Mountbatten: Apprentice War Lord

397 Pages·2010·3.72 MB·English

by  Adrian Smith

Adrian Smith is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton, with
access to the Mountbatten papers within the Broadlands Archives. He has taught at
the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the University of Kent. An established
author, broadcaster and journalist in the fields of modern British political, social
and cultural history, his books include The City of Coventry: A Twentieth Century Icon
(I.B.Tauris), Mick Mannock, Fighter Pilot: Myth, Life and Politics and The New Statesman:
Portrait of a Political Weekly, 1913–1931.

Mountbatten
apprentice War Lord
adrian Smith
Published in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
Copyright © 2010 Adrian Smith
The right of Adrian Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 84885 374 4

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham
from camera-ready copy edited and supplied by the author
To Sean Greenwood, Colin Seymour-Ure, Graham Thomas, Derek Crabtree,
and Peter Hennessy – with thanks

Contents
Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Part One: Dickie Mountbatten, Consul, Courtier, Charmer, and Chancer
1. Introduction 1
2. LordLouisMountbatten–ARoyalParvenu? 29
Part Two: Mountbatten at War, 1914–39
3. theFirstWorldWarandthe1920s 55
4. Fast-trackinginthe1930s 77
Part Three: Mountbatten at War, Flotilla Captain 1939–41
5. HMsKelly,1939–40 103
6. HMsKelly,1941 137
Part Four: Mountbatten at War, Chief of Combined Operations 1941–43
7. FromAdvisertoChiefofCombinedoperations,1941–42 163
8. theDieppeRaid,19August1942 193
9. Dieppe–theAftermath,theInquest,andtheDebate 231
10.‘thesteelhandfromthesea’–CombinedoperationsatitsZenith 257
11.Conclusion 289
notes 309
BibliographyandFilmography 363
Index 377

ILLUSTRATIonS
1.1 HRH going native in Japan with Lord Louis and ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe,
April 1922 5
2.1 The Kelly carries the Duke of Windsor home from France,
12–13 September 1939 31
2.2 The six-year-old Prince Louis Battenberg on parade in Gibraltar, 1906 34
2.3 ‘Bertie’ welcomes ‘David’ home, HMS Renown, 21 June 1922 43
3.1 elder brother ‘Georgie’ on the eve of war, HMS New Zealand,
July 1914 58
3.2 Prince Louis Battenberg, retitled Marquis of Milford Haven,
on board P31 at the end of the Great War 64
4.1 ‘Dickie with backhander 1939’ 97
5.1 The 5th Flotilla’s captain with his navigator, Lt. Maurice Butler-Bowdon,
HMS Kelly, August 1939 108
5.2 A family portrait prior to Patricia and Pamela leaving for America in
July 1940 112
5.3 The torpedoed Kelly’s starboard waist looking aft, north Sea,
13 May 1940 115
5.4 Despite a 65 ft long hole, HMS Kelly limped home to Hebburn, and
Hawthorn Leslie’s dry dock 129
6.1 HMS Kelly, 23 August 1939–23 May 1941 139
6.2 In Which We Serve saw noel Coward restage the Kelly’s sinking off
Crete in May 1941 148
6.3 Mountbatten provided noel Coward with real sailors to ensure the
authenticity of In Which We Serve 156
7.1 edwina Mountbatten leading by example early in her St John’s
Ambulance career 164
10.1 Canadian premier Mackenzie King hosts Churchill, Roosevelt, and
their staffs at the first Quebec conference, August 1943 –
no Mountbatten, so did he take the photograph? 282
11.1 The dying days of the Jazz Age – Dickie, edwina, and the
Prince of Wales on the Isle of Wight, 7 September 1929 303