Lord Mountbatten

Lord Mountbatten (1900-1979), British naval officer and last British viceroy of India. As viceroy, Mountbatten presided over the division of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan.

Louis Mountbatten was born in Windsor, England. His original name was Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas of Battenberg. His mother was Princess Victoria, a granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria, and his father was Prince Louis of Battenberg. German by birth, Prince Louis had become a British citizen at age 14 and rose through the naval ranks to become director of naval intelligence and then first sea lord (1912-1914). After World War I broke out in 1914 he resigned his commission because of his German origins, and in 1917 he changed the family name to Mountbatten.

Louis Mountbatten was educated at home until the age of ten, then attended preparatory school at Locker's Park before attending the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in 1914. He received his first commission in 1916 as a midshipman on the battle cruiser Lion, and by 1918 he was second-in-command of P31, an antisubmarine vessel.

After the war ended, Mountbatten spent several months at Christ's College at the University of Cambridge. He began to specialize in wireless communication technology, spending time as an instructor and signals expert with the Mediterranean fleet. In 1922 he married Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley, with whom he had two daughters. During the interwar years he wrote a book on the wireless telegraph and dictionaries of French and German naval terms, patented a navigational ruler, and became an excellent polo player, writing An Introduction to Polo in the mid-1920s under the pseudonym “Marco.” In 1934 he gained his first command, the destroyer Daring, and then spent three years in naval administration in Whitehall, London. In June 1939 he gained command of a flotilla of destroyers.

During the early stages of World War II (1939-1945), Mountbatten’s flotilla saw heavy action; twice his ship suffered severe damage from German attacks and had to be towed back to port. In May 1941 his ship was sunk by air attacks off the coast of Crete (Kríti). In October 1941, while waiting for another commission, Mountbatten was promoted to the position of adviser on combined operations, where he helped direct commando raids on German-occupied France and plan for the Allied invasion of France. This position, which built on the cosmopolitan experience of his privileged life, strengthened his public relations skills and his ability to carry out complex projects involving a variety of competing organizations.

In October 1943 he took up a new position as supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia, where he directed the strategies of British, American, and Chinese forces. Under his command, the Allies stopped the Japanese advance into India in the climactic battles of Imphāl and Kohīma in May 1944, and within 12 months they had reconquered Burma.

After Japan's surrender, Mountbatten dealt with problems of repatriating Allied and Japanese military personnel and negotiating with emerging postcolonial governments throughout Southeast Asia. When his job ended in May 1946, he returned to Britain as a hero.

In March 1947 he became viceroy of India, with the mandate to end the British Empire there within a year's time. He and his wife befriended the leaders of the Indian National Congress, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi. Mountbatten worked with these men and the leader of the Muslim League, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, to devise a plan for partitioning the empire into two sovereign states, India and Pakistan. On August 15, 1947, the two nations became independent, with Mountbatten remaining as interim governor-general of India until June 1948. For his services during the war and in India, he received the titles of viscount in 1946, and Earl Mountbatten of Burma in 1947.

Mountbatten, heavily decorated, returned to the Mediterranean Fleet as rear admiral in command of the 1st Cruiser Squadron in October 1948. He dedicated himself again to a naval career, becoming commander-in-chief of Allied Forces in the Mediterranean (1952-1954) for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, first sea lord (1955-1959), and chief of the British defense staff (1959-1965). He then retired to his estate in Ireland but remained active in over 200 organizations and helped produce a 12-part television series entitled “The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten.” He was killed in 1979 when a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded in a small boat he was piloting off the coast of Ireland.