Monty: The Legend of El Alamein

Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery was once asked to name the three greatest generals in history. Half smiling, he replied, "The other two were Alexander the Great and Napoleon."

It was a characteristic remark, utterly self-assured and mockingly arrogant. But when Bernard Law Montgomery died at 88 last week at Hampshire, England, there was no shortage of experts who agreed--almost. Historian A.J.P. Taylor felt that Montgomery was "the best British field commander since Wellington." Dwight Eisenhower, World War II boss of the brusque and banty (5 ft. 8 in.) field marshal, said that Monty was tops at winning the admiration of his men and in fighting set-piece battles. Others called Montgomery s overrated and unimaginative as a general and spiteful and cantankerous as a man. Whatever the final verdict on his achievements, few generals of any nationality emerged from World War II with more fame and adulation than the victor of El Alamein and the leader of the British march from Normandy to the Baltic.

No one worked harder at propagating his own legend than Montgomery himself. From his early, loveless childhood, he sought his outlet in domination through leadership--first in sports, then in battle. During World War II, his unflagging confidence combined with a gift for showmanship gave Britons a needed boost in morale. His trademark beret and scruffy turtlenecks, as well as his jut-jawed, wisecracking impatience with routine, became international emblems of the tough, get-the-job-done spirit of the Allied war effort.

Cool Command. Born in 1887 in London's Kennington district where his father was vicar, he got his first taste of soldiering at the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and was almost expelled at one point for setting the shirt of a fellow cadet on fire. In World War I, after three years in India, he fought on the Marne and was badly wounded at Ypres. He emerged from the war at 30 a lieutenant colonel. By 1938, after more service in India and the Middle East, he was a major general. During the opening months of World War II, while France and Belgium were collapsing, his reputation was enhanced by his cool command of a division that escaped almost intact in the Dunkirk evacuation.

It was at El Alamein in North Africa that Montgomery became a national hero, and the controversy over his talents began. Leading the battered British Eighth Army, Montgomery pushed the Afrika Korps of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the vaunted "Desert Fox," out of Egypt and into full retreat to Tunisia--where the Germans ran into Eisenhower's North African forces. El Alamein sent the British into ecstasy. "Before it," said Winston Churchill of the famous battle, "there were no victories; after it, there were no defeats."

Though El Alamein was indeed a turning point in the war, Montgomery may have got more credit for it than he deserved. The British commander executed the battle plan meticulously, but many analysts believe that the British victory was more a product of superiority in manpower and equipment than Monty's strategic skill. When his painstakingly prepared attack finally came on Oct. 23, 1942, Montgomery had 230,000 men and 1,100 tanks facing Rommel's 80,000 men and 260 tanks. Yet when the battle was over, the British losses were triple those of the enemy's.

Arnhem Bridge. El Alamein epitomized Montgomery's battlefield style: a long, careful buildup of materiel superiority followed by a massive frontal attack with secondary flanking pushes. These tactics were successful in many battles--at Mareth, Tunisia, the Sangro River in Italy, and Caen, France--but they also led to some disasters. The most notable was the ill-starred 1944 operation "Market Garden," a Montgomery plan to march straight into Germany's Ruhr Valley by seizing five bridges that crossed the Rhine in Holland. The drive collapsed at the crucial crossing, Arnhem Bridge, with a devastating defeat of U.S. and British forces.

Later Montgomery admitted that he made "a bad mistake at Arnhem." At the time, however, he blamed the disaster on Eisenhower, charging that the American commander had failed to provide Monty's forces with enough materiel. Indeed, throughout the war Montgomery fought an acrimonious verbal battle against overall American command of the Allied armies. This war within a war became so heated that at one point Eisenhower threatened to force Montgomery's removal. Said Monty later: "Ike had simply no experience for the job. As a field commander he was very bad."

Clearly, Montgomery had his shortcomings. Nonetheless he was in Britain far more than just a general. He was a link to the fading days of empire and glory, the man who won the final battles before the eclipse of British military prowess by the rise of the superpowers. As British Military Historian Michael Howard has written, "It is doubtful whether he will be regarded by posterity as one of the great captains of history." But in the popular mind, the hero of El Alamein probably has a secure place alongside, if not Alexander and Napoleon, then at least Marlborough and Wellington, which even Monty might agree is acceptable soldier's company.

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