World of Criminal Justice on Louis Mountbatten, Lord
Louis Mountbatten, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, was a British naval leader and statesman who served his country from 1920 until his assassination by Irish terrorists in 1979. Mountbatten was the last British viceroy in India, guiding the new nations of India and Pakistan to independence in 1947. Mountbatten was born on June 25, 1900 in Windsor, England. He was the son of Prince Louis Alexander, a cousin of King George V of England. Mountbatten was educated at the Royal Naval Academy at Dartmouth and entered the British Navy in 1913. He was the uncle of Queen Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip, and the great-uncle of Prince Charles.
Commissioned as a naval lieutenant in 1920, Mountbatten became the aide-de-camp to his cousin, the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) in 1921. Promoted to captain in the early 1930s, Mountbatten was a world traveler, fluent in French and German. By the late 1930s he had become the aide-de-camp to King George V, who assumed the crown after Edward, his brother, abdicated. With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Mountbatten resumed his naval career in earnest, commanding a destroyer that was sunk in the Battle of Crete in 1941.
After he lost this ship, the Navy gave Mountbatten command of an aircraft carrier. However, he was recalled to headquarters in March of 1942 to become chief of combined operations. In this position Mountbatten planned and coordinated commando raids along the French coast. The following year he was named supreme allied commander of the Southeast Asia Command, a position he held until 1946. Mountbatten successfully conducted the campaign to take Burma from the Japanese.
Following the war Mountbatten became the viceroy of India, the colonial governor of the Indian subcontinent, and wielded enormous power on behalf of the British Empire. Mountbatten quickly realized that the British government had to give up control and had to grant political independence to India. In 1947 he worked to create the dominions of India and Pakistan and then stayed on to serve as the first governor general of India.
In 1948 Mountbatten returned to England and resumed his naval career. He became a lord commissioner of the admiralty, fourth sea lord. In 1950 he assumed command of supplies and transport. In 1952 Mountbatten was appointed commander in chief of all allied forces in the Mediterranean by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He was in charge of all forces in the area except for the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
Mountbatten became first sea lord in 1955 and served until 1959. He was made admiral of the fleet in 1956 and served as chief of the United Kingdom Defense Staff and chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee from 1959 to 1965. In 1965 Mountbatten became governor of the Isle of Wight. During the 1970s he gained international prominence by appearing in a television documentary series chronicling his life. He was killed on August 27, 1979 when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated a bomb on his yacht as it sailed in Donegal Bay, off the Irish coast.
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