By 1942 Louis Mountbatten — great-grandson of Queen Victoria and a Royal Navy officer to the core — was Chief of Combined Operations, charged with carrying the war back to occupied Europe by raid. His commandos struck Vaagso and St Nazaire, where they rammed an explosive-packed destroyer into the one dry dock on the Atlantic coast big enough to take the battleship Tirpitz. The costly Dieppe raid of August 1942 bought hard lessons later spent on the Normandy beaches. In 1943 he became Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia, backing Slim's "Forgotten Army" through the long reconquest of Burma — the campaign that earned his later title, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

The figure shows Mountbatten in Royal Navy service dress — the dark-blue single-breasted jacket with medal ribbons and the peaked cap — standing composed, every inch the senior commander. He belongs in a British high-command display rather than a battlefield diorama: set him alongside Winston Churchill, the field commander Field Marshal Montgomery, and the architect of the air defence, Lord Dowding, for a grouping of the men who directed Britain's war.

W. Britain model 10216. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure on a sculpted groundwork base. Boxed.