Rude but effective
Richard Lamb
THE LONELY LEADER: MONTY 1944-1945 by Alistair Horne and David Montgomery Macmillan, £17.50, pp. 381 So many books have been published about Field Marshal Montgomery and the European campaign that the archives have been drained. However, this well written and absorbing work, using for the first time his letters to his son and the diaries of Johnnie Henderson (Monty's ADC), together with fresh interviews with sur- vivors, brings to life new facets.
Particularly fascinating are the descrip- tions of Monty's 27 `Tac HQs' from Normandy to Germany which Alistair Home and David Montgomery visited in 1992. In these camps close to the line Monty lived with a small team of dedicated young liaison officers who each day visited the forward units, bringing back detailed reports. As a result, Monty, unlike his American counterparts, was always well briefed on the latest developments in the fighting. In his tiny mess Monty was isolat- ed like a bachelor housemaster with his pupils. With the whole British army to choose from, no one who was thick or abrasive was tolerated, and his liaison officers were an impressive lot. Their reminiscences show how fond they were of their 'master', although they knew how difficult he could be at times. The late General Marshall-Cornwall once told me that Monty, like Napoleon, never wanted to be liked by anyone over the rank of Captain.
Stories of Monty's rudeness abound. I thought the worst example was when the American General Mark Clark visited him in Italy to discuss co-ordinating the plans of 5th US Army with those of 8th Army. Monty despised Clark and, having placed his best staff-officer, Charles Richardson, at the American's HQ, felt a personal dis- cussion to be superfluous. Clark was informed that Monty was away. This was manifestly untrue. However, Horne caps this by the tale that at a post-war dinner someone shouted out they could not hear. Monty fixed his eye on T. E. Utley, the blind journalist, and said: 'I can see one of you is blind, but are the rest of of you deaf too?'
David Montgomery, Monty's only child, in a foreword writes that `. . . in the desert and in North West Europe my father was the right man at the right time in the right place.' This is indisputable. The Allies would have been in the soup without him. No other Allied general possessed his out- standing skill in handling armies and in co- operating with air and naval forces, nor had so complete a knowledge of the latest weapons and equipment.
I can recall how dread of the coming invasion of Europe lay like a black cloud over Britain. First world war veterans horrified younger officers with memories of trench warfare and the blood-bath on the Somme and Paschendale. The army at home had no battle experience apart from the survivors of Dunkirk, whose accounts of that disaster did nothing to raise morale. All were puzzled why Britain had won in 1918 and then lost every land battle with the Germans until Alamein in 1942.
In 1944 Monty addressed each formation training for the invasion, and, although his brashness and flamboyance antagonised a few, he successfully got over the message that he always won 'his' battles, and instead of fighting as they had in 1940 with bayonets against Germans with submachine guns and feeble 'Boys' rifles to fire uselessly at tanks, here was a properly equipped and well-trained army which would sweep all before it. He did a magnif- icent and essential job in reviving morale.
As soon as Monty returned to London from Italy he tore up the plan of the cross- channel invasion prepared by General Morgan for a three-division landing, describing it as 'useless — completely useless'. He was 100 per cent right, and insisted on an assault by 15 divisions. According to Horne, D-Day was 'a closer run thing than has been appreciated', with the gods of war sending horizontal rain and hurricane winds as the troops sailed, and 2,000 US soldiers dying on Omaha beach. If Hitler had not been hoodwinked into believing there would be another landing in the Pas de Calais and holding back his Panzers, D-Day could have been a disaster.
Rightly, Horne praises Monty for stick- ing to his original plan for the British army in the north to draw the German Panzers away from the Americans in the south even after the failure of five major British attacks near Caen with a great number of casualties. These setbacks enabled the Americans to discredit Montgomery, so that even Churchill succumbed to their malice, and temporarily lost faith in him, and Monty came near to losing his job.
Monty had put Eisenhower into a tower- log rage at their first meeting in London by telling the chain-smoking American that smoking was not allowed, and they were never after that on the best of terms. American top brass, with the help of some British, were jockeying to get Monty sacked when an Ultra message revealed that the Germans had withdrawn almost all their armour from the US front and put it on the British flank. From then on, Churchill refused to listen to criticism of his favourite general, and the US army went through the depleted German defences like butter. However, Monty's quarrel with Eisenhower was never healed and after the publication of Montgomery's war memoirs they were not on speaking terms. Once Monty had won his great Normandy victory and Paris had fallen, he and Eisenhower quarrelled bitterly. Eisen- hower wanted to attack on all the front. Monty insisted that resources should be concentrated on a single push either by Patton's army into Germany through Metz or on his own pencil-like thrust up the coast to outflank the Ruhr. With Eisen- hower dithering, the Allied armies had the worst of both worlds and Monty made his supreme error by landing airborne troops one bridge too far away at Arnhem. If he had either gone for the nearer Rhine bridge at Wesel or Patton had been given full backing, the war might have been won in 1944.
I have a hideous feeling that the catastrophe at Arnhem may have been due to Monty's hope that such a spectacular coup would make it impossible for Eisen- hower not to allocate to him the resources needed to drive on to Berlin. Instead, the Arnhem defeat shattered Monty's prestige, and enabled Eisenhower subsequently to stand up to Monty's demands to dictate Allied strategy. Indeed, Monty's incessant nagging eventually so infuriated Eisenhow- er that he refused to make Berlin his objec- tive, because it would give Monty the leading role, and instead ordered the American armies to advance into central Europe, reducing Monty's role to that of a flank guard. As a result, Berlin fell to the Russians not the Allies, and Churchill and Monty never forgave Eisenhower for pre- venting the British from capturing Berlin. If Monty had been allowed to take Berlin In accordance with the original Allied plan, the history of post-war Europe would have been very different.
Richard Lamb's Montgomery in Europe Success or Failure? is available in paper- back from Ashford, Buchan and Enright His latest book, War in Italy, was short-listed for the Duff Cooper prize.
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