CHAPTER 8

A NEW THEATRE

IN JUNE 1942, LOUIS FISCHER SPENT A WEEK AT GANDHI’S ashram, and observed the preparations for a new campaign under the slogan ‘Quit India’. The slogan was not only catchy, but accurate: the British administration was to be harried, disobeyed and besieged until it simply upped and left, war or no war, economy or no economy, responsibility or no responsibility. The Quit India resolution, passed by Congress on 8 August 1942, announced that Congress would ‘no longer [be] justified in holding the nation back from endeavouring to assert its will’ against the British administration, and sanctioned ‘a mass struggle on non-violent lines under the inevitable leadership of Gandhiji’.¹ The struggle would only begin at Gandhi’s word; but this was a call for treason as far as the British were concerned. The first arrests were made in the early hours of the morning of 9 August.

Over the following days, India exploded in violent uprisings, described by the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, as the ‘most serious since that of 1857’.² There were Quit India hartals across the country, which turned into riots. The police and the army fought back, often brutally, leaving an official civilian death toll of 1028; bazaar gossip put the total at 25,000.³ Effectively, Congress had given the raj an excuse to imprison hundreds of its leaders, including Gandhi himself and Nehru – who, according to his sister, was almost thankful for it, so uncomfortable had he felt opposing the war effort.⁴ The resolution could never have succeeded. Britain could not evacuate India in the middle of the Second World War, with Japan looming on its eastern front. But the empty space created in politics by the Congress leaders being in prison gave the Muslim League its chance to rush in.

According to Jinnah, it was not in the interests of the Muslims for the British to abandon them in a potentially hostile swamp of Hinduism.⁵ The logical position of the League was actually to keep the British in India – at least for as long as it took to convince them of the case for Pakistan, and perhaps indefinitely. The effect of Gandhi’s Quit India misstep, and the League’s hugely successful campaign during the 1940s, can be seen from the election statistics. In the general election of 1945–6, the Muslim League would win about 75 per cent of all Muslim votes. In every previous election, its share of the Muslim vote had hovered around 4.6 per cent.⁶ During the war years, Gandhi and Congress handed Jinnah a sixteenfold increase in his support. Quit India damaged the chances of a united India at least as much as any single act of the British administration ever had.

Linlithgow wrote to Churchill, admitting that he was concealing the severity and the extent of the violence from the world. But the Americans found out, and sent their own mediators to Delhi. The Americans’ ‘zeal in teaching us our business is in inverse ratio to their understanding of even the most elementary of problems’, Linlithgow complained to the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. It would be bad if the Americans came, he averred; it would be worse still if they tried to talk to Gandhi or Nehru. He pleaded with Amery ‘to arrest at least for a time this flow of well meaning sentimentalists’.⁷ But the flow of Americans continued, and Indians delighted to see them spoiling official occasions for the British by wearing the wrong clothes, disregarding procedure and cheerfully ignoring distinctions of rank.⁸

But the imprisoned leaders of Congress were impotent. After five months in prison, Gandhi’s frustration grew to the point where he threatened to fast.⁹ The British had been expecting this very move. ‘He is old, and you know you can’t feed the old man,’ Linlithgow had told Louis Fischer. ‘He is like a dog and can empty his stomach at will … I cannot permit the old man to interfere with the war effort.’¹⁰

Gandhi scheduled his fast to begin on 9 February, and continue for twenty-one days. ‘This fast can be ended sooner by government giving the needed relief’, he wrote to Linlithgow.¹¹ The Viceroy replied that he held Congress leaders responsible for the terrorism that had followed Quit India, and that he could not give into terrorism. On the point of the fast, he was softer. ‘I would welcome a decision on your part to think better of it,’ he wrote, ‘not only because of my own natural reluctance to see you wilfully risk your life, but because I regard the use of a fast for political purposes as a form of political blackmail (himsa) for which there can be no moral justification, and understood from your own previous writings that this was also your view.’¹²

This argument provoked an angry letter from the Mahatma, by return of post. ‘Posterity will judge between you as the representative of an all-powerful government and me as a humble man who has tried to service his country and humanity through it’, he wrote.¹³ But the government’s opinions on how to deal with Gandhi and his fasts had hardened. ‘My own views have always been clear’, wrote Linlithgow. ‘They are that Gandhi should be allowed to fast to death.’¹⁴ No negotiation would be entered into: ‘Important thing is to avoid parleying with him or giving him an excuse for that hair-splitting correspondence at which he is so expert.’¹⁵

Gandhi’s fast began at the Aga Khan’s palace in Poona, in which he was imprisoned, with the world’s media clustered expectantly around. Three days later, the Hindus in the Viceroy’s council had still not resigned in sympathy with the Mahatma, for fear that Jinnah would make the most of it if they did. ‘Fast is falling rather flat,’ reported Linlithgow with satisfaction.¹⁶ Churchill, meanwhile, found the whole business irritating. ‘I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics’, he wrote to Linlithgow. ‘Would it be possible to verify this?’¹⁷ ‘This may be the case,’ replied Linlithgow, ‘but those who have been in attendance on him doubt it, and present surgeon general Bombay (a European) says that on a previous fast G was particularly careful to guard against possibility of glucose being used.’¹⁸

From that day on, Gandhi began a marked deterioration. As he weakened, the Americans became increasingly upset at the distress of Gandhi’s followers and the stubborn inflexibility of the British. Roosevelt – ‘probably under the influence of Madame Chiang-Kai-Shek and Mrs. Roosevelt’, the British thought¹⁹ – asked his envoy to persuade the Viceroy to release Gandhi. Linlithgow refused to see the envoy, and told him that intervention by the United States government would be ‘disastrous’.²⁰

On the night of 21 February, Gandhi suffered a seizure. General Smuts, who had dealt extensively with Gandhi in South Africa many years before, sent Churchill a personal message. ‘Gandhi’s death should be avoided by all means if possible,’ he advised, ‘and it is worth considering whether forcible feeding by injections or otherwise should not be applied to him, as in previous cases in English practice.’²¹ ‘I do not think Gandhi has the slightest intention of dying,’ replied Churchill, ‘and I imagine he has been eating better meals than I have for the past week.’²² This was something of an overstatement – even outside his fasts, Gandhi was not known to open a bottle of hock at breakfast. But the apt timing of Gandhi’s heart failure to coincide with a conference of Congress leaders in Delhi, and his recovery immediately afterwards, appeared to confirm British suspicions. ‘It now seems almost certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast’, Churchill wrote to Linlithgow, advising that ‘the weapon of ridicule, so far as is compatible with the dignity of the Government of India, should certainly be employed.’²³ To this, the Viceroy replied at length. ‘I have long know Gandhi as the worlds [sic] most successful humbug’, he wrote. ‘I am suggesting slyly to certain American correspondents here that it has not been so much a matter of having their heartstrings plucked as of their legs being pulled.’²⁴ Churchill was satisfied. ‘What fools we should have been to flinch before all this bluff and sob-stuff.’²⁵

A further tragedy awaited Gandhi that year. In December 1943, while he was still in prison, his wife Kasturba fell ill with bronchitis. The disease was soon compounded by pneumonia. Her doctors advised that Gandhi stay away from Kasturba, or at least keep his face a distance from hers. ‘But no one dared say even that to him,’ remembered his devotee Sushila Nayyar, herself a qualified doctor. ‘Gandhiji did not believe in germ theory. So the best course I felt was to say nothing.’²⁶

As Kasturba neared death, Mohandas took over her care. Two days before she died, she pleaded for castor oil; he would not give it. ‘A patient should never try to be his or her own doctor,’ he told her. ‘I would like you to give up using medicine now.’²⁷ The last battles of the Gandhi family took place over Kasturba’s deathbed. Devadas had penicillin flown in from Calcutta to treat his mother. Gandhi was opposed from the outset and, when he heard that the penicillin was to be given by injection, forbade it. Devadas and his father had a fight, with Gandhi pleading, ‘Why do you not trust God?’²⁸ Kasturba had no penicillin. Instead, her husband filled the room with his followers, who sang devotional songs.

On 21 February, the black sheep of the family, Harilal, turned up. He had been invited to the prison by the government, not by his family – though Mohandas had recently caught Kasturba praying to an icon of Krishna for her eldest son to visit. When Harilal arrived he was drunk. Gandhi’s entourage ushered him out of his mother’s presence, while she sobbed and beat her forehead with her hands.²⁹

The next day, Kasturba died, after a long, slow and painful illness, her suffering unrelieved except by prayer. That night, Sushila Nayyar visited Gandhi as he lay in his bed. ‘How God has tested my faith!’ he exclaimed. ‘If I had allowed you to give her penicillin, it could not have saved her. But it would have meant bankruptcy of faith on my part … And she passed away in my lap! Could it be better? I am happy beyond measure.’³⁰ Only Mohandas’s closest disciples were permitted to glimpse his real feelings. After the cremation his sons gathered their mother’s ashes to throw into holy rivers. Gandhi’s disciple Miraben, formerly Madeleine Slade, the daughter of a British admiral, walked back to the prison with the Mahatma. On that walk, she saw him cry for the first time.³¹

Back in England, Dickie Mountbatten, amazingly, had kept his job. Churchill was not especially perturbed by the horror of Dieppe. He had proved his point, which was that to invade across the Channel at this point was impossible. Instead of being sacked, Mountbatten was given a new set of toys to play with. ‘Winston adored funny operations,’ remembered an intelligence liaison officer.³² Mountbatten planned a raid on the Channel Islands, leading General Brooke to complain that he ‘was again putting up wild proposals disconnected with his direct duties.’³³ He planned to sneak troops into the north of Norway, whence they would descend on Axis forces like valkyries in little armoured snow-carts. He puzzled over the anchorage of the Mulberry harbour, demonstrating models to Churchill in his bathtub aboard the Queen Mary.³⁴ At one stage, he championed an enormous, rolled-up spiral of roadway, called the Swiss Roll, which would be released by rocket propulsion. Unfortunately, when he invited a group of admirals and generals to watch him demonstrate it, the Swiss Roll went off-course and rolled most of them into the sea.³⁵

Geoffrey Pyke, one of a group of scientists Mountbatten nurtured at Combined Operations, was his co-conspirator in the greatest of all his flights of fancy. Habakkuk was to be an aircraft carrier, fashioned out of a colossal, moulded iceberg. It could be frozen in Canada or Russia, and then dragged to the North Sea to fight Hitler. Pyke invented a special extra-strong ice, which he named Pykecrete, made from paper pulp and seawater. A prototype Habakkuk, sixty feet long, thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep – about the size of twelve double-decker buses – was set up on Canada’s Patricia Lake, so that Mountbatten could sell the idea to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Quebec. With typical theatrics, Dickie produced two blocks of ice – one standard, one Pykecrete – pulled out a revolver, and shot each one. The standard ice exploded; the Pykecrete survived, and so impressively that the bullet glanced off it and stung the American Chief of Naval Operations in the leg before lodging in the wall. The Americans vetoed the project.

In August 1943, Mountbatten had confessed to Churchill: ‘I have a congenital weakness for feeling certain I can do anything.’³⁶ Churchill seemed to believe he could do anything, too, for he proposed Mountbatten for the new role of Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia. Roosevelt agreed: he had met Dickie during the latter’s propaganda tour of the United States in the autumn of 1941, and liked him.³⁷ In the military, it appeared that Churchill and Roosevelt were more or less the only two men who did. ‘Dickie Mountbatten is, of course, quite unfit to be a Supreme Commander,’ said Montgomery. ‘He is a delightful person, has a quick and alert brain and has many good ideas. But his knowledge of how to make war is really NIL.’³⁸ ‘Seldom has a Supreme Commander been more deficient of the main attributes of a Supreme Commander than Dickie Mountbatten,’ agreed Brooke.³⁹ But it was Admiral Cunningham, the new First Sea Lord, who summed up the reaction most succinctly. ‘I think most people in the Service have just laughed.’⁴⁰

Mountbatten left for Delhi, brimming with delight at his appointment. ‘It is the first time in history that a Naval officer has been given supreme command over land and air forces,’ he wrote to Edwina. ‘It will mean another stripe.’⁴¹ But the person to whom Dickie most wanted to show his stripe was nowhere in evidence. His wife was now Superintendent-in-Chief of the St John Ambulance Nursing Division, and had no interest in going out to Asia to act as the Supremo’s hostess. ‘I really don’t know how I will be able to do this job without you’, wrote Dickie plaintively to her. ‘Wouldn’t it be romantic to live together in the place we got engaged in, and in a job which is really more important in the war than our host’s was …’⁴² But Edwina stayed put in London.

Mountbatten’s role at South East Asia Command (SEAC) was ill-defined, and he was regarded with suspicion by much of the existing hierarchy. His own superiors had conflicting interests: the British Chiefs of Staff intended for SEAC to recapture Burma, Malaya, Singapore and the rest of the former European colonies; the Americans only really cared about helping China and were wary of imperialist tendencies among their European allies.⁴³ In the absence of strong direction, Mountbatten decided that morale needed the boosting power of a new logo. He dedicated many hours to sketching a Japanese rising sun impaled on a sword before someone informed him that the branding of Allied uniforms with such an emblem would, in the event of capture by the Japanese, guarantee the immediate execution of the soldiers in them. His final design of a phoenix was less controversial, though no more lauded: the troops nicknamed it the ‘pig’s arse’. Still, that probably cheered them up, which was the point. To boost morale further, Mountbatten attempted to persuade his cousin, King George VI, to visit. The King was receptive to the idea, but Churchill blocked the trip. Anglo-American relations were now very prickly over India, and a triumphant tour by the King-Emperor would have been provocative.⁴⁴ Mountbatten, meanwhile, was reduced to visiting hospitals, and making careful notes on any lack of staff or equipment. ‘I really can’t bear to see someone’s stomach being cut open and all their guts pulled out,’ he noted, ‘but it is difficult to refuse what is evidently regarded as a great privilege.’⁴⁵ It escaped no one’s attention whose example had inspired this initiative, though there was a general consensus that she was better at it, and some even thought she might have been better at the rest of the Supreme Allied Commander’s job, too. ‘There wouldn’t have been 7,000 of us in Command HQ if Edwina had been “Supremo”,’ said one of Dickie’s staff at the time. ‘There would have been 700, and we’d have been in Singapore six months before Hiroshima instead of after.’⁴⁶

By the middle of 1944 Mountbatten had moved his headquarters from Delhi to the beautiful Botanic Gardens at Kandy in Ceylon, which was 2000 miles from the front line.⁴⁷ This distance was probably no bad thing. Mountbatten was, it must be admitted, a hopeless strategist. It was left to commanders of proven competence – notably William Slim and the 14th Army – to win the battles. Mountbatten spent a lot of time sitting in Kandy devising complex and manpower-heavy operations against the Japanese, which were cancelled by the Chiefs of Staff whenever he finished putting them together.⁴⁸

Meanwhile, outside India, something alarming was happening. Subhas Chandra Bose had fallen in with the Nazis. The political vacuum created by Quit India had not only benefited the Muslim League; it had allowed the Indian National Army (INA), Bose’s militia, to get a foothold. In Germany, Bose met Hitler, Mussolini and high officials from the Japanese governments, and, to the disgust of Nazi eugenicists, involved himself with a German woman.⁴⁹ He was indulged with the creation of an Indian Legion in the German Army, though the reputation it soon carved out for itself as brutal and ill-disciplined did him no credit.⁵⁰

In the summer of 1943, Bose emerged from the foam off the coast of Singapore, a fascist Aphrodite spewed up from the deep, with a Japanese submarine serving as his scallop shell. The Germans had put him in a U-boat at Hamburg three months previously, and he had swapped ships off the coast of Madagascar. He was taken to Tokyo, and given command of the formerly British Indian soldiers that had been captured in Singapore. More than half of them had refused to fight for the Japanese, and were put in camps where thousands perished. But Bose managed to persuade 10,000 more among the survivors to join the turncoats, and was able to add 20,000 recruits from Malaya.⁵¹ In October 1943 he declared a provisional government of Free India, and made himself Head of State, Prime Minister, Minister of War, and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He set up his government’s headquarters in the Andaman Islands, a tropical archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, and declared war on the United States and Britain. In January 1944 he moved his base to Rangoon in Japanese-occupied Burma, and marched on India with 7000 of his men.

While Bose geared up for an attack on Assam, the Allied commanders did their best to keep Mountbatten out of their way. ‘Dickie has been interfering in your battle again,’ General Browning told General Christison, who had been commanding the defence at Arakan. ‘I’ve told him he must not and he is going to come and apologize to you. Don’t be nice to him, he’s so keen he’ll only do it again!’⁵² In the hope of finding someone who would be nice to him, Mountbatten went to visit his deputy, the American General Joseph Stilwell, on the Chinese front. Stilwell, known as ‘Vinegar Joe’ for his acid tongue, was not a fan of the British – ‘the bastardly hypocrites do their best to cut our throats on all occasions. The pig fuckers’ – but had been unusually affable towards Mountbatten. Close contact soon caused him to revert to his natural state. ‘The Glamour Boy is just that,’ he decided. ‘Enormous staff, endless walla-walla, but damned little fighting.’⁵³

Returning from his visit to Stilwell’s front on 7 March 1944, Mountbatten finally received his war injury. He drove his jeep over a bamboo stump and it flicked up into his face, hitting him in the left eye. Even the threat of blindness could not diminish his enthusiasm for action. Five days later, he was ignoring doctors, tearing off bandages and heading back to bother the real commanders.⁵⁴ The battle of Imphal was beginning, with the large British garrison besieged by a smaller but effective force of Japanese. The Japanese were reinforced by the INA, which reached Imphal by May. The British garrison held them off until the monsoon rains came, literally dampening the efforts of Bose’s men. The siege collapsed into retreat by 22 June, and the ragged remains of the INA, depleted by desertion and suicide, surrendered in Rangoon in May 1945.

Bose himself escaped from Saigon on the last Japanese plane out of that city, but would not live out the year. In August 1945 he died when his plane crashed in Formosa. Conspiracy theories abounded that Bose had survived, and was raising a new army in China, Tibet or the USSR; these were believed in high enough circles that even Gandhi professed them for a while, though he later recanted.⁵⁵ The story of Bose’s survival continues to have its adherents. In 1978, the elderly Lord Mountbatten would receive a letter of the most baroque character from the Indian High Commissioner to London. He accused Mountbatten of helping Nehru to cover up Bose’s escape to the Soviet Union, ‘perhaps because the British did not want to pick up a quarrel with their erstwhile ally and Nehru did not want to have a rival.’⁵⁶

Whatever happened to Bose, the INA was finished as a political or military force. Despite his disgust at Bose’s totalitarian leanings, Nehru was moved by the passion of his soldiers. The trial of INA officers at the Red Fort in December 1945 would persuade him to swallow his long-held principle that, because he did not recognize the British regime, he could not participate in its legal system. He donned the wig and gown of a British barrister for the last time in his life to defend them.

Mountbatten’s greatest asset, besides his own charm, was his wife. Back in Europe, Edwina had been asked by General Eisenhower to work for the Red Cross in field hospitals. Edwina’s hospital visiting technique, later to garner so much approval in India, was developed in Europe during 1944. She always carried make-up, a comb, a clothes brush and a shoe-shine pad so she looked her best, always inspected hygiene and organizational facilities with a keen eye for nursing procedure, and always spoke to every single patient in the hospital.

Later that year, her husband invited her to lead the recovery effort in South East Asia. On 9 January 1945, she arrived in Karachi and immediately embarked on a tour of the local hospitals. She met up with her husband shortly afterwards in Delhi. Womanmagazine wrote a gushing profile of her a few years later, in which it was claimed that she said in Delhi: ‘Keep one of my afternoons free. Dickie and I want to go and hold hands in the bungalow where he proposed to me.’⁵⁷ The source for the comment was a friend of hers, who wrote to Edwina to apologize. She was unbothered: ‘the sentence in question sounded deliciously romantic to the readers of “Woman”, and I believe they lap it up!!’⁵⁸ Delicious though it may have been, the story was not completely unfeasible. On this occasion, Dickie and Edwina enjoyed an affectionate reunion, which Dickie was confident enough to describe as ‘our new-found relationship’.⁵⁹

When Dickie had left for SEAC, Edwina’s affair with Bunny Phillips had been so serious that he had toyed with the idea of divorce – not on grounds of personal affront, but because he did not want to stand in their way. Instead he found Bunny a job in SEAC, and the marriage held. The arrangement was unusual but, according to the Mountbattens’ daughter Pamela, it worked: ‘Because my mother was happy with Bunny, it made her much easier in the home as well.’⁶⁰ Their affair had lasted nearly a decade when, in the summer of 1944, Bunny uneasily announced that he was going to marry another woman. Edwina was devastated. Dickie wrote his wife an extraordinarily charitable letter of sympathy.

I must tell you again how deeply and sincerely I feel for you at this moment when, however unselfish you may be about A. [Bunny]’s engagement, the fact that it is bound to alter the relationship – though I feel convinced not the friendship – which has existed between you, is bound to upset you emotionally and make you feel unhappy.

You have however still got the love and genuine affection of two chaps – A. and me – and the support of all your many friends …

A. always knew that I had accepted the fact that after the war you were at liberty to get married and I could not let either of you get the impression that anything I had ever done had stood in the way.⁶¹

Edwina was moved. ‘As well as helping so tremendously at what must be a difficult time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘it has made me realise more than ever before how deeply devoted I am to you and what very real and true affection as well as immense admiration I have for you.’⁶² When she came out to the east, she sparkled with new enthusiasm – and transferred much of it to her adoring husband before she left again in April. Getting Edwina’s attention was never easy, but, whenever Dickie managed it, he glowed in the light of her approval. The two would sit at breakfast and compare their total numbers of British hands shaken, or hospital patients comforted.⁶³

Mountbatten was in London when news of the Japanese surrender came through. He returned to Singapore for the surrender ceremony with the left-wing journalist and MP Tom Driberg. On their way, they visited Burma, where Driberg was able to witness both Mountbattens in action. In Rangoon, they attended a dinner party with the resistance leader, Aung San – to whom Mountbatten was supposed to present a ceremonial dagger as a token of the Allies’ gratitude. Mountbatten had already noted of Aung San and his Burma National Army that ‘I am completely on their side’, a view which had taken some of the shine off him as far as Churchill was concerned. ‘I hope Mountbatten is not going to meddle in Burmese politics,’ he had noted severely, as the campaign for an independent Burma gathered pace.⁶⁴ The imperial loyalists who organized the evening were obviously more Churchill than Mountbatten, and had churlishly seated Aung San at a lower table at the far end of the room, omitting his name from the list of toasts. Mountbatten flatly refused to speak unless Aung San was invited to do so, too. The hosts gave in, and, according to Driberg, ‘Aung San’s was the speech of the evening.’⁶⁵

As the Mountbattens and Driberg drove on towards Singapore, they stopped at the prisoner-of-war camps that still housed many British soldiers. At each camp, the performance was the same. Dickie and Edwina would leap on to a truck, and he would order the men to break ranks and cluster around. He would speak for approximately ten minutes, combining general world news with an update on how long it might be until the former POWs could be taken home. Edwina on her own was every bit as impressive, if not more so. She had organized a council to bring together the Red Cross and other welfare organizations, and visited even those camps in the most perilous parts of the interior. ‘Conditions indescribable’, she wrote in her diary, but her spirits remained high.⁶⁶ One officer remembered Edwina visiting his POW camp in a remote part of Thailand. She sprung, unexpectedly, from a convoy of army jeeps, and was swarmed by a crowd of curious POWs. ‘I know I am the first white woman you have seen for years,’ she joked, ‘but remember I have got a husband knocking about here somewhere.’ She visited the field hospital, taking the name and address of each invalid. Many of their mothers later received personal letters from Edwina, saying that she had seen their sons and found them well. Before she left, Edwina passed on the news that 20,000 Japanese soldiers at the nearby headquarters had accepted the surrender. ‘She left the camp to roars from the men,’ remembered the officer admiringly.⁶⁷

‘To me she was the famous playgirl of the twenties and thirties, and some people said she’s only coming out here to pursue an affair,’ remembered Lieutenant Colonel Paul Crook. But, when he watched her tour Singapore camps, making lists of needs and sourcing them the next day from SEAC, Crook was won over. He was impressed with her fearlessness in visiting dangerous areas, which were off limits to much of the military – let alone to military wives. ‘The bravery of it all was quite remarkable,’ he added.⁶⁸ One American general put it more baldly: ‘She is so smart she scares me.’⁶⁹

Though he was fond of Dickie, Driberg was not blind to the man’s faults. In Penang, it was discovered that the batman had packed Mountbatten’s set of full-sized decorations rather than the miniatures that are correctly worn with evening dress. Dickie threw a tantrum. After several frantic telephone calls between aides-de-camp, the miniatures were found back at South East Asia Command. Luckily, ‘There was just time before the dinner for an RAF aircraft to fly them from Kandy to Penang.’⁷⁰

On 12 September, Mountbatten accepted the Japanese surrender in Singapore. Afterwards, Driberg and Edwina went on to Saigon. A couple of weeks before, the last Emperor of Indochina had abdicated in favour of nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam had been declared. Very early in the morning of 23 September, French forces, supported by British Gurkhas, stormed buildings occupied by the Viet Minh, whom they suspected of planning an insurrection. This strike did not begin the First Indochina War, but those on the spot could tell that a build-up was underway. Driberg had contacts which he believed could get him in with Ho, and offered his services as a mediator. Mountbatten relayed this to London, and the Foreign Office sent back its authorization – but, before it arrived, Driberg had to leave.⁷¹ The situation in Indochina was part of a far greater picture. From the ashes of a worldwide war, a new world was rising.

Among the highest ranks of the British Empire, few were ready for the shift into a post-colonial era. One man, however, was. ‘It is horrifying’, Mountbatten had written in his diary shortly before the end of the war in the east, ‘to think that the American and Indian press evidently still regard us as merely Imperial monsters, little better than Fascists or Nazis.’⁷² When Attlee vacillated and Churchill blustered over setting a date for Burmese self-government, it was Mountbatten who tried to persuade them to set a firm timetable for the handover.⁷³ It was Mountbatten, too, who had opened negotiations with Aung San; it was Mountbatten who had wanted to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh; it was Mountbatten who had persuaded the Dutch to negotiate with Sukarno in Indonesia. In all of these matters, he was led by his wife. Referring to Indonesia, he admitted: ‘Nobody gave me an idea of the strength of the nationalist movements. Edwina was the first person to give me an inkling of what was going on.’⁷⁴ From then on, said Driberg, ‘she showed an instant strong sympathy with any Asian nationalist who was being oppressed by some American-backed right-wing regime.’⁷⁵

It cannot be pretended that Mountbatten was a brilliant sailor, nor even that he was a competent one. It cannot be pretended that he was a brilliant commander-in-chief. And it is certainly true that he could be hasty, negligent, and easily distracted by trivialities. Nonetheless, he was the man of the coming age. Perhaps uniquely among the high ranks of the British armed forces, he was liberal, personally charming, and apparently favoured Asian nationalism over Western imperialism. He may have been a bit of a joke in Whitehall. But, only fifteen months after the end of the war, Dickie Mountbatten would be called upon to act as the saviour of his country.