Bernard Montgomery: the victor of El Alamein

Montgomery was the general Britain needed in 1942: a professional who promised his beaten desert army that the bad times were over, and then made it true. He was also among the most difficult men in the Allied high command, arrogant, boastful and tactless with his peers and his American allies. The National Army Museum sums him up as arrogant and unlikeable, but ultimately successful.²

Early life

Bernard Law Montgomery was born in London on 17 November 1887, the son of a clergyman. He was educated at St Paul's School in London and at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and in 1908 was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.³

World War I

Early in World War I, in 1914, he was shot through the lung, a wound so severe that he was not expected to live; the National Army Museum places it at the First Battle of Ypres, English Heritage at the Marne. He recovered and spent the rest of the war as a staff officer.⁴

What he saw there shaped him for life. He came away appalled by the losses that the commanders of that war had been ready to accept, and resolved to reach his objectives with as little loss of life as possible. Between the wars Britannica notes he became known as a first-rate trainer of troops, with a forcible insistence on physical fitness, youth and efficiency in leadership.⁵

1940: France and Dunkirk

In April 1939 he was given command of the 3rd Infantry Division, and that autumn he took it to France with the British Expeditionary Force. When the German offensive broke the Allied line in May 1940, he pulled his division back in good order and brought most of it home through Dunkirk. He then commanded in southeastern England, the sector most exposed to a German invasion.⁶

El Alamein

In August 1942 Winston Churchill gave him the Eighth Army in Egypt, beaten back by Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps and badly demoralized. Montgomery told his men that the bad times were over. He visited his units constantly, explained what he expected of them, made sure they were properly supplied, and trained and re-equipped them for weeks before attacking.⁷

At the end of August he stopped Rommel's last drive toward the Nile in a defensive battle at Alam Halfa. Instead of counterattacking at once, he spent the next weeks building up his forces, retraining his men and making sure he had superior numbers of men, tanks and guns. Facing him, Rommel, short of fuel for a battle of maneuver, dug in behind minefields so deep that the Germans called them "devil's gardens."⁸

The Second Battle of El Alamein opened with a huge artillery barrage on the night of 23 October 1942, the date given by Britannica, the National Army Museum and the Imperial War Museums. Montgomery made a feint in the south and his main attack in the north, where infantry and engineers cleared two corridors through the minefields for the armor. The tanks stuck in the congested corridors, and for a week the battle became a grinding fight of attrition, which Montgomery called "crumbling." He held his nerve, regrouped, and on the night of 1 to 2 November launched the final attack, Operation Supercharge, which broke the Axis line. By 4 November Rommel was in retreat. Montgomery's caution let the German motorized units escape, but the Italian infantry, without transport, were left behind and taken prisoner.⁹

It was the first clear-cut British land victory over the Germans in the war and a huge boost to Allied morale. Days later, on 8 November, Anglo-American forces under Eisenhower landed in French North Africa, and the Axis armies were caught between two fronts. Montgomery pursued them across Libya to Tunisia, where they surrendered in May 1943.¹⁰ › El Alamein, 1942

Sicily and Italy

Under Eisenhower, Montgomery took the Eighth Army into Sicily in July 1943 and then up the east coast of Italy. At the end of 1943 he was called home to command the Allied land forces for the invasion of France.¹¹

Normandy

Montgomery did not like the invasion plan he was given. He insisted on a larger assault force and a wider landing area, which Eisenhower approved, and drew up a plan for the battle of Normandy as a springboard for the liberation of France. On D-Day, 6 June 1944, and for the following weeks he commanded all the Allied ground forces in France.¹² › D-Day, 1944

English Heritage notes the personality clashes and differences of opinion over progress, but judges that the result was as Montgomery had planned. In September 1944 Eisenhower took over direct command of the land battle, and Montgomery went back to commanding the 21st Army Group of British and Canadian troops. He was promoted to field marshal.¹³

Market Garden to the Elbe

Montgomery persuaded Eisenhower to back Operation Market Garden in September 1944, an airborne and armored thrust through the Netherlands meant to seize a bridgehead over the Rhine at Arnhem. It failed, with heavy losses, and English Heritage calls it his only major failure.¹⁴ › Operation Market Garden

When the Germans struck in the Ardennes in December 1944, he took command on the northern side of the Bulge and helped to contain the attack, though his later claims of credit offended the Americans, who had done most of the fighting. In the spring of 1945 his armies advanced across northern Germany, and on 4 May 1945, on Lüneburg Heath, he accepted the surrender of the German forces in the Netherlands, northwest Germany and Denmark.¹⁵

Command style

Montgomery was a cautious, thorough planner who would not attack until his men and supplies were fully ready. Fellow Allied commanders often found him exasperatingly slow, after El Alamein and in Normandy above all; his defenders, English Heritage among them, see a deliberate method of gathering resources and striking with overwhelming force at the right moment to make victory certain and keep casualties down. Britannica judges that the policy brought steady, if slow, success and made him popular with his troops.¹⁶

He was also a showman with a purpose. His black beret became a trademark, he talked to his soldiers often and plainly, and he made sure every officer understood the battle plan. The other side of the same confidence was arrogance: he was openly critical of peers and superiors and lacked diplomacy, which made him increasingly unpopular with the Americans.¹⁷

Later life, death and legacy

In 1946 he was made a Knight of the Garter and 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. He commanded the British Army of the Rhine, was Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1946 to 1948, chaired the defense organization of the Western European Union from 1948 to 1951, and then served for seven years as deputy supreme commander of NATO's forces in Europe.¹⁸

His Memoirs of 1958 criticized many wartime colleagues, including Eisenhower, by then president of the United States, and he took controversial positions, among them support for apartheid in South Africa and opposition to the decriminalization of homosexuality. He died on 24 March 1976 near Alton in Hampshire.¹⁹

His boastfulness and tactlessness long weighed on his reputation, but time has turned attention back to what he achieved. The National Army Museum ranks him among the British Army's greatest commanders, and Britannica among the outstanding Allied commanders of the war. Read how he clashed with his allies in Eisenhower vs Montgomery and Patton vs Montgomery, how he fought his great opponent in Montgomery vs Rommel, or explore the greatest British commanders.²⁰