2
The raid on Bruneval became the most important operation of the war thus far to be launched by Churchill’s piratical creation, Combined Operations. This had its inception on 4 June 1940. Amid the catastrophe of Dunkirk, Churchill wrote a memorandum to Maj. Gen. Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, his chief of staff, which afterwards became famous as an earnest of his burning commitment to offensive action, rather than mere reaction to German assaults. He began by saying it was right for Britain to be much preoccupied with the threat of a Nazi invasion, and to address this danger energetically: ‘But … some may feel inclined to ask the question – why should it be thought impossible to do anything of the same kind to [the Germans]? The completely defensive habit of mind, which has ruined the French, must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative.
‘It is of the highest consequence to keep the large numbers of German forces [committed] all along the coasts of the countries they have conquered, and we should immediately set to work to organize raiding forces on these coasts where the populations are friendly … What we have seen at Dunkirk shows how quickly troops can be moved off (and I suppose on) to selected points if need be. How wonderful it would be if the Germans could be made to wonder where they were going to be struck next, instead of forcing us to try to wall in the island and roof it over! An effort must be made to shake off the mental and moral prostration to the will and initiative of the enemy from which we suffer.’
Two days later, in the same vein, Churchill wrote: ‘Enterprises must be prepared with specially-trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of terror down [enemy-occupied] coasts … I look to the joint Chiefs of Staff to propose the measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive against the whole German-occupied coastline.’ Among the first fruits of the prime minister’s musing was the appointment, on 14 June, of fifty-eight-year-old Royal Marine Lt. Gen. Alan Bourne as ‘Commander of Raiding Operations on coasts in enemy occupation’ and Adviser to the Chiefs of Staff on Combined Operations, with a headquarters in the Admiralty. At the same time the brilliant maverick Col. Dudley Clarke, who would later become celebrated as a master of deception in the desert, convinced army chief Gen. Sir John Dill that Britain needed a specialist raiding unit, of the kind Churchill characterized as ‘men of the hunter class’. The first ‘Commando’ was formed, its name – suggested by the South Africa-reared Clarke – borrowed from that of the Boer guerrillas who had fought the British to such effect four decades earlier. On 23 June, Clarke himself led a pathetic little raid on the French coast, by men transported in RAF air-sea rescue launches. They landed at three points around Boulogne, killed two Germans and came close to terminating Clarke’s own career when a careless friendly-fire bullet almost severed his ear. On 14 July another such venture failed against occupied Guernsey, with the loss of all those involved.
The prime minister said crossly: ‘Let there be no more silly fiascoes like those perpetrated at Boulogne and Guernsey.’ Eight months would pass before the next such operation, during which Churchill pressed for action to form, arm and equip units capable of doing more serious damage to the Germans. As early as 22 June, impressed – indeed, much over-impressed – by the contribution of Luftwaffe paratroops to Hitler’s conquest of the continent, he ordered the creation of a matching British force. On 7 July he likewise addressed the Ministry of Supply, asking what was being done to design and build landing-craft capable of carrying tanks. This last initiative produced vessels which, eventually copied by the US Navy, conveyed Allied armour into amphibious assaults through the victorious years of the war.
On 17 July Churchill decided that Gen. Bourne lacked the clout for his appointed role and replaced him at the head of Combined Ops with Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, a sixty-seven-year-old veteran of many battles. During the 1901 Boxer Rising this then-junior naval officer had forced a Chinese railway engine-driver to do his bidding by travelling on the footplate himself, holding a revolver at the man’s ear. Keyes went on to become prime mover and director of the April 1918 naval raid on Zeebrugge. Churchill had always admired the admiral as a mischief-maker as well as a professional hero: the new chief had the stature and public image which Bourne lacked. One of Keyes’s first initiatives was to demonstrate the independence of his old service by moving Combined Operations out of the Admiralty and into requisitioned houses in Richmond Terrace, a few steps across Whitehall from Downing Street. The veteran seadog, despite his age, was full of energy. In March 1941 his command mounted its first raid that was deemed a success, against Norway’s German-occupied Lofoten Islands. But the old man at the head of Combined Ops was vain, petulant, quarrelsome. While famous for his courage, he was not equally celebrated for brains. Although Churchill was respectful of presumption and often tolerant of insubordination, he tired of Keyes’s inability to work with others, and of his manifest lack of judgement.
The prime minister wanted Combined Ops to be led by a star, but he now acknowledged that such a figure should be identified with the current war, not the previous one. He cast around for a younger model than Keyes. In the autumn of 1941, Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, destroyer leader and friend of Hollywood film stars, was in America waiting to put to sea once more, on the bridge of HMS Illustrious. This was the nation’s finest aircraft-carrier, under repair in a US shipyard after suffering extensive bomb damage in the Mediterranean. The prime minister dispatched a signal to ‘Dickie’, as Mountbatten was universally known, demanding his immediate return to London, relinquishing command of Illustrious, to assume a role that his Downing Street admirer was confident would prove rewarding. To Churchill’s irritation, the order did not prompt instant compliance. Mountbatten, with the serene self-confidence conferred by his semi-royal status as a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, said he could not drop everything and dash across the Atlantic. Pressed, he cited a pending invitation to a White House dinner. When he did catch a plane home, he used the president as an air-raid shelter from Churchillian wrath, having prompted Franklin Roosevelt to soothe Britain’s ‘former naval person’ with assurances that Dickie had been most useful to him.
All this took place some weeks before Pearl Harbor and US entry into the war. Mountbatten finally presented himself at Chequers on 25 October 1941, when he learned of Churchill’s intention to appoint him to succeed Keyes. He was blessed with matinee idol looks and boasted cousinship with King George VI, together with charm, ambition and some intelligence, impaired by a childlike vanity. Born in 1900, he was the sort of professional hero whom the prime minister liked, advanced and was not infrequently deceived by. Yet Churchill was not wrong that glamour had a part to play in sustaining the spirit of peoples in adversity at war, and there was not much of it around: consider how the US government and chiefs of staff felt obliged to defer to that prince of charlatans, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, because he possessed star quality.
Now, however, Mountbatten with his usual hubris baulked at the prime minister’s proposal. He asserted that he would prefer to remain afloat. Always in his mind was the ultimate ambition to become First Sea Lord. Churchill responded furiously: ‘What can you hope to achieve, except to be sunk in a bigger and more expensive ship? Here, I give you a chance to take a part in the higher leadership of the war!’ Churchill said that while the immediate role of Combined Operations was to organize mere raids, its ultimate and most important purpose was to prepare for the re-invasion of France, which would perforce become the greatest combined operation in history: ‘You are to give no thought to the defensive. Your whole attention is to be concentrated on the offensive.’
Mountbatten allowed himself to be persuaded. Only afterwards was a title agreed, that of Commodore, Combined Operations, which meant a step in rank for him. He was crestfallen, however, to be briefed by the chiefs of staff about their own much less grandiose vision of his role: ‘You are to be technical adviser on all aspects of, and at all stages in, the planning and training for combined operations.’ The chiefs were determined to keep Mountbatten in his place. They failed, though, because the man himself declined to defer to mere rank and seniority. The prime minister’s backing, reinforced by the new commodore’s social attack and salesmanship, trumped mere service hierarchy.
Mountbatten would hereafter become one of the most famous British figures of World War II, though it is still disputed whether he was a substantial one. Adrian Smith, one of his biographers, has written: ‘The Chief of Combined Operations always remained an agent, never a real player.’ Mountbatten controlled no army, air force or fleet, beyond a few commandos and landing-craft. To implement its plans, his organization depended upon the goodwill of the three service chiefs to loan men, ships and planes on an operation-by-operation basis. Yet it is impossible to dispute the celebrity and influence which the new commodore achieved. Nobody, except perhaps his country’s admirals, could deny that Dickie thrived under floodlights. If he lacked depth of intellect, he compensated with a driving enthusiasm that bore him far towards the greatness he craved. His ambition was given early impetus by the injustice done to his father, Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, deposed as First Sea Lord in 1914 because of his German lineage. Doubts persist whether Battenberg was, in reality, the great naval leader and strategist that his younger son – the family name changed amid conflict with Germany – claimed. Prince Louis was certainly badly treated, but the first-generation Mountbatten’s own hunger for glory needed no stimulus of parental grievance to prompt him to try hard.
Bereft of any capacity for reflection, less still self-doubt, Mountbatten in his youth drove through the lower ranks of the Royal Navy like some advanced motor torpedo-boat under uncertain control. After World War I service as a midshipman in Beatty’s battlecruiser Lion, he became a lieutenant with a reputation for technical efficiency and ease in handling men. Close friendship with Edward, then Prince of Wales, together with a 1922 marriage to Edwina Ashley, possessor of a vast fortune as granddaughter of Edwardian financier Sir Ernest Cassel, earned suspicion and resentment from some colleagues and superiors, as did his playboy lifestyle off duty, among a louche, racy social set.
On the polo field, as a pilot, as a seaman, success did not come to him from natural genius. Instead he hauled himself up the Royal Navy through professional dedication, an infinite capacity for taking pains. Critics of his nightlife could scarcely fault an officer who never failed on duty to give of his utmost; who passed out top of his specialist signals course and displayed a passionate interest in new technology. His courage was matched only by lust for recognition. ‘What an opportunity for anyone to earn an Albert Medal!’ he wrote in frustration after a young seaman fell overboard from Warspite and drowned while he himself was unluckily below. ‘Wish I’d been on deck.’
Mountbatten adored being rich – his wife inherited the equivalent of £100 million in modern money at a time when his naval pay was £610 a year – and indulged himself in servants, cars, boats, homes. His London bedroom was remodelled to resemble a naval officer’s cabin, with a porthole which revealed a diorama of Malta’s Grand Harbour, featuring model ships that could signal to each other. When this atrocity was completed, he held a press viewing which confirmed his seniors’ view that Mountbatten was no gentleman, as the Royal Navy understood the word, but instead a cad and bounder not unlike Beatty, the great naval star – though by no means naval genius – of the previous generation.
Dickie and Edwina’s weekend guests at Broadlands, their stately home in Hampshire, were issued each evening with a proforma which they were obliged to fill out and return to the staff, saying what they wished to do on the following morning and afternoon. A second docket invited them to indent for available cars, horses, boats, fishing facilities. No extravagance was too vulgar, no presumption excessive, that enabled Mountbatten to boost a polo team, win a race, secure a medal or gain an appointment.
Mountbatten weathered the 1936 Abdication Crisis without being compelled to make the dangerous gesture of serving as best man at the now-Duke of Windsor’s subsequent wedding to Wallis Simpson, though he was loyal enough to offer. His social and political connections were unmatched, fostered by lavish hospitality in London and Hampshire. Admirals not infrequently found themselves being wined and dined by young Captain Mountbatten on a sybaritic scale which they would have been less than human not to find irksome. His severest critics were drawn from his own Service. Nor was their disdain the product of mere social exasperation.
‘He possesses a naïve simplicity combined with a compelling manner and dynamic energy,’ declared his 1938 confidential report on completing a posting at the Admiralty. ‘His interests incline mainly towards the material world and he is, therefore, inclined to be surprised at the unexpected; he has been so successful in that sphere that he does not contemplate failure. His social assets are invaluable in any rank to any Service. His natural thoroughness is extended to sport. Desirable as it is to avoid superlatives, he has nearly’ – [author’s emphasis] – ‘all the qualities and qualifications for the highest commands.’
Noel Coward’s feature film In Which We Serve, which was being shot at Denham Studios even as preparations were made for the assault on Bruneval, made Mountbatten and his destroyer Kelly famous, though both their experience and the names were lightly fictionalized. Noel adored Dickie, saying, ‘He is a pretty wonderful man, I think.’ Years later Mountbatten wrote disingenuously to his thespian friend, looking back: ‘I have been greatly criticised, chiefly among my brother officers, for being a party to the making of a film which was apparently designed to boost me personally.’ It was assuredly true that Mountbatten himself never tired of screenings, hosting one in Richmond Terrace for COHQ’s staff. On such occasions, he kept up a running commentary for audiences, not least a party at Buckingham Palace that included Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, about the personal history on which the film was based.
Yet his record in command of Kelly was at best exceedingly unlucky. When he drove the ship gratuitously fast in heavy seas she was struck by a wave which heeled her fifty degrees to starboard, inflicting severe damage and almost causing her to founder. Repairs were scarcely completed before the destroyer hit a mine in the mouth of the Tyne. After eleven weeks in dry dock, she emerged to be badly damaged in a collision with another warship. In the Norwegian campaign, Kelly was torpedoed and almost sunk after rashly using her signal lamp at night in hostile waters. When Churchill – always Dickie’s friend, as well as then First Lord of the Admiralty – sought the award of a DSO to her captain for getting the crippled ship home, the navy would have none of it. The C-in-C Home Fleet wrote acidly that ‘owing to a series of misfortunes … Kelly had only been to sea for 57 days during the war, and that any other captain would have done the same’.
In the Mediterranean, Mountbatten incurred severe criticism from his C-in-C Admiral Andrew Cunningham for his performance in the days before Kelly was finally sunk by German aircraft: ‘The trouble with your flotilla, boy,’ the merciless ‘ABC’ later told one of Mountbatten’s subordinates, ‘is that it was thoroughly badly led.’ Philip Ziegler, Dickie’s best biographer, declares this a harsh judgement but himself agrees that ‘Mountbatten was not a good flotilla leader. It is perhaps not too fanciful to compare his performance on the bridge with his prowess behind the wheel of a car. He was a fast and dangerous driver.’
Mountbatten’s sexuality was an object of speculation among his contemporaries and to posterity. Edwina never provided him with the intimate companionship for which he yearned, though she acted out impeccably the public role of consort when, as was increasingly often the case, her husband appeared on platforms, under spotlights. He himself later said: ‘Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.’ It was certainly true that Lady Mountbatten boasted a legion of lovers, yet Ziegler comments of her husband: ‘He conducted at least two protracted love-affairs [with women] outside his marriage, to the apparent satisfaction of both parties, but he was never promiscuous. Though he liked to imagine himself a sexual athlete, he seems to have had in reality only slight enthusiasm for the sport … if asked to choose between seduction by the most desirable of houris and a conversation on service matters with a senior officer of influence, he would unfailingly have chosen the latter.’ There has been gossip that he was a closet gay, but ambition was surely too dominant a force for him to have risked a sexual scandal which, in those days, must have been terminal. He was certainly an extreme narcissist. He seems unlikely, however, to have indulged in active homosexuality.
After the loss of Kelly in May 1941, Mountbatten toured America describing his experiences, both in public and in private, to US leaders. He enjoyed a huge success. Americans always liked him, responding to the showmanship that sometimes irked his compatriots. It did no harm that he was sort-of-royal and could have been auditioning for Hollywood; and that he, in his turn, appreciated Roosevelt’s people. One of his strongest cards, when he reached the highest ranks, was that he empathized with Americans as most upper-crust British men did not.
On arrival in Richmond Terrace to take up his role at Combined Ops, he inherited a staff of only twenty-three. This he expanded exponentially, with Combined Ops spilling out of its poky headquarters to occupy most of nearby Scotland Yard. The chiefs of staff were wary of him from the outset, and dismissed many of the CCO’s wild proposals as unrealistic. But Dickie’s rhino-hide skin preserved him from being bruised by the snubs and put-downs of generals, admirals and air marshals. He commanded the support of the man who mattered, the prime minister. He set about establishing Combined Operations as the film set on which not only would heroic deeds be enacted for the benefit of the British war effort, but these would also elevate the fame and fortune of himself, their executive producer.
Philip Ziegler wrote: ‘Mountbatten delighted in the planning of these adventures, took an interest in every detail and fretted obsessively while they were in progress … The more outrageous the methods used, the more he relished them.’ A raid on Brest was once being discussed, involving the landing of tanks and the rolling of depth charges into the dry dock. A staff officer who recoiled from such an assured bloodbath said wearily: ‘Let’s forget about all this nonsense and catch the 5.15 from St Malo!’ The commodore promptly seized on this as a wonderful idea, calling for a plan to hijack a train and drive it to Brest’s harbourside.
It became a persistent gibe in the corridors of uniformed power that Mountbatten’s outfit was a mere tennis match – ‘all rackets and balls’. Many able officers were reluctant to join its staff, seeing it as a career cul-de-sac. A senior army functionary, Col. Cyril Lloyd, observed to Robert Bruce Lockhart that while he liked Mountbatten personally, ‘the PM is ruining him by exalting him in the way he has done. His position has been made impossible with the Chiefs of Staff and the service departments generally, and his own staff is the laughing stock of London.’
Mountbatten could be ungenerous, even vindictive, to subordinates not on his favourites’ list. He appointed Sir Harold Wernher, a brother-in-law twice removed, as ‘Controller of Ministry and Service Facilities’. Churchill grumbled: ‘Isn’t he some sort of relation of yours?’ Mountbatten, unabashed, responded tartly: ‘Not so close as Duncan Sandys’ – a Churchill son-in-law newly appointed to government office – ‘is to you.’ Wernher proved one of the commodore’s most successful appointments, but others were much less inspired. He chose as his chief of intelligence ‘Bobby’ Marquis de Casa Maury, for which this pre-war polo crony’s credentials were hard to discern. Casa Maury was a forty-five-year-old Cuban-Spanish aristocrat who had owned the Curzon cinema in Mayfair. After an earlier divorce he married Freda Dudley Ward, long-serving mistress of the Duke of Windsor when Prince of Wales. The Casa Maurys now occupied a grand house in Hamilton Terrace, St John’s Wood.
A well-known racing driver before the war, the marquis had also become an RAF reservist. He was serving as an intelligence officer at West Country fighter stations when Mountbatten plucked him forth to join his own court at COHQ. Casa Maury inspired mistrust among the intelligence organizations as an outsider and foreigner, acknowledged to the man himself by Brigadier Robert Laycock, later Mountbatten’s successor as CCO – and, incidentally, married to Freda Casa Maury’s daughter Angie – as ‘a wholly irrational prejudice against you in that you are a marquis and your name is … not Smith, Jones or Robinson’. Casa Maury was now accorded a leading role in planning the Bruneval raid.
Here was evidence to support the worst charge against Mountbatten, which would dog him until the end of his life: that he clogged his entourage with toadies and favourites, among whom Casa Maury’s name was often mentioned; and that he was obsessed with his own self-aggrandizement. Alan Brooke wrote of Mountbatten’s contribution that ‘he certainly played a remarkable role as the driving force and mainspring’ of Combined Operations, but the CIGS adopted a harsh view of Mountbatten’s subsequent appointment to the Chiefs of Staff Committee: ‘There was no justification for this move … he frequently wasted both his own time and ours … at times he was apt to concern himself with matters outside his sphere … The title “Chief of Combined Operations” was also badly chosen, since every operation we were engaged in was a “combined” one.’ Harold Macmillan reflected on Mountbatten years later: ‘A strange character … who tries to combine being a professional sailor, a politician and a royalty. The result is that nobody trusts him.’
Yet among those who could forgive his defects, Mountbatten inspired respect and loyalty as well as affection. Whatever the sailor lacked as a director of military or naval operations, he sought to make good by a genius for public relations. At this stage of the war, when Britain stood inescapably on the strategic defensive, it was important to create at least a façade of activity, attack, initiative. In the winter of 1941, it is hard to imagine anyone better-suited to do this than Mountbatten, though it was much less assured that he was fit to bear responsibility for men’s lives in action.
He worked enormously hard, often sleeping in the office – as also, to do him justice, did his friend Casa Maury. He showed an imagination that, if often fantastic – for instance, his later enthusiasm for Habakkuk, an iceberg aircraft-carrier – was an antidote to the congenital pessimism that afflicted many of Britain’s service directors, including Alan Brooke. In the first months after the United States entered the struggle and began to work with British brass, Roosevelt’s service chiefs displayed grave doubts about whether they had entered the right war with the right ally. Thus, the value should not be underestimated of the liking and respect that Mountbatten generated among Americans. US general Al Wedemeyer accompanied George Marshall on an early 1942 visit to Britain, and wrote later: ‘Mountbatten was by all odds the most colourful on the British Chiefs of Staff level. He was charming, tactful, a conscious knight in shining armor, handsome, bemedalled, with a tremendous amount of self-assurance. Because of his youthfulness … it was obvious that the older officers did not defer readily to his views. They were careful, however, to give him a semblance of courteous attention. After all, he was a cousin of the King and, no doubt about it, a great favourite of the Prime Minister.’
Churchill wrote to Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, as chairman of the chiefs of staff, about Mountbatten: ‘I want him to exercise influence upon the war as a whole, upon future planning in its broadest sense; upon the concert of the three Arms and their relation to the maintaining of strategy; upon Combined Operations in the largest sense, not only those specific Operations which his own organization will execute.’
Later in the struggle, indeed later in 1942, Mountbatten’s tenure at Combined Operations would be permanently tarnished, his reputation justly scarred, by the disastrous raid on Dieppe. But ten months earlier, when he assumed his role, that failure lay in the future. Both Dickie and his embryo organization had everything to play for. Beyond recruiting personnel and touring training facilities, with his usual diplomatic skills he wooed Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare who was responsible for the Special Operations Executive. Dalton envied Mountbatten’s privileged relationship with the chiefs of staff, and his later membership of their committee, but he, too, found himself seduced by Dickie’s famous charm.
Naval capability, and above all the means to convey troops to a hostile shore, would obviously be a key element of Combined Operations. The boat-builders Thornycrofts were commissioned to create some prototype shallow-draught landing-craft, forty feet long, constructed from mahogany then armour-plated, with a maximum speed of ten knots. The new organization also acquired several former cross-Channel ferries including Prins Albert, a 370-foot-long, 3,000-ton Belgian vessel capable of twenty-two knots, which could carry eight landing-craft and 250 troops, and became mother ship for the embryo flotilla. A base and training centre was established in the Household Brigade Yacht Club at the mouth of the River Hamble in Hampshire, which by 1942 had become home to almost a thousand personnel ‘terrifically keen’, in the words of their CO, most of whose officers were amateur yachtsmen posted immediately on completion of a brief naval indoctrination at the shore training base HMS King Alfred. They acquired an assortment of vessels, and exercised mostly with requisitioned leisure craft.
A thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant-commander, seconded from the Royal Australian Navy, was appointed to direct the base and its operations. He christened it HMS Tormentor, with a flea his curious choice for its crest, justified by Combined Operations’ supposed mandate to make the Germans itch. Fred Cook from Victoria became a naval cadet at thirteen. Since the war started, on secondment to the Royal Navy he had been among just four hundred survivors following U-47’s October 1939 torpedoing of the battleship Royal Oak in Scapa Flow. Seven months later, he was serving as second-in-command of the light cruiser Curlew when she too was sunk, by German air attack off Norway. Soon after that experience, he was posted to the embryo Combined Ops, where his enthusiasm won warm approval. He first met Mountbatten in November 1941, when the new commodore came down to watch landing-craft exercises in the Solent. Later, Cook designed what became the badge of Combined Operations, featuring an albatross borrowed from the Australian Air Force crest, a tommy gun and a RAN-pattern kedge anchor.
Combined Ops’ first significant action under Mountbatten’s direction was mounted in the last days of December 1941. Army commandos paid a return visit to the Norwegian coast, briefly occupying the islands of Vaagso and Maaloy, where they wrecked German facilities, killed some enemy soldiers and brought home to England scores of Norwegian volunteers for the Allied forces. The raid was noisy and disorganized, but yielded a propaganda success, at a cost of modest casualties. Churchill was not impressed, however, writing testily to Ismay on 7 January that it ‘must be judged a marked failure, as it was abandoned hastily and without any facts being apparent which were not foreseen at the time of its inception’.
Even less happy was Operation Flipper, a November commando assault on Rommel’s supposed headquarters in North Africa, though planned by Eighth Army in Cairo rather than in Richmond Terrace. The iconic commander of the Afrika Korps proved to be elsewhere. Roger Keyes’s son Geoffrey was among the casualties, apparently accidentally shot dead by one of his own men, a mishap compensated by a posthumous Victoria Cross. It was widely felt in the army that the decoration was designed to make everybody feel better about a fiasco, not the first or last time a VC has been awarded under such circumstances.
But such pinprick operations as these failed to fulfil Churchill’s intemperate demands for European coastal action, such as would seriously trouble the Boche, the World War I term by which he often referred to the enemy. The Air Ministry produced a mildly facetious memorandum, explaining how Combined Operations was to work with the three services. ‘Procedure: CCO [Mountbatten] has bright idea and discusses with Commanders or Commands concerned. Commands submit their comments on feasibility or otherwise.’ ‘Otherwise’ would feature extensively in Whitehall debate during the months and years that followed. Mountbatten and his staff rummaged for ideas; planned furiously. They were obliged to discard a score of fanciful schemes that exasperated Churchill’s senior officers without ever coming to the attention of Hitler’s generals and admirals.
A cheeky staff officer composed a doggerel which, to the commodore’s credit, he himself sometimes quoted:
Mountbatten was a likely lad,
A nimble brain Mountbatten had,
And this most amiable trait:
Of each new plan which came his way
He’d always claim in accents pat
‘Why, I myself invented that!’
Adding when he remembered it,
For any scoffer’s benefit,
Roughly the point in his career
When he’d conceived the bright idea,
As ‘August 1934’
Or ‘Some time during the Boer War’.
Then in December 1941 the Air Staff, at the behest of Reg Jones and the Telecommunications Research Establishment, offered Combined Ops its proposal for an assault on Bruneval; the kidnapping of a Würzburg. As soon as Dickie heard of it, he loved it. When the chiefs of staff signed off the mission, in January 1942, the CCO hastened to mobilize means to launch the operation. It would need planes, ships. And a revolutionary force in warfare: paratroops.