Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma ( born Prince Louis of Battenberg ; 25 June 1900 – 27 August 1979 ), was a British statesman and naval officer, an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and second cousin once removed to Elizabeth II.

In 1979 Mountbatten was assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army ( IRA ), who planted a bomb in his yacht, the Shadow V, at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, in the Republic of Ireland.

Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, Prince Louis of Battenberg and their four children Princess Alice of Battenberg, Louise, George and Louis. Lord Mountbatten was born as His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg, although his German styles and titles were dropped in 1917.

In June 1917, when the Royal Family stopped using their German names and titles and adopted the more British-sounding " Windsor ": Prince Louis of Battenberg became Louis Mountbatten, and was created Marquess of Milford Haven.

His second son acquired the courtesy title Lord Louis Mountbatten and was known as Lord Louis informally until his death.

David Kahanamoku, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Edward, and Duke Kahanamoku, c. 1920. After his war service, and having been promoted to sub-lieutenant on 15 January 1919, Mountbatten attended Christ's College, Cambridge for two terms where he studied engineering in a programme that was specially designed for ex-servicemen.

In 1934, Mountbatten was appointed to his first command-the destroyer HMS Daring.

Mountbatten was appointed a Personal Naval Aide-de-Camp to King George VI on 23 June 1936, and, having joined the Naval Air Division of the Admiralty in July 1936, he attended the coronation of King George VI in May 1937.

In July 1939 Mountbatten was granted a patent ( UK Number 508, 956 ) for a system for maintaining a warship in a fixed position relative to another ship.

When war broke out in 1939, Mountbatten became commander of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla aboard his ship Kelly, which was famous for its many daring exploits.

On the night 9 May / 10 May 1940, Kelly was torpedoed amidships by a German E-boat S 31 of the Dutch coast and Mountbatten subsequently commanded the 5th Destroyer Flotilla from the destroyer HMS Javelin.

Coward was a personal friend of Mountbatten, and copied some of his speeches into the film.

In August 1941, Mountbatten was appointed captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious which lay in Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs following action at Malta in the Mediterranean in January.

Mountbatten was a favourite of Winston Churchill, ( although after 1948 Churchill never spoke to him again since he was famously annoyed with Mountbatten's later role in the independence of India and Pakistan ), and on 27 October 1941 Mountbatten replaced Roger Keyes as Chief of Combined Operations and received promotion to commodore.

Mountbatten, who was promoted to the acting rank of vice-admiral in March 1942, was in large part responsible for the planning and organisation of The Raid at St. Nazaire in mid 1942, an operation resulting in the disuse of one of the most heavily defended docks in Nazi-occupied France until well after war's end, the ramifications of which greatly contributed to allied supremacy in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Historian Brian Loring Villa concluded that Mountbatten conducted the raid without authority, but that his intention to do so was known to several of his superiors, who took no action to stop him.

Another project that Mountbatten proposed to Churchill was Project Habakkuk.

South East Asia Command was disbanded in May 1946 and Mountbatten returned home with the substantive rank of rear-admiral.

Mountbatten was fond of Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru and his liberal outlook for the country.

Mountbatten admitted " Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people's beds.

After an official engagement of five months, as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, he married Elizabeth on 20 November 1947.

Their children were John Vinton Dahlgren, who married Elizabeth Wharton Drexel ; Eric Bernard Dahlgren, Sr., who married Lucy Wharton Drexel ; and Ulrica Dahlgren, who married Josiah Pierce, and was the grandmother of Romaine Dahlgren Pierce, wife of David Mountbatten, 3rd Marquess of Milford Haven.

Her father married Lady Louise Mountbatten three years later.

The title was created for a fourth time on 19 November 1947 by George VI, who bestowed it the next day on his son-in-law Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, when he married Princess Elizabeth.

In 1947, Princess Elizabeth ( as Queen Elizabeth II was then titled ), heir presumptive to King George VI, married Philip Mountbatten.

* Ludwig ( 1854 – 1921 ), created first Marquess of Milford Haven in 1917, married in 1884 Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine ( 1863 – 1950 ), with issue ( including Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, Queen Louise of Sweden, and the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma ).

Other prominent members of the Ashley-Cooper family include Liberal politician Evelyn Ashley, second son of the 7th Earl ; his son, noted politician, Wilfrid Ashley, 1st Baron Mount Temple, who was a member of the Conservative Party, and his daughter, Edwina, who married Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and last Vicereine of India.

Ashley and Mountbatten were married on 18 July 1922 at St Margaret's, Westminster.

In 1946 he married The Honourable Patricia Mountbatten, daughter of the naval commander Viscount Mountbatten ( later the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma ).

*** Princess Louise of Battenberg ( 1889 – 1965 ), renounced her title in 1917 to become Lady Louise Mountbatten, married the future King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden in 1923.

Prince Louis's second daughter Princess Louise of Battenberg become Queen Consort of Sweden as she married King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden in 1923 and his younger son Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma served as the last Viceroy of India.

Prince Louis's elder daughter, Princess Alice of Battenberg, married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark ; their son, Prince Philippos of Greece and Denmark, married the heiress presumptive of the British throne, later Elizabeth II, after having renounced his Greek titles and taken his grandfather's and uncle's surname, Mountbatten.

During World War I, two of her sisters who had married into the Russian royal family were murdered by communist revolutionaries, and she and her husband abandoned their German titles and adopted the British-sounding surname of Mountbatten, which was simply a translation into English of the German " Battenberg ".

Ashley had been married in 1901 to " Maudie " Cassel, only daughter of the Edwardian financier Sir Ernest Cassel, and their elder daughter the Honourable Edwina Ashley, a considerable heiress, was married in 1922 to Lord Louis Mountbatten, later the last Viceroy of India.

Ivar Bryce's niece Janet Mercedes Bryce had been married to David Mountbatten and was Janet Mountbatten the mother of Ivar and George.

* 1979 – A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb kills British World War II admiral Louis Mountbatten and three others while they are boating on holiday in Sligo, Republic of Ireland.

Pursuing his interests in technological development and gadgetry, Mountbatten joined the Portsmouth Signals School in August 1924 and then went on to briefly study electronics at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

Mountbatten claimed that the lessons learned from the Dieppe Raid were necessary for planning the Normandy invasion on D-Day nearly two years later.

Lord Mountbatten with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru the first Prime Minister of sovereign India in Government House, Lady Mountbatten standing to their left. When India and Pakistan attained independence on 15 August 1947, Mountbatten remained in New Delhi for ten months, serving as India's first governor general until June 1948.

Lord and Lady Mountbatten with Muhammad Ali JinnahNotwithstanding the self-promotion of his own part in Indian independence — notably in the television series The Life and Times of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Mountbatten of Burma, produced by his son-in-law Lord Brabourne and Dominique Lapierre, and Larry Collins's Freedom at Midnight ( of which he was the main quoted source ) — his record is seen as very mixed ; one common view is that he hastened the independence process unduly and recklessly, foreseeing vast disruption and loss of life and not wanting this to occur on the British watch, but thereby actually causing it to occur, especially in Punjab and Bengal.

Mountbatten arrives on board HMS Glasgow at Malta to assume command of the Mediterranean Fleet, 16 May 1952After India, Mountbatten served as commander of the 1st cruiser squadron in the Mediterranean Fleet and, having been granted the substantive rank of vice admiral on 22 June 1949, he became Second-in-Command of the Mediterranean Fleet in April 1950.

Mountbatten attended the funeral of King George VI in June 1952 and, having been promoted to the substantive rank of full admiral on 27 February 1953, he attended the coronation of the Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953.

In his biography of Mountbatten, Philip Ziegler comments on his character:

Lord and Lady Mountbatten had two daughters: Patricia Mountbatten, 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma ( born on 14 February 1924 ), sometime lady-in-waiting to the Queen, and Lady Pamela Carmen Louise ( Hicks ) ( born on 19 April 1929 ), who accompanied them to India in 1947-48 and was also sometime lady-in-waiting to the Queen.