You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [99]
The holiday outing turned into a “political statement” when a fifty-pound radio-controlled bomb was detonated on board, killing the grandfather, one of his grandsons, the aide, and the dowager.
A few hours later the following statement from the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army in Belfast was issued: “The IRA claim responsibility for the execution of Lord Louis Mountbatten. This operation is one of the discriminate ways we can bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country.”
Lord Louis Mountbatten was an anomaly for the royal family. In addition to being Queen Elizabeth’s cousin and the mentor to Prince Charles — Elizabeth’s son and heir to the throne of England — Lord Mountbatten was an honest-to-god “war hero” who served with distinction in World War II, including a stint as commander of the British destroyer HMS Kelly which was torpedoed several times (and immortalized by Noel Coward in the 1942 classic In Which We Serve), after which he continued service in Southeast Asia from 1943 to 1946.
After the war he was named viceroy of India, where he witnessed firsthand the strife and violence that went hand in hand with the handover of power to the Congress Party and the subsequent partition of the Indian subcontinent into separate Muslim and Hindu states.
To say that he was acquainted with unrest caused by religious tensions and political strife in an occupied land is a major understatement.
In addition to his actual service to England, Mountbatten was separated from other members of the royal family for another reason — he was almost universally well liked, and cheered by members of all of England’s vastly stratified social classes. Indeed, he also had a soft spot in his heart for Ireland and the Irish people, and since the early seventies had often vacationed there, ignoring the numerous security warnings that had become de rigueur for the entire royal family as a direct result of the so-called troubles pertaining to Northern Ireland.
For some, the murder/bomb plot was seen as a landmark event in the grand scheme of IRA military strategy, but the results were far less earth-shattering. Indeed, in the words of historians Simon Freeman and Ronald Payne: “The murder changed nothing in the province and only demonstrated, as if it was necessary, that determined terrorists often find ways to murder their chosen targets.”
Experts on such matters believed that the plot was really just bait, that is, a reason given to the Crown to reinstitute the sort of harsh security measures that tended to sway Irish public opinion toward the “downtrodden and overmatched revolutionaries” that the IRA positioned themselves as and away from the fascistic establishment of the military and police factions of the British government. Margaret Thatcher, the so-called Iron Lady, had just taken office as prime minister and was expected to take a very hard line on dealing with the disciples of Irish republicanism. The engineers of the bomb plot were sure that this would provide the excuse, but the prime minister failed to take the bait. Ever cautious, she concentrated her initial efforts, marshaling cooperation and coordination on interservice intelligence operations with an accent on the acquisition of information for prevention of future “terrorists’ acts” rather than on the type of public-animosity-inducing security crackdown that the plotters had anticipated.
Thus on a simple strategic level, the IRA plot had failed to achieve its desired outcome.
However this was not the only “downside” the plotters experienced.
Irish and British citizens alike were horrified at the choice of Lord Mountbatten as a target. In addition to his service to all British subjects, and his popularity, the former Supreme Allied Commander was viewed by many as being sympathetic toward if not actually supportive of Irish independence, given his own fondness for the land and its people, as well as his own experience as a firsthand