Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Prince Philip of Greece had a good war, too. His mother, Princess Alice, who had returned to live in Athens in November 1938, had hopes that her son might choose to serve in the Greek navy. From Philip’s point of view, it was not an inviting prospect. The Greek navy was tiny. Philip’s knowledge of the Greek language and people was sketchy. He was a prince of Greece, but he had spent most of his life in England, France, and Germany. Where did his loyalty lie? He could see there was a dilemma and he was torn – but not for long. King George II of Greece (the son of King Constantine I, Prince Andrea’s eldest brother) let him off the hook. Philip had started his naval training in Britain. The King decided it was only sensible he should continue it there.

  Philip had no regrets about the decision. He was not greatly given to ‘regrets’, as we know. Nor was he given (despite the presence of C.S. Forrester’s Hornblower novels on his bookshelves) to recounting tales of his wartime adventures on the high seas. He was ‘mentioned in dispatches’, but he would not want to exaggerate his contribution or achievement. In 1948, when, as the Duke of Edinburgh, he was presented with the Freedom of the City of London, he looked back on his war service and said, ‘In every kind of human activity there are those who lead and those who follow … I would like to accept the Freedom of this City, not only for myself, but for all those millions who followed during the Second World War. Our only distinction is that we did what we were told to do, to the very best of our ability, and kept on doing it.’

  His first appointment, as an eighteen-year-old midshipman, in January 1940, was to an old battleship, HMS Ramillies, then in Colombo, Ceylon, and working as an escort to convoys that were part of the Australian Expeditionary Force moving from Australia to the Middle East. The ship, a veteran of the Great War, was uncomfortable; the appointment – at least in the eyes of a young man eager for action – somewhat unexciting. He was, of course, Prince Philip of Greece, and Greece was not yet at war. That was an issue. For the time being, the powers that be felt it necessary to keep him out of the main line of fire. Did he find that frustrating? He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Inevitable,’ he said. ‘And it was useful experience. I was quite young.’

  It turns out that Louis Mountbatten had proposed to George VI that Philip be sent to a ship on the China station. When I raised this with him, Prince Philip bridled at the suggestion that Mountbatten was the orchestrator of his career. Uncle Dickie took an avuncular interest, certainly – ‘He put in a good word where he could, I’ve no doubt’ – but Prince Philip made it pretty clear to me that he hoped whatever he achieved in the navy he achieved through his own best endeavours. In fact, he was not entirely sure that being a prince, and nephew to a noted ‘operator’ like Mountbatten, may not have been positively to his disadvantage.

  In September 1943, when Mountbatten, aged only forty-three, was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia Command, and promoted to the rank of Acting Admiral, Philip, still only twenty-two, wrote teasingly to him: ‘What are they going to make you? Acting Admiral of the Fleet or something? You had better be careful … before you know what you will have the prospect of 40 years without promotion in front of you. What a thought! As a string-puller, of course, you’ve practically lost all value, you’re so big now that it might smell of nepotism (just to make sure I had the right word, I looked it up in the dictionary, and this is what it says: undue favour from holder of patronage to relatives, originally from Pope to illegitimate sons called nephews).’

  In 1940, after four months in Ramillies, Prince Philip served briefly in HMS Kent, in a shore station in Ceylon, and in HMS Shropshire. ‘Action’ continued to prove elusive. ‘We have something to look forward to,’ he noted, optimistically, in his logbook at one point in his time in Kent: ‘there is an enemy raider in the Indian Ocean and there is just a chance our tracks will cross’. They didn’t. The only ‘fun’ to be had was thanks to the swirl of the ocean: ‘On one occasion a particularly heavy sea completely smothered the bridge and platform, and even the crow’s nest felt the spray from it. Steaming with the sea on the beam and at twenty-one knots the rolling was greatly emphasised, and a lot of innocent fun was had in the mess, watching the Goanese stewards diligently laying the table, and then the plates, knives, forks, spoons, butter dishes, toast racks and marmalade landing in a heap on the deck.’

  The catering arrangements were clearly taken seriously on board HMS Kent. When the ship was off Bombay, the first lieutenant noted in his log: ‘It rained most of the Morning Watch. Luckily had Prince Philip as the snotty41 and he makes the best cup of cocoa of the lot.’

  In 1999, in a tribute to his friend and fellow snotty Terry Lewin – who became First Sea Lord in 1977 and was Chief of the Defence Staff at the time of the Falklands conflict in 1982 – Prince Philip recalled what happened next: ‘I remained in the East Indies Station until June 1940, when the Italians invaded Greece and I became a combatant. I was appointed to HMS Valiant in the Mediterranean Fleet, where I found Terry as Senior Midshipman of the Gunroom. I remember it as a very happy Gunroom, which was a reflection of his good humour and powers of leadership. The fact that he had a typical rugby player’s build and an all-round athletic ability helped to establish his authority. Valiant saw quite a lot of action during the latter part of 1940, including Malta convoys, the bombardment of Bardia, and the night action off Cape Matapan in March 1941, and the evacuation of Crete in May.’

  It was for his contribution to the success of the Battle of Matapan, manning the searchlight on board his battleship, that Prince Philip, not yet twenty, received his ‘mention in dispatches’ – and the Greek War Cross. (According to his cousin, Alexandra, when she congratulated him on the honour, ‘he simply shrugged’.)

  On the night of 28 March 1941, as darkness fell off the coast of Cape Matapan, at the southernmost point of the Peloponnese, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Commander of the British Mediterranean Fleet, in his flagship, HMS Warspite, was leading his battleships – including HMS Valiant and HMS Barham – towards three Italian cruisers. ‘My orders,’ Prince Philip noted in his log, ‘were that if any ship illuminated a target I was to switch on and illuminate it for the rest of the fleet, so when this ship was lit up by a rather dim light from what I thought was the flagship I switched on our midship light which picked out the enemy cruiser and lit her up as if it were broad daylight.’ Then the fun started: ‘She was only seen complete in the light for a few seconds as the flagship had already opened fire, and as her first broadside landed and hit she was blotted out from just abaft the bridge to right astern. We fired our first broadside about seven seconds after the flagship with very much the same effect … By now all the secondary armament of both ships had opened fire and the noise was considerable. The Captain and the Gunnery Officer now began shouting from the bridge for the searchlights to train left. The idea that there might have been another ship, with the one we were firing at, never entered my head, so it was some few moments before I was persuaded to relinquish the blazing target and search for another one I had no reason to believe was there. However, training to the left, the light picked up another cruiser, ahead of the first one by some 3 or 4 cables. As the enemy was so close the light did not illuminate the whole ship but only about ¾ of it, so I trained left over the whole ship until the bridge structure was in the centre of the beam … she was illuminated in an undamaged condition for the period of about 5 seconds when our second broadside left the ship, and almost at once she was completely blotted out from stern to stern.’

  It was at this point that ‘all hell broke loose, as all our eight 15-inch guns, plus those of the flagship and Barham’s started firing at the stationary cruiser’. Through the noise and the pounding – ‘the glasses were rammed into my eyes … flash almost blinding me’ – Philip kept his searchlight on target. ‘More than 70% of the shells must have hit,’ he recorded, with justifiable satisfaction. ‘When the enemy had completely vanished in clouds of smoke and steam we ceased firing and switched the light off.’
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  The Battle of Matapan was, for the time being, the last British victory in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was made possible, not only by Prince Philip’s steady hand on the searchlight – the action which brought his ‘mention in dispatches’ – but also by British supremacy in the air. The Italians had no aircraft at Matapan. British aircraft – from Cunningham’s aircraft carrier, Formidable – had been deployed during the afternoon of 28 March and had done serious damage to a number of the Italian ships. When it came to the Battle of Crete seven weeks later, it was a different story. Here the Germans had command of the air. On 22 May, within fifteen miles of Crete, Philip recorded in his log: ‘We were bombed from a high level by a large number of small bombs dropped in sticks of 12 or more. One Dornier came straight for us from the port beam and dropped 12 bombs when he was almost overhead. We turned to port and ceased firing, when suddenly the bombs came whistling down, landing very close all down the port side.’

  Within forty-eight hours three cruisers and six destroyers were lost, among them HMS Kelly, under the command of Louis Mountbatten. At 0800 hours on the morning of 23 May, twenty-four Junkers dive bombers appeared in the sky above his ship. ‘Christ, look at that lot,’ Mountbatten is said to have said, quite calmly. Within thirty seconds of being hit, with guns firing and the captain standing firm on the bridge, Kelly was capsizing. ‘I felt I ought to be last to leave the ship,’ Mountbatten wrote to his daughter, Patricia, soon after, ‘and I left it a bit late because the bridge turned over on top of me and I was trapped in the boiling, seething cauldron underneath. I luckily had my tin hat on, which helped to make me heavy enough to push my way down past the bridge screen, but it was unpleasant having to force oneself deeper under water to get clear.’ He managed it. He ‘suddenly shot out of the water like a cork released’ and, with his first lieutenant, set about swimming desperately through the oily water around the wreckage, rescuing wounded men and dragging them to the safety of a raft. As Kelly finally went down, he called for three cheers for the ship, and, bobbing up and down in the treacherous water, led his surviving crew in an extraordinary chorus of ‘Roll out the Barrel!’ It was the heroic stuff of which movies are made.42

  Mountbatten and his surviving crew were picked up by HMS Kipling and taken to Alexandria, where Uncle Dickie, to his surprise, was met by ‘the cheery grinning face’ of his nephew, Philip. ‘He roared with laughter on seeing me,’ Mountbatten reported to his wife, ‘and when I asked him what was up he said, “You have no idea how funny you look. You look like a nigger minstrel!” I had forgotten how completely we all were smothered in oil fuel.’

  Separately, Uncle Dickie and his nephew now returned to England: Mountbatten, to brief Churchill (unbidden) on the need for greater air support in the Mediterranean and to take command of the aircraft carrier Illustrious; Philip, to take his sub-lieutenant’s courses and exams at Portsmouth. He worked hard and he played hard. In the exams – covering seamanship, signals, navigation, gunnery, and torpedoes – he secured the top grade in four sections out of five. In March 1942, staying in London with the Mountbattens, he went out on the razzle with his cousin, Dickie’s other nephew, David Milford Haven, who was also in the navy. The young men borrowed the Mountbatten Vauxhall to help transport themselves around the more fashionable West End and Mayfair nightspots and, at 4.30 a.m., collided with a traffic island, wrote off the car, and returned to their uncle’s residence, bloodied if unbowed. ‘So,’ reflected Mountbatten, ‘after facing death many times over at sea, they got their first wounds in a London blackout.’

  In June 1942 Philip was appointed to the destroyer HMS Wallace and, that October, when Wallace’s first lieutenant was appointed elsewhere, the Commanding Officer asked that Prince Philip take his place. At just twenty-one, Philip became one of the youngest first lieutenants in the Royal Navy. More than forty years later, his friend Lord Lewin said to me that if Prince Philip had stayed in the navy, ‘he’d have gone right to the top’. When I put the possibility to Prince Philip, he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, emphatically. ‘Given the way of the British press, I wouldn’t have got very far. Every promotion would have been seen as me being treated as a special case.’

  HMS Wallace was one of the destroyers on convoy duty on the British east coast, constantly moving up and down ‘E-Boat Alley’, as it was known, from Sheerness to Rosyth and back. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was necessary, arduous, and, given the effectiveness of the German E-boats’ torpedoes, not without its hairy moments.

  At the beginning of July 1943 Wallace joined the armada of ships (and 150,000 men) amassed off the coast of Sicily ready to invade the island. According to Harry Hargreaves, a yeoman aboard the ship, 8 July was the night when Prince Philip of Greece saved the day. ‘The stars were bright and the sea was black,’ recalled Hargreaves. ‘There was only one problem: the water shone and sparkled, and our progress created a long, glowing trail which made it extremely easy for enemy aircraft to spot us.’ At midnight the first plane struck. ‘We were sitting ducks. It was inevitable that one of the bombs would hit us. We had little chance of survival and all 163 of us on board thought we were facing death.’

  After the first attack – which hit the side of Wallace – the enemy aircraft disappeared. ‘We knew it would return in minutes – with other aircraft.’ At this point, according to Hargreaves, Philip came up with ‘a brilliant plan that was destined to save our lives’. He got a group of men to lash together large planks of wood to make a raft, attaching smoke floats at each end. They launched the raft into the sea and activated the smoke floats. ‘Billowing clouds of smoke and small bursts of flame made it look like the flaming debris of our ship floating in the water.’ Wallace then steamed away from the raft for ‘a good five minutes’ before the captain ordered the engines stopped. When, shortly afterwards, the enemy aircraft returned, ‘I heard the scream of bombs falling,’ Hargreaves recalled, ‘but they were aimed at the raft, not at us. The first lieutenant’s ruse had worked.’

  Hargreaves had only good memories of Philip, who, on the day they first met, when Wallace was docked at Tilbury, rustled up a meal of sausages and powdered egg for them both, despite the fact that Philip was an officer and Hargreaves ‘merely a yeoman’: ‘He was a down-to-earth, ordinary man. He had no airs or graces, and when the captain told me he was a prince, I said, “He doesn’t look like that to me.”’

  In 1944, as the war in Europe moved decisively the Allies’ way, Philip was appointed to a brand-new destroyer, HMS Whelp, still building in Newcastle when he joined her, and, subsequently, set off with her for more exotic climes: the Far East and the climax of the war against Japan in the Pacific. En route, Whelp called at Colombo and Philip spent a memorable Christmas Eve with Uncle Dickie, now Supreme Commander, South-East Asia Command, and Mountbatten’s new Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning. According to Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten’s official biographer, the night went gloriously awry because ‘the Singhalese cook, overawed by the occasion, took refuge in drink and served dinner cold, late, and back to front: Christmas pudding at midnight, turkey at 1 a.m. Nobody minded – least of all Mountbatten.’

  Dickie was increasingly a father figure for Philip. Earlier in December he had had to break the news to his nephew that his actual father, Prince Andrea, was dead. Andrea, aged sixty-two, unreachable in Vichy France, had died of a heart attack in his bedroom at the Hôtel Métropole in Monte Carlo in the early hours of 3 December. His lady friend, the Comtesse Andrée de La Bigne, was with him. His widow, Princess Alice, living reclusively in Athens, received the news two days later. Somehow she got word to Dickie, who sent a naval message to Philip on board Whelp. The message was deciphered precisely as follows: ‘So shocked and grieved to hear of the death of your (?) father and send you all my heartfelt sympathy. Following has been received from your mother: “Embrace you tenderly in our joint sorrow. Your loving mama.”’43

  In November 1938 Princess Alice had returned to live in Greece. From Athen
s, on 5 December that year, she had written to Philip: ‘I have taken a small flat just for you and me. Two bedrooms, each with a bathroom and two sitting rooms, a little kitchen & pantry. I found some furniture stored away in various places from our rooms in the Old Palace, which I had not seen again since 1917, a most agreeable surprise & the family here are giving me things to complete it.’ Philip was happy to visit his mother in Greece, but he had been educated in Britain and he was joining the Royal Navy: Athens was to him a port of call, not his home. Just before the outbreak of war, in August 1939, he stayed with his mother in her small flat in Athens. In January 1941, on leave from HMS Valiant in Alexandria, he visited her again. George II, still King of Greece (if only just), wrote to Alice’s mother, Victoria, at Kensington Palace: ‘With Alice we talk and think of you often. She is very busy looking after the needy families of soldiers and we only get to see her on Sundays. A few days ago Philip arrived here on leave, which naturally is a great source of joy for her. He is looking very well and happy.’

  Philip had returned to his ship in the middle of February 1941. By the end of March that year he had become one of the heroes of the Battle of Matapan. On 6 April 1941, the Germans had come to the rescue of the defeated Italians and invaded Yugoslavia. By 17 April the German forces were advancing through Greece. On 23 April King George II and his immediate family were on their way into exile: first to Crete, then to Egypt, then to London. On 26 April German troops marched into Athens and the Nazi flag was raised above the Acropolis. Alice stayed put. Her mother wrote to Dickie: ‘I rely on her pluck & common sense to carry her through these times, which must be very painful to her.’