Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

changed his family name from Battenberg to Mountbatten at King George V’s request and was created Marquess of Milford Haven. The First Sea Lord’s equally affected son vowed to fill one day the post from which an unjust outcry had driven his father.

      During the long years between the wars, however, his career had followed the slow, unspectacular path of a peacetime officer. It was in other, less martial fields that the young Mountbatten had made his impression on the public. With his charm, his remarkable good looks, his infectious gaiety, he was one of the darlings of Britain’s penny press, catering to a world desperate for glamour after the horrors of war. His marriage to Edwina Ashley, a beautiful and wealthy heiress, with the Prince of Wales as his best man, was the social event of 1922.

      Rare were the Sunday papers over the next years that did not contain a photograph or some mention of Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the Mountbattens at the theatre with Noël Coward, the Mountbattens at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, dashing young Lord Louis water-skiing in the Mediterranean or receiving a trophy won playing polo.

      They constituted an image Mountbatten never denied; he revelled in every dance, party and polo match. But beneath that public image there was another figure of which the public was unaware. It emerged when the dancing was over.

      The glamorous young man had not forgotten his boyhood vow. Mountbatten was an intensely serious, ambitious, and dedicated naval officer. He possessed an awesome capacity for work, a trait which would leave his subordinates gasping all his life. Convinced that future warfare would be patterned by the dictates of science and won by superior communications, Mountbatten eschewed the more social career of a deck officer to study signals.

      He came out top of the Navy Higher Wireless Course in 1927, then sat down to write the first comprehensive manual for all the wireless sets used by the Navy. He was fascinated by the fast-expanding horizons of technology and plunged himself into the study of physics, electricity and communications in every form. New techniques, new ideas, were his passions and his playthings.

      He obtained for the Royal Navy the works of a brilliant French rocketry expert, Robert Esnault Pelterie. Their pages gave Britain an eerily accurate forecast of the V-bomb, guided missiles and even man’s first flight to the moon. In Switzerland, he ferreted out a fast-firing anti-aircraft gun designed to stop the Stuka dive bomber; then spent months forcing the reluctant Royal Navy to adopt it.

      He had followed the rise of Hitler and German rearmament with growing apprehension. He had also watched with pained but perceptive eyes the evolution of the society that had driven his beloved uncle Nicholas II from the throne of the Tsars. Increasingly, as the thirties wore on, Mountbatten and his wife spent less and less time on the dance floor, and more and more in a crusade to awaken friends and politicians to the conflict both saw was coming.

      On 25 August 1939, a proud Mountbatten took command of a newly commissioned destroyer, HMS Kelly. A few hours later the radio announced Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact. The Kelly’s captain understood the import of the announcement immediately. Mountbatten ordered his crew to work day and night to reduce the three weeks needed to ready the ship for sea.

      Nine days later, when war broke out, the captain of the Kelly was slung over the ship’s side in a pair of dirty overalls, sloshing paint on her hull along with his able seamen. The next day, however, the Kelly was in action against a German submarine.

      ‘I will never give the order “Abandon ship”,’ Mountbatten promised his crew. ‘The only way we will ever leave this ship is if she sinks under our feet.’

      The Kelly escorted convoys through the channel, hunted U-boats in the North Sea, dashed through fog and German bombers to help rescue six thousand survivors of the Narvik expedition at the head of the Namsos Fiord in Norway. Her stern was damaged at the mouth of the Tyne and her boiler room devastated by a torpedo in the North Sea. Ordered to scuttle, Mountbatten refused, spent a night alone on the drifting wreck, then, with eighteen volunteers, brought her home under tow.

      A year later, in May 1941, off Crete, the Kelly’s luck ran out. She took a bomb in her magazine and went down in minutes. Faithful to his vow, Mountbatten stayed on her bridge until she rolled over, then fought his way to the surface. For hours, he held the oil-spattered survivors around a single life raft, leading them in singing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ while German planes strafed them. Mountbatten won the DSO for his exploits on the Kelly and the ship a bit of immortality in the film In Which We Serve, made by Mountbatten’s friend Noël Coward.

      Five months later, Churchill, searching for a bold young officer to head Combined Operations, the commando force created to develop the tactics and technology that would eventually bring the Allies back to the continent, called on Mountbatten. The assignment proved ideal for his blend of dash and scientific curiosity. Vowing he was a man who would never say no to an idea, he opened his command to a parade of inventors, scientists, technicians, geniuses and mountebanks. Some of their schemes, like an iceberg composed of frozen sea water mixed with five per cent wood pulp to serve as a floating and unsinkable airfield, were wild fantasies. But they also produced Pluto, the underwater trans-channel pipeline, the Mulberry artificial harbours and the landing and rocket craft designs that made the Normandy invasion possible. For their leader, they ultimately produced his extraordinary elevation to Supreme Command of South-east Asia at the age of 43.

      Now preparing to take on the most challenging task of his career, Mountbatten was at the peak of his physical and intellectual powers. The war at sea and high command had given him a capacity for quick decision and brought out his natural talent for leadership. He was not a philosopher or an abstract thinker, but he possessed an incisive, analytical mind honed by a lifetime of hard work. He had none of the Anglo-Saxon affection for the role of the good loser. He believed in winning. As a young officer, his crews had once swept the field in a navy regatta because he had taught them an improved rowing technique. Criticized later for the style he’d introduced, he had acidly observed that he thought the important thing was ‘crossing the finishing line first’.

      His youthful gaiety had matured into an extraordinary charm and a remarkable facility for bringing people together. ‘Mountbatten’, remarked a man who was not one of his admirers, ‘could charm a vulture off a corpse if he set his mind to it.’

      Above all, Mountbatten was endowed with an endless reservoir of self-confidence, a quality his detractors preferred to label conceit. When Churchill had offered him his Asian command, he had asked for 24 hours to ponder the offer.

      ‘Why,’ snarled Churchill, ‘don’t you think you can do it?’

      ‘Sir,’ replied Mountbatten, ‘I suffer from the congenital weakness of believing I can do anything.’

      Victoria’s great-grandson would need every bit of that self-confidence in the weeks ahead.

      

       Penitent’s Progress I

      At every village, his routine was the same. As soon as he arrived, the most famous Asian alive would go up to a hut, preferably a Moslem’s hut, and beg for shelter. If he was turned away, and sometimes he was, Gandhi would go to another door. ‘If there is no one to receive me,’ he had said, ‘I shall be happy to rest under the hospitable shade of a tree.’

      Once installed, he lived on whatever food his hosts could offer: mangoes, vegetables, goat’s curds, green coconut milk. Every hour of his day in each village was rigorously programmed. Time was one of Gandhi’s obsessions. Each minute, he held, was a gift of God to be used in the service of man. His own days were ordered by one of his few possessions, a sixteen-year-old, eight-shilling Ingersoll watch that was always tied to his waist with a piece of string. He got up at two o’clock in the morning to read his Gita and say his morning prayers. From then until dawn he squatted in his hut, patiently answering his correspondence in longhand by pencil. He used each pencil right down to an ungrippable stub because, he held, it represented the work of a fellow human being and to waste it would indicate indifference to his labours. Every morning at a rigidly appointed hour, he gave himself a salt and water enema. A devout believer in nature cures, Gandhi was convinced that was the way to flush the