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48.02.18B (1205w)
TO EARL MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA1 February 18, 1948
[Washington, DC]
Dear Mountbatten: I have just received this morning your letter of October 10 transmitting a copy of your Report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. I do not know why it took so long to make the journey from India. Please accept this explanation as my apology for my long delay in acknowledgment.
I appreciate very much the generous expressions of your deed of gift on the fly-leaf of the book and of your generous reference to me in your letter.2
I have already glanced through the first twenty pages, and will give the Report an immediate reading.
It seems a long time since those days of discussion, argument and conclusions preceding each long step towards the various operations which brought about the end of the conflict.
Incidentally, Mrs. Marshall is wintering in our little place at Pinehurst, North Carolina, and I am reminded of you each weekend because my plane lands on a little field near Pinehurst which is close by the hotel where you and Dill and I spent an extremely hot night, and I think you and Dill later talked almost throughout the night of the pros and cons of a cross-channel operation.3
I have followed your distinguished work in India and had the opportunity last December of reading a summary of the situation, apparently for the British Foreign Office, by Ismay. He, incidentally, was in Washington the other day and I had him for dinner with as many of his old friends as were about town. It was a delight to see him again and to find him looking so well. He gave us informally and most confidentially an outline of the situation in your region.4
While in London recently, I had dinner with Mr. Churchill and my former colleagues, Cunningham, Brook[e] and Portal, and also Hollis and the civilian secretary.5 Portal was unchanged. Cunningham looked a little thin but I found Brook[e] considerably changed through he seemed in good spirits.
I, myself, like you have been having a very difficult time and it has reached a veritable peak of difficulties at the present time. I am still in the difficult position, which was spared my British associates during the war, of being constantly under the cross fire of Congressional committees and the continual subject of Congressional debates. It is not a very restful existence, but I have promised Mr. Truman I will stay with him until the end of the year. Thereafter, Mrs. Marshall takes control over my decisions in such matters. Either that, she threatens, or I will have to go my own way.
I note what you said in your letter about Stilwell, but I have not had time to find the reference to those difficulties in the Report.6
I do hope that you will triumph over your problems in India. There seems to be general support for all that you have done.
With warm regards, Faithfully yours,
GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers (Secretary of State, General)
1. Mountbatten had been Supreme Allied Commander of the South-East Asia Command (SEAC) between October 1943 and June 1946. In December 1946, he had been named Viceroy of India, arriving in that country in March 1947. He had insisted upon being given plenipotentiary powers, and thus could make decisions without having them referred to the Secretary of State for India in London. British rule in India was expected to end in June 1948, and his job was to settle the outstanding governmental issues with India’s varied political leaders and independent princes. Civil unrest, which included riots and massacres between Hindus and Muslims, and pressures to partition the area into Hindu and Muslim states, forced a speed-up in the negotiating process. India and Pakistan became independent of Britain on August 15, 1947. (Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Reflections on the Transfer of Power and Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Lecture, 1968 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968].) As the monarchy had not yet been abolished (a republic was proclaimed in 1950), Mountbatten remained in India as governor general until June 1948.
2. Mountbatten had written: “Submitted to the great war time leader and Chief of Staff, US Army, General of the Army George C. Marshall with gratitude and deep appreciation for his unfailing support and friendship.” (Report to the Combined Chiefs of Staff by the Supreme Allied Commander South-East Asia, 1943–1946 [N.p.: n.d.] in GCMRL/Rare Books Collection.) In his letter to Marshall, he wrote: “I wanted to have the privilege and pleasure of sending you a personal copy which I hope you may care to keep as a small souvenir of how much I owe to you for your great personal support of me throughout the South-East Asia campaign.” (Mountbatten to Marshall, October 10, 1947, GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers [Secretary of State, General].)
3. Mountbatten had been sent to the United States in June 1942 to argue the British Chiefs of Staff’s case for a North African campaign as opposed to a cross-Channel operation. Marshall took him and Sir John Dill on a tour of some southern army bases. On the night of June 8–9 they stayed near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which is close to Pinehurst. See photograph #13 in Papers of GCM, vol. 3 (following p. 224) and pp. 225–26, 232–33 on the trip.
4. Sir Hastings Ismay (Baron Ismay in January 1947) had been Winston Churchill’s chief of staff during World War II. When Mountbatten was viceroy of India, Ismay was his chief of staff.
5. On December 2, 1947, Marshall had dinner with former Prime Minister Winston Churchill at his town house, 28 Hyde Park Gate, London. Andrew B. Cunningham (Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope after August 1945) had been the Royal Navy’s First Sea Lord between October 1943 and May 1946. Alan Brooke (Viscount Alanbrooke in 1946) had been chief of the Imperial General Staff between December 1941 and January 1946. Charles Portal (Baron Portal of Hungerford in 1945) had been Royal Air Force chief of air staff between October 1940 and October 1945. Leslie C. Hollis, formerly senior assistant secretary in the office of War Cabinet (1939–46), at this time was an acting lieutenant general and chief staff officer to the minister of defence. Sir John Colville was Winston Churchill’s principal private secretary.
6. Joseph W. Stilwell had been Mountbatten’s deputy between November 16, 1943, and October 21, 1944. Mountbatten wrote: “I had hoped to be able to omit references to certain differences of opinion which arose between General Stilwell and myself; for I got on very well with him personally, and the differences that arose never affected our personal relations.
“Unfortunately a book has been published in the United States by a member of the C.B.I. [China-Burma-India Theater] Public Relations Staff, which advertises a number of these differences.
“I discussed this matter with Ike Eisenhower when he was in London in 1946, and he agreed that I should not now omit reference in my Report to any controversial matter published.
“I only hope that the impartial reader will realise that we were on the whole a very happy family in S.E.A.C.” (Mountbatten to Marshall, October 10, 1947, GCMRL/G. C. Marshall Papers [Secretary of State, General].)