In Which We Serve was premiered on 17 September 1942, to rapturous reviews. Coward won an honorary Academy Award for ‘outstanding achievement in production’ at the 1943 Oscars; the film was nominated for Best Picture the following year, but lost to Casablanca. On 27 October 1942, Coward received a letter from Dickie ‘embodying a suggestion from his cousin’.39 The cousin was King George VI, and the suggestion a knighthood. The profoundly royalist Coward admitted himself ‘flung into a frenzy’. He would accept, of course, he replied to Dickie: ‘I only wish secretly that it could be a little different from the usual award on account of that particular accolade having fallen rather into disrepute lately through being so very indiscriminately bestowed.’40 As it turned out, knighthoods were not so very indiscriminately bestowed, for Coward’s was blocked (by Churchill, he thought) before it could be made official.41
Dickie’s wartime adventures left Edwina alone in London and, for the first time, able to find a role that fulfilled her ambition. Her father, the Conservative minister Lord Mount Temple, had been one of those Britons who found the disciplined machismo of Nazi Germany all too seductive by the middle 1930s, when he had with lamentable timing founded the Anglo-German Fellowship. Edwina, whose love for her Jewish maternal grandfather had far outshone the distant relationship she had with Mount Temple, did not find Hitler’s politics appealing. She paid for many of her German Jewish relatives to escape to London, and installed them in suites at the Ritz.42 The satisfaction that came from making a practical difference changed her life. She volunteered for the St John Ambulance Brigade in October 1940, and spent many nights visiting air-raid shelters, particularly in Stepney and around the East End. A St John lieutenant remembered that on Edwina’s night tours of shelters ‘her hat was at just the right angle, and there was never a hair out of place. She’d go down into those filthy shelters, so dainty and clean herself, with a smile for everybody; and you should have seen their faces light up.’43 But Edwina did more than just waft around impressing Cockneys with her personal grooming. She inspected shelters thoroughly, noting anything from a missing light bulb to a total absence of lavatories, and then lobbied officials and government ministers tirelessly over every detail. Her technique for improving standards was a combination of feminine wiles and outright bullying: she would flutter her eyelashes one minute as shamelessly as she might pull rank the next. But she could not be ignored. She also began to talk in increasingly anti-colonialist and even anti-capitalist tones.44 Edwina’s upper-crust friends generally dismissed these views as affectations. The Conservative MP Chips Channon had a drink with the Mountbattens and the King of Greece at the Dorchester on 25 February 1942, and noted that ‘Edwina M – is now a complete Socialist, which for anybody in the position of a millionairess, a semi-royalty, and a famous fashionable figure, is too ridiculous.’ Ridiculous or not, it was evidently doing her, and her marriage, no harm. ‘She looked a dream of beauty and seemed fond of Dickie.’45 They were getting on better than ever, perhaps because they rarely saw each other more than once or twice a week. Richard Hough, to whom Mountbatten spoke openly about his marriage, wrote: ‘They certainly never went to bed together; that had ceased years ago. When they did meet it would be on some formal occasion or, like a divorced couple, at weddings or funerals.’46
In October 1941, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had recalled Mountbatten from a tour of the United States, where he had been attempting to charm the Americans into the war. Churchill was nostalgic for the fast-receding days of Britain’s supremacy, and its embodiment in famous men. He would speak in reverential tones of his ‘great ancestor’, by whom he meant the Duke of Marlborough who had trounced Louis XIV’s armies at Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenaarde. In Mountbatten, he saw resurrected many of Marlborough’s virtues: fearlessness, patriotism, chiselled features, aristocratic breeding, an easy rapport with women. Over the next year, it would become clear that Marlborough, Churchill and Mountbatten shared another trait: their love of the grand gesture, untempered by concern for human lives.
Churchill wished to install Mountbatten in a new position as Adviser on Combined Operations. Mountbatten demurred, saying that he would prefer to remain in the Navy. ‘Have you no sense of glory?’ Churchill replied. ‘I offer you a chance to take part in the highest direction of the war and all you want is to go back to sea. What could you hope to achieve except to be sunk in a bigger and more expensive ship?’47 Mountbatten gave in and, on 4 March 1942, was promoted to Chief of Combined Operations.
It had been a giddy ascendancy. Before transferring to Combined Operations, Mountbatten been a mere Captain in the Navy, commanding a small fleet of destroyers. Churchill’s promotion gave him the acting ranks of Vice-Admiral of the Navy, Lieutenant-General of the Army and Air Marshal of the Royal Air Force. The Chiefs of Staff, men of far greater strategic experience than their new peer, regarded him as a dangerously callow upstart – and supposed he had only been promoted as Churchill’s pet.48
The plan was for Combined Operations to annoy Hitler as much as possible along his north-western front, mainly to distract the German Army from the then more critical front in the east. Mountbatten’s appointment was largely political, a sop to the Americans and the Russians.49 General Dwight D. Eisenhower turned up in London in May 1942 and specifically requested that Mountbatten be made commander of a putative invasion of France. ‘In America I have heard of a man … his name is Admiral Mountbatten,’ he told the Chiefs of Staff. ‘I have heard that Admiral Mountbatten is vigorous, intelligent and courageous, and if the operation is to be staged originally with British forces predominating, I assume he could do the job.’ Sir Alan Brooke eventually broke the frosty silence that followed by pointing out, ‘General, possibly you have not met Admiral Mountbatten. This is he, sitting directly across the table from you.’50 Eisenhower gamely supported Mountbatten’s candidacy even after he had met him. It was not such a bad appointment. A big, obvious flourish was needed, rather than military success – and, when one needed a big, obvious flourish, the man to call for was Mountbatten.
The raid on the French port of Dieppe, which was planned from April 1942, was an experiment. It had become a truism in Allied Command that any invasion of northern France via the English Channel would have to begin by securing two or three major ports, ideally without wrecking them. Dieppe, a smallish port on the Normandy coast, was to serve as a test case.
The location being settled, there followed two months of faffing, squabbling, buck-passing and indecision, the curses of Combined Operations. Too many high-ranking individuals had a say in the planning, but the attention from most of them was intermittent. Insofar as there was a commander at all, it was the unproven Mountbatten. He first planned to land forces on either side of Dieppe and attack in a pincer movement. General Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery told him flatly that this plan was amateur, and he ought to go for a frontal assault as well. Mountbatten caved under the weight of the senior man’s scorn. Next he planned that the raid be preceded by air strikes, a provision to which Churchill agreed on 1 June. But Mountbatten missed the next crucial meeting a few days later by being in Washington, and in his absence the idea was dropped. This pattern continued. Plans for big-gun support by a battleship or a pair of cruisers were dropped in favour of an ineffectual flotilla of little destroyers. Plans to use a small force of about 500 experienced Marines and commandos were dropped in favour of a massive force of 5000 newly imported Canadian troops, who had never been trained for an amphibious operation, on the grounds that their government was keen to get them into the field.51
The first rehearsal took place at Bridport on 13 June, and was a shambles, with men being seasick, tanks being lost and troops landing in the wrong place.52 The second, on 23 June, was more coherent, though not much. The operation was scheduled for the next clear day. Almost as if the heavens themselves were warning the raid off, there followed three weeks of the filthiest weather the Channel could throw up. The Chiefs of Staff began to realize – correctly
, as it later transpired – that the Germans must have worked out what they were up to by this point, not least because every one of the 10,000 Allied troops selected to take part had been told.53 On 8 July Montgomery recommended that the whole thing be called off. The idea might never have been seen again, had not Mountbatten brightly suggested that they relaunch the operation six weeks later, still aiming at Dieppe – setting up the ultimate elaborate double-bluff.
This madcap plan was met with disbelief by the Chiefs of Staff. Mountbatten was apparently able to win over these august strategists with the argument that – in his words – ‘the very last thing they’d ever imagine is that we would be so stupid as to lay on the same operation again.’54 His charm was, as Jawaharlal Nehru would later remark, dangerous.
At 5 a.m. on 19 August 1942, a group of commandos landed on either side of Dieppe, while a frontal assault by Canadian troops came straight at the beach. The commandos to the west achieved their objective; those to the east, partially so. The bombardment of the front failed, and all parts of the operation ran hopelessly late. The main body of troops approached the beach an hour and a half after the Germans had realized they were being attacked. Captain Denis Whitaker, of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry, remembered the moment when they realized that the bombardment had had no impact on the town’s defences. Where they had been expecting devastation and rubble, unbroken window panes shone in the morning sun. The situation was worse than they knew. The fifty-three tanks that had been supposed to cover them had not arrived, and every German post was fully manned and ready.
The men who mounted the beach walked into a killing field. German machine guns picked off scores of Allied troops before they even landed. Those that did staggered but a few steps before being hit by tracer fire and mortar bombs. Heaps of bodies piled up as the men fell, those behind wading through seawater scarlet with the freshly spilled blood of their fellows. All around them, bullets whacked into arms, legs and stomachs with dizzying efficiency. The beach offered no cover: infantrymen attempted to jam themselves into the shallow pools left by the sea behind jagged rocks, to little avail. Around half of the tanks eventually arrived; several promptly threw their treads on the sharp stones of the beach. Those men who attempted to get out and repair them were cut down in a hail of fire.
Back in the destroyers, the situation was uncertain. Lieutenant Dan Doheny was sent ashore for a recce. He arrived amid the carnage and jumped for cover behind a tank to see his friend Lieutenant John Counsell. ‘It’s an awful F.U.,’ Counsell said. ‘They were waiting for us. They knew we were coming.’ As he said this he pitched forward into Doheny, a bullet in his back. Stretcher-bearers swiftly ran out of bandages and morphine. The first landing craft that tried to get to the beach to evacuate survivors was swarmed. So many of the troops piling on to it were shot in their attempt to get up the ramp that the doors would not close; it sank, captain and crew killed. At 9.40 a.m., the withdrawal signal was sent through, and attempts to get the remaining men on the beach back to the flotilla began. They took what shelter they could as bomber squadrons from the RAF, RCAF and the Luftwaffe filled the air. Planes dropped from the sky: 106 were downed (against only 48 of the Luftwaffe), and 60 pilots killed. At twenty minutes past noon, the ships turned back for Britain in tattered disarray.55
All the brave efforts of the men on the beach had been in vain. Without air support, without proper cover from tanks, without the timely arrival of the pincer-movement commandos, and without the advantage of surprise, they had been doomed. Not one man got as far as the centre of the town. More than 2000 were left behind to be taken prisoner, and watched their own fleet turn tail. Meanwhile, the tide came in, drowning many of the gasping soldiers who still lay wounded on the beach. A few managed to pull themselves out of its reach, and bled to death on higher ground. Their wretched deaths brought the total killed to over 1000 men. The Canadian troops suffered a horrifying rate of 65 per cent casualties.56 Hundreds of bodies, riddled with German bullets, were washed out to sea by the gentle swell of the waves.
Mountbatten, Churchill and Eisenhower attempted to put the best possible gloss on this catastrophe. But it is Mountbatten who has borne most of the opprobrium. His apologists shift the blame on to Montgomery’s admittedly poor advice, or speculate that the outcome would have been the same whoever was in charge. But such a defence is in the worst taste. Mountbatten was an inexperienced and overconfident commander, with a known propensity for taking risks. And, even if some of the planning decisions cannot be pinned on him, he was unquestionably responsible for the fiasco of the intelligence operation. After he had arrived at Combined Operations he had filled its offices with his cronies, who swiftly became known as the ‘Dickie Birds’. Harold Wernher, brother-in-law of Dickie’s brother George, had been put in charge of supply chain management; Peter Murphy, Dickie’s sometime live-in chum, headed up a nebulous office considering political ramifications of military affairs; and Bobby, the Marquis de Casa Maury, an occasional racing driver who managed the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair, had been made Head of Intelligence. Some of the Dickie Birds got on all right with their tasks; others did not.57 Bobby Casa Maury was one of the latter sort. He got everything wrong in his assessment of Dieppe. He had reported that Dieppe’s defences were puny; they turned out to be comprehensive. He had said that the defending force was one battalion of the 110th division of the German Army, headquartered in Arques-la-Bataille, four miles south of Dieppe; this was impressively wrong on three counts, for the real defence was a regiment (comprising three battalions), headquartered at Envermeu, six miles from Arques, and it was of the 302nd division. The 110th had been at the Russian front since the war began.58 This information was not difficult to find. The description of Dieppe’s defences that appeared in the New York Times on 20 August 1942, taken from old newswire reports, was significantly more accurate than the one prepared by Casa Maury for the operation itself.59
Mountbatten must also take the blame for the loss of the crucial element of surprise in the operation. It was he who had suggested the double-bluff: and, despite his official biographer’s insistence that the Germans knew nothing about the plan to attack Dieppe specifically, it was well-known in the German Army that the Allies might be planning a Channel raid of some sort. The German commanding officer in Dieppe had actually received a report that the combination of dawn and high tide on 19 August might be chosen for such a raid.60 Even had the Germans not been on high alert, the plan for the operation contained a crucial weakness, to which Mountbatten’s attention had been drawn. Troops landing on the beach needed to surprise the Germans, which would be impossible if the two flanking pincer raids had already landed at local villages half an hour before, and bombardment from the British destroyers on the town had commenced five minutes before.61
Mountbatten himself repeatedly attempted to dodge the blame, and even to propagate the feeble and insulting fiction that the sacrifice of over 1000 young men was a great boon to the commanders rather than a result of their incompetent planning. Useful lessons were showcased at Dieppe, but many of them could equally have been learned from books, or indeed – for Mountbatten was not partial to books, unless they were about genealogy or polo – by asking Churchill about what had happened at Gallipoli.62 Furthermore, all of the mistakes made had been suggested at the planning stage before Dieppe, or were apparent from the rehearsals. Mountbatten was happy to accept the attractive titles and smart uniforms of high office, but reluctant to take the responsibility along with the power.
On 15 February 1942 the Allies – and Britain in particular – had received a devastating shock when the supposedly ‘unconquerable’ Singapore was taken by the Japanese. Singapore’s huge guns pointed out to sea, and were mounted in concrete; the Japanese simply went around the back and attacked from the land. The parallel with Lawrence of Arabia’s capture of Aqaba in 1917, one of the most famous escapades in British military history, is so strong that it seems extraordinary that a British command would not have anticip
ated such an approach. Yet it did not. Without firing a single shot, Colonel Hunt surrendered with 60,000 troops of the Indian Army.63
This brought Japan right up to India’s doorstep, threatening British interests on a new and potentially devastating front. ‘If the Japanese adopt a bold policy,’ the Joint Planners warned Churchill, ‘we are in real danger of losing our Indian Empire – with incalculable consequences to the future conduct of the war.’64 The old man reacted instantly when stung in his Indian Empire. Until then, the British had not bothered to improve upon their offer of dominion status with a date or a constitution. But whether or not they planned on keeping India, they could not lose it to the Japanese; and its defence could be facilitated by some form of cooperation from Indian politicians. Meanwhile, Churchill was under attack domestically and internationally for his reactionary stance on Indian freedom. The Labour leader, Attlee, told Churchill his views were ‘not widely shared’, and that imperialist braggadocio was ‘fatally short-sighted and suicidal’.65 Roosevelt leant on him harder still.66
Besieged on all sides, even Churchill had to accept that only some sort of settlement would satisfy the Americans and result in a useful war effort from the Indians. Just three weeks after the Japanese took Singapore, he sent Labour MP Sir Stafford Cripps to Delhi. In India, the march to independence had been milling about pointlessly for so long that its leaders were completely taken aback.
Cripps arrived in India on 22 March 1942. Gandhi met him, and soon deduced that the Mission intended to offer a straightforward bargain. Britain was prepared to offer India dominion status after the war, in exchange for the main parties giving their full support to the Allies while it lasted. Protesting that he was unwilling to participate in violence, Gandhi withdrew to his ashram. Nehru took over negotiations, for he was prepared to fight Japan if it would result in an agreement. But Cripps’s eventual offer soured his ambivalence into dissatisfaction. Heavy concessions to the princely states, and a voting system weighted by caste and creed, would deprive Congress of overall control. Furthermore, dissenting provinces would be permitted to leave the Indian Union.
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