The Burma Campaign

by Frank McLynn

  It is an astounding fact that no serious or reputable person could be found to approve the appointment. Cunningham denounced it but consoled himself with the thought that it must surely be the end of the upstart Mountbatten’s naval career. Universal criticism within the Royal Navy had a threefold basis: senior officers were naturally jealous of an overpromoted junior; there was resentment that royal influence had been allowed to override the interests and traditions of a professional service; and there were genuine doubts about Mountbatten’s abilities. In the army there was also understandable resentment. Auchinleck was very displeased with the appointment, though publicly he sent Mountbatten a generous letter of congratulation.25 Most bitterly disappointed was Alanbrooke, who had reluctantly supported Mountbatten for the job on the understanding that his loyalty would secure him the post of Supreme Commander of OVERLORD. Suddenly, and in a cavalier aside, Churchill told him that that job was going to an American, even though he had explicitly promised it to Alanbrooke on no fewer than three occasions. Alanbrooke was eloquent in his disappointment: ‘It was a crashing blow to hear from him that he was now handing over this appointment to the Americans, and had in exchange received the agreement of the president to Mountbatten’s appointment as Supreme Commander for South-East Asia! Not for one moment did he realise what this meant to me. He offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were of minor importance! … [The alleged necessity] did not soften the blow, which took me several months to recover from.’26 Meanwhile Churchill cabled the news of Mountbatten’s new job to the premiers of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, disingenuously (and with typically Churchillian hyperbole) claiming that everyone was delighted with the appointment. Oliver Harvey, Eden’s secretary, said that all people of any substance and importance were opposed to Mountbatten except Churchill and the Americans. A Wingate admirer himself, Harvey consoled himself with the much-touted idea that the Mountbatten–Wingate ‘dream ticket’ would be a huge improvement on the Wavell–Auchinleck axis.27

  One of Churchill’s unique selling points for Mountbatten was that he was the one British officer who could get on easily with Americans, charm them and talk to them in their own idiom, a kind of military version of David Niven, as it were. Like all Churchill’s hyperbole, this claim was overdone. Actually, even Harvey was, albeit unknowingly, exaggerating. The Americans were very far from pleased with Mountbatten as an Asian panjandrum. Although Marshall had given his approval as part of the inevitable give-and-take imbricated in Allied discussions, he was privately displeased and said that the Mountbatten appointment was part of a plot by the British to divert landing-craft to South-East Asia to regain their colonies.28 The American press was never keen on the idea of a Brit as Supreme Commander in South East Asia, and queried the wisdom and propriety of having an effete princeling giving orders to American GIs. Some saw the move as a slap in the face to General MacArthur and a conspiracy to keep him out of the highest roles in Allied decision-making.29 A few observers connected this with Eisenhower’s known partiality for Mountbatten and his corresponding detestation of MacArthur. When asked if he knew MacArthur, Eisenhower famously replied that he not only knew him but had studied dramatics under him for many years in the Philippines. Privately, his animadversions were even more ferocious: ‘I just can’t understand how such a damn fool can have gotten to be a general,’ he said. ‘MacArthur could never see another sun or even a moon for that matter in the heavens as long as he was the sun.’30 In this context it is interesting that Ike constantly ‘talked up’ Mountbatten and said that he was much more able than his detractors claimed. And it is true that, initially at least, Americans responded well to Mountbatten’s brio and charisma, even though they tended to see through him after a while. His American deputy chief of staff at South-East Asia Command (SEAC), Major General Albert Wedemeyer, is a good barometer of this transatlantic ambivalence. Wedemeyer, who began by agreeing with Eisenhower, to the point where he thought Mountbatten capable of gulling the impressionable FDR, soon cooled in enthusiasm once he worked with the boy wonder, and remarked cynically that he was unreliable ‘away from salt air’.31

  Perhaps the most surprising American ally of Mountbatten was the US Navy Chief Admiral Ernest King. Another complex character, King aimed to be the complete mariner, a kind of Renaissance man of the oceans. Having served on destroyers and battleships in World War I, he set out to master all aspects of naval warfare, and was in turn a submariner and a naval aviator. He commanded the US Atlantic fleet in 1940–41, when the USA was still neutral in the war, but was of the aggressive tendency who wanted to take the war to German U-boats even before Pearl Harbor. After war with Japan was declared, he devoted all his energies to the Pacific theatre and was a vehement opponent of Roosevelt and Marshall’s ‘Europe first’ strategy. In addition to all this, he was a dedicated Anglophobe, who matched Stilwell in his contempt for the ‘Limeys’. He disliked everything about Britain, especially the Royal Navy, but was equally intolerant and suspicious of the US army.32 He was especially dismissive of civilians, who, he said, should be told nothing about a war while it was being waged and afterwards only who had won. Two other aspects of King are worthy of note. He was notoriously irascible and described himself as a ‘sonofabitch’. He claimed that charm was a virtue that should be reserved strictly and only for wives of US naval officers. FDR described him as ‘a man who shaves with a blowtorch’. His own daughter said of him: ‘He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy. He is always in a rage.’33 He was also a deep-dyed alcoholic. The famous incident at the Casablanca conference when he allegedly tried to climb across the table to hit Alanbrooke was in fact a drunken outburst.34 Such a man would have seemed an unlikely ally for Mountbatten, particularly in the perfervid atmosphere of the Quebec conference. If we posit that the conference was trying to square a circle, or rather a triangle, one can see how unlikely the Mountbatten–King entente was. The main allies had contrary interests, with the British obsessed with India and trying to regain their lost empire in South-East Asia, the Americans similarly preoccupied with China, and Chiang pursuing his own agenda, which had very little to do with the war aims of the English-speaking nations. Yet King correctly intuited that Mountbatten was Churchill’s ‘teacher’s pet’ with a vengeance, and may have seen an unexpected opportunity to advance his ‘Pacific first’ designs. Certainly there is not much extant evidence to warrant King’s assertion that Mountbatten was the most impressive officer at the Quebec conference.35 This was not an attitude shared by Americans without an axe to grind. When ‘Hap’ Arnold was told of Mountbatten’s ice-and-sawdust composite for the creation of iceberg aircraft carriers (HABBAKUK), he showed his contempt by attacking the exhibit with an axe.

  All in all, it could not be said that the appointment of Mountbatten was one of Churchill’s wiser decisions. Perhaps this accounts for the slightly opéra bouffe quality of the many anecdotes about Mountbatten both on the trip across the Atlantic and in Quebec. On 15 August 1943, Churchill, having decided to appoint Mountbatten, had a private talk with him to sound him out about his ambitions. When the Prime Minister mentioned South-East Asia, Mountbatten at first thought he was referring to a tour of inspection. He replied that he would of course go where he was sent, but what he really wanted was to go to sea. ‘Go to sea?’ bellowed Churchill. ‘Don’t you understand I am proposing you should go out as Supreme Commander?’36 With no sense of irony, in his letters to his family Mountbatten compared himself to Eisenhower and MacArthur, the only other supreme commanders. He wrote a gushing and sycophantic letter of thanks to Churchill, calling him ‘the greatest master of strategy and war this century has produced’.37 To the fury, bitterness and consternation of his colleagues in the Royal Navy, he was promoted to acting admiral, though even Churchill drew the line when his protégé proposed that he be given an equivalent rank in the two other services. But the vain and self-loving Mountbatten found a partial way around this proscription
, as Alanbrooke relates:

  Just after he had been informed of his selection as Supreme Commander for South-East Asia Command, Dickie had come up to me and asked if I could give him one of my tunic buttons! He said that he intended to put a similar request to Portal [Head of the RAF, Marshal Charles Portal] and that the reason was that he wanted to have them sewn on his tunic. He would then have on him buttons of the three services on his jacket and felt that such an arrangement was a suitable one for a Supreme Commander. I only quote the story as an example of the trivial matters of outer importance that were apt to occupy Dickie’s thoughts at times when the heart of the problem facing him should have absorbed him entirely.’38

  Although the choice of supreme commander was an unwise one, there are grounds for saying that the very creation of the post was even more ill-advised. Stilwell accurately described it as ‘a Chinese puzzle, with Wavell, Auk, Mountbatten, Peanut, Alexander [the ATC commander] all interwoven and mixed beyond recognition’.39 Stilwell was to add the role of deputy supreme commander to his three existing roles (head of US forces in China, Chiang’s chief of staff, and director of Lend-Lease in the CBI theatre), so that he now fulfilled a fourfold function and had to satisfy three different chiefs: Marshall, Chiang and Mountbatten. It is not surprising that even the participants in the Chinese puzzle were confused and uncertain about the demarcation between the overlapping responsibilities. The most ticklish problems concerned Mountbatten’s relations with the British service chiefs in the CBI theatre. The chiefs of staff in London fudged the issue of whether he was to be a mere coordinator or whether he could overrule his commanders-in-chief.40 This in turn was a consequence of the failure to define ‘supreme commander’ adequately. There were two existing models, divergent and almost diametrically opposed. The Eisenhower model stressed conciliation and teamwork, while MacArthur functioned more like an Asian generalissimo or a Roman proconsul, reluctantly acknowledging the distant authority of Washington. Since MacArthur answered only to Marshall but Ike to both Marshall and Alanbrooke, Mountbatten drew the convenient inference that he should be like MacArthur and answer only to Alanbrooke, cutting Washington out of the loop just as MacArthur and King had cut the British out of the Pacific. The British commanders-in-chief naturally thought that the Eisenhower model was the only sensible and realistic one. In Mountbatten’s desire to be another Chiang or MacArthur lay the waters of a sea of further troubles. Even Churchill eventually tired of Mountbatten’s imperial pretensions. When he began to complain vociferously about the ‘recalcitrant’ commanders-in-chief, he was told tersely that Churchill had more important things on his mind. Moreover, it was intimated, if he could not run things without antagonising Royal Navy high-ups, he would have no chance of ever becoming First Sea Lord. Churchill had in the end to dispatch a special envoy to India to persuade Mountbatten to toe the line and accept the Eisenhower model of supreme commander.41

  If all these problems may be said to have been intrinsic to the very notion of a supreme commander, Mountbatten compounded the difficulties by his attitudes, managing within a short time to alienate all his important collaborators except Wavell. Dismayed that the wayward Edwina did not deign to join him on his tour of duty, he left Northolt airport on 2 October, made a stopover in Baghdad and arrived in Delhi on 6 October. The scope of his command (much of it in partibus infidelium, since it was Japanese-occupied territory) comprised Burma, Ceylon, Siam, Sumatra and Malaysia. Mountbatten’s vanity is fully in evidence in this diary entry for 6 October: ‘I could not help getting a certain thrill at the moment when we crossed the coast of India, to feel that it had fallen to me to be the outward and visible symbol of the British Empire’s intention to return to the attack in Asia and regain our lost empire.’42 But his first days in India were scarcely propitious. Auchinleck received him icily and made it clear he wanted absolutely no interference in his domain as Commander-in-Chief, India.43 By this time ‘the Auk’ had heard Wingate’s disparaging comments about the Indian army as an immense system of outdoor relief and was incandescent about the Zionist upstart he regarded as a ‘churlish bully’. And now here was Mountbatten, whom Churchill had sent out expressly to be Wingate’s ‘minder’. One raging prima donna in his bailiwick was intolerable for Auchinleck, but now here was a second.44 Wavell was always much more sympathetic to Mountbatten and welcomed him cordially, but his powers as viceroy were not really designed to assist the younger man in his new role.45

  Matters deteriorated when Mountbatten made the disastrous and insensitive decision to evict General Giffard and Admiral Somerville, the army and navy commanders-in-chief, from their offices in Faridkot House, a maharajah’s palace in Delhi, to make way for his own staff. Though exasperated by such impudence from a man many years his junior (Giffard 58, Mountbatten 43), Giffard did not at first make his displeasure felt and tried his best to accommodate himself to the new situation, though the personality clash was evident to outsiders. It was hardly surprising that the publicity-hating Giffard would not hit it off with publicity-hungry Mountbatten.46 The secret enmity of Giffard was to some extent compensated for by the surprising commitment shown to the new supreme commander by General Henry Pownall, who had once been in the running for the job himself. Alanbrooke thought he was being very subtle in appointing Pownall as Mountbatten’s chief of staff, hoping that he would be both Dutch uncle and mentor to his younger superior and combat the scheming of the Admiralty, elated that they had ‘their’ man as supremo, even if ABC Cunningham detested him. Unfortunately Pownall very quickly ‘went native’ and became a staunch Mountbatten ally. Some have speculated that because he loathed Churchill, Pownall deliberately tried to put a spoke in the wheel of his key aide, Alanbrooke. When the issue of the Eisenhower versus MacArthur model for leadership came up, Pownall weighed in on his chief’s side with a decisive statement: ‘“Supreme Commander” means just that – he’s not just the chairman of a committee.’47 Pressure from London soon made Mountbatten climb down, and he announced that he was amalgamating his own war staff with the planning staffs of the commanders-in-chief. This ‘statesmanship’ (actually action taken under duress) persuaded Giffard and Auchinleck that Mountbatten should be given a second chance, so that a ‘honeymoon’ period ensued.48 But Mountbatten, secretly piqued by the directive from London, took his revenge by breaking his pledge to Alanbrooke. He had promised that he would govern in a down-to-earth manner, with a small staff and without any trappings of proconsular grandeur. Soon, to the consternation of Alanbrooke, Auchinleck, Giffard and all interested parties, the Supreme Commander’s staff had expanded to mammoth proportions.49 Moreover, Mountbatten was guilty of blatant cronyism and appointed all his old friends from Combined Operations to senior positions. ABC Cunningham raised the issue of the ‘gravy train of the Mountbatten appreciation society’. Once again Mountbatten was reprimanded, but nothing serious was done. When Alanbrooke mentioned the question of the bloated staff at the Supreme Commander’s HQ, Mountbatten simply asserted that his staff was small (a howling lie) and Alanbrooke expressed his delight, saying that this was the sort of sacrifice all commanders had to make at the present juncture.50

  If Mountbatten had temporarily managed to find a modus vivendi with Giffard, the problems with the other two commanders were more intractable. Air Chief Marshal Richard Peirse was temperamentally unsuited to working with a risk-taker like Mountbatten, since ‘safety first’ was his motto and he always liked to plan every military operation with huge margins of safety.51 Even worse, Peirse was carrying on an indiscreet affair with Auchinleck’s wife, which the gossip-mongers of Delhi claimed as the Eastern version of the notorious affair between Harold Macmillan’s wife and Robert Boothby. By the end of 1943, Peirse’s affair was virtually public knowledge. Mountbatten, no stranger to affairs himself, had always considered that sex had the potential to ruin a career, and now he proved it by cabling London and asking the head of the RAF, Marshal Portal, to recall Peirse once his tour ended in early 1944. The luckless Peirse, unawa
re that his fate was being decided, asked for a six-month extension of his tour (to prolong his amour), but Portal coldly rebuffed him. Peirse’s career ended in disgrace virtually overnight. A much tougher proposition in every way was Admiral James Somerville, the naval commander-in-chief, a combative character who despised Mountbatten and had the secret (and sometimes not so secret) support of ABC Cunningham.52 There was open warfare between the staffs of Somerville and Mountbatten, and Somerville spent much of his time minuting complaints to Cunningham that Mountbatten was trying to set himself up as a second MacArthur. When Mountbatten tried to make an official complaint about Somerville, Alanbrooke in effect told him to shut up and get on with the job. This was the occasion when even Pownall lost patience with his boss, whom he described as ‘highly strung, inconsequential and temperamental, his tongue runs away with him’.53 The vendetta with Somerville irked everyone on both sides. Somerville’s secretary Alan Laybourne wrote that both men behaved like schoolboys at times, and many other observers commented that they acted pettily, childishly and like prima donnas.54