Mountbatten

Philip Ziegler was Mountbatten's official biographer. However, he claims in the preface to the book not to have been subject to any censorship, and given the frankness with which he acknowledges his subject's flaws, one can believe his claim. Mountbatten was a close relative of the British royal family; Prince Philip is his nephew, and he regularly referred to Queen Elizabeth as his niece; and he was also a close confident of Prince Charles. He was quite ambitious, and not above using his royal connections to advance his military career. How successful that career was is open to some debate. There is no question about his physical courage -- indeed, he may have had too much of it. As Field Marshall Mountgomery enjoyed pointing out, Mountbatten had three destroyers sunk under him during the early part of the war. Later, he oversaw the Dieppe raid, which was one of the worst fiascos of the war -- a large commando raid on a fortified port resulted in near elimination of some units by German forces composed in many cases of file clerks and cooks. This loss did not stop his career, however; he ended the war with the command of the Burma theater, where he seems to have performed well. After the war, he became the last British Viceroy of India, with the task of working out a peaceful transition from British rule. That was a failure, as hundreds of thousands died in riots between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslims could have been forgiven for suspecting Mountbatten's neutrality; his wife was carrying on an affair with the Indian leader Nehru. Mountbatten was no saint in these matters, and could hardly complain. Mountbatten was murdered in 1979 when the IRA put a bomb on his boat. Why they did this has never been clear. Mountbatten had never been involved in Irish affairs, and at almost 80 years of age played no important part in the Government.Ziegler does a good job of capturing Mountbatten's charm -- almost everyone who met him liked him -- and his vanity -- after Elizabeth became queen, his aides would compete to see who could be the first to get him to refer to "my niece, the Queen." Curiously, Ziegler begins the book with a description of Mountbatten enjoying reading books on his family tree, an opening that is quite similar to that of "Persuasion" by Jane Austen. The similarity is odd because the character in Austen's novel is a fool and a snob with no ability, and no other claim to distinction. That could not be said of Mountbatten.Mountbatten lead a truly interesting life, and Ziegler has produced what is likley to be the definitive biography of that life. His honesty is such that one need not be an uncritical admirer of Mountbatten to enjoy this biography.