History has though, recently, been unkind to him and he has taken much of the blame, probably too much, for many of the disasters of the coming nine months. This is partly because he tried, particularly in his latter years, to ascribe to himself more of a role than he in fact played. Had he let his record speak for itself, and fully acknowledged the contribution of others in London and India, then his reputation would probably not have suffered as it has. In 1975 he gave a series of interviews to two journalists, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, which resulted in the publication of Freedom at Midnight, an exciting account of Indian independence but one that was considered more a hagiography. In these interviews Mountbatten claimed he had been given special plenipotentiary powers by Attlee but, if so, no record of them exists; Attlee’s direction to Mountbatten was a very clear letter written on 18 March explicitly stating that decision-making remained with the Cabinet.40 Mountbatten also told Collins and Lapierre that the only things Wavell handed over were his insignia as Grand Master of the Order of the Star of India and a plan called Operation Madhouse, being his emergency evacuation plan. While it is true that Wavell was still persisting with this idea, and John Christie was working on it at the time, this neglects to mention his detailed briefings about the Interim Government and his concern over the Mountbattens’ domestic arrangements, both of which survive in the records. In a subsequent series of interviews with the authors, Mountbatten also downplayed the number of deaths caused by partition, which by that stage were fairly clearly established.41
Whatever tricks old age played on Mountbatten, there is no denying the extraordinary difficulty of the task facing him and it is of note that his reputation is stronger among Indians than among the British. Many Indians, although few Pakistanis, think that his decisions during the coming months were correct and that had he done things differently the casualty toll would have been even worse. He was not the originator of any startling new solutions but what he did do was use his considerable charm and charisma to deliver what Attlee wanted, which was a British exit. Mountbatten was the ringmaster, and a good one, but the masters of ceremonies remained in Congress, with a supporting caste in Downing Street. It is Attlee and Cripps who are as responsible for the consequences as are Nehru and Patel. Kushwant Singh thought Mountbatten had a certain amount of panache and, critically, common sense rather than any great ability.42 He was, he thought, more of a functionary but that he was a good functionary and did an almost impossible job well.
Certainly in March 1947 most people in Delhi were very pleased to see him. His arrival promised a new impetus to a process that had become stale and fractious. John Christie, who was to continue as a private secretary, thought ‘that of the Viceroy himself . . . one cannot write except in superlatives. He was brilliant, inspiring, courageous, tireless; he was also a great leader, the perfect commanding officer. He drove his staff hard but never harder than he drove himself’.43 He had also brought with him from London some of his own staff, who were an impressive group. Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay was his chief of staff, an Indian cavalry officer who had served as Churchill’s chief military assistant during the war. He knew India well and was generally liked and trusted by both the ICS and the Indian leadership. ‘He had an acute and tenacious mind, and the kind of genius which is a combination of inexorable common sense with the taking of infinite pains’, recalled Christie.44 Ismay had just retired after a hectic war and had been looking forward to life on his farm in the Cotswolds. Despite the fact that ‘there had been an almost record snow-fall, followed by a prolonged frost’ and that ‘there was a grave shortage of coal, and electric power was drastically restricted; food and clothing rationing were still in force; and finally there had been a very rapid thaw, with much flooding’, he found leaving England much more difficult than before. He went because Churchill had asked him to and because he had a deep respect for Mountbatten, whom he found ‘had a commanding influence, a flair for improvisation, dynamic energy, and a remarkable readiness to accept responsibility’. Before he arrived in Delhi he ‘had thought that a period of fifteen months was far too short a time in which to complete arrangements for the transfer of power’ but he had not been there three weeks before he had concluded that ‘far from being too short, it was too long’. He was particularly pleased on arriving at his allocated house on the viceregal estate to find pensioner Abdur Rahman, who had joined the 21st Cavalry as a recruit at the same time as Ismay and who had been his orderly for twenty-five years. Ismay had been paying him a small supplementary pension but just before he had left home he had been told by his bank manager that Abdur Rahman had stopped drawing it. He had assumed he was dead but Rahman had heard on the radio that Ismay was due to return to India and the next day had taken a train to Delhi so he was there when he arrived. He immediately resumed his old duties.45
George Abell, the ICS officer who had played cricket for England, remained as principal private secretary but was joined by Eric Miéville, ex-private secretary to the king and an experienced colonial administrator. Alan Campbell-Johnson, who had been Mountbatten’s PR officer in South East Asia Command (SEAC), now returned to the same job. Critically, and he was to prove one of the new viceroy’s most valued advisers, V. P. Menon, the reforms commissioner, stayed on as well. There were suspicions among the staff that he was too pro-Congress and becoming less objective. He was certainly close to Patel but within two months both Mountbatten and Abell would be very grateful to him. Mountbatten also brought his long-standing naval secretary, Ronald Brockman, and Vernon Erskine-Crum, ‘a young soldier with a fine war record and an extraordinary talent for straightening out in the minutes the tangled skein of debate and decision’.46 It is to Erskine-Crum’s precise pen that we owe the exceptionally clear record of the next four months. His task was not always straightforward. Mountbatten tended to conduct meetings one to one without Erskine-Crum present and then give him a verbal résumé afterwards. This meant that the viceroy and his correspondent could leave with rather different opinions as to what they had agreed.
The effect of this new team was, Christie thought, electric. Immediately Mountbatten started meeting with the Indian leadership. On the same day he was inaugurated he sat down for the first time with Nehru. Mountbatten realised that he must get on with the volatile Nehru at a time when Nehru was becoming increasingly exasperated. Two things played on Mountbatten’s mind. First, he had quickly come to realise that India was nearer to a complete breakdown of law and order than his masters in London appreciated. Ismay noted that ‘communal bitterness had grown to incredible proportions since I was last in India’. A ‘spirit of bitter animosity had been rampant throughout the country for several months . . . and there was tension everywhere. There was no knowing when a new outbreak might start’.47 The need for the Raj and Congress to be seen to progress a political solution was vital. Dr Prem Bhatia, a Delhi industrialist on the edges of the nationalist movement, said that even at his level the Mountbatten–Nehru relationship ‘was invaluable’.48 The recent massacres in the Punjab had reminded everyone what could happen if negotiations broke down. Attlee’s announcement of 20 February had also, almost overnight, transformed the relationship between the Indians and the British, who were no longer seen as the public enemy, but that could change and throughout Mountbatten’s early months there is frequent reference to the need to protect the remaining 80,000-odd Europeans. Memories of 1857 were long and, as it turned out, far too long.
Yet Mountbatten, more politically astute than Wavell, also knew that there was a strong direct link between Congress and the Labour government. This was in part a shared socialist vision but it was also based on Nehru’s own personal standing and contacts. Wavell discovered when he got back to London that Cripps had been operating a direct briefing system behind his back, with Congress passing information via Krishna Menon, secretary of the Indian League in London and their unofficial ‘ambassador’. Krishna Menon lived a life of many parts and strongly divided opinion. A committed socialist, a La
bour councillor and at one time a Labour parliamentary candidate, his power base was his strong friendship with Nehru. He was known as ‘Nehru’s evil genius’ and Eisenhower famously described him as a ‘Menace’; later in his political career Time magazine would put him on its front cover surrounded by cobras with the caption ‘Snake Charmer’.49 Yet divisive as he undoubtedly was, Menon did have Cripps’s ear. Mountbatten knew the importance of the Menon–Cripps relationship and he also knew how much influence Cripps exercised over Attlee on Indian affairs; it had been Attlee who had persuaded Churchill to send Cripps on his first mission in 1942. Mountbatten therefore knew that if Nehru did not like his approach he had a method of getting his views heard around the Cabinet table independent of what the viceroy advised. He had made a point of befriending Cripps, whom he tried to persuade Attlee to put into the India Office instead of the increasingly ineffective Pethick-Lawrence, and had been to see Krishna Menon before he left London; he also made a point of telling Attlee and Cripps he had done so.
Mountbatten therefore needed Nehru more than Nehru needed Mountbatten, and the viceroy, ever a pragmatist, realised that progress would be impossible without Congress’ support. The 20 February announcement had effectively relegated Britain to the role of facilitator. The story of the next five months would in reality be one of Congress deciding what it wanted to do and using Mountbatten to execute it. The two men in fact went on to develop a genuine friendship. By April Mountbatten was writing that, ‘We have made real friends with him’ and that ‘I feel his friendship is sincere and will last’.50 There were those, like Patel, who felt that Nehru used Mountbatten too openly, describing him as ‘a toy for Jawaharlal to play with’.51 There was also much speculation about the relationship between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. Whatever the truth behind those rumours, the practical impact was damaging. Paddy Massey was with the Mountbattens at Delhi airport one day as they were departing on a visit. Nehru, who was accompanying them, kissed Edwina in public. It was a perfectly normal greeting to the cosmopolitan, Westernised Nehru but one which ‘sent a frisson of horror through the Mahommedan community’, noted Massey, and contributed, he thought, to the Muslims feeling that even at this early stage ‘Mountbatten was too pro Hindu’.52
The first meeting therefore predictably went well. Mountbatten noted that ‘Pandit Nehru struck me as most sincere’ although he was slightly surprised to be told that the ‘greatest problem facing India at the present time was economic’.53 Nehru was also slightly distracted as he had chosen that week to host an Asian Nations Conference on the Purana Qila Ground, a site with ancient Indian connotations. Delegates from thirty-one countries came. An enormous canopy was erected under which 20,000 people sat to hear speeches about the need for greater Asian cooperation, concluding with one by Gandhi. It was a clear statement by Nehru that he was the leader in waiting. No anti-British speeches were made but the League boycotted the event as they were not asked to co-host it and Liaquat Ali Khan held a Pakistan Day rally in Delhi instead.
Next Mountbatten saw Patel. He was equally charmed, although possibly a little taken back by Patel’s uncompromising approach to the Muslim League, which he said must be got rid of, and his repeating that most Indian Muslims were just forcible converts from Hinduism.54 Menon thought that Patel was becoming increasingly impatient. ‘He felt that the sand was running out’, he recalled and that: ‘He was a man who appreciated power. He was a sick man also – he suffered from jail. He was tired. He wanted to get on with things. He was anxious to get into power’.55
On 31 March, Mountbatten met Gandhi. He was always going to make a point of getting on with Gandhi. It was part of the Labour approach. Wavell had been horrified at what obeisance Cripps and the Cabinet Mission had shown to the old man the year before when they had insisted on attending his prayer meetings but then Wavell was never prepared to see anything good in Gandhi. Mountbatten was also genuinely impressed with the old sage, but again he appreciated just how much influence he still wielded and that his support would be critical to any new initiative. In the event it was more of a social chat, Gandhi sizing up the viceroy who was thirty-two years his junior. They sat having tea in the Moghul Gardens, both making sure there was ample time for press photographs first.56 Gandhi had been walking through Bihar, trying, as he had done with limited success in Bengal, to mend relations between Hindus and Muslims. His spiritual exhortations were meeting a similarly sceptical response. ‘How transitory is life. Everyone has to die one day. It is difficult to comprehend the ways of God’, he had told a group of grieving widows at Pipalwan, who might have been hoping for something more concrete.57
He had recently had another sharp exchange with Patel over the Congress Working Committee’s announcement that the Punjab should be divided. Whereas Nehru had answered diplomatically, Patel had been more forthright ending sharply, ‘You are, of course, entitled to say what you feel is right’.58 Mountbatten would soon become aware that partition of any sort remained an anathema to Gandhi and, should it come to that, managing him would be challenging. Gandhi, however, quickly summed up Mountbatten, who sent a telegram back to London summarising their meeting and purring that ‘it is his considered opinion as a student of history and world politics that never before, in any case of history he had read about in recent or past times, had so difficult or responsible task been imposed on any one man as that which now faced me. I thanked him sincerely for realising the position in which I was now placed’.59
Another group also made a beeline for Mountbatten in those early days and that was the princes. They had, so far, played only a limited part in the debate but now they sensed that with a fellow royal in Viceroy’s House, and a man who several of them already knew, they had an opportunity to put their case. The Maharaja of Bikaner did so on the day of the inauguration. He said that the princes as a group were divided. The key Rajputs, the great rulers of the central Indian plains, men like Jaipur, Jodhpur and himself, were generally for Congress, who they saw as the one entity with the capability to govern and to prevent India descending into chaos.60 Others though wanted to go their own way. Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, the dewan (chief minister) of the huge southern state of Travancore said that neither he nor his ruler had any intention of taking part in negotiations over a future constitution. If the British went then Travancore would become a Dominion like other ex-British colonies as, he pointed out, Travancore had a bigger population than Australia.61 A third group, and the majority, however, saw Congress as a left-wing party which posed a direct threat to their interests. The Nawab of Bhopal, Hadji Sir Hamidullah Khan, the greatly respected Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes, and an old friend of Mountbatten, was their leader.
There was one more key relationship that Mountbatten needed to foster and that was with his commander-in-chief, Auchinleck. Relations with Auchinleck were never going to be easy. Auchinleck had been a close confidant and friend of Wavell, with whom he shared the common experience, some would say distinction, of being sacked by Churchill as commander-in-chief in the Middle East. To make matters worse, when Auchinleck was told that his consolation prize was to be commander-in-chief in India, he was also told that the job was losing operational responsibility for South East Asia, which would pass to the new SEA C, whose first supreme commander would be none other than Mountbatten. It had been a harsh blow, which effectively relegated Auchinleck to a supporting role. He subsequently christened Mountbatten ‘Pretty Dickie’ and his staff mocked what they saw as the ineffectiveness of SEA C. Now the two men must work together at a time when not only was internal unrest inevitable but when the Indian Army, which Auchinleck had devoted his whole life to, may have to be divided.
Auchinleck had joined the Punjabi Regiment in 1904 after a difficult childhood. His father, also a regular soldier, had died when he was eight and his mother had been left to bring up her young family in rented rooms on a meagre army widow’s pension. He had won a Foundation Scholarship to Wellington College, which had enabled him to be private
ly educated, and from there went straight into the army. The Indian Army had been his life ever since. He took part in the North West Frontier skirmishes before the First World War and fought with his Punjabis in the muddled and bloody campaign in Mesopotamia, where he had seen his battalion reduced from 942 to 247 men in their attempts to relieve the besieged British force in Kut. Picked out for his successes commanding on the Frontier again in the 1930s, he was rapidly promoted at the beginning of the Second World War when senior British officers with recent operational experience were hard to find. He was sent to try to sort out the mess at Narvik during the Norway campaign in 1940 after which he was entrusted with the defence of southern England against possible German invasion. In 1941 Churchill sent him to replace Wavell as commander-in-chief in the Middle East.
His initial successes, clearing the Germans and Italians from Cyrenaica and taking Tobruk, were overshadowed by Rommel’s subsequent counter-attack, when he threatened Egypt. Auchinleck was dismissed and replaced in August 1942. In 1943, as Wavell was appointed to succeed Linlithgow as viceroy, he took over as commander-in-chief in India. His personal life had not been happy either. In 1945 his wife, Jessie, left him in a very public separation for Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, a man of sixty-two and a contemporary. It was not an easy humiliation to suffer in the stuffy world of the memsahibs. It was at least some consolation that he was near universally liked and respected throughout the Indian Army. Speaking Hindi, Punjabi and Pashtu fluently, he was never happier than when chatting to his soldiers and their families, people he saw as almost a separate constituency above the tawdriness of nationalist politics. It was his great strength but it would also prove his undoing.
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