Freedom at Midnight Read Free

were the
    leaders of the Congress Party, representing most of India's 300 million Hindus. To them, the division of the subcontinent would be a mutilation of their historic homeland, an act almost sacrilegious in its nature.
    Britain was trapped between those two apparently irreconcilable demands. Time and again British efforts to resolve the problem had failed. So desperate had the situation become that the present viceroy, an honest, forthright soldier, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, had just submitted to the Attlee government a final, and drastic, recommendation: should all else fail, he proposed, the British should "withdraw from India in our own method and in our own time and with due regard to our own interests and we will regard any attempt to interfere with our program as an act of war which we will meet with all the resources at our command."
    Britain and India, Attlee told Mountbatten, were moving toward a major disaster. The situation could not be allowed to continue. Wavell was a man of painfully few words, almost hopelessly inarticulate, and had been unable to establish any real contact with his loquacious Indian interlocutors. A fresh face, a new approach, was desperately needed if a crisis was to be averted. Each morning brought a batch of cables to the India Office announcing an outburst of wanton savagery in some new corner of the subcontinent. It was, Attlee indicated, Mountbatten's solemn duty to take the post he had been offered.*
    A sense of foreboding filled Mountbatten as he listened to the Prime Minister's words. He still thought India was "an absolutely hopeless proposition." He liked and admired Wavell, and he had often discussed India's problems with him during his periodic visits to Delhi as Supreme Commander in Southeast Asia.
    Wavell had all the right ideas, Mountbatten thought. "If
    * Although Mountbatten didn't know it, the idea of sending him to India had been suggested to Attlee by the man at the Prime Minister's side during their meeting, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps. It had come up at a secret conversation in London in December, between Cripps and Krishna Menon, an outspoken Indian leftist and intimate of the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru. Menon had suggested to Nehru that Congress saw little hope of progress in India as long as Wavell was viceroy and had advanced the name of a man Nehru held in highest regard, Louis Mountbatten, as a possible substitute. Menon became independent India's first High Commissioner in London and later, ambassador to the U.N.
    he couldn't do it, what's the point of my trying to take it on?" Yet he was beginning to understand that there was no escape. He was going to be forced to accept a job in which the risk of failure was enormous and in which he could easily shatter the brilliant reputation he'd brought out of the war.
    If Attlee was going to drive him into a corner, Mount-batten was determined to impose on the Prime Minister the political conditions that would give him some hope of success. His talks with Wavell had given him an idea what they must be.
    He could not accept, he told the Prime Minister, unless the government agreed to make an unequivocal public announcement of a precise date on which British rule in India would terminate. Only that, Mountbatten felt, would convince India's skeptical intelligentsia that Britain was really leaving and infuse her leaders with the sense of urgency needed to get them into realistic negotiations.*
    Second, he demanded something no other viceroy had ever dreamed of asking: full powers to carry out his assignment without reference to London, and above all, without constant interference from London. The Attlee government could give the young admiral his final destination, but he alone was going to set his course and run the ship along the way.
    "Surely," Attlee said, "you're not asking for plenipotentiary powers above His Majesty's Government, are you?"
    "I am afraid, sir," answered