Following is a remembrance of Montgomery by Colin Coote, Liberal politician and editor of The Daily Telegraph. I think it gives some additional color to the man Monty was.
OBITUARY
"Monty: Cromwellian Cavalier" by Colin R. Coote
The Daily Telegraph, Thursday, March 25, 1976
By an odd coincidence, a branch of my family owned the house in the village of Meteren in the garden of which Lieut. Bernard Law Montgomery, a platoon commander in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, fell severely wounded on Oct 13, 1914.
His wound was very nearly mortal; and, if it had been...well, the average life of a British infantry subaltern was then about a fortnight, and nobody would have been surprised.
But he survived to become a man who attracted much attention and who was, indeed, an expert at organizing it. There may be some superlative soldier -- though he had a victory with which to silence every critic; but there can be no question at all that he was a superlative actor.
A famous American lecturer was asked the secret of his success. He replied: "I just get on the stage and let my personality spread." That was also Montgomery's recipe. When he took over the command of the Eighth Army he deliberately set about spreading his personality through a lot of gimmicks -- an Australian hat, a black beret with twin badges, a staccato flood of cliches, using a caravan as headquarters, popularizing snappy phrases such as "master plan," "hitting for six."
The "austerity" on which Winston Churchill (to whom he had a deep devotion) remarked was there, but it required no conscious effort to maintain it. He genuinely disliked alcohol and tobacco. A Cromwellian affection for the Old Testament was also perfectly natural and sincere. "God and my good sword" fitted him as aptly as any Crusader.
Not that he was in the least impeccable. He was as deeply devoted to publicity as man can be, but there was no hypocrisy about it; he openly reveled in it. Once he lost a bet to me, and paid me with a 5 pound note on which he had inscribed his name and titles. "There," he said, "get that framed. It will interest your grandchildren."
Let us get the weak side of the man finished with first. It must be confessed that as a politician he was pretty immature. He had earned his status by half-a-century of distinguished services and he had every right to enjoy it, but it is to be feared that he was no psychological specialist when he pronounced on Stalin or Mao; and he missed several other excellent opportunities to be silent.
His comments on these worthies were as simple as the argument which another great soldier, the Duke of Wellington, used about railways: he opposed them because they increased the mobility of the working classes. "Monty" also was better in a battle than at a a desk; and he was always more busy than happy in his post-war jobs.
Even in his own field, all was not always spring flowers. It is clear that the picture he draws in his Memoirs of his predecessor, Field Marshal Auchinleck, was very unfair. It gives the impression of a rather pedantic defeatist; and that Auchinleck certainly was not.
When the Eighth Army staggered and struggled back to the Alamein positions on June 30, 1942, the men were, as Churchill put it, "brave but baffled," What baffled them was the problem of stopping Rommel. But he was stopped early in July -- he made his first attempt to break through on July 1-5 -- though only just. Every possibility had at that the possibility that he was not permanently stopped.
Five weeks later the position was completely changed. Two fresh divisions had arrived and 300 new Sherman tanks were due early in September. Any British commander would have been entitled to view the future through rosier spectacles. I am not denying Montgomery any of the credit due to him for a sensational recovery in Eighth Army morale. I am only saying that Auchinleck was not confining his thinking to scuttling back to the Delta, and thence to the Levant or the Sudan.
The full truth is given by Sir James Butler in his "Grand Strategy":
July 5 was the turning point...By his termination and imperturbability Auchinleck had once again saved the situation. He was now confidently holding a position from which a further assault from Rommel could be repelled, and an Allied offensive resumed when a decisive superiority in men and material had been created.
There were two other instances of an apparent lack of generosity towards colleagues. The first was an unduly large claim for his share in stopping the last German offensive in the Ardennes. The second as some rather sharp remarks about Gen. Eisenhower's strategical talents and about the broad front advance in the Rhine as compared with his (Montgomery's) own concept of a narrow thrust into North Germany.
Here again, the complaints are more of alack of tact than a lack of sense. The Cockney definition of an aristocrat is "Haffable halike to hequals and hinferiors." This is rather difficult to live up to when your conviction is that you have no equals; but at least to his inferiors -- de Guingand, Williams, Belchem and the rest of his "famile militaire" as Foch used to call his staff -- Monty was affability itself.
It is a great thing to have a personal conviction that one is right. When the elder Pitt said, "I know that I can save this country and nobody else can." his attitude was precisely that of Montgomery. Such self-confidence made PItt the hero of the Seven Years' War and Montgomery the most successful British soldier since Wellington or even Marlborough. In both cases, the background was more than a febrile conceit.
Monty was a soldier who for many years had thought of little except his profession. The conceptions he had formed during this concentrated pondering were not very new. Strategically speaking they were rather impishly defined as "no advance without security."
He refused to budge prematurely. Though he agreed with Napolean that the moral is to the material as three to one, he insisted on having the material as well as the moral. His tactical use of the material was not strikingly original. It was, indeed, rather a reversion to armour which was nill past tactic of 1918; and to the principle of explaining to troops exactly what was going to be done and why -- a principle which goes back at least to the Peloponnesian War.
Montgomery followed the personal contact principle extraordinarily well. He was thorough. He also possessed the Napoleonic requirement in a leader of being lucky. He came to the front (after, it is true, a hard, competent and gallant apprenticeship) just the the trickle of men and arms was becoming a flood. And "on the other side of the hill" Rommel was a sick man, and Hitler's military ideas were verging more and more on the suicidal.
On the whole a fair verdict on him as a soldier would be that he was infinitely more than mediocre, substantially less than miraculous.
After all, there is a ring of affection as well as of admiration in the nickname "Monty." He had some attractive human traits. He would go to great trouble to give a promising youngster a chance though he was severe if the chance was not taken. If he asked somebody to collaborate in, say the preparation of a speech he was receptive of ideas as well as fertile in them. He was enormously industrious.
Like Curzon, he wrote all his letters in a clear, if slightly schoolboyish, longhand. One of his foibles was writing letters in ink and longer manuscripts in pencil. he was oddly proud of this practice. His Memoirs bear in facsimile on the jacket: "Every word of the book was written in pencil in my own handwriting" -- as if this was something unusual.
But the man was unusual. Rather prim at one moment, the complete swashbuckler the next; lapping up the hero-worship one day, doing good by stealth the next.
One final story about him will show how far from the whole truth was the popular conception of him as a mixture of bravado and bravery. At a dinner party of mine, Rebecca West, somewhat short-sighted, was looking round the drawing-room before the company went to table. "Tell me," she asked, "who is that quiet, retiring little man sitting in the corner of the sofa?" It was Field Marshal The Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.
OBITUARY
"Monty: Cromwellian Cavalier" by Colin R. Coote
The Daily Telegraph, Thursday, March 25, 1976
By an odd coincidence, a branch of my family owned the house in the village of Meteren in the garden of which Lieut. Bernard Law Montgomery, a platoon commander in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, fell severely wounded on Oct 13, 1914.
His wound was very nearly mortal; and, if it had been...well, the average life of a British infantry subaltern was then about a fortnight, and nobody would have been surprised.
But he survived to become a man who attracted much attention and who was, indeed, an expert at organizing it. There may be some superlative soldier -- though he had a victory with which to silence every critic; but there can be no question at all that he was a superlative actor.
A famous American lecturer was asked the secret of his success. He replied: "I just get on the stage and let my personality spread." That was also Montgomery's recipe. When he took over the command of the Eighth Army he deliberately set about spreading his personality through a lot of gimmicks -- an Australian hat, a black beret with twin badges, a staccato flood of cliches, using a caravan as headquarters, popularizing snappy phrases such as "master plan," "hitting for six."
The "austerity" on which Winston Churchill (to whom he had a deep devotion) remarked was there, but it required no conscious effort to maintain it. He genuinely disliked alcohol and tobacco. A Cromwellian affection for the Old Testament was also perfectly natural and sincere. "God and my good sword" fitted him as aptly as any Crusader.
Not that he was in the least impeccable. He was as deeply devoted to publicity as man can be, but there was no hypocrisy about it; he openly reveled in it. Once he lost a bet to me, and paid me with a 5 pound note on which he had inscribed his name and titles. "There," he said, "get that framed. It will interest your grandchildren."
Let us get the weak side of the man finished with first. It must be confessed that as a politician he was pretty immature. He had earned his status by half-a-century of distinguished services and he had every right to enjoy it, but it is to be feared that he was no psychological specialist when he pronounced on Stalin or Mao; and he missed several other excellent opportunities to be silent.
His comments on these worthies were as simple as the argument which another great soldier, the Duke of Wellington, used about railways: he opposed them because they increased the mobility of the working classes. "Monty" also was better in a battle than at a a desk; and he was always more busy than happy in his post-war jobs.
Even in his own field, all was not always spring flowers. It is clear that the picture he draws in his Memoirs of his predecessor, Field Marshal Auchinleck, was very unfair. It gives the impression of a rather pedantic defeatist; and that Auchinleck certainly was not.
When the Eighth Army staggered and struggled back to the Alamein positions on June 30, 1942, the men were, as Churchill put it, "brave but baffled," What baffled them was the problem of stopping Rommel. But he was stopped early in July -- he made his first attempt to break through on July 1-5 -- though only just. Every possibility had at that the possibility that he was not permanently stopped.
Five weeks later the position was completely changed. Two fresh divisions had arrived and 300 new Sherman tanks were due early in September. Any British commander would have been entitled to view the future through rosier spectacles. I am not denying Montgomery any of the credit due to him for a sensational recovery in Eighth Army morale. I am only saying that Auchinleck was not confining his thinking to scuttling back to the Delta, and thence to the Levant or the Sudan.
The full truth is given by Sir James Butler in his "Grand Strategy":
July 5 was the turning point...By his termination and imperturbability Auchinleck had once again saved the situation. He was now confidently holding a position from which a further assault from Rommel could be repelled, and an Allied offensive resumed when a decisive superiority in men and material had been created.
There were two other instances of an apparent lack of generosity towards colleagues. The first was an unduly large claim for his share in stopping the last German offensive in the Ardennes. The second as some rather sharp remarks about Gen. Eisenhower's strategical talents and about the broad front advance in the Rhine as compared with his (Montgomery's) own concept of a narrow thrust into North Germany.
Here again, the complaints are more of alack of tact than a lack of sense. The Cockney definition of an aristocrat is "Haffable halike to hequals and hinferiors." This is rather difficult to live up to when your conviction is that you have no equals; but at least to his inferiors -- de Guingand, Williams, Belchem and the rest of his "famile militaire" as Foch used to call his staff -- Monty was affability itself.
It is a great thing to have a personal conviction that one is right. When the elder Pitt said, "I know that I can save this country and nobody else can." his attitude was precisely that of Montgomery. Such self-confidence made PItt the hero of the Seven Years' War and Montgomery the most successful British soldier since Wellington or even Marlborough. In both cases, the background was more than a febrile conceit.
Monty was a soldier who for many years had thought of little except his profession. The conceptions he had formed during this concentrated pondering were not very new. Strategically speaking they were rather impishly defined as "no advance without security."
He refused to budge prematurely. Though he agreed with Napolean that the moral is to the material as three to one, he insisted on having the material as well as the moral. His tactical use of the material was not strikingly original. It was, indeed, rather a reversion to armour which was nill past tactic of 1918; and to the principle of explaining to troops exactly what was going to be done and why -- a principle which goes back at least to the Peloponnesian War.
Montgomery followed the personal contact principle extraordinarily well. He was thorough. He also possessed the Napoleonic requirement in a leader of being lucky. He came to the front (after, it is true, a hard, competent and gallant apprenticeship) just the the trickle of men and arms was becoming a flood. And "on the other side of the hill" Rommel was a sick man, and Hitler's military ideas were verging more and more on the suicidal.
On the whole a fair verdict on him as a soldier would be that he was infinitely more than mediocre, substantially less than miraculous.
After all, there is a ring of affection as well as of admiration in the nickname "Monty." He had some attractive human traits. He would go to great trouble to give a promising youngster a chance though he was severe if the chance was not taken. If he asked somebody to collaborate in, say the preparation of a speech he was receptive of ideas as well as fertile in them. He was enormously industrious.
Like Curzon, he wrote all his letters in a clear, if slightly schoolboyish, longhand. One of his foibles was writing letters in ink and longer manuscripts in pencil. he was oddly proud of this practice. His Memoirs bear in facsimile on the jacket: "Every word of the book was written in pencil in my own handwriting" -- as if this was something unusual.
But the man was unusual. Rather prim at one moment, the complete swashbuckler the next; lapping up the hero-worship one day, doing good by stealth the next.
One final story about him will show how far from the whole truth was the popular conception of him as a mixture of bravado and bravery. At a dinner party of mine, Rebecca West, somewhat short-sighted, was looking round the drawing-room before the company went to table. "Tell me," she asked, "who is that quiet, retiring little man sitting in the corner of the sofa?" It was Field Marshal The Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.