Bernard Law Montgomery
1887 - 1976

The English field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount
Montgomery of Alamein, was an outstanding commander and hero of
the British people during World War II.
Bernard
Montgomery was born on Nov. 17, 1887. He went to St. Paul's
School in London and entered the army in 1908. He fought in
France during World War I and was mentioned in dispatches for
gallantry in action.
After the usual staff and command assignments, Montgomery was a
major general in command of the 3d Division in 1939. The
division moved to France with the British Expeditionary Force in
that year for the so-called Phony War. Montgomery participated
in the withdrawal to Dunkirk in the spring of 1940. In England
he became head of the 5th Corps in 1940, of the 12th Corps in
1941, and of the South East Command in 1942. In July 1942 he was
appointed commander of the British 8th Army in Egypt, a position
that marked the beginning of his rise to fame.
Northern Africa and Italy
Now a lieutenant general, Montgomery reorganized the 8th Army,
gave the officers and men confidence in themselves and in
eventual victory, and set about to defeat his opponent, German
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. When Rommel attacked at Alam Halfa
on August 31, Montgomery won a defensive battle. On October 23
at the Battle of El Alamein, Montgomery gained an offensive
victory. His defeat of the Italo-German army prompted an Axis
retreat out of Egypt to the Mareth Line positions in southern
Tunisia, 1,500 miles away. Although Montgomery pursued Rommel,
he was unable to trap him.
Montgomery was a full general before the end of 1942 and was
knighted on November 10 of that year. In February 1943 his 8th
Army came under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's Supreme Allied
Command and directly under Gen. Sir Harold Alexander, the Allied
ground force commander. In March, Montgomery took part in the
final Anglo-American offensive in Tunisia, which swept the Axis
forces entirely out of North Africa by May.
It was largely Montgomery's plan, one of concentrated rather
than dispersed landings, that dictated the invasion of Sicily on
July 10, 1943. While Gen. George Patton's U.S. 7th Army landed
on the southern coast of Sicily, Montgomery put his 8th Army
ashore on the eastern face. Montgomery then tried to drive up
the eastern coast to Messina, but his army was blocked at
Catania, and American forces reached Messina first.
Montgomery led his army across the Strait of Messina on Sept. 3,
1943, to the Italian mainland. He moved to the Taranto and Bari
areas of the eastern coast, where his forces captured the Foggia
airfields by October 1.
The 8th Army moved across the Biferno River and captured Termoli
after a complicated and brilliant operation that utilized an
amphibious landing together with a direct pressure force. But
bad weather and difficult terrain, plus obstinate German
resistance, prevented rapid progress, and by the end of 1943
Montgomery's army was immobile at the Sangro River.
Invasion of Normandy
At that time Montgomery was assigned to the United Kingdom,
where he took command of the British and Canadian forces
scheduled to participate in the cross-Channel attack. In
addition to being 21st Army Group commander, he was named the
Allied ground forces commander for the invasion of Normandy. On
June 6, 1944, D-day, he directed the British 2d Army and the
U.S. 1st Army, which crossed the Channel.
Montgomery's generalship came under criticism during the first 2
months of the European campaign because of his alleged caution
and slowness. He was to have captured Caen on D-day, but he took
it only on the forty-second day of the campaign. His Goodwood
attack also became the subject of much controversy. Yet
Montgomery virtually destroyed two German field armies in the
Argentan-Falaise pocket, closed on August 19, and he propelled
the four Allied armies across the Seine River in a pursuit that
came to an end only at the Siegfried Line.
Montgomery relinquished his command of the Allied ground forces
to Eisenhower on Sept. 1, 1944, a change contemplated long
before the invasion. He was promoted to field marshal on the
same day. He started the discussion now known as the broad-front
versus narrow-front strategy. Finally, Eisenhower gave
Montgomery permission to launch Operation Market-Garden, a
combined air-ground attack planned to get British forces across
the lower Rhine River in Holland. The airborne drop was
successful, but the ground attack failed, and the hope of
driving directly to Berlin and bringing the war to a quick end
vanished.
The winter fighting was bitter. It came to a climax on Dec. 16,
1944, when the Germans launched their Ardennes counteroffensive
and created the Battle of the Bulge. Eisenhower put Montgomery
in command of all the troops on the northern shoulder of the
Bulge.
Montgomery crossed the Rhine River late in March 1945, helped
encircle and reduce the industrial Ruhr, and swept across the
northern German plain to the Elbe River. He commanded the
British occupation forces and the Army of the Rhine (1945-1946),
then was chief of the imperial general staff (1946-1948). He was
chairman of the Western Europe Commanders in Chief Committee
(1948-1951) and deputy supreme Allied commander, Europe
(1951-1958). He retired in 1958 and wrote his memoirs. He died
on March 24, 1976, in Alton, Hampshire.
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Bernard Law Montgomery, the son of a bishop, was born in London
on 17th November 1887. He was educated at St Paul's School and
Sandhurst Military Academy and after graduating in 1908 joined
the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.
Montgomery served in India before being sent to France at the
beginning of the First World War. He was seriously wounded when
he was shot in the chest in October 1914 and was hospitalized in
England. He returned to the Western Front in 1916 and by 1918
was Chief of Staff of the 47th London Division.
Montgomery remained in the British Army and in 1926 became an
instructor at Camberley.
Promoted to the rank of major general he was sent to command
British forces Palestine in October, 1938.On the outbreak of the
Second World War Montgomery was sent to France with the British
Expeditionary Force. He led the 2nd Corps but was forced to
retreat to Dunkirk during Germany's Western Offensive and
arrived back in England on 1st June, 1940.
Montgomery was placed in command of the 5th Corps (July
1940-April 1941), the 12th Corps (April 1941-December 1941) and
the South-Eastern Army (December 1941-August 1942).
In July 1942 Erwin Rommel and the Deutsches Afrika Korps were
only 113km (70 miles) from Alexandria. The situation was so
serious that Winston Churchill made the long journey to Egypt to
discover for himself what needed to be done. Churchill decided
to make changes to the command structure. General Harold
Alexander was placed in charge of British land forces in the
Middle East and Montgomery was chosen to replace Claude
Auchinleck as commander of the Eighth Army.
On 30th August, 1942, Erwin Rommel attacked at Alam el Halfa.
Montgomery responded by ordering his troops to withdraw to El
Alamein and to establish a good defensive line from the coast to
the impassable Qattara Depression. Montgomery was now able to
make sure that Rommel and the German Army was unable to make any
further advances into Egypt.
Over the next six weeks Montgomery began to stockpile vast
quantities of weapons and ammunition to make sure that by the
time he attacked he possessed overwhelming firepower. By the
middle of October the Eighth Army totalled 195,000 men, 1,351
tanks and 1,900 pieces of artillery. This included large numbers
of recently delivered Sherman M4 and Grant M3 tanks.
On 23rd October Montgomery launched Operation Lightfoot with the
largest artillery bombardment since the First World War. The
attack came at the worst time for the Deutsches Afrika Korps as
Erwin Rommel was on sick leave in Austria. His replacement,
General George Stumme, died of a heart-attack during the 1000
gun bombardment of the German lines. Stume was replaced by
General Ritter von Thoma and Adolf Hitler phoned Rommel to order
him to return to Egypt immediately.
The Germans defended their positions well and after two days the
Eighth Army had made little progress and Montgomery ordered an
end to the attack. When Erwin Rommel returned he launched a
counterattack at Kidney Ridge (27th October). Montgomery now
returned to the offensive and the 9th Australian Division
created a salient in the enemy positions, which they managed to
hold despite a series of German attacks.
Winston Churchill was disappointed by the Eighth Army's lack of
success and accused Montgomery of fighting a "half-hearted"
battle. Montgomery ignored these criticisms and instead made
plans for a new offensive, Operation Supercharge.
On 1st November 1942, Montgomery launched an attack on the
Deutsches Afrika Korps at Kidney Ridge. After initially
resisting the attack, Rommel decided he no longer had the
resources to hold his line and on the 3rd November he ordered
his troops to withdraw. However, Adolf Hitler overruled his
commander and the Germans were forced to stand and fight.
The next day Montgomery ordered his men forward. The Eighth Army
broke through the German lines and Erwin Rommel, in danger of
being surrounded, was eventually given permission by Hitler to
retreat. Those soldiers on foot, including large numbers of
Italian soldiers, were unable to move fast enough and were taken
prisoner.
For a while it looked like the the British would cut off
Rommel's army but a sudden rain storm on 6th November turned the
desert into a quagmire and the chasing army was slowed down.
Rommel, now with only twenty tanks left, managed to get to
Sollum on the Egypt-Libya border.
On 8th November Erwin Rommel learned of the Allied invasion of
Morocco and Algeria that was under the command of General Dwight
D. Eisenhower. His depleted army now faced a war on two fronts.
The British Army recaptured Tobruk on 13th November, 1942,
bringing the battle at El Alamein to an end. During the campaign
half of Rommel's 100,000 man army was killed, wounded or taken
prisoner. He also lost over 450 tanks and 1,000 guns. The
British and Commonwealth forces suffered 13,500 casualties and
500 of their tanks were damaged. However, of these, 350 were
repaired and were able to take part in future battles.
Winston Churchill was convinced that the battle of El Alamein
marked the turning point in the war and ordered the ringing of
church bells all over Britain. As he said later:
"Before Alamein we never had a defeat, after Alamein we never
had a defeat."
Montgomery and the Eighth Army continued to move forward and
captured Tripoli on 23rd January, 1943. Rommel was unable to
mount a successful counterattack and on 9th March he was
replaced by Jurgen von Arnium as commander in chief of Axis
forces in Africa. This change failed to halt the Allied advance
in Africa and on 11th May, 1943, the Axis forces surrendered
Tunisia.
At the Casablanca Conference held in January 1943, Winston
Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to launch an
invasion of Sicily. It was hoped that if the island was taken
Italy might withdraw from the war. It was also argued that a
successful invasion would force Adolf Hitler to send troops from
the Eastern Front and help to relieve pressure on the Red Army
in the Soviet Union.
The operation was placed under the supreme command of General
Dwight D. Eisenhower. General Harold Alexander was commander of
ground operations and his 15th Army Group included Montgomery
(8th Army) and General George Patton (US 7th Army). Admiral
Andrew Cunningham was in charge of naval operations and Air
Marshal Arthur Tedder was air commander.
On 10th July 1943, the 8th Army landed at five points on the
south-eastern tip of the island and the US 7th Army at three
beaches to the west of the British forces. The Allied troops met
little opposition and Patton and his troops quickly took Gela,
Licata and Vittoria. The British landings were also unopposed
and Syracuse was taken on the the same day. This was followed by
Palazzolo (11th July), Augusta (13th July) and Vizzini (14th
July), whereas the US troops took the Biscani airfield and
Niscemi (14th July).
General George Patton now moved to the west of the island and
General Omar Bradley headed north and the German Army was forced
to retreat to behind the Simeto River. Patton took Palermo on
22nd July cutting off 50,000 Italian troops in the west of the
island. Patton now turned east along the northern coast of the
island towards the port of Messina.
Meanwhile Montgomery and the 8th Army were being held up by
German forces under Field Marshal Albrecht Kesselring. The
Allies carried out several amphibious assaults attempted to cut
off the Germans but they were unable to stop the evacuation
across the Messina Straits to the Italian mainland. This
included 40,000 German and 60,000 Italian troops, as well as
10,000 German vehicles and 47 tanks.
On 17th August 1943, General George Patton and his troops
marched into Messina. The capture of Sicily made it possible to
clear the way for Allied shipping in the Mediterranean. It also
helped to undermine the power of Benito Mussolini and Victor
Emmanuel III forced him to resign.
Montgomery, as commander of the 8th Army, led the invasion of
Italy on 3rd September, 1943. When he landed at Reggio he
experienced little resistance and later that day British
warships landed the 1st Parachute Division at Taranto. Six days
later the US 6th Corps arrived at Salerno. These troops faced a
heavy bombardment from German troops and the beachhead was not
secured until 20th September.
The German Army fought ferociously in southern Italy and the
Allied armies made only slow progress as the moved north towards
Rome. The 5th Army took Naples on 1st October and later that day
the 8th Army captured the Foggia airfields.
In December 1943, Montgomery was appointed head of the 2nd Army
and commander of all ground forces in the proposed invasion of
Europe. Montgomery believed he was better qualified than General
Dwight Eisenhower to have been given overall control of
Operation Overlord. However, as the United States provided most
of the men, material and logistical support, Winston Churchill
was unable to get the decision changed.
Soon after the D-Day invasion Montgomery proposed Operation
Market-Garden. The combined ground and airborne attack was
designed to gain crossings over the large Dutch rivers, the
Mass, Waal and Neder Rijn, to aid the armoured advance of the
British 2nd Army. On 17th September 1944, three divisions of the
1st Allied Airbourne Corps landed in Holland. At the same time
the British 30th Corps advanced from the Meuse-Escaut Canal. The
bridges at Nijmegen and Eindhoven were taken but a German
counter-attack created problems at Arnhem. Of the 9,000 Allied
troops at Arnhem, only 2,000 were left when they were ordered to
withdraw across the Rhine on 25th September.
After the failure of Op. Market Garden Montgomery began to
question the strategy developed by Eisenhower and as a result of
comments made at a press conference he gave on 7th January,
1945, he was severely rebuked by Winston Churchill and General
Alan Brooke, the head of the British Army.
Although he came close to being sacked Montgomery was allowed to
remain in Europe and the end of the war was appointed Commander
in Chief of the British Army of Occupation.
In 1946 Montgomery was granted a peerage and he took the title
Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. He also served under General
Dwight Eisenhower as deputy supreme commander of the Allied
forces in Europe.
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Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of
Alamein, KG, GCB, DSO, PC, often referred to as "Monty", was a
British Army officer. He successfully commanded Allied forces at
the Battle of El Alamein, a major turning point in the Western
Desert Campaign during World War II, and troops under his
command were largely responsible for the expulsion of Axis
forces from North Africa. He was later a prominent commander in
Italy and North-West Europe, where he was in command of all
Allied ground forces during Operation Overlord until after the
Battle of Normandy.
Early life
Montgomery was born in Kennington, London in 1887, the fourth
child of nine, to an Anglo-Irish Anglican priest, Rev. Henry
Montgomery. The Montgomery family came from Moville, County
Donegal, near Londonderry, and maintained their home, New Park,
there. Montgomery considered himself Irish and a County Donegal
man. In 1889, the family moved with his father when he was made
Bishop of Tasmania. His father was kind, but ineffectual in the
house, and often away on missionary work. His mother was a
martinet, who allowed her husband 10 shillings a week from his
salary and beat her children. Montgomery said that he had an
unhappy childhood, often clashing with his mother and becoming
the black sheep of the family to such an extent that he declined
to go to his mother's funeral. His father died at Moville in
1932.
In 1901, Bishop Montgomery became secretary of the Society for
the Propagation of the Gospel, and the family returned to
London. Montgomery went to St Paul's School and then the Royal
Military Academy, Sandhurst, from which he was almost expelled
for setting fire to a fellow cadet during a fight with pokers.
He joined the 1st Battalion, The Royal Warwickshire Regiment in
1908, first seeing service in India until 1913.
First World War
The First World War began in August 1914 and Montgomery moved to
France with his regiment that month. He saw service during the
retreat from Mons, during which half the men in his battalion
became casualties or prisoners. At Meteren, near the Belgian
border at Bailleul on 13 October 1914, during an allied
counter-offensive, he was shot through the right lung by a
sniper and was injured seriously enough for his grave to be dug
in preparation for his death. He was awarded the DSO for gallant
leadership.
After recovering in early 1915, he was appointed to be
brigade-major training Kitchener's New Army and returned to the
Western Front in early 1916 as an operations staff officer
during the battles of the Somme, Arras, and Passchendaele.
During this time he came under IX Corps, part of General Sir
Herbert Plumer's Second Army. Through his training, rehearsal,
and integration of the infantry with artillery and engineers,
the troops of Plumer's Second Army were able to achieve their
objectives efficiently and without unnecessary casualties.
Montgomery served at the battles of the Lys and Chemin-des-Dames
before finishing the war as General Staff Officer 1 and
effectively chief of staff of the 47th (2nd London) Division,
with the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. A photograph of
October 1918 shows the then unknown Lt-Col Montgomery standing
in front of Winston Churchill (Minister of Munitions) at the
victory parade at Lille.
Between the wars
After the war Montgomery commanded a battalion in the British
Army of the Rhine, before reverting to his substantive rank of
captain. He wrote up his experiences in a series of training
pamphlets and manuals. He then attended the army's Staff College
at Camberley, before being appointed brigade-major in the 17th
Infantry Brigade at the end of 1920. The brigade was stationed
in County Cork during the Anglo-Irish War. A cousin of
Montgomery's had been assassinated by the IRA in 1920 (see the
Cairo Gang) and he was a half-Irish Protestant. However, though
he was effective, he did not employ methods as brutal as those
of his contemporary in Cork, Arthur Percival. On his arrival he
urged units of his brigade that their "behaviour must be beyond
reproach" although later he stated that it "never bothered me a
bit how many houses were burnt" (a reference to the government
policy of burning the homes of suspected republicans and
sympathisers). IRA officer Tom Barry said that he "behaved with
great correctness". Montgomery increasingly came to see the
conflict as one that could not be won, and withdrawal of British
forces as the only feasible solution. In 1923, after the
establishment of the Irish Free State and during the Irish Civil
War, Montgomery wrote to Percival that in order "to win a war of
that sort you must be ruthless" and 20th century democratic
Britain would not do that, and so "the only way therefore was to
give them some form of self-government and let them squash the
rebellion themselves".
In 1923 Montgomery was posted to the Territorial 49th Division,
eschewing the usual amounts of drill for tactical training. He
returned to the 1st Royal Warwickshires in 1925 as a company
commander and captain, before becoming an instructor at the
Staff College, Camberley and a major (brevet
lieutenant-colonel). In 1927, he met and married Elizabeth
Carver, a widow, and a son, David, was born in August 1928.
Elizabeth was the sister of Percy Hobart, WWII commander.
Montgomery became lieutenant-colonel of the 1st Battalion of The
Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1931, and saw service in
Palestine, Egypt, and India. He was promoted to full colonel and
became an instructor at the Indian Army Staff College in Quetta,
India. As was usual, Montgomery maintained links with the Royal
Warwickshires, taking up the honorary position of
Colonel-of-the-Regiment in 1947. As throughout his career,
Montgomery stirred up the resentment of his superiors for his
arrogance and dictatorial ways, and also for his disregard of
convention when it obstructed military effectiveness. For
example, he set up a battalion brothel, regularly inspected by
the medical officer, for the 'horizontal refreshment' of his
soldiers rather than forcing them to take chances in unregulated
establishments. He became commanding officer of the 9th Infantry
Brigade in 1937, with the rank of brigadier, but that year also
saw tragedy for him. His marriage had been a very happy and
loving one, but his wife was bitten by an insect while on
holiday in Burnham-on-Sea. The bite became infected, and his
wife died in his arms from septicaemia following an amputation.
The loss devastated Montgomery, but he insisted on throwing
himself back into his work immediately after the funeral.
In 1938, he organised an amphibious combined operations landing
exercise that impressed the new commander-in-chief, Southern
Command, General Wavell. He was promoted to major-general and
took command of the 8th Infantry Division in Palestine. There he
quashed an Arab revolt before returning in July 1939 to Britain,
suffering a serious illness on the way, to command the 3rd
(Iron) Infantry Division.
Second World War
Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. The 3rd
Division was deployed to Belgium as part of the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF). Montgomery predicted a disaster
similar to that in 1914, and so spent the Phony War training his
troops for tactical retreat rather than offensive operations.
During this time, Montgomery faced serious trouble from his
superiors after again taking a very pragmatic attitude towards
the sexual health of his soldiers - outraging the clergy by
stating openly in a memo that in his opinion "when a man wanted
a woman, he should have one" - but was defended from dismissal
by his superior Alan Brooke, commander of II Corps. Montgomery's
training paid off when the Germans began their invasion of the
Low Countries on 10 May 1940 and the 3rd Division advanced to
the River Dijle and then withdrew to Dunkirk with great
professionalism, returning to Britain intact with minimal
casualties. During Operation Dynamo — the evacuation of 330,000
BEF and French troops to Britain — Montgomery had assumed
command of the II Corps after Alan Brooke had taken acting
command of the whole BEF.
On his return Montgomery antagonised the War Office with
trenchant criticisms of the command of the BEF and was briefly
relegated to divisional command and only made CB. In July 1940
he was promoted to lieutenant-general, placed in command of V
Corps and started a long-running feud with the new
commander-in-chief, Southern Command, Claude Auchinleck. In
April 1941 he became commander of XII Corps and in December 1941
renamed the South-Eastern Command the South-Eastern Army to
promote offensive spirit. During this time he developed and
rehearsed his ideas and trained his soldiers, culminating in
Exercise Tiger in May 1942, a combined forces exercise involving
100,000 troops.
North Africa and Italy
In 1942 a new field commander was required in the Middle East,
where Auchinleck was commander-in-chief. He had stabilised the
allied position at Alamein, but after a visit in August 1942,
the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, replaced him with
Alexander, and was persuaded by Alan Brooke to appoint
Montgomery commander of the British Eighth Army in the North
African campaign after Churchill's own preferred candidate,
William Gott, was killed flying back to Cairo.
Montgomery's peremptory assumption of command of the Eighth Army
was deeply resented by Auchinleck and his departing staff, but
transformed the Eighth Army. Taking command two days earlier
than authorised on 13 August 1942, Montgomery ordered immediate
reinforcement of the vital heights of Alam Halfa, joined the
army and air headquarters together in a single operating unit,
and ordered all contingency plans for retreat to be destroyed. A
criticism of the Eighth Army up until this point had been that
the constituent units tended to fight their own separate
battles. Montgomery was determined that the Army should fight
its battles in a unified, focused manner according to a detailed
plan.
Montgomery made a great effort to appear before troops as often
as possible, frequently visiting various units and making
himself known to the men, often arranging for cigarettes to be
distributed first. Although he still wore a standard British
officer's cap on arrival in the desert, he briefly wore an
Australian broad-brimmed hat before switching to wearing the
black beret (with the badge of the Royal Tank Regiment next to
the British General Officer's badge) for which he became famous.
Both Brooke and Alexander were astonished by the transformation
in atmosphere when they visited on 19 August.
German commander Erwin Rommel attempted to encircle the Eighth
Army at the Battle of Alam Halfa from 31 August 1942. ULTRA
decryption had confirmed Montgomery's initial decision to defend
the area, and Rommel was halted with very little gain. After
this engagement, Montgomery was criticised for not attacking the
retreating German forces; however, in Montgomery's judgement,
the Eighth Army could not defeat the Germans in mobile, fluid
mechanised battles and choosing to engage in such a battle,
therefore, would play to German strength.
The reconquest of North Africa was essential for airfields to
support Malta and for Operation Torch. Ignoring Churchill's
demands for quick action Montgomery prepared meticulously for
the new offensive. He was determined not to fight until he
thought there had been sufficient preparation for a decisive
victory, and put into action his beliefs with the gathering of
resources, detailed planning, the training of troops, especially
in night fighting and in the use of over 300 of the latest
American-built Sherman tanks, 90 M7 Priests, and visiting every
single unit involved in the offensive.
The Battle of El Alamein began on 23 October 1942, and ended 12
days later with the first large-scale, decisive allied land
victory of the war. Montgomery correctly predicted both the
length of the battle and the number of casualties (13,500).
Montgomery was knighted and promoted to full general. The Eighth
Army's subsequent advance as the Germans retreated hundreds of
miles towards their bases in Tunisia used the logistical and
firepower advantages of the British Army while avoiding
unnecessary risks. It also gave the Allies an indication that
the tide of war had genuinely turned in North Africa. Montgomery
kept the initiative, applying superior strength when it suited
him, forcing Rommel out of each successive defensive position.
On 6 March 1943 Rommel's attack on the over-extended Eighth Army
at Medenine (Operation Capri) with the largest concentration of
German armour in North Africa was successfully repulsed. At the
Mareth Line, 20 to 27 March, when Montgomery encountered fiercer
frontal opposition than he had anticipated, he switched his
major effort into an outflanking inland pincer, backed by
low-flying RAF fighter-bomber support.
This campaign demonstrated the battle-winning ingredients of
morale (sickness and absenteeism were virtually eliminated in
the Eighth Army), co-operation of all arms including the air
forces, first-class logistical back-up and clear-cut orders.
The next major Allied attack was the Allied invasion of Sicily
(Operation Husky). It was in Sicily that Montgomery's famous
tensions with US commanders really began. Montgomery managed to
recast plans for the Allied invasion, having Patton's Seventh US
Army land in the Gulf of Gela (on the left flank of Eighth Army,
which landed around Syracuse in the south-east of Sicily) rather
than at Palermo in the west of Sicily as Patton had wished.
Inter-allied tensions grew as the American commanders Patton and
Bradley (then commanding II US Corps under Patton), took umbrage
at what they perceived as Montgomery's attitudes and
boastfulness. They resented him, while accepting his skills as a
general.
During the autumn of 1943 Montgomery continued to command Eighth
Army during the landings on the mainland of Italy itself. In
conjunction with the Anglo-American landings at Salerno (near
Naples) by Mark Clark's Fifth Army and seaborne landings by
British paratroops in the heel of Italy (including the key port
of Taranto, where they disembarked without resistance directly
into the port), Montgomery led Eighth Army up the toe of Italy.
Some criticism was made of the slowness of Montgomery's advance.
The Eighth Army, responsible for the eastern side of the Allied
front, from the central Apennine mountain spine to the Adriatic
coast, fought a succession of engagements alternating between
opposed crossings of the rivers running across their line of
advance and attacks against the cleverly constructed defensive
positions the Germans had fashioned on the ridges in between.
Eighth Army crossed the Sangro river in mid-November and
penetrated the German's strongest position at the Gustav Line
but as the winter weather deteriorated the advance ground to a
halt as transport bogged down and air support operations became
impossible. Montgomery abhorred the lack of coordination, the
dispersion of effort, and the strategic muddle and opportunism
he percieved in the Allied effort in Italy and was glad to leave
the "dog's breakfast" on 23 December.
Normandy
Montgomery returned to Britain to take command of the 21st Army
Group which consisted of all Allied ground forces that would
take part in Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy.
Preliminary planning for the invasion had been taking place for
two years, most recently by COSSAC staff (Chief of Staff to the
Supreme Allied Commander). Montgomery quickly concluded that the
COSSAC plan was too limited, and strongly advocated expanding
the plan from a three-division to a five-division assault. As
with his takeover of the Eighth Army, Montgomery travelled
frequently to his units, raising morale and ensuring training
was progressing. At St Paul's School on 7 April and 15 May he
presented his strategy for the invasion. He envisaged a ninety
day battle, ending when all the forces reached the Seine,
pivoting on an Allied-held Caen, with British and Canadian
armies forming a shoulder and the US armies wheeling on the
right.
During the hard fought two and a half month Battle of Normandy
that followed, the impact of a series of unfavourable autumnal
weather conditions disrupted the Normandy landing areas and
seriously hampered the tactical delivery of planned
transportation of personnel and supplies which were being
brought over precipitously across the English Channel.
Consequently, Montgomery argues in his literary account (WIP)
that he was unable to follow his pre-battle plan precisely to
the timescales planned outside of battle. It should be noted
that the extension of the battle plan by one month was the cause
of significant retrospective criticisms of Montgomery by some of
his American peers, including the much respected Bradley and
equally controversial Patton. However, it can be shown that this
may well have been embitterment relating to Montgomery's Bulge
press statement above.
Montgomery's plan was clear in its early brief, that is, an
aggressive British and Canadian presence in the east to attract
the bulk of the German armour, combined with a building up of
American forces in the west as preparation to a southern
breakout, followed by a pincer east originally towards the
Seine, where all bridges west of Paris were destroyed. Correctly
the American pincers turned north for an entrapment at Falaise.
Regardless of concerns over delays and operational wisdom,
Montgomery significantly adapted and strategically planned the
Normandy landings to the extent that it was the significant
structure which attracted, trapped and destroyed the bulk of the
German attacking forces from north western France, that is from
the Point de Calais to Le Havre, and beyond.
As stated above, this series of battle plans by the British,
Canadian and American armies inflicted one of the biggest
defeats of the war on the German army in the west. The campaign
that Montgomery fought was essentially attritional until the
middle of July with the occupation of the Cotentin Peninsula and
a series of offensives in the east, which secured Caen and
attracted the bulk of German armour there. An American breakout
was achieved with Operation Cobra and the encirclement of German
forces in the Falaise pocket at the cost of British sacrifice
with the diversionary Operation Goodwood.
Advance to the Rhine
The increasing preponderance of American troops in the European
theatre (from four out of seven divisions at D-Day to 72 out of
85 in 1945) made it a political impossibility for the Ground
Forces Commander to be British. After the end of the Normandy
campaign, General Eisenhower himself took over Ground Forces
Command while continuing as Supreme Commander, with Montgomery
continuing to command the 21st Army Group, now consisting mainly
of British and Canadian units. Montgomery bitterly resented this
change, even though it had been agreed before the D-Day
invasion. Winston Churchill had Montgomery promoted to field
marshal by way of compensation.
Montgomery was able to persuade Eisenhower to adopt his strategy
of a single thrust to the Ruhr with Operation Market Garden in
September 1944. It was the most uncharacteristic of Montgomery's
battles: the offensive was bold and poorly planned. It ended in
failure with the destruction of the British 1st Airborne
Division at Arnhem. Montgomery's preoccupation with the push to
the Ruhr had also distracted him from the essential task of
clearing the Scheldt during the capture of Antwerp, and so after
Arnhem, Montgomery's group were instructed to concentrate on
doing this so that the port of Antwerp could be opened.
When the surprise attack on the Ardennes took place on 16
December 1944, starting the Battle of the Bulge, the front of
the U.S. 12th Army Group was split, with the bulk of the U.S.
First Army on the northern shoulder of the German 'bulge'. The
Army Group commander, General Omar Bradley, was located south of
the penetration at Luxembourg and command of the U.S. First Army
became problematic. Montgomery was the nearest commander on the
ground and on 20 December, Eisenhower (who was in Versailles)
transferred Courtney Hodges' U.S. First Army and William
Simpson's U.S. Ninth Army to his 21st Army Group, despite
Bradley's vehement objections on nationalistic grounds.
Montgomery grasped the situation quickly, visiting all
divisional, corps, and army field commanders himself and
instituting his 'Phantom' network of liaison officers. He
grouped the British XXX Corps as a strategic reserve behind the
Meuse and reorganised the U.S. defence of the northern shoulder,
shortening and strengthening the line and ordering the
evacuation of St Vith. The German commander of the 5th Panzer
Army, Hasso von Manteuffel said
"The operations of the American 1st Army had developed into a
series of individual holding actions. Montgomery's contribution
to restoring the situation was that he turned a series of
isolated actions into a coherent battle fought according to a
clear and definite plan. It was his refusal to engage in
premature and piecemeal counter-attacks which enabled the
Americans to gather their reserves and frustrate the German
attempts to extend their breakthrough."
Eisenhower had then wanted Montgomery to go on the offensive on
1 January to meet Patton's army that had started advancing from
the south on 19 December and in doing so, trap the Germans.
However, Montgomery refused to commit infantry he considered
underprepared into a snowstorm and for a strategically
unimportant piece of land. He did not launch the attack until 3
January, by which point the German forces had been able to
escape. A large part of American military opinion thought that
he should not have held back, though it was characteristic of
him not to want to throw troops away owing to inadequate
preparation. After the battle the U.S. First Army was restored
to the 12th Army Group; the U.S. Ninth Army remained under 21st
Army Group until it crossed the Rhine.
Montgomery's 21st Army Group advanced to the Rhine with
operations Veritable and Grenade in February 1945. After a
meticulously-planned Rhine crossing on 24 March and the
subsequent encirclement of the German Army Group B in the Ruhr,
Montgomery's role was initially to guard the flank of the
American advance. This was altered, however, to forestall any
chance of a Red Army advance into Denmark, and the 21st Army
Group occupied Hamburg and Rostock and sealed off the Danish
peninsula.
On 4 May 1945, on Lüneburg Heath, Montgomery accepted the
surrender of German forces in northern Germany, Denmark and the
Netherlands. Characteristically, this was done plainly in a tent
without any ceremony. In the same year he was awarded the Order
of the Elephant, the highest order in Denmark.
On 26 October 1945 he was made a Freeman of Huddersfield.
Later life
Montgomery and Soviet generals Zhukov, Sokolovsky and
Rokossovsky at the Brandenburg Gate 12 July 1945.After the war,
Montgomery was created 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein in
1946. He was Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1946 until
1948, but was largely a failure as it required the strategic and
political skills he did not possess. He clashed particularly
with his old rival Arthur Tedder, who as Deputy Supreme
Commander had intrigued for Montgomery's dismissal during the
Battle of Normandy, and who was by now Chief of the Air Staff.
When Montgomery's term of office expired, the Prime Minister
Clement Attlee appointed General (later Field-Marshal) William
Slim as his successor; when Montgomery protested that he had
already promised the job to his protege General Crocker, a
former corps commander from the 1944-5 campaign, Attlee is said
to have given the memorable retort "Untell him".
Montgomery was then supreme commander or chairman of the western
union's commanders-in-chief committee. He was an effective
inspector-general and mounted good exercises, but out of his
depth politically, and was pleased to become Eisenhower's deputy
in creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces
in 1951, continuing to serve under Eisenhower's successors
Ridgeway and Al Gruenther until his retirement, aged
seventy-one, in 1958. His mother died in 1949; Montgomery did
not attend the funeral, claiming he was "too busy".
Montgomery was chairman of the governing body of St John's
School, Leatherhead, Surrey from 1951 to 1966 and a generous
supporter.
In 1953, the Hamilton Board of Education in Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada, wrote to Montgomery and asked permission to name a new
school in the city's east end after him. Viscount Montgomery
Elementary was billed as "the most modern school in North
America" and the largest single-storey school in Hamilton, when
the sod was turned on 14 March 1951. The school officially
opened on 18 April 1953, with Montgomery in attendance among
almost 10,000 well-wishers. At the opening, he gave the motto "Gardez
Bien" from his own family's coat of arms.
Montgomery referred to the school as his "beloved school" and
visited on five separate occasions, the last being in 1960. On
his last visit, he said to "his" students:
Let's make Viscount Montgomery School the best in Hamilton, the
best in Ontario, the best in Canada. I don't associate myself
with anything that is not good. It is up to you to see that
everything about this school is good. It is up to the students
to not only be their best in school but in their behaviour
outside of Viscount. Education is not just something that will
help you pass your exams and get you a job, it is to develop
your brain to teach you to marshal facts and do things.
Before retirement, Montgomery's outspoken views on some
subjects, such as race, were often officially suppressed. After
retirement these outspoken views became public and his
reputation suffered. He supported apartheid (although such views
were more common in the 1960s than subsequently) and Chinese
communism under Mao Zedong, and argued against the legalisation
of homosexuality in the United Kingdom, arguing that the Sexual
Offences Act 1967 was a "charter for buggery" and that "this
sort of thing may be tolerated by the French, but we're British
— thank God." Ironically, a number of Montgomery's biographers,
including Chalfont (1976) (who found something "disturbingly
equivocal" in "his relations with boys and young men") and Nigel
Hamilton (2002) have suggested that he may himself have been a
repressed homosexual; in the late 1940s he conducted an
affectionate friendship with a Swiss boy, Lucien Treub.
Montgomery's memoirs (1958) were broadly judged to be tactless
and arrogant. He criticised many of his wartime comrades in
harsh terms, including Eisenhower (whom he accused, among other
things, of prolonging the war by a year through poor leadership
— allegations which ended their friendship, not least as
Eisenhower was still US President at the time). He was stripped
of his honorary citizenship of Montgomery, Alabama, and was
challenged to a duel by an Italian officer. He was threatened
with legal action by Field-Marshal Auchinleck for suggesting
that Auchinleck had intended to retreat from the Alamein
position if attacked again, and had to give a radio broadcast
(20 November 1958) expressing his gratitude to Auchinleck for
having stabilised the front at the First Battle of Alamein. The
1960 edition of his memoirs contains a publishers' note
(opposite page 15) drawing attention to that broadcast, and
stating that in the publishers' view the reader might assume
from Montgomery's text that Auchinleck had been planning to
retreat and pointing out that this was in fact not the case.
Perhaps at least in part because of these controversies,
Montgomery was never raised to an earldom, although unlike his
wartime contemporaries Harold Alexander, Louis Mountbatten and
even Archibald Wavell, he had never been a Theatre Supreme
Commander or held high political office. An official task he
insisted on performing in his later years was bearing the Sword
of State during the State Opening of Parliament. His increasing
frailty, however, raised concerns about his ability to stand for
long periods while carrying the heavy weapon. Ultimately, those
fears were borne out when he collapsed in mid-ceremony in 1968
and did not perform this function again.
A favourite pastime of the British press during these years was
to photograph Montgomery cashing his old age pension cheque at
the local social security office. Because of his eminence, many
assumed Montgomery was wealthy and did not need the money. In
fact, he had always been a man of modest means and it caused him
great anguish that many believed he was taking taxpayer money he
did not need.
Another blow was a break-in at his home. Despite making a
heartbreaking televised appeal for the return of his
possessions, many of which bore only sentimental value, the
items were never recovered.
Montgomery died in 1976 at his home in Alton, Hampshire, and was
interred in the nearby Holy Cross Churchyard, Binsted after a
state funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor. His portrait (by
Frank O. Salisbury, 1945) hangs in the National Portrait
Gallery. A statue of Viscount Montgomery can be found outside
the Defence Ministry in Whitehall, alongside those of William
Slim and Alan Brooke. Another statue of Viscount Montgomery can
be found in Brussels, Belgium, watching a Montgomery Square.
Character and controversy
Montgomery was a complex person. On the one hand, though far
from flawless, he was a great and successful general through
hard work, a refusal to conform to dead tradition, and an open,
clear and alert mind. He was a humane man and was capable of
inspiring great loyalty among his staff and his troops.
Montgomery believed that in the 20th century it was essential to
explain to troops why they were fighting and that orders and
plans must be clear. He therefore tended to appeal more to the
common soldiers under his command than to many of the officers
who had more direct dealings with him. These men defended him
with great passion even after the war, as the British historian
Richard Holmes discovered when he was critical of Montgomery.
On the other hand, he was personally a difficult man. Montgomery
did not get on with his contemporaries and mostly associated
with junior officers. He was insensitive, conceited, and
boastful. He was not an easy man to know socially and not loyal
to the staff officers serving immediately under him. His
dismissive and occasionally insulting attitude to others often
soured opinions about his abilities and personality. It can be
argued that his failures happened when he allowed his desire for
personal glory to taint his planning, causing him to abandon his
usual caution.
In stark contrast to his counterpart in East Asia, Field Marshal
William Slim, Montgomery rarely ever admitted to making a single
mistake during the Second World War. Slim was far more candid
about his own mistakes, even in his wartime memoirs, than
Montgomery.
Often it was Montgomery's statements about battles, as much as
his actual conduct of them, that formed the basis of
controversy. In his career, Montgomery's orders to his
subordinates were clear and complete, yet with his superiors his
communications would be opaque and incomplete. So, in Normandy
he gave the impression to Eisenhower and others that he was
attempting a breakout, while playing down this possibility in
his actual orders to his subordinates. For example, shortly
before Operation Goodwood he removed Falaise as an objective,
but did not forward these new orders to SHAEF. Throughout his
career he enraged his superiors and colleagues, partly because
he would not allow convention to disrupt military effectiveness,
partly because of a contempt for authority and an unwillingness
to be in a situation where he was not in control, and partly
because he could be quite a strange person. Walter Bedell Smith
once said to him "You may be great to serve under, difficult to
serve alongside, but you sure are hell to serve over!". He also
found it difficult to publicly admit his operations had not gone
to plan, irrespective of whether they were ultimately successful
(Normandy) or unsuccessful (Market Garden, where he claimed that
it had been a 90% success).
In the United Kingdom, Montgomery is remembered particularly for
his victorious campaign in North Africa, which, with the Battle
of Stalingrad, was very much seen as the turning point of World
War II. The different nature of the war for the United States
means that his reputation there is very much coloured by the
controversies in the later stages of the war in Europe,
especially around the Battle of the Bulge. These brought into
relief both his virtues and failings.
At the end of 1944 there was tension between the Allies owing to
a campaign by the British press for Eisenhower to appoint a
deputy and for him to be the Allied ground commander.
Immediately after the Battle of the Bulge, on 7 January 1945
Montgomery held a press conference in which he downplayed the
role of the American generals, especially Patton, in the Allied
victory at the Battle of the Bulge and focused on his own
generalship. Many of his comments were ill-judged, particularly
his statement that when the situation "began to deteriorate",
Eisenhower had placed him in command in the north, and they were
inflammatory to Patton, implying that he needed to be rescued by
Montgomery "with a bang". In the press conference Montgomery
said that he thought the counter-offensive had gone very well
and did not explain his delayed attack on 3 January. According
to Churchill, the attack from the south under Patton was steady
but slow and involved heavy losses, and Montgomery claimed to be
trying to avoid this situation. Montgomery also gave the
impression that substantial British forces had been involved in
the fighting that repelled the German attack (an impression
explicitly corrected by Churchill in the House of Commons). A
slanted version inserted by Germany within an Allied radio
broadcast added to American resentment.
In a memo to Eisenhower, Montgomery proposed that he should
again be made Commander Ground Forces and implicitly criticised
recent conduct of the war while American confidence had been
shaken and nerves were raw. Eisenhower, encouraged by the Deputy
Supreme Commander, Air Marshal Tedder (another person with a
long running feud with Montgomery), was on the point of
dismissing Montgomery, when Bedell Smith and Montgomery's
chief-of-staff, Major-General Freddie de Guingand, pointed that
this would be both politically unwise and difficult to justify.
De Guingand was able to convince Montgomery of the impact of his
words (of which he was apparently unaware) and Montgomery wrote
an apology to Eisenhower. The moment passed. Eisenhower
commented in his memoirs: "I doubt if Montgomery ever came to
realise how resentful some American commanders were. They
believed he had belittled them — and they were not slow to voice
reciprocal scorn and contempt".
On the other hand, during the same press conference Montgomery
showed his respect for ordinary troops and eulogised the
American soldier:
I first saw him in battle in Sicily and I formed a very high
opinion of him. I saw him again in Italy. He is a very brave
fighting man, steady under fire and with that tenacity in battle
which marks the first-class fighting soldier. I have a great
affection and admiration for the American soldier. I salute the
brave fighting men of America. I never want to fight alongside
better soldiers. I have tried to feel that I am almost an
American soldier myself so that I might take no unsuitable
action or offend them in any way ... Rundstedt was really beaten
by the good fighting qualities of the American soldier and by
the team work of the Allies.
On Eisenhower, he said:
The captain of our team is Eisenhower. I am absolutely devoted
to Ike; we are the greatest of friends. It grieves me when I see
uncomplimentary articles about him in the British press; he
bears a great burden, he needs our fullest support, he has the
right to expect it and it is up to all of us to see that he gets
it.
Montgomery later wrote:
I think now that I should never have held that press conference.
So great were the feelings against me on the part of the
American generals that whatever I said was bound to be wrong. I
should therefore have said nothing.
Brooke was perhaps near the truth when he said of Montgomery,
He is probably the finest tactical general we have had since
Wellington. But on some of his strategy, and especially on his
relations with the Americans, he is almost a disaster.
Assessment of Montgomery as a military commander
Any assessment of Montgomery is immediately entangled in his
sometimes difficult, boastful personality, harshness towards
those he felt did not measure up, and issues of Anglo-American
national pride. Nevertheless this section attempts a balanced
summing up of his general leadership from a military
perspective. Was he primarily a ponderous set-piece general or
was he indeed one of the most brilliant commanders of recent
history, a true heir to Marlborough, at least from the British
perspective? The truth lies somewhere in between. It is helpful
to analyse Montgomery's generalship by looking at some central
aspects of his successes and failures.
Positive aspects
As a trainer of men and mentor of subordinates
Montgomery deserves his due as an outstanding trainer of men.
His record in Palestine, North Africa, Sicily and Northern
Europe shows this. His meticulous preparation of his troops,
ranging from the usual physical necessities, to painstaking
explanation of his vision and plans down to relatively low
levels, to well articulated exercises and drills, to his
insistence that formations like divisions "should fight as
divisions" (i.e. gain proficiency in "big picture" coordination
and integration) show the mind and skill of a keen organiser.
None of this is earth-shattering for any competent military
commander (though many of his contemporaries, including many
remembered better by history, showed great deficiencies in this
regard), but Montgomery demonstrated a great level of
proficiency and made it one of his special trademarks.
Montgomery was a keen advocate of physical fitness and hard
training: in the desert he had all ranks from brigadier down
doing daily physical training; any man, no matter what rank, was
expected to be fit to fight, and if any officer could not keep
up on daily runs, he was sent home - Montgomery once observed
that if a middle-aged officer was going to have a heart attack,
better for it to happen on a training run than in action.
Montgomery was also a critic of Battle Drill Training, which he
felt was a crutch used by unit commanders. His personal view,
put into action during the Phony War and afterwards, was that
company and battalion training in the phases of war—relief in
place, passage of obstacles, hasty attack, etc.—was ignored in
favour of simple drilling at the section and platoon level.
Montgomery had a deep technical understanding of how the Army
operated, at all levels from the infantry company to the Army
Group. He helped to shape the Canadian army through assisting
the formation of the fledgling First Canadian Army while they
were under his command in South-Eastern Army. Montgomery
personally visited most Canadian units, down to the battalion
level, and assisted Canadian Army commander Harry Crerar in
weeding out poor officers, giving direct criticism of battalion
commanders, company commanders, and even regimental
sergeants-major. Montgomery indirectly shaped the Canadian Army
that saw action in Italy and NW Europe.
As a strategist and tactician
Montgomery's hallmark as a strategist was a detailed analysis of
his enemy and development of a clear vision as to how that enemy
was to be fought and defeated. Two words sum up the approach of
the British commander: clarity and organization. These were put
into practice through careful preparation of what he termed a
"master plan", to which all subsequent effort was to be
subordinated. The "master plan" embodied the vision, and the
strategic and tactical approaches that would be used. Far from
being rigid, Montgomery held that the flexibility or "balance"
was one of the keys to his overarching structure. He regarded
the German Army as one of hard-core professionalism, and held
that wishful thinking and foggy concepts against such an
opponent was a recipe for dismal failure.
Montgomery sought changes along these lines in the plan for the
Allied invasion of Sicily. His influence however was more
limited and his own less-than-spectacular gains in the difficult
terrain, were unfavorably compared by some to the thrusting
mobility of US General George Patton — a foreshadowing of
controversies to come. Operation Husky was a success, but the
Germans were able to extract tens of thousands of troops from
Sicily to fight elsewhere, indicating that Montgomery's concerns
about concepts, planning and execution were not totally off the
mark.
His approach can be seen in his insistence on recasting or
adjusting the invasion plans of Normandy, generally
strengthening initial shock forces and insisting on a clear
vision and method of how subsequent battles were to be fought.
The success of the D-Day landings owed a great debt to
Montgomery's planning. After the war, Eisenhower and his chief
of staff, Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith told the
American military correspondent, Drew Middleton that "No one
else could have got us across the Channel and into Normandy...
Whatever they say about him, he got us there".
Montgomery felt his approach vindicated at the Second Battle of
El Alamein. His strategic vision ushered in much needed clarity,
and his defensive preparations (drawing in part on the prior
work of his predecessor Auchinleck) also envisioned a decisive
counterattack. During the most critical point of the battle his
concept of "balance" or flexibility within the confines of a
master plan held, and the British were able to shift forces to
see off Rommel's thrust, and mount their own riposte that
shattered the back of the Axis formations.
The Battle of Normandy saw similar success. He insisted on more
forces for the initial landing and a clear vision for the
further campaign against some planners who were primarily
concerned with just getting on the beach. Despite the failure of
all but the Canadians to gain the ambitious targets on D-Day,
and the subsequent improvisations, his strategy of attritional
battle on the left drawing in German forces and allowing a
breakthrough on the right was successful. This approach could
not be broadcast on the nightly news and the public perception
of the struggle was typically one that saw both Allies equally
attempting to break out of the beachhead, with progress being
"slow." Montgomery however persisted, and deflecting pressure
from his superiors (who remained in England) for quicker
results, retained mastery of the developing battle. Overall, he
achieved victory well within the originally planned ninety days.
Normandy and El Alamein cement Montgomery's place as one of the
greatest of the modern British generals in the view of some
historians, and vindicate his concept of "balance" within the
overall structure of a dominant "master plan".
As a builder of morale
Montgomery also deserves credit as a builder of morale, both
that of his soldiers and that of the general public. A large
part of his reputation has been sustained by the people who
served under him. After his experiences in the First World War
he had determined not to waste soldiers' lives: as Haig
persisted in attritional battles, Montgomery wrote to his
brother Donald, on seeing Canadians sent to assault
Passchendaele Ridge that they were 'magnificent', but 'they
forget that the whole art of war is to gain your objective with
as little loss as possible', which was a doctrine that
Montgomery subsequently lived by.
Further to this, he also displayed a genuine concern for the
welfare of the men serving under him: for example, at one time
he jeopardised his career by illegally hiring out land to a fair
to raise welfare funds; he arranged for female nurses at forward
casualty clearing centres in the desert war in 1943; he took a
very pragmatic view towards sexual health; directly after the
Battle of Medenine he was lobbying Brooke to allow long-serving
soldiers to return to England. Coupled with this was his belief
that soldiers must actually understand why they were fighting,
and that they deserve to have things properly explained to them.
Montgomery thought that one of the most important roles for a
military commander was to motivate his men to fight, that
military command is "a great human problem". In addition,
Montgomery's experiences in the First World War led him to
despise generals who led from the rear, well away from any
fighting, and so was visible in his campaigns.
The early years of World War II saw a series of humiliating
defeats and military reverses for Britain. Montgomery was not
the first to unequivocally reverse. His experiences in Ireland
had shown him the importance of public support in a war.
Montgomery was sometimes ungracious, but he was able to
painstakingly articulate a vision for victory and couple with it
a good sense for publicity (the use of his distinctive black
beret with two badges, for example). He continued these same
methods in England prior to the invasion, insisting on a clear
concept of battle beyond the beaches, all united under a
powerful master plan. Later on, Montgomery was not the only
leader who struck a distinctive chord for morale prior to the
great invasion, but he was certainly one of the most
influential, ensuring not only the troops that stepped ashore on
6 June, were thus men confident in their leaders, their plans,
their equipment and their cause, but so were the public. His
speaking tour of British munitions factories before D-Day had
made Churchill worry that he would be "filling The Mall" with
adoring crowds if he was allowed to receive his field marshal's
baton at Buckingham Palace.
Criticisms of Montgomery's generalship
Montgomery's record also has been extensively criticised. The
criticism of his actions tends to be bound up with his difficult
personality and relationships with superiors (see the Character
and controversy Section above) but generally two areas in
particular can be separated out, which are summarised here.
Slowness and over-caution
Montgomery was often accused of being slow and overcautious.
Examples cited include before El Alamein, afterwards in the
pursuit of Rommel, the Battle of Normandy, and in the
counter-offensive in the Ardennes. In North Africa, prior to
Montgomery taking command, the history of the campaign in North
Africa had see-sawed as each offensive outran its supply lines:
both sides won battles but neither gained a decisive advantage.
Similarly, during the Battle of Normandy, the fear of stalemate
made the supreme command in Britain pressure Montgomery to push
harder. At one point in July 1944, it was thought that Churchill
was flying to France to personally sack Montgomery at
Eisenhower's request. Air commanders complained that Montgomery
had not captured suitable airfields from which to operate. Much
is made of the fact that many of Montgomery's initial targets
were not met, especially the failure to capture Caen on the
first day or even for weeks after D-Day (criticism that was
compounded after the war when Montgomery insisted that all
elements had gone "according to plan", which clearly was not the
case, although it should be noted in fairness that the bulk of
the German panzer divisions, including S.S. units, were
stationed on the Caen sector). However his predictions, the so
called "phase lines" on the maps, were never intended to be a
rigid guarantee but a guide, as would be clear from previous
opposed landings at Salerno and Anzio. Much of the criticism
resulted from Montgomery giving his superiors and the press the
impression that he was trying to achieve large-scale breakouts
while actually fighting an attritional campaign. However, in the
end Montgomery's success was achieved in less time than planned.
Montgomery was not a dashing general, and deliberately
methodical, usually not willing to sacrifice military
effectiveness for other people's agenda. The realities of the
wartime Britain must also be remembered. It had seen severe
early defeats, an economy almost crippled by German U-boat
attacks, and dwindling supplies of manpower to fight on fronts
ranging from the Far East to the Mediterranean. There simply
were no more big armies to commit wholesale in Normandy or
elsewhere. Montgomery thus carefully husbanded the troops he had
left. Furthermore, much of his apparent caution sprang from his
regard for human life and a desire not to throw the lives of his
troops away in the manner of the generals of the First World
War. Therefore, for El Alamein, Normandy and the Ardennes, he
was not prepared to go into an offensive until there was
complete readiness of both men, equipment, and logistics. This
approach sometimes exasperated his superiors, but it generally
brought success, and ensured his popularity with his men.
The criticism of slowness and caution has been taken further
with Montgomery being called primarily a "general of matériel":
one who emerged at the right time and place to take advantage of
the massive outpouring of American and British war production,
ensuring the Allies local material superiority against their
opponents. But this charge is hard to maintain in a war during
which material weight counted above almost all factors. It was a
mass production war in every theatre, and the same "matériel"
criticism of Montgomery must then need to apply to the great
Russian commanders of the Eastern Front like Zhukov or Konev, as
well as to the American effort. Equally, it ignores the
successful improvised actions in North Africa, Normandy, and the
Ardennes, and yet as stated above, Montgomery did not have the
man power or equipment to achieve those scale victories; so in
essence one could say he was doing more with what he had, than
any other general in Europe.
A second great area of criticism centres around Montgomery's
only defeat of the Second World War, the failure of Operation
Market Garden at Arnhem. It may be significant that this
operation was unlike any of Montgomery's successful battles by
being bold, but poorly planned and supported. R.W.Thompson
writes
The conception of such a plan was impossible for a man of
Montgomery's innate caution... In fact, Montgomery's decision to
mount the operation aimed at the Zuider Zee was as startling as
it would have been for an elderly and saintly Bishop suddenly to
take up safe-cracking and begin on the Bank of England.
It has been suggested that the ambition of the plan may have
been a result of interpersonal friction and competition with the
American generals, as well as other personality traits
A result of the concentration on Market Garden was the failure
to clear the Scheldt estuary, which surrounded the vital port of
Antwerp. In the autumn of 1944 the Allies required a port to
shorten their supply lines and allow supplies to be brought in
for the advance into Germany. It also meant that the Germans
could reinforce their defensive lines in Holland, blocking one
main axis of advance into their homeland. Montgomery pleaded the
difficulties of continual fighting in prior weeks and logistical
problems, but the result of the distraction of Market Garden was
the escape of the German 15th Army and lengthy operations to
clear the Scheldt. Thompson calls it "Montgomery's most
agonizing failure", while Montgomery himself later noted that
this was "a bad mistake — I underestimated the difficulty of
opening up the approaches to Antwerp ... I reckoned that the
Canadian Army could do it while we were going for the Ruhr. I
was wrong."
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