The Mountbattens

by Andrew Lownie

  Why was Mountbatten so keen to press ahead given all the reservations? Could it have been personal glory and the chance to lead the naval aspect of the D-Day invasion? Peter Murphy told General Dallas Brooks in an interview on 6 August 1942, ‘the operation is considered very critical from the point of view of the CCO’s personal career . . . If he brings this off . . . he is top of the world and will be given complete control.’288

  Mountbatten always claimed that Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke had supported Jubilee, but that for the sake of security, few others should be told. That included the Defence Committee, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the intelligence services and the Inter-Service Security Board. Nothing was committed to paper. Amidst the thousands of pieces of paper on the operation, there is not a single one signing it off. It also meant no more rehearsals.

  In the early hours of Wednesday, 19 August 1942 – now slightly nearer daybreak to avoid naval collisions – an armada of 237 ships, ranging from destroyers and transports to MTBs and minesweepers – sailed for Dieppe. It included the first Americans to fight on mainland Europe and the future creator of James Bond, Commander Ian Fleming from the Naval Intelligence Department’s Operational Intelligence Centre. The delay into August meant the raid had to take place over one tide, and not two, reducing the operation to a mere six hours.

  The first signs of trouble came at 3.47 a.m., when German armed trawlers intercepted 3 Commando’s boats, which included the naturalist Peter Scott, thereby alerting the Dieppe garrison and delaying the Commando’s carefully synchronised landings. In spite of that, commandos, led by Lord Lovat, captured and destroyed a battery six miles to the west of the town, and to the east a similar attack gained its objective.

  The main frontal assault, however, was a disaster, with the well-protected and armed German defenders picking off most of the troops on the landing craft or narrow beach with their heavy machine guns and 81 mm mortars, and the tanks unable to climb the steep shingle beach onto the promenade. Those tanks that did manage to surmount the beach found themselves trapped by debris in the streets. Ninety per cent of the Royal Canadian Engineers responsible for dismantling anti-tank obstacles lay dead or wounded, making any tank progress impossible.

  Rather than pull back, the troops continued to be landed, even if many had to be forced off the landing craft at pistol point. Of the 6,000 soldiers and commandos who took part, over 900 were killed, 586 were wounded and almost 2,000 captured. The Royal Regiment of Canada suffered 97 per cent casualties in under four hours. Bodies kept being washed up on the beach for a week afterwards.

  An informal inquiry held two days later revealed a shocking picture of panic, confusion and incompetence, including evidence that the beach master had refused to leave one of the two heavy-duty Landing Craft Mechaniseds.289 A fuller, more sanitised, report in October concluded ‘that a capital ship could have operated during the first hours of daylight without undue risk and could probably have turned the tide of battle ashore in our favour.’290 Its recommendations included a higher proportion of military forces be held in reserve, tanks not to be landed until a beach head established, and the need for greater naval covering fire.

  What new lessons were learnt for subsequent operations, such as the Torch landings in North Africa and even D-Day itself? Clearly capturing a port without it being destroyed was going to be near impossible. The only option was to bring the port with you, stimulating the development of the portable ‘Mulberry’ harbours that were used at D-Day. In order to seize a port, it must be done from inland, which is exactly what happened on D-Day, when the Cotentin Peninsula was cut off and the port of Cherbourg taken from the rear.

  Much heavier and more accurate covering fire than that provided by destroyers was essential, and also a much more highly trained, specialist naval assault-force with armoured landing craft would be required. At Dieppe, the Navy had been averse to sending in ships too close to enemy-held shorelines, but it was realised that as long as there was air superiority, then naval losses were likely to be minimal.

  The radio navigation system used by the RAF, known as ‘Gee’, was subsequently adopted by the Navy, ensuring on D-Day the safe and timely arrival in the assault area, through the strong tidal streams of the Channel, of the armada of over 4,000 vessels. More communications headquarters ships were made available for the Normandy landings, as a result of the experiences at Dieppe, and there was greater integration of air support through a combined naval and landing force joint command.

  The Dieppe Raid meant that the Germans had to commit greater resources to the west, which was part of the objective. In January 1942, there had been 33 German divisions in the west, which had increased to 35 by September and 52 by November. Unfortunately this did not alleviate pressure on the Eastern Front, where the number of divisions rose from 163 in January to 182 by September.291 It did, however, lead them to concentrate on coastal defences in the belief that attacking forces could be destroyed on the beach – something which, as a result of Dieppe, was not tried again on D-Day.

  Though often criticised, Mountbatten was justified in later years to say that lives on D-Day had been saved as a result of the knowledge gained at Dieppe, but it had still been a costly experience.

  Who was to blame? Recriminations still continue over 70 years later. A case can partly be made for Montgomery. The decision to replace commandos with Canadian troops and to cancel the preliminary air bombardment was taken at the 5 June 1942 meeting chaired by him when Mountbatten was not present.292 The Force Commander, ‘Ham’ Roberts, should have recognised that, without covering support from the Navy and Air Force, his troops were too exposed; but Canadian troops had been in Britain for two years without seeing action and the troops, their political masters and public opinion at home were hankering to be allowed to fight. The refusals of both Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, and Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, to provide adequate gunfire and bomber support were also disastrous.

  Mountbatten, or at least some of his appointments, were also at fault. German defences were stronger than intelligence estimates from COHQ had originally suggested. The man blamed was the head of intelligence at COHQ, Dickie’s old chum Casa Maury, and he eventually resigned in February 1943.293 The depth of the shingle on the beach had not been analysed, a failure of the scientists. The landing-craft crews, vital to punctuality and accurate navigation, were of uneven quality, especially for night-time, in-shore navigation – a failure of training.

  Part of the problem was also down to organisation rather than individuals. ‘My own feeling about the Dieppe raid,’ Montgomery wrote in his memoirs, was that ‘there were far too many authorities with a hand in it; there was no one single operational commander who was solely responsible for the operation from start to finish, a Task Force Commander in fact.’294 Having three force commanders, each with their own planning team, plus Mountbatten and his staff, certainly meant there was no obvious channel of command or responsibility. There was also no contingency planning should things not go as intended, or for a breakdown in communications. In short, the problem with Dieppe was its objectives were never clear and its execution, after constant readjustments, faulty.

  Mountbatten, for all his later attempts to distance himself from decisions or deflect responsibility, was the head of Combined Operations.295 The buck stopped with him. If he had had reservations about the raid, he should have cancelled it. There were plenty of opportunities to do so, not least when air support and naval fire power were not made available and Canadian troops replaced Commandos and Royal Marines. He chose not to do so, overriding those who did raise objections. It appears the raid had taken on a momentum of its own, which few in real authority seemed prepared to question.

  But could there be another explanation, given the obvious planning defects of the raid? David O’Keefe has argued that one purpose of the raid was to try and capture a four-rotor Enigma cipher machine used by the German Navy
to encrypt its messages.296 The British had captured a three-rotor machine, but with the introduction of the four-rotor machine in February 1942 they could no longer read German signals – the extra rotor multiplied already difficult odds against decryption another 26 times.

  The codebreakers at Bletchley Park could no longer warn of submarine attacks and mounting merchant shipping losses in the Atlantic were threatening Britain’s supply routes. This came to a head on 4 July, when the PQ-17 convoy was attacked, with only 11 of the 34 ships reaching Iceland. A week later, Mountbatten made his case for resurrecting Rutter.

  Dieppe was a key link in the German Navy’s signal chain and not only had the latest cipher equipment at its shore facilities, but the visiting vessels also held useful cipher material. A frontal raid makes sense if the purpose of the raid was really to seize the code books as quickly as possible from naval headquarters in the Hotel Moderne, and this would also explain the involvement of Fleming’s Intelligence Assault Unit and the secrecy of the mission.

  Throughout the battle, the focus of the raid remained resolutely to reach the trawlers and the naval headquarters, even when more attractive opportunities for advancing presented themselves, and it is clear that the Germans frantically attempted to drop overboard seven bags of Top Secret signals. The last bag failed to sink and attempts to make it do so with grenades led to the material being showered over the dock.

  The minutes of one chief of staff’s meeting read:

  Concerning the withholding of information that the Dieppe raid was to take place, Lord Louis Mountbatten explained that the necessary people had always been informed of previous operations and that there was no intention of withholding information in future from those whose duty necessitated their being so informed. On the particular occasion of Dieppe, however, he had received special instructions from the Chiefs of Staff that only certain individuals were to be informed of the intention to re-mount the operation. He had been compelled, in fact, even to mislead his own staff on this occasion.297

  Mountbatten had always been a master of public relations, skilfully using publicity for an event or organisation to forward his own career, and the disaster was given a positive spin. At COHQ he had set up a news briefing system, which he would refine in all his subsequent appointments, and on his publicity staff were: the former head of Twentieth Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, who had been active in the Royal Naval Film Corporation; Jock Lawrence, Sam Goldwyn’s publicist, and David Astor – already planning his relaunch of the Observer. This high-level galaxy of spin doctors ensured that, from the beginning, the Dieppe disaster was carefully controlled and presented as a success, a strategy that backfired when German news agencies began to present a very different picture.298

  As the size of the losses sunk in, questions began to be asked in Whitehall about Mountbatten’s future at Combined Operations. The Head of the Political Warfare Executive, Robert Bruce Lockhart, after lunching with General Dallas Brooks on 15 June, had already noted in his diary, ‘There is considerable feeling against Dickie Mountbatten, both in the Royal Navy proper and in the Marines. The charge is that he is setting up a rival navy for a series of stunts which are useless unless linked with the general strategy.’299

  Ten days after the raid, Sir Alan Brooke, dining at Chequers, raised his concerns about the raid with Mountbatten, occasioning the head of Combined Operations to respond: ‘I was absolutely dumb-founded . . . when you made your very outspoken criticism of the manner in which the Dieppe raid was planned.’300 He argued he had followed the proper procedures.

  Brooke remained unsatisfied and in December, unimpressed by the invasion plans for Sardinia drawn up by COHQ, began to encourage Churchill to press Mountbatten on why Dieppe had failed so spectacularly. Dickie, skilled in the ways of Whitehall, deflected the blame onto Roberts, insisting that the planning, if followed properly, would have been successful and that, in any case, the lessons learned had justified the cost.301

  Dieppe had, however, dented his reputation, ‘I had a very heated discussion in the COS lasting about an hour, concerning the role and charter of Mountbatten (as Chief of Combined Operations),’ wrote Brooke in his diary on 22 December. ‘The suggestion being that he should command the naval forces for an invasion of France. Portal and Pug Ismay were supporting him, and Dudley Pound and I were dead against it on the basis that his job is one of an advisor and not of a commander. We finally shook the other two and went a long way towards making the point.’302

  For all his problems at Combined Operations, Mountbatten had many successes with small landing operations. At the end of the year, Operation Frankton, which involved six canoeists fixing limpet mines to cargo boats in the docks at Bordeaux, took place. The operation, immortalised in the film The Cockleshell Heroes, damaged four ships but at a high human cost – only two of the 12 canoeists returned, having crossed the Pyrenees and Spain to Gibraltar.

  The main priority were the Anglo-American landings in North Africa, Operation Torch, in November 1942, designed to open up a new front and use American forces that Combined Operations supported. This was followed by Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily, planned for the summer of 1943. With the creation of the new role of Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), the role of COHQ had begun to shrink, but it continued to focus on planning for what would eventually become Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings. Its priority was to have ready 4,500 fully crewed assault ships and landing craft by 1944.

  One of COHQ’s great achievements was developing important innovations in modern warfare. These included: artificial harbours that could be towed across the Channel; PLUTO (Pipe Line Under the Ocean), which at its peak was allowing a million gallons of petrol to be sent to France each day; equipment to demolish underwater obstacles; waterproofed engines so vehicles could be driven ashore; and even a spring-loaded walking stick to test the hardness of a beach.

  Mountbatten’s experiences at COHQ had matured him into a very astute, if not always popular, political operator. He could still be impetuous, but he had learnt to be more calculating in his pursuit of power and manipulative in exercising it. The head of his secretariat, Captain N.T.P. Cooper, remembered:

  A useful little device which I installed under his desk was an electric bell which, when he was tired of his current visitor, he could press with his knees which was the signal for me to go into his room to remind him of a very frightfully important appointment which was of course imaginary.303

  Mountbatten’s charm, strong work ethic and ability to work with others had been noticed. The broadcaster Arthur Marshall attached to Combined Operations remembered how, ‘All officers in the HQ were invited, usually in pairs, to have lunch with the Mountbattens in their house in Chester Street. They could not have been easier or more welcoming and they made one feel that this had, for them, been the Treat of the Week.’304

  He was much influenced by Maurice Maeterlinck’s theory of ‘the spirit of the hive’ in his The Life of the Bee (1919), which argued the benefits of teamwork. A particular skill was ‘man-management’. His deputy, Charles Haydon, upset about not being told about the remounting of the Dieppe Raid, proffered his resignation. But Mountbatten saw him immediately and the next day Haydon was writing, ‘You are – you know – a very difficult person to deal with. Yesterday I felt angry, sore and hardly done by. Today I feel a worm for ever having harboured any of those feelings. I really do.’305 There are countless examples of his interpersonal skills winning round his opponents.

  In April 1943, his punishing workload – often he worked 16 to 18-hour days with weekly tours of the units of his command – caught up with him and he came down with pneumonia. It was his first serious illness since adolescence. His doctor told him that if he had neglected his condition for another 24 hours, he might well have died.306 For a month he recuperated at Broadlands, where he saw much of Edwina.

  Her war work was also taking its toll on her. ‘Felt terrible all day,’ she wrote in her diary a
t the end of May, ‘. . . worked hard all the same . . .’307 ‘It was hard to believe that before the war she was reckoned to be one of the most beautiful women in England,’ recalled a member of her staff. ‘She was grey and haggard and lined. Even her beautiful eyes looked tired behind her thick spectacles.’308

  In July 1942, she had been appointed Superintendent in Chief of the Nursing Division, the highest post a woman could hold. She was now responsible for 60,000 adult volunteers and 10,000 cadets. She continued to travel widely throughout the country, visiting convalescent homes, blood transfusion centres, hospitals and ARP posts, opening bazaars, presiding at auctions and inspecting Guards of Honour. Recognition of her work came with the award of the CBE in the New Year Honours list.

  She had discovered that, like her husband, she had leadership qualities. She, too, could use her high-level connections to ensure things happened and was always well prepared. She had at last been given something useful to do and she had risen to the challenge, much to the pride of Dickie.

  * * *

  At the beginning of August 1943, Mountbatten, as a member of the Chiefs of Staff, sailed on the Queen Mary for Quebec, one of 150 officers going to the Quebec Conference. The meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt was to shape future grand strategy and especially discuss the invasion of Europe. It also gave Mountbatten an opportunity to demonstrate to the Chiefs of Staff a new invention for Combined Operations – an aircraft carrier 2,000 feet in length, made of frozen seawater and wood pulp called pykrete, which could be positioned as a refuelling stop for aircraft in the Atlantic. He chose to do so after a particularly acrimonious meeting in which the American Admiral Ernest King had punched a British officer, and the room had had to be cleared of most of the officials.

  Mountbatten proceeded to produce two bits of ice – one purely consisting of water and the other pykrete. He then drew his revolver. Firing at the first, it shattered into a series of ice splinters. He now took aim at the second. Ricocheting off the block, the bullet buzzed around the room, grazing the leg of Admiral King before burying itself in a wall. There was a stunned silence and then from outside the room, a voice piped up: ‘Oh God, they’ve started shooting each other now.’309