Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (1887–1976): Monty, El Alamein and Normandy

17 November 1887 – 24 March 1976 | British Army | Second World War

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, was one of the most famous British soldiers of the twentieth century. Known to his men and to the public simply as “Monty”, he commanded the Eighth Army to victory at El Alamein in 1942, led the Allied ground forces in the invasion of Normandy in 1944, and accepted the surrender of the German forces in northern Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands in May 1945. He was also one of the most argued-about generals of the war: admired by his soldiers, resented by many of his fellow commanders, and criticised long after the fighting ended.

Montgomery was born in London on 17 November 1887, the son of the Reverend Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, who later became Bishop of Tasmania, and his wife Maud. The family moved to Tasmania when Bernard was two years old, and much of his childhood was spent there. He returned to England for his schooling at St Paul’s School in London, and in 1907 he entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst.

His time at Sandhurst was nearly cut short. He was almost expelled after a fight in which he set fire to another cadet with a poker, an incident that became part of the Montgomery legend and an early sign of a temperament that would trouble his superiors for the rest of his career. He survived the episode, passed out of Sandhurst, and in 1908 was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.

Alexander and Montgomery in the Western Desert, 1942.
Imperial War Museum (E 15750), via Wikimedia Commons.

Early life and the First World War

Montgomery’s first experience of war came in France in 1914. He went out with the British Expeditionary Force as a young officer of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and in October of that year, during the First Battle of Ypres, he was shot through the right lung by a sniper. The wound was so severe that a grave was prepared for him. He survived, recovered, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his gallantry.

He spent the rest of the First World War as a staff officer, serving at the Somme in 1916 and at Passchendaele in 1917. The experience shaped him profoundly. He watched attacks go forward against prepared defences at a cost that appalled him, and he came away with a settled conviction that a commander must not spend his men’s lives carelessly. Years later, in his memoir of 1958, he wrote: “The frightful casualties appalled me. The so-called ‘good fighting generals’ of the war appeared to me to be those who had a complete disregard for human life.”

That conviction became the foundation of his method as a commander. Montgomery would not attack until he believed he had prepared properly, built up his supplies, and given his men the best possible chance. His critics would later call this caution; his soldiers, who trusted him to look after them, called it something else entirely.

After the war he served in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, and then built a reputation as a staff officer and trainer. He attended the Staff College at Camberley, served as an instructor there, commanded the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment from 1931 to 1934, and commanded the 9th Infantry Brigade from 1937 to 1938. In 1938 he took command of the 8th Infantry Division in Palestine, where British troops were engaged in the Arab revolt. By the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 he was one of the Army’s most experienced divisional commanders, though still little known to the public.

Dunkirk, 1940

Montgomery went to France with the British Expeditionary Force in 1939 in command of the 3rd Division. He was, by his own account, already convinced that the campaign would end badly, and he trained his division for a tactical retreat. When the German attack came in May 1940 and the Allied armies were driven back towards the Channel, that preparation proved its worth. His division withdrew in good order, and he played a significant part in the evacuation from Dunkirk, taking over command of II Corps during the final stages of the operation.

After Dunkirk he commanded V Corps, then XII Corps, and from late 1941 South-Eastern Command, responsible for the defence of south-east England against invasion. He was a demanding trainer, unpopular with some officers for his brusque manner and his habit of sacking commanders he judged inadequate, but the troops under him knew exactly what was expected of them. In the summer of 1942, when the war in the desert was going badly for Britain, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, turned to him.

North Africa and El Alamein

In August 1942 Churchill appointed Montgomery to command the Eighth Army in the Western Desert. He took over an army whose morale had been badly shaken by a series of defeats at the hands of General Erwin Rommel’s German and Italian forces. Montgomery moved quickly to restore confidence. He told his men that the retreat was over, and that the Eighth Army would fight where it stood. In an address to his troops he declared: “I want to impose on everyone that the bad times are over, they are finished! Our mandate from the Prime Minister is to destroy the Axis forces in North Africa... It can be done, and it will be done!”

For nearly two months he trained, reorganised and re-equipped his army, refusing to be hurried into battle before he was ready. He first defeated Rommel’s attack at Alam Halfa at the end of August, and then, on 23 October 1942, launched the Second Battle of El Alamein. After days of hard fighting, the Axis line broke in early November. It was the first major Allied land victory of the war, and a turning point in the North African campaign and, as the National Army Museum puts it, in the whole war.

Montgomery then led the Eighth Army in pursuit across Libya, taking Tripoli in January 1943 and advancing into Tunisia. In April 1943 he won a wager with the American Major-General Bedell Smith that British forces would capture the Tunisian city of Sfax by 15 April; Sfax fell on 10 April, and Montgomery demanded as his prize an American bomber to use as his personal transport. The Axis forces in North Africa surrendered in May 1943.

Sicily and Italy

In July 1943 Montgomery commanded the Eighth Army in the invasion of Sicily, landing on the south-east coast of the island while American forces under General George Patton landed to the west. The campaign succeeded, but Montgomery’s relationship with his American counterparts was already strained. Patton and his fellow American commander, General Omar Bradley, resented what they saw as Montgomery’s caution and his appetite for publicity, while Montgomery doubted their handling of the campaign. The friction would only grow.

In September 1943 Montgomery’s Eighth Army landed at Salerno in southern Italy, as part of the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland. The landing met fierce German resistance, and the advance up Italy was slow and costly. By the end of the year Montgomery had been chosen for a larger command, and he left Italy to prepare for the invasion of north-west Europe.

Churchill and Montgomery, 19 May 1944.
Imperial War Museum (H 38661), via Wikimedia Commons.

Normandy and North-West Europe

On 6 June 1944, D-Day, Montgomery commanded all the Allied ground forces taking part in the invasion of Normandy. It was the greatest amphibious operation in history, and the landings succeeded. The fighting that followed was harder and slower than planned: the British and Canadian forces around Caen were held up for weeks, and Montgomery was criticised, particularly by American commanders, for the delay in taking the city. In August, however, his planning helped to entrap and defeat the German forces in the Falaise Pocket, and the Allied armies broke out across France. In September 1944 he was promoted to field marshal.

That same month he persuaded the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to approve Operation Market Garden, an ambitious attempt to seize a series of bridges across the Netherlands and cross the Rhine, using airborne troops to hold the bridges until ground forces could reach them. The operation failed. German armoured units in the area were stronger than expected, the British 1st Airborne Division was effectively destroyed at Arnhem, and the losses were heavy. Market Garden remains the most serious failure of Montgomery’s career, and the one his critics return to most often.

He redeemed himself, in the judgement of the National Army Museum, during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. When the Germans launched their surprise offensive through the Ardennes against the Americans, Montgomery was given command of the northern half of the battlefront. By bolstering the American defences with XXX Corps and permitting the deployment of reserves, he helped to turn the tide of the battle.

In March 1945 he oversaw the meticulously planned crossings of the Rhine, and his forces advanced rapidly into northern Germany. On 4 May 1945, at Lüneburg Heath, he accepted the surrender of all German forces in Denmark, northern Germany and the Netherlands. It was the last major surrender of the war in Europe before the general capitulation four days later.

Later life and legacy

After the war Montgomery became Commander-in-Chief of the British Army of the Rhine, the first commander of the occupation force in Germany, and a member of the Allied Control Council, with wide-ranging responsibility for the government of occupied Germany. In 1946 he was created 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein and appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the professional head of the British Army, a post he held until 1948. From 1948 to 1951 he chaired the Commanders-in-Chief Committee of the Western Union, the early Western European defence organisation. He then served as NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 1951 until his retirement from the Army in 1958, after fifty years of service.

Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Senior Commander Mary Williamson, Gatow, 1946.
National Army Museum (NAM. 1994-07-296-39).

In retirement he wrote his memoirs, published in 1958. The book was inflammatory: he was sharply critical of many of his wartime colleagues, including Eisenhower, who was by then President of the United States. In later life he was involved in several public controversies, voicing support for apartheid in South Africa, speaking against the legalisation of homosexuality, and criticising American tactics in Vietnam. His reputation, already contested among his fellow commanders, became contested among historians too.

Churchill’s verdict on him, given in 1945, has lasted better than most: “In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.” Montgomery was arrogant, direct to the point of rudeness, and famously lacking in diplomacy. Yet, as the National Army Museum notes, that same directness made him a great military leader in the eyes of his soldiers, who trusted him because he prepared carefully and did not waste their lives. He remains one of the best-known generals of the Second World War and one of the British Army’s greatest ever commanders, a claim to fame that even reached popular culture: the comedy troupe Monty Python have sometimes said they chose their name in mocking tribute to him.

Montgomery died at Isington in Hampshire on 24 March 1976, aged 88. A statue of him stands outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, a few yards from the building where he once worked. He had been made a Knight of the Garter, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath and a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, and had been mentioned in despatches nine times. The honours tell only part of the story. The rest is in the campaigns he commanded, the men who followed him, and the arguments about him that have never quite ended.

Sources

• National Army Museum, “Bernard Law Montgomery: Unbeatable and unbearable” — https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/bernard-montgomery
• National Army Museum, Online Collection, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Senior Commander Mary Williamson, 1946 (NAM. 1994-07-296-39) — https://collection.nam.ac.uk/detail.php?acc=1994-07-296-39
• National Portrait Gallery, Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein — https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp03144/bernard-law-montgomery-1st-viscount-montgomery-of-alamein
• Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia Commons: Alexander and Montgomery, Western Desert, 1942 (IWM E 15750) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Campaign_in_North_Africa_1940-1943-_Personalities_E15750.jpg
• Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia Commons: Churchill and Montgomery, 19 May 1944 (IWM H 38661) — https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winston_Churchill_during_the_Second_World_War_in_the_United_Kingdom_H38661.jpg