Bernard Montgomery

Bernard Law Montgomery was born on November 17, 1887, in Kennington, south London, the fourth of nine children of Henry Montgomery, an Anglican clergyman, and his wife Maud ^[1]. In 1889 his father was appointed Bishop of Tasmania, and the family moved to Hobart, where Bernard spent most of his childhood. He later described his upbringing as unhappy, marked by constant friction with his strict and domineering mother, a relationship that biographers have often cited when explaining his combative adult personality ^[2].

The family returned to England in 1901, and Montgomery attended St Paul's School in London, where he showed more aptitude for games than for study. In 1907 he entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. His time there was nearly cut short when he was demoted for his part in a violent prank against a fellow cadet, but he graduated in 1908 and was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment ^[1]. His first posting took him to India, where he served on the North West Frontier and began to develop the professional seriousness that would set him apart from many of his peers.

The First World War shaped Montgomery more than any other experience. In October 1914, during fighting near Meteren in Flanders, he was shot through the right lung by a sniper and wounded so severely that a grave was dug for him. He survived, was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, and spent the rest of the war in staff appointments, finishing as chief of staff of the 47th (London) Division ^[1]. The waste and confusion he witnessed on the Western Front convinced him that battles had to be carefully planned, thoroughly rehearsed, and fought only when the odds favored success. That conviction became the core of his military method ^[3].

Between the wars Montgomery built a reputation as one of the British Army's most dedicated trainers of troops. He attended the Staff College at Camberley in 1920 and later returned there as an instructor. He helped rewrite the infantry training manual, commanded his regiment in Palestine and India, and by 1938 was leading the 8th Infantry Division during the Arab revolt in Palestine ^[2]. Colleagues found him opinionated and difficult, but few doubted his professional skill.

When war came again in 1939, Montgomery took the 3rd Division to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. During the retreat to Dunkirk in May 1940 he handled his division with notable competence, executing a difficult night march across the front of the advancing Germans to plug a gap in the line ^[3]. The evacuation confirmed his standing, and over the next two years he rose through corps and regional commands in a Britain bracing for invasion, drilling his troops with a rigor that some resented and others credited with transforming morale.

In August 1942 Montgomery was appointed to command the Eighth Army in Egypt, which had been driven back to the Alamein position by Erwin Rommel's Axis forces. The appointment itself owed something to chance: the original choice, William Gott, was killed when his aircraft was shot down ^[1]. Montgomery arrived to find a tired army and immediately set about restoring its confidence, visiting units in person, insisting there would be no further retreat, and making himself instantly recognizable in his black tank beret with two badges ^[4].

His first test came at Alam Halfa at the end of August 1942, when he repulsed Rommel's final attempt to break through toward the Nile. Montgomery then refused to attack until he had built up an overwhelming advantage in men, tanks, guns, and supplies. The Second Battle of El Alamein opened on October 23, 1942, with a massive artillery bombardment. After twelve days of attritional fighting, the Axis line broke and Rommel began a long retreat that ended in Tunisia the following spring ^[4]. The victory was the first large-scale British defeat of the German army in the war, and Winston Churchill ordered church bells rung across Britain to mark it ^[5].

Alamein made Montgomery famous. He was knighted and promoted to full general, and the Eighth Army pursued the Axis forces some 1,500 miles across Libya into Tunisia, where the campaign ended in May 1943 with the surrender of nearly a quarter of a million Axis troops to the combined Allied armies ^[3]. Montgomery then led the Eighth Army in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and in the early battles on the Italian mainland, working, often uneasily, alongside American commanders including George S. Patton.

In December 1943 Montgomery was recalled to England to command the 21st Army Group and to serve as commander of all Allied ground forces for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, under the supreme command of Dwight D. Eisenhower ^[1]. He pressed successfully for the assault plan to be enlarged from three seaborne divisions to five, widening the invasion front. On June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy, and through the difficult summer battles that followed, Montgomery directed a strategy of drawing German armor onto the British and Canadian front around Caen while American forces built up strength for a breakout in the west ^[5]. Caen fell more slowly than planned and his conduct of the campaign drew criticism, but the German position in Normandy collapsed in August 1944.

When Eisenhower assumed direct control of the land campaign on September 1, 1944, Montgomery was promoted to field marshal as a mark of his standing, though he resented losing the ground command and argued repeatedly for a single concentrated thrust into Germany under his own direction ^[2]. His attempt to shorten the war by seizing a bridgehead across the Rhine at Arnhem, Operation Market Garden in September 1944, ended in costly failure when the British 1st Airborne Division was destroyed at the final bridge ^[6].

During the German Ardennes offensive of December 1944, Eisenhower placed the American armies on the northern flank of the bulge temporarily under Montgomery's command. He handled the defensive battle capably, but a self-congratulatory press conference in January 1945 infuriated American commanders and nearly cost him his job ^[5]. In March 1945 his army group crossed the Rhine, and on May 4, 1945, at Lüneburg Heath, Montgomery accepted the surrender of German forces in the Netherlands, northwest Germany, and Denmark ^[1].

Montgomery married Elizabeth Carver, a widow whose first husband had been killed at Gallipoli, in 1927. The marriage brought him unusual happiness, and their son David was born in 1928. Elizabeth died in October 1937 from septicemia following an insect bite, a loss that devastated Montgomery and after which he threw himself even more completely into his profession ^[2]. He never remarried.

He was an ascetic by soldierly standards: he did not smoke, rarely drank, kept early hours, and demanded physical fitness from his officers. He was also famously tactless, certain of his own judgment, and dismissive of those he considered less professional, traits that damaged his relationships with allies and superiors alike ^[3]. Yet the same self-belief made him an effective communicator with ordinary soldiers, whom he addressed in plain language and whose lives he was genuinely reluctant to spend carelessly. Anyone weighing Bernard Montgomery facts against the legend finds a man who inspired strong loyalty and strong dislike in roughly equal measure.

After the war Montgomery served as commander of the British occupation forces in Germany and then, from 1946 to 1948, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the professional head of the British Army. He was raised to the peerage in 1946 as 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein and appointed a Knight of the Garter ^[1]. His tenure as army chief was stormy, marked by poor relations with fellow chiefs of staff.

From 1948 he chaired the commanders-in-chief committee of the Western Union defense organization, and from 1951 to 1958 he served as deputy supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe under Eisenhower and his successors, his final military appointment ^[3]. In retirement he published his blunt and self-justifying Memoirs in 1958, which sold widely but provoked lasting controversy, including sharp criticism of Eisenhower's generalship that permanently soured their relationship ^[6]. He also wrote A History of Warfare (1968), traveled to meet leaders including Mao Zedong, and made headlines with provocative remarks in the House of Lords. Montgomery died at his home, Isington Mill near Alton in Hampshire, on March 24, 1976, at the age of 88, and was buried in Binsted churchyard after a state-honored funeral at St George's Chapel, Windsor ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Bernard Montgomery encounters one of the most argued-over reputations in modern military history. Admirers point to Alamein, the restoration of Eighth Army morale in 1942, the successful Normandy campaign, and his insistence on thorough preparation that kept casualties lower than in the First World War battles of his youth ^[4]. Critics answer with his caution in pursuit, the failure at Arnhem, and a talent for alienating allies that complicated coalition warfare at the highest level ^[6].

Any balanced Bernard Montgomery biography must weigh both sides. Historians such as Nigel Hamilton, his official biographer, have documented a commander whose greatest gifts were training, planning, and the projection of confidence to citizen soldiers who needed to believe they could win ^[2]. Among Bernard Montgomery achievements, the transformation of a defeated desert army into a winning one within ten weeks remains the most striking, and the surrender he took at Lüneburg Heath gave Britain its formal moment of victory in Europe. His papers are held at the Imperial War Museum in London, which also displays the two campaign caravans from which he commanded in the desert and in Europe, and his name endures in the title he chose: Montgomery of Alamein ^[7].