Mountbatten's official biography by Philip Ziegler contains some interesting passages regarding Mountbatten's attitude to the TSR 2.
Early in November [1957] Sandys [Duncan Sandys Minister of Defence whose Defence White Paper of February 1957 was regarded by many in the military as a recipe for disaster] visited Portsmouth, dined aboard the Victory and went on to spend the weekend at Broadlands. ‘This will be my first chance of a really quiet spell alone with him,’ announced Mountbatten in his newsletter. ‘Wish me luck!’ This was why even the most hostile admirals had recognized that Mountbatten had something to offer the Navy which nobody else could provide; no other First Sea Lord would have had the style, the status or, for that matter, the country house to entertain the Minister of Defence and deal with him on equal terms. ‘We got on very well,’ Mountbatten told Patricia, ‘too well, I fear.’ He underestimated his achievement. No firm bargains were struck but when the weekend was over it was more or less agreed that, if Sandys would accept the larger Navy of 88,000 men, Mountbatten would agree that west of Suez the aircraft-carriers would concentrate on an anti-submarine role. An extra aircraft-carrier was bought for the price of closing some naval air-stations and the commando-carrier got the Minister’s blessing. The only serious disagreement came over the aircraft the Navy was to use in future operations. The Navy wanted the NA 39 - the Buccaneer, a fast, low-flying aircraft that would come in to attack below the enemy’s radar cover. The Air Force said that this would no doubt do for sailors but that they needed their own aircraft - the heavier, more sophisticated and more expensive TSR 2. Sandys at first insisted that the two Services must use the same aircraft and only after nine months allowed development to proceed on both models. The resultant controversy lingered on for nearly a decade, cost the nation a king’s ransom and gave Mountbatten occasion, time and time again, to employ to the full his talents as a fighter in the Whitehall jungle
Mountbatten - Relations with Solly Zuckerman
Edward Playfair [in 1960] was the newly appointed Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, occupant of the office that, under Sandys, had seemed to the Chiefs of Staff to be gaining dangerously in importance.
Solly Zuckerman, the Minister’s Chief Scientific Adviser and Mountbatten’s old ally from Combined Operations, had been lured back from academic life by the promise of fresh worlds to conquer. He complemented Mountbatten admirably. Sceptical, iconoclastic, analytical yet brilliantly perceptive, he both fuelled the C.D.S. with the ideas that were to shape Britain’s defence policy over the next five years and acted as a brake on Mountbatten’s more impetuous extravagances. The ‘Zuk-Batten Axis’ dominated its section of Whitehall. Some people have sought to represent Zuckerman as a puppet-master pulling the strings of a personable but vacuous Admiral, others see him as Mountbatten’s creature and hatchet-man. One image is as false as the other. Both men were self-willed and inclined to arrogance; each respected the other’s intelligence and abilities; each accepted that, if the other disagreed strongly with his ideas, there was at least a case for re-examination. They composed a partnership, the sum of which was greater than the parts.
Battle for TSR 2
It was not only defence reorganization that embittered Mountbatten’s relationship with his colleagues. It was the function of the C.D.S. to be above the inter-Service rivalries that occasionally racked the Chiefs of Staff, in the same way as the Minister of Defence was above the conflicts that divided the Service Ministers. The Minister of Defence, however, was a politician whose first loyalty was to his party and Cabinet colleagues; the C.D.S. had spent all his working life in one of the three bodies between which he was now supposed to arbitrate. In such circumstances total objectivity was too much to hope for but an approximation to it was expected. Dickson had been generally accepted as impartial; Mountbatten was another matter, if only because his temperament and the active role which he pursued made him far more conspicuous than his predecessor.
The main clashes of interest came usually between the Navy and the Air Force. Boyle and Pike were convinced that Mountbatten abused his position to obtain advantage for his beloved Navy. More objectively, the Minister of Defence, Harold Watkinson, felt that the C.D.S. had never really shed his naval aura. Yet Alfred Earle, himself an airman and, as Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, well placed to judge his chief’s proclivities, believed that Mountbatten was as nearly impartial on inter-Service issues as it was possible for him to be.
However innocent or guilty Mountbatten may have been, he could have behaved more tactfully. By May 1960 the faithful Brockman was so alarmed at the envenomed atmosphere that he warned the C.D.S. that Pike was disturbed ‘because he thinks you have been handling recent meetings in a dictatorial manner’. In general, Brockman went on, ‘he is believed to be upset at the part you have played in stating the Navy’s case recently’. A C.D.S. must not only be fair, but must be seen to be fair; in this Mountbatten failed. Whether he was indeed unfair is largely a matter of semantics. On two or three of the major issues that divided Navy and Air Force, Mountbatten took the Navy’s side, but these were matters which he believed to be of critical importance, far transcending any mere inter-Service squabble. Should he, for instance, have remained neutral in the great battle over the TSR 2 and the Buccaneer? Mountbatten was convinced that, if the Air Force was allowed to pursue the exaggeratedly expensive TSR 2, they would bankrupt the defence budget and still not end up with the aircraft desired. He thought it essential that Navy and Air Force should standardize on the Buccaneer, an aircraft of lesser performance but vastly cheaper, more readily available and already largely proven. This, he felt, was an issue on which an impartial C.D.S. must decide the best course and fight to impose it. To the Air Force, however, he was displaying not impartiality but wanton favouritism - a naval man supporting a naval plane at the expense of the rival Service.
Mountbatten did his best to oppose the TSR 2 without appearing to do so. First he tried to persuade Solly Zuckerman to lobby the Minister of Defence. He drafted a paper which he suggested the Scientific Adviser might send to Watkinson and scribbled in pencil in a covering note: ‘This is the first occasion on which your action is absolutely vital to the Country’s Defence Policy, and to save the Minister from making a ghastly mistake. You know why I can’t help you in Public. It is NOT moral cowardice but fear that my usefulness as Chairman would be seriously impaired. BURN THIS!’ Evidently Zuckerman alone did not carry big enough guns to carry the day. Ten days later Mountbatten approached Watkinson direct, in a hand-written letter delivered at the Minister’s house:
In the context of the present Defence Organisation I am afraid I have had to make a choice between giving you what I believe to be correct advice and destroying my value to you as the impartial Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, in view of my known opposition to the TSR 2 when First Sea Lord.
I have tried to get round this by giving you my extremely strong views in private about the TSR2-NA39 controversy; but, as I warned you, I did not intend to repeat these views so emphatically in public as to cause a rupture between C.A.S. and myself.
Nor do I intend to do propaganda with the other two Chiefs of Staff, which could cause bad feeling between them and Tom Pike as well.
Mountbatten then recapitulated the arguments for the NA39, or Buccaneer, and against the TSR 2. If he had been Chief of Air Staff, he said, he would either have gone for an improved Buccaneer or for some radically new innovation like Barnes Wallis’s Variable geometry’ plane.
So you can see what a difficult decision I have had to make - should I publicly fight the Air Ministry and thus damage the present C.O.S. organisation, or should I let them persist in pushing through a scheme I believe to be a formidable waste of money, and which may never come into service.
What has come out of my dilemma is a firm conviction that by the end of the year the Prime Minister and you will have to set up an investigation into the whole organisation of defence. I shall leave it to my colleagues while I am away to try and work out proposals for handling this investigation
Mountbatten’s somewhat transparent deviousness gained him little; the Air Force had no doubt that he was leading the attack upon their favourite project, and merely added duplicity to the other charges against him. They took it for granted that, whenever anything went wrong, the C.D.S. was responsible. Quite often they were right. In March 1962 George Edwards of the British Aircraft Corporation, the firm building the TSR 2, did an excellent job selling his aeroplane to Sir Frederick Scherger, the Australian Chief of Defence Staff. Next year Scherger visited London, saw Mountbatten and Zuckerman, and left — according to the somewhat engage historian of the project - with his enthusiasm for the TSR 2 mysteriously diminished. At lunch with Julian Amery, the Air Minister, Scherger is said to have asked pointedly ‘why Earl Mountbatten was opposed to the project’. Lord Zuckerman denies that anything he said could have disillusioned Scherger, and a transcript of Mountbatten’s talk with the Australian would probably prove similarly innocuous. Even when he wanted to, however, the C.D.S. was inept at concealing his feelings. It would have been surprising if Scherger had left his office without a clear impression of his dislike for the whole affair.
Mountbatten overplayed his hand. Watkinson, who anyway felt that the Buccaneer could not match the Air Force’s requirements, finally became so weary of the C.D.S.’s importunities that he ordered him never to mention the subject again. Mountbatten obeyed. It was not till several years and many millions of pounds later that the then Minister of Defence, Denis Healey, finally abandoned the enterprise. ‘One of the tragedies of the aerospace industry is that the R.A.F. didn’t buy the Buccaneer and develop it when it first came out,’ wrote Healey, ‘but they were determined to have their own aircraft.’ On the whole this judgement has stood the test of time. Mountbatten today seems more nearly right than his Air Force opponents. His tactics, however, were questionable. He pushed his campaign against the TSR 2 to the limit of the scrupulous, some would say beyond it. The hostility that he generated was to cause him serious problems in the following years.
This was by no means the only case in which Mountbatten seemed to the Air Force to be unacceptably prejudiced. The long-drawn-out battle over the future of Coastal Command came to a head shortly after Mountbatten became C.D.S……