Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Annals of Undeserved Promotion: Dickie

Here's an edifying little tale with two morals: one, horses for courses. And two (following Nietzsche, or was sit Arnold Schwarzenegger?) anything that doesn't kill you will educate you. The subject is Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, Lord Louis Mountbatten and a lot of other titles, known to his friends as "Dickie." His only qualification for high office appears to have been tha the was buds with two kinds--Edward VIII (as in "the woman I love") and his brother/successor, George VI.

As a commander of naval vessels in World War II, Dickie couldn't catch a break. His first ship, the destroyer HMS Kelly, was "a catalog of disasters" (113). At one point, retrieving the ship from drydock after an early misadventure, Dickie plowed the Kelly straight into another ship. It is said that only his birth saved him from court-martial (114).

Wrecking a destroyer may count as comedy. A more somber chapter followed. Dickie presided over one of the most incompetently managed military episode in British history, saved from the annals of major disaster by its small size. That would be the Dieppe Invasion, the ill-conceived and ill-executed attempt to anticipate (in 1942) the Normandy Invasion of 1944.

Undismayed by any of this, Dickie nurtureda project to build an aircraft carrier on a man-made iceberg. To show the durability of his artificial ice, Dickie fired a pistol at it. The bullet indeed bounced off the artificcial ice--and stung the American chief of naval operations in the leg. (132)

Armed with this resume, Dickie won the appointment to what was, at the time, the position as Vicory of India--a ruler at times more powerful than the King himself.

Granted, Dickie's brief differed from any of his predecessors. The government sent him out not to preside over the Empire but to preside over its dissolution. Still, it is hard to think of anyone more grotesquely unsuited for an important office of trust & profit under the crown.

Yet, by all accounts, Dickie did a splendid job of it. Granted, there was epic-scale rioting and mass murder. But almost everyone concedes that it could have been far worse, and that it was Dickie's peculiar chemistry that made it work.

So, look again at his resume. What do we see? We see a man who has consorted and cavorted with royalty all his life--so, as peer or a superior to everyone he had to deal with in the subcontinent. We see, by corollary, a man who is besotted with ceremony and the trappings of office (one suspects he wore his medals to bed with him)--so, uniquely suited to provide over one of the greatest of ceremonies. We see a man almost impervious to any perception of his own shortcomings; a man who, in time of chaos and disaster, is ready to shout "full speed ahead."

And so, ideally equipped for a job which, in the end, he did quite well. Horses for courses. Anything that doesn't kill you will educate you--if you now how to put it to work.

[It did nothing to refurbish his general reputation, though. Later the Minister of Defense, Denis Healey, had to consider whether he should reappoint Dickie to a top defense post. Healey asked 40 of Dickie's underlings. Thirty-nine said "no." (368)

Mostly culled from Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann (2007), a ripping yarn if ever I read one. Numbers in parentheses are references to pages in that book.

Afterthought: Actually, there are two other events in Dickie's life that cry out to be remembered. One, he was perhaps the principal force behind the marriage of his nephew, Philip Battenberg, to his Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth. And two: his life came to a violent end when he was blown up aboard his yacht by Irish terrorists. "The I.R.A. are not looking for an old man like me," he had said with characteristic charm, insousiance, and error.

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