Freedom at Midnight (7 page)

His family's lineage, with one female change, went back to the Emperor Charlemagne. He was, or had been related by blood or marriage to Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Ferdinand I of Rumania, Gustav VI of Sweden, Constantine I of Greece, Haakon VII of Norway, and Alexander I of Yugoslavia. For Louis Mountbatten, the crises of Europe had been family problems.

Thrones, however, had been in increasingly short supply by the time young Mountbatten was eighteen, at the end of the First World War. The fourth child of Victoria's favorite granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse, and Prince Louis of Battenberg, her cousin, had had to savor the royal existence at second hand, playing out the summers of his youth in the palaces of his more favored cousins. The memories of those idyllic summers remained deeply etched in his memory—tea parties on the lawns of Windsor Castle to which every guest might have worn a crown; cruises on the yacht of the Tsar; rides through the forests around St. Petersburg with his hemophiliac cousin the Tsarevich and his sister the Grand Duchess Marie, with whom he fell in love.

With that background, Mountbatten could have enjoyed a pleasant little existence, a modest income, a token commission, the life of an appropriately handsome embellishment to the ceremonials of a declining caste. He had chosen quite a different course, however, and he stood this winter morning at the pinnacle of a remarkable career.

Mountbatten had just turned forty-three when, in the fall of 1943, Winston Churchill, searching for "a young and vigorous mind," had appointed him Supreme Allied

Commander Southeast Asia. The authority and responsibility that command placed on his youthful shoulders had only one counterpart, the Supreme Allied Command of Dwight Eisenhower. One hundred and twenty-eight million people across a vast sweep of Asia fell under his charge. It was a command, which at the time it was formed he would later recall, had had "no victories and no priorities, only terrible morale, a terrible climate, a terrible foe and terrible defeats."

Many of his subordinates were twenty years and three or four ranks his senior. Some tended to look on him as a playboy who had used his royal connection to slip out of his dinner jacket into a naval uniform and temporarily abandon the dance floor of the Cafe de Paris for the battlefield.

He restored his men's morale with personal tours to the front, asserted his authority over his generals by forcing them to fight through Burma's terrible monsoon rains, cajoled, bullied and charmed every ounce of supplies, every priority he could get from his superiors in London and Washington.

By 1945, his once disorganized and demoralized command had won the greatest land victory ever wrought over a Japanese army. Only the dropping of the atomic bomb prevented him from carrying out his grand design, Operation Zipper, the landing of 250,000 men staged out of ports two thousand miles away on the Malayan Peninsula, an amphibious operation surpassed in size only by the Normandy landing.

As a boy, Mountbatten had chosen a naval officer's career to emulate his father, who had left his native Germany at fourteen and risen to the post of First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. Mountbatten had barely begun his studies as a cadet, however, when a tragedy shattered his adored father's career. He was forced to resign by the wave of anti-German hysteria that swept Britain after the outbreak of World War I. His heartbroken father changed his family name from Battenberg to Mountbatten at King George V's request and was created Marquess of Milford Haven. (The King himself, also of German descent, changed his family name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor at the same time.) The First Sea Lord's son vowed to fill one day the post from which his father had been driven by an unjust outcry.

During the long years between the wars his career had been the slow, unspectacular rise of a peacetime naval 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 glamor after 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 theater with Noel Coward, the Mountbattens at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, the dashing young Lord Louis waterski-ing in the Mediterranean or receiving a trophy won playing polo.

Mountbatten reveled in every dance, party, and polo match. But another figure of which the public was unaware emerged when the dancing was over. The glamorous young man had not forgotten his boyhood vow. Mountbatten was also an ambitious, totally dedicated naval officer. He possessed an awesome capacity for work, a trait that 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 communications techniques.

He came out at the 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 he plunged himself into the study of physics, electricity and communications in every form. New techniques, new ideas, new gimmicks were his passion 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 antiaircraft gun designed to stop the Stuka dive bomber, then spent months forcing the reluctant Royal Navy to adopt it.

Even in his pastimes, Mountbatten displayed the same

methodical, analytical approach that characterized his work in the Navy. When he discovered polo, he made slow-motion movies of the best players in action to study their techniques. He picked apart the polo stick, analyzing it in every detail, then devised a new one. By the time he finished, he was only a better-than-average player, but he had acquired enough knowledge to write the definitive textbook on the game, and the teams he led rarely lost a match.

He had followed the rise of Hitler and Germany's 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 that was coming.

On August 25, 1939, Mountbatten took command of a newly commissioned destroyer, H.M.S. Kelly. A few hours later the radio announced that Hitler and Stalin had signed a nonaggression 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 Namsen Fjord 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 Irish 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 D.S.O. for his exploits on the Kelly, and the ship won a bit of immortality in the film In Which We Serve, made by Mountbatten's friend Noel 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 Mountbatten's blend of dash and scientific curiosity. Promising that 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 that involving an iceberg composed of frozen sea water mixed with 5 percent wood pulp to serve as a floating, un-sinkable airfield—were wild fantasies. But they also produced Pluto, the underwater transchannel pipeline, the Mulberry artificial harbors and landing- and rocket-craft designs that made the Normandy invasion possible. For their leader, they ultimately produced his extraordinary elevation to Supreme Command of Southeast Asia at the age of forty-three.

Now, preparing to take on the most challenging task of his career, Mountbatten was at the very peak of his physical and intellectual powers. The war at sea and high command had given him a capacity for quick decision and had 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. When he was a young officer, his crew had once swept the field in a navy regatta, because he had taught them an improved rowing technique. Criticized later for the style he had introduced, he acidly observed that he thought the important thing was "crossing the finish line first."

His youthful gaiety had matured into an extraordinary charm and a remarkable facility to bring 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 that his detractors preferred to label conceit. When Churchill had offered him his Asian command, he had asked for twenty-four 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.

Noakhali: Penitent's Progress 1

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 programed. 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 himself with a pencil, in longhand. He used each pencil right down to an ungrippable stub, because he held that it represented the work of a fellow human being and to waste it would indicate indifference to his labors. 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 that was the way to flush the toxins from his bowels. For years, the final sign that a man had been accepted in his company came

when the Mahatma himself offered to give him a salt-and-water enema.

At sunup, Gandhi began to wander the village talking and praying incessantly with its inhabitants. Soon he developed a tactic to implement his drive to return peace and security to Noakhali. It was a typically Gandhian ploy. In each village he would search until he found a Hindu and a Moslem leader who responded to his appeal. Then he would persuade them to move in together under one roof. They would become the joint guarantors of the village's peace. If his fellow Moslems assailed the village's Hindus, the Moslem promised to undertake a fast to death. The Hindu made a similar pledge.

But on those blood-spattered byways of Noakhali, Gandhi did not limit himself to trying to exorcise the hatred poisoning the villages through which he passed. Once he sensed that a village was beginning to understand his message of fraternal love, he broadened the dimension of his appeal. India, for Gandhi, was its lost and inaccessible villages like those hamlets along his route in Noakhali. He knew them better than any other man alive. He wanted his independent India built on the foundation of her reinvigorated villages, and he had his own ideas on how to reorder the patterns of their existence.

The lessons "which I propose to give you during my tour are how you can keep the village water and yourselves clean," he would tell the villagers; "what use you can make of the earth, of which your bodies are made; how you can obtain the life force from the infinite sky over your heads; how you can reinforce your vital energy from the air which surrounds you; how you can make proper use of sunlight."