Bernard Montgomery

• 1. Left for Dead

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  Bernard Law Montgomery lay in an open field at Méteren on the 13th of October 1914, shot through the right lung by a sniper. The village sits near the Belgian border at Bailleul. Montgomery was a young officer of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He stayed perfectly still and pretended to be dead, hoping the enemy would lose interest. One of his men tried to rescue him. A hidden sniper shot that man dead, and the body collapsed across Montgomery. The sniper kept firing and hit Montgomery again, this time in the knee. In Montgomery's own later words, the dead soldier "received many bullets meant for me." His battalion assumed both men were dead and left them there until dark, when stretcher bearers carried them in. At the advanced dressing station, the doctors saw no hope and ordered a grave dug. Montgomery was still alive. He was born on the 17th of November 1887 and died on the 24th of March 1976. By the end he was Field Marshal Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, known to soldiers and public alike as "Monty." What made him so single-minded? Why did his allies alternately defend him and plot to remove him? And why do historians still argue about what he really intended at Caen?

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• 2. Family and Loss

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  Bernard was the fourth of nine children, born in Kennington, Surrey, to a Church of Ireland priest named Henry Montgomery and his wife Maud. Maud was the daughter of Frederic William Farrar, a famous children's novelist and preacher, and was 18 years younger than her husband. Henry's father, Sir Robert Montgomery, was a noted colonial administrator in British India. Sir Robert died a month after his grandson's birth. Henry then inherited the family estate of New Park, at Moville in County Donegal, together with a mortgage debt of £13,000. That was a large sum in the 1880s for a man who was still only a vicar. Selling the farms at Ballynally barely kept the estate afloat. Relief came in 1889, when Henry was made Bishop of Tasmania and the family moved to that British colony.

  In Tasmania the bishop considered it his duty to tour the rural areas, and he was sometimes away for up to six months. His wife, still in her mid-20s, gave the children what were described as "constant" beatings, and otherwise mostly ignored them. She took little interest in their schooling beyond hiring tutors brought out from Britain. Bernard briefly attended St Michael's Collegiate School. His sister Sibyl died young in Tasmania, while his siblings Harold, Donald and Una all emigrated. Montgomery later admitted what that loveless household did to him: "I was a dreadful little boy. I don't suppose anybody would put up with my sort of behaviour these days." He never forgave his mother. He refused to let his son David have anything to do with her, and he declined to attend her funeral in 1949.

  In 1925, in his first known courtship, a man in his late thirties proposed to a 17-year-old girl named Betty Anderson. He tried to impress her by drawing diagrams in the sand showing how he would deploy tanks and infantry in a future war. That war seemed very remote at the time. Betty Anderson respected his ambition and single-mindedness, but she declined. In 1927 he met Elizabeth Carver, also called Betty, born Hobart, who was the sister of the future commander Sir Percy Hobart. She was a widow with two sons in their early teens, John and Dick, from her first marriage to Oswald Carver. Dick Carver later wrote that it had been "a very brave thing" for Montgomery to take on a family like that. Montgomery's own son David was born in August 1928.

  The marriage was extremely happy, and it ended abruptly in 1937. While on holiday at Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, Betty was bitten by an insect. The bite became infected, her leg was amputated, and she died of septicaemia in her husband's arms. Montgomery, then a brigadier, was devastated, yet he insisted on returning to work immediately after the funeral. Most of his letters to her were later destroyed when his quarters at Portsmouth were bombed. After Montgomery's death, John Carver offered a blunt verdict. His mother, he wrote, had arguably done the country a favour by keeping her husband's extreme single-mindedness and his suspicion of other people's motives within reasonable bounds, long enough for him to reach high command.

  Both stepsons became army officers in the 1930s, and both were serving in India when their mother died. Each eventually reached the rank of colonel in the Second World War. Dick Carver was taken prisoner at Mersa Matruh on the 7th of November 1942, during the pursuit after El Alamein. Montgomery wrote to his contacts in England, asking them to trace his stepson through the Red Cross and to send parcels. Dick escaped in September 1943, in the confusion after Italy left the war, and reached British lines on the 5th of December 1943. Montgomery sent him home to Britain to recover.

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• 3. Hard Lessons

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  Montgomery graduated from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in September 1908, having nearly been expelled for rowdiness and violence. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and first served overseas in India later that year. He became a lieutenant in 1910. In 1912 he was made adjutant of the 1st Battalion at Shorncliffe Army Camp. When the Great War began in August 1914, he crossed to France with his battalion, part of the 10th Infantry Brigade in the 4th Division of the British Expeditionary Force. He was promoted to temporary captain on the 14th of September and fought at Le Cateau and in the retreat from Mons.

  The London Gazette published his Distinguished Service Order citation in December 1914. It praised his gallant leading and said he had turned the enemy out of their trenches with the bayonet. He then spent well over a year in England. In early 1915 he became brigade major, first of the 112th Infantry Brigade and then of the 104th, which was training in Lancashire. He returned to the Western Front in early 1916 and served at the Battle of the Somme. In January 1917 he became a staff officer with the 33rd Division and took part in the Battle of Arras in April and May. That July he moved to IX Corps, part of General Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army, and served through the Battle of Passchendaele. He ended the war in November 1918 as chief of staff of the 47th (2nd London) Division, with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel.

  A photograph from October 1918, reproduced in many biographies, shows the then unknown Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery standing in front of Winston Churchill. Churchill was Minister of Munitions at the time, and the occasion was the parade after the liberation of Lille. Montgomery drew bitter conclusions from the war. "I never once saw the British Commander-in-Chief, neither French nor Haig, and only twice did I see an Army Commander," he later wrote. He recalled headquarters whose comforts grew with their distance behind the lines. From this he concluded that "the staff must be the servant of the troops." The frightful casualties appalled him. The so-called good fighting generals, he thought, were often those with a complete disregard for human life. Plumer was one exception, though Montgomery had seen him only once and never spoken to him.

  At a tennis party in Cologne, after the war, Montgomery talked Field Marshal Sir William Robertson into adding his name to the list for the Staff College at Camberley. He had not been selected at first, and the college was his only hope of high command. He had meanwhile commanded the 17th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and then reverted to captain in November 1919. After graduating, he became brigade major of the 17th Infantry Brigade in January 1921. The brigade was stationed in County Cork, carrying out counter-guerrilla operations in the last stages of the Irish War of Independence.

  In 1923, after the Irish Free State was established, Montgomery wrote candidly to Colonel Arthur Percival of the Essex Regiment. He admitted that it never bothered him how many houses were burnt, and that he had regarded all civilians as "Shinners." To win such a war, he argued, you must be ruthless, but public opinion and politicians would never allow it. He concluded that self-government for Ireland was the only workable solution, and that Lloyd George had been right to move toward it. The clearest test of his judgment had come on the 2nd of May 1922. Montgomery led 60 soldiers and four armoured cars to the town of Macroom to look for four missing British officers. His orders forbade him to attack the IRA. In the square before Macroom Castle he summoned the IRA commander, Charlie Browne, to parley. Browne answered with his own ultimatum, telling Montgomery to "leave town within 10 minutes," and walked back inside. Another IRA officer, Pat O'Sullivan, then whistled to draw Montgomery's attention to scores of volunteers who had quietly taken up firing positions all around the square. Montgomery led his troops out. The decision raised hostile questions in the House of Commons but was later approved by his superiors. By then the four missing officers had already been executed.

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• 4. Training for War

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  In 1929 Montgomery went to the War Office to help write the Infantry Training Manual. In 1931 he became commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and served in Palestine and British India. He was promoted to colonel in June 1934 and became an instructor at the Indian Army Staff College in Quetta. He returned to Britain in June 1937 to command the 9th Infantry Brigade as a temporary brigadier. In 1938 he organised an amphibious landing exercise that impressed General Sir Archibald Wavell, the new commander of Southern Command. Montgomery became a major-general on the 14th of October 1938 and took the 8th Infantry Division to Palestine, where he helped suppress an Arab revolt. Reporting its end in April 1939, he wrote, "I shall be sorry to leave Palestine in many ways, as I have enjoyed the war out here."

  Britain declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September 1939, and Montgomery's 3rd Division crossed to France under General Lord Gort. Within weeks he was in serious trouble. He had issued a circular on preventing venereal disease, worded in language so blunt that the senior chaplains of both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church objected. His corps commander, Alan Brooke, told him he wanted no more errors of this kind. Brooke nevertheless defended him from dismissal. Brooke decided against forcing a formal withdrawal of the circular, since that would remove whatever vestige of respect for Montgomery was left.

  The 3rd Division was a Regular Army formation, comprising the 7th (Guards), 8th and 9th Infantry Brigades. Montgomery was unimpressed by its readiness. While the rest of the force prepared defences against an attack expected someday, he trained his men in offensive tactics. His exercises lasted several days. Typically the division advanced to a river line, came under attack, and fell back behind the next river. Most took place at night with minimal lighting. By the spring of 1940 the division had a reputation as an agile and flexible formation. Plan D called for the Allies to advance deep into Belgium and hold the River Dyle. Brooke was pessimistic about it, but Montgomery was unconcerned, believing his division would cope in a war of movement.

  The Germans invaded the Low Countries on the 10th of May 1940, and the 3rd Division moved to its position near the Belgian city of Leuven. Soldiers of the Belgian 10th Infantry Division mistook the British for German paratroopers and opened fire. Montgomery walked up and offered to place himself under Belgian command, though he took control himself once the Germans arrived. Here he began a habit he kept all war, going to bed at 21:30 every night. His only standing order was that he must not be disturbed, and it was rarely disobeyed. On the 27th of May, as the Belgian Army on the flank began to disintegrate, his division made a night move from the right to the left of another division, only 2,000 yards behind it. It filled a dangerous gap without incident.

  On the 29th and the 30th of May, Montgomery temporarily commanded II Corps for the last stage of the Dunkirk evacuation, while Kenneth Anderson led the 3rd Division. Operation Dynamo carried 330,000 Allied personnel to Britain, though the force abandoned a great deal of equipment. Back home, Montgomery antagonised the War Office with sharp criticism of how the expeditionary force had been commanded. He was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath. He was then ordered to prepare invasions of the Portuguese Azores, the Cape Verde islands and neutral Ireland, including the seizure of Cork, Cobh and Cork harbour. None went ahead.

  In July 1940 he took command of V Corps, defending Hampshire and Dorset, and began a long feud with Claude Auchinleck, the new head of Southern Command. In April 1941 he moved to XII Corps in Kent. He demanded continuous training and high physical fitness from officers and soldiers alike, and he sacked officers he thought unfit for command. In December 1941 he took South-Eastern Command and renamed it the South-Eastern Army to promote an offensive spirit. His rehearsals culminated in Exercise Tiger in May 1942, which involved 100,000 troops.

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• 5. Alamein to Italy

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  In August 1942 Winston Churchill replaced Auchinleck in the Middle East with General Sir Harold Alexander and picked William Gott to lead the Eighth Army. Gott was killed flying back to Cairo. Brooke, by then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, persuaded Churchill to appoint Montgomery. A story, probably apocryphal but popular at the time, has Montgomery remarking, "After having an easy war, things have now got much more difficult." When a colleague told him to cheer up, he supposedly answered, "I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about Rommel!"

  Montgomery created X Corps, holding all the armoured divisions, to fight beside XXX Corps, which held the infantry. The historian Correlli Barnett judged this arrangement wrong, because it deepened an existing separatism. The German panzer corps, by contrast, combined infantry, armour and artillery under one commander. Montgomery spent two months reinforcing the 30-mile front at El Alamein. He asked Alexander for the 51st Highland and 44th Home Counties Divisions, which were then arriving in Egypt. He moved his field headquarters to Burg al Arab, beside the air force command post, so that army, navy and air forces could fight to one plan. At his first meeting with his officers he announced, "I have cancelled the plan for withdrawal." He added that if they could not stay there alive, they would stay there dead. In fact Auchinleck had never planned to withdraw from the strong position at Alamein.

  Montgomery visited units constantly and handed out cigarettes. He arrived in a standard officer's cap, briefly tried an Australian broad-brimmed hat, and then settled on the black beret that made him famous. Jim Fraser gave it to him while driving him on an inspection tour. When Brooke and Alexander visited on the 19th of August, less than a week after Montgomery took command, both were astonished by the change in atmosphere. Brooke noted that whenever Montgomery fell out of favour with the impatient Churchill, he became "my Monty."

  Montgomery expected Rommel to attack toward the heights of Alam Halfa and ordered them reinforced. Rommel attacked on the 31st of August 1942. The assault was stopped in heavy fighting, and Rommel had to pull back before the British minefields cut off his retreat. Critics faulted Montgomery for not counter-attacking at once. He answered that his methodical build-up was not yet ready, and that a hasty move could ruin his plan for an offensive on his own terms. On the 23rd of September 1942 Churchill telegraphed Alexander that a victorious battle would make amends for much delay. Montgomery prepared with care. He trained troops in clearing minefields and fighting at night, and he visited every unit involved. He gathered 252 American-built Sherman tanks and 90 M7 Priest self-propelled howitzers. By late October, the Eighth Army had 231,000 men on its ration strength.

  The Second Battle of El Alamein began on the 23rd of October 1942 and ended 12 days later as one of the first large-scale, decisive Allied land victories of the war. Montgomery correctly predicted both its length and its casualties, which came to 13,500. More than 30,000 prisoners were taken, including the German second-in-command, General Ritter von Thoma, and eight other general officers. Montgomery was promoted to full general. Rommel's attack on the Eighth Army at Medenine on the 6th of March 1943 was repulsed. At the Mareth Line, from the 20th to the 27th of March, Montgomery met stiffer opposition than expected and switched his main effort to an inland flanking pincer backed by low-flying RAF fighter-bombers. The United States awarded him the Legion of Merit.

  For the invasion of Sicily, Montgomery judged the agreed plan unworkable because it scattered the Allied effort. He had it recast so that George Patton's US Seventh Army landed in the Gulf of Gela rather than near Palermo. American commanders Patton and Omar Bradley took offence at what they saw as Montgomery's boastfulness. The Eighth Army landed on the toe of Italy in Operation Baytown on the 3rd of September 1943, four years to the day after Britain declared war on Germany. It met little resistance but was slowed by blown bridges, mines and booby-traps. Montgomery was later criticised for the lack of progress. By early November the army was stuck at the River Sangro. Montgomery disliked the lack of coordination in the Italian campaign and called the whole affair a "dog's breakfast." He was delighted to be recalled to Britain in January 1944.

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• 6. Caen and the Plan

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  Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower had both found Montgomery difficult and wanted the genial Alexander to command the ground forces in the invasion of Normandy. Brooke argued firmly that Montgomery was the better general, and he secured the appointment. Without Brooke, Montgomery would have stayed in Italy. Montgomery took command of the 21st Army Group, all Allied ground forces in Operation Overlord, under Eisenhower's overall direction. He presented his strategy at his headquarters in St Paul's School on the 7th of April and the 15th of May 1944. He foresaw a ninety-day battle ending with all forces on the Seine. Caen, in the east, would be the pivot. British and Canadian armies would form a relatively static shoulder that drew in and defeated German counter-attacks. Meanwhile the Americans would seize the Cotentin Peninsula and Brittany, then wheel south and east to form a pincer.

  Montgomery's first idea was for the Anglo-Canadian forces to break out from the beaches toward Caen and take it on D Day or two days later. The 3rd Infantry Division, the 50th (Northumbrian) Division and the 3rd Canadian Division were stopped from the 6th to the 8th of June. They were hit hard by the 21st Panzer Division and the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. The latter was drawn from fanatical members of the Hitler Youth and led by Kurt Meyer, nicknamed "Panzer Meyer." Rommel sent in the 2nd Panzer Division. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt won Hitler's permission to send two elite SS divisions, Leibstandarte and Das Reich. The historian Stephen Badsey called the forces gathering there the most formidable German divisions in France.

  The failure to take Caen at once has produced an immense dispute, with bitter nationalist overtones. A "British school" accepts Montgomery's postwar claim that he never meant to take Caen immediately. In this view the Anglo-Canadian fighting was a holding operation, part of a "Master Plan" conceived long before. An "American school" argues the opposite, that he meant to take Caen and drive his tanks into the plains beyond. Eisenhower's letters at the time show he expected "the early capture of the important focal point of Caen." A memo by Eisenhower's chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, written after meeting Montgomery in late June, mentions no holding operation. It speaks instead of a breakout into the plains.

  On the 13th of June, at Villers-Bocage, five Tiger tanks led by Michael Wittmann destroyed twenty British Cromwell tanks in about five minutes. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder complained that fighter squadrons could not move to France until Montgomery captured airfields. The first V-1 flying bomb attacks on London began that same day, adding pressure from Whitehall. In Operation Epsom, Sir Richard O'Connor's VII Corps tried to outflank Caen from the west. It cost about 4,000 men and won a salient only 5 miles deep and 2 miles wide. General Friedrich Dollmann, commanding the German Seventh Army, feared it would succeed and committed suicide. Even so, the Allies had advanced only about 15 miles inland, when their plans had called for Rennes, Alençon and St. Malo to be taken already.

  The Canadian historians Terry Copp and Robert Vogel judged that Montgomery's Directive of the 30th of June drew the correct conclusion from the early setbacks. British and Canadian limited attacks could hold the German armour and wear it down, creating the conditions for an American breakout. They added that his insistence on a master plan made by design from the start did him a disservice. Rigid planning before the German response was known, they wrote, would have been bad generalship. Montgomery told General Sir Miles Dempsey to "Go on hitting, drawing the German strength, especially some of the armour, onto yourself." The Germans put twelve divisions, six of them Panzer, against the British, and eight divisions, three of them Panzer, against the Americans.

  Operation Charnwood began on the 7th of July with a carpet-bombing offensive that turned much of the countryside and the city of Caen into wasteland. The British and Canadians pushed into northern Caen, but the Germans used the ruins to stop them. Meanwhile Allied code-breakers at Bletchley Park had broken many German codes, and French Resistance sabotage forced the Germans onto the radio. Through this Ultra intelligence, Montgomery learned that German Army Group B had lost 96,400 men and received only 5,200 replacements. The Panzer Lehr Division at Saint-Lô was down to 40 tanks. Montgomery later wrote that he knew then he had the Normandy campaign won.

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• 7. Goodwood and the Sack Campaign

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  At 0500 hours on the 18th of July 1944, a British tank crewman recalled, "1,000 Lancasters were flying from the sea in groups of three or four at 3000 ft." Operation Goodwood had begun. Its bombing struck what was left of Caen and the countryside around it. A German tank soldier of the 21st Panzer Division remembered seeing little dots fall from the planes, so many that "the crazy thought occurred to us: are those leaflets?" The 7th, 11th and Guards Armoured Divisions advanced rapidly and by noon approached the Borguebus Ridge, which dominates the land south of Caen. If the British took it, the plains of northern France would lie open and Paris might be within reach. The Germans knew it. Lieutenant Baron von Rosen later said he held his pistol to a Luftwaffe battery commander's head to make him fight.

  The dug-in 88 mm guns around the ridge turned the countryside into a field of burning Sherman tanks. One British officer wrote of men climbing out on fire like torches and rolling on the ground. Montgomery ordered the attack to press on, but fierce German counter-attacks stopped it. British casualties were 5,500, about 400 tanks were knocked out, and 7 miles of ground were gained. The Canadians finally took Caen by the 25th of July. The operation drew the last German reserves toward Caen and away from the American sector, but it fell short of fully capturing Borguebus Ridge.

  Historians disagree about what Goodwood was for. The journalist Mark Urban saw a diversion, meant to let the Americans break out, and argued that Montgomery could not tell his own soldiers so. The American historian Stephen Power thought that was unrealistic. An operation using 4,500 aircraft, 700 artillery pieces and over 8,000 armoured vehicles and trucks, costing over 5,500 casualties, was not likely conceived for so limited an aim. Power noted that Goodwood and the American Operation Cobra were meant to start together on the 18th of July, and that rain cancelled Cobra. John Keegan said Montgomery was "hedging his bets," with a plan for a breakout if the front collapsed, and evidence of a battle of attrition if not. Bradley had no doubt about the purpose. He wrote that the British decoy mission pinned the Germans while the Americans made their break on the long road to Paris. He added that Montgomery left himself open to criticism by making Caen a symbol.

  Goodwood almost cost Montgomery his job. Eisenhower seriously considered sacking him. The popular "Monty" was so well loved in Britain that firing him might have strained the Atlantic alliance at a critical moment. The campaign to remove him was led most strongly by a Briton, Air Chief Marshal Tedder. An American officer noted in his diary that Tedder had come to pursue his "current favourite subject, the sacking of Monty." Brooke grew worried enough to visit Montgomery in France. He warned that Churchill was listening to suggestions that Montgomery played for safety. Brooke advised him to invite the Prime Minister to Normandy, since Churchill's backing would give Eisenhower the political cover to fire him.

  Montgomery met Eisenhower on the 20th of July and Churchill on the 21st, at his Tactical Headquarters in France. One of his staff officers recalled it was common knowledge there that Churchill had come to sack him. No notes were taken at either meeting. Montgomery nevertheless persuaded both men to leave him in place. Then Cobra succeeded, and Patton's Third Army was unleashed. Eisenhower wrote to Montgomery, "Am delighted that your basic plan has begun brilliantly to unfold with Bradley's initial success." Cobra was helped by Operation Spring, an offensive south of Caen by II Canadian Corps under General Guy Simonds, the only Canadian general whose skill Montgomery respected. It made little headway, but the Germans took it to be the main offensive.

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• 8. Falaise to Surrender

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  After the American breakout, Montgomery opened Operation Bluecoat with Sir Richard O'Connor's VIII Corps and Gerard Bucknall's XXX Corps. Dissatisfied with Bucknall for being insufficiently aggressive, Montgomery sacked him and replaced him with Brian Horrocks. He also redirected Patton, whose Third Army was meant to advance into Brittany, toward Nantes, which soon fell. Knowing through Ultra that Hitler did not plan to retreat, he ordered an envelopment of Army Group B on the 6th of August 1944. On the 11th of August he changed the plan so that the Canadians would take Falaise and meet the Americans at Argentan. Operation Totalize, begun on the 7th of August, advanced only 9 miles in four days. Operation Tractable, launched on the 14th of August, finally took Falaise on the 17th.

  On the 13th of August Patton asked permission to take Falaise himself, and Bradley refused. Many historians have since argued that Bradley lacked aggression and that Montgomery should have overruled him. The Falaise Gap was closed on the 22nd of August 1944. About 60,000 German soldiers had been trapped in Normandy, but about 20,000 escaped before it closed. About 10,000 died in the battle. Eisenhower, viewing the field on the 24th of August, remarked with horror that it was impossible to walk without stepping on corpses. Patton and several other American generals accused Montgomery of being too slow to close the gap. Brooke defended his protégé in his diary, blaming the criticism on "national" spectacles.

  Montgomery commanded all Allied ground forces from the 6th of June 1944 until the 1st of September 1944. He then led the 21st Army Group through the rest of the campaign in north-west Europe. That included the failed attempt to cross the Rhine in Operation Market Garden. When German armour broke through American lines in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, Montgomery received command of the northern shoulder of the Bulge. In March 1945 his army group, with the US Ninth Army and the First Allied Airborne Army under it, crossed the Rhine in Operation Plunder. Troops under his command encircled the Ruhr Pocket, liberated the Netherlands and captured much of north-west Germany.

  On the 4th of May 1945, Montgomery accepted the surrender of German forces in north-western Europe at Lüneburg Heath, south of Hamburg. Berlin had surrendered to the USSR two days earlier. After the war he became Commander-in-Chief of the British Army of the Rhine and then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, from 1946 to 1948. From 1948 to 1951 he chaired the Commanders-in-Chief Committee of the Western Union. He then served as NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, a post he held until he retired in 1958.

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