Final Betrayal by Mark Felton

Author:Mark Felton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS027100
ISBN: eBook ISBN:9781844684786
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2010-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Mountbatten was forced to delay launching Zipper until 9 September as a result of Operation Python. The question was why had the British government enacted Python when they knew that Zipper was about to be launched? It appeared that the answer was that the decision was a political rather than a military one. A general election was coming up, and the government was after servicemen’s votes. ‘It looks like an electioneering dodge’,11 opined Admiral Cunningham in one of his rare displays of support for Mountbatten. According to Lieutenant General Sir Henry Pownall, Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, Grigg used his dislike of Mountbatten to attack him by introducing Python, and so he used Python to attack him. ‘Now, when P.J. [Grigg] doesn’t like someone, he does not neglect an opportunity to stick in a knife,’12 wrote Pownall. In reality, although Grigg may have thought that he was damaging Mountbatten, in reality this cheap and selfserving ploy was actually hurting the British war effort and costing British lives, specifically prisoners-of-war who could have been liberated early from their purgatory in Japanese hands. Python had destroyed any chance of Zipper being launched before the Japanese surrender, and it doomed hundreds of POWs to death as relief never reached them until three weeks after the final surrender. Many lives would have been saved as the camps would have been liberated as the Zipper forces pushed out from the beachheads. It also robbed the British of a chance to finally lay to rest the humiliation of Singapore’s surrender in February 1942 by wresting control of the city back off the Japanese by force, and would do much to stir up anti-British and independence movements in the immediate post war period. Operation Python must rank as one of the classic examples of a selfserving politician meddling in military affairs to the detriment of people’s lives.

In July 1945, Mountbatten intended to fly to London to try and get additional supplies from the Chiefs of Staff, but he was diverted by Churchill and flew into a wrecked and gutted Berlin to attend the Potsdam Conference, the meeting that decided the shape of the post-war world and also set the stage for the Cold War. Mountbatten was about to receive some earth shattering news. At Potsdam, General George C. Marshall, the US Chief of Staff, took Mountbatten to one side and told him, in the strictest secrecy, that the United States had the atomic bomb and that they would drop it on Japan in early August. Later that same day, Prime Minister Churchill confirmed Marshall’s comments to Mountbatten. ‘You are going to have to revise your plans,’ said Churchill to Mountbatten. ‘The war with Japan will be over in less than a month. We are going to use a new bomb, an atomic bomb, against the cities of Japan, and the Emperor will be forced to capitulate.’13 The new American President Harry S. Truman told Mountbatten the same thing as well, though interestingly he failed to inform General MacArthur.

The

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