Compton Mackenzie
AFTER the declaration of war on Germany in 1914 a despicable campaign was promoted by a part of the English press to impugn the loyalty of Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg. the First Sea Lord. It was carried so far as to start a rumour that he had been confined in the Tower on a charge of treason. The Globe newspaper was the leading guttersnipe, but plenty of mud was slung by other papers as well, and in October a letter from Prince Louis was published tendering his resignation on the ground that his birth and parentage in some respects impaired his usefulness. Mr. Churchill testified warmly to the great services of Prince Louis, notably to his having taken the first step to secure the con- centration of the Fleet at the outbreak of the war, but the First Sea Lord's resignation was accepted, and forty-six years of distinguished service in the Royal Navy came to an end because a few vicious fools had poisoned the mind of a credulous and hysterical public. At that date Lord Mount- batten was a naval cadet of fourteen, the same age as his father had been when he entered the Royal Navy. The effect of that vile campaign of calumny on the imagination of a boy was to make him set before himself as his supreme ambition the post of First Sea Lord one day in the future.
The prospect of such an appointment is now being befogged in certain quarters of the popular Press by politics. The legend has been basely coined that Lord Mountbatten as a stooge of the Socialists rushed the sub-continent of India into indepen- dence and partition for his own political advantage. Therefore according to those critics he should not be offered the post of First Sea Lord and that if offered the post it will be his duty to refuse it. ' He's very red, isn't he ? ' I hear Myself asked in portentous tones from time to time. And I reply, ' As red as the Admiral of the Red in the days of Nelson.'
When that great soldier Lord Wavell became Viceroy and Governor-General of India in 1943 he had to face perhaps the most arduous task any Viceroy was ever called upon to face, and with the help of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, Whose outstanding services as Commander-in-Chief have not Yet been fully appreciated, Lord Wavell was able to carry On through those immensely difficult years of war.
Afterwards it was obvious that the independence of India could not be postponed indefinitely and Mr. Attlee confronted the problem with statesmanship and remarkable courage when the Labour Party attained power in 1945. The crux of the problem was partition and Lord Wavell became increasingly Pessimistic of the possibility of solving it without civil war. e was tired out by eight years of military and civil responsi- bility heavier than that imposed on any commander in the war. It was lamentable that the Government did not supersede him more gracefully, but let that pass as a piece of gaucherie. Of wavell could be said what Tacitus said of Agricola : What we have loved in Agricola, what we have admired, abides and will abide in the hearts of men, in the procession of the ages, in the records of history. It was a pity that Mr. Attlee did not say something similar about Wavell.
Yet his decision to send Lord Mountbatten as %vas successor was an inspiration. I declare without hesitation as an observer on the spot that nobody else in Great Britain could have achieved what he achieved as Viceroy and Governor- General in little over a year. gradualness. We had talked so long about that independence for India when the right moment should arrive for it that India believed by now that the right moment never would arrive. Moreover, it was generally feared that the Labour Party would be out of office by June, 1948, the promised date for independence, in which case under a Tory Government independence would again be postponed on one excuse or another. The task for the new Viceroy was to convince India that at last we were in earnest, and to that was added the task of carrying through the partition which was by now inevitable. The main criticism of Lord Mountbatten has been that he was precipitate in bringing forward the date of independence from June, 1948, to August, 1947. It is not extravagant to argue that by doing so he averted a ferocious civil war, and it is quite certain that the affection and trust he wakened in India, an affection and trust with which he alone of all Viceroys and Governor-Generals had been able to touch Indian hearts, was the decisive factor in keeping India within the Common- wealth. It may be true that Pakistan felt he favoured India, but it is questionable whether in the state of feeling which then existed between India and Pakistan anybody could have avoided a charge of favouritism by one or other. And it must be remembered that it was Pakistan which desired partition. In accepting partition India surrendered a great deal, and though it may be true that Pandit Nehru before the arrival of Lord Mountbatten had already practically bowed to the sad necessity of partition it may be doubted if even Pandit Nehru would have held the extreme Indian nationalists in check if independence had not been granted as soon as it was.
The flight of Muslim refugees to the West Punjab and of the Hindu refugees to the East Punjab was accompanied by horrors, but the number of unhappy fugitives who lost their lives has been fantastically exaggerated. I heard an ex- Minister declare on a public platform that the deaths had been estimated at five million but that he should prefer to put them at much nearer ten million. I asked him afterwards if he knew what the total population of the Punjab was, and of course being an ex-Minister with the proverbial ignorance of geography he did not know. Was I expected to believe that I had been living in a country where such massacres had taken place without noticing that one person in three had been killed within three months ? My own estimate of those who lost their lives by violence, exposure, inanition, disease and drowning in the floods, would be half a million. That is dreadful enough without indulging in reckless magnifi- cation of the figures, but it is a very much smaller loss of life than a civil war would have caused, and to blame it upon Lord Mountbatten's precipitate policy is entirely unjustified.
In any case what has his achievement in India, whether admired or disapproved, got to do with his suitability for the post of First Sea Lord ? Surely that must be judged on his naval record alone, which even his bitterest critics admit to be unblemished. If a Tory Government had b in power when Lord Mountbatten was Governor-General of India, would he have been accused of indulging in politics to the detriment of his professional status ? It may be doubted. For all I know there may be opposition in naval circles to his being appointed First Sea Lord, but that is a professional question about which a layman has no right to offer an opinion. What any layman has a right to say is that if the Royal Navy is to be deprived of a good First Sea Lord because his political opinions are believed not to coincide with those of the orthodox imperialists who have managed to lose the Empire for us it will mean that McCarthyism, like the Colorado beetle, has crossed the Atlantic. We have kept the Colorado beetle from spreading; we must be equally diligent to control the other pest.
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