"Dickie" on Top

WILL 1959 BE MOUNTBATTEN'S YEAR? cried a headline in Lord Beaverbrook's London Sunday Express. Next morning Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas, first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, walked into his office as First Sea Lord, waving the Sunday Express, beamed matter-of-factly: "The Beaver's attacking me again--I must be due for a promotion." Within 48 hours came the announcement: next July, when R.A.F. Marshal Sir William Dickson retires, Lord Mountbatten will become Chief of the Defense Staff, top military man over all Britain's services.

Not everyone cheered the news, and realizing that they would not, the Tory government shrewdly timed the announcement for the holiday season when members of the House of Commons were out of town. To the royal family, "Dickie" Mountbatten is a favorite blood relation (he is both Elizabeth's cousin and Philip's uncle); to Britain's political leaders, who keep advancing him, he is a diplomat-sailor with charm, foresight and savvy; to his fellow officers he is courageous and capable; to the newspaper-reading public he is part hero, part legend, handsome and dashing. But to some diehard Tories, Mountbatten is a bad word.

The Critics. They think Mountbatten both arrogant and vain, criticize his habit of showing up last at meetings, when they say he grabs attention with just that little extra disturbance that the final arrival can create. They complain that Lady Mountbatten, the former Edwina Ashley, is a Socialist and a "do-gooder." By other critics, Mountbatten will always be remembered as the last Viceroy of India, who cooperated with the Labor government in presiding over the breakup of the British Empire.

Lord Beaverbrook holds other grudges against Mountbatten. He blames him for planning the ill-starred World War II raid on Dieppe, in which 3,369 of Beaver-brook's fellow Canadians were casualties. But the feeling goes deeper. Noel Coward's wartime movie In Which We Serve was built around his friend Mountbatten's own heroism as commander of the destroyer Kelly. Beaverbrook blames Mountbatten for not getting Coward to delete a shot of drowning sailors, in which a copy of the Daily Express floats by, with its famed 1939 headline: THERE WILL BE NO WAR THIS YEAR.

The Career. Against such criticism, and the suspicion of favoritism that always attaches to a man who succeeds despite a distinguished name, Mountbatten rose from destroyer commander to Combined

Operations Chief to Supreme Allied Commander Southeast Asia, to Viceroy. He might then have had a political career. But there was one post he really coveted. His father, German Prince Louis of Battenberg (the family name, before it was Anglicized to Mountbatten), was forced out in 1914 as Britain's First Sea Lord because of his German origin. One day in 1955 Dickie Mountbatten sat down proudly in his father's old chair at the Admiralty.

As First Sea Lord, Mountbatten pushed ahead with the "Dreadnought" project to build a fleet of British nuclear submarines. On his new appointment, many Britons would agree with London's Spectator, which last week congratulated the Tory government "on ignoring prejudice, political considerations and pressure from the popular press and [its] own party in appointing the best man to the job."

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