Montgomery: Friends Within, Foes Without: Relationships In and Around 21st Army Group

By Malcolm Pill

In this new study of personal relationships within the British (including Canadian) Command in 21st Army Group during the campaign in North-West Europe in 1944-1945, Malcolm Pill considers the scope and depth of these relationships, ranging from those of the Secretary of State for War to the Corps Commanders. Montgomery is central. His great success in the management of his own multinational team is contrasted with the hostility created and lack of success achieved with those outside his team. Pill explores the importance of his great skill with the written word. The relevance of these personal relationships to the success of Britain's last major campaign as a great power is assessed as are the post-war consequences for those involved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uniform
• Release date: Nov 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912690930

Malcolm Pill

On retirement as a Lord Justice of Appeal, Malcom Pill took an MA in Military History at Buckingham University. His lifelong interest in military history was stimulated during his father’s service in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War, described in A Cardiff Family in the Forties (1999), reading Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe and his own National Service and Territorial Service in the Royal Artillery. He studied the Laws of War as a part of the Cambridge International Law LLM and a has held a long-term professional interest in behavioural studies and assessing oral and written evidence.

Book preview

• • • • •

This book is dedicated to my father R.T. Pill

• • • • •

‘Once you can get the confidence and trust of your subordinates, then you have a pearl of very great price’.

General Montgomery to Lieutenant-General Crerar, 26 July 1944

• • • • •

‘[Montgomery] liable to commit untold errors in lack of tact, lack of appreciation of other’s people’s outlook … He wants watching and guiding continually’.

(General Brooke’s diary, 3 June 1943.)

• • • • •

‘The senior British officers at SHAEF must realise that, in addition to being good allied chaps, they have loyalties to our side of the house’.

(General Montgomery to Field-Marshal Brooke, 8 August 1944.)

• • • • •

‘Such men as Tedder, Morgan, Whiteley and Strong [at SHAEF] possess great ability and are absolutely unimpeachable in their objective approach to every question’.

(General Eisenhower to General Marshall, 7 April 1945.)

CONTENTS

• • • • •

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

THE CAST WITH PRINCIPAL OFFICES HELD

INTRODUCTION

Synopsis

Background

Methodology

Assessment of Evidence

Historiography: What has been said

1 EARLIER LIVES

Brooke

Paget

Morgan

Montgomery

Dempsey

O’Connor

Crocker

Ritchie

Bucknall

Horrocks

Crerar

Simonds

De Guingand

Grigg

2 BACKGROUNDS

Family, Educational and Military

Marriage

Tragedies

Religion

3 THE PLANNING

Paget and OVERLORD

Morgan’s work as COSSAC

Morgan on Paget’s SKYSCRAPER

4 MONTGOMERY

Relations with Brooke

Skill with the written word and its value

Personal staff

Popularity at home

Views on planning and command

Monty’s Men?

5 NORMANDY

COSSAC’s later work

Montgomery’s arrival at 21st Army Group

Montgomery’s method of command

Montgomery and Morgan (1)

The displaced strategist?

Operation GOODWOOD, the deception

Operation BLUECOAT and the dismissal of Bucknall

Victory in Normandy

6 RELATIONSHIPS

Dempsey, O’Connor and Barker

Montgomery and O’Connor

Montgomery and Grigg

Montgomery and Dempsey

Dempsey and other officers

Brooke and Grigg

Montgomery and the Canadian command

Crerar, Simonds and Crocker

Operation MARKET GARDEN

7 COMMAND STRUCTURE

Montgomery’s team in operation

Montgomery in command of Americans

Commanding other Allies

Health problems in the command

Horrocks and other commanders

SHAEF, the build-up and the position of Tedder

8 COMMAND ISSUES

The Port of Antwerp

The Scheldt estuary

Single thrust

31 December 1944

9 THE CANADIANDIMENSION

Operation VERITABLE

Canadian conclusions

10 SHAEF IN OPERATION

British Officers at SHAEF and their work

Strong and the Ardennes

Montgomery and Morgan (2)

Montgomery and the British officers

Montgomery and Whiteley

Montgomery and SHAEF: Conclusions

Montgomery in the chain of command

11 AFTER THE WAR

Introduction

De Guingand

Paget

Brooke

Montgomery

Montgomery as author

Brooke and Dempsey: a put down

Dempsey

Crocker

Ritchie

Horrocks

Horrocks: a footnote

Simonds

Morgan, Strong and Gale

12 CONCLUSIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PLATES

COPYRIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• • • • •

My thanks to the Trustees of Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London (LHC) for use of their research facilities and for permission to publish photographs from their archives. The Centre houses the library and papers of B.H. Liddell Hart, who was of course an influential author and military analyst, and his correspondence with other prominent figures. Also lodged there are the papers of prominent soldiers including Field Marshall Alanbrooke. My thanks to the staff at the Centre, in particular Lianne Smith, now at Manchester University, for their consistent help.

Thanks to the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and staff, in particular Owen Van Spall and Anthony Richard, for use of facilities and guidance, and to the National Archives at Kew.

The Trustees of Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke, deceased, are thanked for permission to use extracts from Lord Alanbrooke’s published diaries. The Diaries are published in War Diaries, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2001, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman. In their Acknowledgements, the editors themselves thank the Alanbrooke Trustees for ‘unrestricted access’ to the Alanbrooke Papers at the LHC and also thank the Trustees and archive staff at LHC.

My thanks to the copyright holder of the papers of Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein for permission to use extracts from the collection of Montgomery’s papers held at the IWM.

My thanks also to Col. Rupert Prichard, OBE, grandson of Lt.-Gen. F.E. Morgan, for permitting me access to the General’s personal papers in his possession and permission to quote from these and from Morgan’s other writings.

I am grateful to Lt.-Gen Sir James Bucknall, KCB, CBE, for permission to quote from the personal papers of his grandfather, Lt.-Gen G. C. Bucknall held at the IWM and also for providing comments on aspects of the Battle of Normandy.

Dr Michael Neiberg and Charles M. Saunders of the United States Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania are thanked for supplying transcripts of Forrest C. Pogue’s interviews with Lt.-Gen. F. E. Morgan and Wing Commander Leslie Scarman respectively.

References to the sources of the photographs published are given as a part of each caption. Thanks to the Trustees of LHC for permission to publish photographs held there. Other photographs are in the public domain and some are held at IWM, Library and Archives Canada/Department of National Defence, US National Archives and Records Administration and at the National Library of Australia.

Attempts have been made to trace photograph 13. A copy appears in Sir John Baynes’, The Forgotten Victor, his biography of General R. O’Connor, where thanks for the photograph are given to Major W.J. O’Connor the General’s stepson, who has since died. The photograph is not held at LHC where General O’Connor’s papers are lodged. Major J.K. Nairne, formerly of the Seaforth Highlanders and the General’s literary executor, has catalogued and annotated his papers at the LHC. He has kindly sought to trace the photograph but without success. He tells me that the search by Mrs Iona O’Connor, Major O’Connor’s widow, was unsuccessful as was an earlier search by him at the IWM. The copyright in The Forgotten General is held by Sir John’s widow, Lady Shirley Baynes, who has kindly agreed to the publication of the photograph.

The books identified in my Introduction (Historiography section) are of course all valuable sources for research and references to them appear in endnotes and in the Bibliography. I should like to pay particular tribute to the authors who undertook, long after the events in which the generals were involved, biographies of important generals who had been somewhat neglected in the literature: chronologically, Sir Charles Richardson for Send for Freddie (1985) (de Guingand), Sir John Baynes for The Forgotten Victor (1989) (O’Connor), Dominick Graham for The Price of Command (1993) (Simonds), Sir Julian Paget for The Crusading General (2008) (Paget, father of the author), Paul Dickson for A Thoroughly Canadian General (2007) (Crerar), Peter Rostron for The Life and Times of General Sir Miles Dempsey (2010) and Douglas E. Delaney for Corps Commanders (2011) (including Crocker, Simonds and Horrocks).

On a more personal level, I offer thanks to Peter Ledger, author of City Boys at War recently published by Unicorn, Wing Commander Graeme Morgan and David Lermon, for their help and encouragement. My wife, Dr Roisin Pill, has endured my alleged monopolisation of her computer and, with more publishing experience than I have, made many helpful suggestions.

PREFACE

• • • • •

Mine has been a fortunate generation. Following unsettled wartime years, we enjoyed the benefits of secondary education, and the prospect of higher education, that followed the Education Act 1944 and the growth and opportunities of the post-war period. We have enjoyed the fifty and more years of peace in Europe that was made possible and initiated by the successful campaign of the British and American armies in the campaign to liberate North-West Europe in 1944 to 1945 and by the steadfastness of their governments thereafter.

My interest in the campaign was kindled by the daily maps of Normandy in the newspapers of Summer 1944 and a Saturday morning visit at that time to Camberley Staff College while my father was a student there. A patriotic man, he had joined the Territorial Army in 1939, aged almost thirty and without civilian qualifications or military connections. His first fortnight camp was converted into over six years service in the Royal Artillery. After spending the first winter of the war digging gun pits and peeling potatoes on the coast in the south-east of England, he served with the guns of the City of Edinburgh Yeomanry (TA) in North Africa and as a staff officer in a brigade commanded by Brigadier P.G. Calvert-Jones and and by Brigadier Mortimer Wheeler, himself a Territorial Officer, in North Africa and Italy. That led to a mention in dispatches, appointment as MBE, and selection for staff training at Camberley. Service at HQ 21st Army Group in North-West Europe followed.

Interest in the campaign was kept alive not only by my father’s successful, if modest, participation but by published post-war accounts, in particular Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe, that demonstrated the magnitude of the operation and the significance for my generation of the success achieved. I looked to the generals who had achieved it. The qualities and outlook of the British generals had been tempered, and also enlightened, by tough experiences in the horrors of the First World War and by a wide range of military duties between the wars. The generals then had the opportunity to plan and execute Britain’s last major campaign as a Great Power.

The roots of its success were in the planning in London and Washington, the training in Britain and the experience of successful operations in North Africa and Italy. The battles in North-West Europe have been well described; this study focuses on and analyses aspects of the campaign often receiving only cursory attention in the literature, the personalities and command relationships of the senior officers, British and Canadian, involved in and around 21st Army group. It is an opportunity to consider newly available and rarely cited records and to approach them and more familiar records and accounts from a different viewpoint. It is hoped that fresh insights are provided.

ABBREVIATIONS

• • • • •

THE CAST WITH PRINCIPAL OFFICES HELD

• • • • •

WASHINGTON

US Gen. of the Army G. Marshall, Chairman Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS).

F.-M. J. Dill, Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission to Washington, died November 1944.

LONDON

P.J. Grigg, S of S for War.

F.-M. A. Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS).

Gen. H. Ismay, Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff.

Lt.-Gen. A. Nye, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff (VCIGS).

Maj.-Gen. F. Simpson, Director of Military Operations, War Office.

BRITISH COMMANDERS

Gen. B. Paget, GOC-in-C 21st Army Group to December 1943.

F.-M. B. Montgomery, GOC 8th Army, August 1942-December 1943, GOC-in-C 21st Army Group from January 1944.

Gen. M. Dempsey, GOC 2nd British Army.

Lt.-Gen. J. Crocker, GOC 1st Corps.

Lt.-Gen. N. Ritchie, GOC 8th Corps.

Lt.-Gen. R. O’Connor, GOC 12th Corps to November 1944.

Lt-Gen. E. Barker, GOC 12th Corps from November 1944.

Lt.-Gen. G. Bucknall, GOC 30th Corps to August 1944.

Lt.-Gen. B. Horrocks, GOC 30th Corps from August 1944.

Lt.-Gen. F. Browning, GOC 1st British Airborne Corps.

BRITISH STAFF OFFICERS

Maj.-Gen F. De Guingand, Chief of Staff 21st Army Group.

Maj. Gen. H. Pyman, Chief of Staff 30th Corps then of 2nd British Army.

Maj.-Gen. M. Graham, Head of Administration 21st Army Group.

Brig. R. Belchem, BGS Operations 21st Army Group.

Brig. C. Richardson, BGS Plans 21st Army Group.

Brig. E. Williams, Head of Intelligence 21st Army Group.

CANADIAN COMMANDERS

Gen. H. Crerar, GOC 1st Canadian Army.

Lt.-Gen. C. Foulkes, GOC 1st Canadian Corps, in N-W Europe from February 1945.

Lt.-Gen. G. Simonds, GOC 2nd Canadian Corps.

MONTGOMERY’S PERSONAL STAFf

Lt. Col. C. Dawnay, Military Assistant.

Capt. J. Henderson, ADC.

SHAEF

US Gen. D.D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force.

A.-M. A. Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander.

Admiral B. Ramsay, C-in-C Allied Naval Expeditionary Force, died January 1945.

A.-M. T. Leigh-Mallory, C-in-C Allied Expeditionary Air Force, until October 1944.

Lt.-Gen. W. Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff at SHAEF.

BRITISH OFFICERS AT SHAEF

Lt.-Gen. F. Morgan, COSSAC, then Deputy Chief of Staff.

Lt.-Gen. H. Gale, joint principal Logistical Officer (G-4).

Maj.-Gen. K. Strong, Head of Intelligence (G-2).

Maj.-Gen J. Whiteley, Deputy Chief of Operations (G-3).

RANKING US ARMY OFFICERS

Gen. O. Bradley, GOC 1st US Army, then GOC-in-C, 12th Army Group.

Lt.-Gen. C. Hodges, GOC 1st US Army from August 1944.

Gen. G. Patton, GOC 3rd US Army

Lt.-Gen. W. Simpson, GOC 9th US Army.

Lt.-Gen. L. Brererton, GOC 1st Allied Airborne Army.

OTHER BRITISH OFFICERS WHO FEATURE SIGNIFICANTLY

F.-M. H. Alexander, C-in-C 15th Army Group, June 1943, Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean, November, 1944.

Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations 1941-1943, Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia, August 1943.

Gen. C. Auchinleck, C-in-C Middle Eastern Command, June 1941-August 1942, GOC 8th Army, June-August 1942.

INTRODUCTION

• • • • •

SYNOPSIS

This is a study of relationships between senior British and Canadian army officers involved in the planning and execution of the invasion of North-West Europe during the Second World War. Many studies have been devoted to studying the battles fought during the Allied campaign, Britain’s last major military role on the world stage. The performance in battle of the British generals involved in the campaign has also been examined closely, as have the tensions between the Supreme Commander, US General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and British General (later Field Marshal) Bernard Law Montgomery, who commanded all land forces during the battle of Normandy and British 21st Army Group thereafter.

What is now examined are the relationships between the senior British and Canadian army officers involved in the planning and carrying out of the campaign. As one of those involved, Lt.-Gen. Brian Horrocks, when considering how the ‘higher formations … worked in this campaign’, wrote that ‘the quality of the personalities concerned and of their relationships with each other was of immense significance’.¹ The focus is on relationships and those included in the study are:

Relationships between Montgomery, Field Marshall Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and Maj.-Gen. Simpson, who became Director of Military Operations at the War Office. There were many written communications between them.

Relationships between Montgomery, his chief of staff and his army and corps commanders and their relationships with each other.

Montgomery’s relationships with the senior British officers at Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).

The Secretary of State for War, P.J. Grigg, is included in the study because of his role and his involvement with the most senior officers.

The study involves consideration of the generals’ backgrounds and personalities and the situations in which they found themselves and dealt with each other. Performance in battle inevitably affects relationships. Conversely, success in relationships may affect operational success and this may emerge from the evidence. The battles themselves, already very well documented, will be described only in so far as necessary to provide the context in which the relationships developed and the interaction occurred.

Primarily concerned with relationships, the study will throw light on the character, performance and reputations of officers who played important roles in a major conflict. Consideration will be given to how well the officers at 21st Army Group performed as a team and to what their level of performance as a team should be attributed. Reliance is placed on contemporaneous and later documents and on the narratives of those involved and the interviews they gave.

Central to the study is Montgomery. As team leader, Montgomery created and fostered team spirit in his command and thereby developed an efficient fighting instrument for his use. Montgomery’s management and treatment of his subordinates will be analysed with reference to the great care, sensitivity and insight that earned their ‘confidence and trust’. His own management skills contributed to their working together as a team quite remarkably well. The part played by his high skills as a report and letter writer in achieving his success will be considered. Montgomery was equally successful in his relations with his two British superiors and supporters, the civil servant turned politician Grigg and Brooke, the CIGS.

A stark contrast emerges between Montgomery’s attitude to and conduct towards his British superiors and to members of his own team and his attitude and conduct towards those he regarded as outside it. His views on British officers outside his team were harsh, often gratuitously so, readily categorising them as ‘useless’. His strained relations with SHAEF included extremely poor relations with senior British officers at that headquarters. Their roles will be examined and the reasons for his attitude to them. It is difficult to understand how a commander so accomplished in the management of his own team was so gauche in dealing with those outside it.

Conclusions on these issues require study not only of the conduct in 21st Army Group when a part of the expeditionary force during the campaign but examination of the processes by which and by whom the campaign was planned and prepared. They require study of how and why the senior officers occupied the roles they did and the process by which the Army Group took the form it did. The post-war lives of the principal actors will be considered not primarily with a view to describing careers in detail but in order to consider the extent to which their relationships persisted and how their lives were affected by wartime relationships and attitudes. As CIGS from 1946 to 1948, Montgomery was in a strong position to influence those lives in the immediate post-war years.

BACKGROUND

For present purposes the context in which the campaign was fought can be re-stated briefly. During the first year of the Second World War, the German Army was triumphant in Northern and Western Europe as well as in Poland. By June 1940, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had been expelled by German arms from North-West Europe and Germany controlled France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark, with Spain a not-unfriendly neutral. Britain and its Empire stood alone against the Axis powers, Germany and Italy. With Winston Churchill as Prime Minister from May 1940, Britain resolved to fight on against the Axis Powers.

When the United States, with Franklin D. Roosevelt as President, entered the war in December 1941, liberation of Western Europe became a realistic, though not an imminent, possibility. Churchill and Roosevelt decided to plan for that liberation, a task made easier by the involvement of most of the German Army in fighting the Soviet Army, whose territory it had invaded. Overall strategy for the invasion of Western Europe was planned by Churchill, Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs of Staff based in Washington, with US General Marshall presiding.

In January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt decided to set up an allied planning staff for the proposed operation and Lt.-Gen. F.E. Morgan of the British Army was selected to lead the staff. The head of the British Army throughout the process, as CIGS, was F.-M. Brooke, later Lord Alanbrooke. His predecessor as CIGS, F.-M. Dill, became Head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington and served there until his death in November 1944.

Following the Battle of Alamein and the expulsion of Axis forces from North Africa, Italy was invaded by the Allies in late 1943 and the invasion of Western Europe was planned. On 6 June 1944, D-Day, an Allied force under the overall command of Eisenhower landed in Normandy, Operation OVERLORD. His Deputy was Air Chief Marshall Tedder and the naval and air commanders were also British, Admiral Ramsay and Air Marshall Leigh-Mallory.

Eisenhower defined OVERLORD as ‘Plan and operation for the invasion of France in spring of 1944’.² Montgomery, who had formerly commanded the British 8th Army in North Africa and Italy, initially commanded all land forces. Eisenhower assumed command of land forces on 1st September 1944. His force comprised 21st Army Group, 12th Army Group and later 6th Army Group. Complete victory over the Germans in Western Europe was achieved by May 1945 and the allied forces met up with victorious Soviet forces advancing into Germany from the east.

During the build-up, and until 1944, the composition of the proposed invasion force had been predominantly British. In the summer of 1943, there was only one American field division in the United Kingdom;³ there could have been more but for the British preference for operations in the Mediterranean theatre. By D-Day and during the early part of the campaign, the British and Canadian land forces involved were about equal in size to the American forces, the naval contribution was mainly British, and Britain provided the base for the operation. In the later stages, the American contribution to the force became overwhelming. After Normandy, Montgomery remained in command of 21st Army Group under the overall command of Eisenhower.

METHODOLOGY

Where possible, particular relationships are considered in a specific section of the study. While the order in which relationships are considered has regard to chronology, this approach makes a strictly chronological account of relevant events impossible. In some cases, relationships emerge and are best considered in the course of the narrative or in the context of specific operations and events in which a number of officers were involved. These events, of varying importance, are given separate sections and identified by name. Interposing them puts additional strain on the chronology. Their places in the campaign will be known to most readers but, it may be helpful to list them chronologically:

Following the capture of Caen in July 1944, British armoured forces in 8th Corps, in Operation GOODWOOD on 18 July 1944, conducted a major attack in the eastern part of the lodgement area in Normandy to the south-east of Caen and towards Bourgebus Ridge.

On 30 July 1944, British 8th and 30th Corps, in Operation BLUECOAT, attacked southwards from Caumont. In the course of the operation, on 2 August, Lt.-Gen. Bucknall was dismissed from command of 30th Corps.

After the breakout from Normandy, and the rapid advance across France and Belgium, British 30th Corps captured Antwerp Docks intact on 4 September 1944.

On 17 September 1944, Operation MARKET GARDEN involving the 1st Allied Airborne Army and British 30th Corps was launched in the Netherlands.

In the Autumn of 1944, 1st Canadian Army was involved in operations to clear the Scheldt Estuary of the enemy and thereby allow the port of Antwerp to become operational.

Following Eisenhower’s assumption of command of all land forces on 1 September 1944, Montgomery conducted a prolonged campaign for the Allied offensive to be concentrated on a single thrust, under his command, in the northern part of the front.

On 16 December 1944, the Germans launched a major counter offensive in the Ardennes. It achieved initial successes and had a significant impact on the Allied command structure.

Montgomery’s continuing campaign to promote a single thrust into Germany, under his command, led to a confrontation between him and Eisenhower in events culminating on 31 December 1944.

Operation VERITABLE, the main set piece offensive of 1st Canadian Army during the campaign, was launched on 9 February 1945

ASSESSMENT OF EVIDENCE

Max Hastings’ Armageddon, which includes much valuable oral history, has a section entitled ‘Sources and References’.⁴ In it, Hastings makes the broad assertion that ‘written evidence’ about matters of life and death … should be treated with at least as much caution as interviews with witnesses’. In support, he makes the statement, notoriously true, that minutes of meetings reflect the ‘personal prejudices of whoever was responsible for keeping the record’. In the assessment of evidence, however, such generalisations are not particularly helpful. It depends on the document and depends on the oral evidence what degree of caution is required, what weight can be given to it and what assessment can be made on the basis of it. It also depends on the nature of the issue on which a judgment is to be made.

Some documents will be conclusive of some issues, others will require analysis of the motives and reliability of the document-maker and the circumstances in which the document was made. Hastings rightly recognises what another has called the ‘self-mythologising retrospect’⁵ that is revealed, on assessment, in some documents. Oral evidence is, however, subject to the fallibility of human memory and to an assessment of the maker’s credibility. The mindset of the interviewer may also be a factor in assessing the value of oral statements made during the interview. The manner of assessment needs to be specific to the particular evidence assessed.

The point is not laboured further. Military historians are not alone in having to assess all kinds of evidence. Judges have been doing it day by day for centuries. In this study, the aim is to examine evidence objectively and without pre-conceptions.

HISTORIOGRAPHY: WHAT HAS BEEN SAID.

A good starting point for a study of the Allied campaign in North-West Europe in 1944–1945 is still Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe,⁶ published in 1952. (Particulars of the editions of publications consulted are given in the endnotes; dates of first publication, where different, appear in this text.) One of the best and bravest BBC correspondents reporting from Europe, Wilmot landed in Normandy by glider on D-Day with the British 6th Airborne Division and sent dispatches throughout the campaign.⁷ Wilmot’s stylish narrative combines a flavour of the times with a blend of ‘lucid narrative, close analysis and judicious character studies’.⁸

While he was an ‘eloquent advocate’⁹ for Montgomery, who became a Field Marshal on 1 September 1944, Wilmot’s ‘honesty and integrity made the book a classic’.¹⁰ He did interview some of those involved in the campaign during and shortly after the war. Wilmot’s analysis of the wealth of material which became available after the publication of The Struggle for Europe, with his further judicious character studies, would have been most valuable but, sadly, he died, aged forty-two, in January 1954 when a passenger on a Comet airliner which disintegrated over the Mediterranean Sea. That was a great loss to fuller analysis of the campaign and the personalities.

Anyone writing now must of course have regard to material and analysis not available in 1952. One can only speculate as to whether Wilmot’s advocacy of Montgomery would have survived it. For its quality as campaign historical literature The Struggle for Europe is unsurpassed.

Montgomery has of course been the subject of many biographies, the most comprehensive being Nigel Hamilton’s three volumes, published in 1981, 1983 and 1986.¹¹ Of the others, Alan Moorhead’s Montgomery¹² had appeared in 1946, Ronald Lewin’s¹³ in 1971 and Alistair Horne’s, with David Montgomery,¹⁴ appeared in 1994. T.E.B. Howard edited a series of essays by those closest to Montgomery during the war in Monty at Close Quarters, 1985.¹⁵ They wrote with great style and insight:

Despite his claim to the contrary,¹⁶ Montgomery did keep personal diaries throughout the campaign. These were found by David Montgomery at Isington Mill, Montgomery’s home, after his father’s death in 1977. These diaries were not available to earlier biographers. A selection of them appears, with letters he received and other relevant papers, in Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, 2008, edited by Stephen Brooks.¹⁷ The papers were lodged at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) by 2004 and sorted and catalogued by Brooks who thought the combination of papers was Montgomery’s ‘sitrep for posterity’. Brooks estimates that the personal diaries from June 1944 to May 1945 amount to about 50,000 words. His choice of documents for the book, and his endnotes, demonstrate his insights into the qualities of the protagonists and the problems of the time. Brooks had previously edited Montgomery and the Eighth Army, which performs the same service for the period between August 1942 and December 1943.¹⁸

Consistency between the contents of Montgomery’s personal diaries and other contemporaneous documents is good but, as Brooks writes in his ‘Notes’, it does not follow that ‘Montgomery always wrote the entries on a daily basis’.¹⁹ Brooks accepts that they were written ‘very much with future historians in mind’.²⁰ The diary does not have the contemporaneous flavour of the CIGS’s diary, mentioned below, and its orderliness and coherence are such that it is unlikely that he did write it up each day. However, Brooks expresses the opinion, in relation to the Normandy sections, that ‘the entries have a degree of detail and immediacy that precludes their being written up much later with the benefit of hindsight’. As with all diaries, the entries are revealing for what they omit as well as for what they say. On at least one dramatic post-Normandy occasion, for example, while the contents of the diary are accurate, they are incomplete to the point of being misleading as an account of events.²¹

Studies of the relevant wartime events appeared not long after the war in autobiographies of some of those principally involved. Capt. Harry Butcher, Supreme Commander Eisenhower’s military assistant, was first with Three Years with Eisenhower²² published in 1946 and provided insight into Eisenhower’s views. Eisenhower’s own Crusade in Europe appeared in 1948.²³ US Gen. Omar Bradley, commander of 12th Army Group, produced A Soldier’s Story in 1951.²⁴ Maj.-Gen. Francis de Guingand, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, published Operation Victory²⁵ in 1947. The account of Air Marshal (A.-M.) Arthur Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander, With Prejudice,²⁶ appeared much later, in 1966.

Montgomery presaged a future career as an author when writing from Italy to Simpson at the War Office in November 1943. Having said that he would ‘want some leave’ when Rome was captured, he wrote: ‘I shall probably write a book entitled Alamein to Rome I don’t think’.²⁷ His account of the war, Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery,²⁸ was published in 1958. While it has the merit of setting out some important contemporaneous documents in full, Montgomery did himself less than justice in Memoirs, described by Bedell Smith’s biographer D.K.R. Crosswell as ‘inflammatory’.²⁹ David Fraser thought Montgomery ‘a better general than autobiographer’.³⁰ Montgomery considered Memoirs definitive. When the official British war historian, Maj. L.F. Ellis, submitted a draft of his work to Montgomery for comment, he replied that ‘most of [his] views’ had been expressed in Memoirs.³¹

A much better general and person emerges from Montgomery’s voluminous contemporary writings, his reviews of the military situation and, in particular, his letters to Brooke and to Simpson at the War Office, and from his personal diaries. To write as much as he did under the pressures of the campaigns, was a remarkable achievement. The reports reveal a brilliant military mind. That he wrote consistently with coherence, an economy of language and with style magnifies the achievement.

Brig. Edgar (Bill) Williams, Montgomery’s Chief Intelligence Officer, puts the best face on Memoirs by saying the book has ‘a highly personal flavour’,³² an indication that the fairness and objectivity of earlier writings was missing. Vanity had taken hold. Montgomery wrote several other books and said in 1966 that he had come to the conclusion ‘that writing books is far more lucrative than soldiering – but not so enjoyable’.³³ More is said about Montgomery’s writing in later sections.

Brooke did not write an autobiography