincingly that Mountbatten's handling of the transfer of power in India in 1947 was a success, considering political realities there. He opposed the splitting off of Muslim Pakistan from India and tried to prevent it. But religion had its customary disastrous effect on politics. Hindus and Muslims despised each other; partition and the bloodshed that followed, says Ziegler, were inevitable.

Despite Mountbatten's massive size, the evenhanded narrative moves with enormous grace and wit. This affectionate character study of a nearly extinct species can also be read as a fascinating gloss on World War II, or as a social history of wealth and privilege in decline. It was privilege, in the end, that killed Mountbatten. His habit over the decades was to spend his summers at Classiebawn Castle, an elegant old pile he owned in the Republic of Ireland. It will stand as one of history's sad ironies that Mountbatten had never taken part in the dispute over the control of Ulster and that, in fact, the Tories counted him a dangerous left-winger and a partisan of self- determination. But he was an English earl and a cousin of the Queen, and he died a sacrifice to the kind of tribal hatred he had worked so hard in India to overcome.